Lucy Stanton was probably the first African American woman to complete a four-year collegiate course of study. Stanton, the daughter of John Brown, a Cleveland barber active in the Underground Railroad, enrolled in nearby Oberlin Collegiate Institute (now Oberlin College) in northern Ohio. The institution would soon be noted for its abolitionist politics and admission of both male and female African American students. In 1850, Stanton completed the ladies course, which, unlike the B.A. program, required no Greek, Latin, or higher mathematics.

As president of the Oberlin Ladies Literary Society, Stanton was invited to offer a graduation address at the commencement exercises on August 27, 1850. Delivered just two weeks before the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act, a time when black and white abolitionists felt the cause was experiencing its greatest difficulty in years, Stanton bravely called upon her fellow women students to embrace the anti-slavery campaign. She also envisioned, perhaps to the surprise of many in her audience, the day in the not to distant future when slavery would be destroyed.

When I forget you, Oh my people, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may my right hand forget her cunning! Dark hover the clouds. The Anti-Slavery pulse beats faintly. The right of suffrage is denied. The colored man is still crushed by the weight of oppression. He may possess talents of the highest order, yet for him is no path of fame or distinction opened. He can never hope to attain those privileges while his brethren remain enslaved. Since, therefore, the freedom of the slave and the gaining of our rights, social and political, are inseparably connected, let all the friends of humanity plead for those who may not plead their own cause.

Reformers, ye who have labored long to convince man that happiness is found alone in doing good to others, that humanity is a unit, that he who injures one individual wrongs the race;—that to love ones neighbor as ones self is the sum of human virtue—ye that