The life of Charlotte Forten, the first black graduate of
Salem Normal School, illustrates a passionate social consciousness.

By Gwendolyn Luella Rosemond and Joan M. Maloney

IX YEARS AFTER composing the class hymn for her graduation from Salem Normal School, and in the midst of the Civil War, Charlotte L. Forten arrived at Oaklands, a liberated plantation, off the coast of South Carolina. Her childhood and youth spent in relative security, comfort, and gentility as a free black in the ante-bellum North, Charlotte found at Oaklands a physical and social environment quite removed from her Philadelphia and Salem, Massachusetts, upbringing.

Initiated early in life into a social consciousness which abhorred slavery, complex forces combined to predestine the young black woman to act in the letter and spirit of the words she wrote at Salem Normal. Her sojourn at Oaklands, on St. Helena in 1862 sprang not from momentary missionary zeal, but from a lifelong determination to the eradication of slavery and its effects. Chronicled in her journal, begun upon her arrival in Salem, this commitment evolved through Charlotte's experiences in the community of Salem and at Salem Normal School.1 Her writings suggest that the support and encouragement of her mentors at Salem Normal played not a small part in Charlotte's eventual destiny.

Charlotte's family background epitomized the history and traditions of many free Northern blacks in the mid-nineteenth century. Her grandfather, James, descendent of slaves, enjoyed high esteem in Philadelphia's black community, and amassed over $100,000, a fortune by the standards of the times.

James Forten lived well in an impressive brick home on Philadelphia's Lombard Street, purchased for his wife, Charlotte, and their five children. Committed to civic issues, his abiding passion remained to secure equality for his own race. In 1831, with William Lloyd Garrison's publication of the first issue of The Liberator, soon the most influential voice of the Abolitionist movement, Forten became an admirer, supporter and friend of Garrison, joining him in the leadership of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

All of James Forten's children took up the Abolitionist cause, thought the most prominent by far was his son, Robert Bridges Forten, who from the age of seventeen dedicated himself to the anti-slavery movement. Increasingly embittered by national developments, especially the passage of the odious so-called Compromise of 1850 and its attendant Fugitive Slave Law, Robert Forten considered moving his family to Massachusetts, the heart of the resistance. These plans, however, excluded his eldest child, Charlotte. Raised by her grandmother and namesake after the death of her mother, Charlotte enjoyed the nurturing of loving family members and received tutoring at home because of the rigid segregation of the Philadelphia schools. Though Charlotte held warm regard for her stepmother, she increasingly suffered estrangement from her father. Consequently, Robert sent her to Salem, Massachusetts, to continue her education in a more formal and less discriminatory setting.

Massachusetts prided itself as
the first state to ban slavery

In 1843, Salem desegregated its schools, one of the first three cities or towns in Massachusetts to do so. The legal demise of school segregation in Salem followed years of unrest and discrimination. The small, local, black population arrived as both slaves and freedmen prior to the Revolution. Although Salem sea captains participated in the African slave trade, Massachusetts prided itself as the first state to ban slavery and the only state in the Federal census of 1790 to report no slaves. The black situation in Salem, however, typified the black experience in the North. Blacks lived in ghettos and found employment in menial occupations. The educational system perpetuated their status.