At the same time there were other persons and organizations in the field.  Prominent among the first of these workers was Daniel Coker, known to fame as a colored Methodist missionary, who was sent to Liberia.  Prior to 1812 he had in Baltimore an academy which certain students from Washington attended when they had no good schools of their own, and when white persons began to object to the co-education of the races.  Because of these conditions two daughters of George Bell, the builder of the first colored schoolhouse in the District of Columbia, went to Baltimore to study under Coker.[1] An adult Negro school in this city had 180 pupils in 1820.  There were then in the Baltimore Sunday-schools about 600 Negroes.  They had formed themselves into a Bible association which had been received into the connection of the Baltimore Bible Society.[2] In 1825 the Negroes there had a day and a night school, giving courses in Latin and French.  Four years later there appeared an “African Free School” with an attendance of from 150 to 175 every Sunday.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., p. 196.]

[Footnote 2:  Adams, Anti-slavery, etc., p. 14.]

[Footnote 3:  Adams, Anti-Slavery, etc., pp. 14 and 15.]

By 1830 the Negroes of Baltimore had several special schools of their own.[1] In 1835 there was behind the African Methodist Church in Sharp Street a school of seventy pupils in charge of William Watkins.[2] W. Livingston, an ordained clergyman of the Episcopal Church, had then a colored school of eighty pupils in the African Church at the corner of Saratoga and Ninth Streets.[3] A third school of this kind was kept by John Fortie at the Methodist Bethel Church in Fish Street.  Five or six other schools of some consequence were maintained by free women of color, who owed their education to the Convent of the Oblate Sisters of Providence.[4] Observing these conditions, an interested person thought that much more would have been accomplished in that community, if the friends of the colored people had been able to find workers acceptable to the masters and at the same time competent to teach the slaves.[5] Yet another observer felt that the Negroes of Baltimore had more opportunities than they embraced.[6]

[Footnote 1:  Buckingham, America, Historical, etc., vol. i., p. 438.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 438; Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade, pp. 54, 55, and 56; and Varle, A Complete View of Baltimore, p. 33.]

[Footnote 3:  Varle, A Complete View of Baltimore, p. 33; and Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade, pp. 85 and 92.]

[Footnote 4:  Ibid., p. 33.]

[Footnote 5:  Ibid., p. 54.]

[Footnote 6:  Ibid., p. 37.]