In Pursuit of Knowledge: An Interview with Kabria Baumgartner

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Kabria Baumgartner, author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. In her book, Baumgartner explores the origins of the fight for school desegregation in the 19th century Northeast by focusing on the stories of African American girls and women.

You note in the book that you’ve chosen to define activism more broadly than some histories. How did that more elastic approach enrich the book? What did you include that has not been recognized in other works?

Using a more elastic definition of activism enabled me to identify patterns in young African American women’s public actions. For instance, I found multiple examples of these young women desegregating private female seminaries and public high schools. That was a form of activism in the nineteenth-century Northeast, and it was dynamic and sometimes collective.

In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America
By Kabria Baumgartner
NYU Press, 2019
320 pages

I also argue that there were important linked moments of activism in the struggle for African American women’s education which have been overlooked by scholars. Establishing literary societies, publishing essays in the African American and antislavery press, and desegregating female seminaries were not disparate or singular campaigns at the local level, but rather concurrent and linked forms of activism that impacted the region. Sarah Mapps Douglass, an African American teacher in New York City and Philadelphia, participated in an African American women’s literary society, wrote about the value of education, and encouraged young Black women to pursue advanced schooling. Black women were working in as many different sites as they could, and they often coordinated their efforts.

What was changing in American schooling in this era that added urgency to the fight for inclusion? How did Black women envision the purpose of schooling in antebellum New York?

Well, the common school reform movement ushered in big changes, including the expansion of public schools in towns and cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. For many reformers, schools were powerful sites that could “Americanize” immigrants and provide social mobility for poor and working-class whites.

African Americans knew all about the power of schools too. For instance, free Blacks in Nantucket, Massachusetts successfully opened a primary school for Black children before their white counterparts had even organized public schools for white children. As public schools developed, African Americans dealt with marked inequality; schools for white children received more funding and resources. African Americans wanted the same level of funding and resources, so their fight began.

Black women activists like Maria Stewart, Sarah Mapps Douglass, and Rosetta Morrison often asked themselves and each other: How can we live our purpose amid such formidable obstacles in our way — racial violence, discrimination, prejudice, gender oppression, not to mention the experiences of those enslaved in the South? For these women, education was the way. In other words, they navigated and negotiated their sense of purpose through the field of education, specifically schooling and teaching.

The purpose of schooling was intellectual and moral development, which might sound kind of amorphous. Certain teachers like Fanny Tompkins and Maritcha Lyons defined that somewhat differently. The African American women teachers whom I discuss in my book focused on character education, which stressed Christian faith, goodness, charity, love, and self-discipline — all qualities that they deemed best suited to cultivate the mind and make good citizens who would work to secure African American civil rights.

How did Black women’s education activism intersect with advocacy for suffrage? With the abolitionist movement? How did the New York-based women in your book interact with institutions like the African Free School and the male leaders who ran and advocated for it?

Black women’s educational activism intersected with the suffrage movement in interesting ways. Take, for instance, the story of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, an African American suffragist and editor of the Woman’s Era newspaper. As a child, Josephine was on the front line in the school desegregation fight in Boston in the 1850s. She recalled that, as an eight-year-old girl, her white classmates mocked, teased, and scorned her. She was “wounded beyond endurance,” so she went to school in Salem, Massachusetts and then later New York. She eventually returned to Boston with the clear goal of fighting against both racial and gender prejudice.

Eunice Ross’s story is fascinating to consider as well. She was involved in abolition, school desegregation, and women’s suffrage. Born in Nantucket around 1824, she had five older siblings. Her mother was a homemaker and her father worked as a laborer. Around the age of thirteen, she joined a local juvenile antislavery society. Her responsibilities as a member might have included writing letters, signing petitions, and singing in the antislavery choir. In the 1830s, Eunice had attended the racially segregated African School in Nantucket, and she aspired to advance her studies at the newly established coed Nantucket High School. She passed the high school entrance exam, but the school committee rejected her because she was Black. She protested by telling her story in a neatly written 83-word petition sent to the Massachusetts state legislature. This and subsequent petitions along with a separate lawsuit and a boycott led to the racial integration of the Nantucket public school system in 1846. In the course of my research, I also learned that Eunice Ross signed a petition for women’s voting rights, which was submitted to the Massachusetts state legislature in January 1858. So, for many of the African American girls and women profiled in my book, educational activism, abolition, and sometimes women’s suffrage intersected.

The deGrasse children, part of a mixed-race family from New York, attended the African Free School. Maria deGrasse even taught at one of the schools. Quite a few Black women teachers in New York like Fanny Tompkins and Mary Eato devoted their lives to teaching, and they were well-regarded in the African American community, not to mention beloved by their students. What is frustrating is that a lack of sources really limits what can be said about deGrasse, Tompkins, and Eato and how they interacted with male leaders.

In the Introduction, you write, “examining African American women’s education makes it clear that racial and gender discrimination in public and private schools was not just local but hyperlocal.” What were some of the particular features of the educational landscape for Black New Yorkers?

In early 19th century Salem, Massachusetts, there were a few racially integrated public schools, though the city’s school committee had adopted a policy of racial exclusion. How do we explain these differing practices regarding racial school segregation within a town or city? I use the term, hyperlocal, to account for these differences. The point is that residents in a particular ward or area could decide whether to adhere to the school committee’s policy of racial exclusion. This happened in Providence and Boston. The point is that we need to rethink racial school segregation as a matter of course in the 19th century Northeast. It was not. African Americans challenged it and sometimes won.

Some form of hyperlocalism played out in New York City too. African Americans, for the most part though, took charge of their own schools, whether private, public, Sabbath or something else. Just like in Nantucket, free Blacks in Brooklyn operated a school for Black children before white residents had established their own public schools. The Colored School of Brooklyn, which had been in full operation by 1827, may be an early example of shared governance since African Americans maintained some control (hiring African American teachers) while public school inspectors oversaw funding and other administrative concerns. (That all changed by the mid-1840s with the establishment of the Brooklyn Board of Education. There is an interesting debate about the Colored School of Brooklyn between scholars Carlton Mabee and Robert Swan.) Make no mistake, though, this school did not receive the same level of funding as white public schools.

Black women seem like they’d be underrepresented in archival sources from this period. What challenges arose in conducting research for this book? How did you navigate those challenges?

African American girls and women are underrepresented in the archive, but there are still some fascinating collections that, used skillfully, could enable scholars to tell partial stories. There are some amazing examples of such scholarship; I’m thinking of Saidiya Hartman’s recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.

As a starting point for my own research, I relied on historical sources such as census records, court records, newspaper articles, and letters. I also analyzed school integration petitions and school catalogs, which turned out to be a gold mine because I could read the list of students alongside census records to try to identify students’ racial background. It took me months to find multiple sources to prove that the seven Black women at the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary, probably the first racially integrated female seminary in the North, located at Clinton, New York, were indeed Black. (In the vast majority of school catalogs I’ve examined, Black students weren’t listed separately so a researcher has to do some work to make those connections.)

I spent many months sitting in repositories, looking at collections, just seeing what I might find. Too often I came up empty-handed. This is why the book took a long time to research and write. I never stopped looking, however; in fact, I depended on restarting, sometimes looking at the same material twice or three times. I ended up digging through a collection at Bowling Green State University Library where I stumbled upon multiple references to the seven Black women students at the Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary. I even found two letters written by one of them, Serena deGrasse. The finding aid for this collection does not make any reference to African American students, but I traveled to Bowling Green State University on a hunch and it paid off.

I still come across documents related to Black girls’ and women’s education in the 19th century. A historian, Lise Breen, just shared with me the name of a young Black woman who matriculated at Topsfield Academy in Massachusetts in the 1850s.

What does a focus on Black women’s educational activism reveal about antebellum New York?

There has been some fantastic research on African Americans in antebellum New York that considers how race and gender intersect. I’m thinking of books authored by Leslie Harris, Jane Dabel, Leslie Alexander, Carla Peterson, Craig Wilder, and others.

What my book reveals is that Black women were active in the fight for educational access and opportunity in antebellum New York. There weren’t many paths open to Black women, so some of them connected their activism to their teaching. That is, as career teachers, they believed in the efficacy and power of schooling all the while knowing it was not a panacea. Hence they remained involved in other activist initiatives and sometimes invited students to join them — supporting the African American press, attending antislavery and Black convention meetings, writing antislavery short stories and poetry, aiding fugitive slaves, and filing lawsuits against racial discrimination.

These career teachers gave so much of themselves to their students and thus paved the way for a future generation of activists.

Kabria Baumgartner is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (NYU Press, 2019).