Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  The census noted that all three children attended school the previous year. The next year Mary attended the progressive Everett School for girls, which opened in 1860 in Boston’s South End, on Northampton Street. The opening speech, dedicated by the former governor for whom the school was named, noted that to educate girls in a first-class school such as this one was a political act: “Give [girls] for two or three generations equal advantages of mental culture, and the lords of creation will have to carry more guns than they do at present, to keep her out of the enjoyment of anything which sound reasoning and fair experiment shall show to be of her rights.”1 Edward Everett had taken an early step toward education access when, as president of Harvard in 1848, he stated publicly that black applicants for admission to Harvard would be judged by the same criteria as white applicants, without prejudice to race.

  In 1849 Robert Morris, the young black attorney and antisegregation activist, asked Charles Sumner to be his co-counsel when Sarah Roberts v. City of Boston, a case fighting segregation in Boston’s public schools, reached the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Few black men had passed the bar, and no black attorney had yet argued before the state’s highest court. Sumner took the case without payment.

  In Roberts v. Boston, Benjamin Roberts, the father of five-year-old Sarah Roberts, had tried to take his daughter to their neighborhood public school, and she was physically denied entry. To attend one of the two schools in Boston designated for children of color, Sarah would have had to walk 2,100 feet, past elementary schools intended for white students. Her father sued the city of Boston for damages. Sarah Roberts’s 2,100-foot walk to school might be considered trivial, Sumner argued, but like the small tax on tea that began a revolution, trivial matters serve as symptoms of our deepest injustices.

  Appearing before Judge Lemuel Shaw of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts that December, Morris and Sumner argued that the Boston School Committee’s racial segregation policy was unconstitutional. The Declaration of Independence and the Massachusetts constitution both affirmed that “all men are created equal,” and Sumner argued that the state’s educational resources should provide for all the children of Boston. He recalled his personal experience of sitting companionably “on the same benches with colored persons, listening, like myself, to the learned lectures” while at law school in Paris. Boston should not make caste distinctions.

  We abjure nobility of all kinds; but here is a nobility of the skin. We abjure all hereditary distinctions; but here is a hereditary distinction, founded not on the merit of the ancestor, but on his color. We abjure all privileges derived from birth; but here is a privilege which depends solely on the accident, whether an ancestor is black or white. We abjure all inequality before the law; but here is an inequality which touches not an individual but a race. We revolt at the relation of caste; but here is a caste which is established under a Constitution, declaring that all men are born equal.

  Charles Sumner, Sarah Roberts v. City of Boston, December 4, 18492

  The court found against Sarah Roberts. Chief Justice Shaw claimed that racial prejudice could not be legislated, as it was born of society and not of the law. Robert Morris, with Benjamin Roberts and Charles Sumner, then took their case to the Massachusetts legislature. William Cooper Nell supported them by leading a petition and letter writing campaign. Massachusetts banned segregated schools in 1855, the first state to do so (though the schools continue to be separated in practice). But the Roberts case cast a dark shadow. Southern supreme courts took up Shaw’s ruling as a precedent in support of segregation, and the U.S. Supreme Court cited it in its infamous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which made “separate but equal” the law of the land.3

  The Liberator positioned Mary Mildred Williams as a poster child for the last time in an 1861 article that crowed about how successful Boston’s integrated Everett School had become.

  COLORED YOUTH IN BOST ON SCHOOLS

  Six years have elapsed since the Legislature abrogated the last distinction which this State has made in the education of her children—the separate colored school; and though Boston was the last to come under the sway of this advancing idea, she seems destined to be the first to bestow an appreciative need upon the deserving colored child. . . . In the Everett School, there are some six or eight of these children. A recent gathering in the hall of the school-house showed, on one side of the room, a white slave girl ransomed a few years since, through the effort of a Massachusetts Senator, and on the other, a sable daughter of one of the isles of the Southern Ocean, while between were youth of almost every nation and clime—Celt and Teuton, African and Asiatic—in happy emulation with the children of our more favored Anglo-Saxon race. That they were taught without prejudice, each stimulated by a proper competition with the other, and all cordially welcomed to the advantages of our inestimable system, it is not necessary that I should here assert.

  Liberator, December 13, 1861

  Six years after her brief moment in abolition’s gaze, after her “ransoming” by Senator Sumner, Mary’s color and personal history still elicited notice. She was marked as a representative of her race in a group of children, singled out by this school official from the “six or eight” children of color to anchor his imaginary global lineup of races. Mary marked the white extreme in this diversity spectrum, to the side of immigrants and at the farthest distance from her Caribbean classmate. The “white slave girl,” along with her immigrant, African, and Asian classmates, is held apart from “our more favored Anglo-Saxon race” in this address by the founder of her school, Charles Wesley Slack, also the author of the bill that (nominally) ended school segregation in Boston.

  Her token presence in a schoolroom still held enough social currency to make a political point. It is unclear whether her sister Adelaide Rebecca joined this tableau. Mary had made some progress toward anonymity; her name was not given or needed in the Liberator’s article to tell her story.

  “Colored Youth in Boston Schools” appeared on the bottom of the front page of the Liberator on December 13, 1861. Above it was a glowing review of Frederick Douglass’s lecture on photography’s power, “Pictures and Progress,” which he had delivered the previous week at Tremont Temple.

  If ever a man, standing before a great audience of refined and cultivated people, has the right to their indulgence, surely he whose early years were spent in slavery, whose spelling book was the soft sand at his feet, and who took his degree of the sign-boards over the doors, might claim such indulgence; and yet, as Frederick Douglass stood there, his form dilating with conscious power, his eye flashing, and his whole face glowing with enthusiasm, while his clear silver tones rang like a trumpet, all who saw and heard him must have felt that he was not an object of indulgence, but of admiration. His very presence gives the lie to the oft-repeated assertion that the negro is incapable of elevation, and only fit for a menial condition.

  But it is not in a lecture such as this that Frederick Douglass shows his greatest power–that he is really himself. At the close of the meeting at Tremont Temple, he went directly to Rev. Mr. Grimes’s church . . . Here the exuberance of his nature found expression in the glowing imagery of his imaginative race: his wit and drollery were inimitable; and his rollicking good humor, blended with a vein of pathos, took all hearts captive.

  The Liberator, December 13, 1861

  The lecture was part of the Parker Fraternity lecture series. “Men from the highest seats of learning, philosophy and statesmanship”—including Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Charles Sumner—had been invited to speak in memory of Theodore Parker, who had died of tuberculosis in Florence, Italy, in May 1860.4 Sumner said in his speech that although he was inclined “naturally to some topic of literature—of history—of science—of art—to something at least which makes for Peace,” he could not take such liberties in wartime, as “the voice refuses such a theme.” Sumner chose the topic of war. But Douglass did not:
“it may seem almost an impertinence to ask your attention on a lecture on pictures,” he told the audience, but “the all engrossing character of the war” makes its own apology for “this seeming transgression.”5

  In this lecture and in the three subsequent lectures he gave on the same theme during the war, Douglass explored photography’s potential to influence public opinion. “The world is flooded in pictures,” he said; Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, has turned “the planet into a picture gallery.” Parked at every crossroads in the United States, Douglass reported, was the “inevitable Daguerreian Gallery” on wheels where “the farmer boy gets an iron shoe for his horse, and metallic picture for himself at the same time, and at the same price.”6 In the nation’s love affair with pictures, Douglass argued, could be found a latent democratic power: this cheap, ubiquitous technique of image-making could propagate messages that were equally legible to the whole of society. Douglass’s theory of images rested on the assumptions that sentiment had the power to effect political change, and that photography opened new ways to appeal to it. One of racism’s pathologies was a diseased visuality—an inability to see past race. What if the pictures we made and saw told a different story?

  “Pictures, like songs, should be left to make their own way in the world,” he told his audiences, because they are “equally social forces—the one reaching and swaying the heart by the eye, and the other by the ear.” He would go on to become the most-photographed man in America in the nineteenth century.7 He tried to make an impression on American culture of what it meant to be a black man.8

  No one in the nineteenth century made a more lucid assessment of photography’s service to ideology than Frederick Douglass; but his contemporary audience, expecting another of Douglass’s recriminations of slavery, seems to have been unwilling to applaud Douglass’s “latitude of range.” According to one local correspondent, Douglass’s lecture “came near being a total failure; the Speaker only saved himself by switching off suddenly from his subject and pitching in on the great question of the day,” that is, the war to end slavery.9 After his lecture at Tremont Temple, Douglass repaired to Reverend Grimes’s Twelfth Baptist Church for what appears to have been an after-party. His reviewer for the Liberator followed him there. The Liberator review noted Douglass’s code switching: in the room filled to capacity with members of Boston’s black abolitionist community, Douglass was “really himself.”

  On December 3, 1861, President Lincoln made the same mistake on the same day. His first annual message to Congress was also panned for omitting to mention slavery.10

  Exactly a year earlier, on December 3, 1860, Douglass had spoken in Tremont Temple at a John Brown commemorative event, honoring him on the anniversary of his execution, when an anti-abolitionist riot erupted. Winslow Homer’s 1860 illustration of that event for Harper’s Weekly depicts a man who could be Douglass suspended triumphantly mid-oration, his arms outstretched above a melée of limbs. Douglass was pulled from the podium by the hair and subjected to the verbal abuse of an antiabolitionist mob shouting “Put him out! Down him! Put a rope around his neck!”

  “Expulsion of Negroes and Abolitionists from Tremont Temple, Boston, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1860,” engraving by Winslow Homer, illustration for Harper’s Weekly, December 15, 1860.

  On December 3, 1861, Douglass took the podium at Tremont Temple again, to “impertinently” speak of pictures and progress. He could not know if his audience’s response would be a welcome or another nightmare. He concluded his speech on pictures with this moral: “where there is no criticism, there is no progress.”

  On December 31, 1862, once more in the Tremont Temple, Douglass waited for midnight—with Reverend Grimes and William Wells Brown and much of black Boston—to see the jubilee promised by the Emancipation Proclamation. On New Year’s Day, during that first “watch night” of equal parts disbelief and hope, word arrived over the telegraph wires that President Lincoln had signed the document. Chaos of a happy sort erupted in the hall.

  That night Douglass took the podium to lead the congregation in singing “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow.” He would later describe the scene as “wild and grand. Joy and gladness exhausted all forms of expression, from shouts of praise to joy and tears.” At midnight, the party had to vacate Tremont Temple, so Reverend Grimes opened his church for a continued celebration, which lasted until dawn, as it has every year since. It was, Douglass remembered, “a worthy celebration of the first step on the part of the nation in its departure from the thralldom of the ages.”11

  20

  Prudence Bell

  Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1864

  The words spoken to the crowd assembled at Tremont Temple on the historic morning of January 1, 1863, were recorded by Edward Mitchell Bannister, the secretary of the Union Progressive Association, a group founded by William Cooper Nell for social uplift and political organizing.

  Bannister, a freeborn activist, was deeply connected with the work of antislavery in Boston. He and his wife Christianna Carteaux boarded with Lewis Hayden, the ardent abolitionist whose home was a fortified safe house for fugitives. He aspired to be a painter but had found no established white artists in Boston to take him on in a studio apprenticeship. Nor had he found patronage for travel abroad to the schools of Europe. He taught himself how to paint, by seeing paintings, and how to make photographs at a studio in New York. He started out painting portraits, later making his mark as a landscape painter. He ran an ad for “E. M. Bannister Portrait Painter” in the Liberator, on October 21, 1864. He rented space in the Studio Building on Tremont Street, two doors down from that of the sculptor Edmonia Lewis.1

  Few of Bannister’s portraits remain today. But according to art historian Juanita Marie Holland, his only extant work from 1864 is a memorial portrait of Prudence Nelson Bell. Her daughters, Elizabeth and Evelina, commissioned the painting after Prue died on November 29, 1864.

  I wrote to Evelina’s grandson, Charles Johnson, Jr., to request details about the painting, which was displayed in their home in New Jersey for many years, before they moved to Connecticut in 1981. Charles had already died, but his widow, Arlette, responded to my request. She told me that Prue’s descendants had passed down a story about this sitting:

  Bannister arrived at Prue’s home to find her laid out in a coffin, under dim window light. Working quickly and quietly in the solemn company, he painted Prue as if he had known her in her prime. Evelina had arranged her mother in her favorite lace bonnet. Banister placed her before a dark, neutral background with a nondescript green hill or upholstered chair behind her. As he worked, the portrait would not come together—the eyes were not right. Bannister was not to blame, given that they were dimmed by death. One story had it that Ludwell was called in to sit for Bannister, given that his eyes were so like his mother’s. On the other hand, Arlette Johnson wrote to me, “I heard that . . . her eyes [were] painted from her daughter’s,” referring to Evelina.2

  Prudence Nelson Bell (oil painting), posthumous portrait by Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1864.

  In person, the portrait has a hurried quality.3 Only her face is rendered in any detail. Her straight, strong nose is framed by a single strong crease. Circles shadow her eyes, but the rest of her face is clear and bright. Given her age, her dark hair should have been gray or white, but Bannister made her youthful. The bow of her white bonnet has a greenish tinge. In the background is a neon green mound.

  Prue had died quickly of pneumonia, in only six days, when she was seventy-three years old. According to the register Deaths in Boston, she died at 1 Livingston Street in Rockland, which would have been near her son Ludwell in East Abingdon, southeast of Boston. Floating above the name “Prudence Bell” there is a small designation, “cold.” Likely Evelina Bell gave the details of her mother’s death to the city. She omitted the name “Nelson” from her mother’s tombstone as well as her death record.

  Under the column designated for occupa
tions, the clerk wrote, “wife of Thomas.”

  Ludwell Bell Nelson had moved to Abington in Plymouth County shortly after his manumission, where he worked as a boot cutter, then as a boot stitcher. His brother Jesse Bell Nelson joined him in the shoe industry, moving to Abington after his manumission on July 3, 1856. Jesse died of typhoid fever, just nine months into his free life, on March 24, 1857.

  On January 8, 1863, Ludwell married a white woman, nineteen-year-old Isabella Pike of Weymouth, Massachusetts, and they lived as a white family. Like most white men of his era, he enrolled in the militia in 1859. I do not know if he saw service. Demand for boots soared during the war.

  After his mother’s death, Ludwell’s record disappears, as does the record of his oldest sibling, Albert Bell Nelson. Albert had remained in Washington for three months after their manumission in July 1856. He was married, and a “Mr. White” owned his wife and child. He hoped to see them freed, with John A. Andrew’s assistance, as his sister had been. His wife’s owner had offered to sell her and the child to Albert, in exchange for $1.75 per day in labor, should Albert choose to remain in Washington for several more years. He did not. He left Washington for Boston on the morning of September 24, 1856, taking the six o’clock train.4 There is no further trace of Albert or any record of the redemption of his wife and child.

  According to an oral history recorded by Evelina’s daughter, Addie Johnson Trusty, Ludwell and Albert moved to New Jersey and joined white society as a doctor and a journalist, respectively.5 Trusty also noted that Prudence Bell had been “an active fugitive slave assistant” in Weymouth until the end of her life.