In 1854 there was found in Norfolk, Virginia, what the radically proslavery people considered a dangerous white woman.  It was discovered that one Mrs. Douglass and her daughter had for three years been teaching a school maintained for the education of Negroes.[1] It was evident that this institution had not been run so clandestinely but that the opposition to the education of Negroes in that city had probably been too weak to bring about the close of the school at an earlier date.  Mrs. Douglass and her pupils were arrested and brought before the court, where she was charged with violating the laws of the State.  The defendant acknowledged her guilt, but, pleading ignorance of the law, was discharged on the condition that she would not commit the same “crime” again.  Censuring the court for this liberal decision the Richmond Examiner referred to it as offering “a very convenient way of getting out of the scrape.”  The editor emphasized the fact that the law of Virginia imposed on such offenders the penalty of one hundred dollars fine and imprisonment for six months, and that its positive terms “allowed no discretion in the community magistrate."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Parsons, Inside View of Slavery, p. 251; and Lyman, Leaven for Doughfaces, p. 43.]

[Footnote 2:  13th Annual Report of the American and Foreign Antislavery Societies, 1853, p. 143.]

All such schools, however, were not secretly kept.  Writing from Charleston in 1851 Fredrika Bremer made mention of two colored schools.  One of these was a school for free Negroes kept with open doors by a white master.  Their books which she examined were the same as those used in American schools for white children.[1] The Negroes of Lexington, Kentucky, had in 1830 a school in which thirty colored children were taught by a white man from Tennessee.[2] This gentleman had pledged himself to devote the rest of his life to the uplift of his “black brethren."[3] Travelers noted that colored schools were found also in Richmond, Maysville, Danville, and Louisville decades before the Civil War.[4] William H. Gibson, a native of Baltimore, was after 1847 teaching at Louisville in a day and night school with an enrollment of one hundred pupils, many of whom were slaves with written permits from their masters to attend.[5] Some years later W.H.  Stewart of that city attended the schools of Henry Adams, W.H.  Gibson, and R.T.W.  James.  Robert Taylor began his studies there in Robert Lane’s school and took writing from Henry Adams.[6] Negroes had schools in Tennessee also.  R.L.  Perry was during these years attending a school at Nashville.[7] An uncle of Dr. J.E.  Moorland spent some time studying medicine in that city.

[Footnote 1:  Bremer, The Homes of the New World, vol. ii., p. 499.]

[Footnote 2:  Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in U.S.A., 1833-34, p. 346.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., pp. 346-348.]