Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

“ [164] than seven years, I can testify that they are more punctual in their payments than any five hundred white subscribers whose names I ever placed indiscriminately in my subscription book.”

There was an earnest desire on the part of the free people of color to raise the level of their class in the Union. At a convention held by them in Philadelphia, in 1831, they resolved upon a measure calculated to make up, to some extent, the deprivations which their children were suffering by being excluded from the higher schools of learning in the land. So they determined to establish a college on the manuallabor system for the education of colored youth. They appealed for aid to their benevolent friends, and fixed upon New Haven as the place to build their institution. Arthur Tappan, with customary beneficence, “purchased several acres of land, in the southerly part of the city, and made arrangements for the erection of a suitable building, and furnishing it with needful supplies, in a way to do honor to the city and country.”

The school, however, was never established owing to the violent hostility of the citizens, who with the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council resolved in public meeting to “resist the establishment of the proposed college in this place by every lawful means.”

The free people of color were derided because of their ignorance by their persecutors, but when they and their friends proposed a plan to reduce that ignorance, their persecutors bitterly opposed its execution. New Haven piety and philanthropy, as embodied in the Colonization Society, were not bent on the education of this class but on its emigration to the