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  Given her active mind and frail body, Miner searched for a way to extend her education, at one point even writing to Governor Seward of New York to ask if there was some way a girl like her could acquire a liberal education. The outcome presented a good news/bad news scenario. The good news was that the governor actually wrote her back. The bad news was his message: such programs and endowments did not exist for women at that time.12 Undaunted, she continued to self-educate as the years passed. She tried to teach some younger girls, but Miner became aware of her own academic limitations. She knew needed to go to school, serious school, so she resorted to begging.

  The principal of Young Ladies’ Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York, found himself facing a delicate brunette woman with huge eyes and a sallow complexion, whom he later described as “pathetic,” pleading with him to allow her to attend his school for free.13 She hoped the principal would let her defer payment for a year until she could work it off. Something in him recognized her passion was real.

  Once admitted under this arrangement, Miner would let nothing keep her from her classes or lessons, even as she underwent a procedure to have setons inserted near her spine.14 She wrote to her brother Seth that sometimes she was so sore she could barely move. Although physically weak, she began to develop a strong voice, a feminist one, which in turn awakened an abolitionist leaning. At school she observed three classmates, free colored girls, who were treated the same as she was. The extent to which her feminism and abolitionism would fuse would not be fully clear until after she left school and, in 1847, accepted her third teaching position, at Newton Female Institute in Whitesville, Mississippi. She was thirty-two years old.

  Miner was not prepared for the sound of the whip. Slaves were being herded, and in some cases beaten, not far from where she was teaching the charming daughters of the area’s wealthy plantation owners. While the young ladies were learning ornamental knitting and ancient languages, young girls their age worked the fields. When she quietly approached the field master about more humane treatment for the slaves, he replied it was out of his power and that “they are but grown up children and must be whipped or they will not work and we cannot sustain them without.”15 The conditions horrified Miner; she could not eat or sleep. She also couldn’t leave her lucrative job. She was very much in debt due to her schooling. To pay back her loan she would have to endure the experience—and it would change her life forever.

  In the South the idea of teaching slaves or even free blacks to read was anarchic. As one former slave named Elijah Green remembered, “For God’s sake, don’t let a slave be catch with a pencil and paper. That was a major crime. You might as well had killed your marster or missus.”16 If a slave in the Deep South dared to learn to read, the harsh penalty could be a whipping, branding, or the painful removal of a finger. South Carolina’s slave code prohibited slaves from gathering without white supervision, learning to read and write, and growing their own food. Some whites feared slave uprisings if their property became educated.

  After two years of watching the plight of young enslaved women, Miner thought she had uncovered a way to help. She approached the principal of the institute, Dr. D. L. Phares, to ask about teaching the young slave girls in her free time. Phares reminded Miss Miner that doing so was illegal in Mississippi under penalty of fine or imprisonment. Undaunted, she appealed to their shared strong religious convictions.

  “I am convinced that they should be properly instructed or the belief in their immortality be relinquished be persons professing to be guided by Christian principles…. I beg leave to teach them.”

  “Have you ever taught colored people at home?” the principal asked.

  “Not as a class but only as individuals in white schools.”

  Dr. Phares quietly responded, “I have often thought that northern philanthropists have a great field of labor among their own colored people and if they would convince us of their sincerity they should instruct and elevate them first.” The truth in those words struck Miner, and later she recalled, “It was that hour I resolved to open a normal school for colored youth.”17

  Miner knew her best chance at success was elsewhere. She was aware that within the Washington, DC, city limits, it was illegal for “coloreds” to attend white schools but it was not illegal to teach them. But Myrtilla Miner’s mission was bigger than simply teaching colored girls to read and write. She was looking for a long-term solution to both the horror she’d witnessed in Whitesville and the benign neglect of the North. She believed if a colored woman learned to teach, she could then teach her own people, especially in the South. It was Miner’s take on the proverb “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” As she prepared to open a school in Washington, she wrote to a friend:

  All who look upon with curiosity rather than earnest sympathy I distrust for it is evident they are attracted to me by my peculiar ties and not by the spirit within me. I am really going to Washington to secure a school for the colored missus there…. Our intention is to educate a class of teachers who shall be efficient and exert an influence that in ten years may be felt. We go forth anticipating vast obstacles and many trials but a friend in Washington writes, he thinks we can undisturbingly teach colored children there.

  Some thought the idea preposterous, and it was clearly dangerous. When word from the tiny woman with the huge plan reached the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass he told her the plan was “reckless, almost to the point of madness.”18

  On December 6, 1851, in a rented room owned by a free black and paid for by money from northern Quakers, Miner’s school opened: the Normal School for Colored Girls. Her first students, just six of them, were barely literate, and some left almost immediately. Within a month, however, there were fifteen pupils. And as colored families learned of the extraordinary news that there was a school where young girls could learn more than just rudimentary addition and reading, Miner was inundated with requests. She soon had forty pupils. Parents approached her, some desperate. One pleaded with Miner, “Will you educate my daughter? I have so many children I can hardly feed and clothe them, much less give them learning, but I want this one taught and if you educate her you may have her.”19

  Myrtilla Miner, founder of the Normal School for Colored Girls.

  Library of Congress, John Angel James Wilcox, engraver

  As grateful as some were for her work, others were equally hateful. Her home was set on fire and bricks were thrown through her windows.20 She was forced to move the school several times because of threats. One morning she arrived at school to find a note that read, “If you are not out of that house with your niggers by the tenth of April you and all your effects will be set in flames.” It was signed “Citizens of the First Ward.”21

  Things came to a head four months after the school opened. A group of local white neighbors began to harass Miner’s students as they left at the end of the day. The group gathered outside the school and verbally assaulted the young girls as they tried to walk home. The angry whites blocked the sidewalks and forced the girls to go around them. One lawyer spread his elbows out in an effort to knock the girls off the walkway. When his arm made contact with one of the young misses, he then cursed the girls, calling them “impertinent hussies.” White Washingtonians were not as progressive as Miner had hoped. The words of Frederick Douglass were coming true. Her students worried. One of her students, a girl named Marietta, wrote to her teacher, “Sometimes a dark cloud seems to overshadow me. The cloud appears thicker and darker. I say will slavery forever exist? But a voice says, it shall cease. It shall and it must be abolished! I think blood will be shed before all and be fair. The question is are we willing to give up our lives for freedom?” 22

  On the morning of her thirty-seventh birthday, Myrtilla Miner dressed in her best clothes. She was not going to a party or to a show. She was going to confront the lawyer with the sharp elbows. He had threatened the school’s landlord, an older colored
woman who told Miner she feared for her property and for herself. He told the old woman that she might expect to see her house torn down over her head, and if she escaped she should think herself well off. The old woman had come to Miner distraught.

  “The Lord save us! O the Lord have mercy! I can’t endure this. I shan’t have no home that ole masssa lef me during my lifetime. Then I’ll be so desolate. What will I do ?” The old woman was wringing her hands.

  “Why, what is the matter Aunty? I think the Lord will save and have mercy, too, if we trust Him,” Miner tried in vain to console her.

  “But they threaten to mob this house ’cause I let in the school and I can’t afford to be mobbed and turned out in my old age.”

  “O, don’t be so troubled. If they mob this down, the Lord will give you a better one. There are friend whose will not see you suffer to such a cause.”

  “But the thing’d be to get it. I’se ’fraid to trust.” But the old woman did trust Miner, who regularly paid the rent of ten dollars a month. And in a moment of strength the older woman informed the man that as long as the teacher paid the rent, Miner had the right to stay and no one could turn her out. The attorney was an upper-crust sort who thought he knew how to intimidate the old colored landlady and the spinster teacher.

  Myrtilla Miner recalled in a detailed letter to a friend that the lawyer received her politely on that day, her birthday, when she introduced herself. However, once she inquired about his contention that her pupils were disturbing the peace, their conversation became heated.

  “Your pupils?” the lawyer responded.

  “Yes, the colored girls.”

  “What, you keep that nigger school?”

  “Yes and hold myself responsible for their deportment in the street.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you we are not going to have this nigger school. Anyhow for they are saucy and impudent and shove white people off the walks! It is contrary to all rules to have them gathered in such companies and we shan’t have it!”

  “Did more than one answer you?”

  “Yes they all answered as saucy as possible!”

  “It tells too much,” Miner countered. “For I have forbidden my pupils to even answer the insults of white men. What did you say to my scholars?”

  “We are not going to have you Northern Abolitionists coming down here to teach our niggers. We know better what to do with them than you do.”

  “What do you propose to do with them?”

  “Send them out of the country. We don’t want them here.”

  “But you cannot do that in a day, and while you are prosecuting your plans, I shall prosecute mine.”

  “I have an idea that they have grown more impertinent since you came among.”

  “Very likely, for they have not had time to outgrow their ignorance and folly, but wait two years and see how they will appear.”

  “Who sent you here to teach niggers?”

  “A higher power than man directed me and man shall not defeat me.”

  “But who pays you?”

  “The scholars pay a regular tuition and I am infringing no law, so the mayor tells me.”

  “Well you will be mobbed; that will be the consequences.”

  “It seems to be a new version of Southern chivalry that you would mob a defenseless woman who violates no law of God or man, merely because she dare earn her living in a philanthropic way and insult her pupils because they wish to acquire knowledge to earn their livelihood and be independent of the aid of those who despise and degrade them.”

  The lawyer responded, “I shall not do it but you will be mobbed and that is certain.”

  “Who will mob me?”

  “Why—the rowdies!”

  “No, never! They do not care what or whom I teach and never take the responsibility of violating the laws except when instigated by such men as yourself! It would be well to remember that we are on national domain and the laws are for me as well as for you.”

  The man stamped his foot.

  “No! This is every inch my own soil. Every inch mine we stand on.”

  “But you can make no law because they are made by legislation of the country for my protection and for my scholars as well as for you. Besides, these free colored people are not your niggers and you have no more right to say what I shall or shall not do with them than I have to say what you shall do. Inasmuch as I do not presume to dictate to you neither shall you interfere with my plans.”

  The lawyer tried a different tack.

  “But what good will it do to teach them? They will never thank you. They are a most ungrateful set and will only turn and despise you for all you do.”

  “I should so suppose from the treatment they have received, but I am not seeking thanks, and these considerations are of little consequences compared with the law of right.”

  “Paying all deference, Madam, to your judgment which I undoubtedly hold in the highest respect, I must be allowed to differ and assure there is no right in the case and you will be disappointed in your expectations. Some morning it will come out in the ‘Baltimore Sun’ that the white abolitionist that came down here to teach a nigger school was mobbed. The house torn down and all the books and furniture burned.”

  “The next morning it will come out that the famous Mr. Lawyer instigated the mob and then we shall no longer remain in obscurity but stand side by side before the world for judgment and I shall be more willing to take my sentence than you.”

  “But I shall not mob you,” he offered as a defense. Plausible deniability. He would get the poor whites to do his work. Still, Miner would not be distracted.

  “Then it will not be done. For you are the first who threatened it and you will have the glory and if Washington can afford a mob because one lone woman wishes to teach a few of its neglected free colored people I can afford to meet the mob. You will be obliged to mob many times unless you mob my head off and as you are not prepared do that, it will be better to make no attempt.”

  “They will not hurt you, but they will tear down the house and I would not like to see you in it at the time.”

  “I hope I may be there. It must be sublime. Quite like an ocean story.”23

  The conflict lasted about an hour.

  Miner stayed in the building only another month before leaving out of respect for the terrified landlord. By this time, Myrtilla Miner had learned how to use a pistol.

  Funding was another issue. Because there were no public funds available for her school, Miner constantly needed to solicit donors to keep the school afloat. Another concern was the exclusiveness of her student body. She wanted her school to be a place where all could learn but, in her own words, “confessed” to a friend that she sought out more educated girls for her school and often sought out girls of mixed race. A fund-raising letter revealed why. Reverend William H. Beecher, one of her biggest supporters, trustee of the school, and brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, was able to collect impressive sums for the school from northern abolitionists. He received $375 from the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and $33 from the Congregational Church in Guilford, Connecticut, as well as many more donations. At one point he was able to collect $1,262 in just two months.24 His fund-raising letters touted the virtue and the moral position of educating colored citizens. In one pitch he painted a dramatic scenario, describing that, in addition to the general population of the District, the school would

  hope to reach a class of girls of peculiar interest, often the most beautiful and intelligent and yet the most hopelessly wretched. Receiving from the mother beauty, grace, and gentleness and from the master-father the Saxon energy, intelligence, and fire, they are often object of strong paternal affection and gladly would he educate and save them. But no place of refuge is there on all the earth; domestic peace drives them from his hearth; he cannot emancipate them to be victims of violence or lust; he cannot send them to Northern schools…. We would open an asylum near them where they may be brought, educated in housewifery as well as scie
nce, and thus be prepared to be teachers among their own race and places of usefulness guaranteed to them.

  That many of the girls had access to reading or basic education by virtue of their access to whites, perhaps through a white parent, apparently made for an effective—and perhaps latently racist—fund-raising pitch. As did the tragic mulatto theme.

  The fund-raising over the years was successful. Miner was able to purchase three acres near N Street and New Hampshire Avenue NW for $4,300, a fourth of which came from Harriet Beecher Stowe—royalties from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  In March 1854 the school opened on its own property. That year more than a hundred people from around the country visited the school. They came from as far away as Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and even Canada to see the work for themselves.25 It was a Miner miracle. Miner’s standards were high. Her students learned geography, history, and languages. Each girl tended her own garden. Miner was fastidious about cleanliness and required her students to bathe daily. Her students thought of her as their guardian angel.26 She too believed that she was protected by God, and she also believed herself to be clairvoyant, a fact that informs the substance of this letter to a friend:

  I love this school of mine profoundly, and have really no idea, when I am with them, that my students are not white, recognizing their spiritual more than their physical. Some, indeed, many spirits with whom I come in contact here seem far darker than they.27

  Given her success against the odds, Miner was emboldened to pursue a secondary school, something akin to a high school, for colored children. She and a contingent of abolitionists sought to buy land to build a new facility that would accommodate 150 students. It would include a dormitory for teachers and students who wanted to come from neighboring states.