The Teacher Wars (8 page)

As a teacher, Lockwood had experienced pay discrimination firsthand, an offense she called “
odious … an indignity not to be tamely borne.” But rather than pursue pay equity in her own profession—which at this point in her life bored her—Lockwood proclaimed herself the advocate for female government workers. Through suffrage organizing, she had met a clerk for Tennessee congressman Samuel Arnell, the chairman of the House Committee
on Education and Labor. Lockwood lobbied Arnell aggressively, and in 1870 he introduced
H.R. 1571, “A bill to do justice to the female employees of the Government.”

Lockwood launched a national petition drive to support the legislation, which Congress debated that spring. The Senate version of the bill would have prohibited federal agencies from sex discrimination in both hiring and pay, but in the end a weaker House version became law, guaranteeing women equal pay in the lowest federal clerk positions, but doing nothing to help them gain access to higher-level government jobs. Nevertheless, H.R. 1571 was the United States' first equal-pay law for women. After it was enacted, the number of female Treasury Department workers earning more than $900 annually increased from 4 to 20 percent—which meant some female clerks could make more than three times as much as a female teacher or even a female principal.

Lockwood eventually enrolled in the National University Law School, and in 1879 became the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar. In 1884
she launched a presidential run as the standard-bearer of the National Equal Rights Party, founded by feminists fed up with the Republican Party's sidelining of women's issues. She ran for president again four years later. Lockwood's rapid ascent from country schoolteacher to congressional lobbyist to trailblazing attorney provided early evidence of the complicated relationship between feminism and the teaching profession. It was through teaching that many women became aware of their talents and began to hunger for a role in the wider world. Yet when ambitious women left the underfunded, often maligned teaching profession to better their lives, public education lost powerful advocates for both teachers' and students' needs.

In the African American community, even greater barriers to employment outside education worked to keep more of the most talented black women—and men—in the classroom. There they developed a set of high ideals about the political and social power of educators, which anticipated later hopes that all teachers, regardless of their own race, would understand themselves as agents for racial justice.

BLACK TEACHERS AND RACIAL UPLIFT AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

On November 7, 1861, the Union army captured the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. White plantation owners fled, abandoning homes, cotton fields, and ten thousand slaves. When word of the Yankee takeover reached the mainland, more slaves arrived, runaways from parts south. By February, twelve thousand black people had gathered on the islands, at Hilton Head, St. Helena, and Port Royal. There was a lot of potential labor, and a lot of cotton, too, of a finer, more valuable quality than the cotton grown on the mainland.

The U.S. Treasury Department dispatched Edward Pierce, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts lawyer, to the islands to assess how they might be used in the war effort. He reported back that he was more impressed with the character of the former slaves than he thought he'd be; they harvested the cotton in their masters' absence, and were committed Christians, honest and industrious. Those who had escaped slavery had a “courage … worthy of heroes.” What they really needed, he concluded, were teachers. In the states that became the Confederacy, it had been a crime to teach the four million enslaved men, women, and children to read or write. Pierce had met a few literate black people on the Sea Islands, but they had learned to read clandestinely and only haltingly, usually by befriending a white child. “
All of proper age, when inquired of, expressed a desire to have their children taught to read and write, and to learn
themselves,” he wrote. “On this point, they showed more earnestness than on any other.”

In part on Pierce's recommendation, the islands became the site of a massive government and philanthropic intervention, known as
the Port Royal Experiment. If given an education and collective custody over their former owners' property, could freed slaves build a functioning, self-sufficient society? Pierce put out a call to the North to recruit volunteer teachers:

In Philadelphia, an extraordinary young woman named Charlotte Forten was moved by this call to action. She was the fourth generation of black Fortens to be born free, the granddaughter of James Forten, a Revolutionary War veteran who was taken prisoner aboard a British ship. Many black prisoners of war were exiled to the West Indies as slaves, but James impressed the English captain with his intelligence and sense of humor and won his release. He later owned his own sail-making company and became a wealthy man. His descendants enjoyed elegant homes and private educations at a time when most black Americans lived in bondage.

By the time Charlotte was born in 1837, the Forten family had
led abolition and temperance efforts in Philadelphia for several decades. Her mother died when she was three years old, and Charlotte grew into an introspective young woman, prone to waves of despondency. From her adolescence into her late twenties she kept a keenly observed, beautifully written journal, in which she recorded the contradictions of a life lived between extremes: Forten received the best education available to a girl of her race and class and met and corresponded with many of her era's most important freethinking activists and artists, including the poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the famous abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, both of whom were white. But Forten also experienced the pain and loneliness of living as a free black woman moving alongside, if not exactly within, the American upper crust. Most of the white girls with whom she associated as a student avoided her outside the classroom. She had few intimate companions of her own age or race. At age seventeen she wrote that racism produced in her
a “constant, galling sense of cruel injustice and wrong. I cannot help feeling it very often, it intrudes upon my happiest moments, and spreads a dark, deep gloom over everything.” She found it incredible that “every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind.”

Throughout her life Forten struggled not to succumb to her natural pessimism. She had been raised with the expectation that she would use her relative privilege to serve the race, and because she was a girl, this meant she was expected to teach. In 1856 she became the first African American to enroll in the Salem Normal School, one of the teachers colleges founded in Massachusetts by Horace Mann. While enrolled at Salem, Forten taught herself Latin in the evenings. She submitted poems and essays to
Ladies' Home Journal
and
The Liberator
, an abolitionist newspaper. A few of her pieces were published, but Forten still considered herself a teacher first and a writer second. “I will spare no effort to become what [my father] desires that I should be,” she promised her journal, “to prepare myself well for the responsible duties of a teacher, and to live for the good that I can do my oppressed and suffering fellow creatures.”

Forten was appointed the first black teacher in the Salem public schools, but she was soon forced to abandon her work when she
suffered a life-threatening respiratory infection. She was back in Philadelphia when the Civil War broke out, and by her twenty-fifth birthday on August 17, 1862, Forten vowed to overcome ill health in order to play her part, as a teacher, in the great unfolding drama of the war. She signed up to teach in one of the newly established Sea Islands schools for emancipated children. As Forten anticipated a physically challenging voyage into an active war zone, she prayed “
that God in his goodness will make me noble enough to find my highest happiness in doing my duty.”

Forten described her eighteen months teaching on St. Helena Island as “
a strange, wild dream,” one that challenged many of her pious preconceptions about lifting her people out of dependence and poverty. She lived with other northern volunteers and officers' wives in a drafty house abandoned by a rebel doctor and his family. There were too few blankets in the winter, and she confessed to “intense mental suffering” due to the constant threat of a Confederate invasion. Her students' lives were even more difficult. They lived in former slave quarters, typically two-room huts with open holes for windows. In winter, fire pits clogged the air with poisonous smoke. Forten longed to teach modern habits of sanitation and personal hygiene, but she admitted it would be impossible to expect much improvement under such crowded conditions, without stoves or running water.

The school met inside a one-room Baptist church, where Forten and another volunteer presided over 140 students, ranging in age from toddlers to a sixty-year-old woman who contentedly sat on the ground among her grandchildren, eager to learn her ABCs. Forten referred to them all as “my scholars,” and at first she was delighted by the freed slaves' enthusiasm for learning.
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“Coming to school is
a constant delight and recreation to them,” she wrote. “They come here as other children go to play.” But she found the work “
dreadfully wearying.” Some of her pupils were so young that they needed babysitting more than teaching;
she wrote to philanthropists in Philadelphia
to send picture books for toddlers. The older children, who just months before had been toiling in the fields, were unaccustomed to “intellectual concentration,” as Forten called it, and needed constant stimulation “in order to keep their thoughts from wandering. Teaching here is consequently far more fatiguing than at the North.”

Forten created lessons meant to supplant memories of slavery with those of racial pride. She taught her students about
Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture, who had been born a slave. “It is well that they should know what one of their own color could do for his race,” she wrote in her journal. “I long to inspire them with courage and ambition.” At Forten's request, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier sent the children of St. Helena a Christmas hymn he had written especially for them:

Forten taught the children to sing Whittier's hymn and showed them the writer's picture. The reality of the students' lives was far more complicated than the poet's optimistic verse acknowledged, but knowing that such an important artist had dedicated himself to their cause made the students “
very proud and happy,” Forten wrote. That—as much as sharing academic knowledge—was one of her goals as a teacher.

In many ways, Forton's sojourn south was in the same spirit as the voyages of the northeastern white women who volunteered to teach in western frontier schoolhouses. But while nineteenth-century white missionary teachers were motivated largely by the desire to promulgate Protestantism, as well as their belief that women should have a socially useful alternative to marriage, Forten and the black
educators who followed in her footsteps subscribed to an additional ideology: They believed it was the responsibility of more privileged African Americans to instill in their disadvantaged brothers and sisters not only knowledge, but also self-esteem and racial pride. W. E. B. Du Bois later articulated this way of thinking in
The Souls of Black Folk
, writing, “In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing.”

Teaching was a brave choice for Forten and other young black women and men. Before the Civil War, antitax southern state legislatures actively resisted the spread of the common schools movement, preferring to leave the education of white children in the hands of families and churches. By 1870, black activists and Reconstruction politicians had driven every state to organize at least a rudimentary public education system, with separate schools serving white and black students. Yet even with the U.S. Army garrison of the South, expanding black education remained a political lightning rod and a target for white supremacist violence. “
Schoolhouses are burnt, teachers mobbed and murdered, schools broken up,” Frederick Douglass reported in 1871.