Maria Baldwin's Worlds
216 pages, 6 x 9
12 b&w illus.
Paperback
Release Date:20 Sep 2019
ISBN:9781625344786
Maria Baldwin's Worlds
A Story of Black New England and the Fight for Racial Justice
University of Massachusetts Press
Maria Baldwin (1856–1922) held a special place in the racially divided society of her time, as a highly respected educator at a largely white New England school and an activist who carried on the radical spirit of the Boston area's internationally renowned abolitionists from a generation earlier.
African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called Baldwin "the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area" during her lifetime. Baldwin used her respectable position to fight alongside more radical activists like William Monroe Trotter for full citizenship for fellow members of the black community. And, in her professional and personal life, she negotiated and challenged dominant white ideas about black womanhood. In Maria Baldwin's Worlds, Kathleen Weiler reveals both Baldwin's victories and what fellow activist W. E. B. Du Bois called her "quiet courage" in everyday life, in the context of the wider black freedom struggle in New England.
African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called Baldwin "the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area" during her lifetime. Baldwin used her respectable position to fight alongside more radical activists like William Monroe Trotter for full citizenship for fellow members of the black community. And, in her professional and personal life, she negotiated and challenged dominant white ideas about black womanhood. In Maria Baldwin's Worlds, Kathleen Weiler reveals both Baldwin's victories and what fellow activist W. E. B. Du Bois called her "quiet courage" in everyday life, in the context of the wider black freedom struggle in New England.
Weiler has succeeded in placing Baldwin in New England’s civil rights activist circles where she belongs.'—American Historical Review
'This well-written biography of an intriguing black educator is strong on narrative, recovering Baldwin's life from obscurity with sound scholarship.'—Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, author of Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow
'I learned a great deal from Maria Baldwin's Worlds about the self-organization of the black community in the North over a crucial but often neglected half century, and found it thoroughly readable as well as informative.'—Charles Leslie Glenn Jr., author of The Myth of the Common School
'Weiler's biography of Baldwin is an excellent book that fills a significant gap in the literature on black women educators in New England.'—History of Education Quarterly
Kathleen Weiler is professor emeritus of education at Tufts University and author of Democracy and Schooling in California: The Legacy of Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds.
