Sarah Mapps Douglass
Sarah Mapps Douglass was born on September 9, 1806, in Philadelphia, PA. Douglass came from a family of Black activists; her mother was also an educator. Douglass was definitely an eduactivist.
Douglass was first educated by private tutors and attended an independent black school in Philadelphia established by her mother and James Forten in 1819. She later attended Pennsylvania Medical University, which was extremely rare for an African American woman at the time.
Douglass began teaching in the early 1820s in New York and later returned to Philadelphia, where she taught at her mother’s school. In the mid-1820s, Douglass started her own school for Black women in the city. A passionate educator, she taught black children and adults in New York and Philadelphia. In 1853, she took over the girls’ preparatory department at the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth, offering courses in literature, science, and anatomy.
At only twenty-five, she had organized a major fundraising campaign for the primary journalistic instrument of abolition — William Lloyd Garrison’s paper The Liberator, on the pages of which Frederick Douglass found and trained his own literary voice.
In addition to that work, Douglass helped to establish the Female Literary Association in September of 1831, where she also served as secretary. It was an intellectual group for Black women. She was also the leader of the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia — the first specialty library for African-American women, literate and illiterate, free and enslaved, devoted to “the cultivation of intellectual powers” as the highest tribute to the sanctity of human nature.
At a gathering of the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia in 1832, Douglass gave an impassioned speech where she spoke of her taking up the cause for abolition:
“One short year ago, how different were my feelings on the subject of slavery! It is true, the wail of the captive sometimes came to my ear in the midst of my happiness, and caused my heart to bleed for his wrongs; but, alas! the impression was as evanescent as the early cloud and morning dew. I had formed a little world of my own, and cared not to move beyond its precincts. But how was the scene changed when I beheld the oppressor lurking on the border of my own peaceful home! I saw his iron hand stretched forth to seize me as his prey, and the cause of the slave became my own.”
May Douglass’ words serve as inspiration for any of those safely secure in their bubble of privilege to burst that bubble in the name of freedom for someone else.
Happy Black History Month, make sure to read up on Sarah Mapps Douglass, a member of the Black Educator Hall of Fame.
