Mary Jane Patterson: Education Pioneer
Educator Mary Jane Patterson is considered to be the first African American woman to receive a B.A. when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1862. A fellow Oberlin alumnus, Lucy Stanton Day Sessions, graduated twelve years earlier but was not in a program that awarded official bachelor’s degrees.
Although Patterson’s early years are unclear, it is believed that she was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1840. As a young girl, she arrived in Oberlin, Ohio with her family during the mid-1850s. At that time, Oberlin was a haven for African-Americans, and it had a large black population living there. It was also known as an abolitionist town and one that regularly protected fugitive slaves. It was also home to Oberlin College, which had admitted African-American students since 1835. In 1857 Patterson completed a year of preparatory coursework at Oberlin College. Rather than transitioning into Oberlin’s two-year program for women, she enrolled in the school’s “gentlemen’s course,” a four-year program of classical studies. She became the first Black American to receive a Bachelor of Arts with high honors in 1862. As one future student, Fanny Jackson, recalled, the course was not forbidden to women, but not recommended, either. “They did not advise it,” she wrote. “There was plenty of Latin and Greek in it, and as much mathematics as one could shoulder.” At the time, women were not expected to immerse themselves in classical languages, mathematics, or science, but Patterson bucked the trend and took her place next to a class of white males.
Patterson spent the next year as a teacher in the southern Ohio town of Chillicothe. At the age of 22 she left Ohio for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she taught for the next five years at the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania…the oldest predominantly black institute of higher education in the United States). In 1869 Patterson moved to Washington, D.C. to teach at the newly founded Preparatory High School for Colored Youth (later M Street High School and now Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) which was the first U.S. public high school for African Americans and the first public high school in Washington, D.C.
Two years later in 1871 Patterson became the first Black principal of the school, serving for one year before being appointed assistant principal when Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard University in Massachusetts, came on as principal. Greener left after one year, and Patterson resumed her position as principal, staying there until her resignation in 1884. She was told that the thriving school was now so big it needed a man in charge. During her tenure the school thrived and became well known as a prestigious institution for secondary education.
It is believed that Patterson remained at the school as a teacher following her tenure as principal. Aside from her career as an educator, Patterson was involved in women’s rights, helping to found the Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 54 on September 24, 1894. Her home at 1532 15th Street, NW is part of the Washington, D.C.’s historic walking tour. Her name is largely forgotten today, however, she left a rich legacy as both an educator and an early example of educational attainment in the African-American community.
Sources:
Garner, C. (2010, December 03). Mary Jane Patterson (1840-1894). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/patterson-mary-jane-1840-1894/
https://time.com/4788672/mary-jane-patterson-history/
Source of the author’s information:
Jessie Carney Smith, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book 1
(Detroit: Gale Research, 1992); Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters:
Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984);
Mary Gibson Hundley, The Dunbar Story (1870-1955) (New York: Vantage
Press, 1965); “Mary Jane Patterson Residence,” Cultural Tourism DC, https://www.culturaltourismdc.org/portal/mary-jane-patterson-residence-african-american-heritage-trail.
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