Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,090
By This is the grave of Caroline Still Anderson.
Born in 1848 in Philadelphia, Caroline Still grew up pretty well off for the Black community of that time. Her parents were middle class and political. They were involved in the city’s robust abolitionist movement and as the city just over the Mason-Dixon Line, that was an important battleground between supporters and opponents of slavery. Her father made a good bit of money in coal, though I am not sure just what he was doing. But he made enough to send his kids to the best available schools, sometimes Black and sometimes integrated. In 1864, that included attending Oberlin, which was integrated before this, but only sort of. She was the only Black student in her class. She was only 15 and she graduated at 19.
Still married a man named Edward Wiley, who she met at Oberlin, in 1869, but he died in 1873. When that happened, Still enrolled at the Howard University College of Medicine and then the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, finishing there in 1878. This made her one of the first Black women doctors in the United States. Boston was a place that would accept a Black woman as a doctor, at least for an internship, and she did this at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. That lasted until 1879. She remarried, a man named Matthew Anderson, who was a minister. Now Caroline Still Anderson, she started a dispensary in the back of his church.
Anderson was a doctor but she was really much more. First, she couldn’t exactly practice like a white doctor might. Whites sure weren’t going to go to her, at least not if they had other choices. Her patients would have been quite poor. She wouldn’t have access to the peak medical facilities of the day. Moreover, she already had done a lot of other things in her community. She had to put herself through medical school, at least when she didn’t get scholarships, so she did a lot of teaching and other community outreach work to earn money. So as a doctor and working with her preacher husband, she combined providing what medical care she could with a lot of other activities. That included teaching public speaking to people who wanted and needed it. It included other sorts of education too. It included teaching hygiene and the other more home-based medicine of the day that was still pretty rudimentary but very slowly moving toward something that looks like modern medicine.
The Andersons then founded the Berean Manual Training and Industrial School, better known as the Berean Institute for most of its long history, in 1899. They created an investment opportunity in the school among Philadelphia’s black leadership, raising $150,000 of stock for it, which was a lot of money for the end of the 19th century. So the community then also had a financial investment in the success of the school. Then they started bringing in students. This was adult learning, doing mostly vocational training so local people could improve their financial situation by having access to better employment opportunities. In one sense, this was connected to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in that it provided really hands-on education to improve the race through better jobs, but unlike Washington, they never dismissed political organizing at all, bur rather saw more money in the community as a conduit to more effective politics. In fact, they were much closer to W.E.B. DuBois, who on multiple occasions wrote about the amazing work the Anderson’s were doing. The school was quite successful. He was the principal, she was the vice-principal. The school started with 25 students and by 1909 had 300, with a good growth in employed instructors as well. The Berean Institute remained open all the way until 2012, so this is quite an achievement.
Anderson is a good example of the black Progressive. We usually think of Progressives as whites, and white women especially. There’s good reason for that. But unsurprisingly, these ideas would have plenty of pull in black communities too. When whites founded settlement houses for immigrants in Chicago and New York, black women (and sometimes whites too) would try to do the same for their communities, especially as poor people were moving up from the South to cities such as Washington, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the early 20th century, even before the Great Migration would move this to hyperdrive during and after World War I. So Anderson was involved in a lot of Progressive organizations in her city. She found a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at Berean. She opened black chapters of the Young Men’s Christian Association. She also did a ton of charity work and sat on a lot of boards of black institutions in the city.
Anderson began to have strokes late in life and they got larger and that did her in. She died in 1919, at the age of 70. I’m not sure if her husband is buried here, since this seems to be the plot of her parents family. But he was as big as she was. Still, more than happy to talk about her alone.
Caroline Still Anderson is buried in Eden Cemetery, Collingdale, Pennsylvania.
If you would like this series to visit other black women activists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Anna Julia Cooper is in Raleigh, North Carolina and Dorothy Height is in Brentwood, Maryland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.