Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet
*Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet was born on this date in 1831. She was a Black educator and suffragist.
Sarah J. Smith was born on the Shinnecock Reservation of Long Island. She was the daughter of Sylvanus and Anne Smith, both of African, Native American, and European heritage. She was the oldest of 11 children; her parents were farmers and owned land in Queens County, then part of Long Island. Her sister was Susan McKinney Steward.
When Tompkins began teaching at fourteen in New York City, the public schools were racially segregated. She left the profession to marry another teacher, Samuel Tompkins, who died in approximately 1852. She taught at the African Free School of Williamsburg in 1854 when Brooklyn was a sizeable city still decades from being consolidated in 1898 with New York City (then confined to Manhattan and the Bronx). In February 1863, the death of Charlotte S. Smith, the principal of Manhattan's Colored School No. 7 on West 17th Street, created a vacancy.
Tompkins was appointed that spring as principal of the school, which 1866 was renamed Colored School No. 4. She taught many prominent students, including musician Walter F. Craig. Garnet founded the Brooklyn suffrage organization, the Equal Suffrage League, in the late 1880s. She was also the superintendent of suffrage for the National Association of Colored Women.
On December 28, 1875, Tompkins married abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet and thereafter was usually identified as Sarah Garnet. In 1881, President James A. Garfield appointed Henry Garnet as ambassador in Liberia, who died on February 13, 1882, in Monrovia. She retired from active school service in 1900 as a teacher and principal for 37 years. Sarah Garnet owned a seamstress shop in Brooklyn from 1883 to 1911. In 1911, she traveled with her sister to London, England, for the inaugural Universal Races Congress, where her sister presented the paper "Colored American Women."
Soon after they returned from Europe, Sarah Garnet died at home on September 17, 1911. She is buried in Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Two public schools in New York City are named for Garnet: PS 9 Brooklyn was renamed Sarah Smith Public School 9 in 2019, and PS 11 in Manhattan was renamed the Sarah J. Garnet School in 2022. PS 9 Brooklyn was formerly named for Teunis G. Bergen; following a movement to remove the slaveholding Bergen Family name from a school whose students are 40% African American, on March 28, 2022, the school unveiled a sign with the new name.
PS 11 is in Chelsea, just a few blocks from the former Colored School No. 4, where Garnet was principal. Middleton Playground in Brooklyn was renamed in 2021 to Sarah J.S. Tompkins Garnet Playground as a part of an NYC Parks initiative to rename parks in honor of prominent Black Americans.
To Become a School Principal
To Become an Elementary School Teacher
