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Women and African American History: 1860-1869

• founded in 1832 and accepting male and female, white and black students, by 1860 Oberlin College had a student population that was one-third African American

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, was published, including descriptions of the sexual exploitation of female slaves

• Laura Towne, from Pennsylvania, went to the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina to teach the former slaves -- she ran a school in the Sea Islands until 1901, adopting several African American children with her friend and teaching partner, Ellen Murray

• Charlotte Forten arrived in the Sea Islands to work with Laura Towne, teaching former slaves

• Mary Jane Patterson, graduating from Oberlin College, was the first African American woman to graduate from an American college

• Congress abolished slavery in Washington, DC

• (July 16) Ida B. Wells (Wells-Barnett) born (muckraking journalist, lecturer, activist, anti-lynching writer and activist)

• (July 13-17) many New York African Americans killed in draft riots

• (September 22) Emancipation Proclamation issued, freeing slaves within territory controlled by the Union

• Fanny Kemble published Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation which opposed slavery and served as anti-slavery propaganda

• Memoir of Old Elizabeth a Coloured Woman published: autobiography of an African Methodist Episcopal evangelist

• Susie King Taylor, African American army nurse with the Union army, began writing her journal, later published as In Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: Civil War Nurse

• Mary Church Terrell born (activist, clubwoman)

• Rebecca Ann Crumple graduated from the New England Medical College, becoming the first African American woman M.D.

• slavery ended in the United States with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution

• American Equal Rights Association founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and others, to work for equal

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