Biographical Profile of Sgt. Major Henry C. Marrs, 5th U.S. Colored Calvary

Every month, during the years 1868 to 1870, Henry Marrs sat down to fill out a report about the Kentucky school where he was currently teaching.  There were more than 30 questions before him.

These school reports were sent to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known more simply as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Anticipating the needs of the formerly enslaved Black population, the Bureau was established by President Lincoln and Congress on March 3, 1865.¹  One of its missions was to educate newly freed African Americans, something forbidden by law in many slave states. Education itself was not illegal in Kentucky, but many enslavers punished those who attempted to learn to read and write.

Marrs, however, had learned to read and write as a young man while still enslaved by Jesse Robinson of Shelby County. According to Henry’s brother, Elijah Marrs, Robinson encouraged literacy in all enslaved young men so they could read the Bible.² That literacy led to Henry’s promotion to Sergeant Major while serving in the 5th Regiment of the United States Colored Cavalry.

After the war, Henry decided to use his skills to become a teacher. Within weeks of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in April of 1865, Oliver O. Howard, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, ordered the assistant commissioners of each state to facilitate the creation of schools to educate the Black population of the South. It was part of the federal government’s plan to help the formerly enslaved become self-sufficient. According to the Louisville Daily Union Press, Black students poured into the schools throughout the South.   During a three-month tour, the Freedmen’s Bureau Inspector General, William E. Strong, found that many schools were flourishing and that the “ease and eagerness with which old and young freedmen went through elementary textbooks was astonishing.”³ 

But not everyone wanted to see Black Kentuckians educated. Beginning in 1866, the Kentucky legislature passed laws requiring that only the taxes paid by the Black population would be used to pay for their education. That money was then further divided to pay for Black indigents as well as for public education, with the designation that funds should be used first by county officials for the poor,  then whatever was left over could be used for Black schools. The legislature also added the burden of a tax on all adult Black men, thereby taxing the least who could afford it.⁴  Starting at a school in LaGrange, Kentucky, Marrs was careful in his reports to answer “taxation of freedmen” to one of the many questions of how his school was financed.  

Even with assistance from the Freedmen’s Bureau and benevolent societies from northern states,  such as the American Missionary Association, Black schools struggled to recruit and pay teachers. Another question in the monthly report hinted at a possible, and more dire, reason why: Sometimes Marrs would write simply “good,” but just as often he would write “good in this locality,” implying that he knew things were not as good elsewhere. And indeed, violence against Black people became so bad in Kentucky that Henry Marrs and five other Black men would write a petition to Congress in 1871⁵ detailing 116 acts of violence by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan. The Klan’s night riding included burning and attacking Black schools and teachers,  as well as the wanton murder of other Black Kentuckians.

Marrs’ teaching career spanned schools in LaGrange, Frankfort, and Lexington, and he eventually moved to Louisville where he convinced his brother Elijah to join him in forming the Baptist Normal and Theological Institute, which would become today’s Simmons College. Elijah Marrs notes in a memoir that after 16 years of teaching throughout Kentucky and Indiana,  Henry decided to go to college and graduated with high honors in 1883⁶. Sadly, Henry died the following year from typhoid fever, leaving behind his wife Anna and two sons, Charles and Robert. He is buried at Eastern Cemetery in Louisville.