Desiring to have better training than what was then given to persons of color in Detroit, she went to Toronto where she studied English, history, drawing and needlework.

In later years she attended the Teachers' Training School in Detroit.

She became a public-school teacher there in 1863 and after fifty years of creditable service in this work she was retired on a pension in 1913.[39] The Negroes in the North had not only shown their ability to rise in the economic world when properly encouraged but had begun to exhibit power of all kinds.

There were Negro inventors, a few lawyers, a number of physicians and dentists, many teachers, a score of intelligent preachers, some scholars of note, and even successful blacks in the finer arts.

Some of these, with Frederick Douglass as the most influential, were also doing creditable work in journalism with about thirty newspapers which had developed among the Negroes as weapons of defense.[40] This progress of the Negroes in the North was much more marked after the middle of the nineteenth century.