grew larger the task of educating them grew more
arduous. Some of them probably attended the school conducted by a
Scotch-Irishman in the home of Richard De Baptiste. When the reaction
against the teaching of Negroes effected the closing of the colored
schools in Virginia, this one continued clandestinely for many years.
Determined to have her children better educated, Mrs. Richards sent one
of her sons to a school conducted by Mrs. Beecham, a remarkable English
woman, assisted by her daughter. These women were bent on doing what
they could to evade the law interpreted as prohibiting any one from
either sitting or standing to teach a black to read. They, therefore,
gathered the colored children around them while they lay prostrate on
the couch to teach them. For further evasion they kept on hand splinters
of wood which they had the children dip into a match preparation and use
with a flint for ignition to make it appear that they were showing them
how to make matches. When this scheme seemed impracticable, one of the
boys was sent to Washington in the District of Columbia to attend the
school maintained by John F. Cook, a successful educator and founder of
the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. This young man was then
running the risk of expatriation, for Virginia had in 1838 passed a law,
prohibiting the return to that State of those Negroes, who after the
prohibition of their education had begun to attend schools in other
parts.[2]

It was because of these conditions that in 1851 when her husband died
Mrs. Richards sold out her property and set out to find a better home in
Detroit, Michigan. Some of the best white people of Fredericksburg
commended her for this step, saying that she was too respectable a woman
to suffer such humiliation as the reaction had entailed upon persons of
her race.[3] She was followed by practically all of the best free
Negroes of Fredericksburg. Among these were the Lees, the Cooks, the
Williamses and the De Baptistes. A few years later this group attracted
the Pelham family from Petersburg. They too had tired of seeing their
rights gradually taken away and, therefore, transplanted themselves to
Detroit.

The attitude of the people of Detroit toward immigrating Negroes had
been reflected by the position the people of that section had taken from
the time of the earliest settlements. Slavery was prohibited by the
Ordinance of 1787. In 1807 there arose a case in which a woman was
required