FACT 3:David Ruggles, abolitionist activist, opens the first African American bookstore in the nation, in New York City.
David Ruggles, abolitionist, businessman, journalist and hydrotherapist, was born in 1810 in Norwich, Connecticut. He attended the Sabbath School for the poor which admitted people of color starting in 1815. In 1827 he left Connecticut for New York City where he operated a grocery store for the next four years. He then quit the grocery business to open his own bookshop in early 1834. Ruggles is generally known as the first African American bookseller. While working at the bookstore he extended many publications and prints promoting the abolition of slavery and in opposition to the efforts of the American Colonization Society which promoted black settlement in Liberia. Ruggles also took on job printing, letterpress work, picture framing, and bookbinding to augment his income. In September 1835, a white anti-abolitionist mob burned his store.
In 1833 Ruggles began to travel across the Northeast promoting the Emancipator and Journal of Public Morals, an abolitionist weekly. Ruggles, who wrote articles and pamphlets and gave lectures denouncing slavery and Liberian colonization, made him a figure of rising prominence in abolitionist circles in the late 1830s.
Ruggles was also active on the Underground Railroad from 1835 to 1838. In 1835 when the New York Vigilance Committee was organized, Ruggles became the secretary of this rare interracial organization. His work with the `committee led to his involvement in numerous court cases where he helped organize the legal defense against fugitive slaves who had fled to the North. The New York Vigilance Committee with the help of Ruggles intervened in over 300 cases of fugitive slaves in 1836, the first year of its existence. In September 1838 Ruggles took on the case of an escaped Maryland slave, Frederick Washington Bailey. Later Bailey changed his name to Frederick Douglas.
By 1842 David Ruggles was in such poor health that he was almost completely blind and his physician didn’t think he would live more than a few more weeks. Lydia Maria Child, a prominent white abolitionist, learned about Ruggles’ health and had him brought to Northampton, Massachusetts where the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, composed of abolitionists, accepted him as a member. While there trying to recover he learned about hydrotherapy. After eighteen months of hydrotherapy his health was restored. That recovery convinced others of the effectiveness of hydrotherapy. He was said to have the ability to diagnose ailments by his sense of touch, called “cutaneous electricity.” Ruggles’s first patients included wealthy members of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, which further enhanced his reputation as a healer.
On January 1, 1846 Ruggles purchased land and a building to conduct his hydropathic treatments. Ruggles became famous in the field and modestly wealthy, offering a cure for ailments that were claimed by conventional medicine to be incurable. His most famous patient was the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
Ruggles worked as a hydropathist until a recurrence of an inflamed optic nerve in his left eye in September 1849, placed him in the care of his mother and sister. Three months later on December 26, 1849, David Ruggles died in Northampton, Massachusetts of a severe case of inflammation of the bowels.
FACT 4: In 1845, Macon B. Allen of Worcester, Massachusetts is the first African American admitted to the bar in any state when he is allowed to practice law in Massachusetts.
Macon Bolling Allen is believed to be the first black man in the United States who was licensed to practice law. Born Allen Macon Bolling in 1816 in Indiana, he grew up a free man. Bolling learned to read and write on his on his own and eventually landed his first a job as a schoolteacher where he further refined his skills.
In the early 1840s Bolling moved from Indiana to Portland, Maine. There he changed his name to Macon Bolling Allen and became friends with local anti-slavery leader General Samuel Fessenden, who had recently began a law practice. Fessenden took on Allen as an apprentice/law clerk. By 1844 Allen had acquired enough proficiency that Fessenden introduced him to the Portland District court and stated that he thought Allen should be able to practice as a lawyer. He was refused on the grounds that he was not a citizen, though according to Maine law anyone “of good moral character” could be admitted to the bar. He then decided to apply for admission by examination. After passing the exam and earning his recommendation he was declared a citizen of Maine and given his license to practice law on July 3, 1844.
Finding work in Maine, however, was difficult. There were few blacks there willing and able to hire Allen and most whites were unwilling to have a black man represent them in court. In 1845 Allen moved to Boston, Massachusetts where he met his wife Hannah Allen. They had five sons together, most of whom became teachers.
Allen passed the Massachusetts Bar Exam on May 5, 1845. Shortly afterwards he and Robert Morris, Jr., opened the first black law office in the United States. Allen soon set his sights even higher; in 1848 he passed another rigorous exam to become Justice of the Peace for Middlesex County, Massachusetts. In addition to his license to practice law he is believed to be the first black man to hold a judiciary position.
Allen moved to Charleston, South Carolina after the Civil War to open a new legal practice. In 1873 he was appointed as a judge in the Inferior Court of Charleston and one year later was elected judge probate for Charleston County, South Carolina.
After Reconstruction, Allen moved again, this time to Washington, D.C. where he worked as an attorney for the Land and Improvement Association. He continued to practice law right until his death at age 78. Macon Bolling Allen was survived by his wife and one son, Arthur Allen.
FACT 5: In 1847,David Jones Peck is the first African American graduate of a U.S. medical school. He graduates from Rush Medical College in Chicago.
David Jones Peck was the first black man to graduate from an American medical school. He was born to John C. and Sarah Peck in Carlisle, Pennsylvania around 1826. John Peck was a prominent abolitionist and minister who founded the local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Carlisle. Peck was also a barber and wigmaker.
John and Sarah Peck moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1830s where they established the first school for black children in the area. David was one of their first students. Between 1844 and 1846 David Peck studied medicine under Dr. Joseph P. Gaszzam, an anti-slavery white doctor in Pittsburgh. He then entered Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1846, three years after the institution opened. After he graduated in 1847, Peck toured the state of Ohio with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass promoting abolitionist ideals. His status as the first black graduate of a medical college was used by abolitionists to promote the idea of full black citizenship and was implicitly an attack on slavery.
In 1849 Peck established his practice in Philadelphia. He lived in and worked from a red brick row house with his wife, Mary E. Peck, whom he married on July 24, 1849. Peck’s medical practice, however, was not successful. Few doctors recognized his status, referred patients to him, or consulted with him.
Peck closed his medical practice in Philadelphia in 1851 and was preparing to travel to California when Martin Delany, an old friend and fellow Pittsburgh abolitionist, persuaded him instead to participate in an emigration project that would resettle U.S. free blacks in Central America.
Delany, Peck, and other black emigrants moved to Nicaragua in 1852, settling on the east coast of the nation. The emigrants established San Juan Del Norte with Delaney as the mayor and commander of the militia. Peck practiced medicine and became the town physician. In 1854 he joined the Liberal side in the Nicaraguan Civil War and was killed by cannon fire in the town of Granada in January 1855. Dr. Peck was buried in the town square of the city of Granada.
***Information courtesy of Blackpast.org***