Louisa “Lulu” Matilda Jacobs, teacher, equal rights activist, and entrepreneur, was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, on October 19, 1833. She was the daughter of congressman and newspaper editor Samuel Tredwell Sawyer and his mixed-race enslaved mistress Harriet Jacobs. Louisa Jacobs was educated in private schools in New York City, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts, and trained as a teacher. From 1852 to 1854, she alternated living with the white abolitionist Zenas Brockett family, who operated an Underground Railroad station in Manheim, western New York State, and assisting her mother at the Hudson River home of Home Journal editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. From 1856 to 1858, Jacobs lived with the family of Willis’s sister, author and journalist Fanny Fern and her husband, biographer James Parton. Fanny Fern’s abusive rages and unfounded accusations of impropriety with Parton culminated in her attempt to physically attack Jacobs in the spring of 1858. Jacobs left the Parton’s New York household abruptly and moved back to Boston where she remained through the early 1860s. After founding a Freedman’s school in Alexandria, Virginia, during the Civil War, Jacobs joined Charles Lenox Remond and Susan B. Anthony in early 1867 on an Equal Rights Association … Continue reading Louisa Matilda Jacobs (1833-1917)