The “Reception, Maintenance and Education of Orphan Colored Children.”
An Orphange, A University, and (Great) Expectations at Johns Hopkins
Join us Wednesday, April 26, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. ET, for our semester’s last webinar featuring live presentations from the Lab’s student researchers. As always, registration is free and simple - just click here.
It has been a semester for breaking silences. Our work began with the March 1873 letter that Johns Hopkins penned to the men he selected to steer the future of the hospital that would bear his name. Among his provisions were those related to what became the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum. Today at John’s Hopkins we have had very little to say about what his words came to mean. Our research aimed to remedy that by examining the records from the asylum and understand how it ultimately provided for the “reception, maintenance and education of orphan colored children,” as Mr. Hopkins put it.
These words — “reception, maintenance and education” — had no plain meaning in the lives of girls resident in the asylum during its operation between 1875 and 1914. To discover the lived experience of these terms, we reviewed the surviving asylum records — most of them concerning administrative and financial matters — along with news reports, city directories, census returns, and maps to recover the the perspective of the hundreds of girls (and for a time the few boys) who resided there.
We discovered a story of juxtapositions and, we might even say, contradictions. Kamal Kaur’s work teaches us how ways of accounting for the asylum’s girls — in financial records and the census — rendered them isolated “inmates” or “orphans,” while discovering their whole lives — from news reports to death records — reveals that the same girls were also daughters and sisters, young people with family ties that pre-dated and out-lived their time spent at the asylum.
Matt Palmer’s research surfaces how the material conditions of the asylum introduced girls to a respectable, middle class lifestyle that included sewing quality clothes, the donning of shoes and hats, healthful meals, a playground, and a well-maintained flower garden. In the later years of the asylum, girls regularly visited the dentist and were fitted for eye glasses. Still, research from both Matt and Kamal reveals that provision of these relative fineries did not aim to prepare girls for futures as middle class heads of their own households. Instead, the material circumstances of the asylum prepared girls to perform domestic work in homes headed by the elite white women for whom they were expected to labor.
Emma Petite focused her research on the asylum’s “Lady Managers,” women who closely governed the place while also standing in for those among Baltimore’s elite who expected to hire the girls who aged out of care at the asylum. Emma’s work reveals how elite women, along with the elite men on the Johns Hopkins Hospital board of trustees, shaped the experiences of girls resident there. At the same time, it underscores the great social distance between the asylum’s young residents and the philanthropically-minded women who governed it.
Our lab sits on the JHU Homewood campus, in the Wyman Park Building, on the site where once stood the Colored Orphan Asylum. Just as the Hospital was preparing to close the asylum in 1914, Gilman Hall was going up on property just across the way. Two visions for young people’s futures, in Baltimore and beyond, faced off — and stood in stark contrast. One encouraged Black girls, educated in middle class ways, to spend their lives in service to others. The second promoted the education of young white men for elite leadership and the heads of households that would run on the labor of girls like those resident in the orphan asylum.
For a moment at Johns Hopkins, both things were true
Please join us on April 26 at 3:00 p.m ET for a conversation about the Colored Orphan Asylum and its essential juxtapositions. Missed us live? You can visit our YouTube channel to catch up on your own time.
— MSJ