Nearly a century before the tragic assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, a determined Newport reformer achieved educational integration in Rhode Island and led other peaceful efforts to gain equality for his fellow African-Americans in the aftermath of slavery. That man, George T. Downing, was an important forerunner of King and deserves far greater recognition than he has thus far received.
Downing was born in New York City on Dec. 30, 1819. His father, Thomas, a native of coastal Virginia, established a very upscale and successful New York City restaurant, whose patrons included many of the prominent businessmen and politicians of the metropolis. This success allowed George to attend the private Mulberry Street School for black youth, where he met several young boys who would soon become vocal abolitionists, like Downing himself.
Downing displayed such intellectual and leadership potential that his father sent him to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Upon his return from Clinton, he joined with his father not only in the food business but also in the business of promoting racial justice. Both became active in the Underground Railroad, helping several fugitive slaves escape to freedom.
In 1846, Downing came to Newport, a town that had a sizable black community, to replicate his father’s restaurant. This enterprise proved successful in a town that had begun to emerge as a fashionable summer resort, and which was attracting some of his father’s New York patrons.
With some financing from his father, he built his impressive Sea Girt House on South Touro Street (now part of Bellevue Avenue), nearly opposite the Newport Tower. The multistory building included his residence, a restaurant, his catering business and “accommodations for gentlemen boarders.” A suspicious fire destroyed the elegant house in 1860, but Downing was able to recover $40,000 of insurance proceeds to rebuild a larger structure on the site, which came to be called the Downing Block, no longer standing.
While achieving success in business, Downing also launched successful campaigns against slavery in the South and school segregation in Rhode Island. He assisted the efforts of local abolitionists, such as the Buffum family, and national leaders of this movement, such as U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and ex-slave Frederick Douglass.
In his quest for human rights, Downing was most uniquely associated with the desegregation of Rhode Island’s public schools, a campaign he commenced in 1855 with the support of Senator Sumner. By 1857 he began to take bold public action, launching a lobbying campaign, which he personally financed, against segregated education. However, it took the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, which banned slavery, to overcome the resistance of such communities as Providence, Bristol, and Downing’s own Newport.
Downing’s oft-repeated argument was that all race distinctions stemmed from slavery, and must die with slavery. In 1866, 11 years after Downing first strategized with Sumner, the General Assembly, with little debate, overwhelmingly voted to outlaw separate schools and ended the era of legal educational segregation in Rhode Island.
Downing continued his racial-equality crusade in the decades following the Civil War. In 1869, he helped to form the Colored National Labor Union because of the refusal of the all-white National Labor Union to admit blacks.
Downing’s most visible job mixed his two passions, food and politics. For 12 years, from 1865 to 1877, he was in charge of the cafe-dining room of the U.S. House of Representatives, giving him the opportunity to influence and lobby policymakers. One salutary project on which he worked was the passage, in 1873, of an equal opportunity public accommodations law for the District of Columbia. Two years after leaving his post in Washington, he retired from his Newport business.
George Downing died at his Newport home on July 21, 1903, surrounded by his several children, one of whom, Serena, wrote his brief biography in 1910. At his passing, The Boston Globe called him “the foremost colored man in the country” and praised his efforts on behalf of liberty and equality for all Americans.
Patrick T. Conley is historian laureate of Rhode Island.