Black People : The Colored Orphan Asylum

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The Colored Orphan Asylum

Its name, the Colored Orphan Asylum, sounds grim enough to have been concocted by Charles Dickens.

The orphanage, founded in 1836, is credited with being one of the first places in the country to take in black children whose parents had died, or could no longer care for them. It also took in some American Indians. It moved from place to place in Manhattan, and in 1863, its building at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue was destroyed during the Civil War draft riots. The home moved to Harlem and, in the early 1900's, to Riverdale, where its charges lived in small cottages, meant to feel more like home.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/nyregion/recalling-a-place-of-sanctuary-for-black-orphans.html


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Black Orphanage Destroyed by Angry Whites

July 13, 1863

Working class Irish in New York City, angered by the Conscription Act that allowed exemptions from military service for $300, burned a provost marshal's office and the Colored Orphan Asylum. The act triggered a three-day anti-black race riot.

http://www.blackfacts.com/fact/0fd9f698-dd40-4af5-a179-c05a11b35d84


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Destee
 
Chattanooga's First Black Orphanage

The Steele Home for Needy Children (1884 - 1925)


In post-Reconstruction Chattanooga, no orphanage existed for black children. Almira S. Steele, a white teacher from Boston, met the need by founding the Steele Home for Needy Children on this site. Mrs. Steele suffered persucution ranging from slander to fire. However, her philanthropic mision endured. Over 1600 children were aided, educated, and sheltered. Many were saved from the streets and became productive citizens. The home closed shortly after the death of Almira Steels in 1925.

http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMM5M

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Destee
 
The Salem School and Orphanage. White Missionaries, Black School

Traces the establishment of the Salem School and Orphanage for African Americans in Elk Park, North Carolina in the late nineteenth century, when mission work on behalf of African Americans in Appalachia was rare. The school was started by Emily Prudden and run by White Mennonite missionaries who faced threats and racism from the surrounding community.

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPorta...&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ464580

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Destee
 
Jenkins Orphanage - Charleston, South Carolina

In 1891, the Reverend Daniel Jenkins, pastor of a small African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, stumbled on a group of four black youths huddled in an abandoned building on the edge of town. Not only were the boys under the age of twelve, but as Jenkins discovered, they were all orphans. Their plight had special meaning to Jenkins. Born a slave on a plantation just outside of Charleston, Jenkins himself had been orphaned at a young age and had been turned off the plantation. He spent most of his formative life moving from farm to farm working for room and board. Seeing other children suffering a similar fate, and such a young group of children in a city as sophisticated as Charleston, moved the Reverend Jenkins to act. He immediately took the orphans in with the resolve of establishing something Charleston did not have-- an orphanage for African-American children. The text of his Sunday sermon on charity became an impassioned speech before the Charleston city council. If the city would allow him to use the abandoned warehouse next to the prison on the waterfront, Jenkins promised to rid the city of its "roaming, thieving wild children." With their agreement and a small stipend of $100, the Reverend Daniel Jenkins Orphanage was born.

From the beginning the orphanage was a success in terms of its mission. The first year alone, over 360 boys settled into their new home. They ranged in age from 5 to 18 years old, but soon Jenkins was accepting children as young as 3 and letting many of the older boys stay until they were 20. The location of the orphanage next to the prison was not always ideal. Many nights, Jenkins remembered, the inmates’ noise and outcries kept them awake. But the prison also served as a reminder for those who didn’t heed Jenkins strict and moral instruction. Jenkins was a strict disciplinarian, reinforcing in his charges the virtues of hard work and responsibility. Most of all, however, he wanted the orphans to be self-sufficient, to be able to grow their own food and to feed and clothe themselves and not be at the mercy of the charity of others. The orphanage would need land to farm if Jenkins was to realized his vision. Jenkins petitioned the city for money to buy property but was denied and his requests for donations from the public produced few results. So the Reverend settled on an unusual solution. He would raise the money by assembling a brass band and tour the northern states is search of support and sponsorship.

http://www.sc.edu/orphanfilm/orphanage/symposia/scholarship/hubbert/jenkins-orphanage.html

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Destee
 
Nova Scotia School for Coloured Children

James Kinney was the first Black man to graduate from the Maritime Business College and he later became a force in forming the Coloured Hockey League. He was also a student of Booker T. Washington, and after the league folded, Kinney used this education to influence other Black leaders in the establishment of a Black orphanage, the Nova Scotia School for Coloured Children.

http://splshelflife.blogspot.com/2009/02/black-ice-lost-history-of-coloured.html

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A Place Called Home

The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children does good work, but its name now echoes of prejudice.

The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children opened in 1921. It was big, a house, really, three floors and lots of bedroom windows, on Main Street, in what is now Dartmouth. Back then it was Preston. The children it took in were orphans, mostly, and not allowed in any of the local orphanages or schools set up for other children in need.

Eighty-eight years ago this week, the north end of Halifax was flattened in the Halifax Explosion, and the number of orphans skyrocketed. There was nowhere for black children to go. In Shattered City, Janet Kitz writes that a committee set up after the explosion felt “‘Coloured or feeble-minded orphans constituted a special problem that would have to be dealt with.”

The Home still exists. It’s now a stone’s throw west on Main Street. Two brown barn-like buildings stand near the street. Everyone calls it The Home. At The Home, that’s how the phone is answered. “The Home.” On The Home’s stationary, it says in big underlined letters across the top, THE NOVA SCOTIA HOME and then in very small letters below FOR COLORED CHILDREN. There’s no sign out front, just the civic number, 1018, on Main Street.

http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/a-place-called-home/Content?oid=958363

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Destee
 

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