In July 2024, Dr. Rebecca Coleman made a discovery that had been hiding in plain sight at the Missouri State Historical Archives for more than 150 years. While using a high-resolution scanner to digitize a photograph cataloged simply as an unidentified school group from the 1870s, Coleman noticed something she had missed in a dozen previous examinations. Enhanced digital resolution revealed faint scars circling the neck of a Black woman standing before a wooden schoolhouse, along with additional marks on her wrists consistent with years of wearing manacles.
The photograph, dated April 1871, showed two women—one white, one Black—standing side by side before a schoolhouse surrounded by approximately 20 children of both races. The image was remarkable for its time, but the scars suggested something far more extraordinary than an unusual school portrait. Coleman called her colleague Dr. James Morrison, a specialist in African-American history during Reconstruction.
When Morrison saw the scars, he identified them immediately: iron collar and manacle marks, evidence of years of enslavement. What made the discovery even more startling was the date. In April 1871, only six years after abolition, integrated schools in Missouri were not just rare—they were illegal. The state had passed strict segregation laws in 1865, and operating a mixed-race school meant prosecution and often violence.
A formerly enslaved woman teaching in an integrated school should not have existed. The two historians began a search that would uncover a story of remarkable courage and brutal violence, all documented in a collection of personal letters that had been donated to the archive in 1995 but never fully cataloged. The letters were written by Katherine Hayes to her sister Margaret in Massachusetts between 1869 and 1872. They revealed that Hayes, the daughter of an abolitionist, had come to Missouri from the North with a specific purpose.
In September 1869, Hayes wrote of purchasing five acres of land near Pleasant Grove in Clay County, noting that local residents viewed anyone from the North with suspicion. She declared her intention to build a school where any child could learn, regardless of skin color, despite knowing she would be violating Missouri law. By March 1870, Hayes had met the woman who would become her partner. Eleanor Price had been enslaved on a nearby farm until 1865, and had learned to read in secret with the help of the farm owner’s daughter.
When Price heard about Hayes’s plans, she walked directly to the new arrival’s door and offered to help, stating she had been teaching freed people to read for four years. The two women decided to open the school together as equal partners, a decision Hayes acknowledged was radical. Their arrangement lasted for more than two years, and it was documented in a series of letters that recorded a campaign of escalating violence against them. The first direct threat came in August 1870, when someone nailed a note to the schoolhouse door warning them to abandon their plans.
Despite the threat, 12 students enrolled—six Black children and six white children. The violence escalated on the night of October 11, 1870. Hayes wrote that approximately eight to ten masked men surrounded the schoolhouse carrying torches and clubs. When the women stepped outside, the men demanded they abandon their work.
Price responded with defiance, stating that if educating children threatened their “natural order,” that order deserved to be threatened. A man struck Price across the face so hard she fell to the ground. She stood back up, blood running from her split lip, and told the attackers she had survived 25 years of being owned like property and would not be frightened by a nighttime raid. The men destroyed the schoolhouse that night, smashing windows, breaking desks, and tearing books to shreds.
When Hayes suggested they might need to leave Missouri, Price would not hear of it. They began rebuilding the next day. By November 1870, a new schoolhouse had been built, partially hidden among trees and difficult to see from the main road. Members of the freed people’s community helped with construction, working only at night for fear of being seen.
An elderly white farmer named Thomas, a Union Army veteran, offered to keep watch over the property, stating he had not fought to end slavery only to watch “cowards and nightriders destroy freedom with threats and violence. ”
Records from the period reveal Price’s extraordinary background in greater detail. A deposition from 1866, given in a legal case involving property disputes after the Civil War, documented that Price was born into slavery in Kentucky around 1836. She was made to wear an iron collar for three years as punishment for teaching herself to read using discarded newspapers.
She attempted to escape in 1859 and was subsequently chained during fieldwork. The research revealed that the Pleasant Grove School was not Price’s first attempt at integrated education. After the war ended, Price traveled to Kentucky and opened a school for freed children, which operated for nearly three months before authorities shut it down and jailed her for two weeks. In 1867, she tried again in Tennessee.
That school lasted five months before being burned to the ground, with Price barely escaping with her life after being severely beaten. When Hayes asked Price why she kept risking her life, Price answered that every child she taught destroyed the lie that Black people were incapable of learning, and every white child learning alongside a Black child destroyed the lie that they could not coexist as equals. The photograph referenced by Hayes’s letters was taken on April 20, 1871. A traveling photographer named William Hayes, no relation to Katherine, had initially hesitated to photograph a mixed-race school, fearing he would lose his business.
Price convinced him, arguing that without documentation, their story would be erased and future generations would be told that integration was never possible. All 22 students were gathered before the schoolhouse for the photograph. Price and Katherine Hayes stood together as equals, both holding their teaching books, their hands resting on the shoulders of students of different races. Price’s scars were visible in the photograph.
She made no attempt to cover them with a high collar or gloves. She was not ashamed of what they represented. Persecution intensified in May 1871. On May 16, the county sheriff arrested Price on charges of inciting social disorder and unlawful assembly.
Katherine Hayes demanded to be arrested alongside her partner, but the sheriff refused, telling Hayes she was a white woman from a decent family who would not be going to jail. The trial lasted less than two hours. Three prosecution witnesses testified that Price had been stirring up trouble by teaching ideas of racial equality. Since Price was Black, Missouri law prohibited her from testifying in cases involving white complainants.
Her attorney’s objections were repeatedly overruled, and no defense witnesses were called. She was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in jail plus a fine of $50, an enormous sum in 1871. The judge stated her punishment would serve as a warning to others. During the sentencing, the elderly farmer Thomas stood up and addressed the court, reminding the judge that he had fought in the Union Army and lost a son at Shiloh.
He declared that teaching children to read was not a crime, but hope. Katherine Hayes kept the school open every day of Price’s imprisonment. Other community members began helping in small ways, with a Black woman providing food for students and a white carpenter repairing desks at dawn to avoid being seen. Two mothers, one Black and one white, began assisting with lessons at separate times so they would not be seen together.
During a jail visit, Hayes found Price held in an eight-by-eight-foot cell with no window. Price had lost significant weight but remained determined. She told Hayes they were proving something their enemies wanted to deny: that a world of separation and hierarchy justified by law was not inevitable, but a choice. They were choosing differently.
Price was released on June 14, 1871, after serving her full sentence. The violence reached new levels in September 1871. Approximately 20 masked men seized Price while others held Hayes back. They stripped away her clothing and poured hot tar over her back, arms, and neck, covering her scars from slavery.
Then they covered her with feathers. Even with her skin burning from the hot tar, Price did not beg. She told her attackers they could cover her in tar but could not cover the truth. The children would continue learning.
A neighbor’s wife worked for three hours to remove the tar. The next morning, despite her injuries, Price insisted on going to school. She stood before the students, now numbering 23, and told them that what had been done to her was what hatred looked like when people were afraid of change. She told them they were what love and courage looked like, and that they were worth every scar she bore.
The letters continued through the fall and winter of 1871, describing growing numbers of students and an escalating toll on both women. Hayes wrote of constant exhaustion, of watching for threats, planning escape routes, and starting awake at every sound. By November, the school had 31 students. The letters ended abruptly in April 1872.
The final letter, dated April 3, revealed that Thomas had learned of a credible plan to kill them both. Men planning the attack had grown frustrated that legal prosecution and physical violence had not stopped the women, and had decided that their deaths were the only solution. Price initially wanted to stay, arguing that leaving would prove violence works and that courage has limits. Hayes convinced her, barely, that their deaths would serve no one.
The women held a final gathering with students and families. Price told the children that the school building was closing but their education was not ending, and several older students pledged to continue teaching the younger ones. Katherine Hayes returned to Massachusetts and taught at a school for Black children in Boston until her death in 1894. Price’s trail was harder to follow, but records eventually showed she taught in Philadelphia for 25 years, becoming an advocate for integrated education long before it was legally mandated.
Rebecca Coleman and James Morrison traced the fates of the students from the Pleasant Grove School through census records, city directories, and genealogical databases. The young Black student in the photograph became a teacher who operated a school in Kansas City for 40 years, teaching more than 2,000 students. A white student became a lawyer who took civil rights cases without charge. A girl named Ruth became one of the first Black women to attend college in Missouri and later founded three schools for Black children.
Another student became a minister who preached racial equality and was eventually forced to leave Missouri because of his beliefs. The historians documented that more than 60% of identifiable Pleasant Grove students went into education, activism, law, or ministry. The literacy rate among these students and their children was more than double the Missouri average for that period. In September 2024, Coleman and Morrison located 17 families who could trace their lineage directly to children who attended the school.
At a special presentation at the Missouri State Historical Archives, descendants viewed the photograph for the first time with full knowledge of its story. One elderly man, the great-great-grandson of the Black student in the photograph, said his grandfather used to tell stories about a school where Black children and white children learned together and where two women teachers were partners and friends. The family had always believed the stories were legends embellished over time. Another descendant, a middle-aged woman, recognized her great-great-grandmother among the girls in the front row.
She said her great-great-grandmother became a teacher and always said she was taught by the bravest women she had ever known. The photograph now hangs in the Missouri State Historical Archives’ permanent exhibition on education and civil rights. A placard beside it explains the scars visible on Price’s neck and wrists, describing them as purposeful evidence of what she survived and why she fought. The placard explains that Price endured 25 years of slavery, three years in an iron collar as punishment for teaching herself to read, and brutal violence for attempting to educate children across racial lines.
She taught in three different states, survived having schools burned around her, and endured arrest and tar-and-feathering. She never stopped believing that education and equality were possible. The two women taught together for only two years in Pleasant Grove, but their students taught for decades, and their students’ students continued the work.
The photograph kept their secret for more than 150 years, and now their story has been told.