Sarah Parker Remond

Sarah Kathleen Sequoia Parker Jacquelina Remond
Born (1815-06-06)June 6, 1815
Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died December 13, 1894(1894-12-13) (aged 79)
Florence, Italy
Alma mater Bedford College for Women, London
Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, Florence
Occupation Activist, physician
Spouse(s) Lazzaro Pintor Cabras
Parent(s) John Remond (father)
Nancy Lenox (mother)
Relatives Charles Lenox Remond (brother)
Caroline Remond Putnam (sister)
Cecilia Remond Putnam (sister)
Marchita Remond (sister)

Sarah Parker Remond (June 6, 1815 – December 13, 1894) was an African-American lecturer, abolitionist, and agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society. An international activist for human rights and women's suffrage, she made her first speech against slavery when she was only 16 years old. Late in life she became a physician in Italy. As a young woman, Remond delivered speeches throughout the Northeast United States against slavery. She was chosen to travel to England to gather support for the abolitionist cause in the United States and, after the American Civil War started, for support of the Union Army and the Union blockade of the Confederacy. She was the sister of orator Charles Lenox Remond and sometimes they toured together for anti-slavery lectures.

From England Remond went to Italy in 1866, where she started medical training and became a physician. She practiced medicine for nearly 20 years in Florence and married there, never returning to the United States.

Biography

Early years

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Remond was one of eight children of John Remond and Nancy Lenox. Her mother, Nancy, was born in Newton, daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran who had fought in the Continental Army; Sarah's father John Remond was a free person of color who was brought in 1798 to Massachusetts from the Dutch island of Curaçao at the age of 10.[1] In Salem, the Remonds built a successful catering, provisioning, and hairdressing business. They prospered and valued education, encouraging their children's ambitions. They still suffered from racism and the children attended a segregated school. Remond was mostly self-educated, attending concerts and lectures, reading widely in books, pamphlets and newspapers borrowed from friends or purchased from the anti-slavery society of her community, which sold many titles at a cheap price.[2] The Remond family also took in students who were attending the local girls academy, including Charlotte Forten (later Grimké).

The family continued as entrepreneurs. Her three sisters: Cecilia Remond (wife of James Babcock), Maritchie Juan Remond, and Caroline Remond Putnam (married to Joseph Putnam),[3] "owned the fashionable Ladies Hair Work Salon" in Salem, as well as the biggest wig factory in the state.[4] She also had a sister Nancy, who was the eldest and wife of James Shearman, an oyster dealer. Their brothers were Charles, abolitionist; and John Remond, who married Ruth Rice.[3]

Activism

Sarah Remond's family and associates included many activists of the times. The Remonds' home provided a haven for both black and white abolitionists. Remond regularly attended antislavery lectures in Salem and Boston. Along with teaching household duties of cooking and sewing, her mother taught her daughters to seek liberty lawfully. She reared them to take part in society.

Salem in the 1840s was a center of anti-slavery activity. The whole family was committed to the abolition movement. They hosted many of the movement's leaders, including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and to more than one fugitive slave fleeing north. Her father was a life member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Her older brother Charles Lenox Remond was the American Anti-Slavery Society's first black lecturer and a leading black abolitionist. Along with her mother and sisters, Remond was an active member of the state and county female anti-slavery societies.

In 1853, Remond bought tickets by post for herself and a group of friends including historian William C. Nell to the popular opera, Don Pasquale, at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston.[5] When she refused to accept segregated seating, she was forced to leave the theatre and pushed down some stairs.[2] Remond sued for damages and won her case. She was awarded $500, gaining an admission that she was wronged, and the court ordered the theater to integrate all seating.[5]

Remond's sisters went into their parents' trade, becoming caterers, bakers, and hairdressers, but she chose a different path. With the support and financial backing of her family, she became an anti-slavery lecturer. Abby Kelley Foster, a noted abolitionist in Massachusetts, encouraged Remond when they toured together in 1857.[6] On December 28, 1858, Remond wrote in a letter to Foster:[7]

I feel almost sure I never should have made the attempt but for the words of encouragement I received from you. Although my heart was in the work, I felt that I was in need of a good English education ... When I consider that the only reason why I did not obtain what I so much desired was because I was the possessor of an unpopular complexion, it adds to my discomfort.

Anti-slavery lecturer

In 1856, the American Anti-Slavery Society hired a team of lecturers, including Remond, her brother Charles, already well known in the US and Britain; and Susan B. Anthony, to tour New York State addressing anti-slavery issues. Over the next two years, she, her brother, and others spoke in Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She and other African Americans were often given poor accommodation owing to their race.

Although she was inexperienced, Remond rapidly became an effective speaker. William Lloyd Garrison praised her "calm, dignified manner, her winning personal appearance and her earnest appeals to the conscience and the heart."[8] Over time, she became one of the society's most persuasive and powerful lecturers. She toured England, Scotland and Ireland between 1859 and 1861, fundraising for the anti-slavery cause.[9]

In the mid-1860s, she published a letter in the Daily News protesting that racial prejudice in Great Britain had worsened thanks to the efforts of the planter class in the West Indies and the American South.[10]

As a good speaker and fundraiser, Remond was invited to take the anti-slavery message to Great Britain, as her brother Charles had done 10 years earlier. Accompanied by Samuel May, Jr., she sailed from Boston for Liverpool on December 28, 1858, on the steamer Arahia. They arrived in Liverpool on January 12, 1859, after a frightening trip in the winter. The ship had become covered with ice and snow. It rolled and tossed so much that many of the passengers were sick, including Remond.

Before she sailed, she told Abby Kelly Foster, she feared not "the wind nor the waves, but I know that no matter how I go, the spirit of prejudice will meet me." But, she met with acceptance in Britain. "I have been received here as a sister by white women for the first time in my life," she wrote; "I have received a sympathy I never was offered before." She spoke out against slavery and racial discrimination, stressing the sexual exploitation of black women under slavery. At Tuckerman Institute on January 21, 1859, Remond gave her first antislavery lecture. Without notes, she spoke eloquently of the inhuman treatment of slaves in the United States. Her stories shocked many of her listeners. She also described the problems endured by free blacks throughout the United States. During her tour of Ireland, she focused on comparing the plight of the African slave to the working-class laborers in her audience, worrying her middle-class and elite British sponsors.[11] In her short autobiography, written in 1861, she observed that "prejudice against colour has always been the one thing, above all others, which has cast its gigantic shadow over my whole life."[12]

Remond lectured to crowds in cities throughout the British Isles, raising large sums of money for the anti-slavery cause. Once the American Civil War (1861–65) began, she worked to build support in Britain for the Union blockade of the Confederacy (which affected British shipping) and the Union cause. Because British textile factories relied heavily on American slave-harvested cotton, Remond particularly focused on this in her lectures. In an 1862 speech, she implored her London audience to "Let no diplomacy of statesmen, no intimidation of slaveholders, no scarcity of cotton, no fear of slave insurrections, prevent the people of Great Britain from maintaining their position as the friend of the oppressed negro."[13] At the end of the war and emancipation of slaves, she lectured on behalf of the freedmen, soliciting funds and clothing for the ex-slaves. She was an active member of the London Emancipation Society and the Freedman's Aid Association in London. A lecture she delivered in London, "The Freeman or the Emancipated Negro of the Southern States of the United States", was published in The Freedman (London) in 1867.

Education and later years

During her years in Britain, she also undertook extensive studies at the Bedford College for Women (later part of the University of London and now merged with Royal Holloway College). She studied classical subjects: French, Latin, English literature, music, history and elocution,[14] continuing her lectures in college vacations.[15] In this period, she also traveled to Rome and Florence in Italy.

Returning to the US, she joined with the American Equal Rights Association working for equal suffrage for women and African Americans.[15]

In London she stayed at the home of the honorary secretary of the Ladies' London Emancipation Society and Remond is thought to be the only black woman[16] who was among the 1500 signatories to a women-only petition requesting the right of women to vote, prepared in 1866.[17] Subsequently, at the age of 42, she moved permanently to Florence, where she entered the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital as a medical student.[5] After completing her studies and becoming a doctor, she remained in Florence.[6] Remond practiced medicine for more than 20 years, never returning to the United States. Two of her sisters joined her there from the United States, and Frederick Douglass met the three women while visiting Italy in 1886.[18]

In Italy, Remond married Sardinia-born painter Lazzaro Pintor Cabras (1833–1913)[19] on April 25, 1877. A diarist's account of her visit to a salon in Rome addresses the question of race in Italian society.[20]

March 17, 1878. Tell Madgie that the P___s were there with their black aunt. She was a bride, having just married an Italian, and wore her bridal dress of grey silk. It must have been very trying for Mrs P____. People came up to question her. One Italian said, 'Chi e quell'Africana?' [Who is the African?] It appears that she is very clever, and a female doctor.... She has given lectures. I went to sit on the sofa with her, to the amusement of Franz, who cannot rise above her appearance. Dr Baedtke was much impressed to think that anyone has had the courage to marry her, and said, 'In that I should have been a coward.'

Remond died on December 13, 1894, in Florence, and is interred at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.[21]

Tribute

In 1999 a series of six tall marble panels with a bronze bust in each was added to the Massachusetts State House; the busts are of Redmond, Florence Luscomb, Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Dorothea Dix, and Lucy Stone.[22] As well, two quotations from each of those women (including Redmond) are etched on their own marble panel, and the wall behind all the panels has wallpaper made of six government documents repeated over and over, with each document being related to a cause of one or more of the women.[22]

References

  1. ↑ MacLean, Maggie, "Sarah Parker Remond — Lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society", Civil War Women, November 29, 2006.
  2. 1 2 Hine, Darlene Clark; Elsa Barkley Brown; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1993). "Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894)". Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. vol II M-Z. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-926019-61-9. Archived from the original on July 20, 2008.
  3. 1 2 Grimké, Charlotte Forten (1988). "People in the Journals". In Stevenson, Brenda E. The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. xli-xlix. ISBN 0-19-505238-2.
  4. ↑ Rooks, Noliwe M. (1996). Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African-American Women. Rutgers University Press. p. 24.
  5. 1 2 3 "Sarah Parker Remond and the Remonds of Salem", Variety, Spice, Life, July 20, 2011.
  6. 1 2 Sterling, Dorothy (1994). Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 276.
  7. ↑ Sterling, Dorothy, ed. (1984). "Women with a Special Mission". We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 176.
  8. ↑ Sterling, Dorothy, ed. (1984). We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 176. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
  9. ↑ "Remond at Bedford College in London", SARAH PARKER REMOND: A Daughter of Salem, Massachusetts, July 15, 2011.
  10. ↑ Bolt, Christine (2013). Victorian Attitudes to Race. Routledge. pp. 103–104.
  11. ↑ Zackodnick, Teresa (2011). Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. p. 66.
  12. ↑ Miller Sr., Connie A. (2008). Frederick Douglass American Hero: and International Icon of The Nineteenth Century. Xlibris. p. 343. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
  13. ↑ Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham, eds. (1998). "Chapter 66: The Negroes in the United States of America – Sarah Parker Remond". Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. pp. 377–80. ISBN 978-0817308483. Reprinted from The Journal of Negro History 27 (April 1942), pp. 216–18.
  14. ↑ James, Edward T.; Janet Wilson James, eds. (1971). Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: 1607–1950. 3. Harvard University Press.
  15. 1 2 Johnson Lewis, Jone, "Sarah Parker Remond, African American Abolitionist", ThoughtCo., September 16, 2017.
  16. ↑ "Women Writers and Italy: Two Englishwomen In Rome and Sarah Parker Remond", Woman And Her Sphere.
  17. ↑ Crawford, Elizabeth, "Women: From Abolition to the Vote | Women's suffrage campaign: 1866–1903", British History, BBC, June 20, 2011.
  18. ↑ Coleman, Willie, "Remond, Sarah Parker (1824–1894)", BlackPast.org.
  19. ↑ "Lazaro Pintor Cabras pittore" (in Italian). Retrieved December 7, 2016.
  20. ↑ Lucas, Matilda (1938). Two Englishwomen in Rome, 1871–1900. Methuen.
  21. ↑ "Notable Graves of the Non-Catholic Cemetery". The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
  22. 1 2 "HEAR US Virtual Tour". Mass Humanities. Retrieved 2018-02-09.

Further reading

  • Coleman, Willie, "'...Like Hot Lead to Pour on the Americans': Sarah Parker Remond and the International Fight Against Slavery", in Stewart James and Kish Sklar, Sisterhood and Slavery: International Antislavery and Women's Rights. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
  • Coleman, Willi (2007). ""Like Hot Lead to Pour on the Americans...": Sarah Parker Remond - From Salem, Mass. to the British Isles". In Stewart, James Brewer. Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation. Yale University Press. pp. 173–188. ISBN 9781281735294.
  • Harper, Judith E., ed. (2004). "Remond, Sarah Parker (1826-1894)". Women During the Civil War: An Encyclopedia. Routledge. ISBN 9780415937238.
  • Porter, Dorothy Burnett, The Remonds of Salem Massachusetts: A Nineteenth Century Family Revisited. Boston: American Antiquarian Society, 1985.
  • Salenius, Sirpa (2016). An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 9781625342454.
  • Salenius, Sirpa (2017). "Transatlantic interracial sisterhoods: Sarah Remond, Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs in England". Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. University of Nebraska Press. 38 (1): 166&ndash, 196. JSTOR 10.5250/fronjwomestud.38.1.0166.
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