Martel A. Perry

October 07, 2005

Shaw University "brings home" wife of founder

Henry Tupper graduated from the College so long ago we can’t find a class year for him, in the first forty years when the College was still a sectarian institution influenced by the Abolitionist movement and recent graduate Henry Ward Beecher 1834.

Tupper is not listed among the “College founders and presidents” in the College’s Wikipedia entry, but he founded the institution now known as Shaw University in 1865. As a Baptist chaplain during the Civil War, Tupper carried the College’s ideal with him; a recent article in the Raleigh News & Observer explains:

“In his writings [Tupper] talked about crawling around on his belly to minister to fallen soldiers,” said Martel Perry, the university’s executive vice president. “He was very moved by the bravery of the black soldiers and the cause for civil rights. After the war, he looked for a place to start a school for free Negroes.”

That school became Shaw, the oldest of what are known known as “HBCUs,” or Historically Black Colleges and Universities, named after Elijah Shaw, who gave the largest contribution towards the purchase of its present site, in 1870. (Anyone know if Shaw was also an Amherst alumnus?)

Just before the war ended, Tupper married Sarah Baker Leonard. The future Mrs. Tupper was described in Sunday’s program as a college-educated woman of exceptional beauty, grace and musical talent.

This weekend is Shaw’s 140th Homecoming, and as the News & Observer article explains, they have another homecoming to celebrate: Sarah’s remains are being brought back to Raleigh to be re-interred next to Tupper’s on the Shaw campus.

“After [Tupper] died, there wasn’t a very close connection between her and the university,” Perry said.

Nonetheless, university officials placed an empty tomb and gravestone beside her husband’s on the school grounds and would honor both of them each year during a graveside service.

World Translation Click On Language and enter Website http://cts21st.net

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