Margaret Crittendon Douglass

Margaret Crittendon Douglass (born c. 1822; year of death unknown) was a Southern white woman who served one month in jail in 1854 for teaching free black children to read in Norfolk, Virginia.

[1] The case drew public attention to the highly restrictive laws against black literacy in the pre-Civil War American South.

In 1845, she and her daughter relocated to Norfolk, Virginia, where she established herself in a modest apartment in a tenement neighborhood and made ends meet by running her own business as a seamstress and vest maker.

She chose not to participate in social activities with her white neighbors in the nearby tenements, who she felt were "not of the most refined class".

In her memoir, Douglass states that the two girls were intelligent, attentive, made rapid progress, and were "a source of pleasure to us."

A month later, Margaret and Hannah Rosa decided to open a small school for free black children in their home, and charge three dollars per student per quarter.

[7] When one of her female students grew ill, Douglass made regular visits to her home, and arranged for and participated in the girl's funeral when she died.

[8] On the morning of May 9, 1853, while Hannah Rosa and the children were assembled at their desks, two police officers stationed themselves at the front and back door of her house.

[12] Outside the courtroom, Douglass noted that she was met by a group of free black adults, parents of the children and their friends, waiting to hear the decision and offering to pay for any penalties or bail she might incur.

"[14] Although she thought the case was now behind her, on July 13, she was served legal papers for a Grand Jury Indictment for her and her 17-year-old daughter, which stated: "Each of them did unlawfully assemble with diver negros, for the purpose of instructing them to read and to write, and did instruct them to read and to write, contrary to the act of the General Assembly, in such case made and provided, and against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Virginia'.

On November 11, she entered the crowded courtroom alone, wearing a black velvet dress, white kid gloves and a plain straw bonnet.

In her memoir, she states that these men, who she describes as part of the 'aristocracy' of Norfolk, were either lecturers at the church's Sunday school, or had wives and daughters who were, and had given the free black children of the community the same books she was using to teach them to read.

"Ask how that white blood got beneath those tawny skins," she suggested, "and let nature herself account for the exhibition of these instincts.

The Judge noted that some people in Norfolk were opposed to the law, and chided her for 'the indiscreet freedom with which you spoke of the colored race in general'.

He also admonished her for speaking directly and honestly in her own defense instead of hiring an attorney, which would have allowed her case to have been presented in a 'far more favorable light'.

Under the headline "Her Own Lawyer," an editor in the Petersburg Daily Express wrote of how the courtroom was 'filled with persons anxious to witness the novel spectacle' of a woman defending herself and compared her speech making abilities to renowned feminists like Lucy Stone.

[20] The editor of the Virginia newspaper The Argus wrote that although the Norfolk community was reluctant to put a white woman in prison, 'there rose a righteous indignation towards a person who would throw contempt in the face of our laws, and brave the imprisonment for 'the cause of humanity' '.

Let her seek her associates at the North, and with them commingle, but let us put a check to such mischievous views as fell from her lips last November, sentiments unworthy of a resident of the State, and in direct rebellion against our Constitution", he wrote.

"How important then for these Southern Sultans that the objects of their criminal passions should be kept in utter ignorance and degradation", she writes.

[25][26] One legal scholar wrote that with the case of Margaret Douglass: "The modern era of Anglo-American Law had arrived early, and the principal actor had been, appropriately, a woman.

Her jury speech had, appropriately, employed the female metaphor of the family, in which all the children deserved equality of treatment.