Barbara Ann White

Barbara Ann White is a Research Fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association and a retired public school teacher. She wrote the ground-breaking book, A Line in the Sand, which documents the history of Nantucket's school desegregation in the 1840s which led to the first civil rights law in the U.S. guaranteeing equal access to the public schools. She also contributed a chapter in "Nantucket's People of Color" edited by Robert Johnson. Her latest work is a biography of Cyrus Peirce, the director of the first public teacher training college in the nation, founded in 1839 in Lexington, Massachusetts. (It evolved into Framingham State University that just celebrated its 175th anniversary.) She is currently working on "Hidden Histories of Nantucket" with fellow author, Frank Morral. After that, she will work on a biography of Anna Gardner, a Nantucket school teacher who was among the first teachers to teach the freedman during and after the Civil War and who stayed teaching in the South long after most of the other Northern teachers had left.