"If God allows to live, I will devote my entire life to teaching slaves" - Myrtilla Miner
The Catechism has shown us how the common good begins with the good of the individual. It further shows us that each individual can participate in the pursuit of the common good for all—and that this participation is not optional, but an obligation. Fr. Mike in his Catechism In a Year Podcast episode 253 explains the nature of this obligation in quite simple terms: “see a need, fill a need.”
Myrtilla Miner, born March 4, to a poor family near Brookfield, New York saw a need and filled it: Wanting to become a teacher, she took out a loan. She taught in New York and then went to Mississippi to pay off her school loan. No need for debt relief, or debt cancelation.
In Mississippi Myrtilla saw slavery firsthand. She sought permission to hold classes for African-American girls in the community. Her request was denied. Myrtilla found that freed slaves in the North, were not much better off than the slaves in Mississippi.
Because of her sympathy for the slaves, she was forced to leave Mississippi.In 1849, Miner returned to New York, where she taught in the town of Friendship, and developed a plan to train African American girls to become teachers for their people. She asked, “can slavery be removed when the free colored man remains degraded?”
With the financial aid from a Quaker philanthropist, donations of school supplies from friends and encouragement of Rev. Henry Beecher Towe, Myrtilla opened a school for African-American girls . Initially Myrtilla held classes in her home, but soon started receiving threats, and with the help of benefactors helped her find a safer and permanent home.
From the beginning, Miner faced “rowdyism and incendiarism.” Much of this harassment targeted the teachers and students. Mobs attempted to burn down Miner’s school. The school met with formal opposition from the white community and city leaders such as former Mayor Walter Lenox. On May 6, 1857, Lenox bitterly denounced Ms. Miner and her school in the National Intelligencer. Despite a constant barrage of bigotry, harassment, and threats of violence, Miner remained defiant and determined to teach African American girls. In the end, she prevailed. One of her students remarked that she was “one of the bravest women I have ever known.”
Due to illness, Miner stepped down from teaching in 1857. By then, the Board of Trustees included Samuel Janney, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband Calvin Stowe, and her brother Henry Ward Beecher. Harriet Breecher wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin
Within five years six graduates of the Normal School for Colored Girls were teaching in schools.
Though her efforts to educate free African American girls were a moderate and indirect approach to ending slavery, the University of the District of Columbia traces the history of public higher education for African Americans in the city to Myrtilla Miner's School.
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