Social Welfare History Project Eras in Social Welfare History Page 26

Douglass, Frederick

Douglass’s life spanned important decades of American history in which the contradictions of race, class and gender were debated. Douglass played a crucial role in those debates. He spoke out against Northern race prejudice as well as Southern slavery. He challenged segregated Sabbaths–either white or black and criticized the race prejudice of immigrant labor organizations which excluded black freemen. Douglass once remarked that his son could more easily become an apprentice in a Boston law firm than in any workingman’s organization.

Brown, William Wells

By 1843 Brown was lecturing regularly on his experiences in slavery for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. By that time he also became deeply committed to lecturing on behalf of women’s rights and temperance laws. It was this involvement as a prominent speaker that many historians and scholars suggest provided the trajectory for his later career as a writer.

Unruly Slaves (Fighters for Freedom)

“It is a remarkable thing to tell you, some people can’t see it, but I am going to tell  you, you can believe it or not but it’s the truth; some colored people at that [time] wouldn’t be whipped by masters. They would run away and hide in the woods, come home at nights and get something to eat and out he would go again. Them times they called them “runaway niggers”. Some of them stayed away until after the war was over.”

Haynes, Elizabeth Ross

In the early twentieth century Progressive era reformers largely ignored the needs of African American women. Lacking settlement houses and other resources African American reformers such as Elizabeth Ross Haynes turned to one of the few institutions available to them, the YWCA.

Towne, Laura Matilda

In 1861, the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina fell to the Union army. Faced with defeat, the entire white population fled, leaving their homes, belongings, and ten thousand slaves. Towne arrived on the Sea Islands in April 1862, one of the first Northern women to go south to work during the Civil War. She participated in the Port Royal Experiment, the first large-scale government effort to help former slaves. The teachers who went south sought not only to teach the freedmen how to read and write, but hoped to help them develop socially and morally.

Hunter, Jane Edna

Jane Edna Hunter (1882-1971) – Social Worker, Advocate for Women and Founder of the Phillis Wheatley Association

Edwards, Thyra J. (1897 – 1953)

Thyra J. Edwards (1897 – 1953) – Social Worker, Child Welfare Advocate, Labor Organizer

Port Royal Experiment

In January of 1862 Union General William T. Sherman requested teachers from the North to train the ex-slaves. Three months later U.S. Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase appointed Boston attorney Edward L. Pierce to begin the Port Royal Experiment, which would create schools and hospitals for ex-slaves and to allow them to buy and run plantations. That same month the steamship Atlantic left New York City bound for Port Royal. On board were 53 missionaries including skilled teachers, ministers and doctors who had volunteered to help promote this experiment.