February 25, 2021 - Sarah Parker Remond

On February 15, 2021, Lyles Station Historic School and Museum recognizes the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond.
In 1816, Sarah Parker Remond was born into the well-to-do Remond family in Salem, Massachusetts.
Her father, John Remond was a free man who immigrated to Massachusetts from Curacao, a Dutch colony. He and her mother Nancy established a successful catering, provisioning, and hairdressing business, becoming well-established businesspeople and anti-slavery activists. Despite their success and status in the community, when the Remonds tried to enroll their children in a private school, they were rejected because of their race.
Then Sarah Remond and her sisters were accepted to a local high school but were quickly expelled after other parents complained, and the school committee founded a separate school for African American children.
Remond later described the incident as engraved in her heart "like the scarlet letter of Hester."
Salem at the time was the center for the abolitionist movement, but while the African Americans were in theory free, equal citizens, they were often subjected to prejudice, abuse, and racism. For Remond, this affected her education.
Remond recognized this injustice and spoke on how it affected her: “Years have elapsed since this occurred, but the memory of it is as fresh as ever in my mind…engraved on my heart.”
The family then moved to Rhode Island, where they were once again refused admittance to the public high school.
The girls did attend a private school established by a group of African American residents, but Remond’s father did not give up on fighting the injustice. In 1841, the family returned to Salem where he successfully led a campaign to desegregate schools in Salem.
Remond continued her education on her own, attending concerts and lectures, and reading widely. Her family’s financial success with catering and hairdressing provided Remond with the self-confidence and education to pursue her own abolitionist efforts.
Her career as an abolitionist began when she was only sixteen years old, and she spoke out against slavery across America and in Europe where she condemned the atrocity of slavery in America.
Remond credited her mother Nancy for her strong beliefs, as she wrote to a friend,
“While our mother never excused those who unjustly persecuted those whose only crime was a dark complexion, her discipline taught us to gather strength from our own souls; and we felt the full force of the fact, that to be black was no crime.”
Both of Remonds’ parents were active in the Anti-Slavery Society, and her brother Charles Lenox Remond also was recognized as the American Anti-Slavery Society’s first African American lecturer.
In her youth, she witnessed several acts of discrimination and prejudice, and her friends persuaded her to start speaking publicly about abolitionist causes. Even on her tours she faced prejudice and had to stay in private homes since hotels would not admit her.
In 1853, at one theatre event, Remond entered and headed to the whites-only seating. The white manager grabbed her and dragged her to the separate “colored” seating where she refused to sit. He then pushed her down a flight of stairs. She survived and sued the theater, receiving $500 in damages, and the theatre integrated.
Remond traveled extensively throughout America speaking out against slavery and was asked to travel to the United Kingdom to encourage support for the abolitionist movement.
Between 1859 and 1861, Remond spoke in fifty-two locations across England, Ireland, and Scotland. Speaking in 1859 in Liverpool, she declared, “I appeal on behalf of four million men, women and children who are chattels in the Southern States of America, …not because they are identical with my race and colour, though I am proud of that identity, but because they are men and women.”
After her first year, she enrolled in college in London while continuing her lecture tours.
During the Civil War, she urged the British to support the Union and its blockade of the Confederacy, and after the war, urged the British to support the newly emancipated freedmen of the South.
When she was forty, she moved to Florence and began studying medicine. Human rights activist and former Underground Railroad conductor Elizabeth Buffum Chace described Remond as “a remarkable woman and by indomitable energy and perseverance is winning a fine position in Florence as a physician and also socially.”
By the 1880s, Remond was living and practicing medicine in Rome. She was a close friend of the African American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis and entertained Frederick Douglass and his wife when they toured Europe. The Douglasses were friends of her parents, participating in anti-slavery efforts.
Remond died in Florence in 1894 at the age of 79 and was buried in Rome, where, in 2014, a memorial plaque was put up in her memory.
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