Garnet, Sarah Smith Tompkins, 1831-1911.

Sarah J. Tompkins Garnet née Smith July 31, 1831, Brooklyn, NY - Sept. 17, 1911; African-American educator and suffragist from New York City who was a pioneer as the first African-American female school principal in the New York City public school system; daughter of Sylvanus and Anne (Springsteel) Smith, oldest of eleven children; her parents were farmers and owned land in Queens County, then part of Long Island; sister Susan McKinney Steward was the first African-American woman in New York State to earn a medical degree, and the third in the United States; married Samuel Tompkins who died in approximately 1852; began teaching in segreated New York City public schools; first African-American woman to be appointed as a principal in the New York City public school system; retired from active school service in 1900; founder of the Brooklyn suffrage organization, Equal Suffrage League in the late 1880s. And she was the superintendent of suffrage for the National Association of Colored Women; owned a seamstress shop in Brooklyn from 1883 to 1911; married abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet;

Sarah J. Tompkins Smith Garnet 31 Jul 1831, Queens, Queens County, New York - 17 Sep 1911, Brooklyn, New York; Educated by her grandmother, Sylvia Hobbs, began teaching at the age of fourteen in an African Free School; first black woman to be a principal in the NYC public schools and she began a night school program; married Rev. James Thompson, he died in the late 1860s; about 1879 she married Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, widowed in 1882; founder of the Equal Suffrage Club, a group of black women in Brooklyn who worked for political rights for women; joined the National Association of Colored Women and was a delegate to the Universal Races Congress in London; sister, Susan Maria Smith McKinney Stewart (1845-1918) graduated from NY Medical School for Women and Children and was a doctor in Brooklyn and at Wilberforce University in Ohio