Mary S. Peake

Mary Smith Peake, born Mary Smith Kelsey (1823-February 22, 1862), was an American teacher, humanitarian and a member of the black elite in Hampton, best known for starting a school for the children of former slaves starting in the fall of 1861 under what became known as the Emancipation Oak tree in present-day Hampton, Virginia near Fort Monroe. The first teacher hired by the American Missionary Association, she was associated with its later founding of Hampton University in 1868.

Mary Smith Kelsey was born free in Norfolk, Virginia. Her father was an Englishman "of rank and culture" and her mother was a free woman of color, described as light-skinned. When Mary was six, her mother sent her to Alexandria (then part of the District of Columbia) to attend school. Living with her aunt Mary Paine, Kelsey studied for about ten years. The US Congress enacted a law prohibiting free people of color in the District of Columbia from being educated (as was the case in Virginia and several other southern states). (This was several years before Alexandria was retroceded to Virginia in 1846.) The new law closed all schools for free blacks in that city, as had happened in Virginia after the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831.

In 1839, at age sixteen Mary Kelsey returned to live with her mother. Despite the risk, she secretly taught slaves and free blacks to read and write, which was prohibited by law. She believed education was important to the race. In 1847 her mother married Thompson Walker and the family moved to Hampton, where they bought a house. In the 1850s she secretly began teaching enslaved and free black Americans and she was one of a number of black women whose teaching was, a few years later, officially sanctioned by the Union army as the United States entered the Civil War.

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