One such child was the Rev. Absalom Jones. Possibly taught at the Philadelphia school attached to Christ Church in the 1760s (where a vestryman claimed ownership over him), Jones would go on to become an early leader of the city’s Black community. Dismayed by White efforts to segregate worship at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, Jones founded the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794. Alongside the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, also located in Philadelphia, St. Thomas established one of the first all-Black congregations in the nation’s history. Admitted to holy orders in 1796, Jones became America’s first Black Episcopal priest in 1802.
Using every opportunity at his disposal to advocate for Black Americans, Jones proved crucial to the expansion of educational opportunities in his city. Joining the Christ Church School, Jones founded another institution attached to St. Thomas. With the help of the country’s first Episcopal Bishop, William White, Jones then convinced the Associates of Dr. Bray to contribute to his school for the education of young Black men. Under his tutelage, these students were prepared to enter trades by instruction in reading, writing and mathematics.
After Jones retired, another Black man affiliated with St. Thomas, Solomon Clarkson, took over the helm in 1815, instructing the city’s Black youths from his home on Lombard Street for 30 more years. He helped give them one of the most precious commodities a Black child growing up in early America could possess: education, that “light by which men can only be made free” as Frederick Douglass put it. Transforming the education they received into a legacy for others, Jones and Clarkson empowered hundreds of students in Philadelphia.
Thanks to the records left behind by Clarkson and the various White teachers at the Christ Church Bray School — such as Sarah Ann Leech, who taught more than 180 students for some 15 years in Spring Garden — we are able to recover the names, ages and sometimes even the familial relations of the children they taught. Saving hundreds of boys and girls from complete historical erasure, the reports from these schools memorialize their students’ lives in at least some small way.
Future scholarship will have to use these resources to try to uncover what happened to these children after their education. But, without a doubt, these institutions proved essential in a world where public education was all but unheard of, and Black entry was prohibited even where it was.