The Negroes of Baltimore were almost as self-educating as those of the District of Columbia.  The coming of the refugees and French Fathers from Santo Domingo to Baltimore to escape the revolution[1] marked an epoch in the intellectual progress of the colored people of that city.  Thereafter their intellectual class had access to an increasing black population, anxious to be enlightened.  Given this better working basis, they secured from the ranks of the Catholics additional catechists and teachers to give a larger number of illiterates the fundamentals of education.  Their untiring co-worker in furnishing these facilities, was the Most Reverend Ambrose Marechal, Archbishop of Baltimore from 1817 to 1828.[2] These schools were such an improvement over those formerly opened to Negroes that colored youths of other towns and cities thereafter came to Baltimore for higher training.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Drewery, Slave Insurrections in Virginia, p. 121.]

[Footnote 2:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., 1871, p. 205.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., p. 205.]

The coming of these refugees to Baltimore had a direct bearing on the education of colored girls.  Their condition excited the sympathy of the immigrating colored women.  These ladies had been educated both in the Island of Santo Domingo and in Paris.  At once interested in the uplift of this sex, they soon constituted the nucleus of the society that finally formed the St. Frances Academy for girls in connection with the Oblate Sisters of Providence Convent in Baltimore, June 5, 1829.[1] This step was sanctioned by the Reverend James Whitefield, the successor of Archbishop Marechal, and was later approved by the Holy See.  The institution was located on Richmond Street in a building which on account of the rapid growth of the school soon gave way to larger quarters.  The aim of the institution was to train girls, all of whom “would become mothers or household servants, in such solid virtues and religious and moral principles as modesty, honesty, and integrity."[2] To reach this end they endeavored to supply the school with cultivated and capable teachers.  Students were offered courses in all the branches of “refined and useful education, including all that is regularly taught in well regulated female seminaries."[3] This school was so well maintained that it survived all reactionary attacks and became a center of enlightenment for colored women.

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., p. 205.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 206.]

[Footnote 3:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., p. 206.]