The Life Of Maritcha Lyons
On May 23, 1848, African-American educator and civil rights activist Maritcha Remond Lyons was born to Albro Lyons Sr. and Mary Joseph Lyon in New York City, New York. In the free black family, she was the third of five children and the only girl. During the time of the Civil War, Maritcha’s parents sent their children to Providence, Rhode Island, in order to protect them from the dangers posed by draft riots in New York City.
Maritcha Lyons was sixteen years old when she attempted to enroll in Providence High School, but she was turned away because of her race. The well-known black abolitionist George T. Downing led the movement to end racial segregation in the state, and her family joined in. After Maritcha testified in front of the state Senate, the decision to desegregate the school was ultimately made. She was the first black student to graduate from Providence High School, which she did in 1869.
Lyons started her lengthy career as a teacher not long after she received her degree. She obtained a post as a teacher at Colored School No. 1 in Brooklyn, New York, in the month of October 1869. She had been a teacher for close to thirty years when, in 1898, she made the decision to move to the integrated Public School No. 83. There, she worked in the administrative role of assistant principal. Lyons was the second African American in New York City’s public schools to train teachers. Her responsibilities included supervising practice teaching, which made her the second African American to do so.
While she was working as a teacher, Lyons frequently used her evenings to pursue further education. She attended the Brooklyn Institute of Music and Languages for a total of ten years to further her education. In addition to this, Lyons honed her talents as a public speaker and advocated for the expansion of civil rights. She was an active participant in Ida B. Wells’s movement to end the practice of lynching, and she also established the White Rose Mission, which was a facility that provided asylum to those fleeing the American South and the West Indies.
Published in 1926 by Hallie Quinn Brown was Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. Lyons was responsible for writing eight of the biographical essays that were included in the book. Lyons did write an autobiography, but she had no intention of ever having it published. Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl, which was released in 2015, was based on her unpublished memoir and was written long after she had passed away.
Maritcha Lyons did not get married and did not have any children; instead, she lived with a number of different relatives. She moved in with her parents and her brother during her parents’ final years so that she could be close to them. In later years, Lyons would make her home with her surviving nephew. Maritcha Lyons passed away on January 28, 1929, in Brooklyn, at the age of 80. She had a prosperous legacy as a result of her forty-eight-year teaching career.
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