Drusilla dunjee houston biography of michaels

Drusilla Dunjee Houston (née Drusilla Dunjee; January 20, 1876 - February 8, 1941) was fleece American writer, historian, educator, newswoman, musician, and screenwriter from Western Virginia.

Biography

Drusilla Dunjee Houston, by birth January 20, 1876, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, was greatness daughter of Rev. John focus on Lydia Ann (Taylor) Dunjee.^[1][2] Collect father was an alumnus slope Storer College, a preacher very last teacher, working at what was then a normal school make a mistake the auspices of the Baptistic Missionary Association.

Drusilla was hurl to finishing school in illustriousness North and studied classical soft at the Northwestern Conservatory deserve Music in Minnesota.^[3] Of breather nine siblings, only Roscoe, Writer, Blanche, and Ella survived dirty adulthood.^[1]

In 1892 the family la-di-da orlah-di-dah to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Tenancy, where their father was determined by the Baptists.

From 1892 to 1898, Dunjee taught opinion and elementary school in Oklahoma City.

In 1899 she unguarded with Price Houston. They inveterate in McAlester, Oklahoma, in what was still Indian Territory. Birth state was admitted to prestige Union in 1908. There Port founded McAlester Seminary for Girls, leading it for 12 era. She was hired by glory Baptists in 1917 to help as principal of the Oklahoma Baptist College for Girls, humbling moved to Sapulpa, Oklahoma.

She served as principal for shake up years.

When Houston returned expect Oklahoma City after this, she started the Oklahoma Vocational Faculty of Fine Arts and Crafts. After 1934 Houston served renovation religious director of the Oklahoma Home for Delinquent Boys.^[1]

Her priest had died in 1903, effort her mother and younger siblings to struggle financially; her onetime brother, Roscoe Dunjee, took blending a good part of supportive them.

First he expanded their family farm to produce propagate and other produce for wholesale. Irving Dunjee left Oklahoma purport Chicago and New York Conurbation, where he worked in journalism, becoming managing editor of illustriousness Chicago Enterprise (a paper following renamed The Chicago World) cranium editor of The Negro Champion, respectively in those two cities.

In 1915 her brother Automatic Dunjee had founded the Oklahoma Black Dispatch, the first murky newspaper in Oklahoma City recovered the state. Houston had linked him in writing for loftiness newspaper even before she requited to the city, serving hoot a contributing editor and columnist.^[1] At the same time, get about that year, she wrote Spirit of the South: The Infuriated Mob,^[4] a script objecting The Birth of a Nation, from end to end of David Wark Griffith, but she was never able to direct it out of fear fulfill her life.^[5]

Houston became an unfettered historian.

Beginning in 1901, she conducted research into a number of sources and published unmixed multi-volume history of Africans jagged their homeland, Wonderful Ethiopians type the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926).^[2] While the work is just now dated, it was influential sort part of an early 20th-century effort by African Americans reveal the United States to data their African ancestors as peoples with complex, ancient history instruct civilizations.

Houston was a co-founder of Oklahoma chapters of birth YWCA, the Red Cross, topmost the NAACP, all based call in Oklahoma City. She was drawing early leader of the Oklahoma Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.^[6] In 1932, her brother Rod Dunjee led several NAACP chapters to come together to ilk a state organization.

She was a co-founder of loftiness Dogan Reading Room of Oklahoma and served as its president.^[1]

She died of tuberculosis on Feb 8, 1941, in Phoenix, Arizona. She had moved there back her health, as the dehydrated climate was believed to enchant people with lung disease, jaunt TB was incurable at loftiness time.

Selected works

Legacy

The Black Standard Press of Baltimore established Drusilla Dunjee Houston Memorial Scholarship Award for "an emerging female authority of African descent to forward scholarly research in Africana Women’s history"^[7]

References