Took me by surprise to learn that William Lloyd Garrison was a dedicated teacher.

We think of him as a leader of the Abolitionist movement and as the co-founder, publisher, editor, and lead writer for The Liberator, a newspaper that appeared every week for 34 years.

He didn’t quit until the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered and it was clear that the Union was about to win the Civil War. After that, he became a leading voice for women’s suffrage. He also added his voice to the call for Prohibition, but he can be forgiven that lapse. Two out of three ain’t bad.

So how did he find time to teach?

Historian Kabria Baumgartner, a professor at Northeastern and a resident of Newburyport, tells us that Garrison instituted apprenticeships at The Liberator to serve a dual purpose: to produce the paper and to teach young Black men “the power of the pen and the power of the press.”

In Newburyport’s 3rd Annual William Lloyd Garrison Lecture at the Old South Church, just around the corner from where he was born and raised, Baumgartner took most of us by surprise. Her title, “I Will Be Heard: Antislavery Printing and Youth Activism at William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator Office,” hinted at a talk that at times was more about the technology of typesetting than the history of race relations. So the surprise was not his inclusion of Blacks in the process, but that he and co-founder Isaac Knaap, another Newburyport native, made a point of grooming them to send them elsewhere.

Elsewhere was across a country that was expanding by the day, down the Ohio, across the Mississippi, to the Rockies, where they would establish independent Black-owned newspapers. Baumgartner reminds us that this was a time when the Southern states were passing anti-literacy laws, banning pamphlets from the North, and putting bounties on the heads of influential pamphleteers such as David Walker whose “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” set the stage for Frederick Douglass, another leader of the Abolition movement.

She then spoke of something most of us never hear in school. Newspapers in the North that called for Abolition lived with violence an ever-present threat. At least three died, burned to the ground in New York, Ohio, and in Alton, Illinois, where the white publisher was fatally shot trying to fend off a pro-slavery mob. When The Liberator published a sketch of the riot, Elijah Lovejoy became a martyr for the Abolitionist cause.

Another surprise–and another item that this native New-Englander never saw in a textbook–was Baumgartner’s revelation of “drapetomania.” To counter all criticisms of slavery, Southern politicians concocted the myth of “benevolent” conditions, a myth that I do recall from my 1950s & 60s texts. By 1851 the plantation owners feared that the number of runaways would make the myth impossible to believe.

To their rescue came a Mississippi doctor named Samuel Cartwright who “hypothesized” that the desire to escape was a mental illness–drapetomania is a combination of the Greek words for escape and madness–that resulted when owners became friendly with servants. This only confused the servants who…. Ya, right!

The concept was immediately mocked and satirized in the North. In the South? Don’t know about drapetomania, but in their howling objections to The 1619 Project, we heard several Republican office holders, on both federal and state levels, insist that slavery, for the most part, was “a benevolent institution” and the enslaved lived comfortably and well–an absurd claim echoed today by the absurd dismissal of January 6 as “a normal tourist day.”

Baumgartner, the author of last year’s In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, did not shy away from today’s echoes of the mid-19th Century. She compared the anti-literacy laws to Florida’s recent “anti-woke” law and to the “boogeyman” reactions to critical race theory, calling it “a false debate.”* She hit closer to home when she addressed New Hampshire’s passage “of what is effectively an anti-critical race theory law.” Speaking of New Hampshire teachers:

Some of them are very nervous and scared that if they are teaching about Black history, any aspect of it, someone’s watching them, might report them. They might lose their job… Those laws are very, very similar, eerily similar to the anti-literacy laws passed in the South in the 1830s to suppress Abolitionist literature… There’s a direct tie.

As a friend told me later on, her “calling out New Hampshire for its CRT law, and [its] chilling effect on education, was admirable… [I]f ever there was a call for action where someone asks ‘Is this still going on, and what can I do?’ that was it.”

In a tone that suggests something Baumgartner has repeated hundreds of times, she sighed that CRT “is not taught in elementary or high schools,” only “in law schools.” She said it twice.

At the risk of reading into her words, Baumgartner’s use of boogeyman suggests a belief that CRT has become a term to mean anything about race and discrimination, both present and past. As whites who complain about it are quick to claim, CRT makes their children “uncomfortable.”

Without her saying it, that may have been the most, well, uncomfortable echo in Baumgartner’s talk. Coming at the end of “I Will Be Heard,” it was a sharp reminder of what she said earlier of Daniel Laing Jr., an independent Black printer in Boston, likely one of Garrison’s apprentices though there is no record of it. His marriage was announced in The Liberator, if that helps.

Already renowned and respected as a printer of books and pamphlets that fueled the Abolitionist cause, Laing’s dream was to become a doctor. He and two other Black men entered Harvard Medical School in 1850 but were soon expelled after protests by Harvard’s faculty and other students.

According to the stated grievance, Laing and his two friends made Harvard’s white people “uncomfortable.”

Garrison would have been proud. Whether Laing was his apprentice or not, making people uncomfortable was his life’s work. Moreover, when all else fails, it’s a potent educational tool. But there were no failures in Baumgartner’s assessment of William Lloyd Garrison as a teacher, the role that made his most far reaching, if least known contribution toward a more perfect Union.

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As a postscript to the lecture, and to this blog, Baumgartner was followed by five vocalists accompanied by one pianist sent by The Performing Project of Lawrence to sing a song of worship that two friends tell me is from the soundtrack of The Color Purple (1985). I still have figured out the song’s title, but I’m working on it, and will post, as soon as it comes, an answer to my query at:

http://performingproject.org/

Meanwhile, you can hear it on the video pasted below, starting at the 1:05:10 mark. If you can identify it, please let me know.

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*Applications of 19th Century laws to today’s gag orders and other curbs on discussion of climate change, reproductive rights, and gender issues in various Southern states are easy to make. Texas’ law offering $10,000 bounties for information on women seeking abortions could be modeled on the infamous Fugitive Slave Law.