Julia Williams Garnet

Quick Facts

Significance:

Abolitionist, community leader, teacher

Place of Birth:

Charleston, South Carolina

Date of Birth:

July 1, 1811

Place of Death:

Allegheny City, Pennsylvania

Date of Death:

January 7, 1870

Born in Charleston, South Carolina,¹ Julia Williams Garnet became an anti-slavery activist and educator in Boston. While living in Boston, Garnet held significant influence in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.

At a young age, Julia Williams moved from South Carolina to Boston with her family. At 21, she traveled to Connecticut to attend Prudence Crandall’s Canterbury Female Boarding School, the first school for young Black women in the United States.² In 1834, only a few years after Williams had arrived, White residents terrorized the school with mob violence and forced it to close. She next attended the co-educational Noyes Academy in New Hampshire, where she met her future husband, Henry Highland Garnet.³ When violence also consumed the Noyes Academy, Williams finished her education at the integrated Oneida Institute in New York.

After a tumultuous education, Williams returned to Boston and became a schoolteacher. She worked at Martha and Lucy Ball’s school for "young ladies of color."⁴ As a devout Christian, she also taught Sunday school and participated in other charitable and activist pursuits. Williams came to value education as a means to eradicate slavery.

In the late 1830s, Julia Williams became a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. She represented the group as one of four delegates sent to the 1837 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York. Susan Paul joined her, making them the only Black women from the Boston organization to attend.⁵ In 1841, she married her husband, Henry Highland Garnet, a fellow abolitionist.

In addition to individual activism, Julia Williams Garnet helped her husband with his ministry and public speeches. She gave counsel on Garnet’s controversial address at the 1843 National Negro Convention, which came to be known as the "Call to Rebellion." Garnet defended his wife’s involvement with his speech in The Liberator: "if she did counsel me, it is no matter, for ‘we twain are one flesh.'"⁶ The couple moved to the West Indies for missionary work in 1852, then settled in Pennsylvania where Williams Garnet remained until her death in 1870.⁷

Many in Julia Williams Garnet’s community remembered her influence in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and her dedication as a devout educator. Her obituary in the Christian Recorder stated:

Her devotion to the anti-slavery cause, and her sacrifices for the fleeing fugitives, may not be recorded by human pen but the recording angel has written them. ‘Nothing makes death evil but what follows it.’ In this sense, and in a far higher sense, death was no evil to Julia Garnet. The living will embalm the sacred memory of her virtues in their hearts. They will strive to emulate them.⁸

Contributed by: Elizabeth Glina, Park Guide.

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Footnotes

1. While most sources indicate that she was born free, new scholarship may suggest she had been born into slavery.
2. “Students at Prudence Crandall's School for African-American Women, 1833-1834,” Yale Macmillan Center, Yale University, accessed June 22, 2024, https://glc.yale.edu/students-prudence-crandalls-school-african-american-women-1833-1834.
3. “Died,” The Christian Recorder (Nashville, TN), Jan. 22, 1870.
4. Debra Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 14.
5. John C. Van Horne and Jean Fagan Yellin, The Abolitionist Sisterhood : Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 58.
6. Henry Highland Garnet, “A Letter to Mrs. Maria W. Chapman,” The Liberator, 8 Dec. 1843.
7. “Died,” The Christian Recorder (Nashville, TN), Jan. 22, 1870
8. “Died,” The Christian Recorder (Nashville, TN), Jan. 22, 1870.