Sarah Parker Remond

• Sarah Parker Remond
• Born: June 6, 1815
• Died: December 13, 1894

Abolitionist and physician, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, one of eight children (two sons and six daughters) of John Remond, a merchant trader, and Nancy (Lenox) Remond, daughter of Cornelius Lenox, a Revolutionary War veteran and a black freeholder in Newton, Massachusetts. John Remond, a West Indian, emigrated in 1798 to Salem, where he eventually opened a wholesale-retail provisions business. The Remond family was one of the most prosperous black families in Salem. Prosperity, however, did not bar them from racial prejudice. Sarah Remond was initially educated in Salem’s public-school system, but after a separate black high school was created in 1834 she continued her education at home, where she was trained in domestic duties by her mother. She became an omnivorous reader, borrowing books and journals from libraries of family friends.

The Remond home was often visited by distinguished black and white abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, who worked with John Remond in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. From childhood Sarah Remond was permitted to talk freely with these visitors, and she regularly attended abolitionist meetings. She was particularly inspired by her brother Charles, sixteen years her senior, who was an organizer and lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Remond was active in the abolitionist cause. In 1853 she was refused admission to a seat she had paid for in Boston’s Howard Athenaeum and was forcibly ejected because of her color. She took her case to court and won. She joined the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Essex County and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Societies and in 1856 became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, appearing on the lecture-circuit platform with Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Susan B. Anthony.

Remond was an exception among black women of her era, having never been a slave or the victim of brutality. She was well educated and well bred, and she found in the abolitionist movement a means to enrich her life while serving others. She became a black-rights advocate and for two years lectured in the eastern and midwestern United States with her brother Charles and other abolitionists. Away from Salem she frequently encountered racial prejudice and was often denied hotel accommodations. These incidents strengthened her dedication to the cause of abolition.

She also became involved in the women’s-rights movement. Abolitionists were divided over the issue of women’s rights and the acceptability of women working for reform. Garrison and his supporters were backers of women’s rights, and Remond found herself in a dual campaign to free the slaves and to free women. In May 1858 she was a principal speaker at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York City.

In the summer of 1858 Remond sailed to England to present the case for abolition to the British public, to further her education, and to enjoy greater personal freedom. Landing in Liverpool, she was well received at antislavery societies in the north of England, and she continued her speaking tour throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. Almost everywhere she attracted large audiences, and her activities were publicized in abolitionist newspapers, including the Anti-Slavery Advocate of London. The appearance of a woman on the lecture platform was itself a novelty, and her sincerity won her the support of her audiences as she told them of the horrors of the slave system, denouncing it as un-Christian and inhuman.

In October 1859 Remond entered Bedford College for Ladies (now part of London University), where she studied liberal arts. While at Bedford she lived with the college’s founder, Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a staunch abolitionist, and there she met Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in America to receive a medical degree.

In November 1859 Remond applied for a visa from the American consul to travel to France. Her request was denied on the ground that she was black and therefore did not have the rights of an American citizen. Furthermore, the legation secretary declared that her passport, which had been obtained from a Salem judge, was invalid. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied civil rights even to blacks who were born free, and the American legation applied the decision to free American blacks living abroad. Remond’s case was picked up by the London newspapers, including the Morning Star and the Daily Mail, but in February 1860 the State Department also refused her a visa.

With the aid of British friends, however, Remond circumvented the law. Although initially intending to remain away from the United States for only a year, she decided to stay abroad longer, continuing at Bedford College until 1861 and lecturing during Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations. Her speeches were aimed at making the British sympathetic toward American blacks, keeping Britain from recognizing the Confederacy, and persuading it to use its economic power to help bring about the emancipation of slaves in America.

After the Civil War Remond returned to America and, with emancipation won, turned her attention to equal rights for all. But her stay was brief. She returned to London and became an active member of the London Emancipation Society and the Freedmen’s Aid Association—groups that solicited funds and clothing for former slaves. In 1866 she moved to Florence, Italy, where she became a student of medicine in the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. Although no official documentation survives, she probably completed her studies in 1868, receiving her professional medical practice diploma. Elizabeth Buffum Chace, the abolitionist and feminist, visited her in Florence in 1873, and recorded in her diary that Remond had an excellent position in that city’s society both socially and professionally.

Sometime during this period Remond married a man named Pintor, but no details of his background or their marriage exist. Little else is known about her later life, including the date of her death.

Never a slave herself, Remond spoke for enslaved black womanhood. Perhaps ironically, she best served the cause of the freedom of black Americans in Britain. As part of the British abolitionist movement she helped influence public opinion, and ultimately Great Britain came to support the Union in the Civil War.

Remond’s writings include The Negroes and Anglo-Africans as Freedmen and Soldiers (1864) and “Colonization,” Freed-Man, February 1, 1866. There is no full-length biography. The best modern accounts are the sketch in Notable American Women (1971) and R. Bogin, “Sarah Parker Remond: Black Abolitionist from Salem,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, April 1974. See also D. B. Porter, “Sarah Parker Remond, Abolitionist and Physician,” Journal of Negro History, July 1935, and B. J. Loewenberg and R. Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings (1976). For her suffrage activities see E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (1881).