Charlotte Williams Foster Myers

Quick Facts

Significance:

Educator

Place of Birth:

Stoughton, MA

Date of Birth:

1796

Place of Death:

Taunton, MA

Date of Death:

February 9, 1885

Charlotte Williams Foster Myers, an Afro-Indigenous woman, taught at Boston Primary School No. 5, one of the segregated public schools for African American children in Beacon Hill.

Born in 1796, Charlotte Elizabeth Williams grew up in Stoughton, Massachusetts with her parents Isaac Williams and Elizabeth Will. Isaac Williams, an enslaved African American, served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, and later married Elizabeth Will, a Ponkapoag woman.¹

Williams moved to Boston as a young woman, and in 1814 she married Samuel Foster, a barber in Beacon Hill. Together they had one son, Horatio Foster, who later became a prominent abolitionist in Lowell, MA.² Samuel Foster died in 1820, likely leaving his widow and their young son reliant on support provided by mutual aid societies in Beacon Hill's close-knit Black community.³

Charlotte Foster's circumstances changed in 1822, after the Boston Primary School Committee appointed her headmistress of Boston Primary School No. 5. When this school opened, it enrolled 47 Black students.⁴ This segregated primary school served as an extension of the all-Black grammar school housed in the basement of the African Meetinghouse on Belknap St. The Boston Primary School Committee described Foster's students as "poor and ignorant." They commented on the fact that "in a school of 50 pupils, 42 were in the Alphabet class" learning their first letters.⁵ However, the Committee also recognized Foster's talent for teaching, describing her instruction as "satisfactory."

The primary school Charlotte Foster taught at belonged to a small network of public "African Schools" in Beacon Hill. In 1835, a year before Foster retired from teaching and left Boston, the School Committee consolidated the African schools in the brand-new Abiel Smith School. Members of the local Black community held mixed views on the Smith School. Many families recognized the stark and unequal differences between the learning conditions at the Smith School and those at White-only schools. It is unclear how Charlotte Foster felt about this issue as a teacher in a segregated school. When the state legislature finally integrated the public schools in 1855, Foster had already retired and left the city.

In 1836, Foster married her second husband, Nicholas Myers, and their family relocated to Lowell, MA shortly after. Horatio Foster found work in Lowell as a barber and became an active member the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society.⁶

Charlotte Myers lost her second husband in the 1860s. As a Ponkapoag woman, Myers qualified for financial support from the state government. This policy supported her life as an elderly widow.⁷ In 1879, Myers moved back to Boston and applied to live at the Home for Aged Colored Women, where she resided for a few years. Charlotte Myers passed away in 1885 from apoplexy, at the age of 87.⁸

To learn more about the equal schools movement, please visit:

Abiel Smith School

Smith Court Stories

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Footnotes

1. Baumgartner, Kabria. In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. NYU Press, 2019. 189.
2. Letter from Horatio W. Foster, Lowell, [Mass.], to Maria Weston Chapman, April 18, 1843. Digital Commonwealth.
3. Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. 1999. Black Bostonians: family life and community struggle in the Antebellum North. New York: Holmes & Meier.
4. Wightman, Joseph Milner. 1860. Annals of the Boston Primary school committee, from its first establishment in 1818, to its dissolution in 1855. Boston: G.C. Rand & Avery, city printers.
5. Wightman, Joseph Milner. 1860. Annals of the Boston Primary school committee, from its first establishment in 1818, to its dissolution in 1855. Boston: G.C. Rand & Avery, city printers.
6. Letter from Horatio W. Foster, Lowell, [Mass.], to Maria Weston Chapman, April 18, 1843. Digital Commonwealth.
7. Baumgartner, Kabria. In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. NYU Press, 2019. 190.
8. Baumgartner, Kabria. In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. NYU Press, 2019. 189.