## Running a Kindergarten for Twenty Years
The kindergarten Elizabeth Jennings Graham ran from her home at 247 West 41st Street is often mentioned briefly as a concluding fact about her later life, between the legal victory of 1855 and her death in 1901. It deserves more than a brief mention.
She ran the kindergarten for more than twenty years. That is not a brief initiative or a symbolic gesture; it is a sustained institutional commitment over decades, operated from a private residence, funded by her own resources, serving Black children who lacked access to the early education that the public system provided unevenly and often inadequately.
The kindergarten movement in the United States was itself in its early stages in the late nineteenth century. Formal kindergartens, based on Friedrich Froebel’s educational philosophy, were introduced to the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, and public kindergartens did not become standard features of American public education until the early twentieth century. Elizabeth Jennings was operating hers in the gap — the gap between an educational philosophy whose value was being recognized and a public system that had not yet implemented it broadly, and specifically the gap between what the public system provided to white children and what it provided to Black children.
She was described as founding the city’s first kindergarten for Black children. This claim, like many superlative historical claims, requires qualification and verification, but the sources that make it consistently describe her program as a pioneering institution in this specific regard. Whether or not it was precisely the first, it was an early and sustained example of a Black woman providing early childhood education from her own home for children whose access to such education was limited.