For Black History Month, let’s remember the icon behind Lexington’s newest school | Opinion

Born more than 155 years before the children who will attend the new middle school named in her honor, Lexingtonian Mary Ellen Britton was a trailblazer, innovator, and teacher whose lessons span the centuries between them.

I was previously unfamiliar with her story, but as we enter Black History Month and look ahead to Women’s History Month, I believe all central Kentucky residents can draw inspiration from her life of continuous learning, community building, and servant leadership.

Britton was a prominent 19th-century educator, physician, suffragist, journalist, and civil rights activist whose contributions are well-documented in collections including the “Notable Kentucky African Americans Database,” the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage’s “Women in History,” the “Encyclopedia of Seventh Day Adventists,” and “Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.”

“Unlike most American-born blacks prior to Emancipation, Mary Ellen Britton was born free in Lexington, Kentucky on April 16, 1855,” according to an entry in the “Biographical Database of Black Woman Suffragists” written by Kentucky State University Professor Emeritus Karen Cotton McDaniel.

“Her father Henry, who was of Spanish/Indian heritage, was a free-born carpenter and barber. Her mother, Laura was the daughter of Mary, an enslaved woman, and the Honorable Thomas Francis Marshall, a renowned Kentucky statesman of a very prominent family.” Her mother had been freed at the age of 16.

As a child, Britton went to segregated private schools run by the American Missionary Association in Lexington and the William Gibson School in Louisville. From 1871 to 1874, she attended Berea College, the first institution of higher learning in Kentucky to admit people of color.

Beginning in 1876, Britton taught in segregated public schools first in Chilesburg, and then in Lexington. Just one year into her teaching career she became one of the first members of the State Association of Colored Teachers (later renamed the Kentucky Negro Education Association).

A historical marker in Danville now commemorates the speech she delivered at a gathering of the association in 1887 advocating for giving women the right to vote. Entitled “Woman’s Suffrage: A Potent Agency in Public Reforms,” her remarks were later published in the American Catholic Tribune.

Britton was a prolific writer whose opinion pieces advocating for women’s suffrage, abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and civil rights appeared in local, regional, and national publications. She was also an excellent public speaker whose oratory skills were renowned. In 1893, a speech she delivered opposing Kentucky legislation to segregate railroad car seating gained such acclaim that author Paul Laurence Dunbar was inspired to write a poem entitled “To Miss Mary Britton.”

Her civic engagement went beyond words. A biography written by Jaime Bradley for the Berea College website states that Britton “served as president of the Woman’s Improvement Club, which aimed to improve women’s social status, living conditions, and economic improvements. … Moreover, from 1892 she served as the founding director of the Colored Orphan Industrial Home, an organization that, in collaboration with the Ladies Orphan Society, helped impoverished orphans and homeless elderly women with food, clothing, housing accommodations, and education and guidance on to improve their lives.”

After 21 years in the classroom, Britton retired from teaching to pursue a medical degree at the American Missionary College in Chicago. She continued her medical education at Howard Medical School in Washington D.C., and Meharry Medical College of Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1902, at the age of 47, she became Lexington’s first licensed black female physician. For the next 21 years, Britton treated patients in her home at 545 N. Limestone Street.

The students who attend Mary E. Britton Middle School in 2025 will have access to educational facilities and technological tools unimaginable in her time. They will work in career fields that didn’t exist in the 19th century, use skills unnecessary in the 20th century, and solve problems not yet discovered in ours.

But they will draw upon attributes that stand the test of time – a commitment to lifelong learning, a willingness to reinvent yourself, the fortitude to change careers, a sense of compassion for those less fortunate, the ability to communicate, the strength to stand up for what you believe in, and a recognition of our individual responsibility to participate in democracy.

Mary Ellen Britton embodied all of those qualities, and by naming Fayette County’s newest middle school in her honor, members of the Fayette County Board of Education chose to both celebrate a hidden figure from our community’s past and illuminate a path to our children’s future.

Demetrus Liggins is the superintendent of Fayette County Public Schools.