The Baldwin surname in black history is well known—when the first name is James. I wonder how many people know the history of Maria Louise Baldwin. I certainly didn’t. I was browsing the internet looking for stories about black women in our early history and happened upon a three-year-old post on the Library of Congress’ website: a collection of photographs of 19th-century black women activists.
This erasure is misogynoir because there are two reasons for these black women and their historical contributions to be obscured: race and gender. Even when they are documented in history books, if you don’t know the book exists, then you’ve never read it. And so they are still invisible and stay invisible, unless you happen to live in an area where someone has remembered and uncovered them.
As noted by the publisher, Baldwin “held a special place” in the racially divided world of greater Boston. She was an educator at a “largely white” school, as well as an activist. The University of Massachusetts Press website notes:
African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called Baldwin "the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area" during her lifetime. Baldwin used her respectable position to fight alongside more radical activists like William Monroe Trotter for full citizenship for fellow members of the black community. And, in her professional and personal life, she negotiated and challenged dominant white ideas about black womanhood. In Maria Baldwin's Worlds, Kathleen Weiler reveals both Baldwin's victories and what fellow activist W. E. B. Du Bois called her "quiet courage" in everyday life, in the context of the wider black freedom struggle in New England.
Two months after the book’s release, Weiler wrote an essay for Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, exploring her attempts to delve more deeply into Baldwin’s thoughts, life, and growing militancy, in spite of the scarcity of any written material that went beyond her public role as a lauded teacher “accepted by whites”:
Baldwin, like many black New Englanders of her generation, had been deeply influenced by the abolitionists and believed that a democratic multiracial society could be created in the United States. But by the second decade of the 20th century, the belief that thoughtful argument and black respectability could effectively challenge white racism began to be replaced by a more militant stance. Maria Baldwin has long been viewed as a moderate who was able to move successfully in white as well as black worlds, but her activities in the last years of her life suggest a strong race consciousness and growing militancy.
Minutes of the League of Women for Community Service held at the Schlesinger Library show that Baldwin, always a teacher, increasingly led the other League members to a deepening analysis of white racism and black resistance. The March 13, 1919 Minutes describe the visit of two sergeants from one of the black regiments who fought in France during World War I. Baldwin asked the visitors whether the war had hardened them and one of the sergeants replied that it had. Many of the men were from the South and had had no familiarity with modern weapons. But now “upon return to the Southland should reasons demand it they would [aim] scientifically at the bulls eye and never fail.” This response, with its embrace of active black resistance to white racism, captures the growing militancy of the post war years. Two years later Baldwin invited two survivors of the white race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to speak to the club about their experiences of racist violence.
Though I focus on Baldwin today, it is important to note that she was one of many black women engaged in every aspect of the growing movements of black people post-enslavement. A deeper look at the records of the Niagara Movement, which was the precursor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), turns up the names of numerous women who became involved from the group’s inception. Yet most summary descriptions of what took place at Niagara read like this one, from the Zinn Education Project.
On July 11, 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter convened a conference of Black leaders to renounce Booker T. Washington’s accommodation-ism. They met at Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada, because hotels on the U.S. side of the falls barred African Americans.
The 29 men in attendance set forth a platform that demanded freedom of speech and criticism; a free press; manhood suffrage; abolition of all caste distinctions based on race or color; recognition of the principle of human brotherhood; belief in the dignity of labor; and a united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership.
Missing are the women. Though the initial group meeting was all-male, interestingly enough, the men first met in the home of Mary Burnett Talbert. In their article “African American Women and the Niagara Movement, 1905-1909,” Anita Nahal and Lopez D. Matthews Jr. document their presence from the beginning—including the resistance to them becoming full members, allegedly from William Monroe Trotter, and their acceptance as full members, which was backed by Du Bois:
Desirous of achieving primary race status, Black men have tended to ignore the role of Black women in race movements, with the emphasis being on the contributions of Black men. Further the struggle for gender parity within the Black community was submerged in the larger interests of the race. As such the actual goals, programs, policies and agendas of race movements have centered on the role and encouragement of Black men. Yet when given a role, Black women fulfilled it with enthusiasm and commitment, for they too viewed it as their contribution to race reform. Their aim was to seek empowerment for the race and in the process if they had to neglect their own needs as women, so be it. From the churches to schools, to factories, to women's clubs, to their own national women's movement, to finally race movements like the Niagara Movement, Black women gave quietly and strongly. The above article is an example of their important role that few know about, but history records.
A brief search of Twitter supplies some illustrations to back up all of this.
Many of the women involved in the Niagara Movement went on to participate in its successor, the NAACP. They contributed frequently to The Crisis, which was and still is the NAACP’s official publication. Thanks to the the internet, digitized copies of The Crisis are available online, both through Google Books and via the Modernist Journals Project.
Baldwin’s 1915 essay in The Crisis, “Votes for Teachers,” (on page 189 of the issue) advocated for suffrage rights for educators.
The profession of teaching has a rich inheritance. These convictions were bequeathed to it, to have and to hold: that the dearest interests of life are in its keeping; that its peculiar service to society is to nourish and perpetuate those noblest aspirations called its ideals ; that to do such work one must be devoted and unselfish.
This tradition still inspires the teacher. Some of the unrest, the dissatisfaction with conditions that are everywhere has penetrated her world, but probably no other work is done less in the commercial spirit nor any service more expanded beyond what "is nominated in the bond." Many school rooms are moving pictures of this spirit at work.
One is warranted in thinking that teachers will transfer to their use of the ballot this habit of fidelity to ideals.
This speaks to teacher’s concerns and activism today, as they are still underpaid, and still fighting for better ideals.
In April of 1917, Baldwin was featured in a column in The Crisis titled (I kid you not), “Men of the Month.”
As noted earlier, there are times when some of these black women in our history, such as Baldwin, become figures in today’s local news. This happened in Cambridge and Boston, all thanks to a teenager, as Weiler wrote for the website DigBoston:
In 2000, Nathaniel Vogel, an eighth-grade student at the Agassiz Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began a campaign to change the name of his school to the Maria Baldwin School. The Agassiz School had been named for the nineteenth-century Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, an internationally known geologist and zoologist. But Agassiz was also a follower of the theory of polygenism, which claimed that race is a scientific reality and that different races have separate origins and inherently different abilities, a hierarchical theory that justifies white privilege and racism. When Nathaniel Vogel read Stephen Jay Gould’s condemnation of Agassiz’s racist views in The Mismeasure of Man, he became ashamed that his school bore Agassiz’s name. He already knew something about Maria Baldwin, who had once been his school’s principal. There was a plaque commemorating her at the entrance to the school, and an annual award to an outstanding student was still given in her name. After he read the brief entry on Baldwin in Darlene Clark Hine’s Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and contrasted Baldwin’s accomplishments with Agassiz’s scientific racism, he mobilized a campaign to change the name of the school. Cambridge and Boston newspapers and local television news programs publicized the story. After a number of open meetings, in 2002 the Cambridge School Committee voted to change the name of the school from the Agassiz to the Maria Baldwin School.
Kudos to Nathaniel Vogel. His efforts to remove Agassiz’s name from his school led another student, 20 years later, to propose the removal of his name from the surrounding neighborhood.
Just last month, the website Cambridge Day reports, the student succeeded:
The proposal to change the name has been led by Maya Counter, a resident of the neighborhood and a senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. In 2002, a School Committee vote renamed the neighborhood’s Agassiz elementary school to address the same issue – instead honoring Maria L. Baldwin, who in 1899 became the first black female school principal in the Northeast there – “the most distinguished position achieved by a person of negro descent in the teaching world of America,” W.E.B. Du Bois said in 1917.
Counter spoke Monday during public comment, explaining how she decided to research her neighborhood during an advanced placement history course and discovered the same offensive material about Agassiz as residents had two decades earlier. “His views helped public policy and lawmakers support the continued oppression of black Americans,” Counter said. “It is past time we recognize Agassiz’s legacy for what it was.”
Her suggestion was to follow the example set with the elementary school and rename the neighborhood for Baldwin.
I don’t know what the final name of the neighborhood will be, but Baldwin seems the likely choice. I hope one day I can visit Baldwin. If not, at least I have learned who Maria Baldwin was, and you have as well.
Please join me next Sunday for more black women from the United States’ early history.
