While the colored schools of the District of Columbia suffered as a result of this disturbance, the Negroes then in charge of them were too ambitious, too well-educated to discontinue their work.  The situation, however, was in no sense encouraging.  With the exception of the churches of the Catholics and Quakers who vied with each other in maintaining a benevolent attitude toward the education of the colored people,[1] the churches of the District of Columbia, in the Sabbath schools of which Negroes once sat in the same seats with white persons, were on account of this riot closed to the darker race.[2] This expulsion however, was not an unmixed evil, for the colored people themselves thereafter established and directed a larger number of institutions of learning.[3]

[Footnote 1:  The Catholics admitted the colored people to their churches on equal footing with others when they were driven to the galleries of the Protestant churches.  Furthermore, they continued to admit them to their parochial schools.  The Sisters of Georgetown trained colored girls, and the parochial school of the Aloysius Church at one time had as many as two hundred and fifty pupils of color.  Many of the first colored teachers of the District of Columbia obtained their education in these schools.  See Special Report of U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 218 et. seq.]

[Footnote 2:  Sp.  Report, etc. 187, pp. 217, 218, 219, 220, 221.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., pp. 220-222.]

The colored schools of the District of Columbia soon resumed their growth recovering most of the ground they had lost and exhibiting evidences of more systematic work.  These schools ceased to be elementary classes, offering merely courses in reading and writing, but developed into institutions of higher grade supplied with competent teachers.  Among other useful schools then flourishing in this vicinity were those of Alfred H. Parry, Nancy Grant, Benjamin McCoy, John Thomas Johnson, James Enoch Ambush, and Dr. John H. Fleet.[1] John F. Cook returned from Pennsylvania and reopened his seminary.[2] About this time there flourished a school established by Fannie Hampton.  After her death the work was carried on by Margaret Thompson until 1846.  She then married Charles Middleton and became his assistant teacher.  He was a free Negro who had been educated in Savannah, Georgia, while attending school with white and colored children.  He founded a successful school about the time that Fleet and Johnson[3] retired.  Middleton’s school, however, owes its importance to the fact that it was connected with the movement for free colored public schools started by Jesse E. Dow, an official of the city, and supported by Rev. Doctor Wayman, then pastor of the Bethel Church.[4] Other colaborers with these teachers were Alexander Cornish, Richard Stokes, and Margaret Hill.[5]

[Footnote 1:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, pp. 212, 213, and 283.]