Profile: Ella M. Rice (1863–1920)
Ella M. Rice was born Ella Mount in New Jersey in about 1863. She was serving as an organist at
the Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church in Bordentown, New Jersey, when she met and married Walter Allen
Simpson Rice; they later had four sons together. Her husband had been born a slave in South
Carolina, joined the Union Army at age eighteen, and became a teacher in the Reconstruction South
before moving to New Jersey where he was called to minister in the African Methodist Episcopal
Church. In 1886, the couple founded the Manual Training and Industrial School in Bordentown.
Based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the school provided trade-based
1881, the Rices believed that separate schools did a better job of educating and supporting African
American children. When the school was taken over by the state in 1894, the family moved to New
Brunswick, where her husband had previously been part of the A.M.E. church. In New Brunswick,
the couple founded another school for black children, the Colored Industrial School, a private,
coeducational boarding school, which opened in September 1897. Children at the school learned
skills like cooking and sewing. Her husband served as principal while Rice was an instructor.
When her husband died suddenly in January 1899, Rice took over as principal of the
school. Under her leadership, the school was renamed the Colored (later Rice) Industrial and
Literary Institute and liberal arts courses were added to the trade-based curriculum. She became
a leader in the black community in New Brunswick, frequently holding community fundraisers for
her school, with support from Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Throop Avenue
Chapel, Elks Lodge No. 215, the Colored Women’s Club of Middlesex County, Temple Anshe Emeth,
the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society, and the Rice School’s Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Ella
Rice was herself an active clubwoman who was President of the Colored Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union of New Brunswick and Vice President of the State Association of Teachers of
Colored Children. She was a founding member of the New Jersey Federation of Colored Women’s
Clubs in 1915, when she was elected treasurer. In 1917, Rice attended the NJFCWC convention
with Mt. Zion A.M.E. Sunday school superintendent Annie Timbrook Jackson (1864–1936) and
Ella M. Rice
Courtesy Mildred Rice Jordan
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