Sarah Mapps Douglass Douglass

• Sarah Mapps Douglass
• Born: September 9, 1806
• Died: September 8, 1882

Abolitionist and educator, was born in Philadelphia, the only daughter of Robert Douglass and Grace (Bustill) Douglass. She had one brother, Robert Douglass Jr., who became a nationally known painter and photographer. Her maternal grandfather, Cyrus Bustill (1732-1806), who owned a bakeshop, was an early member of the first Afro-American benevolent organization in the United States, the Free African Society. Her mother established a millinery shop for Quakers next to the family bakery. Her father, who may have been a hairdresser, helped to organize the first African Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, but Sarah Douglass adopted the religion of her mother’s family and was a devout Quaker. Reared in comfortable circumstances and educated privately, she was dedicated to social service and reform. Sometime during the 1820s she opened a school for black children, one of ten in Philadelphia.

Douglass joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society shortly after its founding in 1833 and became its corresponding secretary in 1838. Unlike most women’s societies in the antebellum period, this group, which her mother helped to found, was racially integrated. Among its members were Lucretia Mott and Sarah and Angelina Grimké, all leading white reformers of that generation; and the black teacher and abolitionist Charlotte Forten (later Grimké). In 1837 Douglass was sent as a delegate to the first national convention of female antislavery societies held in New York. The next year, when the convention met in Philadelphia, she was elected treasurer, a post she held for two years.

At a time when interracial friendships were rare, Douglass became a lifelong friend of the Grimke sisters. She made them aware of the discriminatory practices among the Quakers, and she played an important role in the efforts of a few Quakers to end these practices. In the spring of 1837 the Grimké sisters, attending the weekly Quaker Meeting at Arch Street, seated themselves between Sarah Douglass and her mother in the segregated pew and were censured. In December of that year Douglass furnished William Bassett of Lynn, Massachusetts—who was campaigning to bring New England Quakers into the antislavery movement —with information on discriminatory practices among Philadelphia Quakers. The Grimke sisters incorporated this information in a statement about racial prejudice among Quakers that was published by Elizabeth Pease, the English Quaker abolitionist, as Society of Friends in the United states: Their Views of the Anti-Slavery Question, and Treatment of the People of Colour (1840).Although the Philadelphia Friends did not change their practices, Douglass continued to regard herself as a Quaker and to attend meetings.

Racial prejudice and fears of integration were rampant in this period in the City of Brotherly Love. In 1838 Douglass and her mother attended the wedding of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Weld. The Philadelphia press described the presence of black guests in such an inflammatory manner that the reports were said to have provoked the riot that ended with the burning of Philadelphia Hall two days after the wedding.

The following year William Lloyd Garrison advocated admitting women on an equal basis with men to the Massachussetts Anti-Slavery Society. He also promoted the doctrine of nonresistance, arguing that because the Constitution supported slavery, as did political parties, abolitionists should not participate in government on moral grounds. Douglass and her mother were among the first black abolitionists to support Garrison’s position, even though it caused a schism in the antislavery movement. They sent a letter to Garrison’s paper, The Liberator, published on June 14, 1839, giving their unequivocal backing to this stand.

Sarah Douglass supported herself throughout her life by teaching. In 1838 when her school almost closed because of inadequate funding, the Female Anti-Slavery Society assumed its financial support. Later, in 1853, she became the head of the girls’ primary department of the Institute for Colored Youth, a Quaker-supported school (now Cheyney State College) and remained there until she retired in 1877. Douglass, who taught English and enjoyed intellectual activity, founded in September 1859 her own literary society, the Sarah Mapps Douglass Literary Circle. After the Civil War, she served as assistant head of the Women’s Pennsylvania Branch of the American Freedmen’s Aid Commission.

At the age of fifty, on July 23, 1855, Douglass married the Reverend William Douglass, a widower with children, who was rector of St. Thomas’ Protestant Episcopal Church and who had been active in the antislavery movement. (It is not known whether he was her relative.) The marriage did not prove to be a happy one. She died in Philadelphia at seventy-six years of age.

Sarah Douglass contributed to the building of the black community through her activities as an educator. Despite a hostile environment, she was undaunted in her fight for social and legal equality both within the Society of Friends and the antislavery movement.

Manuscript sources pertaining to Sarah Mapps Douglass are in the correspondence of Sarah Grimke in the Theodore Dwight Weld Collection, William Clements Library, University of Michigan. Other correspondence between Douglass and Grimke may be found in the Sarah Grimke Personal File, Library of Congress, and in the Gratz Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Biographical sources include T. E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (1950); G. Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972); and B. Quarles, Black Abolitionists (1969). See also Notable American Women (1971).