From Pine View Farm

When Knowledge Means Jail Time 0

White Southerners considered ignorance a cornerstone of chatttel slavery. At the corner of Granby and City Hall Avenue, downtown Norfolk:

Click for a larger image.

The inscription reads:

Margaret Douglass, a white woman from Charleston, South Carolina, moved to Norfolk with her daughter Rosa in 1845 and lived near hear on the former Barraud Court. She was a vest maker by occupation. In June 1852 she and her daughter opened a school in the second story backroom of her house to teach 25 free black children, both boys and girls, how to read and write. Tuition was three dollars a quarter. After she was seen walking in the funeral procession of one of her deceased students, her school was raided, and she was arrested. She argued her own case in court, pointing out that the wives and daughters of several court officials taught black children weekly in Sunday School classes at Christ Church from the same books she used. After being found guilty, she served a month in jail. Later she mmoved to Philadelphia with her daughter and gained considerable notoriety based on her booklet about her experience in Norfolk that was published in 1854.

Share

Comments are closed.

From Pine View Farm
Privacy Policy

This website does not track you.

It contains no private information. It does not drop persistent cookies, does not collect data other than incoming ip addresses and page views (the internet is a public place), and certainly does not collect and sell your information to others.

Some sites that I link to may try to track you, but that's between you and them, not you and me.

I do collect statistics, but I use a simple stand-alone Wordpress plugin, not third-party services such as Google Analitics over which I have no control.

Finally, this is website is a hobby. It's a hobby in which I am deeply invested, about which I care deeply, and which has enabled me to learn a lot about computers and computing, but it is still ultimately an avocation, not a vocation; it is certainly not a money-making enterprise (unless you click the "Donate" button--go ahead, you can be the first!).

I appreciate your visiting this site, and I desire not to violate your trust.