Every day this month, the Center for Black Educator Development, in partnership with Phillys7thWard.org and the Education Post will highlight a Black Educator Hall of Famer.
But, don’t forget, e’ry month is Black History Month. February is just the Blackest.
Today, our featured Black educator is Letitia Woods Brown.
Letitia Woods Brown was born in Tuskegee, Alabama on October 24, 1915. Brown came from a family with a history in education. Brown’s maternal great-grandfather Lewis Adams was one of the conceivers and founders of Tuskegee University, then Tuskegee Institute. Her parents, Evadne and Matthew Woods were both instructors at Tuskegee. It was a forgone conclusion that Brown would attend Tuskegee. She did, graduating in 1935.
Brown became a teacher in Macon County school in Alabama. According to Brown’s written testimony, her experiences along with the condition of Black children where she taught sounds much like the testimony of Black teachers who leave the teaching profession due to burnout. It is something all educators who care for the improvement of Black education must strongly wrestle with. Of her time teaching in Macon County, Brown shared:
“The rural black school in the segregated post-depression era was deprived by any standard. There were never enough books and the teacher had to provide her own chalk, paper, pencils, curtains and firewood…When the colored schools gave out in early spring, my parents and I agreed that at $300 a year I wasn’t really supporting myself so I might as well go back to school.”
Brown returned to school. She received her master’s in history from Ohio State University in 1937. During the course of her program, her academic advisor openly questioned why an African American woman would be interested in obtaining a graduate degree “since everyone knew that Negroes didn’t have the intellectual ability for academic pursuits.”
Those words didn’t deter her. They kept her focused.
While at Ohio State, Brown participated in sit-ins against whites-only restaurants organized by the NAACP Youth Council. A year after her graduation, Woods visited Haiti to study Caribbean history and literature with a group from Ohio State, adding that the trip fulfilled a desire to “get outside of the United States to breathe free air.”
While a scholar, Brown also taught history at Tuskegee and LeMoyne-Owen College located in Memphis.
She left Columbus for Cambridge and Harvard University for her doctoral studies. It was at Harvard where she met her husband, Theodore Brown, who was also a doctoral student. The pair married in 1947. While on a pause from her doctoral work, Brown was still active as an educator and activist. She was active on various civic boards and the PTA.
However, academia called Brown back to school to complete her doctoral work. Brown graduated from Harvard, the first African American woman to do so in 1966 with her Ph.D. in history. She received a Fulbright Award and began teaching at George Washington University upon her graduation. She is the author of three works: Residence Patterns of Negroes in the District of Columbia 1800-1860 (1971), Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, 1790-1846 (1972), and Washington in the New Era (1972).
Sadly, Brown passed away after battling with Cancer in 1976. In a piece for the Historical Society of Washington D.C., Brown was remembered as a “distinguished historian… a beautiful teacher… [and] a noble woman.”
Letitia Woods Brown; a member of the Black Educator Hall of Fame.
For more information on Letitia Woods Brown, visit the following site.
