Charles Sumner Wilson
Charles Sumner Wilson was one of the first people of African descent to attend Tufts College. His work as a pioneering African American attorney reflects the complex relationship between the College’s Universalist principles and its earliest students of African descent, many of whom faced severe racial discrimination both during and after their tenure at the College.
Wilson was born in 1853 in Salem, Massachusetts. His father, Thomas C. Wilson, was a mariner who may have been born in Africa. His mother, Rhoda Rebecca Spencer Eldridge Wilson, was born free and descended from a Massachusetts family of African and indigenous ancestry. Educated in the Salem public schools, Charles Sumner Wilson attended Tufts after two years at Amherst College. At Tufts, Wilson studied Modern Languages and English Literature, and he lived in today's Packard Hall - then known as Middle Hall - with his roommate, Charles Francello Lewis.
This card records the studies, credit hours, and other information about the Class of 1878. The information here reveals that Wilson studied English Literature and German.
Although Wilson did not graduate from Tufts, he pursued a law career and passed the Massachusetts Bar in 1880. Wilson then moved to Maryland, where he challenged state laws that excluded Black people from the legal profession and was among the first African American to pass Maryland’s Bar in 1885. After decades of struggle, Wilson spent his final years at the Danvers State Hospital, where he died on January 17, 1904.