In front of you sits a modest Federal-style building that, in 1833, became the first free school for Black children in Baltimore. The McKim Free School was founded in 1833 through a bequest from John McKim, a Quaker merchant, who left funds specifically to provide free education for African American children. The Quakers had long been the most consistent white opponents of slavery in America and had established schools for Black children in Philadelphia going back to the 1770s, but McKim's gift brought that commitment to Baltimore, a city where the education of enslaved people was illegal and the education of free Black children was theoretically legal but practically obstructed.
The school opened in the 1833 building at this site, offering basic literacy and mathematics to children who had no other access to schooling. Frederick Douglass, who was learning to read in secret during these very years in Baltimore, represents the hunger for education that institutions like McKim sought to address. The school served the community through the nineteenth century as public education slowly, unevenly, extended to Black children in Maryland.
The building itself is a modest Federal-style structure, understated for the magnitude of what it represented: the idea that Black children deserved education, at a time when much of America denied them even their humanity.