“I told him in a very decided manner he would not do it,” she wrote. He called her the N-word and threatened to slap her on the mouth. “It is only occasionally that I have been beaten and stoned in the street.”Ĭlark also recounted a story of a man who stepped on her dress and complained she was walking too slowly on the sidewalk.

“I have generally walked through the streets unmolested,” she matter-of-factly wrote in one letter. to teach former slaves to read and write throughout Virginia and Maryland, while stoically enduring the daily indignities of racism. She began teaching at a private school in Newport, R.I., but during the Civil War she felt a higher calling - to work with the American Missionary Assn. Jackson, a free Black farmer from Delaware. This is the paper passport that was issued to Ellen Garrison Clark in 1854, by Massachusetts Judge Ebenezer Hoar of Concord, a passport “to travel to Virginia and other states of the United States.” (Massachusetts Historical Archive) The group established the Robbins House Museum in the simple 544-square-foot home that once belonged to the Robbins family.

Archives at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans and the Robbins House-Concord’s African American History, a nonprofit group dedicated to documenting Concord’s African American and anti-slavery history from the 17th to 19th centuries. Much of what we know about Clark comes from letters, preserved at the American Missionary Assn. She was the only Black member of the group she hosted its second meeting in her home.īy the time Clark was 15, she signed petitions demanding equal rights for Native Americans and advocating desegregation of Massachusetts trains and Boston schools.

Her mother, Susan Robbins Garrison, socialized with the abolitionists and transcendentalists who made Concord famous for its liberal leanings, joining Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Lidian, and Henry David Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, as charter members of the Concord Female Antislavery Society in 1837. Her father, Jack Garrison, escaped his enslavers in New Jersey and ran to Concord, where he lived as a farmer and laborer - and fugitive - the rest of his life. Historians recognize her maternal grandfather, Caesar Robbins, a patriot who won his freedom by fighting against the British in the American Revolution. Through speeches and songs, prayers and tears, those gathered remembered the fearless life of a woman who once wrote, “I think it our duty as a people to spend our lives in trying to elevate our own race.”Įllen Garrison was born free in Concord, Mass., in 1823, but her family was well acquainted with bondage.

The green glass sea by ellen klages