Martha Ellicott Tyson (1795-1873) publishes the first biography of self-taught Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker, whom she knew as a child.
Raised in the Quaker family that founded Ellicott’s Mills and married to the son of a pioneering Maryland abolitionist, Tyson is known to have an “exceedingly cultivated mind” and be “moved by a desire to do good.”
As a result of her advocacy of women’s rights, she co-founds Swarthmore College in 1864, the second coeducation college in the country. An ardent abolitionist, she publishes two biographies of Benjamin Banneker, one in 1854, the other posthumously in 1884.
