Read Part One HERE
In this post I will continue to focus on a woman named Myrtilla Miner. She lived from 1815 - 1864. With the support of prominent Quaker Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and a contribution of $100 from a Quaker philantrophist, Myrtilla was encouraged to open a school for African American girls in Washington, D.C. in 1851. This was only one year after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, when freedmen and runaways were beaten, bound and cast into prison and abolitionists were incarcerated for their anti-slavery activities.
District of Columbia Mayor Walter Lenox argued against the school in an article in the National Intelligencer, stating that "it was not humane to the coloured population, for us to permit a degree of instruction so far beyond their political and social condition.... With this superior education there will come no removal of the present disabilities, no new soures of employment equal to their mental culture; and hence there will be a restles population, less disposed than ever to fill that position in society which is allotted to them."
Despite all that, on December 6, 1851, in a rented room about fourteen feet square, in a framed house then owned and occupied as a dwelling by African American Edward Younger, Myrtilla with six pupils established the Normal School for Coloured Girls, the first normal school in the District of Columbia and the fourth one in the US.
Read Part One Hundred And Thirty-Nine HERE
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