African American Educator

Beginnings.

Mary S. Peake, born Mary Kelsey in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1823, was the daughter of an Englishman and a lightskinned, free black woman. At the age of six she was sent to Alexandria to live with her aunt, Mary Paine, in a house owned by abolitionist sympathizer Rollins Fowle. There she attended a "select colored school," studying dressmaking along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, until growing sectional tensions and fear of slave unrest prompted local lawmakers to close all colored schools in the city. Peake was deeply religious, and upon her return to Norfolk at the age of sixteen she joined the First Baptist Church, then under the direction of antislavery pastor Rev. James A. Mitchell. In 1847 at the age of twenty-four, Peake moved to Hampton, Virginia, supporting herself by making clothes and clandestinely teaching black children and adults. In 1851 she...