Alphonso Sumner

Alphonso Sumner was an African American man who opened Nashville, Tennessee's first Black school. Sumner was also a barber, a newspaper publisher, and a Northern abolitionist.

He opened his school March 4, 1833 with about 20 students. The school grew to have a student body of around 200 by 1836. The majority of the pupils were free Black children, but a few may have been enslaved. The rapid growth of the school led him to hire Daniel Wadkins be a teacher. In 1836 Sumner was nearly whipped to death by white vigilantes as he was accused in helping two runaway slaves. Soon afterward he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where he worked as an abolitionist.

In Cincinnati, Sumner was a publisher for the Disfranchised American, that city's first Black newspaper.