I chose to write about Fanny Jackson Coppin and Robert Smalls because of their singular contributions to Black Americans' civil rights. I also want to highlight them because they may be lesser-known heroes. They were both born into slavery and had ties to the struggle for equality in my hometown.
I’ll start with the story where I first read about their experiences in Philadelphia.
Despite the bravery displayed by black troops during the Civil War, their service did not guarantee equal treatment. Philadelphia mass transit, a network of privately owned streetcars, prohibited Black riders (other than servants accompanying White employers).
Before Black men began fighting for the Union Army, the discrimination was aggravating, inconvenient, and insulting. Once black soldiers were putting their lives on the line, it became absurd. Soldiers and their families could not use the streetcars to travel to and from Camp William Penn, the nation’s first training ground for Black troops located near Philadelphia in the La Mott area of Cheltenham. Nor could Black families ride streetcars to visit relatives convalescing from battle wounds in city hospitals.
Among the many Black people prevented from riding Philadelphia streetcars during the Civil War period were: internationally famous orator and activist Frederick Douglass, activist and successful businessman William Still, teacher and later, Fanny Jackson Coppin, longtime head of the Institute for Colored Youth, and Civil War hero Robert Smalls.
Fanny Jackson Coppin:
Fanny Jackson Coppin was born 1837 in Washington, D.C., and died Jan. 21, 1913, in Philadelphia. PA. She was an American educator and missionary.
Born a slave, Fanny Jackson was bought into freedom by an aunt while still a small girl. She determined to get an education and, while employed as a domestic servant, studied to enter the Rhode Island State Normal School. In 1860 Fanny entered Oberlin College and graduated in 1865. Jackson began teaching Latin, Greek, and mathematics at the Institute for Colored Youth. She also served as principal of the girls' high school department. In 1869 Fanny became head principal of the Institute. She was the first African-American woman in the country to hold such a position and quickly began to direct the school's future course.
In 1871 Jackson introduced a normal-school department. Within a few years, enrollment in teacher training far exceeded the classics course. Jackson added a practice-teaching system in 1878. In 1881 she married the Reverend Levi J. Coppin, who in 1900 became a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1889, after a 10-year campaign, Fanny Coppin realized her hope to introduce an industrial-training department that offered instruction in ten trades. To her, vocational training was as necessary a tool as academic education in the struggle to end racial discrimination.
Fanny Coppin resigned from her post with the Institute in 1902. (The school was moved to Cheyney, PA in 1904 and eventually became Cheyney State College in 1951.) That same year the Coppins sailed for Cape Town, South Africa. Over the next decade, Fanny worked tirelessly among the native Black women, organizing mission societies, promoting temperance, and founding the Bethel Institute in Cape Town. She then returned to Philadelphia, where she spent the remainder of her life. Coppin State University was founded in 1900 at what was then called Colored High School. Later it was renamed for Frederick Douglass. In 2004, the school's name changed to Coppin State University, a Historically Black University.
Robert Smalls:
As part of his PBS “African American History Blog,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote a piece responding to the question, “Which Slave Sailed Himself to Freedom?”
Gates began his story, “Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain's wide-brimmed straw hat to help hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself and other defense positions. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet.”
Gates continues, “In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: In the midst of the Civil War, this black male slave had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its 17 black passengers (nine men, five women, and three children) from slavery to freedom.”
I encourage you to read the entire story: Robert Smalls, from Escaped Slave to House of Representatives | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (pbs.org). It is rich with history and details that bring this astonishing tale to life.
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