[Footnote 3: Manuscript in the hands of Dr. J.E. Moreland.]
[Footnote 4: The African Repository, vol. xxii., pp. 322-323.]
[Footnote 5: Howe, Ohio Historical Collections, p. 465.]
[Footnote 6: Ibid., p. 466.]
[Footnote 7: Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 723.]
Many free persons of color of Virginia and Kentucky went north about the middle of the nineteenth century. The immediate cause in Virginia was the enactment in 1838 of a law prohibiting the return of such colored students as had been accustomed to go north to attend school after they were denied this privilege in that State.[1] Prominent among these seekers of better opportunities were the parents of Richard De Baptiste. His father was a popular mechanic of Fredericksburg, where he for years maintained a secret school.[2] A public opinion proscribing the teaching of Negroes was then rendering the effort to enlighten them as unpopular in Kentucky as it was in Virginia. Thanks to a benevolent Kentuckian, however, an important colored settlement near Xenia, Greene County, Ohio, was then taking shape. The nucleus of this group was furnished about 1856 by Noah Spears, who secured small farms there for sixteen of his former bondmen.[3] The settlement was not only sought by fugitive slaves and free Negroes, but was selected as the site for Wilberforce University.[4]
[Footnote 1: Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, Johns Hopkins
University Studies, Series xxxi., No. 3, p. 492; and Acts of the
General Assembly of Virginia, 1848, p. 117.]
[Footnote 2: Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 352.]
[Footnote 3: Wright, "Negro Rural Communities" (Southern Workman, vol. xxxvii., p. 158).]
[Footnote 4: Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed., p. 373; and Non-Slaveholder, vol. ii., p. 113.]