After being denied a chance to teach in Syracuse, Edmonia Highgate taught freed Black people in the South

By Johnathan Croyle | jcroyle@syracuse.com After graduating with honors from a Syracuse high school in 1861, 17-year-old Edmonia Highgate hoped to begin a teaching career in her home city. She was refused because of her race. Highgate, the daughter of two former slaves, was undeterred. She would go on to teach in Montrose, Pennsylvania before becoming the principal at a Black school in Binghamton. In January 1864, she answered the call of the American Missionary Association who was looking for Northern teachers to travel South during the Civil War to set up schools for the emancipated Black population. “I am strong and healthy,” she wrote in a letter to the Association. “I could labor advantageously in the field for my newly freed brethren.” Edmonia Highgate - This image of a school started by the Freedmen's Bureau is an example of the hundreds of school which were set up during and after the Civil War. Hundreds of Northern teachers, Black and white, men and women, went South to educate the newly freed. Edmonia Highgate of Syracuse was one of them. This is from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Courtesy of the Library of CongressCourtesy of the Library of Congr Highgate was assigned to a school in Norfolk in the March of 1864. She taught children during the day and adults at night. Teachers faced disease and insults and violence from Southern whites. Teachers were threatened and beaten. Some disappeared. Others had their schools burned down. After just a few months, Highgate was back in Syracuse, mentally exhausted from what she was doing. She was not totally inactive during her time away. At the National Convention of Colored Men, held in Syracuse from Oct. 4-7, 1864, Highgate addressed the abolitionist meeting, one of only two women to do so. According to the convention’s minutes, the 24-year-old was introduced by Frederick Douglass, who was president of the convention. Its minutes reported: “The President then introduced Miss Edmonia Highgate, an accomplished young lady of Syracuse. Miss Highgate urged the Convention to trust in God and press on, and not abate one jot or tittle until the glorious day of jubilee shall come.” In March 1865, she was teaching again, this time in Maryland. She had to rush to Petersburg, Virginia to be at her younger brother Charles’ bedside after he was wounded in one of the last battles of the Civil War. He died on April 2 and was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Syracuse. After the war, she was assigned by the A.M.A. to the Frederick Douglass School in New Orleans as a principal. After rioting in July 1866, which saw Northerners attacked by Southern whites, Highgate was forced out of the city into the Lafayette parish. In a letter to Rev. M. E. Strieby of the A.M.A., Highgate described what she faced daily while teaching in the South: “There is more than work for two teachers, yet I am all alone, God has wondrously spared me. There have been much opposition to the School. Twice I have been shot at in my room. Some of my night school scholars have been shot but not killed. The rebels have threatened to burn down the school and house in which I board before the first month was passed.” Despite the danger, Highgate recognized the importance of her work and the positive impact it was having among the freed Black people. “The majority of my pupils come from plantations, three, four and even eight miles distant. So anxious are they to learn they walk these distances so early in the morning as never to be tardy. Every scholar buys his own book and slate, etc. They do learn rapidly. A class who did not understand any English came to school last Monday morning and at the close of the week they were reading ‘Easy Lessons.’” “After the horrible riots in New Orleans in July, I found my heart getting impaired from hospital visiting and excitement so I came here to do what I could and to get stronger corporally, that I might enter fully into carrying light and knowledge into dark places,” she added. “The Lord blessed me, and I have a very interesting and constantly growing day school, a night school, and a glorious Sabbath School of near one hundred scholars.” She returned to New Orleans in 1867 but resigned her position after she publicly spoke out against the school board after it proposed “segregated public school system” Highgate said she would “rather starve than stoop one inch on that question.” In 1868, she became a collection agent for the A.M.A in Mississippi. She continued teaching but also became a public speaker to help raise funds. At a speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, she told her audience that their work was “not yet half done; and if it is not thoroughly done, it will have to be done over again.” She also toured cities telling her story in a speech entitled “Five Years Among Southern Loyalists.” Her lecture was a triumph. “Syracuse born and educated, we may all have pride in her accomplishments,” the Daily Standard said on Nov. 15, 1869. And said the local hall where she would speak that night “should be filled to hear her recital of an experience that must be full of interest to all.” “Miss E.G. Highgate was one of the most earnest teachers among the free millions of the South,” the Anti-Slavery Standard wrote. The New Orleans Republican said Highgate “possesses wonderful eloquence,” and The Pilot of Jackson, Mississippi said she was a “thoroughly educated lady and a very charming speaker.” Edmonia Highgate Maireid Conner and Gary Weinstein stand at the grave of Edmonia Highgate (unmarked) in Oakwood Cemetery in June 1988. Syracuse Post-StandardSyracuse Post-Standard The extraordinary life of Edmonia Highgate was tragically short. On Oct. 17, 1870, the Syracuse Daily Journal reported about the “mysterious death” in the city a few days before. The paper said a woman calling herself Sarah Darling who had checked into a boarding house at 67 Taylor Street in Syracuse. She later complained of not feeling well. A doctor called Chase was summoned who gave her some medicine. The woman improved but then died. The woman’s belongings were searched, and it was discovered that she was Edmonia Highgate. A coroner’s investigation said the teacher, activist, and speaker had died after a botched abortion. She had begun an affair with a married white man, a poet named by the name of John Henry Vosburg, whose wife had been sent to a mental institution. Her funeral was held on Oct. 18, 1870, at Syracuse’s Wesleyan Church. “The acquaintance of the family and circumstances of her death attending her death, drew a large audience, filling the house to its utmost capacity,” the Daily Standard said. “At the close, the vast assembly joined in file to take a last look of her who has thus untimely been called away.” Highgate was buried in an unmarked grave besides her brother at Oakwood. On June 18, 1988, a marker to her was placed at her grave on Syracuse’s first observance on Juneteenth. Edmonia Highgate A photograph of Black activist and teacher Edmonia Highgate’s grave in Oakwood Cemetery. The tall marker to the left is her brother Charles. In 1988, a group, The Friends of Edmonia Highgate, led by Mairead Connor, Gary Weinstein and Myriene Jones raised $800 to place a headstone on Edmonia’s unmarked grave. Onondaga Historical AssociationOnondaga Historical Association Read more After breaking records at Syracuse University, Bernie Custis becomes first pro Black quarterback Syracuse’s first Black resident paid $80 for his own freedom, helped dig the Erie Canal