"I Shall Have Your Sympathy, If Your Judgment Refuses Me Your Support": Lucy Stanton Day, the American Missionary Association, and the Politics of Respectability

"I Shall Have Your Sympathy, If Your Judgment Refuses Me Your Support": Lucy Stanton Day, the American Missionary Association, and the Politics of Respectability

Lucy Stanton Day, a free-born African American woman, graduated from the Oberlin College Ladies’ Department in 1850, giving the commencement address “A Plea to the Oppressed.” This student project focuses on her struggle to convince the American Missionary Association that she should be eligible to teach at a missionary school for freed people in the South during the Civil War even though she was separated from her husband.

Oberlin College Archives

1864