Black Foremothers of Education: Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Church Terrell, Mamie Phipps Clark
Though millions of US schoolkids already resumed classes in August, September will always be “back to school month” for this New York City kid. So it’s fitting that issue of #SistoryLessons reflects on some she-roes of education, to remind us why we need to fight for public education, especially now. For decades, anti-freedom zealots have been tearing into public education. You are likely aware that the Department of Education has been rather decimated since 2025, with large-scale staff cuts reported and a civil rights division gutted by layoffs and office closures, replaced by folks whose commitment to “education” is debatable, at best. Tens of thousands of civil rights complaints now sit stalled or ignored, as the Office for Civil Rights has seen its workforce slashed and its regional offices closed even as its caseload has surged. And “good ol’ fashioned” book bans continue to plunge the populace into a world of narrow-mindedness and unknowing. Over the past two school years alone, PEN America has documented more than 16,000 instances of book bans in public schools nationwide—a wave of censorship without precedent in recent history. Do you know what some of the most frequently targeted titles are? Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson, along with many histories and memoirs centering Black, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized experiences. Tell me: how is a historically truthful tome like W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America a threat? Other examples of this fear-based censorship and restriction abound. Most horrifying is the sitting President’s Executive Order 14190 which directs federal agencies to restrict support for K–12 programs that the current administration labels “discriminatory equity ideology” or “gender ideology,” while promoting “patriotic education.” I try to never directly reference the person Robert Reich recently referred to as a "thin-skinned, peevish, petty, incompetent, corrupt infant" in this newsletter, though the deeds of his malignant administration are always implied—but in this case, I wanted to be explicit about the dangers we currently face around the future of education, and zoom in on something concrete and around which we need to be activated and vigilant. Resistance starts at the school board election level, and a change in the makeup of the Federal Government will provide protection and redress—so get busy!
Consider the context within which we are living and “educating” our next generation as you read about three Black Foremothers who in their time fought back against the restrictions of who got to learn, where, and what they were able to do with their education. I know it sometimes feels hard to believe but it is true that our Foremothers faced worse conditions and scenarios than we do today. As you prepare to take action against the muzzling of the American mind, let Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Church Terrell, and Mamie Phipps Clark motivate and encourage you. Charlotte Forten Grimké (1837–1914) — The Black Aristocrat Who Went Down SouthCharlotte Louise Bridges Forten—“Lottie” to those close to her—was born on August 17, 1837, into one of the wealthiest and most politically consequential free Black families in the antebellum North. Her grandfather, James Forten, had built a substantial fortune as a Philadelphia sailmaker and used part of it to support William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, an influential weekly abolitionist newspaper, published in Boston from 1831-1865 demanding the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery and arguing for equal rights for Black Americans. Her paternal aunts, Sarah, Harriet, and Margaretta Forten, helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Charlotte’s mother, Mary Virginia Wood Forten, died of tuberculosis when Charlotte was three; this disease would plague Charlotte’s own life as well, sadly. Her father, Robert Bridges Forten, refused on principle to send his child into Philadelphia’s segregated public schools, so she was tutored at home until age sixteen. In 1854, he sent her to Salem, Massachusetts, so she could attend integrated schools. She lived with leading abolitionists and family friends Charles Lenox Remond and his wife, Amy Matilda Remond. They gave Charlotte both room and board and an important political and intellectual education, connecting her to Salem and Boston’s Black abolitionist communities, lectures, meetings, and anti-slavery organizing. Charlotte enrolled at the Higginson Grammar School, where she was the only nonwhite student among roughly two hundred girls. Tenaciously, she completed her studies there in 1855, then entered Salem Normal School, finishing there in 1856. She received a job offer after graduation—one she greeted with exultation in her journal, three exclamation points and all: a teaching position “in one of the public schools of this city—of this conservative, aristocratic old city of Salem!!!” She took the job, becoming the first African American hired to teach white students in Salem’s public schools. Nineteen-year-old Charlotte wrote in her diary two weeks in: “I find a teacher’s life not nearly as pleasant as a scholar’s. But I do not despair.” Was “Free” Massachusetts Really Free?It is thanks to the journals Charlotte began at age sixteen that we know so much about her life. She was not saccharine or sentimental in describing her days, and her accounts show us that even in a state with a venerable abolitionist tradition, inclusion was a different story. In September 1854, she wrote that she had suffered much that day because her friends had been refused admission to a museum after being given tickets, “solely on account of their complexion.” A year later, she described white acquaintances who were perfectly warm to her indoors and then “feared to recognize me” on the sidewalk the next day. Her exhaustion is familiar to many of us people of color who navigate mixed-race spaces: “it is hard to go through life meeting contempt with contempt, hatred with hatred.” Port Royal and the Sea IslandsIn November 1861, seven months into the Civil War, Union forces captured South Carolina’s Sea Islands. White planters fled inland, leaving behind roughly 10,000 people they had enslaved. The federal government initially classified them as “contraband of war”; though they were functionally free under Union occupation, the Emancipation Proclamation made emancipation legally operative there in 1863. This occupation led to what became known as the Port Royal Experiment—an improvised, live test of whether formerly enslaved people could be schooled, paid wages, and become landowners. Penn School opened on St. Helena Island in 1862, and Charlotte arrived that October, sponsored by the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Association. She joined founders Laura Towne and Ellen Murray as the school’s first Black teacher. Most of the Northern women who came south to teach in the Port Royal Experiment were white; Forten’s presence was therefore a significant intervention in a largely white-led educational mission. Charlotte wrote about the experience for The Atlantic Monthly in spring 1864: “Life on the Sea Islands,” Part I and Part II. They taught in a one-room church, and she described how challenging it was to make oneself heard when there were “often as many as a hundred and forty reciting at once, it was necessary to tax the lungs very severely.” Charlotte’s lungs were already affected by the tuberculosis that took her mother's life. It was not an easy assignment. One thing to love about Charlotte is that she believed in rigor. Her pupils did not receive a watered-down curriculum; she taught them the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the great leader of the Haitian Revolution. She taught them a song about John Brown, the abolitionist whose failed Harper’s Ferry raid cost him his life. Of the older students who worked the fields all morning and walked into class at noon, she wrote that they came in “after their hard toil in the hot sun, as bright and as anxious to learn as ever.” Of the spirituals she heard on those islands, she said they could not be sung “without a full heart and a troubled spirit.” In July 1863, Charlotte watched the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry—one of the first Black Union regiments—lead a devastating assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold guarding Charleston Harbor. When the wounded returned, she volunteered as a nurse, caring for men who survived a battle that was a military loss but a defining demonstration of Black courage and military service. The National Park Service’s account of the 54th and Fort Wagner offers useful background about this battle. The Twenty-One-Year SilenceThere is no record of Charlotte’s diaries over a 21 year period, from May 1864 to November 1885. We do not know whether she stopped journaling altogether or whether those volumes have simply been lost. What we do know is that she was quite busy during that time—teaching and serving Black communities, first with the Freedmen’s Union Commission in Boston and then in Washington, D.C. In the still-segregated nation’s capital, Charlotte taught at the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth—later known as M Street High School and today’s Dunbar High School—the nation’s first public high school for Black students. It was a rigorous center of Black educational excellence that would go on to cultivate generations of trailblazing leaders. Then, in 1878, at age 41, she married the Reverend Francis James Grimké, who was 28. Go, girl! Born enslaved near Charleston to Henry Grimké, a white plantation owner, and Nancy Weston, an enslaved Black woman, Francis was the biological nephew of the famous white abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké. Charlotte and Francis' only child, Theodora, was born on New Year’s Day in 1880 and tragically died before she was six months old. Even in the aftermath of this devastating loss, Charlotte remained committed to collective action: in 1892, she helped found the Colored Women’s League alongside Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and a young Mary Church Terrell. Charlotte’s journals were first published in selections in 1953, and Brenda Stevenson’s landmark scholarly edition, The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, followed in 1988—74 years after Grimké's death. For much of the twentieth century, her literary reputation was overshadowed by her husband, the white Grimké sisters, or her niece, Harlem Renaissance poet Angelina Weld Grimké. Kerri Greenidge’s 2022 book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, helped return the Black Grimkés to the center of this family story. In 2024, Salem, MA placed a life-sized bronze memorial, The Moving Spirit of Love, by artist Ai Qiu Hopen in Charlotte Forten Park; its November dedication marked the city’s first statue honoring a Black woman and its first public memorial by an artist of color. Hopen's artist statement is a fitting way to close our Brave Sis tribute, as the city of Salem's website states: As an Asian woman of Chinese descent, an immigrant, and a mother passionate about preserving humanity for all children, (the artist) was inspired to create this memorial for the future guided by Charlotte’s vision of light and hope and invites us to consider the following quote:
The long, dark night of the Past, with all its sorrows and its fears, was forgotten; and for the Future—the eyes of these freed children see no clouds in it. It is full of sunlight, they think, and they trust in it, perfectly.–Charlotte Forten Grimke. Reflection: What history lives in your hands as a teacher or a learner?Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) ─ The Heiress Who Got to WorkWealthy Girl, Rich ValuesMary Church Terrell was born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee—then a Confederate city under Union occupation—in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. Her father, Robert Reed Church Sr., had been born enslaved and became one of the first Black millionaires in the American South, buying Memphis real estate at depressed prices after the 1878 yellow-fever epidemic emptied much of the city. Her mother, Louisa Ayers Church, also born enslaved, ran a successful beauty business for Black women. Mary was a Black heiress, which was rarissime for this era, but she wanted to pursue education, not sit around being lavish. The National Park Service and the Library of Congress both note the exceptional business success of her formerly enslaved parents. Mary enrolled at Oberlin College, a school unusual for its time in admitting Black students and women; Oberlin admitted its first Black student in 1835 and became a key pipeline for Black professional and intellectual leadership in the nineteenth century. She brazenly chose the four-year “gentleman’s course”—the classical curriculum—rather than the expected two-year “ladies’ course,” which excluded Greek and other elements of the classical curriculum. When she earned her B.A. in 1884, her classmates included another Foremother familiar to longer-term readers, Anna Julia Cooper. Mary added a master’s degree in 1888, then spent two years in Europe studying French, German, and Italian.blogs. Duly credentialed, Mary dedicated herself to education. She taught modern languages at Wilberforce University, the historically Black university in Xenia, Ohio founded through AME Church and Methodist connections, before teaching Latin at Washington’s Preparatory High School for Colored Youth—later known as M Street High School, and today’s Dunbar High School. Our previously honored Foremother in this edition, Charlotte Forten Grimké, had taught there years earlier. Mary rose in the ranks, becoming appointed to the D.C. Board of Education in 1895 and for such, widely recognized as the first Black woman in the United States to hold such a post. The following year, 1896, she became the first national president of the National Association of Colored Women, the legendary nineteenth- and twentieth-century organization founded through a coalition of Black women’s clubs. Its membership and leadership included Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frances E.W. Harper, Harriet Tubman, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, among many others. The organization’s enduring motto, closely associated with Terrell’s leadership, was “Lifting as we climb.” When the NAACP was founded in 1909 by a multiracial group including W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, William English Walling, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and others, Terrell became a charter member. She was among the relatively few Black women centrally involved in its earliest formation and work. Mary was, in 1904, the only American woman of African descent invited to the International Congress of Women in Berlin. She delivered her address in German; the Library of Congress preserves both the text and German translation of her June 13 address. In 1906, she gave a powerful speech entitled “What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States”, pointing out that, as a “colored” woman, she could walk from the Capitol to the White House “ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food.” She also noted that “colored” teachers in D.C. “can never rise to the height of a directorship.” As a member of the D.C. school board, she was speaking from lived experience. The Murder That Set It OffIn 1892, her childhood friend Thomas Moss was lynched in Memphis along with Calvin McDowell and William Stewart, his business partners in the People’s Grocery. Their successful Black-owned cooperative store competed with a nearby white-owned grocer and had become a target of racial hostility. This killing also propelled Ida B. Wells-Barnett into the anti-lynching investigation and advocacy for which she became famous. Inflamed by this injustice and responsive to the escalating terror of lynching as social control and assertion of white supremacy, Terrell accompanied Frederick Douglass in 1892 on a White House visit to President Benjamin Harrison. They asked the president to publicly condemn lynching, but, unsurprisingly, he declined. Mary would spend the next six decades pushing forward. The Lost LawsDuring Reconstruction, the District of Columbia’s Legislative Assembly passed anti-discrimination statutes in 1872 and 1873 requiring restaurants and other specified businesses to serve respectable, well-behaved customers regardless of race. The laws were omitted from the 1901 D.C. Code but had never been repealed. In the 1940s, Howard University students—including Ruth Powell and Pauli Murray—began using and publicizing those laws to challenge segregation in District restaurants and public accommodations. Murray’s research became especially important to the campaign that followed. DC Historic Sites provides a concise history of these “lost laws” and the student activism that preceded Terrell’s case. Mary Church Terrell was in her late eighties by this time, chairing the multiracial Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws. On February 28, 1950, she entered Thompson’s Restaurant, at 725 14th Street NW, with several colleagues and asked to be served. The restaurant refused, creating a protest and test case that became a three-year legal battle. A lower court initially treated the old laws as repealed or unenforceable. But on June 8, 1953, in District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the 1872 and 1873 laws remained enforceable. Justice William O. Douglas wrote the decision; Justice Robert H. Jackson did not participate. The Court’s essential point was as powerful as it was plain: failure to enforce a law does not repeal it. The decision brought a decisive legal end to restaurant discrimination in the District of Columbia, one year before Brown v. Board of Education. Miss Terrell was 89 years old when this decision came down. While she and her fellow plaintiffs awaited the decision, they kept organizing: picketing, boycotting, and staging sit-ins at segregated establishments, including Hecht’s and Kresge’s. This activism followed her 1946–48 fight against the D.C. branch of the American Association of University Women, which had refused her admission despite her two Oberlin degrees. In 1949, after she sued, Terrell became the first Black member admitted to the Washington branch; the national AAUW subsequently adopted a nondiscrimination rule. Go granny, am I right?! Mary Church Terrell died in Annapolis, Maryland, on July 24, 1954—two months after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Reflection: You’re in your 80s; what are you out there fighting for?Mamie Phipps Clark (1917–1983) A Doll StoryMamie Phipps Clark was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on April 18, 1917, to Dr. Harold H. Phipps, a physician from the British West Indies, and Katie Florence Phipps, a Black woman we assume was descendant of enslaved people as her ancestry is absent from the public record. Mamie's was a comfortable Black professional family, but one nevertheless entirely hemmed in by Arkansas segregation. She graduated from Langston High School in 1934 with scholarship offers from both Fisk and Howard; she chose Howard, began in mathematics and physics, and then switched to psychology. She earned her B.A. magna cum laude in 1938 and her master’s degree a year later. As a Howard student, Mamie had a campus job working as a secretary in the law office of Charles Hamilton Houston—the then-NAACP chief legal strategist, who was at the time helping lay the groundwork for the campaign against segregation. She later wrote that the experience was “enormously instructive and revealing in relation to my own identity as a ‘Negro.’” She was a fine student, and dedicated her 1939 master’s thesis to an until-then largely unasked question: at what age do Black children become conscious of race? Her thesis, The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children, grew out of testing Black preschoolers at a segregated Washington nursery school. Her early work found that young Black children recognized racial difference by around age three and that children’s racial awareness and preferences developed in a society structured by anti-Black prejudice. Her racial consciousness was very evident at Columbia University, where she earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1943—the first Black woman to receive a psychology doctorate from that university. Her adviser, psychology department chair Henry E. Garrett, was a prominent eugenicist and scientific racist who later testified for segregation in litigation connected to Brown v. Board of Education. Mamie later provided evidence against the views Garrett represented. What an ordeal it must have been for her to study under such a person. The Doll Test During her senior year at Howard, in 1938, she eloped with Kenneth Bancroft Clark, a fellow psychologist. The couple created a practice that combined psychological testing, counseling, and research, with Mamie’s work on child development and race at its center. The famous “doll study,” published in 1947 as “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” built on Mamie’s earlier research. The Clarks studied 253 Black children, ages three to seven: 134 attended segregated nursery schools in Arkansas and 119 attended integrated schools in Springfield, Massachusetts. Each child was presented with four dolls—two brown-skinned dolls with black hair and two white dolls with blond hair—and asked questions about which doll they wanted to play with, which was “nice,” which was “bad,” which looked like a white child, which looked like a “colored” child, and which looked like themselves. Commercially produced Black dolls were scarce at the time. The National Women’s History Museum and the National Association for the Education of Young Children provide useful summaries of the study. The findings were devastating. A substantial majority of the children assigned positive qualities to the white dolls, while many associated negative qualities with the brown dolls. The Clarks concluded that racial prejudice and segregation damaged Black children’s developing self-concept. The study did not say that Black children were inherently deficient; it demonstrated the injury produced by a racist social order. Kenneth later acknowledged that Mamie’s earlier research was the foundation of the work: “The doll test was Mamie’s primary project that I crashed. I sort of piggybacked on it.” His admission is an example of the gendered erasure that so often happens when women’s intellectual labor becomes part of a partnership’s public legacy. This is an example of what we discuss in our “Unengaged to Ally, Advocate to Sister” course, when we examine Dr. Joy DeGruy’s work on the enduring effects of historic and intergenerational racial trauma. The Clarks’ research showed one powerful way racism could enter the developing self-image of Black children. That was true in the mid-century, and the struggle endures. But There’s More: The Woman Is Minimized, Then Erased Kenneth Clark served as an expert witness in several of the cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education and co-authored the social-science statement appended to the NAACP’s brief. Mamie, though central to the research, was not named in the Supreme Court’s decision. On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous Court that separating children by race “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The Library of Congress’s Brown exhibition describes how the Clarks’ research informed the legal fight. This is the double bind—the “Jane Crow”—that Pauli Murray named: the intertwined exclusions of racism and sexism. Kenneth got it, even as he received much of the public acclaim. At least he later acknowledged that the doll test was fundamentally his wife's work. What Mamie Built Instead As Mamie put it, “a Black female with a Ph.D. in psychology was an unwanted anomaly in New York City in the early 1940s.” Kenneth became a professor at City College, while Mamie encountered profound barriers to a permanent faculty position. She did direct service work, including psychological testing of children at a residence for homeless Black girls, where she saw children being labeled “mentally retarded” when they had primarily been denied adequate schooling. In March 1946, Mamie and Kenneth Clark founded the Northside Center for Child Development in the basement of Harlem’s Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments, with financial support from Mamie’s family. It became Harlem’s first full-time center providing psychological and educational services to local children and families. When Mamie found that children were being misclassified because they had not been taught to read, Northside added academic tutoring to its work. She directed the center until her retirement in 1979; it continues today. Mamie also co-founded the 1960's Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited—HARYOU—with Kenneth and other collaborators. (Fun fact from Wikipedia: its director was Cyril deGrasse Tyson, father of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and founding member of the 100 Black Men of America!) HARYOU's community-based work helped inform emerging federal anti-poverty and early-childhood initiatives, including Head Start. This organizing and resourcing demonstrates Mamie's true legacy: building an institution to help children survive, heal, learn, and thrive in spite of it. Mamie Phipps Clark died in 1983. In October 2024, she was inducted posthumously into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame. Reflection: What early messages shaped how you saw yourself—and which ones do you still need to unlearn?Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for EveryoneAs you think about Charlotte Forten Grimké: how do you use what you have to lift someone else? Write about a time you spent your own resources or access on somebody who couldn’t have gotten there without you. Channeling Mary Church Terrell: what truth are you called to say out loud? How can the written word be a tool for justice? Describe a time when writing something down actually changed an outcome. In tribute to Mamie Phipps Clark: when did you do the work and somebody else got the credit? How did you handle it, and what would you tell your younger self about it now? HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of ColorCharlotte Forten Grimké’s story asks: when did you first realize your education was political? Share knowledge, a resource, or a connection with somebody who needs it this week. Honoring Mary Church Terrell: when has your intellect been questioned, and how did you answer? Channel her and write a letter to a local official or news source about something happening in your community. Thinking about Mamie Phipps Clark: when did you first notice how the world sought to limit you—and how did you fight back? Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White FriendsIn honor of Charlotte Forten Grimké: support Black educators, especially those working in under-resourced schools. Donate to or volunteer with an organization focused on educational equity, and go find out what is actually happening in your local district right now. The Southern Education Foundation is one place to start. To celebrate Mary Church Terrell: write a hundred words on what educational equity would actually require where you live. Then subscribe to and share the work of Black journalists and Black media (for example: The 19th, The Root, Blavity, Essence, and your local Black press). For Mamie Phipps Clark: examine how your own school or family reinforced racial messages early in your life, and look at how your local schools sort, track, and label children. What are you compelled to do with this awareness? What These Women Knew, and What We Must RememberCharlotte Forten Grimké taught 140 children in a one-room church even while she was suffering from tuberculosis, because childhood literacy was that important to her. Mary Church Terrell spent ninety years on picket lines, fighting for equal rights. Mamie Phipps Clark built the instrument that showed a court what segregation costs, then opened a basement clinic with $946 that she ran for 33 years and which is still making a difference today. Let them inspire you today, tomorrow, next week, in two months, and forevermore. Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research. Visit our newly relaunched website for resources to help you Celebrate - Learn - Act.
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