Leader of Men

Just three months after the speech’s publication, the 19-year-old became Oberlin’s first Black graduate. In the coming decades, George devoted his life to social change and pursuing civil rights and educational opportunities for African Americans. And now, 200 years after his birth, the world at large is finally recognizing the enduring legacy of this work.

The Early Years

George Boyer Vashon was born on July 25, 1824, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a town of roughly 3,000 in rural southern Pennsylvania. His father, John B. Vashon, fought in the War of 1812, and his paternal grandfather who was white, served as a captain in the U.S. Army in multiple states. George’s great-grandfather, Simon Vashon, was an enslaver who emigrated to America and fought in the Revolutionary War as part of the Maryland militia.

According to Paul Thornell—George’s great-great-grandson and author of the 1999 Negro Journal of History article “The Absent Ones and the Providers: A Biography of the Vashons”—John’s experience during the War of 1812, where he was freed in a prisoner exchange, influenced son George’s thinking on America. “There’s almost no other way to demonstrate equality,” Thornell said, “other than a Black man fighting for America during the War of 1812, getting captured for his country, and then traded for a white British soldier.”

In 1829, the Vashon family moved to Pittsburgh. John, an astute businessman, found economic success in the growing city, first through a string of barber shops catering to the Black population, then a series of bathhouses, which were popular in a city where public sanitation was still in its infancy. John also used his growing wealth to support the abolitionist movement. In 1832, after meeting with the noted antislavery activist William Lloyd Garrison, John became a regional sponsor of Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator. A year later, John founded the Pittsburgh Antislavery Society.

The 1830s witnessed the rise of the abolitionist movement in the northern United States—and the Vashon home in downtown Pittsburgh was a hub for organizing. On many nights, young, ambitious abolitionists—including Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany—gathered at the family home for passionate debate and discussion, including about whether it was possible for African Americans to ever achieve equality in the United States. 

Patrick Rael, professor of history at Bowdoin College and author of Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, notes the importance of these gatherings: “It’s hard to imagine the Black protest tradition emerging without such urban contexts, opportunities to meet and organize, access to modes of communication like presses, and schools and churches that nurtured Black leadership.” 

John was also determined to educate his son. Since Pittsburgh lacked an educational system for Black children, John decided to create his own. In 1832, he and the Rev. Lewis Woodson, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, established the Pittsburgh African Education Society. Young George excelled in this rigorous environment, combining academic accomplishment with abolitionist organizing. 

By the time he was a teenager, he had studied Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Persian, and Sanskrit and founded the Pittsburgh Juvenile Anti-Slavery Society with his friend, David Peck. The organization grew rapidly, boasting roughly 50 members by its second year.

The Oberlin Years

In 1840, when George was 16, John enrolled his son at Oberlin. Five years earlier, the institution had adopted a “Colorblind Admissions Policy,” the second institution in the country to do so, preceded by the short-lived Oneida Institute in upstate New York, which closed in 1844.“When [George] comes [to Oberlin], he doesn’t have many possible alternatives,” explains Gary Kornblith, Oberlin emeritus professor of history and co-author of 2015’s Elusive Utopia. “There was the occasional Black student at Dartmouth and Amherst, but this is a different place.”

At that time, Oberlin College was known as Oberlin Collegiate Institute and included a pre-college program known as the Oberlin Preparatory School. The vast majority of students who arrived first studied at the preparatory school, as they were simply unprepared for the advanced coursework in the Institute, which was heavy in Greek and Latin. Yet Kornblith emphasized that George was exceptional in that his education prepared him to go directly into the Institute. 

George was one of 18 students in the freshman class and quickly distinguished himself in his studies and organizing. In a letter to fellow abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, Oberlin professor of rhetoric and belles lettres (fine literature) James A. Thome spoke highly of the younger Vashon: “Mr. [John] Vashon of Pittsburgh … has a son of considerable promise. [George Vashon] is now in the Freshman Class, and one of the best minds in the class.”

As George matriculated, the College found itself in a financial crunch that threatened its very existence; in a bid to avoid closure and escape the fate of the Oneida Institute, the administration turned to overseas English donors for additional financial support. George immediately got to work helping the College find the funds, enlisting the support of two other Black Oberlin students, John Mifflin Brown and Charles Henry Langston. The three of them, all members of the “Committee in behalf of Colored Students,” drafted a letter titled “Three Colored Students Attest to Oberlin’s Commitment to Educational and Social Uplift.”

The letter praised the financial support that English donors had given the school while excoriating the position that other educational institutions took toward African American admittance: “Resolved, That we still view with grief and abhorrence the cruel prejudice that would make color instead of character the ground for our reception to literary and theological institutions.” That very committee was likely the first college organization for African Americans in U.S. history. This fact speaks to the strength of the Black organizing at Oberlin and foregrounds the role that Black abolitionists would play in later years, exemplified in such events including the Oberlin Wellington Rescue.

On August 1, 1842, George gave a speech at the Oberlin College Chapel for “West Indies Emancipation Day,” which commemorated the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in the Caribbean. According to Kornblith, this event was an early example of how abolitionists sought to recast the popular conception of America’s founding: “In the early 1840s, [West Indies Emancipation Day] was often celebrated … by abolitionists as an alternative to the Fourth of July.” George played a key role in organizing this event with two escaped slaves, William Newman and Sabram Cox, both of whom began studying at Oberlin in 1839; in later years, Newman became a Canadian minister, while Cox became a key figure in Oberlin city leadership.

George found purpose within the college as well as the broader community. He joined the Union Society, a prestigious literary club for men that later became Phi Delta. In 1843, George also took advantage of Oberlin’s Winter Term to tutor Black students in Chillicothe, Ohio, roughly 150 miles to the south, likely through the AME Church, whose presence was notable in the town. One of his students eventually graduated from Oberlin too: future U.S. Rep. John Mercer Langston of Virginia, brother of George’s classmate Charles Langston.

“[George] had a pretty critical role in bringing a number of Blacks who were in the area around Oberlin,” Thornell said in a 2024 interview with Howard University. “He had a strong commitment in helping bring in younger Blacks to whatever educational institution he worked with.”

A Turning Point

After graduating in 1844, George began studying law under the direction of Pennsylvania Judge Walter Forward and applied to join the Pennsylvania bar. In a stinging defeat, he was denied in 1847 solely on the basis of an 1838 revision to the Pennsylvania constitution that barred African Americans from holding public office.

George’s rejection from the Pennsylvania Bar marked a turning point in his life, and he decided to leave the United States for Haiti in 1848. Yet before he left, he traveled to New York and passed the bar exam, becoming the first Black lawyer in the state. Following his departure, a note appeared in Frederick Douglass’s newspaper The North Star, alluding to George’s reasons for leaving: “Now he leaves his native city, to take up his abode among strangers, expatriated by the cruel prejudices of his fellow citizens.”

Haiti occupied an important place among abolitionists in the United States. In 1791, the country then known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue saw the only successful slave uprising in world history. In 1801, it became the first Black nation in the Western Hemisphere. George’s stay in Haiti corresponded with the increasingly autocratic tenure of Haitian President Faustin Soulouque. In correspondence with fellow abolitionist Gerrit Smith, George wrote that, “Haiti’s unsettled state … deterred me from carrying out my intention of becoming a citizen thereof.”

But George made the most of his time in Haiti before returning to the U.S. in 1850. In addition to his primary job teaching ancient languages at various local schools in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, he began work on a poem that would resurrect the spirit of the Haitian revolutionary Vincent Ogé; was the Haitian correspondent to Frederick Douglass’ The North Star; developed fluency in French; and immersed himself in a study of the country’s history. In 1849, as a result of his work in the country, Oberlin awarded him an honorary MA. 

Making His Mark

Upon arriving back in America, George settled in Syracuse, New York, at that time a hotbed of abolitionist activity, and started practicing law. He later used his legal skills at the Freedmen’s Bureau, where he served as a legal representative for formerly enslaved men as they had their claims heard in both the Supreme Court and federal court in Washington, D.C.

But George distinguished himself in education, taking a job as a professor of belles lettres at New York Central College—making him one of the nation’s first Black professors—and later becoming president of Avery College in downtown Pittsburgh. He also was an administrator in the Black public schools of Pittsburgh and the District of Columbia and became a founder and the first Black professor of Howard University, where he taught courses in reading and arithmetic, became an administrator in the institution’s evening school, and was instrumental in establishing the university’s law school.

In 1873, George took a position as a professor of ancient and modern languages at Alcorn State University in Mississippi. He also was accepted to the Mississippi Bar in 1875, becoming one of the first Black men to do so.

George’s son, John B. Vashon, eventually graduated as valedictorian at Alcorn. But in 1878, George contracted yellow fever in the midst of an outbreak sweeping through the South. He died on October 5 at the age of 54 and was buried in an unmarked grave on Alcorn State University grounds. The location of his remains is unknown to this day.

A Legacy Remembered

George’s family was determined to further his legacy. In 1882, they relocated to St. Louis as part of a larger Black postwar migration to the city. The Vashon family played a crucial role in helping Black students overcome educational barriers, says Calvin Riley, curator of the George B. Vashon Museum in North St. Louis, which is dedicated to George’s life but also serves as a repository for the artifacts of Black Americans whose lives have gone unheralded in history. “They became some of the early pioneers for Black education in St. Louis.”