Good morning! It’s Friday POU Family. Continuing on with the theme, I will highlight Carrie Halsell Ward.
Carrie Halsell Ward (1903–1989) was Oregon State University’s first African-American graduate. She graduated in 1926, with a B.A. of Science in Commerce.
Carrie Halsell was born on October 26, 1903 in Boulder, Colorado to William and Bessie Halsell, the third of six children.The family moved to Salem, Oregon around 1912 where William worked various jobs including janitor, laborer, and farmer and by 1921 he was a shopkeeper on State Street. She died in July 1989.
In high school Carrie was on the honor roll and took part in glee club, girls’ club, girls’ reserve, commercial club, and typewriting contests; she received her high school diploma from Salem High School in Salem, Oregon, in 1921.After getting her degree from Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) in 1926, she moved to Portland, where her family had moved, and worked as a housekeeper for the Meier & Frank department store, one of the few employment opportunities for a black woman in the area. In 1927, The Advocate newspaper printed that Carrie Halsell was vacationing in Corvallis for two weeks in July.In September of the same year she took a position at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (now Virginia State University), as an assistant to the registrar and later as an instructor in business.> While at Virginia Normal she was an establishing member of the Alpha Eta chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, a historic black sorority.
In 1945, Carrie took a position at South Carolina State University, where her husband, Louis Morris Ward, worked as a faculty member in Business Administration.She then got a Master’s in Business Administration from New York University in 1949 by going to school in the summers.
In 2002, Oregon State University named a residence hall in her honor. In 2016, Salem High School posthumously gave her an achievement award as the first African American to graduate from Salem High School.
She died in July 1989, at 85 in Orangeburg, South Carolina.