A brief biographical sketch of Frances Olivia Grant, the subject of Maggie’s book, as published in Black Women in America, Second Edition, 2005. 

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Frances Olivia Grant devoted a lifetime to education.  Born on June 30, 1895, she grew up in one of Boston’s most elite African American families.  Her father, George Franklin Grant, was a prominent dentist, an 1870 graduate of the Harvard Dental School, and the inventor of the golf tee.  He ran his successful practice out of the Grant family home at 108 Charles Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill.  Following his death in 1910, the family suffered severe economic hardships, and his wife, Frances Bailey Grant, returned to work as a proofreader at the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Despite the family’s financial obstacles, young Frances earned valedictory honors from Boston’s Girls’ Latin School in 1913. For having the highest standing in scholarship and character, she received the school’s top honor, the Griswold Scholarship. She then entered Radcliffe College and earned academic scholarships that covered the majority of her tuition for four years. The college’s segregated housing rules forced Grant to live in an off-campus Cambridge apartment with her mother and sister. While the discrimination in housing was overt, Frances found greater acceptance in the school’s extra-curricular life. She was active in a number of student clubs, including the Yearbook Committee, the Classics Club, the Student Government Treasurer’s Assistants Committee, the Radcliffe Guild, and the Idler and Music Committee. Grant was even more determined and focused in the classroom. In the fall of 1916, she became Radcliffe College’s first African American Phi Beta Kappa recipient and only the second black female Phi Beta Kappa in the country.

Upon graduating from Radcliffe with magna cum laude honors in Classics in 1917, Grant encountered limited teaching opportunities in Boston, as the public high schools were reluctant to hire an African American woman, even one with such a distinguished academic record. Her job search took her south to New Jersey, where in the fall of 1917 she began teaching English, History, and Latin at the New Jersey State Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, located in Bordentown, a small town just six miles outside of Trenton.  When Frances arrived in 1917, the segregated boarding school ran from the sixth to the tenth grade and had an enrollment around one hundred. The curriculum centered on vocational subjects such as homemaking skills for girls and mechanical skills for boys.  After tirelessly working with the school’s Principal, W.R. Valentine, a 1904 Harvard College graduate, Grant helped transform the Manual Training and Industrial School into a state-certified ninth through twelfth grade high school with a greater focus on academics.  She also founded and advised the school newspaper and the dramatics program.  Under Grant and Valentine’s leadership, the school not only survived but thrived throughout the Depression years, as the school plant and vocational program expanded and enrollment boomed to nearly four hundred.

Throughout the 1930s the school was a social and cultural center for African Americans.  With renowned entertainers and intellectuals such as Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie H. Buroughs, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, and Eleanor Roosevelt visiting, events at Bordentown drew thousands of African Americans from all along the Atlantic Coast.

While the school flourished throughout the 1930s and 1940s, it could not escape the demand for integration.  Despite Grant’s loud and vigorous protests, the New Jersey Board of Education claimed the school could not be integrated and forced its closing in 1955, following the Supreme Court decision in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case. With that rash decision, Grant’s thirty-eight-year teaching career at Bordentown came to an unceremonious end. After Bordentown’s closing, Grant left New Jersey and moved to New York City, where she taught English and Latin at the Fieldston School for eight years.

While Grant remained deeply devoted to teaching, she managed to lead an active social life outside of the school as well.  During both world wars, she devoted countless hours to teaching young, black soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Upton and Fort Dix.  She loved traveling, and her passport included stamps from a trip to France, Italy, and Germany in 1925 and from Russia in 1935.  Grant was also an active member of the National Organization of Teachers of Colored Children and the National Association of College Women (NACW), which were founded primarily to improve academic conditions for black children.  While serving as the northeast director of the NACW, Grant helped reform the career counseling systems of the New Jersey public schools, which previously steered even the most academically qualified African Americans toward a vocational path.

For a lifetime of dedication to teaching and volunteering, Grant earned Radcliffe College’s highest honor and was one of only ten graduates honored with a Centennial Alumnae Recognition Award in 1979. Unmarried and childless, she died in 1982, after having profoundly influenced thousands of young lives.

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