The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919Various
History
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
I have been always a lover of the Sunday School work. My interest
continues to this day. There is one little incident in my Sunday
School work which I will relate. When I was a boy, with another young
boy like myself, we found that our Sunday School needed some
literature. We succeeded in collecting some money, and Moses Jones and
I found that the nearest place to get the books was Lancaster City,
about twenty-five miles from the church. Undaunted, we took the money
and walked to Lancaster, and back again with the books. Some of those
books remained a great many years in the library of that school.
I am the man who opened the first free school to colored boys in the
District of Columbia. This was in the basement of the old Mt. Zion
Church in 1863 under the Friends' Association of Philadelphia, of
which Mr. H. M. Laing, of that city, was president. I also opened a
school to freedmen in Fairfax County, Virginia, at Bull Run. After
being there about three months, one of the Freedmen's Bureau Officers
came over from Manassas and placed me and my school back under the
direction of the Friends' Association and the same Mr. Laing was still
its president. I remained there two years.
When I opened the school it was a little log cabin built as a
headquarters by the Confederates. They were encamped there in the
spring or rather the winter of 1861-62. While I was teaching at Bull
Run, Prof. John M. Langston was appointed to a position in the
Freedmen's Bureau. I became acquainted with him, interested him in my
work and he secured me one hundred and fifty dollars to assist in
building there a house for two purposes, a church and a school. In
this school I gave the founder of the Manasses Industrial School, Miss
Jennie Dean, her first lessons. Now after the lapse of fifty years,
the Bull Run School is still standing as one of the public schools of
Fairfax County, Virginia.
While teaching in the Bull Run School I was elected a delegate to the
first National Negro Convention after the Civil War. This met in the
Israel Church, Washington, D. C., in 1868. This church was then A. M.
E. Zion, but now C. M. E. There I met some of the leading Negroes of
the world. Among them were Hon. Frederick Douglass, Prof. John M.
Langston, Rev. Henry H. Garnett, C. L. Remond, Robert Purvis, Geo. T.
Downing, Geo. B. Vashon, Rev. Wm. Howard Day, Prof. Bassett, Robt. W.
Elliot, Bishop Henry M. Turner, Prof. Isaac C. Weaver, Richard
Clarke, John Jones, Prof. O. M. Green, Geo. W. White, P. H. Martin,
John R. Lynch, and A. R. Green. These were some of the lights in that
convention. Hon. Fred. Douglass was elected president, with Rev. H. L.
Garnett as vice-president.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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