George Thomas Downing, businessman and civil rights leader

George Downing was Thomas Downing's son and attend the Mulberry Street School at the same time as Peter Guignon. Following in his father's footsteps, he opened a catering business on Broadway, then moved to Newport, Rhode Island where he built a very fancy resort hotel, the Sea Girt House.

Like his father, George was a lifelong political activist. He firmly believed that integration was the only solution to America's race problems and successfully pushed for the integration of Rhode Island schools. After the Civil War, he moved for a time to Washington D.C. where he worked closely with Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner to ensure the passage of civil rights legislation. By the 1880s, however, he had become deeply disillusioned with party politics and for a time switched his allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party.

NYPL ID number: 1804236
Portrait Collection

circa 1880s

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Benjamin Franklin

James McCune Smith did this drawing of Benjamin Franklin while attending the Mulberry Street School. Smith was a top student and his intellectual brillance was recognized by teachers, students, and school trustees alike. Maybe Smith harbored the secret ambition that he would one day become the African American Benjamin Franklin.

James McCune Smith

Negative #7874.25
New York African Free School Collection

circa 1828

The New-York Historical Society

Dr. James McCune Smith, physician and abolitionist

Born in New York City in 1813, James McCune Smith referred to himself as “the son of a self-emancipated bond-woman” who owed his “liberty to the Emancipation Act of the State of New York.” He attended the Mulberry Street School at the same time as Peter Guignon and was recognized as the school's most talented student. Denied entrance to medical schools in the U.S. on account of his race, Smith matriculated at the University of Glasgow Medical School in Scotland, where he graduated at the top of his class. He returned to New York in the late 1830s and established a pharmaceutical and medical practice on West Broadway. It was in this pharmacy that Philip White apprenticed. Additionally, In the early 1840s, Smith became the physician at the Colored Oprhan Asylum.

A true Renaissance man, Smith had many interests. As a political activist, he was a leader in the antislavery movement, fought for black civil rights, and promoted the education of black children. In the 1850s, he joined the Radical Abolition Party, made up of white and black abolitionists; at its 1856 convention, the party nominated an interracial slate of candidates: white abolitionist Gerrit Smith for president and James McCune Smith for vice president.

As a writer, Smith contributed newspaper columns to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, published essays on culture and politics in the Anglo-African Magazine, and even wrote poetry.

Smith married Malvina Barnet in the early 1840s. Very little is known about her. She bore him many children, most of whom died in childhood. Long in poor health, Smith died early in 1865.

Week's

NYPL ID number: 1804234
Portrait Collection

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Penmanship with drawing of the exterior of the school

This drawing of the African Free School on Mulberry Street was done by one of its students, John Burns.

John Burns

Negative #59134
New York African Free School Collection

circa 1815

The New-York Historical Society

African Free School, No. 2

The African Free School no. 2 on Mulberry Street was one of several schools for black children established by the New York Manumission Society from the late eighteenth century on. It offered an exceptionally good education for a charity school of the time. Peter Guignon attended the Mulberry Street School as did his many young men who would later become prominent leaders in the black community, notably James McCune Smith, Alexander Crummell, George Downing, Henry Highland Garnet, Patrick and Charles Reason, and others. In his obituary of Peter, Crummell wrote that "he was the friend and intimate companion of every one of these eminent boys, not only in their boyhood, but afterwards in their manhood and maturity."

This engraving of the school was done by Peter's classmate, Patrick Reason.

Patrick Reason

NYPL ID number: 119719
19th-century Miscellaneous Collection

circa 1828

Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Peter Williams Jr.

Born in 1786, Peter Williams Jr. affiliated with Trinity Church in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He was among the group of parishioners who pushed for the establishment of a separate and independent black parish. After years of struggle with the Episcopal diocese, Williams was finally ordained priest in 1826, thus becoming St. Philip's first black minister. He was an important leader not only of his church but also in the black community, working tirelessly on behalf of the antislavery cause, the education of black youth, and the civil rights of black New Yorkers. Williams died in 1840.

Patrick Reason

circa 1830

Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University

St. Philip's Church, Centre Street

St. Philip's Episcopal Church was the tenth parish of Trinity Church, the place of worship of many of New York's white elite families. After repeated demands by its black parishioners, Trinity finally agreed in 1818 to the establishment of a separate church for them. Wealthy tobacconist and prominent Trinity Church member, George Lorillard, provided a lot of land with a sixty-year lease on Centre Street to build it. The church's first structure was made out of wood and soon burned to the ground. It was replaced by this solid brick building. In 1840, Reverend Peter Williams Jr. married two couples in this building: Peter and Rebecca Guignon, and Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons.

At the same time that he provided the land for the building of St. Philip's, Lorillard also sold Centre Street lots to several black families, notably the DeGrasses, the Crummells, and my great-great-great-grandparents, the Marshalls.

Negative #7761d

circa 1819

The New-York Historical Society

Five Points 1827, Intersection of Cross, Anthony and Orange Streets

By 1810, the intersection of five streets—Mulberry, Anthony (now Worth), Cross (now Park), Orange (now Baxter), and Little Water (no longer in existence)—was the center of a neighborhood referred to as the Five Points. Built on the "made ground" that covered the swampy runoffs of the former Collect Pond, the Five Points was home to the New York's most impoverished citizens, especially African Americans and Irish immigrants. Living conditions were appalling. Families crowded together in narrow streets filled with standing water, contaminated by uncollected garbage and open sewers, and lacking free circulation of air. They huddled in ramshackle dwellings, several families often occupying a single structure. The more fortunate lived on the upper floors, the less fortunate in cellars. Both levels, but especially the cellars, suffered from dampness and poor ventilation. Given such unsanitary conditions, the Five Points became a fertile breeding ground for disease, especially tuberculosis, yellow fever, and cholera. To many outside observers—among them Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens—the Five Points was a den of moral inequity where prostiutiton, thievery, murder, and perhaps worst of all miscegenation were rampant. But to New York's black elite this was home.

Negative #35910

Valentine's Manual, page 112

The New-York Historical Society