Margaret Crittendon Douglass

Margaret Douglass

Margaret Crittendon Douglass (* 1822 in Washington, DC ; † after 1854) was an American woman who in 1854 sat for a month in prison because they had free black children in Norfolk, Virginia informed. She defended herself in court and later published a book about her experiences. Her case drew the public's attention to the extremely restrictive anti-literacy laws of African Americans in the American South prior to the Civil War,

life and work

Douglass was born in Washington, DC and her family moved to Charleston, South Carolina when she was very young. She married and raised two children. After the death of her son, she moved with her daughter to Norfolk, Virginia , where she worked as a seamstress.

In 1852 she saw two little black boys studying spelling books in a barbershop in Norfolk in the back of the shop. The hairdresser said they were his children and that there was no one to teach little colored children. She then gave free reading and writing lessons to the hairdresser's five children. The positive experiences with these children encouraged them to build a school in their home a few months later. She knew it was illegal to teach slaves, so she only took in free black children. In June 1852 she opened her school with 25 boys and girls. On May 9, 1853, they arrested two city police officers at their home for violating Virginia law. Douglass pleaded ignorance of the law and was appalled when the mayor told her that it was illegal to teach a black child in Virginia. She told the mayor that she did not know it was illegal to teach free blacks, and the mayor dismissed the case. However, the grand jury heard of the case and still charged her: on November 2, 1853, she was tried before Judge Richard Baker and a jury of twelve white men. She refused the services of a lawyer and defended herself, probably also for financial reasons. In her own defense, she insisted that she was not an abolitionist, that she recognized the institution of slavery, that she taught only free blacks in her school, and that her students also attended a white Sunday school, where they received books and lessons. When she returned to court on January 10, 1854, to receive her sentence, the judge ordered her to serve a one-month sentence, "as an example for everyone else in similar cases."

Shortly after their release, she and her daughter moved to Philadelphia in February 1854 , where she published an account of her experience in Norfolk. In it she describes the process and the events that led to it. As in her speech in the courtroom, she criticized the literacy and assembly laws for blacks and the indifference of whites towards the situation of blacks, but identified herself as a supporter of slavery in the south. Little is known about her life after her trial.

During the Civil War , the city of Norfolk fell to the Union Army in May 1862. The generals of the north closed the city's public schools to white children and opened them to blacks. At the end of the war, the city government regained control of the schools and returned them to the white community. In June 1865, members of the free black community in Norfolk, Virginia, petitioned the federal government to abolish the restrictive literacy and assembly laws still in force in their community, in 1867.

Media coverage

The case received considerable media coverage at the time, both for and against Douglass and the Anti-Literacy Act. Despite her rejection of abolitionism , she was hailed as a heroine by the abolitionists.

publication

• Educational Laws of Virginia: The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass: A Southern Woman, Who Was Imprisoned for One Month Common Jail of Teaching Free Colored Children to Read, 2019, ISBN 978-1799037163 .

literature

• Douglass, Margaret: Educational Laws of Virginia: The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass. Boston: JP Jewitt & Co., 1854.
• Foner, Philip S .; Josephine F. Pacheco: Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner - Champions of Antebellum Black Education. Westport, Conn .: Greenwood, 1984.
• Cornelius, Janet Duitsman, "When I Can Read My Title Clear": Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.
• King, Wilma: Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Web links

• Margaret Douglass taught Free Black Children In Norfolk to read, 1852
• The case of Mrs. Margaret Douglass
• Virginia Teacher Of Free Black Children