Ann Plato was a nineteenth century mixed race (African American and Native American) educator and author. She was the second woman of color to publish a book in America and the first to publish a book of essays and poems.
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Plato was born during 1820 in Hartford, Connecticut. Like many people of color who lived in America during the 1800s, there exists very little information about her. Most of what is known about her comes from the introduction of her book, written by Reverend W.C. Pennington, pastor of the Colored Congregational Church of Hartford, who called her "Platoess". Plato had a Native American father.
She was employed as a school teacher/misteress at the Black Zion Methodist Church School of Hartford. She was a member of the Talcott Street Congregational Church in Hartford.
In 1841, she published her only known book, entitled Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellanoeus Pieces in Prose and Poetry. The essays reflected the New England Puritan values of her environment. Topics included "Benevolence," "Education," "Employment" and "Religion." The essays stressed both the importance of education and of leading a pious, industrious life. The book also contained some poetry and biographies of departed female friends and acquaintances.
Some critics from later generations found Plato's essays and poetry to be overly moralizing as well as routine and lacking in originality. Many of them also derided her for not mentioning the issue of slavery in America, as some of her near contemporaries like Frances Harper and Charlotte Forten Grimke did. Her one reference to slavery in her book concerns its abolition in the West Indies in 1838 (perhaps a reference to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 valid throughout the British Empire).
Nothing is known about Plato's life after her book was published in 1841. Furthermore, the year of her death cannot be found.
In 1988, Oxford University Press released The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers with Professor Henry Louis Gates as the general editor of the series. Plato's book was reprinted as a part of this collection.
Trinity College, Connecticut, established the Ann Plato Fellowship in her honor.
"A good education is that which prepares us for our future sphere of action and makes us contented with that situation in life in which God, in his infinite mercy, has seen fit to place us, to be perfectly resigned to our lot in life, whatever it may be."
-Ann Plato
A good education is another name for happiness"
-Ann Plato
Shockley, Ann Allen. Afro-American Women Writers 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide, New Haven, Connecticut: Meridian Books, 1989. ISBN 0-452-00981-2