[Previous] [Next]

Women and African American History: 1860-1869

• founded in 1832 and accepting male and female, white and black students, by 1860 Oberlin College had a student population that was one-third African American

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, was published, including descriptions of the sexual exploitation of female slaves

• Laura Towne, from Pennsylvania, went to the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina to teach the former slaves -- she ran a school in the Sea Islands until 1901, adopting several African American children with her friend and teaching partner, Ellen Murray

• Charlotte Forten arrived in the Sea Islands to work with Laura Towne, teaching former slaves

• Mary Jane Patterson, graduating from Oberlin College, was the first African American woman to graduate from an American college

• Congress abolished slavery in Washington, DC

• (July 16) Ida B. Wells (Wells-Barnett) born (muckraking journalist, lecturer, activist, anti-lynching writer and activist)

• (July 13-17) many New York African Americans killed in draft riots

• (September 22) Emancipation Proclamation issued, freeing slaves within territory controlled by the Union

• Fanny Kemble published Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation which opposed slavery and served as anti-slavery propaganda

• Memoir of Old Elizabeth a Coloured Woman published: autobiography of an African Methodist Episcopal evangelist

• Susie King Taylor, African American army nurse with the Union army, began writing her journal, later published as In Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: Civil War Nurse

• Mary Church Terrell born (activist, clubwoman)

• Rebecca Ann Crumple graduated from the New England Medical College, becoming the first African American woman M.D.

• slavery ended in the United States with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution

• American Equal Rights Association founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and others, to work for equal

BlackFacts Details

The first U.S. stamp ever to honor an African American is issued bearing the lik

Washington DC Facts

New York City Facts

United States Facts