Fannie Richards and the Integration of the Detroit Public Schools 

by Robin S. Peebles

It was 12 May 1869. The young black teacher in Detroit’s Colored School No. 2 kept glancing toward the railroad tracks outside her schoolroom window. A week had passed since H. M. Cheeve and D. E. & H. M. Duffield argued before the Michigan Supreme Court that Joseph Workman’s son, and all other black children in Detroit, could not legally be segregated from whites in the public schools. Finally the afternoon train passed by. Fannie Richards and her pupils cheered as they saw John Bagley’s white handkerchief waving from the train window. The prearranged signal meant the court had abolished segregated public schools in Detroit.

Fannie Richards was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, about 1840 and moved to Detroit as a young girl with her family during the 1850s. She received her early education in the public schools of Detroit, then went to Toronto, where she studied English, history, drawing and needlework. She later returned to Detroit to attend the Teachers Training School. In 1863 she opened a private school for black children. Her appointment to segregated Colored School No. 2, administered by the Detroit Board of Education, came two years later.

John Bagley, born in 1832, was a wealthy tobacco manufacturer. He was involved in mining, banking and insurance corporations in the city. He also served as a member of the Detroit Board of Education.

In 1869, the year the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, Richards and Bagley were two of several liberal-minded citizens who helped finance a lawsuit against Detroit’s racially segregated school system. The case, Joseph Workman v. The Board of Education of Detroit, was the first supreme court case in Michigan dealing with segregation in the public schools.

Workman’s attorneys based their case on Act No. 34, Laws of Michigan (1867): “All residents of any district shall have an equal right to attend any school therein: Provided that this shall not prevent the grading of schools according to the intellectual progress of the pupils, to be taught in separate places when deemed expedient.”

The school board argued that the 1867 law did not pertain to the city of Detroit since there was but one district in the city. The board further argued that the city schools were governed by a separate charter, which exempted them from Act 34 and allowed them to establish separate schools for blacks.

Counsel for the board stated: “There exists among a large majority of the white population of Detroit a strong prejudice or animosity against colored people, which is largely transmitted to the children in the schools, and that this feeling would engender quarrels and contention if colored children were admitted to the white schools.”

A major force supporting Workman was the Second Baptist Church, where Fannie Richards taught Sunday school. Since its organization in 1836, Second Baptist had been an influential force in the social, political and educational development of Detroit’s black community. The church assisted escaping slaves along the Underground Railroad prior to the Civil War and helped form the Amherstburg Baptist Association through which Baptist churches in Detroit and Canada aided fugitive slaves.

Bagley went on to become Michigan’s fifteenth governor, serving from 1873 to 1876. In 1871 Richards became the first black teacher in Detroit’s newly integrated school system. She taught at the Everett School for forty-four years. In 1872 she was assigned to implement the Froebel Kindergarten System of Instruction, named for Germany’s Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel (1782-1852). His elementary education innovations included kindergarten, play ideas and handwork.

Richards’s experimental kindergarten was a success. The School Report of 1873 recommended that it be included as a permanent part of the curriculum of the city schools, nothing the “the early withdrawal of pupils from school makes it desirable to have them begin earlier than age six, and that kindergarten work seems to adapt to the need of children preparatory to entering regular schools.”

Richards also continued to work at Second Baptist. In 1897 she and several other church women founded and financed the Phillis Wheatley Home to care for Detroit’s elderly and poor black citizens. Richard was the home’s first president.

In 1915 Fannie Richards retired from Everett. When interviewed by a local newspaper, she remarked: “I loved my boys and girls, Negro, Jew and German, as they came to me in the many changes that forty-four years in one district will bring. The mixture was interesting to watch in the classroom, for while the Jewish children led in arithmetic, and the German children were the best thinkers, the colored children were the best readers, almost orators, I might say. The colored boys and girls had the feeling and voices for expressive reading and no one takes keener pleasure in the progress the Negroes have made in an educational way in Detroit than I have.”

She died in Detroit in 1922.

Robin S. Peebles is one of the charter members of the Michigan Black Historic Sites Association.