Harvard connections to Out of Virginia
By Joe Stinnett
Two of the first three Black doctors to attend Harvard University medical school later cared for the 1865 Lynchburg emigrants to Liberia, as I describe in Out of Virginia. So I was extra-pleased to see a photo of Out of Virginia in the Harvard Book Store window this summer, where the book is for sale.
The summer display at the bookstore included academic publishers' titles including the University of Virginia Press, as well as the UNC, LSU, and Syracuse university presses and others whose books are physically printed and distributed by Longleaf Services. My book was published as part of UVa Press's Rivanna imprint, which is more for general readers than many of their academic titles (which contribute much to our overall body of knowledge, as I hope my book does.) From my first contact with the wonderful people at UVa Press, I stressed that I had no academic credentials other than a long-ago B.A. in English and that I was aiming this book at a general readership who liked history of all sorts.
I learned a lot myself while researching the book. Isaac H. Snowden, Daniel Laing, and Martin Delany, Harvard's first Black medical students, were all expelled in their first academic term in 1850 at the demand of the white students. They went on to get their training elsewhere including Dartmouth and Europe. Snowden, whose father was an anti-slavery preacher in Boston, and Laing practiced medicine in Liberia in the 1850s and 1860s. Delany was an abolitionist and future U.S. Army surgeon who advocated Black emigration from the United States but not to Liberia.
Drs. Snowden and Laing were cautious about sailing to Liberia from Baltimore in 1854. They had heard that it wasn't safe for them to even set foot there, because Southerners emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Act might kidnap them. But they safely got aboard the Sophia Walker as cabin passengers, and didn't travel in the cargo hold, where emigrants slept on mattresses they brought from home. In 1865, Dr. Laing wrote multiple letters from Liberia describing the plight of the Lynchburg emigrants.
