NMH Magazine : Fall 2003

No Slave to Fortune

by Peter Weis ’78

On May 24, 1886, a young man from Eastville, Virginia, arrived on the Mount Hermon campus. That he made it to the school at all places him in our pantheon of heroes. He’d traveled further to get here than if he’d begun life at the antipodes

Thomas Nelson Baker ’89 began his life as another man’s property. Born August 11, 1860, the son of Thomas and Edith Baker, legally he was a part of the plantation owned by one Robert Nottingham.

Released from slavery by the combined effects of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, Baker didn’t enter a world free of prejudice and full of opportunity for African Americans. Rather he entered a world in which, as he observed in a 1903 article, “As a relic of slavery there is an inborn feeling in both the white and the colored child that the latter is inferior.”

He and his family faced terrible economic hardships. Attending Eastville public schools beginning at age eight, Baker was forced to interrupt his education at 12 to work on local farms to help support himself, his parents, and his siblings. This interruption was to last for nine long years. During this period he learned to read and taught his mother to do the same.

Fortunately for Baker, he was able to resume his formal education at 21. From his home in Eastville, on the eastern shore of the lower Chesapeake, he made the short trip across the bay to Hampton, where General Samuel Armstrong had established his Normal School to produce graduates who’d then be qualified to teach, according to the language of the day, “their people”: freed slaves and the children of freed slaves. Thomas Nelson Baker entered Hampton in 1881, graduated in 1885, and in the fall of the latter year, went to the Dismal Swamp, south of Hampton, to teach “his people.”

During Baker’s time at Hampton, his tuition was paid in part by a supporter of Armstrong’s, John Denison, pastor of Williams College in Massachusetts. Denison was particularly struck by Baker’s intelligence and drive to educate himself as well as his interest in the ministry, and he wrote to Henry Sawyer, then-principal at Mount Hermon, offering a shining testimonial and the willingness to pay $100 a year toward Baker’s tuition should the school accept him. It did.

Entering Mount Hermon at the age of 25, Baker distinguished himself with a string of academic and extracurricular successes. At the end of his first term, he received the prize for general excellence and improvement. In June 1887, though only a sophomore, he was selected as honorary speaker at the school’s first commencement.

From 1887 through fall 1888, he was commander of the Battalion of Cadets, which rallied and led student processions at Arbor Day and similar all-school events. Baker was first officer on the first floor of Crossley Hall, a position known by later generations as “floor officer,” “cop,” or “student leader.” He was class treasurer during his senior year and gave the first Spade Oration in June 1889. He even found time to preach an occasional sermon in nearby churches in Bernardston and Gill.

At a time when perhaps five percent of those who matric-ulated at Mount Hermon managed to graduate, Baker finished the four-year course in a shade over three years. He was nearly 29 when he graduated.

There was undoubted pressure for him to quit academia and return to the south, where he might still teach or minister to “his people.” Baker ignored the advice and enrolled at Boston University. At the university Baker continue to excel; the faculty chose him to be commencement speaker at his graduation in 1893, an extraordinarily high honor. From his time in Boston come many letters of love and gratitude for his old school:

I like it here very well, but must say, “There is no place like Mt. Hermon. Long live Mt. Hermon.” I was asked by some men from Canada during one of the summer schools at Northfield how the teachers and students of Mt. Hermon received me. I answered, “The teachers and students of Mt. Hermon are ‘color-blind.’ And for years I found that thing true. I do not find so many people thus effected as to their eyes, not even in Boston.”

Summers, on vacation from Boston University, Baker returned to Mount Hermon, where he served as acting principal during the summer session. Years later he fondly recalled summer evenings on the porch of the principal’s house with Henry and Harriet Cutler. In 1893, no longer working for Mount Hermon, he nevertheless deepened his relationship to the school, becoming president of the Alumni Association. And still his education continued.

Three years at Yale Divinity School brought him a master’s degree. Interspersing academics and preaching, first at Dixwell Congregational Church in New Haven and later at the Second Congregational Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he earned his PhD from Yale in 1903, making him the nation’s first former slave to earn a doctorate in philosophy.

Baker’s relationship with Mount Hermon was not without its strains. Despite his glowing words about “color-blindness,” he surely wondered why he didn’t receive more encouragement to continue his education beyond Mount Hermon. Baker spent virtually his entire professional career at the Second Congrega-tional Church in Pittsfield. A fine position, but perhaps not fitting enough for an intellect as powerful as Baker’s.

Once Baker had earned his doctorate, Mount Hermon officials did nothing to recommend him to academic posts, even in southern institutions like Tuskegee. Though he gave the Founder’s Day address at the school in 1912, he later confessed it was a failure, though he was unspecific why. In 1915 he wrote to Cutler, saying, “I have been told that the ‘Color Line’ has been definitely and finally drawn at Mt. Hermon School…Is this report true?” Unfortunately, Cutler’s response has been lost to history.

While he occasionally attended alumni events in and around Pittsfield, in 1931 Baker didn’t return for the school’s 50th anniversary. By the mid-1930s, he hadn’t been back for more than 20 years. Henry Rankin, an associate of D. L. Moody and a long-time supporter of the schools, remained in contact with Baker and would forward bits of his correspondence to the school from time to time. Rankin and D. L. Moody’s nephew, Ambert, tried to reconcile the two parties, to no avail.

In 2002, six decades after Baker’s death, NMH established a fellowship in his name for students from straitened circumstances. This year 32 students are receiving Baker fellowships; the aid goes toward such items as books and travel expenses and is meant to provide the fellows with a more “normal” school experience.

Thus Baker’s name lives on at the school in a way that would surely make him proud. In 1901, at the 20th anniversary of the founding of Mount Hermon, Baker spoke about its place in education and the world’s work, saying, “We need men today who are not afraid to be fair.” We still do.