Harlem's First

Through the doors of Public School No. 24 in one of Harlem's dingiest districts one morning last week, went many a Negro bigwig bearing congratulations. The rest of Harlem, proud, sent its greetings. There were telegrams from U. S. educators, black and white. There was a letter from a Southern pickaninny which read: "I want to be a principal like you when I grow up."

That morning Mrs. Gertrude Elsie Johnson McDougald Ayer became the first Negro woman to head a New York public school, one of the few colored educators to have charge of white pupils and teachers. Since New York appoints principals only for its biggest schools, she remains on the records as an assistant principal but her duties are the same as those of a full principal. Public School No. 24 has 22 white teachers, three colored. Its 825 elementary pupils are mostly ragged Negro moppets with a scattering of even more ragged Irish, Finns, Jews.

The 825 pupils, had they cared one way or the other, would have had to look twice to be sure that their new principal was not white. One of Harlem's handsomest women, tall, scholarly Gertrude Ayer has a creamy complexion, set off by kinkless grey hair with a streak of black running straight back from the forehead.

Mrs. Ayer's birthplace is now a noisy midtown block opposite Gimbel's department store. One of the first things she learned from her father, New York's second Negro doctor, and her mother, a white woman from the Isle of Wight, was to despise racial prejudice. That attitude and the New York Board of Education's steadfast insistence on racial equality kept her career from being blocked.

Now married to a doctor, Mrs. Ayer has two children by a previous marriage to a Tammany politician named McDougald. Son Cornelius is in Fordham Law School. Daughter Elizabeth, graduated from Hunter College, is doing social service work. With them she has traveled over most" of the U. S. and three years ago Cornelius indulged his mother's liking for motoring and track athletics by driving her to Los Angeles for the Olympic games.

Like many another Negro educator, Mrs. Ayer feels that the backward economic status of her race makes vocational guidance a prime task. Mrs. Ayer was not the only notable of her race to whom the attention of millions of Negro tots was directed this week. All over the land black schoolmarms observed Negro History Week by discoursing proudly to their pupils about the life & work of such distinguished living Negroes as Singers Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes, Novelist Claude McKay, Poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, and of such famed dead as:

Phyllis Wheatley was captured in Africa, sold in Boston. Her book, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, was published in 1773, brought a letter of felicitation from George Washington, went through 15 editions.

Benjamin Banneker reputedly built the first clock made in the U. S., published a series of almanacs. President Thomas Jefferson sent one of his tracts to the French philosopher Condorcet to back up the Jefferson defense of Negro intellect.

Crispus Attucks, a giant mulatto, bobbed up as hero of the "Boston Massacre" (1770), was killed with four others in a skirmish of sailors against British soldiers.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1859-1915), plantation-born pickaninny, teacher, lecturer, reformer, writer, founded Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, died of overwork.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.