The Maryland School for the Deaf, Baltimore

The decades leading up to the twentieth century are marked for their absence of access to education for black deaf persons. “Prior to the Civil War, the Southern states provided no formal public education for African American deaf students.”1 The impact of these policies cannot be overlooked depending on the age of onset and hearing abilities, these individuals would have had limited to no access to spoken language and it is difficult to know how these children communicated with family and community members. It is likely that they developed a system of coded-gestures, referred to as “home signs”. But without formalized education it is would have been exceptionally difficult for these children to learn to read or write English or use American Sign Language.

Baltimore School
Fig 1: Maryland School for Colored Deaf on Taylor Ave.

The first state to institute segregated education for deaf black children was North Carolina in 1869.2 In the state of Maryland, segregation began in 1872. The Maryland state legislature provided for educational opportunities for African American deaf students at the Maryland School for the Colored Deaf. Throughout the history of the school, it was referred to by a number of names; the Institution for the Colored Blind and Deaf-Mutes, Maryland School for Colored Blind and Deaf-Mutes, Maryland School for Colored Blind and Deaf, The Department for Colored Blind and Deaf of the Maryland School for the Blind, the Colored School, the Colored Program, the Colored Department or the Bledsoe Department (named for Superintendent John Bledsoe.)3

Initially, students were drawn from the state of Maryland. Following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, Baltimore students were joined by children from nearby states including West Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. Prior to Plessy v. Ferguson, the student population at the Columbia Institute (now the Kendall School at Gallaudet University, a premiere teaching institution), composed of children from Washington, D.C. and Delaware, were taught in an integrated classroom at the Columbia Institute.4

""Many northern and western state schools for the deaf were integrated from their inception, but southern schools resisted."5

Though educational opportunities existed for African American deaf people after 1872, multiple barriers prohibited them from accessing it. Even with the existence of deaf educational opportunities, great many students did not have access to them. Though the Maryland School for Colored Deaf was advertised throughout the state, recruitment relied on word-of-mouth. Well-known African American newspapers included brief announcements regarding events at the school, but it is unclear how widely recognized the school was.6 Further, for students to attend the school parents were required to provide them with clothing and fund their travel to and from the school. The financial burden of this task certainly played a factor in when and how parents were able to send students to the school. Families were often required to release their children to the school for an extended period of time. For families that relied on the income of their children, the removal of a child to the institution may have been seen as a detriment. “It was generally believed that some colored parents were just not sending their children to school at all. Often the parents did not send the children back to school right after summer vacation. They kept them home to help with work there until cold weather.”7 However, this problem does not seem to have been limited to African American families. The biennial report for the Frederick school addresses that it is difficult to get parents to send kids to school there as well.

Patterning a larger system of Northern white educators serving as instructors in Southern black schools, the staff at the Maryland School for Colored Deaf was composed of white deaf men. Rev. Daniel E. Moylan joined the staff at the school in 1888, teaching shoemaking.8 At a time when normal training programs were growing across the South to supply teachers for black schools, the Maryland School for Colored Deaf faced two barriers to hiring African American instructors: a lack of educated deaf black teachers and an institutionalized pattern of discrimination against black teachers.

"we employ all white teachers in the school and since we are south of the Mason and Dixon Line, we cannot hire both Colored and White teachers in the same school"9

The pattern established by ASD in Connecticut called for instructors to be drawn from the pool of recent deaf graduates. However the relative scarcity of educational opportunities for black deaf people meant that there were no candidates to choose from. Even still, hiring practices seem to have been stacked against black graduates. Normal training programs (teacher training programs) were highlighted in the post reconstruction period, but the training of black teachers for instructing deaf students wasn’t addressed by the Convention of American Instructors until 1931.10 Training wasn’t undertaken until 1938 at Southern University in Baton Rouge. The Hampton Institute initiated a training program in 1940.11 Southern schools for African American deaf students frequently hired African American graduates of local Black colleges. “These schools benefitted from a large population of educated Black teachers, but few of these teachers had any training in deaf education.” 12

Maryland School for the Colored Deaf appears to have placed preference in hiring practices for white deaf instructors. Though there seems to have been a greater concern that as deaf individuals, they would be better suited for instructing deaf students, an exchange with a black deaf teacher in 1910 reveals that it was definitely a factor. It would appear that this discrimination was practiced de facto – in 1945, the superintendent Frances M. Andrews wrote, “we employ all white teachers in the school and since we are south of the Mason and Dixon Line, we cannot hire both Colored and White teachers in the same school.”13 As a result of these features, white faculty dominated at the Maryland School for Colored Deaf into the twentieth century.

However, recent scholarship has argued that the isolation that black deaf students experienced at residential schools produced a distinctive linguistic form, Black ASL.14 Many black deaf children at residential deaf schools were not given access to the codified ASL used by white deaf students and community members. Isolated, both geographically and socially, in many cases these students created their own networks, community, and language.

Sources:

Figure 1: "Maryland School for the Blind and Colored Deaf (Overlea)" Gallaudet University Historical Photograph Collection.

1. Baynton, Gannon, and Bergey, Through Deaf Eyes, 42.

2. Jack R. Gannon, Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America, ed. Jane Butler and Laura-Jean Gilbert (Silver Spring, Maryland: National Association of the Deaf, 1981), 14.

3. Edward Allen Fay, “Miscellaneous,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 18, no. 3 (July 1873): 210; Harris, Stull, and Baker, “Beginning of a Legacy: History of the Maryland School for the Colored Deaf: 1872-1956,” 3, 13; “Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb,” The Sun (1837-1987), August 30, 1899, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

4. Harris, Stull, and Baker, “Beginning of a Legacy: History of the Maryland School for the Colored Deaf: 1872-1956,” 4.

5. Burch, Signs of Resistance, 35.

6. J. Albert Johnson, “A Beneficient Institution; The Maryland School for the Colored Blind and Deaf, 649 W. Saratoga St.,” The Afro American Ledger, May 30, 1903.

7. Harris, Stull, and Baker, “Beginning of a Legacy: History of the Maryland School for the Colored Deaf: 1872-1956,” 4.

8. Charles E. Moylan, “The History of Christ Methodist Church for the Deaf,” Maryland Bulletin 63, no. 5 (February 1943): 73–74, 82.

9. When Blanche Williams, a black deaf instructor at the North Carolina School for the Deaf applied to teach at the Baltimore school, correspondence indicated that she would not be considered on the basis of race. “It would be useless for me to even think of the employment of Mrs. Williams, because we do not believe in the social equality of colored and white people.” Harris, Stull, and Baker, “Beginning of a Legacy: History of the Maryland School for the Colored Deaf: 1872-1956,” 11.

10. >Richard G. Brill, The Training of Academic Teachers of the Deaf, 1950, 91; Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, 34.

11. Brill, The Training of Academic Teachers of the Deaf, 92.

12. Burch, Signs of Resistance, 36–37.

13. When Blanche Williams, a black deaf instructor at the North Carolina School for the Deaf applied to teach at the Baltimore school, correspondence indicated that she would not be considered on the basis of race. “It would be useless for me to even think of the employment of Mrs. Williams, because we do not believe in the social equality of colored and white people.” Harris, Stull, and Baker, “Beginning of a Legacy: History of the Maryland School for the Colored Deaf: 1872-1956,” 11.

14. Carolyn McCaskill, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: its History and Structure (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2011).