It’s the weekend, POU Family and lurkers! This week’s thread focused on African-American Historical Firsts. Now granted, there are tons of firsts out there, so I will be able to visit this subject again soon.
The Three Ph.D’s
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, born Sarah Tanner Mossell (January 2, 1898 – November 1, 1989), was the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in the United States, the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the first national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.
She practiced as an attorney from 1927 to 1982. She was the first African-American woman appointed as Assistant City Solicitor for the City of Philadelphia. She and her husband were both active in civil rights, and in 1952 she was appointed to the city’s Commission on Human Relations, serving through 1968.
Sarah Tanner Mossell was born on January 2, 1898 in Philadelphia to Aaron Albert Mossell II and Mary Louisa Tanner (1867-?). Her siblings include Aaron Albert Mossell III (1893–1975), who became a pharmacist; and Elizabeth Mossell (1894–1975), who became a Dean of Women at Virginia State College, a historically black college. Her maternal grandfather was Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835–1923), a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and editor of the Christian Recorder.
Mossell’s father was the first African American to graduate from University of Pennsylvania Law School, and his brother, Nathan Francis Mossell (1856–1946), was the first African American to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania medical school.
During her high school years, Mossell lived in Washington, DC with her uncle, Lewis Baxter Moore, who was dean at Howard University. She attended the academic high school, the M Street School, now known as Dunbar High School, graduating in 1915.
Mossell returned to Philadelphia to study at the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1918. She pursued graduate work in economics, also at the University of Pennsylvania, earning her master’s in 1919. Awarded the Francis Sergeant Pepper fellowship, she was able to continue her studies and in 1921 became the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. She was the first African-American woman admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In 1927, she was its first African-American woman graduate, and the first to be admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar.
Finding it difficult to get work in Philadelphia, Mossell worked for the black-owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Durham, North Carolina for two years.
In 1923 after her marriage to Raymond Pace Alexander, Mossell returned to Philadelphia and entered law school. After passing the bar, she joined her husband’s law practice, specializing in estate and family law. They both were active in civil rights law as well. Raymond Alexander was elected to the City Council.
Mossell Alexander worked in her husband’s law firm from 1927 until 1959, when he was appointed to the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. She practiced law on her own until 1976. That year she joined the firm of Atkinson, Myers, and Archie as a general counsel. She retired in 1982. In 1928 Mossell Alexander was the first African-American woman appointed as Assistant City Solicitor for the City of Philadelphia, serving to 1930; she was reappointed from 1934 to 1938. Because of her work in civil rights, in 1952 she was appointed to the Commission on Human Relations of the City of Philadelphia, serving through 1968.
She was also active in numerous professional and civic organizations. From 1943-1947 she was the first woman to serve as secretary of the National Bar Association.
They had two children: Mary Elizabeth Alexander (born 1934), who married Melvin Brown; and Rae Pace Alexander (born 1937), who earned a PhD.
Alexander was the first national president of Delta Sigma Theta, serving from 1919 to 1923. She served on the President’s Committee on Civil Rights that was established by Harry Truman in 1946.
Georgiana R. Simpson was the second black women to be awarded a Ph.D. in the United States. She received her degree in German from the University of Chicago in 1921, the same year that Sadie Tanner Mossell became the first black woman to be awarded the degree (from the University of Pennsylvania) and Eva Beatrice Dykes became the third to achieve the honor (from Howard University). Simpson was by far the oldest of the three. She was fifty-five years old when the degree was conferred.
Georgiana Simpson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1866, where she attended public schools. She was then trained at a District of Columbia Normal School which prepared her to teach in the elementary schools in the city beginning in 1885. Encouraged by one of her former instructors, Dr. Lucy E. Moten, Sampson decided to spend a year and a half studying language and literature in Germany. After earning her B.A. in German language and literature at the University of Chicago in 1911, she returned to Washington, D.C. to teach at M. Street School, later Dunbar High School.
Simpson first enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1907, and experienced racism almost immediately upon her arrival at the campus. Several white Southern female students protested Simpson being allowed to live in their dorm and a number of them moved out. Simpson, like other African American students at the school, often took summer courses to avoid interaction with white students as much as possible. She even took many of her courses via correspondence to limit her time on campus.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1911, Simpson returned to the University in 1917 to undertake her postgraduate studies in German philology, focusing on German romanticism. She was in residency on campus during the Chicago Race Riots of 1919. Her presence, however, continued to generate controversy. In 1920 University of Chicago President Harry Pratt insisted that Simpson find an alternative residence off campus. She was fifty-four years old at the time. Her situation sparked a national debate as to how African American students should be accommodated at top universities. Simpson, however, left the University of Chicago campus.
Nonetheless in 1921, she received her Ph.D. A photograph of her in her doctoral robes was featured in the September 1921 issue of The Crisis, the publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Simpson immediately returned to high school teaching in Washington, D.C. The fame and respect she garnered following her graduation eventually led Howard University to offer her a professorship in 1931. Simpson was sixty-five when she became a university professor. She remained a member of the faculty until 1939. Georgiana Simpson never married. She died in her home in Washington, D.C. in 1944.
Eva Beatrice Dykes was the first black American woman to fulfill the requirements for a doctoral degree, and the third to be awarded a PhD.
Dykes was born in Washington, D.C. on August 13, 1893, the daughter of Martha Ann Howard and James Stanley Dykes. She attended M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School) then Howard University, graduating summa cum laude with an B.A. in 1914. After a short stint of teaching at Walden University in Nashville, Tennessee, Dykes attended Radcliffe College graduating magna cum laude with a second B.A. in 1917 and a M.A in 1918. While at Radcliffe she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1920 Dykes began teaching at Dunbar High School, and in 1921 she received a PhD from Radcliffe (now a part of Harvard University). Her dissertation was titled “Pope and His influence in America from 1715 to 1815”, and explored the attitudes of Alexander Pope towards slavery and his influence on American writers. Dykes was the first black American woman to complete the requirements for a doctoral degree, however, because Radcliffe College held its graduation ceremonies later than some other universities, she was the third to graduate, behind Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander and Georgiana Simpson.
After her graduation from Radcliffe in 1921, Dykes continued to teach at Dunbar High School until 1929 when she returned to Howard University as a member of the English Faculty. An excellent teacher, Dykes won a number of teaching awards during her 15 years of service at Howard University. Her publications include Readings from Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges co-authored with Lorenzo Dow Turner and Otelia Cromwell (1931) and The Negro in English Romantic Thought: Or a Study in Sympathy for the Oppressed (1942).[3] In 1934 Dykes began writing a column in the Seventh-day Adventist periodical Message Magazine, this continued until 1984.
In 1920 Dykes joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church and in 1944 she joined the faculty of the small unaccredited Seventh-day Adventist Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, as the Chair of the English Department. She was the first staff member at Oakwood to hold a doctoral qualification and was instrumental in assisting the college to gain accreditation. Dykes retired in 1968 but returned to Oakwood to teach in 1970 and continued until 1975. In 1973 the Oakwood College library was named in her honor and in 1980 she was made a Professor Emerita. In 1975 the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church presented Dykes with a Citation of Excellence honouring her for an outstanding contribution to Seventh-day Adventist education. Dykes died in Huntsville on October 29, 1986, at the age of ninety-three.
***All information courtesy of Wikipedia.org and BlackPast.org***