A Fresh Pot Of Tea Helped Frederick Douglas Heat Up The Abolitionist Movement
Portrait of Mrs. Joanna L. Howard. Colored American Magazine, vol. 5, 1902, p. 211
Edwin Frederick Howard and his wife, Joanna Louise Turpin Howard, were prominent members of the free African American community of Boston. By the 1850s, they made their home in the fashionable West End, a neighborhood with a large number of free black people. Both of them followed their family traditions and were very active in the abolitionist movement to end slavery. Mr. Howard owned his own businesses and was both a barber and a caterer, probably to the wealthy white population. Mrs. Howard remained at home to raise their three children, all of whom attended college.
Portrait of Frederick Douglass. Photograph by George Frances Schreiber, 1870, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
According to the inscription, a friend gave Mrs. Howard this inexpensive plated tea set in 1858. Tea drinking was an afternoon or evening social affair where adults and young people gathered to enjoy each other’s company. Family tradition holds that the service was used in hosting abolitionist luminaries such as Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips. The tea service remained in the Howard family until about 2000, when descendants placed these and other items up for auction.
Joanna Howard’s family recounts that two renowned abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips, drank tea at their Boston home. For the Howard descendants, this tea set is a touchstone to their family’s activism. At the Smithsonian, this family heirloom provides a window into the domestic life of black organizers and serves as a reminder that for African Americans social justice often began at home.
In Boston and across the country, laws denied African Americans access to public spaces where they might meet to organize against slavery or for equal rights. So, African Americans turned to black-owned spaces—churches, schools, homes, and their own businesses—to organize for justice. The Howard home was one such place. By serving tea in her home, Joanna Howard could meet with the prominent abolitionists with less fear of violent retribution. These acts helped knit together a network that survived and spanned many generations, involving their own children.
The Howards’ daughter Adeline T. Howard served as the principal of the Wormley School, a school for black children in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, the NMAAHC collection includes a teapot associated with the name “Wormley.” African American businessman James Wormley, the namesake for the school, owned and operated Wormley’s Hotel—an establishment well known for fine dining that infamously became a site for secret political gatherings in 1877.
- Fath Davis Ruffins, An Abolitionist Family
This beverage service comes from Wormley’s Hotel at 15th and H Streets NW in D.C.—a black-owned, public space opened by James Wormley in 1871 and favored by politicians due to its proximity to the White House. See more
Gift of Charles Thomas Lewis