In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America by Kabria Baumgartner

Abstract

Reviewed by: In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America by Kabria Baumgartner Lucia McMahon (bio) Education history, Black women's history, Female academies, School segregation In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. By Kabria Baumgartner. (New York: New York University Press, 2019. Pp. 286. Cloth, $35.00.) In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America presents compelling case studies of activism that took place in classrooms, communities, and courtrooms. Drawing on a variety of source materials, including school catalogues, court records, petitions, and correspondence, Kabria Baumgartner effectively brings to life both institutional accounts and individual experiences that reveal key moments in "the larger struggle for African American education in the early nineteenth century" (8). Efforts by African American girls and young women to gain access to educational spaces were individual "acts of defiance and protest" (2) that reflected collective struggles. The story of the Canterbury Female Seminary in Connecticut represents one chapter in a larger narrative illustrating the fierce, sometimes violent, opposition that Black students faced, as well as their determination to pursue knowledge. When Prudence Crandall, a white Quaker woman, agreed to admit Sarah Harris to her Canterbury Female Seminary in 1832, white students and residents protested. Crandall transformed her school into one exclusively for African American students, but rather than resolve the controversy, her decision sparked further community backlash. The town passed a law "effectively criminalizing the Canterbury Female Seminary" (32). Crandall and her students faced legal action, trials, threats, and harassment that ultimately led to the Canterbury Female Seminary's closure in 1834, after a group of local residents vandalized the school building. Four years after the Canterbury Female Seminary was forced to close, Mary E. Miles, one of its students, applied to attend the Young Ladies' Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York. Her enrollment, as Baumgartner notes, transformed that institution into "the first racially integrated female seminary in New York, if not the entire North" (47). Founded by abolitionist Hiram Huntington Kellog, the Young Ladies' Domestic Seminary initially welcomed white women from poor, working-class, and [End Page 316] middle-class backgrounds; tuition costs could be reduced based upon the domestic labor a student performed. Supported by Kellog's pedagogical and reformist principles, students cultivated a shared commitment to Christian values and antislavery reform. African American women's pursuits of knowledge were shaped by institutional developments, as a variety of academies, seminaries, high schools, and common schools were in operation by the 1830s. In this evolving educational landscape, private academies and seminaries were unpredictable entities subject to closures due to fiscal constraints, personal circumstances, or community tensions. The era's growing public school movement promised more democratic and permanent access to educational opportunities, but these institutions were often sites of inequity and exclusion. By the 1830s, as Part II of In Pursuit of Knowledge emphasizes, African American activists increasingly pursued equal school rights at public schools as a key means of advocating for civil rights. Efforts to challenge racial segregation practices in public schools, as Baumgartner notes, were often "hyperlocal" (111), varying according to local practices and precedents. In Salem, Massachusetts, Baumgartner has found evidence that at least some of the town's primary-level schools "were not racially exclusive" (112). The seemingly arbitrary aspects of the Salem school system were directly challenged in 1834, when Sarah Parker Remond and her sisters passed the entrance exam to the East School for Girls, a high school offering advanced studies to young women. The Remond sisters "excelled at their studies" (119), but community outrage led to their expulsion, and to the creation of a separate school for African American students. There were numerous public schools in Salem for white students, but African American students were now confined to one school building. This was, Baumgartner asserts, a deliberate, systematic response to the challenges posed by the educational aspirations and achievements of African American girls. "A policy of racial school segregation became systematic in 1834 because of white resentment toward the Remond sisters" (122). In towns and cities across the North, educational activists continued to fight for equal school rights through petitions, court cases, boycotts, and...