Georgiana Simpson was one. We will feature the other two Thursday and Friday of this week.

Early Life

She was born in the District of Columbia near 1866, the daughter of David and Catherine Simpson. She spent all her years there with the exception of time devoted to travel and study elsewhere. She was educated in DC public schools and was trained at the Normal School, under the late Dr. Lucy E. Moten. She went on to become an elementary school teacher in 1885.

Having profited by her opportunities to study German by contact with Germans in the US, she was encouraged by Dr. Lucy Moten to study the language and literature of Germany. She spent a year and a half in that country and would have remained longer had not the serious illness of her mother called her back to the US. She later became a German instructor at the M Street High School – later to be called Dunbar High School.

Education

Georgiana Simpson’s field was German philology. She had written a Masters thesis entitled “The Phonology of Merigarto,” a study of an Early Middle High German poem. Her doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Martin Schütze, focused on German Romanticism and was entitled “Herder’s Conception of Das Volk.”

Simpson earned an AB at the University of Chicago in 1911, mostly with summer and correspondence courses. She began pursuing her graduate work immediately through further summer courses (1915-1919) while also teaching at Dunbar High School. After two years in full-time residence at the University of Chicago (1919-1921), Simpson earned her AM and PhD in German philology.

Simpson’s time at the University of Chicago was important not simply for its scholarly significance. Simpson also found herself both in 1907 and in 1920 and 1921 at the center of debates over where and how Negro students would be housed.

Career

Dr. Simpson was an enthusiastic advocate of the study of German culture. So much so that during the first World War the witch-hunters ignorantly charged her with being pro-German. She was investigated to determine her loyalty, but the wise-acres could find nothing in what she had said and done except to evaluate highly the culture of the German people. She had no interests in or admiration for the Kaiser and Hitler machines which brought the country ruin. Dr. Simpson showed her wisdom in upbraiding Americans for their refusal to study the German language because of the ware histeria of 1914-1919. Instead of refusing to study further the language of the enemy that was the very time to make a serious study of it, she thought.

She was a woman of Christian character. She became a member of the First Congregational Church when it was dominated by the element that participated in the establishment and development of Howard University, and there she remained a member until she died. She was a woman who lived according to Christian ideals – circumspective, temperate, and even Puritanic in her daily life. She walked the narrow path herself and often made enemies by upbraiding (to reprove/scold sharply) those in high places who did not conduct themselves accordingly. She was not swayed by fashions and fads. She came out of a Christian home and moved early among earnest teachers who helped her develop into a woman of unblemished character. She believed in a sound body in which to have a sound mind and lived as a vegetarian.

Race

She was deeply interested in race. She was a frequent visitor at the home of Frederick Douglass even when a little girl. There she learned to admire not only the Sage of Anacostia himself but formed a lifetime friendship with his second wife, Helen Pitts Douglass. For some years after the passing of the distinguished Douglass, Dr. Simpson lived in the home with the widow. This close contact led to a still greater admiration for the bereaved woman; and in an unpublished manuscript of Dr. Simpson, she pays high tribute to this woman who preserved the Douglass Home and made it possible for the women of the country to reclaim it as a national shrine.

Dr. Simpson’s interest in the Negro race was more clearly demonstrated in her teaching in the classroom. She believed that every teacher of Negroes should be a teacher of the history of the race; and, although an instructor in German and French, she had such an abundance of knowledge of her filed that she found occasion to employ her philological skills toward increased understanding of African American history and literature. It was this interest that lead to her editing and bringing out through the Associated Publishers an edition of Gragnon La Coste’s Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1924. This, her last major publication, was a critical edition and translation from the French biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian slave rebellion and father of free Haiti.

She joined the faculty of Howard in 1931. She served until she reached the age limit and retired in 1939. Dr. Simpson died in 1944.

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Information obtained from The Journal of Negro History.

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