On May 29, 1854, a 26-year-old woman opened the doors to her Sacramento home and invited 14 students inside. This simple act — in a humble house on Second Street — established the first private school for African American children in the city.
From these scrappy beginnings, teacher Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood would go on to change education in Northern California forever.
By the time she opened that first school in Sacramento, Elizabeth had already proven herself incredibly resilient. Two years earlier, she had left New Bedford, Massachusetts, traveling by ship across the Isthmus of Panama and onto California, so that her husband Joseph Scott — then a mariner — could become a gold miner. Soon after they had settled in the rowdy mining community of Hangtown (now Placerville), Joseph died suddenly, leaving Elizabeth alone with their infant son, Oliver. Understanding that Hangtown was not a safe environment for a single mom, she soon made the move to Sacramento.
Elizabeth’s quick thinking soon came into play once again, after Oliver was refused entry to the local public school based on the color of his skin. After talking with her equally frustrated neighbors, Elizabeth’s determination to open a school grew beyond the necessity of educating her own child and toward bettering the lives of her entire community. Some of her first 14 students were adults.
Within three months of opening her home this way, Elizabeth was in need of a larger classroom; children of Asian and Native American descent also wanted to enroll. So she moved classes into the basements of the Siloam Baptist Chapel, and to St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church.
Within a year, the Sacramento School Board accepted Elizabeth’s school into the official school district, making Elizabeth’s the first African American public school in Sacramento. However, the Board also refused to provide her with any funding, following the example of the rest of the state. (Although the California Constitutional Convention had introduced a tax fund for state schools in 1849, local school boards routinely granted funding to white schools only.) As such, Elizabeth’s students agreed to pay tuition of one dollar per week to keep her doors open.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth herself kept involved in civic matters beyond her school. St. Andrew’s hosted California’s first State Convention of Colored Citizens in November 1855. The convention’s primary concerns were voting and housing rights, civil rights protections and access to education. Elizabeth was in attendance, as were 49 delegates from 10 California counties.
That same year, she married Isaac Flood, a man who, unlike Elizabeth, had been born into slavery. Flood had purchased his own freedom, moved to Oakland during the Gold Rush and in 1855 worked as a tradesman. At the time of their meeting, Flood was also a single parent to a young son. The merged family soon moved to the area east of Lake Merritt — then named Brooklyn. Elizabeth left her school in the capable hands of another teacher from Massachusetts, Jeremiah B. Sanderson. It was on his watch that a new schoolhouse was finally built for Sacramento’s children of color in 1855.
As one of the first African American families to settle in Oakland, the Floods made their presence felt immediately with a series of firsts. In 1857, Elizabeth turned their home into Oakland’s first private school for Black children. That same year, the couple’s first son together, George, was said to be the first Black baby born in Oakland. The next year, in 1858, the Floods helped establish Oakland’s first Black church—the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. When the church moved into a former schoolhouse, Elizabeth taught classes there, too.
In 1866, Elizabeth’s fight for better schools began to pay off. Up until then, no laws existed protecting the right of Black children to attend school. The Revised School Law required the establishment of a public school for Black students in any district with ten or more Black children that wanted to attend, or else make allowances for them to join white schools — as long as the majority of white parents didn’t object.
The following year, Elizabeth’s campaign for equal education came to a tragic halt when she died suddenly at the age of 39. But her loving husband picked up the baton, later serving as secretary on the Education Committee of the Colored Citizens of California. Crucially, in 1871, he successfully petitioned the Oakland School Board to admit children of color based on the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Finally, in 1880, integrated schools became California law.
Elizabeth and Isaac’s youngest child was just five when she lost her mother—but she certainly inherited Elizabeth’s determination. Lydia Flood Jackson was one of the first children in Oakland to attend a desegregated school, and went on to be a campaigner for women’s suffrage, speaking at the 1918 California State Women’s Convention and serving on the board of the Federation of Women’s Colored Clubs.
Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood dedicated her short life to bucking a status quo that steadfastly refused to serve her people. She understood that the best way to prevail over a system that excluded her was to work outside of it. She set good example after good example until the system decided to finally catch up. Those who remember her rightfully call her the Mother of Desegregated Education in California. The number of children’s lives she transformed is impossible to calculate.
For stories on other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, click here.
