The Black Female Professoriate at Howard University: 1926–1977

Perkins, Linda M.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59084-8_6

Linda M. Perkins⁴

Part of the book series: Historical Studies in Education ((HSE))

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the early Black women faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C. over a fifty-year period, when Mordecai W. Johnson became the first Black president in 1926, until the late 1970s when the early Black female faculty began to retire. This study highlights the profound difference in hiring practices of the historically Black colleges compared with traditional white colleges, and sheds light on the experiences of Black women faculty at one of the most prestigious and elite Black institutions of higher education in the nation. It also illuminates the collective action of tenured senior Black women faculty who advocated for gender equity and provides insight into how women faculty navigated their years working with President Johnson. This chapter also discusses how critical Howard was as the hub for activism on behalf of Black women in higher education. In addition to the actions of these women faculty, this chapter discusses the efforts of Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first Woman Dean at Howard on behalf of Black women students at Howard and nationally. Slowe’s appointment preceded but overlapped with President Mordecai Johnson.

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Notes

1.
Linda M. Perkins, “The Black Female American Missionary Association Teacher in the South, 1861–1870,” in Black Americans in North Carolina and the South, ed. Jeffrey J. Crow and Flora J. Hatley, 1^st ed. (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 122–136.
2.
Linda M. Perkins, “Bound to them by a Common Sorrow: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement,” Journal of African American History 100,(2015): 721–747.
3.
Barbara Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women’s Higher Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) devotes an entire chapter to this dilemma, see Chapter 8. Also see Joyce Antler. “After College, What? New Graduates and the Family Claim,” American Quarterly 32 (1980): 409–434.
4.
The ten schools were: Medicine, Dental, Pharmacy, Divinity, Law, Social Work, Education, Home Economics, Engineering, and Architecture.
5.
Louis Ray, ed., Higher Education for African Americans before the Civil Rights Era, 1900–1964: Perspectives on the History of Higher Education, 29^th ed. (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 153.
6.
Jonathan Scott Holloway. Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Zachery R. Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970 (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2009); Rayford W. Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 1867–1967 (New York: New York University Press, 1969).
7.
These are just the most prominent of the women faculty and among the earliest to serve.
8.
Black Women Oral History Project Interviews. Interviews of the Black Women Oral History Project, 1976–1981 (hereafter, BWOHP). OH-31, T-32. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass (hereafter, SL).
9.
For example, Mary Church Terrell, the prominent Black women’s clubwoman and one of the founders of the National Association of Colored People was an 1884 graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. After graduation she was appointed to the faculty of Wilberforce College in Ohio, one of the first Black colleges, founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856. Terrell was offered a faculty position at several institutions which were all very “desirable;” she noted that “The heads of institutions for colored youth were beginning to insist that the teachers should be college graduates, and there were so few colored women who met this requirement then that it was very easy for those who had to secure desirable positions.” Terrell chose Wilberforce since it wasn’t in the Deep South. Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World.
(Washington, D. C.: National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs Inc., 1968), 60–61.
10.
BWOHP, Eva Dykes, interview by Merze Tate. November 30 and December 1, 1977. OH-31, T-32/Eva Dykes, SL. Interview with Sadie Tanner Mossel Alexander. Alexander Family Papers. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Archives, 1977).
11.
BWOHP, Dorothy Ferebee, interview by Merze Tate. December 28 and 31, 1979. OH-31, T-32/Dorothy Ferebee, SL.
12.
For lengthy discussions of Johnson’s battles with various Howard faculty and administrators, see Logan, Howard University.
13.
Note attached to the letter from Clarence Harvey Mills to Lucy Diggs Slowe, Slowe Papers, Howard University: Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (hereafter, MSRC), January 11, 1927. For a more detailed discussion of Slowe’s negative experiences with Mordecai Johnson see: Logan, Howard University, p.292 and Linda M. Perkins, “Lucy Diggs Slowe and the Self-Determination of African-American College Women,” Journal of Negro History – Vindicating the Race: Contributions to African-American Intellectual History 81, no.1/4 (1996): 89–104; Patricia Bell Scott’s, “To Keep My Self-Respect: Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe’s 1927 Memorandum on the Sexual Harassment of Black Women,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal – Sexual Harassment Issue 9, (1997): 70–76.
14.
Perkins, “Lucy Diggs Slowe”; “The Trials of a President,” Time Magazine, March 1938, 13.
15.
See memorandum to the Howard Board of Trustees by members of the Executive Committee of the General Alumni Association in which they outline President Johnson’s “hate, ill will, and malice” towards Slowe and noted while she was critically ill, Johnson sent Slowe a message that “she should turn to her duties immediately or a successor would be in her place within twenty-four hours;” because of this, the memorandum stated that the family of Slowe requested that Johnson not appear or take part in any aspect of her funeral service. Quoted in Carroll L.L. Miller and Anne S. Pruitt-Logan, Faithful to the Task at Hand: The Life of Lucy Diggs Slowe, Albany: State University of New York Press, 233–234.
16.
BWOHP, Inabel Burns Lindsay, interview by Marcia McAdoo Greenlee, May 20 and June 7, 1977. OH-31, T-32/Inabel Burns Lindsay, SL.
17.
Ibid, 24.
18.
Ibid, 24.
19.
Rayford Logan Diary, entry March 4, 1943, Box 4, folder 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
20.
BWOHP, Dorothy Ferebee, interview by Merze Tate. December 28 and 31, 1979. OH-31, T-32/Dorothy Ferebee, SL.
21.
Merze Tate, telephone interview with the author, April 1984. BWOHP, Merze Tate, interview by Theresa Danley. April 24, 1978 and January 3, 1979. OH-31, T-32/Merze Tate, SL.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Rayford Logan Diary, September 3, 1942, Box 3, folder 7, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
25.
Thomas Dublin, ed., “Caroline Ware” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, Completing the Twentieth Century, Vol.5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 662–664. Also see Linda M. Perkins, “Merze Tate and the Gender Equity at Howard University: 1942–1977,” History of Education Quarterly 54, (2014): 516–551.
26.
Rayford Logan Diary, September 11, 1942, Box 3, folder 7, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
27.
Quoted in Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 161.
28.
Merze Tate to J. St. Clair Price, Dean of Liberal Arts, Howard University, July 17, 1945, Merze Tate Papers, box 219–5, folder 19, Manuscript Division, MSRC.
29.
Transcript of an oral history interview of Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley, January 28 and February 10, 1993, Howard University Oral Histories, MSRC.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Franklin quoted in Rayford Logan’s Diaries, December 23, 1954, Box 6, folder 1, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
33.
Program of the Women’s Faculty Club of Howard University, March 5, 1950, Rankin Memorial Chapel, Howard University in Merze Tate Papers, Manuscript Division, MSRC.
34.
Minutes of the Committee on AAUW Accreditation, March 28, 1961, Tate Papers, Manuscript Division, MSRC.
35.
BWOHP. Merze Tate in Dorothy Boulding Ferebee Interview at Radcliffe College. 1979.. OH-31, T-32/34, SL.
36.
Ibid.
37.
Merze Tate. Report of the Status of Faculty in College of Liberal Arts by Department, Rank and Salary, 1953–54, 1987. Washington, D.C.: Howard University.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Merze Tate to Dean J. St. Clair Price, Dean Liberal Arts, Howard University, October 29, 1951 in Tate Papers, Howard University, box 219–5, folder 19, Manuscript Division, MSRC.
40.
Ibid.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Ibid.
43.
Stewart Nelson to Merze Tate, October 31, 1956, Merze Tate Papers, Box 219–4, folder 17, MSRC.
44.
Merze Tate. Report of the Status of Faculty in College of Liberal Arts by Department, Rank and Salary, 1961, 1987, Box 1, file 1, Washington, D.C.: Howard University.
45.
Faculty Women – College of Dentistry, 1961, Box 9, file 9, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C., Howard University.
46.
Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Interview with Radcliffe College, 34, BWOHP, SL.
47.
For more details on the activities of these women on a national level see Linda M. Perkins, “The National Association of College Women: Vanguard of Black Women’s Leadership and Education, 1923–1954” Journal of Education 172, (1990): 65–75.
48.
Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 161.
49.
Eulogy of Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee by Patricia Robert Harris, Secretary of Health and Human Services, September 20, 1980, Dorothy Ferebee, in Ferebee Papers Manuscript Division, MSRC.

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Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California, United States
Linda M. Perkins

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Graduate School of Education, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, California, USA
Margaret A. Nash

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Perkins, L.M. (2018). The Black Female Professoriate at Howard University: 1926–1977. In: Nash, M.A. (eds) Women’s Higher Education in the United States. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59084-8_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59084-8_6
Published: 29 July 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59083-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59084-8
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