Nettie Langston Napier | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Nettie DeElla Langston June 17, 1861 Oberlin, Ohio |
| Died | September 30, 1938 (aged 77) Nashville, Tennessee |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | activist |
| Spouse | James Carroll Napier (m. 1878) |
Nettie Langston Napier (born Nettie DeElla Langston [1] ) was an African-American activist for the rights of women of color during the early part of the 20th century. She lived in Nashville, Tennessee.
Nettie Langston was born June 17, 1861 [2] in Oberlin, Ohio, into an upper-class family. Her father was John Mercer Langston, later the founding dean of the law school at Howard University, first president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, a historically black college, and the first black person to be elected to the United States Congress from Virginia. Her mother was Caroline Matilda (Wall), also a graduate of Oberlin. After attending Howard for a year, Nettie transferred to Oberlin College, where she studied music.
Her future husband, James Carroll Napier, was then working at the State Department and earned his law degree at Howard, where he met John Mercer Langston and his family. Napier returned to Nashville in 1872 to start a law practice. In 1878 he and Nettie married in Washington D.C., in a "predominantly white Congregational church". [1] They adopted a daughter, Carrie.
Napier became a "prominent clubwom[a]n" in Nashville, and made important social connections across the South. She was part of a "southern network" of about a dozen upper-class women, including such prominent women as Maggie L. Walker, Mary McLeod Bethune, Margaret Murray Washington, Jennie B. Moton, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and Lucy Craft Laney. [3] She was a close friend of the educator John Hope, and was described as "the first lady of Nashville's black elite". The Napier household was known as "the undisputed center of Nashville's African American upper class". [1]
In 1907 she founded the Day Homes' Club, an organization to support African-American children in Nashville. [4] Josie English Wells was physician in charge. [4] She was involved with Fisk University, and was invited by the local Red Cross chapter to work with them during World War I. [5] She was treasurer of the National Association of Colored Women, [6] leading the organization together with Margaret Murray Washington. [5]
In 1915, during a decade when the national Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) was considering expanding its services to colored women (its facilities would be segregated), Napier attended the organization's conference in Louisville, as the representative of Nashville. She wanted to establish a YWCA in Nashville for women of color. [7]
In the 1920s, she became an Honorary Member of Zeta Phi Beta sorority.
In 1934 students of Tennessee State College's "negro history class" honored her and her husband with a pageant entitled From Africa to America. [8]
Napier died on September 30, 1938, in Nashville. [2]
Mary Church Terrell was an American civil rights activist, journalist, teacher and one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree. She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street School —the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1895, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the Colored Women's League of Washington (1892). She helped found the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and served as its first national president, and she was a founding member of the National Association of College Women (1923).
John Mercer Langston was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, diplomat, and politician. He was the founding dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University, a historically black college. He was elected a U.S. Representative from Virginia and wrote From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol; Or, the First and Only Negro Representative in Congress From the Old Dominion.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history.
Sue Bailey Thurman was an American author, lecturer, historian and civil rights activist. She was the first non-white student to earn a bachelor's degree in music from Oberlin College, Ohio. She briefly taught at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, before becoming involved in international work with the YWCA in 1930. During a six-month trip through Asia in the mid-1930s, Thurman became the first African-American woman to have an audience with Mahatma Gandhi. The meeting with Gandhi inspired Thurman and her husband, theologian Howard Thurman, to promote non-violent resistance as a means of creating social change, bringing it to the attention of a young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr. While she did not actively protest during the Civil Rights Movement, she served as spiritual counselors to many on the front lines, and helped establish the first interracial, non-denominational church in the United States.
Sarah Jane Woodson Early, born Sarah Jane Woodson, was an American educator, black nationalist, temperance activist and author. A graduate of Oberlin College, where she majored in classics, she was hired at Wilberforce University in 1858 as the first black woman college instructor, and also the first black American to teach at a historically black college or university (HBCU).
Lugenia Burns Hope, was a social reformer whose Neighborhood Union and other community service organizations improved the quality of life for African Americans in Atlanta, Georgia, and served as a model for the future Civil Rights Movement.
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Juno Frankie Seay Pierce, also known as Frankie Pierce or J. Frankie Pierce, was an American educator and suffragist. Pierce opened the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls in 1923, and she served as its superintendent until 1939. The school continued to operate until 1979. The daughter of a slave, Pierce addressed white women at the inaugural convention of the Tennessee League of Women Voters, held in the Tennessee Capitol in May 1920.
Ruth Logan Roberts was a suffragist, activist, YWCA leader, and host of a salon in Harlem, New York City.
James Carroll Napier was an American businessman, lawyer, politician, and civil rights leader from Nashville, Tennessee, who served as Register of the Treasury from 1911 to 1913. He is one of only five African Americans with their signatures on American currency. He was one of four African-American politicians appointed to a high position under President William Howard Taft, and they were known as Taft's "Black Cabinet." He was instrumental in founding civic institutions in Nashville to benefit the African-American business community and residents, including an emphasis on education.
Mary Frances Gunner was an African American playwright and community leader based in Brooklyn, New York. She was also known as Francis Gunner Van Dunk.
Ida Alexander Gibbs Hunt was an advocate of racial and gender equality and co-founded one of the first YWCAs in Washington, D.C., for African-Americans in 1905. She was the daughter of Judge Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, the wife of William Henry Hunt, and a longtime friend of W. E. B. Du Bois. Along with Du Bois, she was a leader of the early Pan-African movement.
Mary Jackson McCrorey was an American educator, mission worker, and leader in the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA).
Oberlin Academy Preparatory School, originally Oberlin Institute and then Preparatory Department of Oberlin College, was a private preparatory school in Oberlin, Ohio which operated from 1833 until 1916. It opened as Oberlin Institute which became Oberlin College in 1850. The secondary school serving local and boarding students continued as a department of the college. The school and college admitted African Americans and women. This was very unusual and controversial. It was located on the Oberlin College campus for much of its history and many of its students continued on to study at Oberlin College. Various alumni and staff went on to notable careers.
Carolina Mercer Langston was an American writer, actress and mother to poet, playwright and social activist Langston Hughes.
Marian M. Hadley was Nashville, Tennessee's first African American librarian, serving as the first librarian of the Nashville Negro Public Library, a branch of the Nashville Public Library for African American patrons. She went on to work at the Chicago Public Library for almost twenty years, building and promoting the library's collection of African American history and culture.
Mattie E. Coleman (1870-1943) was one of Tennessee's first African-American woman physicians. She was a religious feminist and suffragist who was instrumental in building alliances between black and white women.
Phyllis Terrell Langston was a suffragist and civil rights activist. She worked alongside her mother, Mary Church Terrell, in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs and the White House pickets during demonstrations made by the National Woman's Party.
Minnie Lou Crosthwaite was an American teacher who became the first African-American woman to pass the teacher exam in Nashville's segregated school system. She later became an instructor and then registrar at Fisk University, and was influential in the social life and the education of the city's African-American community.
Rosetta Lawson was an American temperance activist, educator, and suffragette. She was, with her husband, educator and activist Jesse Lawson, a co-founder of Frelinghuysen University, where she taught anatomy and physiology. She served for 30 years as a national organizer for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Lawson organized the first Congress of Colored Women in the United States, and was elected to the executive committee of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.