Photos, videos and docs of Kicha, with the keywords: "Educator"

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

Charlotte Louise Forten Grimké

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:59:02 +0000

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Charlotte Forten was the first northern Black schoolteacher to go south to teach those who were formerly enslaved.

Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten was born August 17, 1837 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Robert Bridges Forten and Mary Virginia Wood. Charlotte’s grandfather, James Forten, a revolutionary war veteran and successful sailmaker, was one of the most prominent African American abolitionists in the United States. James and his activist wife, Charlotte (Vandine), educated their children and grandchildren in their home as Philadelphia’s schools were segregated. James was an active member of the American Antislavery Society and his wife and daughters were founders of the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society. The Forten house on Lombard Street hosted prominent abolitionists such as Richard Allen, William Lloyd Garrison and Samuel J. May. Their children were poets, educators, inventors, and entrepreneurs.

Charlotte’s mother, Mary Virginia, died when she was three. Her grandmothers and aunts became her surrogate mothers. Her father Robert remarried and for a time Charlotte lived in the country with his new family.

However, Robert wanted his daughter Charlotte to be educated in integrated schools and so through abolitionist and family connections, she was sent to live with the Remond family of Salem, Massachusetts, where schools were integrated. However, throughout her life, Philadelphia was always home for Charlotte, where she was welcomed and supported by her family.

Her grandfather James Forten was born in 1766, the fourth generation of a Philadelphia family of African descent. His father died when he was seven, so he helped support his family with odd jobs and received an education in the African School. During the revolution, he served on an American privateer, was captured and imprisoned. Once released, he traveled to London and worked at a sail loft. Returning to Philadelphia he apprenticed under sailmaker, Robert Bridges, eventually taking over the business in 1798. He became one of the wealthiest men of African descent in the new Republic.

The Forten family used their financial success to fund slaves buying their freedom, as well as supporting the Underground Railroad. James Forten was an early backer of William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper “The Liberator” and a frequent columnist under the by-line “A Colored Philadelphian,” promoting a number of reforms, but none so fiercely as the abolition of slavery. His wife Vandine was also an activist and their sons and daughters followed in their footsteps.

Charlotte’s father, grandfather and her aunt’s husband, Robert Purvis, were members of the committee that drafted the “Appeal on Behalf of Forty Thousand Disenfranchised African Americans.” Vandine and Charlotte's aunts Harriet, Margaretta and Sara served on the boards of female abolitionist groups and founded free private schools for African American children in segregated Philadelphia.

Before the Civil War, Salem had a vibrant free African American community and integrated schools, so it was here that Robert Forten sent his daughter Charlotte to finish her formal education in 1853. Salem’s prominent black abolitionist Remond family opened their homes to Charlotte as she pursued her education at Higginson Grammar School for Girls. Charles and Sarah Remond were noted lecturers on abolitionism and women’s suffrage and friends of the Forten family. In addition to her studies, there were walks by the ocean, outings in Marblehead and Nahant and skating parties. The Remonds introduced her to Boston’s black community where she attended lectures and visited anti-slavery fairs.

After graduation from Higginson, Charlotte enrolled in Salem Normal School [now Salem State University] to carry out her father’s wishes that she become a teacher. In the 18-month program, she studied English literature, algebra, geometry, physical geography, hydrostatics, optics, orthography, etymology, physiology, and Latin.

A prolific and talented writer, she wrote poems and essays while still a student, publishing some in Garrison’s “Liberator” and in the “Salem Register” and was mentored by John Greenleaf Whittier.

With her father increasingly unable to support her, Charlotte worked while in school and near the end of her time at the Salem Normal School Principal Richard Edwards secured for her a teaching position at Epes Grammar School. Charlotte was the first African American teacher in Salem public schools.

Always suffering from fragile health, Charlotte left Salem and went back home to Philadelphia. She returned to Salem from 1859 to 1862 to take additional classes at the Salem Normal School, to teach at Higginson, to walk her beloved beaches with Elizabeth Church, visit with Rebecca Manning in her “pleasant home,” and to participate in the Crispus Attucks commemoration in Boston.

In 1872 Forten moved to Washington, DC and accepted a position at the Preparatory High School for Negro Youth. The only college prep high school for blacks in the city, it was housed in the 15th Street Presbyterian Church, whose future pastor she would later marry. She left after a year to take a position with the U.S. Treasury.

In 1878 she married Rev. Francis Grimké, son of a South Carolina planter and Nancy Weston, an enslaved woman in his household. Freed after the war, Francis and his brother Archibald were supported in their education at Lincoln University, a black Presbyterian college, by their older abolitionist half-sisters Sarah and Angelina. On New Year’s Day 1880, Charlotte gave birth to Theodora Cornelia; sadly, the baby died at six months. The Grimkés were guardians to Francis’ niece, Angelina Weld Grimké—later, a feminist poet who influenced the Harlem Renaissance—when Archibald was consul to the Dominican Republic.

The Grimkés were part of a post-war black migration to Washington and a growing “black aristocracy.” With Anna Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Mary Church Terrell, and others, they established cultural societies for their own improvement and organizations for the advancement of their race.

Charlotte and Francis shared a passion for justice. He was a co-founder of the NAACP and she helped establish the National Association of Colored Women. In her later life, she used her pen in essays, poems and letters to the editor (for example, “One Phase of The Race Question” and “Mr. Savage’s Sermon”) against Jim Crow injustice and racial violence and for universal respect and equal rights.

From 1885-1889, they lived in Florida where Francis was sent to rebuild a struggling congregation. Charlotte’s recurrent bouts of illness sent her north for care.

Charlotte Louise Forten Grimké died on July 23, 1914 in Washington, DC.

Source: Salem State University; Annie Wood Webb Papers

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:54:38 +0000

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By her own account Moorer, a teacher at Claflin University, South Carolina's first black college, decided to publish poems because she was frustrated with the way both northern and southern writers misrepresented southern blacks; and she wanted to tell "the unvarnished truth." "Seeing that the one cannot get at the facts, while the other will not, I reach the conclusion that the story must be told by a Negro --- one who is a victim to the inconvenience of prejudice." Most of Prejudice Unveiled: and Other Poems (1907) is dedicated to this mission.

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1868-1936), taught at the Normal and Grammar Schools, Claflin College, Orangeburg, South Carolina, from 1895 to 1899. Little else is known about her life beyond what may be inferred from her poetry. In her introduction to the facsimile edition of Moorer's Prejudice Unveiled and Other Poems (1907) published in 1988, Joan R Sherman calls the first twenty-six poems the "best poems on racial issues written by any black woman until the middle of the 20th century" because the "anger, bitterness, irony, and pain are passionately felt and genuinely integral to the verse." In Prejudice Unveiled, Moorer presents a comprehensive analysis of the sweeping nature of racial oppression. Her poetry targets lynching, debt peonage, white rape, Jim Crow segregation, and the hypocrisy of the church and white press.

Her husband, Jacob Moorer (1863-1935), was a lawyer and civil rights activist from South Carolina.

Sources: Prejudice Unveiled: and Other Poems; African-American Poets, Volume 1, edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities Harold Bloom; Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond edited by Anne P. Rice

Fannie Barrier Williams

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:49:14 +0000

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Fannie Barrier Williams (Feb. 12, 1855 - March 4, 1944) was an African American teacher, social activist, clubwoman, lecturer, and journalist who worked for social justice, civil liberties, education, and employment opportunities, especially for black women. A talented speaker, writer, and musician, she was welcomed in cultured white society in the North, but remained loyal to people of color, knowing that the advantages she enjoyed were not given to other blacks.
She was born in Brockport, New York, six years before the Civil War, in one of the few black families in town. Her father, Anthony Barrier, a barber and part-time coal merchant, was well-respected in the community and a long-time lay leader in the First Baptist Church. Her mother Harriet taught Bible classes and Fannie played the piano for Sunday services.

A bright, personable child, talented in both music and art, Fannie attended public school with her siblings Ella and George. Ella became a teacher and principal in Washington, D.C.; George was an inspector for the Detroit Board of Public Works and a leader in local politics. They were well-liked students who associated freely with white classmates. Fannie was unaware at the time of the racial prejudice that prevailed in other parts of the country, having experienced none in Brockport. Fannie graduated from the State Normal School (now SUNY-College at Brockport) in 1870, the first African American to do so.

When the Civil War ended, the Federal government established schools to educate newly freed slaves. Inspired by her parents' friend Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist who lived in nearby Rochester, and now more knowledgeable about the oppression of blacks, Fannie obtained a teaching position in the South. For the first time she experienced the daily degradations—segregation, intimidation, and physical assaults—suffered by many African Americans. At first she tried to adapt to the dreadful conditions, but said in "A Northern Negro's Autobiography," 1904, "I had missed the training that would have made this continued humiliation possible."

She went to Boston to study piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, but was asked to leave because Southern white students objected to her presence. "I never quite recovered from the shock and pain of my first bitter realization," she wrote, "that to be a colored woman is to be discredited, mistrusted and often meanly hated."

Fannie then went to Washington, D.C. to teach. She socialized with other educated blacks, studied portrait painting at the School of Fine Arts, and met S. (Samuel) Laing Williams, an outstanding African American law student. They were married in Brockport, New York, in 1887, and moved to Chicago where they became leaders in the African American community. Although housing was racially segregated, they made friends with white reformers, such as Jane Addams, founder of the southside settlement, Hull-House; Mary McDowell, the director of the University of Chicago Social Settlement; and meatpacker and philanthropist Philip D. Armour, who employed without discrimination many black workers in his plants.

The Williamses, who had no children, soon took up numerous projects. S. Laing was successful as a lawyer. He organized the Prudence Crandall Study Club, limited to 25 couples from the African American elite. Fannie was its director of art and music. With a generous donation from Armour, in 1891 the Williamses helped establish Provident Hospital. This had a bi-racial staff and clientele, and a nurses' training school for black students who were barred from all others.

Fannie and her husband joined All Souls (Unitarian) Church in Chicago. They may have first been attracted by the Abraham Lincoln Center, a reform settlement which the church sponsored. The minister was Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a free-thinker, pacifist, activist for women and blacks' civil rights, and a founder of the World's Parliament of Religions. Fannie's friend, the Unitarian minister, Celia Parker Wooley, was a member.

Williams came to national prominence at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Black women leaders had protested their exclusion from the fair's planning. To appease them, Williams was appointed to gather exhibits for the women's hall. More importantly, she presented two courageous and controversial addresses, one to the World's Congress of Representative Women, and the other to the World's Parliament of Religions.

In the first, "The Intellectual Progress of Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation," Williams argued, before a mostly white audience, that black women were eager to gain the education and skills denied during slavery, were cheerful and hopeful despite the "distressing burden of mean and unreasonable discrimination," were hard-working in their determination to find jobs and support themselves and their families, and had come amazingly far in less than 30 years. "Few of the happy, prosperous, and eager living Americans," she said, "can appreciate what it all means to be suddenly changed from irresponsible bondage to the responsibility of freedom and citizenship!" While praising those who worked to uplift the downtrodden "colored women," she chastised privileged citizens who were "impatient with ignorance and poverty" and urged them to help rather than hinder the progress of those striving to better their lives, to judge individuals by their worth and not by race or custom. She also observed that black women were becoming interested in a variety of religious institutions "from the Catholic creed to the no-creed of Emerson."

In her second speech, published as "Religious Duty to the Negro," Williams excoriated the Christians who brought Africans to this country as slaves and preached a "false, pernicious, demoralizing Gospel" to make them docile and dependent. The masters dared not "open the Bible too wide," however, or the slaves would have recognized the hypocrisy of Christians committing atrocities against a defenseless people. She noted, however, that after Emancipation a number of white "heroic men and saintly women . . . believed in the manhood and womanhood of the negro race" and generously established schools, colleges, and churches in the South. She was grateful for "this significant change in sentiment," but concerned that Northern churches had sent "too many ministers who have had no sort of preparation and fitness for the work assigned them."

Williams challenged her listeners by asking, "What can religion further do to advance the condition of the colored people?" Her answer reflected Unitarian influence: "More religion and less church. . . . Less theology and more of human brotherhood, less declamation and more common sense and love for truth. . . . The tendency of creeds and doctrine to obscure religion, to make complex that which is elemental and simple, to suggest partisanship and doubt in that which is universal and certain, has seriously hindered the moral progress of the colored people of this country." Because "in nothing was slavery so savage and so relentless as in its attempted destruction of the family instincts," she urged ministers and others to do less preaching and instead "open every cabin door and get immediate contact" with Southern blacks, teaching them the "blessed meanings of marriage, motherhood and family" and how a humane religion can impact their daily lives in positive, practical ways.

She also called it a "monstrous thing" that so many Evangelical churches closed their doors to African Americans. "It should be the province of religion," Williams said, "to unite, and not to separate, men and women according to the superficial differences of race lines." In the audience sat the charismatic, 75-year-old Frederick Douglass. Moved by her address, he rose and praised the remarks of this "refined, educated colored lady," saying that "a new heaven is dawning upon us." After the success of these orations, she became a nationally-known writer and lecturer, who sometimes included a piano concert as part of her program.

In her 1895 talk to African American women in Memphis, Tennessee, "Opportunities and Responsibilities of Colored Women," Williams encouraged them to help themselves and each other to the utmost of their abilities, rather than depend on white benevolence. Their religion, she said, should "stand more for love than doctrine, more for human worth than church name. . . . What men and women do, rather than what they say or profess, shall be the standard of religion." She urged them to have sympathy for the most disadvantaged in their community, to set up projects such as day nurseries for mothers who worked full-time, to take pride in their race and gender, and be "self-respectful, ambitious, aspiring for all that is best in human life."

A year earlier, Williams was nominated by several white friends, including Wooley, to be a member of the prestigious Chicago Woman's Club. Although she would be the first black woman in the 800-member organization, she expected no opposition. To her dismay, a vocal minority fought her application for 14 months, drawing national media attention. Not wanting to offend her friends, Williams resisted the pressure to withdraw her name and was eventually voted in by a decisive majority—the group's only African American for the next 30 years.

Williams established clubs to help black women, especially those who emigrated to Northern cities with insufficient knowledge and few resources. In 1893 she helped found the National League of Colored Women. In 1896 this joined other organizations to become the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). The local clubs, over 200 from many states, provided child care centers, classes, employment bureaus, and savings banks. Williams believed that African American women needed to band together to gain confidence, to protect each other "against the libelous attacks upon their characters," and to teach literacy and domestic and job skills. Williams was a lead organizer for the 1899 NACW convention held in Chicago.

S. Laing Williams was a long-time friend of Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, who advocated vocational training for Southern blacks. The Williamses emphasized the value of higher education, but also believed that working-class people needed jobs, decent places to live, and help with daily survival. Fannie defended Washington's methods and also urged home economics classes for women. In the preface to his 1907 biography of Frederick Douglass, Washington paid tribute to S. Laing and Fannie Barrier Williams for their "incalculable service in the preparation of this volume." Because of their close relationship with both Douglass and Washington, some have speculated that the Williamses ghostwrote the book.

During this time, the African American sociologist W. E. B. DuBois severely criticized Washington for making an accommodation with Southern white supremacy, thus limiting the education and aspirations of intelligent, talented black youth. The Williamses joined the DuBois campaign to attack racial discrimination and lynching and were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. As they however believed the two views on education need not be in conflict, they maintained cordial relationships with both men.

In 1905, with Wooley, who became the director, Williams helped create the Frederick Douglass Center in Chicago, an integrated social settlement. She also helped establish the Phyllis Wheatley Home, a place for young black women to stay, be protected, and find employment when they first moved to the city. The center inspired copies in other urban areas. In addition, she was active in the movement to gain legal rights and the vote for all women. When Susan B. Anthony died in 1907, Williams was the only African American woman to give a eulogy at the National American Women's Suffrage Association convention. She also gave eulogies for Philip D. Armour in 1901 and Celia Parker Wooley in 1918.

In later years Williams concentrated more on writing. She was a reporter for the African American publications Woman's Era, New York Age, and the Chicago Record Herald. She contributed to other newspapers and journals and to several books, including her article, "The Club Movement Among Colored Women of America," in A New Negro for a New Century, 1900.

After her husband died in 1921, Williams continued her activist work. In 1924 she was the first woman and the first African American to be appointed to the board of the Chicago Public Library. Because of declining health, in 1926 she returned to live with her sister Ella in their family home in Brockport (163 Erie Street, now a New York state historical site). She took care of Ella, who became blind, until her own debilitating stroke led to her demise. Ella died a year later. The sisters and their parents were buried in the High Street Cemetery in Brockport. Their brother, George, had died in Detroit in 1907.

For her impassioned work for African American causes, Williams was esteemed by black communities across the land. Because of her genteel manner, organizing talents, and vivacious personality, she was accepted by many Northern white social reformers. Being light-skinned eased her way. Williams recognized the exceptional privileges she experienced as a black woman in her day, but she wrote at the end of her autobiography, "Whether I live in the North or the South, I cannot be counted for my full value." Her heart ached for the bigotry and barriers that confronted African Americans, especially the women whom she considered to be the most oppressed. She dedicated herself to aiding and uplifting those in need, improving interracial relations, and working for justice and equality for all.

Sources: Fannie Barrier Williams By June Edwards (posted March 2005), Unitarian Universalist History & Heritage Society; Paul Tralles, Photographer (Wash DC, 1885); William Henry Richards Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Sadie Chandler Cole

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:41:36 +0000

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Mrs. Cole would not abide by racial restrictions. Once, in the 1920s, she went into a lunch stand on Broadway and asked for a glass of buttermilk. The owner first refused to serve her and then told her it would cost fifty cents. They sold it to others for five cents. She proceeded to break up the man's place of business. They called the police and when he came and inquired the trouble he demanded that the proprietor serve her without extra charge. The owner changed policies and served blacks after that. Mrs. Cole along with members of the local NAACP chapter participated in a 'swim-in' at one of the segregated beaches in Los Angeles. This resulted in Manhattan Beach capitulating. The Pacific Defender stated in 1927, that Manhattan Beach would "forever remain open and free of access to the general public without restrictions."

Sadie Chandler-Cole was the daughter of Abraham Washington Chandler and Sarah Hatfield-Chandler, of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father was one of the founders of the Mound Street Baptist Church of that city and one of the conductors of the Underground Railroad. Her mother attended the first high school for free colored people in Cincinnati, and her grandfather bought a scholarship in Oberlin College in Ohio. Her mother sang in the select choir of the Academy of Music established by abolitionists and friends of free colored people. Mrs. Chandler-Cole was given a fine education by her parents. She was especially trained as a singer and was a member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, with whom she traveled for years. After her marriage to Thomas A Cole, (the son of James H Cole, a wealthy real estate holder), the couple relocated to Detroit, Michigan.

Mrs. Cole was a music and vocal teacher and also a social worker. She was known as a thorough race woman and has done much in Los Angeles to create favorable sentiment for the race. She was the first person to have removed an objectionable sign, "Negroes not wanted." This was many years before the activities of the NAACP. Mrs. Cole went into a lunch stand on Broadway and asked for a glace of buttermilk. They first refused to serve her and then told her it would cost fifty cents. They sold it to others for five cents. She told the writer that she was determined to break up the discrimination if she had to die, and proceeded to break up the man's place of business. They called the police and when he came and inquired the trouble he demanded that the proprietor serve her without extra charge. This was a direct opening wedge in removing objectionable signs.

Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America By Douglas Flamming; The Negro Trail Blazers of California: A Compilation of Records from the California Archives in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, in Berkeley; and from the diaries, old papers, and conversations of old pioneers in the State of California ...by Beasley, Delilah L. (Delilah Leontium), 1871-1934

Lucille Green Randolph

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:34:05 +0000

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Lucille Campbell Green Randolph (1883-1963), was born in Christiansburg, Virginia. In 1883, she was trained as a school teacher. A widow, she married A. Philip Randolph in 1914. A graduate of Howard University, in Washington D.C., she was also one of the first graduates of Madam C.J. Walker's Beauty School in Harlem. She also owned and operated an exclusive beauty parlor on 135th Street from 1913 to 1927. Mrs. Randolph was a crucial source of financial support for her husband's subsequent political, civil rights and labor activism. Her husband, Asa Philip Randolph, was an outspoken civil rights leader and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. [A. Randolph Portrait Collection]

Drusilla Dunjee Houston

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:25:14 +0000

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There’s debate about who actually was the first black female director ... some say even though her project never made it onto film, the honor should still go to Drusilla Dunjee Houston. After seeing D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” Houston wrote a screenplay to challenge it titled, “Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob."

In 1999, the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc. was established in Buffalo, New York in honor of Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876 - 1941). The Institute is named after Houston's 1917 poem entitled, "America's Uncrowned Queens." Like many African American women writers swallowed up and languishing in the historical gap, Houston is one of the most prolific and all but forgotten African American women writers of the 20th century. Considered a "historian without portfolio" and dismissed as a serious historian and writer by leading Black male historians of Post Emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance, e.g., W.E.B. DuBois, Alaine Locke, Carter G. Woodson and others, Houston burst on the historical literary scene in 1926 with Volume I of her magnum opus "Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire Book 1: Nations of the Cushite Empire," thought to represent the crowning achievement of Drusilla Dunjee Houston's literary life. Houston is remembered as the earliest known and possibly the only African American woman to write a multi-volume study of ancient Africa where she unapologetically proclaimed in 1926, an African origin of civilization and culture during one of the most turbulent periods for black Americans in American history. Through this work, Houston left her own mark as a pioneering advocate of the study of Africa, especially ancient African history and is credited with creating a Pan African framework proclaiming the African origin of civilization.

Aside from her writings on ancient African history and later American history, Dunjee Houston was a multi-faceted figure, who, at one time or another during her wide-ranging career was an educator, elegist, racial uplift theorist, institution builder and journalist. Her writings cross multiple literary periods including the race writers, the Black Women's Era (1890-1900), and the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro era. Still, despite voluminous writings for more than four decades -- including editorials, pamphlets, poetry, elegy, screenplays and historical texts Houston remains one of the most overlooked African American women writers in African American women's history and is also one of the most important African American women in the American West. From her early days she taught in segregated schools of pre-Territorial Oklahoma, barely fifteen years of age -- devoted her life to providing the correct historical information on Africa to the black children she regarded as 'acres of diamonds'.

Houston was born into an extraordinary family. Her father, Rev. John William Dunjee was one of the most exciting and productive ministers of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society. One of ten children, only five of whom lived to adulthood, Drusilla Dunjee was born in 1876 in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Her father was a Baptist minister commissioned to travel across the country to establish Baptist congregations in areas inhabited by poor Black rural dwellers. During these times Houston lived in numerous states on the Eastern Seaboard, in the South, the Northeast and finally the Midwest in Oklahoma. A search for Houston over decades reveals an extraordinarily private woman who felt compelled to thrust herself into the major social and political dialogues of her era. She educated hundreds of students throughout her life but was one of her own best students as she was the consummate self-taught student fluent in French, German, Greek and Latin. These skills are especially evident in other writings, particularly her screen play, "The Maddened Mob," written in elegiac verse in 1915 as a refutation of Birth of a Nation. Arguably, Houston was the very first African American to write a blow by blow refutation of "Birth of a Nation," which she hoped to become a flashing photo play." Dr. Peggy Brooks-Bertram has located this material and is in the process of preparing this historic screenplay for publication.

On February 11, 1941, Houston died in Phoenix, Arizona after many years of illness from tuberculosis. Today, Houston is celebrated by the Association of Black Women Historians and the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc., [Bio: "Uncrowned Community Builders"]

The Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), have a scholarship in her honor .... the award recognizes an emerging female scholar of African descent. It fosters scholarly research in Africana Women’s history. Each year an award will be given for the best, unpublished original essay from either a graduate course or a chapter from a thesis or dissertation for the 2015 award year. The essay must be wholly focused on some aspect of history on black women from the U.S. and/or Africana Diaspora. The paper must involve interpretation of primary sources, focus on the ideas or actions initiated among black women, and make a significant contribution to Africana women’s history. The award will be presented at the Centennial ASALH Convention in Atlanta, September 23-27, 2015. The Black Classic Press of Baltimore inaugurated the award two decades ago, and it has been continued through the contributions of ABWH members.

Josephine Turpin Washington

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 03:43:11 +0000

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As a writer and educator, Josephine Washington was committed to freeing America from what she described as the "monster of prejudice whose voracious appetite is appeased only when individuals are reduced to abject servitude and are content to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water." Washington was concerned with social issues from an early age, and in her teaching and many writings she was a powerful advocate of women's rights and racial justice.

Born on July 31, 1861, in Goochland County, Virginia, Washington was the daughter of Augustus A Turpin and Maria V Crump-Turpin. Her father was the son of a former African slave named Mary and Edwin Durock Turpin (1783–1868), a grandson of Mary Jefferson Turpin. Washington was a great-granddaughter of Mary Jefferson Turpin, a paternal aunt of Thomas Jefferson.

Her education began at home and continued through normal and high schools to the Richmond Institute, which later became the Richmond Theological Seminary. She entered Howard University's college department and graduated in 1886. While at the university, Washington spent her summer vacations working as a copyist for Frederick Douglass, during his tenure as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. Following her marriage to Dr. Samuel H. H. Washington, a practicing physician in Birmingham. She moved to Birmingham in 1888. She later taught at Richmond Theological Seminary, Howard University, and Selma University, Alabama. Her commitment to education led Washington to play an important role in the development of Selma University, an educational institution for teachers and ministers alike.

Washington's literary efforts began as a teenager. Her first story, "A Talk about Church Fairs," in which she criticized the sale of wine at church fund-raisers, was published in the Virginia Star—to a favorable reaction—when she was only sixteen years old. While her writing, and perhaps especially her poetry, has largely been neglected, Washington addressed herself to many of the important issues of her day. Essays such as "Higher Education for Women," published in the People's Advocate, and her introduction to Lawson A. Scrugg's Women of Distinction (1893) display her concern with an array of issues affecting black people, including job opportunities, education, motherhood, and relations between women and men. In the latter essay she powerfully defends the "progressive woman" who seeks to successfully participate in both professional and domestic spheres. While chairperson of the Executive Board of the Alabama State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, Washington also wrote their Federation Hymn, "Mother Alabama." Her work appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Freeman, the New York Globe, the AME Review, the Christian Recorder, the Virginia Star, the Colored American Magazine, and the People's Advocate.

Writing in 1904 for the Colored American Magazine on the sixth annual meeting of the State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, held in Mobile, Alabama, Washington reported not only on the delegate's focus on black womanhood, standards of morality, and the setting up of a youth reformatory but also on the pervasive effects of segregation and racial prejudice within the city itself. With an eye to discrimination on all levels of society, Washington noted, for instance, the playgrounds that were set aside for the exclusive use of white children, while black children "look on longingly, but dare not touch the sacred structure."

Washington's numerous writings remain as testimony to her religious faith, her belief in the equality of women, and her strong commitment to ending racial discrimination.

She died on March 17, 1949, at the age of 87 at her daughter’s home in Cleveland, Ohio.

The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, by Irvine Garland Penn; Colored American Magazine (1904 issue)

Haydee E Campbell

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:23:23 +0000

Kicha has posted:

She was an elementary school teacher at a school designated for 'colored pupils' which was located at 1241 South 3rd Street. Named for Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), a French novelist, who is said to have had negro descent. (Report Board Ed. (1929 edition); School Director, (1938/1939).

Mrs. Haydee E. Campbell, nee Benchley a native Texan, was the first African American woman to receive formal kindergarten training under Susan Blow at the St. Louis Kindergarten Training School. In 1882 she became the supervising principal of the kindergartens for African-American children in the St. Louis Public Schools. The philosophy of the kindergarten program was based on the works of Freidrich Froebel (a German educationalist, is best known as the originator of the ‘kindergarten system’), which emphasized the value of play in how children learn. Ms. Campbell, Josephine Silone Yates, and other kindergarten advocates understood that “high-quality kindergarten training was the key to the success of the public kindergarten movement.” In 1896 Campbell became the National Kindergarten Organizer of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) under the leadership of Mary Church Terrell. In Campbell’s first speech, “Why the National Association Should Devise Means for Establishing Kindergartens,” presented at the 1899 NACW Convention, she says:

"The plan of the Kindergarten system has been molded according to the nature of the child, and through it he may be led to a higher state of development of body, mind and soul and a fuller consciousness of this relationship to nature, to this fellow-man and to his God. This is the aim, the vital purpose of the Kindergarten education. The Kindergarten assists the natural growth of the child, developing the good that in him lies and helping him to receive from his environment the good it may contain. As tools to this end, Froebel has given us songs, games, stories, talks, gifts, occupations, lunch and garden work, and these are only tools to be subordinated always to the thought which directs their use." [Info: childrensdefense.org]

For some years past she has resided in St. Louis, Missouri. She distinguished herself by actually going before the school board of St. Louis, as an applicant for the position as principal or instructress for the kindergarten department. Here she was confronted with the task of making the highest average, and leaping the obstacle of white applicants who for so many years have stood in the way. She, with courage undaunted, went into the examination and, to the surprise of the board of examiners, the white applicants and the city of St. Louis, she captured the department with the highest average percentage ever made in St. Louis, for that work. Mrs. Campbell is a tireless worker, and it is never too cold, too wet, for her to do a charitable act. The people of St. Louis love her. She was a student of Oberlin.

Source: Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities," by Monroe Alphus Majors (1893)

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:16:57 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1924 where she attended the segregated school of her time, Lincoln School. She married Warren Fisher in 1944 and had two children, Bruce and Charlene. After graduating from the segregated Langston University with top honors in 1945, Fisher volunteered to be the successful test case for admission to the University of Oklahoma Law School represented by NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall and Oklahoma attorney Amos T. Hall.

When denied admission on the basis of race, Fisher filed a suit asserting that she must be admitted to the OU Law School since there was no comparable facility for African American students. Losing in state courts, Marshall argued the case before the Supreme Court which reversed the lower courts in 1948. The state quickly created a makeshift law school in the State Capitol with three part time instructors and one potential student. Fisher refused to attend. Further litigation was initiated to prove the two law schools were not equal.

In June of 1949, the University of Oklahoma Law School changed its admission policy and finally permitted Fisher to enroll. After graduating in 1951 and passing the State Bar the same year, she practiced law in Chickasha. In the '50s, she became a professor at Langston University where she taught for 32 years. She earned a master’s degree in history at OU in 1968.

Following her retirement from Langston University, she worked as Corporate Counsel for Automation Research System Limited in Alexandria, Virginia, the second largest African American owned computer corporation in the country at that time.

In 1981, the Smithsonian Institution designated her as one of the 150 outstanding black women who have had the most impact on the course of American history. In 1991, OU honored her with an Honorary Doctorate, and in 1992, more than 45 years after she was denied admission to the law school, Governor David Walters appointed Fisher to the University of Oklahoma Board of Regents. She died in 1995.

Sources: Uncrowned Community Builders; Photo comes from Barney Hillerman Collection

Christia Adair

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 04:14:28 +0000

Kicha has posted:

In 1920, Christia Adair took school children to meet the train when Republican Warren G. Harding was campaigning for the presidency. After seeing him shake hands only with the white children, she became a Democrat.

Christia Adair (1893 - 1989), was a teacher, a community leader, and a tireless activist for the rights of women and African-Americans. Born in Victoria on October 22, 1893, Adair spent her early years in Edna, then moved to Austin with her family in 1910. She attended college first at Samuel Huston (now Huston-Tillotson University) and then at Prairie View Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M.) After graduation she moved back to Edna, where she taught elementary school.

She married Elbert Adair in 1918, and they moved to Kingsville. There she opened a Sunday school, and also began her community activism. She joined a multiracial group opposed to gambling, and then became involved in the suffrage movement. At that time neither blacks nor women could vote, and anyone who knows her feminist history knows that there was some racism in the suffrage movement. Indeed, after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, blacks were still turned away from the polls because of racist whites' tactic to deter them: the white primary. Since the South was wholly Democratic at that point, the primary basically decided the election. Thus excluding African-Americans from the primary effectively disenfranchised them. Adair had this to say:

"Back in 1918 Negroes could not vote and women could not vote either. The white women were trying to help get a bill passed in the legislature where women could vote. I said to the Negro women, "I don't know if we can use it now or not, but if there's a chance, I want to say we helped make it.

"We went to the polls at the white primary but could not vote...We kept after them until they finally said 'You cannot vote because you are a Negro.'"

This was a smart strategy, because that gave them grounds to sue. And sue they did. The Adairs had moved to Houston in 1925, and Christia had become very active in the Houston chapter of the NAACP. As executive secretary, she was a driving force behind the landmark lawsuit, Smith v. Allwright, which overturned the white primary - and helped set the stage for Brown v. Board of Education.

In the Jim Crow South, these activities made Adair and her colleagues targets for racist whites. The chapter received bomb threats with alarming regularity. The Houston police were not helpful. In fact, they were a hindrance. According to Adair's entry at the Handbook of Texas Online:

In 1957 Houston police attempted for three weeks to locate the chapter's membership list. While the official charge was battery - the illegal solicitation of clients by attorneys - Adair believed the real purpose was to destroy the organization and its advocacy of civil rights. She testified for five hours in a three-week trial over the attempted seizure of NAACP records. Two years later, on appeal to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall again won a decision for the organization. Adair never admitted having membership lists or having member's names. In 1959 the chapter disbanded and she resigned as executive secretary, though she later helped rebuild the group's rolls to 10,000 members.

Now that's a hardcore sister. And she didn't stop there. She was a lifelong leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church and a precinct judge for more than 25 years. She also helped to...

* desegregate Houston's public buildings, city buses, and department stores
* win Blacks the right to serve on juries and be considered for county jobs
* convince newspapers to refer to blacks with the same courtesy titles used for
whites
* desegregate the Democratic Party in Texas

Any one of her achievements is impressive. Taken together, they're downright amazing. And folks noticed. Adair was recognized by many for her brave and principled activism. Zeta Phi Beta sorority named her Woman of the Year in 1952. In 1974 Houston NOW honored her for suffrage activism. In 1977 she was selected as one of four participants in the Black Women Oral History Project, sponsored by the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College. That same year the city of Houston named a park for her. And in 1984, she was named to the Texas Women's Hall of Fame. Adair died just a few years later at the age of 96, on New Year's Eve 1989, leaving behind her an indelible legacy of justice and equality.

Sources: NOW National Organization for Women; The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present edited by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin

Rosa Dixon-Bowser

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 03:56:28 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Mrs. Rosa Dixon-Bowser (1855 - 1931), writer, educator, civic leader, and first African American teacher in Richmond, Virginia public school system.

Born a slave in Amelia County, Virginia the daughter of Henry Dixon, a carpenter, and Augusta A. Hawkins Dixon, a domestic servant. After freedom came in 1865, the family moved to Richmond and started a new life. Religion and education were the foundations of the family, and they joined Richmond's largest congregation, First African Baptist Church. She first taught in the Sunday school there. Her father recognized her aptitude and enrolled her in the Richmond public schools, where she initially received instruction from northern teachers of the Freedmen's Bureau.

The superintendent of the Freedmen's Bureau schools in Richmond, Ralza M. Manly, identified exemplary students and selected them for teacher training at the Richmond Normal and High School (after 1870 the Richmond Colored Normal School). Dixon became one of Manly's protégés and excelled in English, mathematics, music, and reading. She graduated with the second-highest marks in the class of 1872–1873 and remained in school for an additional year to study Greek, Latin, music, and teaching strategies.

In 1872 Dixon passed the examination for teacher certification and began her teaching career. On September 4, 1879, she married James Herndon Bowser, a fellow teacher who had been the valedictorian in her class at the Richmond Colored Normal School. Soon after their marriage he left teaching and worked instead as a clerk in the Richmond post office until his death from tuberculosis, on April 25, 1881. Their only child, Oswald Barrington Herndon Bowser, became a successful physician in Richmond.

For a time after her marriage and the birth of her son, Bowser taught music in her home and continued to teach in the Sunday school. Regarding the community as her extended family, she formed literary circles and taught childrearing and housekeeping techniques. In 1883 the city school board appointed Bowser to teach in the primary grades at Navy Hill School. The next year Bowser became supervisor of teachers at the Baker School in Richmond and in 1896 principal teacher as well in the night school for men. In addition, she taught classes in social skills at the Young Men's Christian Association in Jackson Ward, the heart of Richmond's African American community.

Bowser organized reading circles in order to give experienced teachers a forum for sharing information with new colleagues about their reading, their students, and their classroom strategies. The success of these groups led directly to the formation in 1887 of the Virginia Teachers' Reading Circle, the first professional African American educational association in the state. Bowser was president of the organization, in 1889 renamed the Virginia State Teachers Association, from 1890 to 1892. Over a period of more than thirty years she often taught at Peabody institutes, sessions of summer teaching courses at various black normal schools in Virginia.

The presidency of the association opened the door for Bowser to play major roles in other African American organizations, including the Hampton Negro Conferences and their successor, the Negro Organization Society. She chaired the conferences' Committee on Domestic Science from 1899 to 1902. At the July 1897 conference Bowser made one of her most notable speeches, "Some of Our Needs," and appealed to the conference to form girls' meetings to teach ladylike qualities and to sponsor mothers' clubs to advise young mothers on childrearing. In response to her appeal, additional girls' and mothers' meetings were organized in scores of Virginia communities. Bowser also called for reforms in education, increased teacher salaries, and improved housing and education for wayward children. She joined with such influential black Virginians as Janie Porter Barrett and Maggie Lena Mitchell Walker to form the Woman's Department of the Negro Reformatory Association of Virginia, which raised money for the development of the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls and the Virginia Manual Labor School for Colored Boys, both in Hanover County.

Although Bowser did not seek an active role in public affairs, in August 1895 she founded and became the first president of the Richmond Woman's League. By July 1896 she had led the league in raising $690 to pay the legal bills of three black Lunenburg County women who were appealing murder convictions, two of them death sentences. Bowser became involved in other social causes and supported the founding and funding of organizations for treatment of tuberculosis, improved medical facilities, and medical insurance. As a result of an alliance she forged, the Federated Insurance League joined with the Woman's League to support a Richmond branch of the Virginia Colored Anti-Tuberculosis League.

Bowser became active in the woman's club movement that swept the nation late in the nineteenth century. She joined the Woman's Era Club, of Boston, Massachusetts, an organization that raised money to create kindergartens for African American children, and for several years served as field editor, or reporter, from Virginia for its journal, the Woman's Era. In July 1896 she participated as a member of its successor organization, the National Federation of Afro-American Women, and as president of the Richmond Woman's League, in founding the National Association of Colored Women. Bowser was nominated for president of the new association but was not elected. She was also a founder of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs in 1908.

In 1912, working with Mary Church Terrell and Maggie Walker, Bowser attempted to aid a young girl sentenced to be electrocuted for murder. Their combined efforts included a direct appeal to the governor of Virginia to reopen the case and commute the sentence. Despite the backing of the National Association of Colored Women, the girl was executed. Bowser and the association also publicly opposed lynching and racial segregation and supported universal woman suffrage.

Bowser continued her community work, teaching in the public schools until she retired in 1923. She taught Sunday school classes at First African Baptist Church for more than fifty years, until diabetes forced her to relinquish the work. In recognition of her many contributions to education, the first branch of the Richmond public library to be opened to African Americans was named for Bowser in 1925. A Richmond vocational training school for boys later bore her name. Bowser died of complications from diabetes on February 7, 1931, at her home in Richmond and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in that city.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Virginia, Veronica Alease Davis; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Studies

Atholene Peyton

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 03:40:36 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Miss Atholene Peyton (1880-1951), was the author of the earliest Kentucky cookbook written by an African American. Her father was Dr. W. T. Peyton, a well known practitioner and educator.

Her book, 'Peytonia Cook Book,' was published in Louisville in 1906. She had deep roots in the city. Peyton was an 1897 graduate of Louisville's Central Colored High School and then went on to the Colored Normal School. She served on the domestic science faculty of the segregated Central Colored High School and was the faculty sponsor of the Girls' Cooking Club. In one of her applications on file om the Jefferson County Public schools archives she noted under "honors": Wrote the first Negro Cook Book in Kentucky." Her career at Central Colored High School lasted from 1904 until her death in April 1951. Peyton also taught domestic science at the Neighborhood Home and Training School for Colored Boys and Girls, located on Fifteenth Street in Louisville. The Training School was supported by the Neighborhood Circle of the King's Daughters. Peyton also represented the Louisville schools at an event in Frankfort featuring Dr. Booker T Washington, held to commemorate the construction of a new dormitory at Kentucky State University, from which she earned a degree in 1935.

Peyton also served on the domestic science faculty of the summer Chautauqua of the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington DC. This was organized by the Woman's Convention, an auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, which was and remains an important African American religious organization. The president of the training school was the well known African American educator Nannie Helen Burroughs, who advocated for the improvement of African American women's marketable skills.

According to a news item in the Indianapolis Freeman (1907), The Peytonia Cook Book "has achieved a wonderful degree of popularity among the best authorities on the culinary art." The cookbook itself includes a warm introduction by Nannie Helen Burroughs.

Sources: Kentucky's Cookbook Heritage: Two Hundred Years of Southern Cuisine and Culture, written by John van Willigen (2014); Colored American Magazine (1906 edition)

Ethelyn Taylor Chisum

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 03:37:55 +0000

Kicha has posted:

She was born to William Henry and Virgie Collins Taylor in Dallas, Texas, where she spent her formative years. Following graduation from Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College May 1913, where Ethelyn M. Taylor was senior class historian, she began her teaching career in the Rock Creek community of Smith County, Texas. Almost three years later she returned to Dallas and a lifetime as an educator, thirty-two years of which were spent as counselor at Booker T. Washington High School.

In 1923, she married Dr. John Chisum who was born in 1895, to Benjamin Chisum and Rosa Pauline White. Following his 1916 graduation as salutatorian of Dallas Colored High School, Dr. Chisum worked as a mortician prior to military service in France during World War I. It was a union that lasted fifty-five years until his death in 1979.

Community service was an integral part of life for Mrs. Chisum, with membership in Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, as well as the Priscilla Art Club, oldest club for Negro women in Dallas. She was a long time member and active worker of the New Hope Baptist Church while Rev. A. S. Jackson, Sr. was pastor; later Dr. and Mrs. Chisum joined Knight's Chapel A.M.E. Church. Mrs. Chisum was often chosen as a leader of Dallas organizations such as the Dallas Teachers Council, serving the group as president for ten years. Realizing the need for a YWCA to serve the black community, Mrs. Chisum was one of the founders in 1927 of the Maria Morgan Branch of YWCA. She was repeatedly honored by local organizations for community service as well as being listed in Who's Who in Education in America. In 1967, two years after retirement from the Dallas Independent School District, Mrs. Chisum joined the staff of Southern Methodist University to work with the Upward Bound program jointly sponsored by the university and the United States Department of Education. She continued her association with SMU until failing health forced her retirement in November of 1982. In an effort to upgrade the teaching profession, Mrs. Chisum often worked as an appointed committee member for the National Education Association as well as the Texas Education Association. Working alongside Dr. John Chisum, her husband of more than fifty years, Ethelyn Chisum strove to improve educational opportunities as well as the quality of life for the youth of Dallas until her death, January 27, 1983.

Source: The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present edited by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin

Mary A. Burwell

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 03:35:09 +0000

Kicha has posted:

For the special care of orphan children there is a peculiar fitness, not at all possessed by the majority, either as an acquired or as an inherited possession. As an earnest laborer in this field among the poor, needy children of the race few of our young women have been more active, according to opportunity, than "Little Mary" Burwell, who was born in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, of (recently) slave parents living in humble circumstances. Her mother, though in very poor health, was nevertheless kind and affectionate, and no doubt would have willingly done all possible in the discharge of her duty towards her only child. However, an uncle of this "only child" came on a visit and was so attracted by the lovable disposition of Mary, asked for her and, upon promise of educating her in the city schools of Raleigh, North Carolina his request was granted, and he and little Mary were soon in the "City of Oaks," where she entered the Washington School at about eight years of age. After spending some time in the primary school she entered Shaw University, from which she graduated after remaining therein six years, taking a diploma from the Estey Seminary course.

She was a member of several classes taught by the author, while upon the faculty of Shaw University, who was always impressed with her meek yet earnest disposition as a student. After graduating she taught for several years in the public schools. She was then called as lady teacher to the orphanage at Oxford, NC., which position she accepted and gave up her school out of a desire to do something to help that struggling asylum, notwithstanding she knew it to be heavily burdened with debt and without one dollar in its treasury. She said, ''Any assistance I can render in the work it will be my pleasure to do so."

Did she expect pay from this institution in the shape of a big salary? No none was offered, as there was nothing to offer her as an inducement. In June, 1890, she entered upon her new work without any promise of earthly reward. Then the asylum consisted of one wood building of three rooms, containing eight little children. It was indeed a poor home. Finding talent among these children, she began to train them for concerts with a hope of getting better quarters for them. In July, just about one month from the time she went there, she took them out to travel. They created much interest through the State.

The General Assembly of North Carolina gave the institution $1,000, and up to November, 1892, less than two and one-half years, she has raised an additional sum of more than $1,500, and has also solicited many annual contributors who will continue to give. So she has done much to help furnish and build additional rooms. Now, instead of one building with three rooms containing eight children, there are many new additional rooms, well furnished with comforts, enjoyed by forty children. Miss Burwell has given new life to things in general at the Colored Asylum at Oxford. She is yet young in years, and has visited most points of interest in the State with these children, holding concerts and soliciting aid for the school, having not a dollar with which to start except previous savings.

Source: Women of Distinction written in 1893 by Lawson Andrew Scruggs (Scruggs was one of the first three African American doctors licensed in North Carolina).

Tate Travel Club

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 01:50:46 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Merze Tate is the woman with the white hat holding the banner) formed her travel club in the 1940s.

Vernie Merze Tate grew up in west Michigan the only black student in her class. She graduated with honors from Western Michigan University and later was the first African-American to graduate from Oxford University in 1932. Tate traveled the globe as a writer, and eventually became a teacher at an all-black high school in Indiana. While there Tate started a travel club for her students.

She taught as a history teacher at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, Indiana from 1927-32.

As a teacher she wanted her students to see the world they learned about. Her determination led to her founding the school travel club which went to such places as Washington D.C., Niagara Falls, and Pennsylvania. One news article criticized her efforts of taking these students into the world, as they were not expected to be more than domestics. Tate proved them wrong. All of the members of the club were honor roll students and many went on to college.

Source: Western Michigan University Archives

Green Family

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 15:52:55 +0000

Kicha has posted:

This photograph shows Dr. and Mrs. Atkins and their children, from left: Jasper, Francis, Olie, Clarence, Russell, Miriam, and Harvey. The youngest daughter, Eliza, was born several years later. A son, Leland, died at an early age.

Simon Green Atkins, the founder and first president of Slater Industrial Academy (now Winston-Salem State University) was born June 11, 1863, in the village of Haywood in Chatham County, North Carolina, to Allen and Eliza Atkins. Atkins attended the town school and taught there before enrolling at St. Augustine's Normal Collegiate Institute in 1880. Following graduation, he taught briefly in Chatham County, N.C., before accepting an invitation from Livingston College President Joseph Charles Price to join the faculty there. While at Livingstone College, Atkins served as grammar school department head. During the last two years of his six-year tenure at Livingstone, he also served as treasurer of the college. In 1881, Atkins helped found the North Carolina Negro Teachers Association. He served the organization as president or secretary until 1927.

In 1889, Atkins married Oleona Pegram (1867-1936) of New Bern, North Carolina. Pegram was as a teacher at Scotia Women’s College (now Barber Scotia College) and Fisk University. A year later the town of Winston offered Atkins a job as principal at the Depot Street School, the largest public school for Blacks in N.C. Shortly after beginning his duties, Atkins approached the Winston Board of Trade and Chamber of Commerce to ask for assistance in starting a college for African-Americans. Upon hearing that the state intended to fund a colored agricultural college, Atkins began soliciting donations to locate the college in Winston. Armed with 50 acres of land, $2,000.00 donated from the local Black community, and an additional $500.00 from R.J. Reynolds, Atkins, with the Chamber’s support, went to Raleigh to lobby Winston’s case. However, as the citizens of Greensboro, North Carolina, offered 14 acres of land and $11,000.00, Greensboro was selected as the site of the school, now North Carolina A&T State University.

Atkins was more successful in his dream to build a community that could serve as a model for Black home ownership. In 1892, Atkins and his family became the first family to move into the new community, Columbian Heights, located on property formerly owned by the Inside Land and Improvement Company. Undaunted by his failure in Raleigh, Atkins persisted in his quest to build a school for Blacks in Columbian Heights. With the help of businessmen Henry E. Fries and William A. Blair, Atkins approached and received financial support from wealthy New England textile manufacturer and philanthropist John F. Slater. Thus, Slater Industrial Academy was founded in 1892 and began the next year as a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher and twenty-five students.

In 1897, Simon Green Atkins began service as the corresponding secretary of the American Negro Academy, the first scholarly organization for African-Americans. Atkins held this position until 1915, when the burdens of fundraising travel and administering Slater hindered his ability to produce the critical scholarly works called for by the organization. He was also a member of the AME Zion Church for more than fifty years; during twenty of those years, he served as the church’s secretary. In 1904, Atkins officially resigned his position at Slater to further pursue his ecumenical work with the church. He remained the school’s nominal head until 1913, when he officially resumed the presidency of Slater Industrial Academy and State Normal School. Atkins continued in this role until retiring at the end of the spring term in 1934, due to poor health. Following Atkins’ death in 1934, his son Francis L. Atkins took over the presidency.

Winston Salem State University

Annie Brooks Evans

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 14:39:09 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Annie Brooks Evans was a music school teacher in the Washington, DC public school system and also the mother of the internationally renowned opera singer Madame Lillian Evanti.

Sources: Addison N Scurlock, Photographer; Evans-Tibbs Collection, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institute, Gift of the Estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs, Jr.

Maude Brooks Cotton

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 23:57:01 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Maude Brooks Cotton (1872-1945), a native of Oberlin, Ohio, received her early school training at Knoxville College. Later she enrolled at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she received a Bachelor of Music degree in 1896. In 1900 she was married to Reverend John Adam Cotton (1865 - 1943), and immediately journeyed in the mission field for the United Presbyterian Church. In 1903, she joined her husband in Henderson, North Carolina, where he was called to pastor and serve as president of the Henderson Normal School. Making him the second African American to do so. She was an active member of the organization and also wrote the words and music for the Federated Song. "We Are Lifting as We Climb." She was a charter member and local and state president of the Parent -Teachers Association. In 1943, she accompanied her husband to Knoxville College, where he was named the first black president and served until his death that same year. She was the mother of Carol C. Bowie, an educator. She is interred on the grounds of Jubilee Hospital.

Sources: Vance County, North Carolina, By Andre Vann, (2000); Beck Cultural Exchange Center, Knoxville, Tennessee; Knaffl Brothers, Knoxville, Tennessee;Courtesy of Andre D. Vann

Miles Vanderhorst Lynk

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 17:23:06 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Physician, journalist, and educator Myles Lynk was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, on June 3, 1871, the son of former enslaved parents. His father was killed when Lynk was only six years old, and he was running the farm by the time he was eleven. His mother insisted that he attend school five months a year, and Lynk supplemented his education by reading at home in what he later called "Pine Knot College." He began teaching in Fayette County when he was seventeen, saving his money for further education. Lynk graduated from Meharry Medical College in 1891.

Lynk became the first black physician in Jackson, Tennessee and founded the first medical journal published by an African American, The Medical and Surgical Observer, published monthly from 1892 to 1894. He also published a literary magazine from 1898 to 1900. Lynk was a cofounder of the National Medical Association for African American Physicians in 1895.

In 1900 Lynk founded the University of West Tennessee, with departments of medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing. In 1907 the school moved to Memphis. Dr. Fanny Kneeland, one of the first women to practice medicine in Memphis, was a member of the faculty. The Jane Terrell Baptist Hospital provided clinical training. When the school closed in 1924, it had issued 216 medical degrees.

Lynk was also a founder of the Bluff City Medical Society and an active member of Collins Chapel CME Church. He wrote several books and numerous articles.

In 1893 Lynk married Beebe Stephen, a Lane College graduate who taught chemistry and medical Latin. They were married for fifty-five years. After her death in 1948, he married Ola Herin Moore. Lynk died on December 29, 1956.

Sources: The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, by Pierre Magnuss; Memphis Museum; The Black Troopers: Or the Daring Heroism of the Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War by Miles V Lynk (published 1889)