CHAPTER 1
The African School
The man’s name is lost, but his question reverberates.
Why, he asked, should his taxes go to support a school from which his children were excluded? It was January 1841. The unnamed man addressing the Rochester Board of Education was, of course, Black.
It could have been the farmer Solomon Dorsey or the barber Elijah Warr. It could have been Nelson or Richard Picket, two brothers and blacksmiths boarding together on High Street, or George Dixon, who waited tables at the Rochester House hotel. It could have been Samuel Brown or William Earl or Charles Thurell or any of the other dozens of common laborers crowded into the Black section of the Third Ward in flimsy, hastily built wood-frame houses, kindling waiting for a fire to come along and reduce them to ashes. It is no surprise that the petitioner’s name is lost; the surprise is that his question was recorded at all. It was one of only a handful of times in the city’s first generation of public schooling that the input of Black families was noted. More often they were ignored and left to whatever teacher and whatever room could be obtained for the lowest price, if public money had to be dedicated at all. Better yet if they could be “aided by the munificence of their friends.”1
When such munificence fell through, as it did more than once, the trustees did not upend their budget to replace it. That is why the unnamed man was at the meeting in the first place. Nine years after the trustees had first affirmed their responsibility to educate Rochester’s few Black children, there existed no public school to receive them. The absence apparently had escaped notice, and the father’s petition left the school trustees red-faced. They referred it to a committee and the committee referred it to John Spencer, the state superintendent of common schools.
“It is certainly desirable that this unfortunate class should have all the benefits of instruction,” Spencer responded. “The laws contemplate their instruction and provision must be made for it.” But he elaborated: “There must, however, be some discretion by the Trustees. Persons having infected diseases—idiots—infants, incapable of receiving any benefit from the school—and persons over 21, who may be deemed too old—may be excluded. . . . The admission of colored children is in many places so odious, that whites will not attend. In such cases the Trustees would be justified in excluding them, and furnishing them a separate room.”2
In the nineteenth century as in the centuries that followed, segregation in Rochester schools took a number of different forms. There was a time when Black children had essentially no access to public schools, followed by a period of explicit segregation written into local law, then a gradual unsanctioned spread of Black children into neighborhood schools. Throughout the period preceding the Black school’s final closure in 1856, parents such as the unnamed Black father of 1841 had a difficult task in advocating for their children. Hardly any of the adults were themselves educated; many had escaped slavery or been emancipated. With few exceptions, the men worked as laborers and the women as servants in the homes of the white well-to-do. Black residents were outnumbered fifteen to one by white residents of the city and effectively unrepresented on the board of education. Still, the credit for desegregation is theirs. They petitioned and organized and, in the last resort, withheld their children from school rather than expose them to what they believed were unsafe conditions and prejudiced instruction. When the Black school closed in 1856, Rochester was the first city in New York with fully desegregated schools. Black families then did not know, of course, that the greater fight for desegregation would remain active more than 150 years later.
The story of Black education in Rochester begins with Austin Steward, the city’s first prominent Black resident. His arrival in the city in turn illustrates the circumstances of Black life in Rochester in the early nineteenth century. Steward was born into slavery in Prince William County, Virginia, about 1793, and was sold with his family at age seven to William Helm, a penurious minor landholder with a penchant for violence and gambling. Helm was related to William Fitzhugh, one of Rochester’s founding fathers.3
Helm sold his Virginia property in about 1801 and relocated to Sodus Bay, forty miles east of Rochester, entirely unprepared for the rigors of life in what Steward called “almost an unbroken wilderness.” He ordered the Black people he owned to clear the dense forest without horses, nearly starving them in the process. At one point, Steward wrote in his memoir, “we were now obliged . . . to gather up all the old bones we could find, break them up fine and then boil them; which made a sort of broth sufficient barely to sustain life.” Within two years Helm had relocated to Bath, Steuben County, where he hired Steward out to serve as a carriage driver for an equally devilish man named Joseph Robinson: “He was cross and heartless in his family, as well as tyrannical and cruel to those in his employ; and having hired me as a ‘slave boy,’ he appeared to feel at full liberty to wreak his brutal passion on me at any time, whether I deserved rebuke or not. . . . He would frequently draw from the cart-tongue a heavy iron pin, and beat me over the head with it, so unmercifully that he frequently sent the blood flowing over my scanty apparel, and from that to the ground, before he could be satisfied.”4
This experience with Robinson caused Steward to suffer from debilitating headaches for the rest of his life but ultimately led to his liberation. New York’s gradual abolition law of 1799 prohibited hiring out enslaved people as Helm had done. Steward learned of the violation in 1815, declared himself free with the help of a manumission society in Canandaigua and went to work for the Quaker abolitionist Otis Comstock.5 Immediately after gaining his freedom and collecting his first wages, Steward enrolled in an academy in Farmington. He arrived there, age twenty-three, “yet to learn what most boys of eight years know,” and continued to attend classes for three winters. In the spring of 1817 he moved to Rochester and soon opened a meat market—the community’s first Black-owned business, and the immediate target of vandalism and other “unmanly proceedings.” Less than a year later, in the summer of 1818, he began teaching a Sunday school for “the neglected children of our oppressed race.” He wrote in his memoir: “For a while it was well attended, and I hoped to be able to benefit in some measure the poor and despised colored children, but the parents interested themselves very little in the undertaking, and it shortly came to naught. So strong was the prejudice then existing against the colored people, that very few of the negroes seemed to have any courage or ambition to rise from the abject degradation in which the estimation of the white man had placed [them].”6
Steward’s 1818 effort marked the first formal educational opportunity for Black children in Rochester. It was apparently fleeting, however; he makes no further mention of it in his memoir. He later joined with school master Zenas Freeman to teach another Sunday school for young Black students. One of his pupils was early Rochester’s other leading Black citizen, Thomas James. Born into slavery in Canajoharie in 1804, James escaped about 1819 and settled in Rochester in 1823. “As a slave I had never been inside of a school or a church, and I knew nothing of letters or religion,” he wrote. “The wish to learn awoke in me almost from the moment I set foot in the place.” He enrolled in Steward and Freeman’s school on Buffalo Street and supplemented this basic formal education with lessons from the clerks at the warehouse where he worked. He joined the African Methodist Episcopal Society in 1823, then began teaching a school for Black children on Favor Street, the later site of AME Zion Church, in 1828. He purchased the lot for the church in 1830 and was ordained as a minister in 1833. “I had been called Tom as a slave, and they called me Jim at the warehouse,” he wrote. “I put both together when I reached manhood, and was ordained as Rev. Thomas James.”7 AME Zion received substantial financial support both from individual white clergy in Rochester and from the various Sunday school associations that had sprung up in the city. Given James’s emergence as a civic leader and Steward’s departure for the Wilberforce colony in Canada in 1831, it seems likely that the Favor Street Sunday school was the primary educational option for Black children and adults prior to 1832.
One drop-out from this time period left a brief record of his educational experience. Austin Reed, perhaps named after Austin Steward, was born in Rochester in 1823. His book, The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict, is the earliest known prison memoir from an African American writer. Reed completed it in 1858 while between stints at Auburn State Prison, having “broke[n] through the restraints of my mother and [fallen] victim to vice and crime.” Reed began his story with the death of his father when he was five years old and pinpointed the moment that his education, likely under Steward’s tutelage, went sideways. “[My mother] then gave me a severe whipping and sent me off to school,” he wrote. “On my way to school I met several boys who ask me to join their company that day, that they was goin’ to have some fun. I stuff my book into my pocket and joined their company.”8
The establishment and initial development of schools for Black children in Rochester coincided with two other important trends, one local and one national. The first was the growth of Rochester itself, both commercially and as a hotbed of evangelism. The second was the advent in the United States of common schools, publicly funded and widely accessible.
Rochester’s explosive expansion in the early nineteenth century, from a crude mill town on the western frontier to a bustling commercial port and nexus of regional civic activism, was one of the most remarkable and remarked-on stories in the young United States. A traveler to Rochester marveled in 1819: “Nothing I have heard of or seen . . . can boast of so rapid growth as the village of Rochester.” The population increased from 331 in 1815 to 7,669 in 1826 and then to 12,252 in 1834, the year the city was incorporated, making it the fastest-growing municipality in the country during that time.9 Even more dramatic was the growth in commercial production, particularly wheat. Output from Rochester mills increased from 65 barrels of wheat in 1823 to 460,000 in 1835, due entirely to the greater ease of getting goods to market on the newly built Erie Canal. Concomitant advances occurred in every sphere, from manufacturing and service industries to infrastructure and housing. Rochester, in short, was “a place of enchantment,” a visitor wrote in 1825, “and [you] can scarcely believe your own senses, that all should have been the work of so short a period.”10
The canal’s role in the maturation and spread of the social movements for which the region became renowned was no less significant. As historian Whitney Cross wrote: “In matters religious and moral, [the canal’s opening in 1825] separates the period of scattered, episodic eccentricities from the era of major, significant enthusiasms.”11 The greatest of these enthusiasms came with the preaching of the young firebrand Charles Grandison Finney. The name “Burned-Over District” refers to the belief that, by the time of Finney’s arrival, western and central New York had been so thoroughly plowed by earlier waves of evangelists that there was scarcely anyone left to convert. As the population around the Genesee Valley swelled in the decade after the completion of the Erie Canal, though, Finney gave the lie to that claim and invested the term with an entirely different meaning. From September 1830 to March 1831, Finney preached nearly a hundred times in Rochester and met ceaselessly with “anxious sinners” eager to hear his message of salvation through faith and works. The local Protestant churches gained hundreds of members. At one overcrowded meeting in the First Presbyterian Church the walls and ceiling began to crumble, causing a stampede from the building, including out the windows into the Erie Canal.
The spiritual energy that Finney unleashed in Rochester and elsewhere soon translated to the promotion of social causes, principally abolitionism and temperance. As historian Milton Sernett wrote: “For those in the Burned-over District who had pledged to seek good and shun evil, it was a small step from thinking in terms of individual regeneration to concluding that there needed to be a national conversion on the question of slavery.”12
While the Erie Canal and the ideas that traveled its length were redefining upstate New York, towns and cities across the country were grappling with a changing sense of their obligation regarding the education of children in their communities. For the first half century of the independent United States, and certainly during the colonial period, there was no single recognizable educational paradigm. Opportunities varied dramatically based on geography, social class, race, and gender. Young male aristocrats, particularly in the Northeast, might learn from a private tutor and then advance to a preparatory academy before attending an early university. Girls might spend several years in a school of their own learning etiquette, dancing, and French—skills meant to help in marriage, if not in a career. Black children would be lucky if a local church sponsored an “African school” providing some rudimentary education, and poor children of any race might be excluded from school altogether if their families relied on them for income.
Just as important, the current distinctions between public, private, and parochial models were yet to be established. As the education historian Lawrence Cremin wrote about academies, one component of the educational ecosystem of the early nineteenth century: “[They] came in every size, shape and form, and under every variety of sponsorship. . . . Some were tied to local communities, some to church assemblies, some to government agencies. Some were supported by endowments, some by taxes, some by subscriptions, some by tuition rates, and most by some combination of the four. . . . [They] seemed infinitely adaptable to particular needs and opportunities.”13 Sunday schools such as those founded by Steward and James in Rochester were an important element in the mix of educational models. They emerged in the beginning of the nineteenth century as a way to provide basic, low-cost (the teachers were largely volunteers) schooling to children and adults, white and Black, who would have been excluded from more prestigious opportunities. From the perspective of the brahmin class, they also provided a means of control over the poor by preaching religion, humility, and temperance. Lessons were mostly limited to learning to read, particularly the Bible. A Sunday school teacher in Geneva, New York, bragged that a young Black girl in her class had recited 709 verses of Scripture in a single session. Steward called the Sunday school “that most useful of institutions, [where] you may learn without loss of time or money, that of which none should be ignorant—to read.”14
Out of this stew, replicated in cities across the country, slowly developed some common ideas about public education and the purpose it should serve. “Never will wisdom preside in the halls of legislation, and its profound utterances be recorded on the pages of the statute book, until common schools . . . create more far-seeing intelligence and a purer morality than has ever yet existed among communities of men,” Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Horace Mann, the person most associated with the common schools movement, wrote in 1848. Crucially, these common schools would largely wipe clear the current class-based hierarchy, which had one track of schooling for aspiring scholars and another for everyone else. The common school, Cremin wrote, “would be common, not as a school for the common people . . . but rather as a school common to all people.” It would cut across “all creeds, classes and backgrounds,” though the implications for Black students specifically were left unenumerated.15
Along with Massachusetts, New York made some early strides toward creating common schools. Its regents described to the legislature in 1795 how common schools “must enrich the pastures of the wilderness and cause the little hills to rejoice on every side.” Later that year the state put aside its first funds dedicated to “the encouragement and maintenance of elementary schools,” requiring a local match. A permanent fund was established in 1805, and the first Act for the establishment of Common Schools was passed in 1812. This came just in time for Rochester, where the first public schoolhouse was built on Fitzhugh Street in 1813.16
Both the social reforms of the Burned-Over District and the movement toward common schools were pursued according to high ideals of personal and civic good. In each realm, though, a significant gap existed between theory and practice as far as people of color were concerned. If the goal of universal education was the creation of a responsible electorate, then Black children (and white girls) needed not be considered. Regarding higher education for Black children, one New York City newspaper asked: “What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician?” Advocates there pointed to the disparity between the “splendid, almost palatial edifices” where white children studied while Black children were “painfully neglected and positively degraded . . . pent up in filthy neighborhoods, in old and dilapidated buildings, held down to low associations and gloomy surroundings.”17
To be sure, white progressives played a critical role in the rise of abolitionism and in establishing Rochester as an important center for various nationally significant social movements. In the thirty-year fight to desegregate the city’s schools, however, white protagonists were scarce. As will be seen, entreaties from Rochester’s few Black families for access to quality, integrated schools were by turns ignored, sidestepped, and delayed. When change did come, it was in response to a powerful set of pressures: families’ protests, the mounting financial strain of operating additional schools, and several years of persistent public criticism from one of the most famous men in the country at that time.
“Prejudice is found also, in many of our schools—even in those to which colored children are admitted,” Steward wrote in the 1850s, having observed the state of Black education in Rochester for more than three decades. “There is so much distinction made by prejudice, that the poor, timid colored children might about as well stay at home, as go to a school where they feel that they are looked upon as inferior, however much they may try to excel.”18
For the first full generation of Black children to grow up in Rochester, the provision of simple lessons was a matter of private charity rather than of the public interest. The initial small step toward change came on January 23, 1832, when a group of thirty-two parents petitioned the state legislature to fund the establishment of a separate Black school: “The fact is too notorious, that [our] children are despised, called negroes, and completely discouraged by the white children. We do humbly believe that if the prayer of our petitions be granted, our children might be encouraged to learn: and although they are black, they may be made comely members of society—there they could enjoy Sunday-school privileges, and many other blessings might flow from such an institution, and we, their parents, would forever feel ourselves under the most solemn obligation.”19
The petition was cosigned by the local commissioner of common schools, John McDonald. He also sent a separate note to the legislature adding that the petition had the support of “a very respectable portion of the other inhabitants of the place.” He continued:
Under the present organization our schools are open to all, and yet it is obvious that in them the literary and moral interests of the colored scholar can scarcely prosper. He is reproached with his color; he is taunted with his origin, and if permitted to mingle with others in the joyous pastimes of youth, it is of favor, not of right. Thus the law which may declare him free, now or in prospect, may be a dead letter. His energies are confined; his hopes are crushed; his mind is in chains; and he is still a slave.
The situation of our colored population generally, not only interests our sympathies, but demands our exertions for its melioration; and your committee are unanimous in the opinion, that the interests of this unhappy class would be most promoted by granting the prayer of the petitioners, and constituting them a separate school.20
McDonald’s note implies that at least some Black children had been admitted to the half-dozen or so existing common schools before 1832. It should continually be kept in mind in any case that from Rochester’s first settling until well into the twentieth century, its Black residents made up a tiny fraction of the population. In 1834 there were about 360 Black people in Rochester, less than 3 percent of the overall population. That included about a hundred school-age children, of whom eighty-three were recorded as having attended at least some school in the winter of 1833–34, the second year of operation for the publicly funded school. The majority before then were surely limited to Sunday school, meaning that any Black children who crossed the thresholds of mostly white public school buildings would have been a brave few indeed.21
Rochester would not have been the only community in New York where schools were segregated in fact if not in policy. The state superintendent of schools had reported in 1824 that, “from habit or prejudice, or from some other cause,” few if any Black students attended public schools, though there was no law prohibiting them from doing so.22 Black residents of Lockport requested funds to open a segregated school because “the customs of the county do not permit us—neither indeed do we desire to join in society with those of a different complexion.” In Buffalo, a nominal tuition fee barred poor Black families from public schools.23
The state legislature quickly approved the 1832 petition and provided an unknown sum of money for “the children of color in the village of Rochester to be taught in one or more separate schools.” The local common school commissioners were enlisted as trustees, suggesting that the school had graduated from a charity interest to a governmental function. The distinction remained unclear, though. The schoolhouse itself, at Spring and Sophia Streets in the Third Ward, was purchased and refitted “by the assistance of a few friends of the colored people.” A Black man, William Bishop, was hired to teach.24
The legislature did not finalize its work until April 1832, meaning that the school likely opened the following fall. In February 1833, trustees Elihu Marshall and James W. Smith toured the new school and reported that though the students’ proficiency was “beyond our anticipation,” parents were unable to continue to pay the teacher’s salary.25 As a result the school closed one year later, in March 1834. According to the local abolitionist newspaper, The Rights of Man: “The teacher was a colored man; possessing a very respectable English education, and all the qualifications of a teacher of a common school. . . . But he has now closed it for two reasons—first, the house, which was rented, has been sold and has gone into other hands for a school for the more favored and wealthy whites, and second, for the want of funds; the colored people being too poor to pay him for his services, even with the aid of the public money.”26
No new Black school was opened after the Sophia Street school closed for want of space and funds; the introduction of public money had proven insufficient to maintain a school for the hundred or so school-age Black children. Those children again had to depend on charity for their education until the establishment of the Rochester Board of Education in 1941.
There are a few reasons why education for Black children may have fallen by the wayside in the mid-1830s. Rochester was officially incorporated as a city in April 1834, just a month after the Black school closed. The administration of schools was then transferred from the towns of Brighton and Gates to the new city’s common council, which may have lacked enthusiasm for the subject or at least neglected to take it up promptly among its other responsibilities. The still-small Black community was also undergoing a leadership transition. Thomas James left Rochester in 1835 to establish a church in Syracuse and did not return for twenty-one years. Austin Steward, who had moved to Canada in 1831, returned to Rochester in 1837 but stayed only a few years before relocating permanently to Canandaigua in 1842. He remained a prominent businessman and antislavery advocate in the region but necessarily had a lesser role in Rochester itself.27 Frederick Douglass, meanwhile, did not arrive in Rochester until 1847 (having been encouraged to do so by James, among others). Thus, as in the earlier period, Rochester’s Black churches continued to be the primary locus for Black education. The Rights of Man reported in 1834 that there were three Black churches in the city, including two, Abyssinian Baptist and AME Zion, with Sunday schools.28
Seven years passed before the next recorded public protest against the lack of schools for Black children. It came in January 1841 from the unidentified Black father who asked for tax relief as long as his children were barred from the common schools.29
The board of education established a committee to investigate the question and asked John Spencer for guidance. He responded in February 1841 that, though the council was required to provide some instruction for “this unfortunate class,” it was not obligated to admit Black students to the general public schools. The council followed this advice and instructed the school trustees, “for the moral good as well of the colored as of the white population . . . to make provisions for the said children in a school separate by themselves, and when such provisions are made to reject them from [the white students’] school house.”30
This resolution, unanimously passed on February 11, 1841, made school segregation the law for the first time in Rochester’s history. The white community’s position on its responsibilities regarding the education of Black children was clear. Guidance from the state education department and school leaders’ own internal deliberations had established that Black schools must be operated as part of the public education system. At the same time, the state and city governments had definitively decided that the two systems, Black and white, should be separate. It did not take long, however, for the newly constituted board of education to realize it would be much more expensive to build a separate school for so few Black children than to disperse them among more than a dozen already existing schools throughout the city.
In July 1841 the board received an estimate of $1,500 to build a separate Black schoolhouse and promptly deemed that expenditure “inexpedient.” It opted instead to rent space in the Third Ward for the Black school. A white man, Leonard Risingh, was appointed as teacher after an unsuccessful search for a Black teacher. Austin Steward, temporarily back in the city, was named a school trustee along with prominent Black merchant and abolitionist Jacob Morris and tailor John Bishop.31 In its 1850 review, the board of education recorded: “The school went on, for aught the committee can discover, quietly and successfully,” until the next legislative action was taken in 1845. This avowed ignorance is indicative of the value the white community placed on Black education at the time, and no record exists of the school trustees reporting to the board as they were charged to do. The 1844 city directory shows that 152 students attended the Black school in a rented space on Spring Street with Samuel Boothby, a white man, serving as principal.32
In 1845 the board passed a pair of local laws affirming its duty to provide public schools for Black children and exempting them from taxation until such schools were provided. At the same time it again formally barred Black children from white schools, “except with the consent of the Board of Education.” That last provision had the unintended consequence of drawing a request for the very consent it mentioned. In March 1846, a Black woman named Phebe Ray asked that her children be allowed to attend the public school on Chestnut Street, nearest her home on Mechanic’s Alley. The request was referred to a committee and resurfaced the following month as a report from the legal committee. It was promptly tabled and abandoned.33
In May 1846 the district opened its second Black school, this one in a building on Washington Street rented from the Female Charitable Society and taught by a white woman named Mary Conning “while funds last.” After that Conning was to “continue it by subscription until another appropriation”—again showing the holes in the public support for education of Black children. The two-school arrangement only lasted one school year; the Washington Street building remained open, with Conning staying on as teacher. The school continued at that location until 1849.34
In the meantime Black parents continued to protest the condition in which their children were kept. In March 1846 a gathering of Black residents produced a lengthy resolution decrying the “almost insurmountable difficulties” to the children’s advancement: “Our children, however great pains we may take to have them neat and tidy in their persons, and respectful in their demeanor, are, in most parts of this, as well as other states, in which we are nominally free, excluded from the benefit of common schools, either through the prejudice of teachers, trustees, boards of education, or of the children of many whites, who, by disgusting exhibitions of abuse toward the colored child, show that they have derived but little benefit from the more favorable circumstances in which they have been placed.”35
Comparatively little information is available about whether Black children were allowed in the region’s various private schools in the mid-nineteenth century. There is evidence that at least one of them was desegregated. The Clover Street Seminary, at Clover Street and Elmwood Avenue in Brighton, was established in 1838 by Isaac Moore, with his sister-in-law Celestia Bloss, a member of a prominent local abolitionist family, as teacher and eventually principal. Bloss’s brother William was a close confidant of Frederick Douglass and later played a role in desegregating the Rochester public school system. One of the teachers at Clover Street Seminary was Myrtilla Miner, a white woman who went on to found the Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington, DC, in 1851. Her stay in Rochester was brief (1843–44) but profound, according to a later profile: “In the Rochester school . . . were two free colored girls, and this association was the first circumstance to turn her thoughts to the work to which she gave her life.”36
Black education in Rochester prior to 1849 was an inconsistent institution, advancing and receding according to political circumstances and the presence or absence of prominent advocates like Steward and James. Bursts of advocacy from Rochester’s early Black residents in 1832, and perhaps again in the 1840s, returned real but short-lived gains. Phebe Ray’s Black children were better off educationally in 1846 than she would have been as a child, but they were hardly any closer to the status of the city’s white students.
The next, boisterous period of change can be dated to October 28, 1847. On that date, a friend then living in Boston wrote a letter to the Quaker abolitionist Amy Post:
My dear Amy,
I have finally decided on publishing the North Star in Rochester, and to make that city my future home. I am now buying type and all the little etc. of a printing establishment. I shall probably be able to issue my first number as early as the middle of November—any delay can only do the enterprise harm—I have therefore resolved to commence at once. . . .
Yours sincerely,
F Douglass37
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. As a child he acquired some basic reading skills from Sophia Auld before her husband, Douglass’s master Hugh Auld, put a stop to it:
Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. . . . “Now,” he said, “if you teach that n—— (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. . . . I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. . . . I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.38
From that slight spark Douglass rose to become one of the greatest men of American letters of the nineteenth century. His primary focus, of course, was the abolition of slavery. He escaped in 1838 by boarding a train heading north with borrowed identification documents and the help of his wife Anna. Among the innumerable other topics that captured his attention, though, was education for Black children—including his own. His own experience had taught him its importance, not only in freeing the enslaved but in preparing them for a life of liberty. “Colored men and women, who in view of the circumstances surrounding them, fail to appreciate the worth of [education] . . . cannot be regarded as otherwise than enemies to themselves, to the class with whom they are identified, and to the God who created them,” he wrote. His arrival in Rochester in late 1847 gave new life to native-born Black Rochesterians’ work in the area of public education for their children. Using his talents as a journalist, community organizer, and public speaker, Douglass helped bring about the end of formal segregation in the city’s schools, even if the change occurred too late for some of his own children.
He was primed for the work through his own experience in slavery. He also served an importance apprenticeship of sorts in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he settled just weeks after fleeing Baltimore in 1838. The New Bedford public schools had been desegregated that year, and he shortly struck up a relationship with the abolitionist William Henry Garrison, who in the following decade was to devote much energy to the integration of schools in the North. During Douglass’s time in Massachusetts, the state witnessed the country’s most intense battle on the topic of school segregation to date.39
Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass arrived in Rochester with four young children. The following summer they arranged for their oldest, nine-year-old Rosetta, to attend Seward Seminary, the city’s most prestigious academy for girls. Sarah Seward had founded her school immediately after moving to Rochester in 1833 and two years later relocated from Spring Street to a newly constructed building on a five-acre lot on Alexander Street, then the city’s eastern border. The school attracted from seventy-five to a hundred girls each year, many coming from elsewhere in New York, other states, and even Canada. Seward married in 1841 and leadership of the school fell to the head teacher, Lucilia Tracy.
In 1849, the girls’ curriculum consisted largely of the “ornamental branches”—for example, the growing and arranging of flowers in place of biology. It qualified nonetheless as the city’s best educational option for girls and, for Rosetta Douglass, had the advantage of being located just a few minutes’ walk from her home. It would be the first school experience for Rosetta, who to that point had boarded and studied in Albany with Abigail and Lydia Mott, Quaker abolitionists and cousins of Lucretia Mott.40
Douglass was away from Rochester when the school year began. He returned to find that Rosetta, instead of being seated with the rest of the class, “was merely thrust into a room separate from all other scholars, and in this prison-like solitary confinement received the occasional visits of a teacher appointed to instruct her.” Tracy, the principal, told him the board of trustees had objected to his daughter’s presence and that she didn’t feel free to disregard their wishes, having “remembered how much they had done for her in sustaining the institution.” She offered, though, that if he and Rosetta could tolerate the treatment for a semester or so, “the prejudice might be overcome, and the child admitted into the school with the other young ladies and misses.”41
While Douglass deliberated with his wife, Tracy went back to her students and asked them each individually whether they objected to Rosetta’s presence. The way she phrased the question, Douglass wrote, was “well calculated to rouse their prejudices,” yet each of the girls, “thanks to the uncorruptible virtue of childhood and youth, . . . [said] they welcomed my child among them, to share with them the blessings and privileges of the school, and when asked where she should sit if admitted, several young ladies shouted, “By me, by me, by me.” Tracy then took the question to each of the girls’ parents, asking whether they were comfortable having a Black child in the school. Of them, according to Douglass, only one objected: Horatio Gates Warner, the influential Democratic lawyer and editor of the Rochester Daily Advertiser.
If Warner had hoped his objection would be confidential, he soon learned otherwise. Douglass wrote a blistering three-page open letter to Warner in the North Star; it was later reprinted in full in newspapers across the country:
If this were a private affair, only affecting myself and my family, I should possibly allow it to pass without attracting public attention to it; but such is not the case. It is a deliberate attempt to degrade and injure a large class of persons, whose rights and feelings have been the common sport of yourself, and persons such as yourself, for ages, and I think it is unwise to allow you to do so with impunity. Thank God, oppressed and plundered as we are and have been, we are not without help. We have a press, open and free, and have ample means by which we are able to proclaim your wrongs as a people, and your own infamy, and that proclamation shall be as complete as the means in my power can make it.
Three other Seward Seminary students, Douglass reported, left the school as a result of the controversy over his daughter, and another three changed their plans to begin there “because it has given its sanction to that antidemocratic, and ungodly caste.” Rosetta, meanwhile, was accepted into another school, “quite as respectable and equally Christian to the one from which she was excluded.”
Douglass concluded his letter to Warner, who by this point surely regretted his earlier stance: “Now I should like to know how much better you are than me, and how much better your children than mine? We are both worms of the dust, and our children like us. We differ in color, it is true (and not much in that respect), but who is to decide which color is most pleasing to God, or most honorable among men? But I do not wish to waste words or argument on one whom I take to be as destitute of honorable feeling, as he has shown himself full of pride and prejudice.”42 This incident, which occurred less than a year after Douglass moved to Rochester, illustrates the tension he endured throughout his twenty-five years in the city. When purchasing his house on Alexander Street, he had already faced opposition from white neighbors. Then, as at the Seward Seminary, children showed the most acceptance and affection, gathering to hear him sing and play the violin on his porch on warm evenings. Even as Douglass’s wife Anna worked tirelessly with him in hosting countless Black people escaping slavery on their way to Canada, she found that racism “ran rampant” in Rochester and made few friends in the city. The final blow came in 1872, when the Douglass home on South Avenue was burned to the ground, an apparent arson, while they were away. “My pathway was not entirely free from thorns in Rochester,” Douglass wrote in retrospect. “The vulgar prejudice against color, so common to Americans, met me in several disagreeable forms.”43
Warner never responded publicly to Douglass, but neither did he or the school relent. Rosetta never returned to Seward Seminary. The experience was not the family’s only personal brush with racism in Rochester schools. Douglass wrote in his Life and Times that his children were barred from the nearby public school but instead would have had to attend the “inferior colored school” in the Third Ward. “I hardly need say that I was not prepared to submit tamely to this proscription, any more than I had been to submit to slavery, so I had them taught at home for a while, by Miss Thayer,” he wrote. Phebe Thayer was a Quaker governess and a relative of Amy and Isaac Post.44 This dispute was likely in the fall of 1849; Frederick Douglass Jr., then seven years old, later recalled that “the colored children attending public schools were sent home on account of their color,” returning several months later after sustained agitation from his father. Douglass argued the case to Superintendent Reuben Jones and several trustees in a private meeting in 1850, Jones later recalled, making “an address which I do not believe was ever excelled. . . . I felt at the time that I wished the whole city of Rochester might hear the argument, and I have often regretted that it is lost to the world.”45
At different times the five Douglass children attended both School 15, near their Alexander Street house, and School 13, on Hickory Street, nearer to the South Avenue home to which they moved in 1852.46 Only the eldest, Rosetta, ever attended college. Jones in later years called her “one of the brightest [students] in any of the schools of the city.” The other children received more practical training, partly at the suggestion of their mother. They were kept home from school one day a week to help with the printing and distribution of Douglass’s newspapers and subsequently stopped attending altogether once their father could find them apprenticeships in typesetting or some other trade. For Frederick Douglass Jr., this occurred at age twelve; for Charles Remond Douglass, age sixteen.47
Even after the schools were desegregated, the Douglass children, like other Black children, faced intense social opprobrium. Charles Remond Douglass described the experience of his sister Annie before her early death in 1860: “The taunts of the school children whose parents were pro-slavery made the further attendance at No. 13 school of my youngest sister Annie and myself intolerable, so mother took her out of school at the age of eleven and sent her to a private teacher.”48
Caution is required in drawing a straight line between Rosetta Douglass’s rejection from Seward Seminary and her father’s subsequent participation in the campaign to integrate the public schools. For one thing, Seward Seminary was private, not public, and her dismissal from it did not mark the end of the family’s woes with Rochester schools. For another, school segregation had been an important cause for Douglass even before he moved to Rochester and likely would have drawn his energy in any case. The episode did, however, serve to publicize the matter dramatically and perhaps increased the urgency with which the public school authorities considered their own situation.
The debates over school segregation of 1848–51 proceeded along a number of contested fronts. Douglass’s arrival helped energize and give voice to Rochester’s Black community, whose protests during that time were more forceful and effective than they had ever been previously. They were supported by a growing number of white people. The abolition movement had gained great momentum by 1848. Two antislavery societies had been established in Rochester in 1833 and the State Convention of the Colored Citizens of New York was held in the city in 1843 and again in 1846.49 Social progressives, including on the school board, were perhaps finding it harder to overlook discrimination in their own community while moralizing against southern slave owners. “Our white countrymen [once] could say the negro ought to be free [and] they felt they had uttered a radical and philanthropic sentiment,” Douglass wrote in 1849. “Something more than the mere act of emancipation is now thought to be due to this long neglected and deeply injured people.” Last, and perhaps decisively, the school board suffered increasingly under the financial burden of operating a separate building for the city’s few Black students, who otherwise could easily have been accommodated in the common schools. This fiscal crisis was fostered in turn by boycotts and other protests of the Black community.50
All these pressures were evident in August 1849 as the school board members deliberated on whether to open a second school for Black children on the east side of the city. A budget analysis showed that educating Black students separately at a second building would cost at least three times more per pupil than educating students in the common schools. This alone, they believed, was enough to foreclose the idea of keeping the segregated schools open. More generally, they continued:
If then, as we trust, we have shown that the system of exclusive schools for colored children cannot be maintained upon the grounds of economy nor utility, upon what ground, then, was the system first established, and why has it been maintained? We answer, it was first conceived and has been maintained solely . . . in order to gratify a morbid public sentiment against the colored race. . . .
But we trust that the enlightened, generous and philanthropic portion of the citizens of Rochester are as willing to open the doors of their “Free Schools” to those whose only impediment is their color, as they are and ever have been to the poor, destitute and degraded of other nations and climes. Why should we close the doors of our schools upon those who can boast that they are American citizens, created by the same overruling Providence, children too who “hunger and thirst” for the blessings of knowledge and education—who have as much natural right to enjoy the beneficent effects of our “Free Schools” as those of a lighter hue?51
Writing in the following week’s North Star, Frederick Douglass wholeheartedly approved the Committee on Colored Schools’ recommendation, saying that it would be “a noble example of justice and liberality worthy of the city of Rochester.” He warned, though, against a scheme to circulate a petition among Black residents asking for the preservation of at least one Black school. “We should feel the most intense mortification if, while many of the most respectable white people of this city should be in favor of admitting our children to equal privileges in the use of our common schools, a single colored man should be found opposed to the measure,” he wrote.52
Nonetheless, the resolution—to close the sole Black school and disperse its students among the common schools—was not adopted. Several board members raised objections. One, John Quinn, noted that gender barriers had only recently been taken down and pointed out that “no citizen would want a colored boy sitting in school beside his daughter.” Instead, an east-side Black school, just north of Main Street between St. Paul Street and Clinton Avenue, was opened, and the board went scouting for alternate sites for a west-side school, as the current school’s North Washington Street site apparently had become untenable.53
The board committee returned in November 1849 with the recommendation of renting space in the basement of AME Zion Church, and the plan was quickly adopted. From Douglass’s perspective, the city’s Black citizens had not only lost the present integration battle but had taken a major step back in finding themselves in the “low, damp and dark cellar” of the church. He heaped scorn on the “stupid creatures who officiate as Trustees in Zion Church” for providing a lifeline to the segregated system:
For some time past [the school trustees] have been at a loss to find a place whereon to build a school-house for colored children; when almost wearied out in the pursuit, and almost ready (from sheer necessity) to admit colored children into the district schools, where they have a right to be, we record with shame and confusion the scandalous fact that the trustees of the Zion Methodist Church, for the paltry consideration of two hundred dollars, offered the use of the cellar of their meeting-house, and have thus become the servile tools of their own proscription and degradation. For such base and cringing servility we have no language sufficiently strong to express our indignation and contempt. . . . The cellar of that church is about as fit for a school-house for tender children as an icehouse would be, and we have been credibly informed that that has been the use to which this cellar has been put.54
Douglass concluded, for the moment, by noting that the fight for integrated schools was “just now, the question of questions for the colored people of this place” and calling for loud resistance. The school board’s decision was all the more harmful because, as soon as the east-side school opened, all Black students living in that part of the city were ejected from the common schools they had been attending. A large group of residents, both Black and white, heeded his call and met at the courthouse in protest. They signed a resolution stating that “the people of Rochester may justly share the reproach of slavery in South Carolina if they give countenance to this wrong.”55
In January 1850 the board again declined to vote for formal desegregation. Nonetheless, cracks in the official policy continued to emerge. The new east-side school was plagued by boycotts; it had only seven or eight Black students as well as a dozen or so “ragged white children” who lived nearby, Douglass reported. And the school board noted in March that, of seventy-three school-age Black children in Rochester, twenty-four were attending their local common schools, with half of them at School 15 on Alexander Street, near Douglass’s house. By contrast, average attendance at the west-side Black school was thirty-eight students. Black parents continued to boycott the east-side school, leading to its closure in the fall of 1851, and Superintendent Reuben Jones recommended a policy whereby children would only attend the Black school if they “[could] do so without great inconvenience.” Desegregation was a fact in the classroom, if not in the law or the school board room. Still, the board—at least what Douglass called the “pro-slavery Irish faction”—would not admit defeat. It pointed to the petitions of 1832 and 1849, both purporting to show support among the Black community for a segregated school that would provide “a place of refuge for colored children who would not be kindly received in other schools.”56
The record of Douglass’s advocacy goes silent in 1851. That may have been a result of him shifting his attention to his more typical sphere of national affairs after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; it may also be that his later writing on the subject was lost when his house (and many of his papers) burned in 1872. The Black community nevertheless continued its fight, protesting again in 1854 when the teacher at the Black school, a white man named William Barnes, was rehired by the board over the wishes of both the parents and “60 or 70 other respectable white citizens.” Barnes, the protesters wrote, had “manifested his love of the intellectual improvement of the colored race, by closing the door and pocketing the key, to prevent young men of color from meeting to improve their minds.” What was more, the board had agreed to pay Barnes $650 annually, $50 more than the Black families’ preferred candidate had requested. He was an unidentified Black man “who has labored for those with whom he is identified, as a letter-writer, as a lecturer, and as a poet,” and who was unable to work at another trade because of disability. The board’s choice of Barnes had been “actuated by narrow prejudice against color, unworthy of them as men, and a disgrace to the city and age in which we live,” the Black parents protested. “We will agitate and agitate, until our rights are respected and our wrongs are redressed.” The episode reinforces how otherwise unknown Black parents, rather than Douglass or any other prominent individual alone, provided the energy and activism for desegregation.57
In fact, the board had already considered and rejected an even more economical option for the school. Barnes was rehired only after the board insisted on a male teacher. A minority of the board members would have preferred “a competent female teacher [who] could be employed at half the cost [and] who would do equal justice to the pupils of the school.” The board again studied the question of closing the Black school in January 1855 and again declined to act despite calculating that continuing to educate Black students separately was increasing expenses fourfold. Attendance had dropped yet again, down to twenty-six students per day on average. Superintendent Jones blamed Black parents for this dilemma, criticizing them for having “shown so little appreciation of the advantages thus offered.”58 The school’s ballooning expense persuaded the board to follow its original plan of hiring a cheaper, female teacher in place of Barnes. Their choice was Lucy Colman, a thirty-nine-year-old abolitionist at the beginning of a long career in social activism. She was given $350 for the year but, as she admitted later, “I had an object in view in taking that school, which I accomplished, other than earning my living.” As she later recalled in her memoir:
I took the situation, determining in my own mind that I would be the last teacher, and that the school should die. It died in just one year. I persuaded the parents in the different districts to send the more advanced children to the schools in their own districts, suggesting that they always see to it that they went particularly clean, and to impress upon the pupil that his or her behavior be faultless as possible. I then advised the trustees of the church to withdraw the permission for any further use of the building, save for church purposes. When the time came for the opening of the new year’s school, there were neither scholars nor school-house. The death was not violent. No mention was made of the decease in the papers, and I presume there were not ten persons in the city that knew, or if they had known would have cared, that the disgrace was abolished.59
AME Zion did not actually withdraw approval for use of the building but rather increased the rent, requesting a sum beyond the board’s already waning appetite. The new superintendent, John Atwater, commented again on the futility of maintaining the Black school in March 1856. Prejudice was the only barrier to change, he noted, “and experience proves this is not a very serious obstacle, for in most of the Schools of the city there are already more or less colored children, and in some instances they are among the best and most intelligent scholars in our Schools.”60
The coup de grace, as Colman noted, came quietly. A committee reported to the school board in July 1856 that it had been “entirely unable to procure a suitable room” for the Black school. As a result, the board announced that it would close the school “for the present term.” That unheralded announcement marked the end of explicit racial segregation in Rochester schools. It came twenty-four years after the city first acknowledged at least partial responsibility for “this unhappy class,” and thirty-eight years after Austin Steward conducted the first formal classes for Black children in 1818.61
As long as the struggle had been, Rochester was the first large school district in New York to fully desegregate. A similar campaign in Buffalo went on unsuccessfully for more than a decade before some Black students were grudgingly admitted to their neighborhood schools beginning in 1855, then given free choice of schools in 1872. Buffalo’s Black School only closed in 1880, after a lawsuit based on Reconstruction-era legislation. Many other cities—Albany, Geneva, Troy, Poughkeepsie, and Schenectady—declined to act until the 1873 passage of a state law that prohibited segregation by race in public facilities, including schools. New York City, like Buffalo, maintained a designated Black school long after allowing Black students to attend the common schools. As late as 1900, the state’s top court upheld the legality of separate but equal schools under both state and federal law, and laws providing for separate education were not entirely repealed until 1938.62
In a preface to Lucy Colman’s memoir, Amy Post claimed that Colman, “by her own exertions, without help from any one, removed from our city of Rochester the blot of the colored school.”63 This, of course, was not true. But why did Rochester achieve the distinction of having the first desegregated school system in New York? Some credit goes to the white residents, including those on the school board, who inveighed against segregated schooling for years. Douglass had certainly brought the issue to its greatest prominence, first through the Seward Seminary affair and then as an organizer and publisher of the North Star.
The most significant contribution—and the one most likely to escape documentation—surely came from Black parents, their names mostly lost to history, who advocated over decades for their children. The unidentified father who asked in 1841 why he should pay taxes for schools from which his children were barred. Phebe Ray, the domestic servant, who petitioned the board in 1846 for access to a closer school. And the groups of Black parents—perhaps a majority of those in the city at the time—who attended a series of protests in the late 1840s and again in the mid-1850s, then boycotted the Black school until its final demise. Their energetic activism made Rochester, at least for a time, the most progressive city in the state in terms of the opportunities it afforded its children.
The parallels between Rochester’s first desegregation effort and its second one—still uncompleted and now mostly abandoned—are plain. As long as nineteenth-century Black children attended school separately, they found themselves in subpar buildings, subject to eviction and with little attention given to their proximity to home. Public officials were swayed more easily by financial considerations than moral ones. The wishes of white families in proximity were given outsized consideration. Black families’ advocacy was most effective when corralled by a charismatic leader such as Frederick Douglass, but otherwise regularly silenced or ignored.
Why were white citizens, in Rochester and elsewhere, reluctant to welcome small numbers of Black children into public schools? As Douglass’s Maryland slave-master, Thomas Auld, put it, education would unfit them for slavery. The logic of that unfitting led Douglass to a conclusion that troubled most white antebellum Americans. “It is very clear to us that the only way to remove prejudice, and to command the respect of our white fellow citizens, is to repudiate, in every form, the idea of our inferiority, by maintaining our right to civil, social and political equality with them,” he wrote. Civil, social, and political equality for Black people—even for Rochester’s purportedly liberal white populace, the idea was almost unthinkable. Even Douglass, the most respected Black man of the century, harbored real bitterness at the treatment he received. Perhaps it was in a fit of optimism that he wrote, “The only source from which we have reason to expect opposition . . . [is] that low vulgar herd of whites, whose chief sense of their own consequence is derived from their ability to abuse and insult with impunity those whom they are pleased to term ‘n——s.’”64
Douglass saw formal school desegregation in Rochester, even in time for some of his own children to benefit. The greater work—“to remove prejudice, and to command the respect of our white fellow citizens”—was hardly begun.