Biographical Database of Black Woman Suffragists
Biography of Dr. Gertrude Elizabeth Curtis, 1880-1973
By Alison Traweek, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Gertrude Elizabeth Curtis was born March 1, 1880 in Bradford, PA.1. Most sources give her hometown as Bradford, PA, but the 1927 Who’s Who in Colored America says she was born in Franklin, PA. There is occasional disagreement over her birth year as well, but 1880 is the most commonly given date. She was adopted as an infant by Stephen and Agnes Elizabeth Curtis. She graduated from Bradford College before moving to New York City and attending the New York College of Dental and Oral Surgery,2. Most sources put her as graduating from Columbia University, although technically the Columbia Dental School did not absorb the New York College of Dental and Oral Surgery until 1923. Armstead-Johnson notes in her brief biography of Curtis that “there is little reason to think that Columbia thought of her as anything other than white” (2), but there is no evidence that Curtis ever actively tried to “pass.” from which she earned her D.D.S. in 1909.3. Though numerous sources say she was graduated from, or passed her exams at, the Pennsylvania College of Dental Medicine in Philadelphia, it is recorded in the 1927 Who’s Who in Colored America that she was licensed by the New York State Board of Dentistry in 1909. Her thesis on pyorrhea alveolis won a Gold Medal from the dental school; she was the only woman to receive the award. She was the first black woman dentist in New York State (some sources say the first on the east coast), and in 1910 became the first African American to be appointed Assistant Visiting Dentist to Bellevue. She maintained a private dental practice in Harlem for some 50 years.
Though she is mentioned frequently in newspapers like The New York Age and The Pittsburgh Courier as both a popular socialite and a dedicated community activist, specific details of her political life, and especially of her connection to suffrage, are largely lost. For instance, she was the 19th district delegate to the Republican State Convention in Saratoga in 1918 and the representative of the Roosevelt Colored Women’s Republican Club for the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, but there is almost no record of her particular causes or positions.For instance, an article in the Chicago Defender of August 3, 1918 preserves a long quote about her experience as a delegate, but she has more to say about her pride in her race and her impressions of Roosevelt than any political stances.
Her political energy seems primarily to have been directed at supporting the Black community, especially Black women, and she referred to herself proudly as a Race Woman. She was a lifelong NAACP member and was very active in local community service; she is recorded as attending and sponsoring many charity events, including giving a talk in 1912 at the YWCA on the importance of physical activity for women, and participating in the 1917 Utopia Neighborhood Club fashion show to raise money for the Sojourner Truth Home for Wayward Girls. In 1932, as president of the Business and Professional Women’s Club, she oversaw a debate on the merits and demerits of birth control with the governing question of how birth control would affect African American women.
Dr. Curtis was married twice but had no children and never changed her name.5. She does use her first husband’s name on federal manuscript census records, however, if irregularly: she is Gertrude E. McPherson in 1920 and 1930, and Curtis Gertrude McPherson in 1940. Her first husband, whom she married in 1912, was Richard Cecil McPherson, known as Cecil Mack. Mack was a musician and songwriter who cowrote The Charleston for the 1923 Broadway show Runnin’ Wild. Curtis, who had been a musical prodigy as a child, was heavily involved in her husband’s work: she accompanied Runnin’ Wild on its European tour in 1923, and served as choir director for part of the European tour of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds in 1930. Mack died in 1944.
In 1948 she married the famous dancer Ulysses ‘Slow Kid’ Thompson. The couple moved to Los Angeles in the late 1940s or early 1950s, where Thompson had business interests. Curtis moved back to New York City in the 1960s. Thompson also returned to New York some time later, as they were living together in Harlem when Curtis died on August 3, 1973.
The Helen Armstead-Johnson Collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture preserves Armstead-Johnson’s short 1979 typed biography of Curtis, Curtis’s obituary, various newspaper clippings and several letters. Additional information on Curtis can be found in the Collection’s files on Cecil Mack and Ulysses S. Thompson. The 1927 Who’s Who in Colored America has an entry on Curtis (under McPherson), and her position as the 1918 Republican delegate is mentioned in Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 as well as in Monroe Work’s 1918-1919 edition of the Negro Year Book.6. Though Terborg-Penn identifies her as the 9th district delegate, Work and other contemporary sources record her as the delegate to the 19th district, which must be correct.
Related Writings in Database
Related Works in DuBois Online Correspondence: 5