Justice  /  Retrieval

To Remember or to Forget

The story of philanthropists Catherine Williams Ferguson and Isabella Marshall Graham’s unlikely interracial collaboration.

By the time she died in 1854, Katy had become Catherine Ferguson and was famed as “an active life-long Christian philanthropist” and a “mother in Israel” to Black and white New Yorkers alike. The illiterate woman was regularly celebrated as the founder of the first Sunday school in New York. If that wasn’t enough, she had “taken forty-eight children–-twenty of them were white children—some from the almshouse and others from” vulnerable families “and brought them up” or got them situated in life. Her obituary was printed and reprinted in newspapers around the country, and the memory of the “remarkable woman” lived on in religious periodicals, history books for youth, and other publications throughout the nineteenth century. Well into the twentieth century, no less than the famed Black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois ranked Ferguson among the most notable “colored women of importance,” alongside some names that today are better known including Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. Du Bois also featured her in his trailblazing monthly magazine for Black children.

Few of the nineteenth-century stories on Ferguson failed to mention that the “sainted Isabella Graham” had regularly invited Ferguson’s “scholars to her house, to say their catechism, and receive religious instruction.” Graham, likewise devout, was a groundbreaking philanthropist. At a time when some clergymen railed against the women beginning to found and run charities, Graham led the creation of New York’s first female-led charity, the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. And that was just the beginning of her charitable leadership in New York. When she died in 1814, she was eulogized for “awaken[ing] the charities of a populous city, and giv[ing] to them an impulse, a direction, and an efficacy, unknown before.”

Recognized in their day as leaders thanks to their piety and benevolence, these women shared an evangelical faith that enabled them to work together. Yet their cooperation was unlikely in their time. It has been remembered or ignored by their biographers according to the racial politics of the era.

Ferguson and Graham’s paths crossed in the 1790s through their church. Graham had only just moved to New York. Two decades earlier, her husband died while they were living in Antigua, leaving her with three young girls and another child on the way and not much by means of support. She returned to her native Scotland and struggled to provide for her family. In 1789, hoping to get out from under “the debt hang[ing] over [her] head],” she reluctantly left Edinburgh to open a school for girls in New York. Soon George and Martha Washington, John Jay, and other prominent families were sending their girls to “Mrs. Grahams boarding school.”