Early Life and Education
Henry Garnet was born into slavery in New Market, Kent County, Maryland on December 23, 1815. When Garnet was ten years old, his family reunited and moved to New York City, where from 1826 through 1833, Garnet attended the African Free School, and the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth. While in school, Garnet began his career in abolitionism. With fellow schoolmates, he established the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. It garnered mass support among whites, but the club ultimately had to move due to racist feelings. Two years later, in 1835, he started studies at the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire.
Due to his abolitionist activities, Henry Garnet was driven away from the Noyes Academy by an angry segregationist mob. He completed his education at the Oneida Theological Institute in Whitesboro, New York, which had recently admitted all races. Here, he was acclaimed for his wit, brilliance, and rhetorical skills. After graduation in 1839, the following year he injured his knee playing sports. It never recovered, and his leg was amputated in 1839.
Read more about this topic: Henry Highland Garnet
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.”
—Mary Oliver (b. 1935)
“I think the most important education that we have is the education which now I am glad to say is being accepted as the proper one, and one which ought to be widely diffused, that industrial, vocational education which puts young men and women in a position from which they can by their own efforts work themselves to independence.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)