Collect Day #31, NOYES ACADEMY
O God, Ancient Heart of Love who instills us with the Divine Spark of Grace: we thank you for the courageous witness of abolitionists who built Noyes Academy for all, for Julia Williams who risked her life to be educated, for the Rev. Alexander Crummell who dared to fight against segregation within the church, and for the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet who inspired rebellion against evil. May the examples of their faith be an inspiration for all of us to become like them, the Word made Flesh; in Jesus’ name we pray, the rock of our salvation. Amen
DAY #31, March 21, 2018
Portsmouth
NOYES ACADEMY
(1835)
JerriAnne Boggis
In 1835 a group of New Hampshire abolitionists opened Noyes Academy, the first racially integrated and coeducational school, based on the idea that women and Blacks had the same rights as white males to a formal education. At the time, although many cities offered some form of segregated schooling for Black children, a classical education was inaccessible to African Americans.
Evidence suggests that 14 of the roughly 40 students, mainly teenagers, in Noyes Academy’s first and only class, were African Americans, including at least one Black woman, Julia Williams. Traveling under treacherous and hostile conditions, they came from all over the Northeast to take advantage of this opportunity.
Within months of its opening, anti-abolitionists in Canaan and neighboring towns, including Hanover, Dorchester and Enfield, began agitating for the town to close the school. A campaign to discredit school officials and cultivate fear over the possibility of interracial marriage and racial mixing soon followed.
In August of 1835, hundreds of men from Canaan and surrounding towns, launched an assault on the school. They arrived with 90 oxen, ropes and chains. It would take several days, but eventually, working in shifts, they physically dragged the schoolhouse off its foundation and demolished it. After destroying the school, the mob threatened the students and the people sheltering them by firing cannons at the homes. The students had to be smuggled out of town under cover of night.
Thus, New Hampshire’s brief experiment in educational equality ended. However, the school launched the careers of several extraordinary African-American leaders, including Alexander Crummell and Henry Highland Garnet.
After he escaped from Canaan, Alexander Crummell continued his education in New York where he was forced to study privately after being denied admittance to the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church because of his race. Nonetheless, at the age of 25, he became an Episcopalian minister and went on to graduate from Queens’ College in England. Crummell founded St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC and organized a group now known as the Union of Black Episcopalians to fight racial discrimination in the church. Crummell, who would become a major influence on innumerable Black leaders, including DuBois, Dunbar and Garvey, died in Point Pleasant, New Jersey in 1898.
Henry Highland Garnet became prominent nationally when he delivered a speech entitled “Call to Rebellion,” urging enslaved people to rise up against their owners and claim their own freedom. He became the pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C. and he was the first African American to make a speach in the Capitol Building. Garnet was appointed ambassador to Liberia by President James A. Garfield in December 1881 and he died there on February 13, 1882, barely two months after his arrival.
