Louisa “Lulu” Matilda Jacobs

Top left image: This portrait ca. 1852 - 1870, is thought to be of Louisa Matilda Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs daughter.
Source: Jean Fagan Yellin, private collector - Publisher of Digital: South Central Regional Library Council
Digital Collection: New York State Women's Suffrage Exhibition Collection.

Right top image: Gilbert Studios photograph of Harriet Jacob. Her only known formal portrait. Date: 1894

Bottom image: 1864 Photograph of the Jacobs Free School, which offered tuition-free schooling to African American children. Founded by Harriet Jacobs, the school was unique in being both free to use, and run by African Americans (the head of the school was Harriet's daughter, en:Louisa Matilda Jacobs, assisted by another young African American woman) instead of being led by White abolitionists. Harriet Jacobs is indicated with a small X beneath her.

This photograph was distributed to Northern abolitionists who had helped fund the school.

Source: Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University by way of The Journal of the Civil War Era.
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Bio

Louisa Matilda Jacobs was born enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina on October 19, 1833: and was a child of rape by Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (a congressman and newspaper editor) and the enslaved Harriet Jacobs, at a time when Harriet was enslaved by Dr. James Norcom. Louisa also had an older brother, Joseph Jacobs, born in 1829.

Harriet Jacobs had been sexually harassed by Norcom for many years, but she continually was able to fend him off and mistakenly hoped giving in to Sawyer's sexual harassment would be a deterrent to Norcom. As Harriet continued to refuse Norcom's advances, Norcom began to threaten her children in anticipation of coercing Harriet into a sexual relationship, and she became increasingly fearful for them.

Harriet chose to escape when Louisa was two years old in hopes that Norcom would sell Louisa and Joseph into a safer situation. Harriet's hopes proved correct when the children's father purchased the children from Norcom and sent Louisa to live with her great-grandmother Molly, then taking her to Washington, D.C. before sending her to live with a cousin in Brooklyn, New York. From Brooklyn, Harriet located Louisa and fled to Boston with her.

Education
While in Boston, Jacobs was educated at home; she afterwards attended the Young Ladies' Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York. She later obtained training to become a teacher in Boston.

Activism
Jacobs's mother Harriet became acquainted with Amy Post and her feminist abolitionist circle while Louisa was studying in Clinton, leading to both Harriet and Louisa becoming involved in the movement.
From 1852 to 1854, she alternated living with the White American abolitionist Zenas Brockett family, who operated an Underground Railroad station in Manheim, western New York State, and assisting her mother at the Hudson River home of Home Journal editor Nathaniel Parker Willis.

From 1856 to 1858, Jacobs lived with the family of Willis’s sister, author and journalist Fanny Fern and her husband, biographer James Parton. Fanny Fern’s abusive rages and unfounded accusations of impropriety with Parton culminated in her attempt to physically attack Jacobs in the spring of 1858.
Jacobs left the Parton’s New York household abruptly and moved back to Boston where she remained through the early 1860s. She also spoke about women's suffrage on an American Equal Rights Association lecture tour through New York state in 1867 which included other activists such as Susan B. Anthony and Charles Lenox Remond.

Career
The Jacobs Free School
In 1863, during the Civil War Jacobs and her mother founded Jacobs Free School, a Freedmen's School in Alexandria, Virginia, putting her teaching education to use by educating Black children who had been freed from slavery. The school grew quickly, requiring a second teacher to be hired within just a few months of opening.

Three years later, she moved to Savannah, Georgia with her mother and founded a new Freedmen's School, which Louisa chose to name Lincoln School. In 1868 Jacobs and her mother sailed to England to raise funds for a home for women and children in Savannah, Georgia, and on their return to the United States, Jacobs taught at the Stevens School in Washington, D.C.

During the early 1870s, following her teaching career Jacobs established a boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her mother, which catered to Harvard faculty and students where they worked and lived side by side, with Jacobs taking on most of the responsibility in later years as she also cared for her ailing mother. In late 1879, Jacobs and her mother moved to Washington, D.C., and operated another boarding house patronized by Governor William Claflin and Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts.

For at least two summers (1882 and 1883), she supervised the thriving canning and bakery business of the E.T. Throop Martin family at their family estate, “Willowbrook,” in upstate New York.

Louisa started her own jam and preserves business in Washington in 1883 while simultaneously teaching sewing and cooking in the Girls Industrial School at Howard University. In late 1884, with her mother ill but insistent that they be hospitable to their second family, Louisa reluctantly accepted geologist Bailey Willis and his wife as boarders.

In the spring of 1887, Louisa and her mother boarded James Monroe Trotter, the District of Columbia recorder of deeds. From 1891 to 1893, Louisa Jacobs worked in the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1896 she participated in the gathering of the Colored Women’s League at the home of Frederick Douglass.

After her mother’s death in 1897, she became assistant matron, then matron, at the National Home for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington, D.C. From 1903 to 1908, she worked as preceptress at Miner Hall, Howard University. Never married, Jacobs retired at the age of seventy-five due to a heart condition. She spent most of her remaining years with the Willis family, who had become like family during her mother's tenure with them.

Literary Works And Memoirs
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs - In Harriet's popular memoir of life as an enslaved woman, the early years of Louisa's life are included under the pseudonym 'Ellen.'

The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers edited by Jean Fagan Yellin - A collection of important documents and correspondence regarding Harriet and her family, including correspondence belonging to Louisa and documents such as a report of her school in Savannah, and her final will.

Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879-1911 edited by Mary Maillard - A collection of letters between Louisa and many acquaintances.

Later Life And Death
Louisa Matilda Jacobs suffered from a heart condition and her health deteriorated following several years of being a full time nurse to her ailing mother. She died on April 5, 1917, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was buried alongside her mother in the family plot of the Mount Auburn Cemetery.
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Source: Wikipedia
Harriet Jacobs, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Jean Fagin Yellin,
Kate Culkin, Scott Korb, eds., Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (Chapel
Hill: UNC Press 2008); Annie Wood Webb Papers, private collection,