Mary Jane Patterson

Mary Jane Patterson was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1840, the daughter of Henry and Emeline Patterson. Her family escaped to Oberlin, Ohio, in the 1850s — Henry Patterson became active in the Underground Railroad — and Mary entered the Oberlin College Preparatory Department in 1857.

She enrolled in the four-year "Gentlemen's Course" at Oberlin (rather than the two-year course typically offered to female students) and completed it in 1862. She thereby became the first African American woman to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree from an established American college. (Lucy Stanton had earlier received a literary degree from Oberlin in 1850 but it was not a full B.A.)

She taught at Mr. Sarah Mapps Douglass's Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia (the predecessor of Cheyney University, the oldest historically Black college in the United States) for four years, then accepted a position at the M Street High School in Washington, D.C. — the leading Black academic high school in the country — in 1869.

She served as Principal of M Street High School from 1871 to 1872 and again from 1873 to 1884 — the school's longest-serving principal and the first African American woman to lead a public high school in Washington. She instituted the rigorous classical curriculum (Latin, Greek, mathematics, classical literature, and history) that prepared M Street students for admission to elite Northern universities and made M Street the principal training ground for the Black professional class of the late nineteenth century. Her colleagues at the school across the decades included Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Charlotte Forten Grimké — all placed in this archive.

She died in Washington on the twenty-fourth of September 1894, age fifty-four.

She is honored here as the first African American woman to earn a Bachelor's degree.