Review: Baumgartner, K. (2019). In pursuit of knowledge: Black women and educational activism in Antebellum America . New York University Press.Matthew Bridges, University of Illinois – Urbana ChampaignLike Freedom Schools, the women in Kabria Baumgartner’s book, In Pursuit of Knowledge, sought and advocated for Black education—as Carter G. Woodson (1968) notes on the period — “in spite of opposition” (p. 13) through denied access and denial based in oppressive, racist systems of schooling. Though they were active in the 19th century, their commitments to education in service of liberation can be seen as central to present-day efforts to craft rigorous, rich learning that challenges deficit notions and celebrates Black communities’ humanity, histories, resources, and excellence.In the first chapter of Baumgartner’s book, the author shares a story that concisely illustrates the project of this book: Grace Lanson, an indentured servant in Litchfield, CT, learned of the Canterbury Female Seminary for African American women. Her ambition for an education led her to forfeit her indenture to a prominent family, risking an extension of her servitude contract or imprisonment (Galenson, 1984), and begin a journey toward the seminary. This story, set in the context of quasi-freedom (the life of legal non-citizenship as a free or freed Black person in the Antebellum North) for Black women, not only shows the great risks these women took for their education, but also how the opposition to their education “registered white anxiety about African American women’s education” (p. 21). Additionally, Grace and her educational pursuit would be lost to history except for a newspaper advertisement, found by Baumgartner, the family put out in the Columbian Register in an attempt to recapture Ms. Lanson. Grace’s story illustrates not only the fragmentation of the archive from this period, but also how significant the stories are for our understanding of Black education in the 19thCentury.In this historiography, Baumgartner “writes African American girls and women back into the history of early American education while also enlarging the scholarship on northern black activism” (p. 6). It is an antebellum history in two parts: part one “traces educational opportunity at private female seminaries” (p. 9) and part two takes up the story of “educational justice in Massachusetts public schools” (p. 9). In telling these histories, Baumgartner also reveals the moral vocation espoused by these women: to live a “purposeful” life. The research shows these women espoused “purposeful womanhood…not simply to rationalize their access to advanced schooling but to motivate more young women to value themselves and do something of value” (p. 4). The purposeful life had moral textures as well: “a purposeful woman was resilient, enterprising, and active—a proud seeker of knowledge…as activists, educators, community members, leaders, and most of all, human beings” (p. 5). While moral lessons in education were common at the time, Baumgartner’s history shows the pressure of quasi-freedom, the work of abolition, and the racism around educating Black women in particular places like Canterbury or Nantucket, which produced a unique experience of education for teachers and students.Baumgartner’s volume has two significant strengths that make it a welcome addition to the field of history of education. First, shown below, is her emphasis on the history of the educational communities in Canterbury, Clinton, Nantucket, Salem, and Boston where these women took up their “purposeful” lives. Second, she tells each history of schools in context, attending carefully to the biographies of the people involved. Her biographies are rich in detail and display the network of connections among students, educators, activists, and communities.In Pursuit of Knowledge ’s emphasis on educational history through biography and community history displays these networks of activist connections even as it elevates the stories of these educators.Baumgartner begins her history with the story of Prudence Crandall and the Canterbury Female Seminary. Located in Canterbury, Connecticut, this seminary “fit firmly within the tradition of the female seminary movement” (p. 17) that sought to educate each enrolled young woman “to ‘acquit herself aright, to whatever social duty she may be justly called”’ (p. 19). Seminaries taught reading, writing, arithmetic, theology, and moral philosophy (p. 14). They also maintained “white female spaces…implicitly if not explicitly” (p. 19). A White Quaker, Prudence Crandall headed the Canterbury Female Seminary for several months before Sarah Harris, a young Black domestic servant in town, applied to enroll in 1832.Crandall admitted Sarah, unsettling the whole town. The controversy led to new restrictive laws limiting education for African Americans in the whole state of Connecticut (p. 32). Closed during multiple court trials over the legality of educating Black people, Crandall’s school reopened in September of 1834. Almost immediately, a group of men broke in and smashed windows and furniture. Crandall was forced to close the school for the safety of the children. In Baumgartner’s telling, despite the opposition, Crandall and her African American students had significant influence: numerous students became teachers themselves and abolitionists picked up the cause of Black education nationally.Baumgartner also takes up stories of activist communities that have been overlooked in the historical conversation about Black education. The Black community in Nantucket, Massachusetts, Baumgartner reveals, took up early opposition to a “separate but equal” racial logic for education. Nantucket’s long story with public education came to a pivot point when Eunice Ross applied to the White public high school. Ross’s admission would have meant sharing the all-White high school with the African American community and, perhaps more difficult, admitting that Black people could progress through this course of education. Eunice was rejected, and her rejection galvanized the Black community, brought national attention, and spurred on segregationist rhetoric.In 1845, after petitions and the increased attention to equal school rights in Salem and Nantucket, Massachusetts passed House Law 45 that ensured “legal recourse for any child excluded from a public school” (p. 138). The law changed nothing overnight but did later allow the family of Phebe Boston to sue after she was rejected just like Eunice. Baumgartner narrates the history of whole communities working to educate their children and the ways that these communities were connected to larger educational movements.There is little to quibble with in Baumgartner’s history. I would like to see more of the language and speeches included in these stories: where is Eunice Ross’s full application essay, or the “love activism” petition letters of Crandall’s students written in support of Crandall and Canterbury Seminary? Baumgartner’s tack to emphasize the roles and lives of Black women in education during this period is unique in approach. Heather Williams’s methodology and use of the archive inSelf-Taught (2007) that centers the voices and activist transcripts from 19th century Black education would be an interesting counterpoint to Baumgartner’s biographical/network approach. Other companion histories like Hilary J. Moss’s book,Schooling Citizens (2019) might fill out the story of the role of women in 19th Century education. Additionally, there are stories that should be highlighted just past Baumgartner’s antebellum period: for example, Perkins’s (1982) sketch of Fanny Jackson Coppin whose work in Philadelphia began in 1869 would certainly fit Baumgartner’s model of a “purposeful” woman.Baumgartner offers the field a new detailed look into the lives of educators, students, and activists not often highlighted in historical scholarship. In between the lines of their stories of escape like Grace or courage like Eunice, she uncovers a culture and emphasis on “purposeful” education, a virtue that tied all these women together. She elevates these women’s self-understanding as “active, resilient, and forward thinking” (p. 207), and reveals an overlooked history of Black education during this period. Present-day Freedom Schools are indebted to these women’s persistence and commitment to education as a source of liberation. They also stand on their shoulders as pillars of Black excellence and perseverance.Baumgartner, K. (2019). In pursuit of knowledge: Black women and educational activism in antebellum America . New York University Press.Galenson, D. W. (1984). The rise and fall of indentured servitude in the Americas: an economic analysis. The Journal of Economic History ,44 (1), 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2120553Moss, H. J. (2009). Schooling citizens: The struggle for African American education in antebellum America . University of Chicago Press.Perkins, L. M. (1982). Heed Life’s Demands: The Educational Philosophy of Fanny Jackson Coppin. The Journal of Negro Education ,51 (3), 181.https://doi.org/10.2307/2294688Williams, H. Andrea. (2007). Self-taught: African American education in slavery and freedom . University of North Carolina Press.Woodson, C. G. (1968). The education of the Negro prior to 1861.Arno Press.
