Maria Baldwin

Maria Baldwin. Educator, Lecturer, and Community Activist. , Maria Louise Baldwin was the headmaster of the Agassiz Grammar School in Cambridge, the first African American to hold such a position in the North., Baldwin was born on April 22, 1856, the oldest child of Peter and Mary Baldwin. Her father, an immigrant from Haiti, was a mariner who became a postman in Boston, and her mother was from Baltimore. While the children were growing up, the family lived first on Washington and then on Clark Street, not far from Kendall Square., Baldwin completed Cambridge's teacher training program in 1881 but was denied a position in the city schools. She began her career as an elementary school teacher in Chestertown, Maryland. In 1882, however, she received an appointment to teach at the Agassiz School on Oxford Street, and in 1889 was offered the position of headmaster., Baldwin also held home study classes for African American students at Harvard in her house on Prospect Street, which she shared with her brother Louis. After her death, her service to the community was praised by Harvard graduates W.E.B. Du Bois and former assistant attorney general William H. Lewis, as well as by President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard. , , Baldwin helped found the League of Women for Community Service and was its president for several years. She also served on the board of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with her Prospect Street neighbor, attorney and alderman Clement Morgan. Although she left Cambridge in 1906, and lived for the rest of her life at the Franklin Square House in Boston's South End. she continued as master of the Agassiz School until her death on January 9, 1922., Louis Baldwin (1865-?) founded Baldwin and Dorsey, a successful real estate firm, and served on the Cambridge Common Council from 1891) to 1893. In 1900, at the request of Booker T. Washington, he was a keynote speaker and organizer for a conference of the National Negro - Business League. He left Cambridge in 1902., Related Cambridge African American Trail Markers: , Charlotte Hawkins Brown 51 Essex Streettes , W.E.B. Du Bois 20 Flagg Street , William H. Lewis, 226 Upland Road , Clement G. Morgan, 266 Prospect Street, Sources: , Boston Transcript, August 24, 1900, and January 10, 1922 , Cambridge Public Libry photograph collection , Louis R. Harlan ed. The Booker T. Washington Papers 1972-1989 , Rayford W. Logan and Michael K. Weston, eds., The Dictionary of American Negro Biography 1982 , Jessie C. Smith ed., Notable Black American Women, 1993, Cambridge Discovery Inc. , Cambridge Historical Commission