Georgiana Rose Simpson

Georgiana Rose Simpson was a philologist and the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in the United States. 

Born in Washington, D.C., she trained to teach in city elementary schools at Miner Normal School in Washington, and started teaching in 1885 at about age twenty. Simpson became interested in German language and culture after working with German immigrant children in her hometown. Decades into her teaching career, Simpson moved to the University of Chicago to study philology and German language and literature (A.B., 1911; A.M., 1920; and Ph.D., 1921) as well as French, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. 

Simpson faced racism and discrimination throughout her academic career. Shortly after she arrived at the University of Chicago, she was forced to live off-campus when white students objected to sharing a dorm with a Black woman, an outcome finally enforced by University President Harry Pratt Judson. 

Following her graduate studies, Simpson returned to Washington, D.C., where she taught at Dunbar High School until she was hired by Howard University in 1931. Though she remained interested in German studies, she also contributed scholarship on Black subjects. In 1924, she published a critical edition and translation from French of a biography of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian slave rebellion. 

Over the course of her life, she befriended abolitionist Frederick Douglass and his second wife; worked alongside early Black feminist Anna J. Cooper; and corresponded with civil rights activist and editor W. E. B. Du Bois, among other leading Black intellectuals. Simpson also participated in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C.