Margaret Crittenden Douglass

author

Margaret Crittenden Douglass

b. 1822

Best remembered for a brave act of teaching, she turned a month in a Virginia jail into a personal narrative that still speaks to the cruelty of anti-literacy laws before the Civil War.

1 Audiobook

Educational laws of Virginia : The personal narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a southern woman, who was imprisoned for one month in the common jail of Norfolk, under the laws of Virginia, for the crime of teaching free colored children to read

Educational laws of Virginia : The personal narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a southern woman, who was imprisoned for one month in the common jail of Norfolk, under the laws of Virginia, for the crime of teaching free colored children to read

by Margaret Crittenden Douglass

About the author

Born in Washington, D.C., around 1822, Margaret Crittenden Douglass later lived in Charleston, South Carolina, and by 1845 had settled in Norfolk, Virginia. She supported herself there as a seamstress and vest maker.

Douglass is known for opening a school for free Black children in Norfolk in the early 1850s, despite Virginia laws that criminalized such instruction. After her arrest, she defended herself in court and served a month in jail, a case that drew wider attention to the harsh laws aimed at preventing Black literacy.

She later wrote Educational Laws of Virginia: The Personal Narrative of Mrs. Margaret Douglass, a firsthand account of her imprisonment and the system that made her teaching a crime. Although many details of her later life remain uncertain, her memoir endures as a vivid witness to everyday resistance in the antebellum South.