Radical Mainers

Rev. William Munroe’s Crusade for Equal Education

In 1833, a 32-year-old radical Black preacher named William C. Munroe stepped off a boat in Portland on a mission to save souls in the city’s small African American community. 

At the time, the only house of worship for the city’s nascent Black working-class population was the Abyssinian Congregational Church on Sumner Street (now Newbury), but its construction was unfinished due to financial challenges. Abyssinian parish clerk George H. Black, who later became a Baptist minister at the historic African Meeting House in Boston, provided Munroe a place to stay at his home on Union Street. Shortly after, Munroe established the First Baptist Society for Colored People, which likely occupied the old Congress Street Grammar School near Eastern Cemetery. 

Although Munroe’s Baptist mission here was short-lived, he went on to become a very influential reformer in the abolitionist movement. He risked his life helping hundreds of southern African American refugees escape slavery and oversaw one of the first interracial colleges in the nation. 

Toward the end of his life, Munroe collaborated with Black nationalist Martin Delaney to establish a free Black colony in Africa. And he presided over the 1858 Chatham Convention, where delegates adopted militant abolitionist John Brown’s provisional constitution for a revolutionary free Black state in the Appalachian Mountains during the lead-up to Brown’s fateful raid on a federal armory in Harper’s Ferry a year later.

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Munroe was born in Maryland around 1801 of mixed Black and white ancestry. Little is known about his early life, but he clearly experienced significant trauma. For example, the summer he came to Portland, while debating supporters of the American Colonization Society’s scheme to send free African Americans to Liberia, Munroe reportedly “spoke with much zeal” in opposition. He pointed to scars on his head inflicted by slaveholders and described how his half-brother tried to sell him into slavery. 

A bright and ambitious young man, Munroe had a lifelong passion for education. But as a Black man in the early 19th century, his access to higher learning was limited. The American Education Society, a religious organization dedicated to “aiding indigent young men of talents and hopeful piety,” eventually paid for Munroe to attend seminary, enabling him to become a minister. In the 1850s, Munroe told the Black newspaper The Voice of the Fugitive that education was “paramount to the survival of the race,” and he fought his entire life to create educational opportunities for Black youth and young adults.

Munroe saw an opportunity to advance his vision for equal education after the founding of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. One of its primary objectives, aside from the abolition of slavery, was to back the establishment of an interracial academy in the region. 

On May 28, 1834, a year after Rev. Munroe arrived in Portland, he joined a delegation of Mainers at the New England Anti-Slavery Society Convention in Boston, where he took part in a debate over a proposal to establish an integrated “manual labor school.” The manual labor school movement was part of a nationwide effort by white social reformers, Black leaders and wealthy evangelical philanthropists to reduce barriers to education by allowing students to pay for their schooling by toiling in farming or mechanical trades.

As University of California professor Paul Goodman writes, the manual labor school concept appealed to liberal-minded reformers because its mission was to “democratize access” to education, thereby providing upward mobility for Black students and other poor and working-class people at a time of increasing wealth inequality. They believed, Goodman writes, that physical toil would “narrow the widening gulf between blue- and white-collar strata” in “an emerging bourgeois culture,” while improving the health of students entering relatively sedentary careers like the ministry. 

The most well known of the period’s integrated manual labor colleges were the radical abolitionist Oneida Institute (1827–1843) in upstate New York, and Oberlin College, which began accepting Black students in 1835. However, the manual labor programs didn’t last long at either institution, and most historians agree the movement failed to make much progress toward its lofty goals.

In those days, certain colleges in New England would admit African Americans, but only if they pledged to emigrate to Liberia after graduation. The initial plan for a Black manual labor college in New England was presented at the second Colored Convention in 1831, in Philadelphia. Famed abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist merchant and philanthropist Arthur Tappan, and white Congregationalist minister Simeon S. Jocelyn, pastor of an all-Black church in New Haven, Conn., presented a proposal to raise $20,000 to build one in New Haven.

The plan’s proponents argued that laws in Connecticut were “protecting to all, without regard to complexion,” and that its residents were “friendly, pious, generous, and humane.” Tappan put up $1,000 as seed money; local white residents and the Black community were to raise the rest. 

However, the announcement of the Black college proposal, on Sept. 7, 1831, was extremely poorly timed. The nation was still in shock at the news of enslaved Black revolutionary Nat Turner’s deadly rebellion a few weeks earlier. The Southern press blamed the rebellion on educated free Black agitators stirring up trouble with enslaved workers. It soon became clear that Jocelyn had greatly overstated the open-mindedness of New Haven’s citizens.

When the Black academy idea was presented to the city, New Haven Mayor Dennis Kimberly called a town meeting to block the proposal. At the crowded meeting, 700 white residents overwhelmingly rejected the plan, declaring in a resolution that they “would resist the establishment of the proposed college … by every lawful means.” The resolution further stated that the existence of the school threatened Southern interests and would harm Yale University’s reputation, because educating “the colored population is incompatible with the prosperity.” 

Opponents were particularly frightened of the prospect of Black men mixing with the city’s white women. A far better place for the school, argued the New Haven Advertiser, would be over in Cornwall, Conn., where “ladies of that town readily give themselves … to the colored gentlemen.” Tappan’s brother Lewis recalled that several of the school’s opponents “belonged to the legal profession, and by their inflammatory speeches, added greatly to the excitement.”

Although the racists won the day, other voices in the media were very critical of the vote. The Vermont Telegraph condemned the white New Havenites for their deference to Southern slave power.

“The northern blacks must be bound to silence!” the Telegraph thundered.  “Because slavery does not exist in Connecticut, therefore within the boundaries of Connecticut it must not be spoken against! Because neither Connecticut nor Congress has any control over the laws of South Carolina, therefore the free people of color at the north must be doomed to perpetual ignorance and degradation! Such is the logic by which founding of colleges for educating colored people is made out to be an interference with the internal concerns of other states.” 

In 1833, Quaker abolitionist teacher Prudence Crandall was met with threats of violence from white neighbors after opening one of the first schools for Black girls in the U.S., in Canterbury, Conn. Fearing the school would draw more Black people into the city and lead to race-mixing, racist mobs pelted the girls with rocks, eggs and manure. 

In response, Connecticut passed its “Black law,” which made it illegal to establish schools that educated African Americans born outside the state, and as a result, Crandall was arrested and jailed. After a hung jury in the first trial, she was tried again and convicted, only to have her conviction overturned by a higher court. Finally, on Sept. 9, 1834, Crandall decided to permanently close the school for the safety of her students. A white mob had attacked the building, breaking windows and smashing furniture.

Even as mob violence and state power repressed efforts to educate African Americans, critics of the proposal to build a Black labor college in New England argued that the academy was unnecessary. To make their point, they cherry-picked examples among the few Black college graduates then in existence. 

By May of 1834, just four African Americans students in the U.S. — including Mainer John Brown Russwurm — had graduated from the prestigious New England colleges of Middlebury, Amherst, Dartmouth and Bowdoin. But as Rev. Munroe pointed out in a debate over the question of whether such institutions accepted Black students on equal terms with whites, those Black graduates were very much the exception. He said he too had applied to those colleges, but was either immediately rejected or “offered admittance … only on such degrading terms, as no one who had any sense of the rights of man would accept.” As the convention reporter wrote, Munroe’s account “must have touched the heart of every friend of Education.”

Later that year, Munroe became the only Black trustee of the institution that developed into the Noyes Academy in Canaan, N.H., the first college in New England to accept both Black and white students, women and men. As Munroe and the other eight trustees argued, “character and not complexion is the basis of every distinction, either of honor or infamy, reward or punishment,” under New Hampshire law. 

But they failed to account for the violent, racist backlash the plan for this academy would spark among Canaan’s white Yankee farmers. More on that in next month’s Bollard. 

Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.