By the standards of his time Huxley, in particular, was a radical progressive. Huxley is best known for his championing of Darwin's theory of evolution, and become known as "Darwin's bulldog".
He was a passionate opponent of slavery, He championed education for women at all levels, and backed the formation of the first women's college at Cambridge University. As a member of the London School Board he played a key role in expanding education opportunities for working people.
The problem was that he also expressed the view that the "average negro" was less intelligent than the average white, what is nowadays termed "scientific racism", a view we nowadays find odious but was almost universally held in Europe and the United States at the time, including figures like Darwin, the radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, and Abraham Lincoln.
Are they all to be cancelled? Should we judge historical figures by modern standards? Or does it make more sense to ask whether they were a force for improvement or regression in their time?
Concerning race, Huxley was an active slavery abolitionist. Despite the fact that two sons of his favourite sister Lizzie were fighting for the pro-slavery Confederate side in the US Civil War, he declared in an 1864 address to the Ladies London Emancipation Society that “the North is justified in any expenditure of blood or of money, which shall eradicate a system hopelessly inconsistent with the moral elevation, the political freedom, or the economical progress of the American people.” He continued with a stinging attack on James Hunt’s pro-slavery paper, On the Negro’s Place in Nature, which argued “for classifying the Negro as a distinct species from the European”.
In 1865, Huxley joined the Jamaica Committee, which had been set up with the aim of prosecuting Edward Eyre, Governor of Jamaica, for his brutal suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion by freed slaves. The Committee was greatly in the minority when compared to Eyre’s supporters. Thus did Huxley find himself opposing his childhood hero, historian Thomas Carlyle, and his great friend Charles Kingsley. For joining the Jamaica Committee, Hunt (a notorious racist, even by the standards of his day) accused Huxley of “negromania.”
Concerning class, Huxley is renowned for his series of lectures for working men, which were so popular that one vicar went in disguise in order to get in, but his appointment to the London School Board led to his greatest role in giving members of the working class an equal chance in life. The Boards had been created to implement the 1870 Elementary Education Act (formally known as An Act to provide for public Elementary Education in England and Wales), a key step in introducing universal education. At that time, about half of children received no schooling at all. The London School Board widely influenced other such Boards across the country, and Huxley’s chairing of the Scheme of Education Committee was central to its success. In fact, Huxley was influential in nearly every aspect of the Board’s work, so overworking himself in 1871 that his doctor ordered rest, and he had to resign. Huxley later said, “I am glad to think that, after all these years, I can look back upon that period of my life as perhaps the part of it least wasted.”
Huxley was also influential in promoting education for women. He helped Elizabeth Garrett, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in England, in the initial steps of her career. He was also a supporter of Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, the first women’s college at Cambridge University; and he petitioned the university to open its degrees to women—though it took them another seven decades to do so. (Both Garrett and Davies sat with Huxley among the inaugural cohort of the London School Board.) In his 1865 essay Emancipation—Black and White, he wrote, “whatever argument justifies a given education for boys, justifies its application to girls as well.” Of course, this strikes us as obvious. But it was a radical idea for its time.