Traveling to History: Twenty Seven
JAILED FOR TEACHING BLACK CHILDREN
Norfolk’s Margaret Douglass Violated Antebellum Virginia Law
By James F. Lee
Image of Margaret Douglass about 1854. This image appeared in her Personal Narrative, decrying her treatment and that of her students in Norfolk. {{PD-US}}
In May 1852, Norfolk residents might have seen a strange sight. Two white women and about 18 Black children marching to the City Hall led by a bailiff with a stout stick and another bailiff taking up the rear. Police had just raided the home of Margaret Douglass on Barraud Court, where she and her 17-year-old daughter Rosa were accused of teaching free Black children to read, contrary to Commonwealth law.
The school had been in operation for about 11 months.
Mrs. Douglass, a widow from Charleston, supported herself as a seamstress. She considered herself a good Christian and a Southern Lady, and felt strongly that all free children, Black or white, should be literate, so that they could read Scripture.
Douglass rented a small two-story house on Barraud Court, an unpaved, unlit street housing a transient population. Holding herself to the highest standards, she kept aloof from her neighbors, finding them not “of the most refined class.” Respectability and personal appearance were very important to her. At the time of her arrest, she kept the constables waiting with the children downstairs while she made herself presentable.
This section of James Keily’s 1851 map of the City of Norfolk shows the approximate location of Barraud Court (blue line) between Granby Street and Martin’s Lane, north of Plume Street. Approximately the site of today’s Dominion Enterprises Building. City Hall is on the upper right. (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division).
I can find no Norfolk map that shows Barraud Court, but a description of it in the 1852 Norfolk City Directory says it runs east from Granby Street, south of the Stone Bridge, to Martin’s Lane. The Stone Bridge carried traffic on Granby Street over the Elizabeth River where it emptied into a marsh that was later filled in, placing it roughly at the site of today’s Dominion Enterprises Building at the corner of Granby Street and City Hall Avenue. It was probably little more than a footpath.
We can only conjecture the route Douglass, her daughter, and her students, took to City Hall, where they were to face Mayor Simon Stubbs for their infraction. Judging by the 1851 map of Norfolk and Portsmouth, I imagine they would have marched from the tenements of Barraud Court, down Granby to Main Street (today’s East Main Street) and then turned left at Bank Street north to City Hall.
Douglass describes the ordeal in her brief memoir: “Will my readers please imagine, for an instant, a crowd of little children, walking two and two, preceded and followed by two stout men, each with a great club in his hands? It reminded me of a flock of little lambs going to the slaughter.”
A large crowd had gathered at the City Hall to witness the curious proceedings.
The former Norfolk City Hall and Circuit Court (circa 1905) was the site of Margaret Douglass’ trial. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Co. Collection, LC-DIG-det-4a12467)
The City Hall was the same building standing today as the site of the MacArthur Memorial, a two-story, Classic Revival structure completed in 1850 with six massive Tuscan columns supporting the front portico. The huge dome, 52 feet in height, was designed by Thomas Ustick Walter, designer of the U.S. Capitol dome.
Douglass said the children grew frightened as they approached the imposing building, a symbol of white power and a place to be feared. City Hall “was to them a place of exceeding terror.” Did they enter from the front, climbing the granite steps and then walking between the huge columns and through the great front door? If so, once inside, they saw a 13-foot-wide hallway running to the back door of the building; the mayor’s office was to the right.
When the mayor ordered the children released, Douglass wrote, “they fled like so many little birds let loose from a cage.”
Douglass assumed the law prohibiting teaching African Americans literacy only applied to enslaved people. In fact, she was no Abolitionist. She supported slavery and claimed to have once owned slaves. And she also wanted to expose what she considered the greatest sin of slavery: the sexual abuse of enslaved women by their white owners. Literacy would shed light on that sin, she reasoned.
Christ Church (circa 1971) was located at 421 East Freemason in Norfolk. Once the church of Norfolk’s elite, it was demolished in 1973. (Photo courtesy of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources)
Mayor Stubbs took a compassionate view of Douglass’s offense, reprimanded her, and let her and her daughter go with the understanding that they would no longer teach Back children.
Thinking all was well, Douglass was stunned to receive a summons to appear in court for violating Virginia’s anti-literacy law, forbidding a white person from teaching Blacks to read or write. She was indicted on July 13, 1853, and scheduled for trial in November.
Her indictment read that Margaret Douglass and her daughter Rosa did “unlawfully assemble with divers negroes, for the purposes of instructing them to read and write … contrary to the Act of the General Assembly…”
It was the fervent hope of the white establishment in Norfolk that Mrs. Douglass would leave town before her trial, sparing them the indignity of possibly imprisoning a woman.
She did leave town, but only for two weeks, returning from a visit to New York, and itching to face her accusers, fully believing that she would lose the case, but would only receive a nominal fine.
The trial opened at Norfolk City Hall on November 24, 1853, presided over by Circuit Court Judge Richard Baker. The court room was located on the first floor to the left.
To the ire of Judge Baker, Douglass opted to represent herself.
At the trial, she wore a form-fitting black velvet dress, with lace sleeves and kid gloves. On her head she wore a straw bonnet trimmed with white. In her hand, she clutched a bible. The Norfolk News reported that she created a “profound sensation” in the court and that spectators struggled to get a glimpse of her.
Douglass called three witnesses, all members of Christ Church, the church of the city elite, where she asserted Black children were taught to read at the Sunday school that was created as an act of charity for poor Blacks. Douglas claimed that the very books she used in her school were the same as those used at Christ Church.
Her point was that what she did was no different than what the good people at Christ Church were doing.
Margaret Douglass marker at the corner of City Hall Avenue and Granby Street, near the location of her home on Barraud Court. (Photo by James F. Lee)
All the children Mrs. Douglass taught attended the Christ Church Sunday School. Judge Baker was a member of that church, and members of his family taught in the Sunday School. Douglass herself was a congregant but didn’t interact with the city leaders who worshipped there.
Christ Church was a brick stucco structure with arched windows located on East Freemason at the corner of Cumberland Street, distinctive by its double columns at the church entrance. The large church bell could be heard ten miles away. The building was demolished in 1973. Today, a condominium building occupies the site.
One of those witnesses was Mr. Sharp, an attorney. He assured Mrs. Douglass that he had nothing to do with the instruction of Black children at Christ Church, that that was the role of the ladies of the church. But he did admit that many of them did know how to read. In her short memoir, Douglass dismissed Sharp as “having crept under the ladies’ aprons in order to shelter [him]self…”
In her summation, Douglass decried the wretched condition of Black people in Norfolk, living in hovels, prohibited from gathering in groups larger than three. Even free Blacks were heavily taxed, and their privileges greatly circumscribed. Literacy, in her mind, was a way to help lift them from their condition.
It took the jury three days to render a verdict of guilty, with the recommendation of a $1 fine. Sentencing was scheduled for January 10, 1854.
At sentencing, Judge Baker gave context to the anti-literacy law, tracing its origins to 1831 in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which occurred in nearby Southampton County. Baker claimed Northern agitators had been guilty of flooding the mails with antislavery documents inflaming the passions of “our Southern negroes to induce them to cut our throats.”
He took issue with the idea that literacy was necessary to learn Scripture, and disagreed with Douglass’ assertion that Blacks, free or enslaved, lived in wretched conditions.
He also admonished her for representing herself and not employing proper counsel.
But there would be no slap on the wrist.
He gave her a one-month sentence, pointing out that if she had been a male he would have given the full six months. Stunned, Douglass was immediately remanded to the city jail, possibly the newly built jail, a Gothic structure with thick granite walls with battlements and a central tower. It stood behind (to the east) of City Hall.
After serving her time, she and her daughter moved to Philadelphia where it is “no crime to teach a poor little child, of any color, to read the Word of God.”
The Old City Hall today is home to The MacArthur Memorial. (Photo by James F. Lee)
Sources
The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a Southern Woman. Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., 1854. Internet Archive (accessed 5/17/2024).
Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner – Champions of Antebellum Black Education. Philip S. Foner and Josephine F. Pacheco. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.
Historical and Descriptive Sketches of Norfolk and Vicinity. William S. Forrest. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1853. Internet Archive (accessed 5/17/2024).
Sargeant Memorial Collection of the Slover Library, Norfolk.
