The first Black missionary set foot in Hawaii 200 years ago

‘Hawaii Once Had A Negro Missionary.” That headline in the May 12, 1906, issue of Honolulu’s Pacific Commercial Advertiser might have been news to the paper’s readers, and it might still be news to some in Hawaii today. But Black History Month is now the right time to remember Betsey Stockton, who came to Hawaii 200 years ago, in 1823 — the first Black missionary, almost certainly the first African American woman to set foot in the islands.

When she arrived, she initially expressed the common missionary reaction to the scantily dressed people who paddled out to greet her ship: “Are these, thought I, the beings with whom I must spend the remainder of my life?” She soon got over her shock, though, and got to work doing what she had come to do — teaching Christianity, of course, but also literacy.

By the 1820s, island leaders had realized that their people needed reading and writing to deal with the demands of the European and American merchants and mariners who had begun to swarm into the islands. For that, the missionaries could be very valuable allies.

Betsey Stockton proved to be especially valuable, because she did what no other missionary had done before: in her new school in Lahaina, Maui, she taught not just the island elite, the ali‘i, but also the maka‘ainana, ordinary people in the lower rungs of island society. That’s where she had come from herself, and she knew from her own experience how much education could mean.

Born into slavery in Princeton, N.J., in 1798, she never went to school a day in her life. As an enslaved child in the household of a prominent Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Ashbel Green, she taught herself the “3Rs” and much more, eventually memorizing poetry and mastering sophisticated works of theology. As a teenager, she gained her emancipation and seized the opportunity to become a missionary to Hawaii, leaving the racism of the United States behind but bringing her intellect to the Pacific.

She stayed in the islands only a little over two years, until 1825, but the islands stayed with her for life. It was in Hawaii that she found her calling, learned her craft, and carried out her commitment to teaching children of color. She continued that back in the U.S., starting schools for Black children, first in Philadelphia for two years, 1828-1830, and then in Princeton for the last half of her life, until she died, in 1865.

Today, what might she mean for Black History Month? We’re most familiar with those more celebrated figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, who certainly deserve their place in the pantheon of anti-slavery in the antebellum era. Betsey Stockton was a teacher — only a teacher, some might say — not an outspoken orator or ardent activist.

But we need to understand that, in her time, many white people considered teaching Black children a useless and even dangerous activity, and Black schools could sometimes be targets of racial violence. People like Betsey Stockton, who worked at the grassroots level, building and sustaining the churches and schools that became such significant institutions in the Black community, exhibited the day-to-day, year-to-year persistence that could be a form of resistance.

One Hawaii person certainly knows Betsey Stockton. In 2020, former President Barack Obama wrote about her as a woman of “resilience, compassion, and commitment to service … with a relentless faith in herself and the possibilities of her fellow peoples.” Always a proponent of hope, Obama urged that “we all strive to hold our sense of faith, and of hope, as tightly as Betsey did, and to share them as freely with so many, as she did.” If we need a fresh message for Black History Month, that could well be it.

———

Gregory Nobles is a professor emeritus of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology whose latest book is, “The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom.”