Album She Rose from Kicha

Bertha Hansbury

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 20:09:56 +0000

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Bertha Allena Hansbury was born and educated in Detroit. After graduating from the Detroit Conservatory of Music, she did post-graduate work in Berlin, Germany. Upon her return to this country in 1909, she established a popular music studio where she taught over three hundred students. In 1925 she established the Bertha Hansbury School of Music at 544 Frederick in the Cultural Center.

After the end of slavery, African-American leaders focused much of their attention on education, seeking to lift up their students and achieve a measure of dignity and respect that had been previously denied them. Teachers and students seeking to raise up themselves and the broader Black community looked to existing educational models, many of which emphasized German language, philosophy, and music. Increasing numbers of students, most notably W.E.B. Du Bois but also musicians like Clarence Cameron White, Felix Weir, Will Marion Cook, and Hazel Harrison, also began traveling to Germany to pursue their studies, hoping to accrue cultural capital that they could deploy to help their communities rise up in the face of a system that still denigrated them.

Bertha Hansbury Phillips (1888-1976), was an important figure on the Detroit musical scene who sought out German study. After graduating from the Detroit Conservatory of Music in 1908, she studied in Berlin for a year. When she returned from Germany, Hansbury established a music studio in Detroit and in 1925 founded the first African-American music school in Michigan. She hoped “to give her people not only a place for the student class to attain cultural value” but also provide an opportunity for talented musicians and teachers to develop their talents when they might otherwise have laid them aside, “fearing there would be no future use for them.” The school was an important cultural institution for a time but was forced to close during the Great Depression.

Hansbury continued to exercise a broader influence not least through her daughter, Ruth (Aruthia Elizabeth Phillips) Mason (1923-2011). Mason became well-known as a disc jockey in Harlem and later helped develop the pathbreaking jazz label Blue Note Records, founded by her German husband Alfred Lion.

Sources: E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, Detroit Public Library (detroityes.com) (E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, Detroit Public Library); Black Central Europe, Jeff Bowersox.

Lucille Berkely Buchanan

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:44:00 +0000

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Though Lucille Berkeley Buchanan was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Colorado, her name and legacy were nearly lost to CU (Colorado University) history.

Thanks to the dogged detective work of a CU professor and the grass-roots support of students and faculty, this trailblazer is being remembered — and honored — with an endowed scholarship and, separately, an undergraduate essay prize.

Seven years ago, someone gave Polly McLean, an associate professor of journalism, a surprising newspaper clipping. The first black woman to graduate from CU had died in 1989 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Denver, it said.

Buchanan’s graduation date was 1918. But the first black woman to graduate from CU had long been identified as Ruth Cave Flowers, who graduated in 1924 and who later overcame significant racial barriers to become a school teacher.

As university archives, genealogical records, property records and other sources confirmed, Buchanan was actually the first, and her life was remarkable in its own right.

Born in 1884 in a mule barn southwest of Denver, Buchanan was the daughter of emancipated Virginia slaves. In 1905, her father built the Queen Anne house in which she spent her later years. It sat on land her mother bought from circus mogul P.T. Barnum.

Buchanan got a teaching certificate in 1905 from the Colorado State College for Education at Greeley. After teaching for a decade, she studied for a year at the University of Chicago. Then she came to CU. So it was that in June 1918, she became the first black woman to earn a degree from CU.

The moment was historic but sad; officials would not let her climb onstage to accept her diploma.

Afterward, she taught in the Chicago Public School system. She retired in 1949 and returned to Denver and the home her father had built. She died in a nursing home at the age of 105.

CU's German Program announced the first annual Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Undergraduate Essay Prize in spring of 2008.

The prize honors the fact that Buchanan was a German major, and it carries a $200 prize for the best paper originally written for a CU German class.

Source: Colorado University at Boulder

Clara Belle Williams

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:37:52 +0000

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Clara Belle Drisdale (1885-1994), was born in Plum, Texas in October 1885. She attended Prairie View Normal and Independent College (now Prairie View A & M University) in Prairie View, Texas beginning in 1903, and was valedictorian of her 1908 graduating class. She married Jasper Williams in 1917, and had three sons: Jasper, James, and Charles. Her husband died in 1946.

Williams took courses at the University of Chicago, and then enrolled at the New Mexico College of Agriculture & Mechanic Arts in the fall of 1928.

Taking courses only offered during the summer, while she worked as a teacher at Booker T. Washington School in Las Cruces, New Mexico, she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from NMCA&MA in 1937 at the age of 51.

During a time when Las Cruces’s public schools were segregated, Mrs. Williams taught at the Booker T. Washington School for more than 20 years.

Mrs. Williams’ three sons all went to college and graduated with medical degrees. Charles attended Howard University Medical School in Washington D.C., Jasper and James graduated from Creighton University Medical School in Omaha, Nebraska. They went on to found the Williams Clinic in Chicago, Illinois.

Clara Belle Williams went on to receive many honors during her lifetime. She succeeded despite significant obstacles of discrimination placed before her while pursuing her higher education. In 1961, New Mexico State University named Williams Street on the main campus in her honor. She received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws degree from NMSU in 1980.

Clara Belle Williams Day was celebrated on Sunday, February 13, 2005 at NMSU. Included in the festivities was the renaming of the NMSU English Building as Clara Belle Williams Hall.

Mrs. Williams passed away July 3, 1994 at the age of 108.

Panorama New Mexico State University Alumni Magazine
By Karl Hill

Mary Henrietta Graham

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:34:19 +0000

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Mary Henrietta Graham was born in 1858 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was the first African American woman admitted to the University of Michigan and the first woman of color to graduate. In 1880 she received a Bachelor’s of Philosophy in literature. In 1882 she married Ferdinand Lee Barnett, an attorney and civil rights activist. The couple moved to Chicago and worked on Barnett’s paper the Chicago Conservator, which was the first Black Newspaper in the city. Graham later died in 1890. Her husband stayed in Chicago and eventually married Ida B. Wells, the famous anti-lynching activist.

Bachelor of Philosophy and Literature
Michigan Historical Society

State of Virginia's First

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:18:19 +0000

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The first Black women in Ettrick, Virginia to vote in 1920 were members of the Virginia State University faculty. They were from left to right in front: Mary Branch, Anna Lindsay, Edna Colson, Edwina Wright, Johnella Frazer (Jackson), and Nannie Nichols. Back row left to right: Eva Conner, Evie Carpenter (Spencer), and Odelle Green.

Source: Virginia Historical Society

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 18:42:34 +0000

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Irene Morgan Kirkaldy (1917 - 2007), whose defiance of bus segregation laws more than a decade before Rosa Parks’ landmark case helped lay the foundation for later civil rights victories.

LA Times
By Elaine Woo

On a hot July morning in 1944, Kirkaldy, who was then known as Morgan, was riding a crowded Greyhound bus from Hayes to Baltimore when a white couple boarded and the driver demanded her seat. The mother of two, who helped build B-26 bombers at a plant in Baltimore, refused.

She had no overarching agenda to challenge the entrenched racism of the era and no intention of picking a fight. If she had, she would not have taken a seat at the rear of the bus, in accordance with Jim Crow laws.

Morgan refused because she had paid for her seat and she wasn’t feeling well, having recently suffered a miscarriage.

“I can’t see how anybody in the same circumstances could do otherwise,” she told the Washington Post years later. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’d paid for my seat. I was sitting where I was supposed to.”

Her rebellion led to her arrest and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided in her favor June 3, 1946, when, in Morgan vs. Virginia, it declared interstate bus segregation unconstitutional.

The Parks case involved intrastate bus travel and attracted far more public attention, in part because of the bus boycotts that followed in its wake and the eloquent advocacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But “if you know the name Rosa Parks, you need to know the name Irene Morgan,” said Robin Washington, an editor at the Duluth News Tribune who produced an award-winning 1995 documentary about the freedom riders called “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!”

“She did everything that Rosa Parks did, with very little knowledge that anyone would come to her aid. Irene Morgan was simply doing what she thought was right,” Washington said.

Her case inspired the first formal “freedom ride” in 1947, when an interracial group led by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin traveled by bus and train from Washington, D.C., to Louisville, Ky., to challenge Southern states to implement the Supreme Court’s decision in the case. Their actions in turn set the mold for the famous rides across the South during the spring and summer of 1961, which helped awaken the nation to racial injustice.

On that July day in 1944 when Morgan rode the bus, all she wanted was to get home to Baltimore to see her husband and her doctor. She had left her children with her mother in Hayes and hoped the doctor would tell her she was well enough to return to work at the plant where she helped assemble B-26 Marauders.

The Greyhound was jammed, leaving her no choice at first but to stand in the aisle. After a short while, Raymond Arsenault wrote in his 2005 book “Freedom Riders,” she “accepted the invitation of a young black woman who graciously offered her a lap to sit on.” About 20 miles later, a seat opened up and Morgan sat down.

The back of the bus was an ever-shifting zone that was reduced depending on the number of white passengers. On this day, Morgan found herself sitting directly in front of a pair of whites, even though she was in the third row from the back. Because she was not sitting next to a white person, she thought she was safe. But then two more whites boarded the bus and the driver turned to Morgan and the woman next to her.

He told both of them to give up their seats. Morgan refused and also tried to stop her seatmate, a young mother, from complying, saying: “Sit down. Where do you think you’re going with that baby in your arms?”

At the next town, Saluda, the driver headed for the jail. A deputy claiming to have a warrant for her arrest ordered Morgan off the bus. “You don’t even know my name,” she told him, and ripped up the warrant.

According to her granddaughter, she then said she was willing to be arrested but warned the deputy not to touch her.

Unschooled in nonviolence but a firm believer in self-defense, Morgan made the deputy regret his next move. “When he put his hands on me, I kicked him where men should not be kicked,” she told Newsday in 2000. He hobbled off the bus, and another deputy weighed in. When he tried to grab her, “I started to bite him,” she recalled, “but he looked so dirty I didn’t want to touch him.”

She was thrown in jail, charged with resisting arrest and violating Virginia’s Jim Crow transit laws. Her mother paid $500 bail, and three months later, determined to see justice served, Morgan stood before a judge in Middlesex County, Va., to plead her case. She agreed to pay the $100 fine for resisting arrest but would not concede on the issue of breaking segregation laws.

Her decision to appeal the latter conviction caught the attention of lawyers for the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, who were searching for test cases to challenge the Jim Crow laws.

Marshall and his team, which included Spottswood Robinson and William Hastie, took the case to the Supreme Court using an unusual argument. They did not argue that segregation was wrong. They argued that it impeded commerce between the states.

The court ruled 6 to 1 in Morgan’s favor, declaring that “seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single, uniform rule to promote and protect national travel.”

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the black New York congressman from Harlem, called the case “the most important step toward winning the peace at home since the conclusion of the war.”

Morgan was thrilled by the victory, but it was largely ignored by bus companies, which treated the decision “as if it did not exist,” James Peck, one of the organizers of the 1947 freedom ride, wrote. As the movement moved on to other battles, Morgan returned to her family.

She faded into obscurity but didn’t shrink from carrying out a personal vision of justice. A high school dropout, she worked an extra job to put her sister through college. She helped save a man from a burning house. She drafted petitions to desegregate Baltimore schools.

Late in life, she returned to school, earning a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University at 68 and a master’s in urban studies from Queens College at 73.

The granddaughter of slaves who had worked as a laundress and a maid, Morgan received overdue recognition in 2000 when she was 83 and the town of Gloucester, where she had boarded the bus in 1944, honored her with a day called “A Homecoming for Irene Morgan.”

The next year, President Clinton called out her name, along with those of Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron and 25 others, to receive the Presidential Citizens Medal. The citation noted that she “took the first step on a journey that would change America forever.”

Carlotta Stewart-Lai

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 01:54:36 +0000

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The third child of T. McCants Stewart and Charlotte Pearl Harris, Carlotta Stewart was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she attended public schools during her formative years. Although her father had spent several years in Liberia, Africa, Carlotta had never traveled outside of the continental United States before coming to Hawaii. She was eighteen when she arrived in Hawaii in 1898, accompanying her father and stepmother.

The first evidence of Carlotta's activities appears in 1902 when she graduated from the Punahou School, Oahu College. After graduation, Carlotta completed the requirements for a Normal School certificate, which she received in 1902, and promptly accepted a teaching position in the Practice Department of the Punahou Normal School in July, right after her graduation. Carlotta remained at the Normal School for several years where she taught English.

Carlotta’s decision to remain in Hawaii, rather than return to the mainland, proved to be an advantageous one, for by 1909 she had been promoted to principal of the Koolau elementary school. Stewart's mobility in the space of seven years was an impressive achievement. While many black women had established careers in teaching and a handful as administrators by 1909, it was unusual for a black female at the age of twenty-eight to serve as principal of a multiracial school. Stewart's upward mobility reveals that blacks were more likely to obtain professional jobs in Hawaii than in many West Coast cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. Teaching and administrative positions would not be open to African Americans in most western cities until the 1940s.

In 1916 Carlotta married Yun Tim Lai in Kauai County. Lai, the sales manager of Garden Island Motors, Ltd., an automobile dealership in Lihue, Kauai, was five years younger than his new wife. The marriage ended in 1935 when Lai died suddenly in Hong Kong while visiting relatives. Carlotta never remarried.

By 1951, ill health forced Carlotta Stewart to enter a Honolulu nursing home. Her health declined rapidly, and on July 6th 1952, she died. Carlotta was a trailblazer, not only for black women in Hawaii, but for black women throughout the entire western United States. In many respects, her work remains a blueprint for what American society hopes, one day, to become.

Sources: The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present edited by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin; African American Odyssey: The Stewarts 1853 - 1963 by Albert S. Broussard

Dr. M.B. Lucas

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:47:57 +0000

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Mrs. Marie B Lucas, M.D., from the Howard University Medical College, class of 1914, has been announced by the District of Columbia Board of Medical Examiners as having passed with credit the examination held by them last month for license to practice medicine in the District. There is probably no graduate of this year's classes of Howard in whom the people of Washington are more deeply or more lovingly interested than in this rare example of true and courageous womanhood.

Dr, Lucas was formerly a Washington public school teacher. She has the distinction of being the only woman to graduate from the Medical Department this year. Her record during the four years course was among the highest; and last year she was awarded the Perry prize in pediatrics. She is the wife of M. Grant Lucas, Principal of the Bruce School, Washington. Their only son, Frank V Lucas, has been promoted to the third-year class of the M Street High School.

FYI: The Bruce School was erected in 1898 in what was then a wealthy, upper-middle class suburb with a large black population. The eight-room school was designed by William M. Poindexter, a prominent Washington architect in private practice working for the Office of the Building Inspector. The school’s namesake, Blanche Kelso Bruce, born enslaved, and the first black to serve a full term in the United States Senate during Reconstruction (1875-1881). A member of Washington, D.C.’s black aristocracy, he held other public offices including Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C. Naming the school in Bruce’s honor reflected the optimism of the time that African Americans could achieve a high status in society through education. The school was closed in 1973 after the new Bruce Monroe school was built and was returned to the District of Columbia government which currently owns it.

Source: The Crisis Magazine, Nov. 1914 issue

Mary Watson Webster

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:31:15 +0000

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Grass-roots philanthropic groups, such as the National Sewing Council under the direction of Mary Hill Watson Webster, enabled Blacks holding nonprofessional jobs to contribute to the welfare of the community. Despite the lack of a formal education, Webster helped establish vocational training programs, set up a Home for the Colored Aged and provided clothes, food and fuel in the District and Africa.

On April 20, 1900, under the leadership of Mrs. Mary Watson Webster, a small group of women founded the National Sewing Council of the United States of America, Inc. Born out of frustration of rejection by the Needle Work Guild of America, and the needs of neighborhood families, this unique organization, which also invited men and children into its membership, is the earliest recorded benevolent society founded by Black Anacostia women.

The idea for an organization that would employ the talents of women occurred to Mrs. Webster after she read an account of the activities of the Needle Work Guild published in Harper's Bazaar. Inquiring about the requirements for establishing "a Branch among colored women," Mrs. Webster was visited by the national president, who expressed "pleasure" at her efforts to help "her people," but advised her that black women could not organize an independent branch, "but might have a colored section under a white Branch." Offended at the subordinate position offered, Mary Webster called a meeting with Barry's Farm/Hillsdale women to discuss the matter, and it was then decided to form an organization of their own. With membership open to those who pledged to contribute "two new plain garments each year of a donation of money," both men and women joined the society. Monthly dues of a spool of thread, a paper of pins, a package of needles, or other such useful items were used to aid and support the work of the sewing council.

Serving the community continuously for over seventy years, generations of Hillsdale families, through the Sewing Council, provided needed services to countless numbers in Anacostia and across the city.

In the tradition of the Black extended family, Mary Watson Webster and her husband, Daniel Webster with no children of their own, helped to raise orphaned children, one of whom became the third president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson, who was orphaned by the age of 2 when both of his parents, Mamie Lucille and William Ross Patterson died from tuberculosis.

Mary Watson Webster died November 15, 1925. In her Will she left a provision for the establishment of a home for aged colored women.

Sources: The Anacostia Story, 1608-1930 by Hutchinson, Louise Daniel; Anacostia Neighborhood Museum (1977); Washington Post

Minniebelle Derrick

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 23:32:44 +0000

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Miss Minniebelle Derrick, the daughter of the late Bishop W.B. Derrick, is the founder of the largest, youngest business enterprises of the day --- the Derrick Shorthand School of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Miss Derrick is a graduate of Wendell Phillips High School, and Columbia University. After her graduation from the latter institution, she was teacher of French at Wilberforce University until the illness and death of her father. On moving to Philadelphia she took a thirty-day business course from a local college, and was placed twenty-six days after enrollment. She then secured permission from Robert Boyd, author and inventor of the famous thirty-day course, to teach his system exclusively to Negro students. With a typewriter and no capital. Miss Derrick began her work. Today this school is the only one of its kind run by Negroes.

The Derrick Business School has within the past five years made such rapid growth and progress under the sound establishment, expert teaching and sane management of Miss Derrick that it is now centrally located in its own building in one of the most exclusive business sections of Philadelphia. This school also has its own dormitories for the accommodation of its students living out of the city and state.

The next time you visit Philadelphia call at her recitation rooms, Childs Building, Chestnut Street, and you will feel proud of this woman who is contributing such splendid well trained material to our business world.

In later life a bad marriage and divorce drained her resources and hampered the progress of her school. Once she got everything started up again, the Depression hit. She sold the building and regrouped, and carried on in different locations in Philadelphia until the 1930s, when she moved to Chicago, her home town.

She restarted the business and was doing well, but sadly died in Provident Hospital after an operation for gallstones on September 20, 1938. She was only forty-nine.

The Competitor, 'Women of Interest vol. 1, 1920 and Colored Boys and Girls Inspiring United States History and a Heart to Heart Talk About White Folks by William Henry Harrison, Jr.] (1921); The Competitor vol. 1, 1920

Mary Annette Anderson

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 21:34:09 +0000

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Phi Beta Kappa was founded by five students at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The first meeting was held on December 5, 1776. John Heath, the first president of Phi Beta Kappa, was determined to develop a student society that would be much more serious minded than its predecessors at the college, one devoted to the pursuit of liberal education and intellectual fellowship. The Greek initials for the society's motto, "Love of learning is the guide of life," form the name Phi Beta Kappa. The Phi Beta Kappa Society is the oldest honor society for the liberal arts and sciences in the United States. It is widely recognized, and is considered as the nation's most prestigious honor society.

Mary Annette Anderson was valedictorian of Middlebury's class of 1899, and the first African-American woman to be inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Mary Annette Anderson, a native of Shoreham, Vermont, matriculated at Middlebury in the fall of 1895 at age twenty-one. As with Martin Henry Freeman, her presence at the College also diversified the student body, albeit in a more complex way: Anderson joined the ranks of the growing number of young women now admitted to the College. By 1880, nearly half the colleges in the United States admitted women. Middlebury’s reason for following suit was largely financial; the College’s enrollment fell from a high of 168 in 1836 to a low of thirty-eight in 1882. Enrolling women allowed Middlebury to keep its doors open. May Belle Chellis was the first woman to matriculate – in 1883 – and to graduate in 1886, as valedictorian of her class. Nine years after Chellis graduated, Mary Annette Anderson became the first African-American woman to enroll at Middlebury College.

Similar to Freeman’s grandfather, Anderson’s father, Billy, a former slave from Virginia, migrated to Vermont after befriending soldiers in the Vermont Eleventh Infantry during the Civil War. Billy Anderson purchased a farm in Shoreham and earned his living as a blacksmith and wheelwright. In 1873, he married Philomene Langlois, an eighteen-year-old woman of French Canadian and native ancestry. They raised two children – Mary Annette, their first child, whom they affectionately called “Nettie,” and William, who would become a respected orchardist and state representative from Shoreham.

Nettie attended Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in Northfield, Massachusetts, the sister school to Mt. Herman School for Boys, her brother’s alma mater. She graduated from Northfield at the top of her class. At Middlebury, Nettie seems to have been well-integrated into the life of the College. One classmate described her as having “won the affectionate regard of all her classmates.” She developed at least two close, lifelong friendships, with Lucy Walker Southwick and Sarah Scoles, two fellow Alpha Chi sorority sisters.

Nettie excelled in her studies. Described as a brilliant student with a quick mind, Nettie graduated first in her class. She not only gave the valedictory address, “The Crown of Culture,” but she also became the first Middlebury woman to address the faculty and alumni at a formal dinner. Moreover, she was the first African-American woman to be inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Evocative of Freeman’s experience, all of Anderson’s friends received teaching offers in Massachusetts upon graduation, except Anderson. Like Freeman, she began her professional career teaching at a historically black college – Straight College in New Orleans. After one year, she accepted a teaching position at Howard University in Washington, D.C. There, Anderson met and – at age thirty-three – married Walter Lucius Smith, an African-American educator from Illinois, who was principal of D.C.’s Paul Laurence Dunbar School.

When Mary Annette married Walter, Howard University insisted that Anderson resign from her teaching position, in concurrence with its rules and regulations that barred married female faculty. Rather than remain idle, Anderson became an active member in the black women’s club movement, spearheading D.C.’s elite College Alumnae Club, founded in 1910. Through this club, Anderson mentored young black women seeking to attend college. She also extended her civic work to Vermont when she joined Shoreham’s Moravian Club, a women’s benevolent society that encouraged intellectual inquiry into a number of historical and contemporary topics.

From time to time, Mary Annette and Walter escaped the hustle and bustle and heat of D.C. by spending summers in Shoreham. While there, Walter undertook graduate work at UVM. During one such visit to their summer home in spring 1922, Mary Annette Anderson was struck with what her obituary describes as a “brief illness.” She died on May 2, 1922, at age 47.

Sources: Black History Month: Early Racial Diversity at Middlebury, The Life of Mary Annette Anderson, By William B. Hart (2016); middlebury.edu

Freddie-Mae Hill

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 21:31:39 +0000

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She was the first African-American resident of Madison to graduate from the University of Wisconsin.

Ms. Hill received her Bachelors of Science degree in home economics in 1928. Her parents were John and Amanda Hill, who owned Hill's Grocery at the intersection of Dayton and Blair.
Freddie-Mae Hill (1904 - 1987) taught home economics at Booker T. Washington’s famous Tuskegee Institute after receiving a B.S. in home economics in 1928. Her senior thesis was “The Evolution of Textile Printing.” Hill was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. While visiting relatives in Wisconsin, her father decided to move the family to Madison. Her parents owned and operated Hill’s Grocery in Madison for more than 50 years. Today, the Hill building has been designated a Madison landmark.

Source: Wisconsin Historical Society

Catherine Delany

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 16:14:45 +0000

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The daughter of a wealthy African-American butcher in Pittsburgh and his Irish wife, Catherine A. Richards married Martin Delany in 1843. Catherine gave birth to seven children, seven of whom lived to adulthood, and helped her husband with sales of his abolitionist newspaper The Mystery, and worked with him in the 'Back to Africa' immigration movement in the 1850s.

Catherine A. Richards, the daughter of Charles Richards, an African American, and Felicia Fitzgerald, a native of Cork, Ireland, was born in 1822 in Pittsburgh. Prior to the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, intermarriage between races had been forbidden in Pennsylvania, but with the passing of the act, the law was nullified.

Catherine was part of an elite Black family, one of the oldest and wealthiest in Pittsburgh. Her father was the son of Lucy and Benjamin Richards, known to many as “Daddy Ben,” a man of substantial wealth and property and a well-established butcher in the colonial era. An early settler, Benjamin had crossed the Alleghenies when Pittsburgh was just a village. He made substantial profits as a butcher and supplier of meat to the military. In 1810, the census for Allegheny County reported Benjamin as head of a free household of six. According to Hallie Q. Brown, in her book Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, Benjamin “erected and owned the first brick building in Pittsburgh where court sessions were held for many years.” His estimated worth was a quarter of a million dollars. Unfortunately, lawyers working on behalf of envious white businessmen disputed Benjamin’s legal possession of deeds. As a result, the bulk of Benjamin’s fortune did not go to his heirs. His son, Charles, owned a leading tavern and provided a comfortable and respectable life for his family but never acquired substantial wealth.

On March 15, 1843, at the age of 21, Catherine was married to aspiring physician Martin R. Delany at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on Front Street. During this same year, Delany established The Mystery newspaper. Catherine Delany helped her husband find agents to sell subscriptions in various cities. She, along with other Black women in the community “held a soiree for the benefit of the newspaper.” This event was held yearly on August 1 (the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies) in Arthur’s Grove, located just outside the city. Although for many the Fourth of July was a holiday to commemorate the birth of the United States, many Black and White abolitionists didn’t observe it given that many Americans were still in bondage. They celebrated on August 1 instead.

During the great fire of 1845 that destroyed much of Pittsburgh, Catherine Delany helped feed homeless families who were given shelter in the courthouse and other places. The AME Church on Front Street was destroyed, as was John Vashon’s barbershop and home. The Delanys’ former home had been destroyed by fire as well.

In 1856, Catherine Delany moved with her husband and family to Chatham, Ontario, which housed a colony of American Blacks near Detroit. By 1864, the Delanys resettled in Wilberforce, Ohio, where they educated their children. It was here that Catherine Delany died in 1894.

University of Pittsburgh: Free at Last? Slavery in Pittsburgh in the 18th and 19th Centuries; explorepahistory.com

Amanda V. Gray

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 14:31:56 +0000

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Amanda V. Gray (1869-1957) was an activist, educator and pharmacist. Gray, who received her pharmaceutical graduate degree from Howard University in 1903, operated a pharmacy in the black community in Washington D.C. She was heavily active in the community’s ongoing social, political and cultural issues.

Amanda Victoria Brown was born in Linneus, Missouri, on March 24, 1870 to Rice and Maria Brown. She attended the local schools of Atchison, Kansas, and worked there as a school teacher for several years before relocating to Washington, D.C. around 1893 when she married Arthur Smith Gray.

Dr. Amanda Gray was a pharmacist for the Woman’s Clinic in the District before partnering with her husband and opening the Fountain Pharmacy in 1905. According to an article in the Afro-American, Amanda Gray was the first black woman to own and operate a pharmacy in Washington, D.C. Their drug store was at 12th and U Streets, NW in the True Reformer Building. In addition to managing their business, Amanda and Arthur were members of the African American elite of Washington, and were active in several professional, civic, and social organizations, including the National Medical Association, the NAACP, the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, and the Mu-So-Lit Club.

After her husband passed away at the age of 48 on March 1, 1917, Amanda closed the pharmacy and joined the WWW I effort, becoming a director of YWCA camp hostess for African American soldiers at Camps Upton, Dix, and Taylor. The War Work Council sent her to Camp Sherman in Ohio as her last assignment. As one of the organizers and board members of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, after the war Amanda went to St. Louis and was president of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA there for 3 years.

Amanda returned to DC., and in 1922 married Andrew Franklin Hilyer, a lawyer, author, and civil rights leader. Arthur and Amanda Gray moved in the same social and civic circles as Andrew and his wife Mamie, before Mamie’s death on December 14, 1916. Andrew, born a slave in Monroe, Georgia, Aug. 14, 1858 or 1859, later moved to Omaha, Nebraska and Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending the local schools. He graduated from the University of Minnesota as the first African American graduate in 1882, moved to Washington, D.C., and obtained an LL.B. in 1884 and LL.M. in 1885 from Howard University. Mamie Elizabeth Nichols, from a long established family in the Washington area, married Andrew in 1886, and the couple had two or three children. Like Arthur Gray, Andrew Hilyer was a civil servant, working first as a clerk at the Treasury Department, then at the Interior Department, Division of the General Accounting Office. Andrew was also an inventor, patenting a water-vapor attachment for hot air registers and an evaporator for hot air registers in 1890.

Andrew passed away on January 13, 1925, and Amanda continued her civic and social activities, as a member of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, president and member of the board of the Ionia R. Whipper Home (a shelter for unwed mothers and abused women ranging from age 12-21), and serving on the advisory council of National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. She died at the age of 87 on June 29, 1957 at her home in D.C.

Source: The Pharmaceutical Era (Oct. 1912)

Madam N.A. Franklin

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 06:13:05 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Born in the small town of Cuero, Texas in 1892, Nobia A. Franklin was a Texas beautician and beauty entrepreneur. From a young age, she was fascinated with the world of beauty, styling the hair of her friends and neighbors, which eventually grew into a successful business.

Nobia Franklin married W. L. McCoy on June 7, 1907, and they had a daughter named Abbie. Franklin retained her maiden name and even gave her daughter the name Franklin, indicating a separation.

She operated a business in Fort Worth before settling in Houston. By 1915, she was running a salon in her home, and sold everything from hair tonics, creams and oils, to straightening combs, shampoos, and other cosmetics. Her business was centered around beauty products for black women, with cosmetics that were meant to flatter, rather than lighten darker skin tones.

In 1917, she opened the Franklin School of Beauty Culture in Houston to train more black women in her trade in what she called "the Franklin way."

By 1919 Franklin was a local celebrity. The Informer entertained readers with stories of her lavish parties, even announcing the menu and guest list. They printed her travel plans when she took an extended trip, and when Franklin renovated her downtown Houston parlor.

Franklin also opened a school and business in Chicago, but retained her status in Houston. Nationally, Franklin's business ranked third behind Annie M. Turnbo-Malone's Company, Poro, and Madame C. J. Walker's beauty empire.

On October 30, 1934, the first African American southern-born beauty operator to relocate north for expansion purposes, Nobia A. Franklin, died in Chicago. The family buried her back in Texas, in her birthplace of Cuero.

The Franklin School of Beauty celebrated its’ centennial anniversary in 2015, and is recognized as a historical institute, garnering support and recognition from leaders like Oprah, President Obama.

Sources: Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City
By Tyina L. Steptoe (2016); Urban Skin RX (Feb. 2020); Texas State Historical Assoc. article by Bernadette Pruitt

Carrie Lee

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 06:11:16 +0000

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Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts accepted New Bedford High School graduate Carrie Evelina Lee (1895-1979) for admission in 1913. Upon arrival, rejection from her assigned dormitory became the impetus for a cornerstone in the founding of what would become Smith College’s Black Student Alliance. Eventually assigned a room on campus, Carrie thrived and graduated in 1917. She became a lifelong advocate against discrimination.

Warrior Women

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 05:38:52 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, Nannie Helen Burroughs and others at a Baptist Women's gathering, in Chicago.

Source: Woodard’s Studio (Chicago, Illinois)

Edith Irby Jones

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:07:36 +0000

Kicha has posted:

I was inspired to become a doctor with the death of my sister. I felt that if I had been a physician, or if there had been other physicians who would have been available, or if we had money adequately - which may not be true - that this physician would have come to us more frequently and that she would not have died. [Photo and Bio: "Celebrating America's Women's Physicians, Changing the Face of Medicine."

In 1948, nine years before the "Little Rock Nine" integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Edith Irby Jones became the first black student to attend racially mixed classes in the South, and the first black student to attend the University of Arkansas School of Medicine. Her enrollment in a previously segregated southern medical school made news headlines across the nation.

Although Edith Irby had been accepted to attend classes at the University of Arkansas School of Medicine, she was not allowed to use the same dining, lodging, or bathroom facilities as other students. The daughter of a sharecropper and a domestic worker, Edith Irby was used to hardship. When she was five, she could not walk for eighteen months due to illness. When she was eight, her father died in a riding accident. Later, she lost a sister and other members of her family to typhoid.

Like many of her contemporaries, Edith Irby Jones was denied equal access to educational opportunities from childhood. But her abilities and talents were nurtured and supported by her family and the larger African-American community, leading her to believe that "you can do anything you want to do."

A high school teacher helped her get a scholarship to the historically black Knoxville College in Tennessee. After high school, African Americans in Little Rock and across Arkansas contributed to her medical school fund with dimes and quarters. High school alumni helped pay for her medical school tuition, while a similar effort sponsored by the black newspaper, the Arkansas State-Press, paid for her living expenses. Even the medical school's custodial staff supported her—placing a vase of fresh flowers on her table in the adjoining—and segregated—staff dining room every day. Jones, in turn, worked to help others, spending many nights traveling the state to help enlist members into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Jones recalled later that, while some white women in her class became good friends, her strongest support in medical school came from her husband, Professor James B. Jones, whom she met and married while she was a second-year medical student.

After receiving her M.D. in 1952, Jones practiced in her home town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, for six years. But she and her husband moved to Houston when the racial climate became sharply polarized. By then they had had two children, but Dr. Jones was determined to complete a residency in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine Affiliated Hospitals. The school welcomed her, but the hospital to which she was assigned segregated her and limited her patient rosters. She completed the last months of her residency at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C. In 1962, she set up a private practice in inner city Houston, which continues to thrive today.

Throughout her career Dr. Jones has passionately and steadfastly committed herself to social betterment, the poor, and her community. In 1985 she became president of the National Medical Association, established for black doctors who were not allowed to join the American Medical Association. She has also been active in the American Medical Women's Association and Planned Parenthood, as well as other groups. In 1991 she sponsored the establishment of a medical clinic in Haiti.

Edith Jones has received numerous awards and citations, most notably from the city of Houston and the State of Texas. In 1986 Houston honored her with Edith Irby Jones Day, in 1988 she was named American Society of Medicine Internist of the Year, and in 1998 the ambulatory center at the former Southeast Memorial Hospital was named in her honor.

Bertha Josephine Blue

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:02:43 +0000

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On a spring day in the early 1900s, a confident looking woman ushers a group of schoolchildren along the hilly sidewalk in Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhood. The children, many of them sons and daughters of Sicilian immigrants, are walking to First Communion practice at Holy Rosary Church. The woman, their first-grade teacher, is African-American.

Bertha Josephine Blue, was a member of Cleveland’s early black middle class. From 1903 to 1947 – this woman of enslaved grandparents taught at Murray Hill Elementary School. In Little Italy, the tightly knit East Side Italian neighborhood of checkered tablecloth restaurants and a checkered history dealing with outsiders.

But Blue used her determination, talent and heart to pierce this insulated community in such a way that it flooded her with love. It wasn’t a strategy, but a calling. You won’t find Blue in most of Cleveland’s history books, but more than a half- century after her retirement and death, the mention of her name still brought tender, responses from older residents of Little Italy.

Blue’s photograph graces the wall of the one room Little Italy Historical Museum.

“She was beautiful. We all loved her,” recalled Eva Maesta, a volunteer at the former museum and one of Blue’s former students. “Every birthday, she got a little cupcake for you with a candle in it. And this is when you couldn’t afford a cupcake.”

“She believed everybody should get a passing grade,” added Lauretta Nardolillo, another volunteer. “If you were a slow learner, she’d help you more. She never scolded you for getting things wrong.”

As a young woman, Blue couldn’t afford four years of college in a row. She did one year at Hiram College, 1899-1900, and took other classes at Miami University in Oxford. It was not until 1932 that she received a bachelor’s degree from Western Reserve University.

Blue’s life was full. There were high teas every afternoon at home, football games at Central High (starring her famous place kicking brother, Joe Blue), the Minerva Book Club, classes in calligraphy and folk-dancing. Blue once took her daughter to a party where bandleader Noble Sissle (best man at Joe Blue’s wedding) and pianist Eubie Blake played. There were annual trips to Oberlin to celebrate the end of slavery, and summer vacations at a black resort in Idlewild, Michigan.

Blue also helped her friend, activist Jane Edna Hunter, manage the Phillis Wheatley Association, a groundbreaking community house for black women. The house emerged to change minds and lives.

Blue adopted Jane Lee Darr, a 2 year old with pecan colored skin and blue eyes. When the adoption was finalized, the parental rights went to Blue’s mother. Then, when she died, the rights went to Blue, a rarity for a single working parent at the time. Darr remembers feeling immediately comfortable with Blue, how Blue touched her small head to calm her, how the house felt immediately like a home.

Schools were changing when Blue retired in 1947. At that time, Kusmer noted in his book, “A Ghetto Takes Shape,” there was a trend toward segregating black teachers with black students. The Civil Rights movement confronted that issue and many others in the 1960s. Blacks not only had the vote, they used it to right longstanding wrongs. In 1963, the year Blue died, city schools were overcrowded. Black students were sent to Murray Hill, but kept in classrooms apart from white Little Italy students.

Tension lingered for decades. Blacks complained of discrimination and other mistreatment in restaurants and on the street. In the 1990s, officials of Case Western Reserve University and Little Italy started meeting to deal with the problems. Reported racial incidents became scarce.

While some blacks were still not comfortable in the neighborhood, many more began using it.

Then the Little Italy Historical Museum published a history book. It was dedicated to three people: two of the neighborhood’s founding fathers and Bertha Josephine Blue.

“She was the first one we thought of,” said museum volunteer Nardolillo. “She was one of us. Everybody liked her so much and she was such a lovely, dedicated teacher, we felt she should get some recognition.”

Sandra Malek Vodanoff, a historical society volunteer and Lake View Cemetery docent, got a plaque installed at Blue’s gravesite, telling how much she was loved by the Italian-American community. Teachers of English as a second language also helped in the effort.

Source: teachingcleveland.org, Debbi Snook article "Bertha Josephine Blue" (Feb. 14, 2011)

Mamie Cunningham

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 06:08:22 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Above is her high school graduation photograph from 1905 from LA High School.

Mamie Virginia Cunningham White was the first African American clerk in the Los Angeles Post Office, and became an early real estate broker in LA and headed the city's first Negro Employment Agency.

Source: UCLA Collections, Miriam Matthews Photograph Collection