Fwd: [wiley58] Historic Perspective: The Underground Railroad and education shape legacy
Rob Robbins
Historic Perspective: The Underground Railroad and education shape legacy
Mike McCormick Special to the Tribune-Star
---- — Although Indiana was
considered an anti-slavery state from the time it adopted its original
constitution in 1816, laws were enacted from time-to-time to aid slave
owners.
Among those statutes were the fugitive slave laws, which imposed
penalties upon those who harbored slaves from neighboring states or aided in
their escape.
Those laws were passed to hinder activities of “the
Underground Railroad,” a phrase adopted to describe a clandestine network of
routes, individuals and safe havens which facilitated the escape to Canada of
fugitive slaves from southern states.
The success of the underground
railroad in Indiana has created a bountiful legacy.
Indiana’s first slave
law was adopted on the heels of an important court decision involving Polly
Strong, “the property” of innkeeper Hyacinth Lasselle of Vincennes. Lasselle was
one of the six founders of the village of Terre Haute in 1816.
Aided by
the courageous advocacy of future Terre Haute lawyer Amory Kinney, Polly was
freed from bondage by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1820.
Indiana passed
its own fugitive slave law in 1824, delineating procedures a slave owner should
follow to reclaim “his property.” A statute adopted in 1831 protected those
assisting in the capture of a runaway slave from a foreign state and mandated
each migrant black to post a $500 bond pending his “good behavior.”
Early
facilitators of the underground railroad often were Quakers or those sympathetic
to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.
Levi Coffin, now known
as “the father of the underground railroad,” founded the first Sunday school in
Vigo County at a Quaker church in Honey Creek Township in 1823. The Coffin
family settled at Fountain City, near Richmond in Wayne County, Indiana, in
1826.
Hartford, at the present site of Pimento in Linton Township, became
the site of a Quaker school a few years later.
Bloomingdale and Annapolis
were early Quaker settlements in Parke County. Congressman Joseph G. Cannon of
Illinois, long-time Speaker of the House, was raised in Annapolis and practiced
law in Terre Haute. His father, Dr. Horace Cannon, was prosecuted under an
Indiana fugitive slave law.
Churches and schools, private and public,
provided a foundation for the success of hundreds of African Americans in the
metropolitan Terre Haute area.
Terre Haute was the site of Allen Chapel
AME Church and its subscription school at First and Sheets (now Crawford)
streets. Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African-American elected to the U.S.
Senate, is credited with founding the private school there in about 1845. Revels
was elected to Congress from Mississippi in 1870.
The Indiana AME state
convention was in Terre Haute during May 1842, devoting special attention to
efforts by the American Colonization Society to establish a colony of free
blacks in Liberia. Wealthy Terre Haute barber Edward J. Roye was among the few
local African Americans who found that proposal attractive.
Roye sold his
tonsorial parlor on North Second Street, with a 79-foot barber’s pole, “the
tallest in the West,” to William Clark and Joseph Patrick and sailed for Africa
in 1846. He became the fifth president of Liberia on Jan. 3,
1870.
Pinckney Benton Stewart — known in history texts as P.B.S.
Pinchback — worked in Terre Haute in 1850-51. Stewart became the nation’s first
black governor in December 1872 when he succeeded Henry C. Warmouth as the chief
executive of Louisiana.
James Sidney Hinton, Indiana’s first black state
legislator, came to Terre Haute from North Carolina with his parents in 1848 to
attend the school at Allen Chapel. His father John built skylights and could
have located almost anywhere. John chose Terre Haute to provide his precocious
13-year old son with a superior education.
James Matthew Townsend, the
second African-American elected to the Indiana legislature, resided in Terre
Haute when he was pastor at Allen Chapel during the 1870s.
Land scout
Bowen Roberts discovered the farmlands of Lost Creek Township in Vigo County in
1827 and encouraged Jordan Anderson, his neighbor in North Carolina, to become
the first homesteader there in 1832.
Lost Creek AME Church was founded in
1839 by Jethro Bass and others.
Josiah and Joshua Hill and their families
trekked from North Carolina to settle at Burnett in Otter Creek Township in
about 1840. John and Louise Underwood, free blacks from North Carolina and
Virginia, situated in Linton Township a year later.
Allen Chapel, the
Lost Creek settlement, Markle Mill, the Underwood settlement, the Jesse Jones
residence in southwest Vigo County (sometimes referred to as the Steele home)
and Parke County villages of Bloomingdale and Coloma reputedly maintained safe
stations.
The Indiana legislature did not authorize the tax funding of
public schools until 1860. Thus, the nonexistence of public schools in the state
was not an ethnic or racial issue, as is often asserted. Until the 1860s, only
private schools were available.
Zachariah M. Anderson, who taught at the
Allen Chapel school, was appointed principal of the first black public school in
Terre Haute effective Sept. 9, 1869.
Albert Ernest Meyzeek, whose
maternal grandfather John Lott maintained an underground railroad safe station
on the Ohio River near Madison, Ind., was valedictorian of the Terre Haute
(later Wiley) High School Class of 1884 and the first principal at District No.
14 (later Lincoln) School.
Meyzeek, for whom a Louisville middle school
is named, has been enshrined as a “Great Black Kentuckian.” His sister Ida
married David Harris of Terre Haute and the couple were the parents of several
teachers including author Evangeline Harris Merriweather.
The list of
esteemed black educators from Vigo County is long. Charles Hyte, Allen Parks,
Jane Dabney Shackelford, John W. Lyda, Marguerite Taylor, Dr. Martin Jenkins,
Warren Anderson, Barbara Sizemore, William “Babe” Holland, Junius Bibbs, Oscar
Edwards, Herb Laffoon, Jr. and Dr. Wesley J. Lyda were a few of the
pioneers.
There were many more.
~Catherine Pulsifer~
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