Martha Ellen Sampson Forrester (d. 12 November 1951), reformer and civil rights activist, was born in Richmond about the middle of the 1860s and was the daughter of Lewis Sampson, a livery driver, and Mary Sampson (maiden name unknown), free Blacks who lived in the Monroe Ward section of the city. She attended the Richmond Colored Normal School, which had been established in 1867 to train African American teachers. Completing the school's rigorous program, she received her high school diploma and teaching certificate in 1876. She began teaching at the city's Navy Hill School in 1884.
As a schoolteacher, Martha Sampson represented a burgeoning Black middle-class that included other Richmond Colored Normal School alumni such as Rosa Dixon Bowser, who helped found and served as president of the Virginia State Teachers Association, and Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman in the country to be president of a bank. Sampson likely knew these women through her involvement in Richmond's Black women's organizations and was connected to a larger network of women professionals engaged in educational activism.
On 11 July 1889, she married Robert S. Forrester, a successful Richmond businessman whose father Richard Gustavus Forrester was among the first African Americans who served on the city council in the 1870s and the school board in the 1880s. Martha E. Forrester and her family, which included a daughter, moved to East Leigh Street by 1900, in a section of Jackson Ward dubbed Quality Row because of the number of elite Black society members who lived there.
As an educated woman and the wife of a respected member of the Richmond business community, much was expected of her. As the school board prohibited married women from teaching, she no longer taught in the city's public schools. The rise of Black women's social activism, spurred on by reformers such as Janie Porter Barrett, urged Black middle-class women to organize and address the problems of racism, education, health, and women's lack of voting rights. Many female educators, including Forrester, heard the call and she became a founding member of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs in 1908, and likely joined the Richmond Council of Colored Women, founded by Walker in 1912.
After the death of her husband in 1907, Forrester continued to manage his florist business. About 1915 she moved to Prince Edward County to live with her daughter and son-in-law in Farmville. There she joined the First Baptist Church and served as secretary of its Missionary Society. Forester recognized the economic and educational deficiencies in her rural community, most notably the limited availability of public education for Black children. On 6 April 1920, she and a small group of women launched the Farmville Council of Colored Women to address educational disadvantages and render support to the Black community. In 1922 the group affiliated with the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, thus expanding its social activism to the regional and state level. Forrester led the Farmville Council's involvement in supporting the Federation's initiatives, including the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls in Hanover County.
As president of the Council of Colored Women for thirty-one years, she prioritized access to public education for Black students in Farmville, focusing on the need for new school buildings, longer school terms, bus transportation, and a four-year accredited high school. These goals were daunting in the face of strong resistance by local and state white leaders. In May 1921, when Forrester and a community committee formally requested that the Prince Edward County school board build a Black school in Farmville, the board responded that African American residents needed to raise $5,000 of the projected $15,000 cost. Getting to work immediately, Forrester sent a fundraising letter stressing, "Nothing is so much needed as a School for our boys and girls."
Over the next four years, the Council of Colored Women helped lead the campaign for the new school. Members pledged to raise $1,000 of the required contribution themselves, and they organized many of the community fundraising activities such as social gatherings and rallies, musical and theatrical events, bake sales, and door-to-door solicitations. Council members were encouraged to register to vote so they could approve the bond issue. Forrester underlined the campaign's urgency in the Farmville Herald, saying, "Let us all get to work, no time to talk or play. It is hoped our white friends will assist us when called upon." A Council member later recalled Forrester's personal commitment, noting that despite needing a cane to walk, "she would go down to see the principal and shake the cane in his face. 'We need this,' she would say. She was a forceful lady." In 1926 voters passed the school bond issue for a new elementary school, which began construction later that year.
Forrester and the Council turned their attention to the lack of a four-year high school for African American students. When the county refused to build a school, the community petitioned the school board to allow grades eight through twelve to be taught on the second floor of the new elementary school. Again, the school board's approval was contingent on the Black community funding teacher salaries, equipment, and textbooks. Council members supported efforts to raise funds that enabled Black students to graduate from high school locally.
By 1935, however, unsustainable crowding plagued Farmville's only Black school building as more than 460 students packed into a building designed for 325 students. Parents continued to contribute extra funds beyond their taxes to mitigate teacher shortages and a lack of educational resources, and Forrester and Council members demanded a new, state-funded, standalone high school. When federal funding became available in 1938, the Prince Edward school board agreed to build the first Black high school in Farmville. R. R. Moton High School opened in 1939 with no cafeteria, infirmary, gymnasium, or locker rooms, and had only eight classrooms that were soon overcrowded with more than 450 students by 1950 attending a school built for 200. Having worked so hard to improve the educational opportunities for Farmville's Black youth, Forrester must have been disappointed when the school board chose to house student overflow in poorly constructed outbuildings that leaked and were insufficiently heated. After students led a walkout protesting these conditions in April 1951, Forrester may have participated in community meetings with National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers to discuss legal actions that ultimately became part of the landmark desegregation lawsuit, Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Martha Ellen Sampson Forrester died of heart failure on 12 November 1951, and she was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Farmville. The Council of Colored Women paid tribute to her inspirational leadership, saying that she had built the organization "too well for us to ever falter. She was truly a woman builder." In 1996 the renamed Martha E. Forrester Council of Women saved the historic Moton High School building from demolition and helped enshrine it as a National Historic Landmark two years later.
Sources Consulted:
Birth year of 1863 on gravestone; United States Census Schedules, Richmond City, 1870 (age ten), 1880 (age twenty), 1910 (age forty-nine), Prince Edward Co., 1920 (age fifty-five), 1930 (age sixty-five), 1940 (age seventy-seven), and 1950 (age eighty-seven), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Marriage Register (age twenty-four on 11 July 1889), Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Ida J. Williams et al., The History of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (1996); Seventy-fifth Anniversary of Martha E. Forrester Council of Women, April 13, 1920–1995 (1995); Ninetieth Anniversary of Martha E. Forrester Council (2010), first quotation and portrait; Edna V. Allen-Bledsoe, "Martha E. Forrester and the Council of Colored Women, 1865–1954," unpublished manuscript, Dictionary of Virginia Biography Editorial Files, LVA; Farmville Herald, 10 Mar. 1922 (second quotation), 6 Jan. 1995 (third quotation and portrait); Farmville Herald and Farmer-Leader, 1 Feb. 1952 (fourth quotation); Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1 Mar. 1952; BVS Death Certificate, Prince Edward Co., with middle name and age "approx" eighty-eight; obituary in Farmville Herald and Farmer-Leader, 16 Nov. 1951.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Lee Ann Timreck.
How to cite this page:
Lee Ann Timreck, "Martha Ellen Sampson Forrester (d. 1951)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Forrester_Martha_E., accessed [today's date]).
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