Sarah Mapps Douglass (September 9, 1806 – September 8, 1882) was an American educator, abolitionist, writer, and public lecturer. Her painted images on her written letters may be the first or earliest surviving examples of signed paintings by an African-American woman. These paintings are contained within the Cassey Dickerson Album, a rare collection of 19th-century friendship letters between a group of women.
Early life and family
Sarah Douglass was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a prominent abolitionist family, the only daughter of abolitionists Robert Douglass, a baker, and Grace Bustill Douglass, a milliner and teacher. Douglass' grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, a Quaker who owned a bakery and operated a school run from his home, was one of the early members of the Free African Society, an early African-American charity organization. Douglass grew up among Philadelphia's elite, and according to C. Peter Ripley "[s]he received extensive [private] tutoring as a child."
She is part of the Bustill family in Philadelphia. Her brother was artist Robert Douglass Jr. with whom she shared advertising space at his shop on Arch Street, where their family lived. Her cousin was artist David Bustill Bowser.
Education and career
In the early 1820s, she attended college, and then taught briefly in New York City. In 1825, Douglass began teaching in Philadelphia at a school organized by her mother with James Forten, the wealthy African-American sailmaker, which she had also attended as child. Starting in 1833, she taught briefly at the Free African School for Girls, before establishing her own school for African-American girls. She was soon recognized as a talented teacher of the sciences and arts, and for holding her students to high standards. In 1838, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society took over the school, retaining Douglass as the headmaster. In 1854, the school merged with the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney State University) on Lombard Street, and Douglass become the head of the primary department, a position she held until her retirement in 1877. As a teacher, she was committed to giving girls equal opportunities to learn subjects which had previously been reserved primarily for boys, including mathematics and sciences. She was interested in various sciences herself, and kept her personal natural history cabinet in her classroom, which included a collection of various shells and minerals for her students to study.
Douglass's role as an activist began as early as 1831, when at twenty-five, she organized the collection of money to send to William Lloyd Garrison to support The Liberator, which she also served as a contributor to.
Douglass also helped found the Female Literary Association (FLA) in 1831, a group of African-American women dedicated to improving their skills and deepening their identification with slave sisters. Black literary societies like this one began forming in urban Northern cities in the late 1820s and early 1830s. These societies turned to reading as an invaluable method of acquiring knowledge and to writing as a means of asserting identity, recording information, and communicating with a black public that ranged from the literate to the semi-literate to the illiterate. Societies were based on the idea that for the welfare and survival of the community, individuals had to come together in larger groups that would both create a sense of national identity and collective spirit and would extend essential knowledge to the black community, both free and enslaved.
Douglass was one of the FLA's leaders, and the FLA was the first social libraries specially for African-American women. The FLA provided a space for Black women to share important readings they found as well as their own writings. The Female Literary Association encouraged self-improvement through education for both the literate and illiterate and to both the free and enslaved. Education was to challenge white beliefs in the intellectual inferiority of African Americans. Douglass and the women of the Association believed that the "cultivation of intellectual powers" was the greatest human pursuit, because God had bestowed those powers and talents. It was their duty as women and African Americans to use those talents to try to break down the existing divides between African Americans and Whites, and to fight for equal rights to advance their race.