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DESCENDANTS
OF SLAVE, OWNER TO MEET ON CAMPUS OCTOBER
22
ATHENS,
Ohio -- Descendants of John Newton Templeton, a former slave
and the first African-American graduate of Ohio University,
will meet descendants of Templeton's former owners for the
first time Friday, Oct. 22, on the Athens campus of Ohio
University.
The
Templetons and the descendants of William Williamson, who
brought Templeton family members to Ohio from South Carolina
after they were freed from slavery by Williamson's family,
will meet the day before the rededication of
Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium. The
auditorium is named in honor of Templeton and Martha Jane
Hunley Blackburn, who in 1916 became the first female
African-American Ohio University graduate.
Templeton
was born a slave of Thomas Williamson in South Carolina
around 1805. Though Templeton died in 1851 -- before the
Civil War or the Emancipation Proclamation -- he was
emancipated by his owner's will in 1813 and brought to Adams
County, Ohio, by his owner's son, the Rev. William
Williamson, a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist.
Templeton enrolled at Ohio University in 1824 and university
President Robert Wilson hired him to work in his home. When
he earned his degree in 1828, at a time when most blacks
were enslaved and illiterate, Templeton became the fourth
African-American college graduate in the United
States.
Blackburn
graduated from Ohio University in 1916 with a degree in
English
and a minor in home economics. Her father-in-law, John R.
Blackburn, was the university's first African-American
member of the Board
of Trustees.
Martha
Blackburn taught at Central State University and later at
Washington High School in London, W.Va. She received the
Alumni Association's Medal of Merit in 1979.
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