Mary Jane Patterson

Mary Jane Patterson was born on September 12, 1840, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her father, Henry Patterson, was a freeborn bricklayer and plasterer; her mother, Emeline Eliza Taylor Patterson, had herself been enslaved before her emancipation. Around 1852 the family made its way north to Oberlin, Ohio — a town whose college and abolitionist community had become a haven for Black families seeking education and freedom — where Henry's trade helped sustain their large household.

At Oberlin College, Patterson refused the shorter "ladies' course" and instead undertook the demanding four-year "gentlemen's course," steeped in Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics. After a preparatory year, she completed the full degree in 1862, becoming the first African American woman to earn a Bachelor of Arts from an established American college — a distinction won by ability and resolve in an age that offered her neither.

Patterson gave her life to teaching. She worked in Chillicothe, Ohio, then joined Fanny Jackson Coppin at Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth. In 1869 she came to the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth in Washington, D.C. — the ancestor of the famed Dunbar High School — and in 1871 became its first Black principal. Over years of leadership she strengthened the school, expanding its enrollment many times over and setting a standard of rigor for Black education in the capital.

Beyond the classroom she helped found the Colored Woman's League in 1892 and supported institutions serving the aged and the vulnerable, teaching until her death on September 24, 1894. May she be remembered as the woman who opened the college door, and held it open for every daughter who followed.