Anita Florence Hemmings

Anita Florence Hemmings, (June 8, 1872 – 1943) born to Dora Logan and Robert Williamson Hemmings, was the first African-American woman to graduate Vassar College and was a Librarian/Foreign Cataloger at the Boston Public Library. Her religious affiliation was Protestant Episcopalian. Her brother was the first African American to Graduate from M.I.T.

The Librarian

Anita Hemmings attended preparation school at Girls High School in Boston and Northfield Seminary. She graduated A.B. (Vassar College) in 1897 from this most prestigious of women’s college as valedictorian, but not acknowledged as such. Anita joined the staff of the Boston Public Library as their foreign cataloger, doing translations and bibliographies. She was proficient in seven languages, including Latin, French, and ancient Greek.

AmCyc Vassar College

She remained a librarian most of her life, and when her daughter was of age, she too was enrolled at Vassar, graduating in the class of '27. She in turn was also vilified by the same person who outed Anita at a reunion, who told the college president that the reason she was so interested was because she had a roommate who was black, upon having learned that the daughter of the first black graduate was also attending. [1] The college responded officially, noting that she (Ellen Love) had a single room in the dormitory, and probably didn't even know that she was black. The story of the first African American graduate of Vassar college, one of the seven sisters and a progressive liberal bastion of W.A.S.P. sensibilities shocked the nation when it was revealed, this due to the doggedness of her roommates father; whom set out to find the parents of this remarkable young woman only so that he could out her publicly as a 'negress' daring to pass in white society. This was just before her graduation and the college immediately held a secret hearing to decide whether she would graduate with her class. After the student made a personal appeal to the pres., Prexy Roberts, she was allowed to do so. In 1914 she was listed in the Woman's Who's who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada. In that listing it was noted that she “favors woman suffrage.” She was also a friend of African American civil rights activist W. E. B. Dubois. Living in New York City with her 'white' husband, and while being multi-racial is not the issue it was in the 19th century, Social conditions had changed and it was no longer seen as socially advantageous to try to "pass" as white. Still, Anita Love (née Hemmings) did not tell her daughter that she was not white, and enrolled her at Vassar as a legacy, fading her to white in doing so.

An 'Exotic' Beauty

She was undeniably the most attractive woman in her class, it was whispered that she had 'Indian blood' which accounted for her dark hued complexion and straight black hair. She sang soprano in the glee club and was the featured soloist at the local churches in Poughkeepsie.

Dr. June Jackson Christmas ’45–4, one of Vassar’s first African-American graduates, admits the move to formally admit black students in 1940 was brought about by a young Presbyterian minister from Harlem, Rev. James Robinson. He was invited to speak at a religious conference sponsored by the Y.W.C.A. and Vassar College in the late 1930s, he offered to find them a black student of Vassar caliber and to present her to the college for acceptance. "In his congregation at the Church of the Master he found Beatrix (Betty) McCleary ’44, a top-notch student at her high school in New York," wrote Christmas in a 1988 Vassar Quarterly article. "She applied, was accepted, and in the fall of 1940 entered Vassar as the first openly acknowledged Negro student in Vassar’s history." When Christmas heard of Vassar’s change in policy as she was preparing to apply to college later that same year, she was skeptical — although she was aware that the college had already admitted at least one African-American student, albeit unknowingly.

"I had grown up in the Boston area hearing a story, which I had always believed was apocryphal, that there had once been a colored girl at Vassar and, having earned the honor of being valedictorian, was revealed to be a Negro and denied both that honor and the chance to graduate," Christmas wrote in the VQ article. "Anita Hemmings was probably the heroine of this story, minus the valedictory but with a happier ending."

In 1997, Vassar African American studies students petitioned college President Frances D. Fergusson to recognize Anita Hemmings at that year’s centennial celebration. Writing about it in Vassar Quarterly, Olivia Mancini ‘00, a Poughkeepsie Journalist, said "It brought [Hemmings’] graduation and presence to a level of honor that it should have had a hundred years ago." Vassar has acknowledged Anita Hemmings as the first African-American to graduate the college, but for almost all of her college career, she ‘passed’ as white. Today she would be listed as black, or other ethnic designation. then, she was one of the class of Multiracial Americans. The term may also include Americans of mixed-race ancestry who self-identify with just one group culturally and socially (cf. the one-drop rule)

The Search

Joyce Bickerstaff is a black woman, an associate professor of education and Africana studies at Vassar, who had been researching Anita's life for eight years when she got access to one of Anita's descendants, Jillian A. Sim. Bickerstaff's interest went back to 1989, when she began constructing an exhibit for Vassar about the African American experience at the school. When Dr. Bickerstaff found in the archives a newspaper account of the first black student, she was intrigued enough to research further. “Society and educational circles in this city,” wrote the New York Newspaper the World in 1897, “are profoundly shocked by the announcement in the local papers to-day that one of the graduating class of Vassar College this year was a Negro girl, who concealing her race, entered the college, took the four year’s course, and finally confessed the truth to a professor a few days before commencement."

“The facts were communicated to the faculty, which body in secret session decided to allow the girl to receive her diploma with her class.…

“She has been known as one of the most Beautiful young women who ever attended the great institution of learning, and even now women who receive her in their homes as their equal do not deny her beauty.…" The fact that she was beautiful may have a place in the narrative, as this may have ignited some jealousy in Anita’s roommate, who had begun to have suspicions about Anita’s racial identity, prompting her to have her father investigate further by sending a private investigator to seek out her parents.

“Her manners were those of a person of gentle birth, and her intelligence and ability were recognized alike by her classmates and professors. Her skin was dark but not swarthy. Her hair was black but straight as an Indian’s, and she usually gathered it in a knot at the back of her head. Her eyes were coal black and of piercing brilliancy. Her appearance was such that in other environments she might have been taken for an Indian. Indeed, not a few of the students whispered that Indian blood flowed in her veins.”

The Providence Journal reported that a "crestfallen" Hemmings appealed to college President "Prexy" Taylor, "with the result that the girl was awarded her diploma." "[She] took a prominent part in the exercises of class day, and no one who saw the class of ’97 leave the shades of Vassar suspected Negro blood in one woman voted the class beauty," said the Journal.

When Dr. Bickerstaff heard that someone was making inquires to the college about Anita Hemmings, she asked for permission to meet. The white woman who had contacted the college was attempting to verify something that her grandmothers friend had told her mother after her grandmother had passed. Her mother told her, and it had festered for years while she was overseas and upon returning to the states and settling in Cape Cod, she set about verifying what she had been told. The friend had told her mother that her grandmother, Ellen, had attended Vassar in the 20's while passing for white; and that, Her great-great-grandfather was a negro. Jillian found out that both her grandmother and the friend had attended Vassar, and the friend was holding on to a family secret after Ellen died, which she had promised Ellen never to reveal, finally telling it to Jill's mother. Bickerstaff told her the names of her Great-Grandparents on her fathers side, and listed their nationalities as American and she identified English and French as other nationalities in her ancestry.

Jillian Sim learned that her great-grandmother was the first black graduate of Vassar College and her grandmother also passed for white while attending Vassar. it was the family secret she was never intended to learn from her family. What white students and faculty might have seen merely as an insolent charade in 1897 was in reality an agonizing and split existence. Throughout her college years Anita went back and forth between elite white Vassar and poor black Boston, between rich white strangers and her family of poor black migrants. She also learned that a Frederick John Hemmings had graduated M.I.T. in 1897, and that he was the brother of Anita Hemmings. He was listed as 'Colored' and Frederick, unlike his sister, never passed for white. A historian at Vassar showed Jillian a letter they received from Ellen when Jill was about seven years old. It was her fervent wish, she said, that her granddaughter Jillian attend Vassar to “avail” herself of the “magic” one could experience there.

Passing

The two had a pair of siblings: Elizabeth and Robert Junior. Elizabeth died in an asylum; she was clinically insane. Meharry Medical College, a historically all-black school in Tennessee in 1890 graduated Andrew Jackson Love, who married Anita Hemmings and ran a medical practice on Madison Ave in NYC for rich white people, claiming to be a graduate of Harvard Medical school. Jillian Sim' wrote in American Heritage magazine in 1999, she saw "Anita and Andrew as equals, partners in a lifelong deception that was courageous, desperate —and so effective that I might very well have gone to my grave without ever learning of it."

Anita Hemmings was an icon before her time, She had attended Vassar College a generation before her daughter did, and was a strong student there. Anita married Dr. Andrew Love, whom she met while working at the Boston Public Library not long after she had graduated. She could speak seven languages and did not know how to cook when she married. She came from French and English stock. Her children, Ellen, Barbara and Andrew Jr. attended Horace Mann School in Manhattan and went to an exclusive whites-only camp in Cape Cod. Like his wife, Dr. Love had been passing for years. a Boston newspaper that interviewed Hemmings when she was working at the public library stated that the "singularly serious, frank, earnest girl" had never made any attempt to deny her African background while in her hometown. Most of the narrative is true, what is not was the color of her skin. She died in 1943

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External links

Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition - by F. James Davis, Paperback – October 2, 2001

More than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order - G. Reginald Daniel, (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2002).

John William Leonard, "Woman's who's who of America: a biographical dictionary of contemporary women of the United States and Canada, 1914-l9l5," p 502, American Commonwealth Co., 1914, at http://books.google.com/books?id=GvwUAAAAYAAJhttp://books.google.com/books?id=GvwUAAAAYAAJ

Fading To White Jillian A. Sim, American Heritage Vol 5, Iss 1, Feb/Mar 1999 http://www.americanheritage.com/content/fading-whitehttp://www.americanheritage.com/content/fading-white

Geaneology research - http://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/love/5901/