Rebecca Primus

Career

Primus, who assisted in the education of her younger siblings, opened a private school for girls in the family home by 1860. Around this time, she befriended Addie Brown, who had possibly been boarding with the family for a while. Their friendship became so close that Mehitable acknowledged, when questioned by friends about their relationship, that had one of them been a man, they would have married. During this period, Primus also wrote poetry and at least one essay, which were preserved in her papers.

At the end of the American Civil War (1863), the country entered the reconstruction era and legislation was passed in 1865, to establish a social-welfare program to assist former slaves in transitioning from bondage to a life of freedom. The Freedmen's Bureau, under the authority of the war department, coordinated the assistance programs offered to freedmen. That year, Primus was one of two teachers selected by Calvin Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe and head of the Freedmen's Aid Society of Hartford, to participate in the Freedmen's Bureau program to educate southern Black students. The society eventually sent three other teachers south, but Primus was the only Black educator from Hartford. She took a train from Hartford to New York City in November 1865, and then made her way through Jersey City and Philadelphia, before arriving in Baltimore. There, the forty-seven Black teachers and thirty-one White ones were segregated by race and assigned to schools by the Freedmen's Aid Society of Baltimore. Within a week, she was aboard a boat and headed to the village of Royal Oak, Maryland.

Primus was provided with room and board by Charles and Sarah Thomas. Charles was appointed as a trustee of the school Primus was to establish. He was born in 1834 and belonged to Mrs. Richard Adams of Talbot County, Maryland. He purchased his manumission in 1859 and worked as a horse trainer on the estate of Edward Lloyd, who had owned a property where Frederick Douglass was enslaved. Within a month, Primus opened the school in the local Black church, initially teaching thirty-six students. Soon she had seventy-five, both children and adults, of whom very few could read or knew the alphabet. Very quickly the students were reading and advanced to learn writing and to study geography and mathematics. Primus also introduced sewing for the girls and oration and music for all of her pupils. In addition to her educational work, she set up a Sunday school and did all the administrative work required to report to the three agencies supervising her work: the Freedman's Bureau and the Freedman's Aid Societies of Baltimore and Hartford.

Primus set about collecting funds and materials to build a separate school building. When negotiations with a White landowner failed, Thomas provided a parcel of his own land for the project. The Freedmen's Aid Society of Hartford provided lumber and the women of the Talcott Street Congregational Church held fundraisers to pay for its construction. Other lumber was secured through the Baltimore Freedman's Aid Society and the Freedman's Bureau provided desks for the students. By November 1867, the school was completed and after a vote by the community at its dedication was named the Primus Institute. The Freedman's Bureau was dissolved by the US Congress in 1869. Lacking funds to continue the work, Primus returned to Connecticut, although the school continued to operate in her absence. She discovered that in her absence Black and White schools had been merged, but only White teachers were eligible for employment. She secured work as an agent for a publishing company in 1870. That year, she also was appointed as an assistant to the superintendent of Sunday School at the Talcott Street Church. It was the first time that a woman had been appointed to manage the church's affairs. She remained in the post until 1873.

Around 1872, Thomas moved north alone, no longer married. He and Primus married on March 25, 1873, and rented a home near her parents. They had a son Ernest Primus Thomas in 1875, who died seven months later. Thomas initially worked as a gardener for Albert Day, then as a self-employed gardener, but a head injury left him unable to work consistently and he remained partially disabled for the remainder of his life. After Thomas's injury, Primus became the primary wage earner for the family and worked with her mother as a seamstress. In 1881, Primus returned to her position as assistant superintendent of the Talcott Street Church's Sunday School. Thomas served as the doorkeeper for the Connecticut State Senate until 1886. He died in Hartford in 1891 and after his death, Primus returned to the family home on Wadsworth Street. Her father had died in 1884, and when her mother died in 1899, their home was sold. Primus moved in with her sister Bell and her husband William Edwards' family, at 115 Adelaide Street. She taught Sunday School classes at the Talcott Street Church until her death.

Death and legacy

Primus died in Hartford on February 21, 1932, and was buried in Zion Hill Cemetery in her family's plot. Most of Primus's papers were acquired by the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History in Hartford in 1934. A dress that she wore, possibly her wedding dress, is owned by the Wadsworth Atheneum. In 2017, the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University acquired a collection of forty-one additional letters which had been written to Primus. Although history has typically failed to reflect that Black women participated in the programs of Reconstruction, even in the work Black Reconstruction in America by W. E. B. Du Bois, Primus's life provides evidence of the importance of Black women who went to The South as teachers for newly freed slaves. Their roles extended beyond the schoolhouse and into the homes of community members to uplift and encourage Black people. According to scholar Barbara Beeching, Primus was the only Black teacher sent from Hartford during Reconstruction.

As there had previously been no schoolhouse for Black students, Primus founded the first school for African Americans in Royal Oak, Maryland, and it was named after her, which would have been highly unusual. The Primus Institute continued to operate as a school until 1929. The building that was believed to be the Primus Institute stood in Royal Oak until damaged by two arsons in 2000, which forced its demolition because the Maryland Historical Trust was unable to secure restoration funding or listing on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1992, the board of directors of the women's shelter and transitional housing facility "My Sister's Place" in Hartford, decided to name their apartments after prominent Hartford women. Primus was among the first seven women to be honored with her name on one of the twenty units.

Coorespondence with Addie Brown

Because of negative stereotypes of Black women, it has been historically rare that their personal details were made public. From the 1970s when new fields of study were created, increased scholarship on women and non-White people has disproved myths that Black women did not leave records, keep diaries and journals, or write letters. In the papers acquired by the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History are sixty letters from Primus to her family, one hundred and fifty letters from Brown to Primus, over the period from 1859 to 1868, and twenty-four letters from Nelson Primus. The letters provide an insight into the personal thoughts, political consciousness, encounters with racism and sexism and the public and private lives of ordinary black women between the Reconstruction era and Great Depression. The letters present an unfiltered glimpse into the lives of Primus and Brown as they were not written like slave narratives or works created during the Harlem Renaissance to be consumed by a White audience. The authors of the letters were neither former slaves, nor abolitionists, but dealt with both the repercussions of segregation and patriarchy.

Numerous scholars and writers have evaluated the letters, and concluded that they showed love and desire in historic contexts that do not necessarily fit into the current constructs of sexuality. They do not reinforce historic stereotypes of Black women's sensuality. Primus and Brown were neither promiscuous harlots nor asexual, nurturing mammies. The letters show that they had an intense friendship which was similar in many ways to other romantic friendships in the nineteenth century, characterized by professions of love, affection, and strong emotional ties. In other ways they differ, as they speak of their sisterhood and bonds of community, efforts at racial uplift, as well as making "explicit references to erotic interactions" between the two women. Sociologist Karen Hansen, noted that what she called "bosom sex", and what historian Leila J. Rupp termed "touching of the breasts", was clear in its eroticism and unlikely to be found in White romantic narratives of the period. However, in the absence of Primus's letters to Brown, the true nature of their relationship is difficult to assess. The letters are significant because they illustrate the complexity of human relationships of their era. They are also important documents in broadening the historical understanding of northern Black women, free people of color, and women writers.