Miner’s increased ambition touched a nerve. An all-girls school to engage the existing semiliterate colored population was barely tolerated. A magnet that would draw more coloreds from other parts of the country was something else entirely. In a letter to a local paper, one of the city’s elders, former mayor Walter Lenox, clearly articulated what many white Washingtonians thought and said to each other about their city, free coloreds, and abolitionists. The mayor’s 1,319-word piece was published in the National Intelligencer newspaper, appearing in the May 6, 1857, edition. On the subject of the proposed school’s course of study, he wrote:
The standard of education which is proposed is far beyond the primary branches, and will doubtless from time to time be advanced. Is it, then, just to ourselves or humane to the colored population for us to permit a degree of instruction so far beyond their political and social condition and which must continue to exist in this as in every other slaveholding community? With this superior education there will come no removal of the present disabilities, no new sources of employment equal to mental culture; and hence there will be a restless population, less disposed than ever to fill that position in society which is allotted to them. In my judgment these two objections—the increase of our free and the indiscriminate education of them far beyond their fixed condition are sufficient reasons for us to oppose this scheme.
Translation: The “coloreds” are too inferior to learn and those who might learn something will become uppity.
On the free coloreds as a burden:
The District of Columbia contains about three thousand six hundred slaves and ten thousand free colored persons. This latter class embraces very many most worthy members who contribute to the wealth of the community but the necessities of a large portion of them impose an onerous tax upon the public revenue and upon private charity. This condition of things does not arise exclusively from their own demerits: they have been gradually and to a very considerable extent ousted by the increase of white labor from the positions formerly filled by them as domestics and laborers.
Translation: We have enough of those free “coloreds” to deal with, so why build something that would attract more of them? Especially when we have poor whites who will do menial work.
On Miner and the Republican conspiracy:
A misguided philanthropy inflamed by political demagogism would readily supply the means and the agents to execute its designs; an incendiary press in our midst will soon follow and with all these varied and active agencies stimulated by the presence of adherents in Congress, in constant operation our District will be converted into the headquarters of “slavery agitation” from which it may deal forth in every direction its treasonable blows. It is unnecessary to depict the fatal consequences to ourselves and to our country.
Translation: Don’t let outsiders change our way of life. This is nothing but trouble. Big time.
And to those who might donate money:
With justice we can say to the advocates of this measure, you are not competent to decide this question; your habits of thought, your ignorance of our true relations to the colored population, prevent you from making a full and candid examination of its merits and above all the temper of the public mind is inauspicious even for its consideration. If your humanity demands this particular sphere for its action, and if, to use your own language, prejudice would brand them at your Northern schools, establish separate institutions in the free States, dispense your money there abundantly as your charity will supply, draw to them the unfortunate at your own door, or from abroad and in all respects gratify the largest impulses of your philanthropy; but do not seek to impose upon us a system contrary to our wishes and interests, and for the further reason that by so doing you injure the cause of those whom you express a wish to serve.
Translation: Things were fine here before you abolitionists showed up. You have no idea about this town. If you are hell bent on doing this, go do it up North. Don’t make us hurt you.
The letter succeeded in killing the drive for a secondary school. Miner’s fundraising efforts were wholly unsuccessful. Her health declined, and she stepped away from the school, which closed for a year while she sought treatment in California. While there, she was in a carriage accident, which injured her in such a way that she never fully regained good health.
Miner was forty-nine when she died, but her dream did not. Within the first seven years of her school’s existence, six of her former students had set up their own schools.28 Based on Miner’s success, and with the 1862 congressional mandate to create public schools for colored students in Washington, Congress voted to incorporate Myrtilla Miner’s school in 1863. It would be named the Institution for the Education of Colored Youth founded by Myrtilla Miner.
Fifteen years later the school became part of the District’s public school system. It was renamed the Miner Normal School. A candidate for the two-year course could be either male or female, must be at least sixteen years old and of good moral character, and would be required to pass exams in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and grammar.29 The Miner Normal School, which became Miner Teachers College in 1929, trained a legion of black teachers who went back into the black school system well into the 1940s.
Myrtilla Miner accomplished her primary goal: teaching colored people to teach higher education. Now it would be up to someone else to create a school where that teaching could be done.
3 THE LAW GIVETH AND THE LAW TAKETH AWAY
THINK ABOUT THE CIVIL rights breakthroughs that occurred in the 1960s and what they meant to the United States. Freedom riders. The March on Washington. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Loving v. Virginia. Something or someone you encountered today was likely affected by the events of that decade.
Now rewind a century and imagine those changes magnified exponentially when slavery gave way after the “Great Unpleasantness” ended. Any vestigial legalized racism was supposedly excised by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. The argument could be made that an American living in the late nineteenth century experienced mind-blowing societal shifts whose magnitude would not be felt again for another one hundred years. These shifts began in the ’60s—the 1860s.
In 1867, less than two decades removed from the active Washington, DC, slave trade, colored Washingtonians gained the right to vote. And vote they did. By the end of the decade, seven colored men had been elected to the District’s city council. The laws began to change. The council passed an ordinance that declared that “any quiet and orderly person” who was “well behaved and respectable” should be welcome in establishments, taverns, restaurants, shops, and concerts in the District regardless of race—and all people should be treated the same. In reality this didn’t happen, but for a time these laws were on the books.1 In the same moment, the city elected Mayor Sayles J. Bowen, the most radical of Republicans, a white man who believed wholeheartedly in integration.
So did the crusading senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, who shared Bowen’s view, especially when it came to schools. The arrogant and brilliant Senator Sumner was almost delusional about the country’s willingness to accept civil rights for colored people. He repeatedly proposed legislation for equal pay, equal housing opportunity, and integrated transportation. And he hated slavery and anyone who liked it.
Once during a debate on the Senate floor, Senator Sumner said a pro-slavery South Carolina senator, Andrew Butler, had “chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who though ugly to others is always lovely to him, though polluted in the sight of the world is chaste in his sight: I mean the harlot Slavery.”2 The suggestion that the good gentleman from South Carolina was cavorting with a whore, metaphorical or otherwise, was astounding.
Senator Sumner never saw the blunt object aimed at his head. He was at his desk when he felt a blow to his skull. Two days after Sumner’s speech, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a relative of the harlot-lover, s
truck Senator Sumner on the head with a metal-topped cane. Repeatedly. Witnesses described the attack in detail: “Sumner rose and lurched blindly about the chamber futilely, attempting to protect himself bleeding profusely.” Two other lawmakers rushed to his aid, but by then Sumner had ripped the desk from its floor bolts to protect himself. Congressman Brooks beat Senator Sumner senseless. As the unconscious senator was carried away, Brooks walked calmly out of the chamber without being detained.3 Sumner was incapacitated for many months.
The reaction was much less dramatic when Senator Sumner pushed legislation that promoted integration in schools. He was simply defeated. However, though one door had closed, another opened. Rather than agree to the insane idea of the races learning together, Congress opted for separate public schools in DC. There would be a “double headed school authority” in Washington. Congress would regulate the white schools through city councils, a board of education, a superintendent, and a board of trustees. The colored-school flow chart was a little more streamlined. The colored schools would be overseen by a board of trustees appointed and governed by the secretary of the interior. Until the board was established, a white superintendent would oversee the schools.
In 1862, the first piece of legislation was passed authorizing the use of 10 percent of taxes collected from colored residents for primary schooling. Given how few colored citizens actually owned land at the time, this was not nearly enough money to start a whole new system, which some speculate was the point. Two years later the act had to be fortified to create a pool of money for all children that would be appropriated based on the percentage of white and colored children in the system. Allocating funds by percentage presented another problem. The number of free blacks in the late 1860s obviously exceed the number before Emancipation Day. Yet the percentages were based on the number of free colored children in DC in 1860. It was simple math. The funding act was revised again to address this problem, but there was another concern. The money had to actually be dispensed to the newly established colored trustees put in charge of the creating the colored public school system. The financial pipeline was sluggish at best. In 1864 only $628 of the $25,000 set aside made it to the trustees.4 In response, Congress put in place a third act as of July 23, 1866, that required funds be handed over to the colored trustees in a timely manner or the DC commissioners would be penalized. Ultimately the funds would go directly to the independent board of trustees for colored schools.5 At the time, “independent” meant “not our problem”—but to a few wise colored men it meant “our turn.”
William Syphax seized the moment. It was no surprise when, in 1868, this “well known and intelligent colored citizen of Washington” was appointed the chairman and president of the District of Columbia Board of Trustees of the Colored Public Schools.6 He was praised for “fidelity and excellent judgment as the Chairman of the Board.”7 Initially Syphax had supported Senator Sumner in his push for integration, both men believing it was the best way to get the best schools for colored children. Senator Sumner once told him, “Mr. Syphax, I want your child to study out of the same book, at the same desk, and under the same teacher as mine; for I am sure that the white man will always provide for his child a good education.”8
Syphax realized that, while Sumner’s assessment may have been correct, it wasn’t going to happen. Syphax knew that he had to act quickly to establish a separate secondary school for colored students while the political winds were at his back and the coffers were open. Where Myrtilla Miner’s efforts to create an institution of higher learning were affected by her gender, northern support system, and maybe even her race, William Syphax had the advantage of his family status and local history. His grandmother had been Martha Washington’s maid, and according to local legend and some Syphax family historians, William may have been a descendant of Mrs. Washington as well as a relative of Robert E. Lee, by marriage.9
Syphax’s enslaved father had been owned by the man who owned Arlington, Virginia—all of it. William had grown up hearing tales from his father about meeting George Washington and Thomas Jefferson when they came to visit the rich landowner for whom he worked. Syphax’s mother, Maria, was the colored daughter of the landowner and the aforementioned maid.10 When the landowner died, he left a large piece of land to Maria Syphax, where her family lived for decades—that is, until the government attempted to seize it through a post-Civil War tax loophole.
William Syphax was a big man, over six feet tall, with a strong, sharp nose and a prominent forehead. He had been educated in a private school in Arlington and had forged a career as a messenger and clerk in the Department of the Interior. He was smart and persuasive, and used both these traits, and his commanding presence, when he boldly and successfully petitioned Congress to pass a bill that returned the fifteen acres of land to his family.11 President Andrew Johnson signed it. If William Syphax could wrestle land from the government, he could surely build a congressionally sanctioned colored school system. But first Syphax would need the help of the community. Schools required pupils.
The population of Washington had changed after the end of the war. Between 1860 and 1867, the number of colored people in Washington increased 200 percent as former slaves found their way north.12 Manual laborers with little or no education, many of them newly emancipated, became a part of what was known as alley life in Washington. Off main streets, these small interior courtyards were lined with back-to-back wooden shacks. Sanitation was minimal at best, but this was the only housing available to some of the new arrivals.
Many middle-class working blacks, Irish, and Italians lived in these areas too.13 Some became functional communities; others suffered from disease and crime. The alleys were not sequestered in one part of town; they were woven throughout the District. Their existence was impossible to ignore, which contributed to the hostility from many whites and some of the original free blacks, who saw the alley dwellers as a threat to the city, or at least their comfortable way of life.14
Many alley children had to work to help their families survive, so school was not an option. Others did not see the point. Here’s a poem from a child questioning the wisdom of spending his days in a classroom. Lost on him is that while sitting in a classroom, he learned to write.15
School
Is, Such, a Funny, Place,
I, Don’t, See, Why, We, Go
But, Yet and, Still, We Have,
To, Go, Each and Every Day,
But, yet, And, Still, We, Have
To, Go, It, Really, Don’t Make
Sence, For, I, Just, Hate, To
Go, To, School, And I, Know
That, You, Will, Agree
For, School, is Just A
Place, For, Fools, and Fools
Don’t only, Go, I Go,
And I, Am, not, a Fool
To combat these attitudes and to create a supply of students for the new colored schools, Syphax appealed to clergy to encourage their congregants to send their children to the new schools. In a letter dated September 10, 1868, Syphax wrote:
Dear Sir: The Trustees of the Colored Schools for Washington and Georgetown earnestly desire to enlist your valuable cooperation with them in efforts to render these schools as efficient as possible … by often holding up before the people of your charge the absolute necessity of education, in order to fit their children for the new duties of freedom and civil equality and to enable them to take and worthily fill positions of honor and responsibility. If educated they can do this; if ignorant they never can…. Carefully instruct the people in the importance of sending their children regularly and punctually to school … by advising the parents to always sustain the regulation and the good discipline of the schools … by urging the parents to visit the school, make the acquaintance of the teachers of their children, see how the schools are conducted and to show the teachers that they take an interest in their children’s progress…. The children of the people of color, for the most part, can attend school for but a few years, when they must seek
employment by which to obtain a livelihood; it is, therefore, of the highest importance that they should make the most of their brief time in school.
Brief for now.
Many of the small grammar schools were stuffed into old abandoned buildings with the children practically sitting on top of one another. The white schools had been around for sixty years and had built up something of a curriculum. The colored schools were lucky to get an old army barracks and a few desks. Clearly, all the schools would be separate but certainly not equal. But at the time, not equal seemed better than nonexistent. To build better structures, Syphax and his colleagues used the funds raised from taxes and appropriated to the Freedmen’s Bureau, a department created to help ease the country’s postwar transition. In 1864 there was only one colored public school. By 1872 there would be seventy-five.16 The system started with seven teachers; the number grew to eighty in eight years. The colored board of trustees named the schools after their greatest supporters, such as Senator Charles Sumner and his partner Representative Thaddeus Stevens. Flattering white supporters in this way was a helpful tactic and a reflection of the cleverness and political savvy employed by Syphax and his compatriots. Sumner and Stevens fought for the Freedmen’s Bureau and saw to it the that hospitals and infrastructure would be built to support the newly freed colored population. This included helping to establish Howard University, which for the next hundred years would act as a big brother to the District’s colored academic high school.
William Syphax (1825–1891), president of the board of trustees of the colored schools of Washington and Georgetown.
The Historical Society of Washington, DC
George F. T. Cook, from one of the richest colored families in the District, became the first superintendent of the colored schools. William Wormley, another colored board trustee, was a successful hotel owner. The trustees worked together to improve education for those children who wanted and needed it. They fiercely fought off saboteurs who regularly tried to reduce the power of their positions. At one point Syphax, Cook, and Wormley battled back an attempted coup by the evolving white board of education that would have folded the colored trustees under the trustees for the white schools and made the colored trustees subordinate. It was in the hands of the president before Syphax and his colleagues realized that a law to abolish the colored board of trustees was almost a reality. It wouldn’t be the last time this fight would be fought.
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