Julie Hayden (teacher)

Julie Hayden (about 1857 to 1874), sometimes written Julia Hayden, was an American Black school teacher who grew up in Spring Hill, Tennessee and attended Central Tennessee College in Nashville, a teachers' college for Black students. She moved to Hartsville to educate Black people, at a time when teaching Black people to read was interpreted as a challenge to white control. Within days of starting a teaching position at a school for Black children there, she was murdered on August 21, 1874, when members of the White Man's League invaded the home where she boarded and shot her. The state Superintendent of Public Instruction asked the county superintendent for a report, Black citizens of Spring Hill petitioned the governor to find the killers, and two men were charged and released on bail in October 1874. Historians Alan Friedlander and Richard Allen Garber wrote that she became the poster child of southern violence.