Georgia Rose Simpson

Biographical Sketch of Georgia Rose Simpson, 1864-1944
(Also known as Dr. Georgiana Rose Simpson)

Biographical Database of Black Woman Suffragist

 

By Jewel Parker, graduate student, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Georgia Rose Simpson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1864 to David and Catherine Simpson. David was a laborer in a botanical garden and Catherine was a washerwoman. Georgia had a younger brother, James, who was born two years later. Neither of her parents could read or write. This may have shaped Georgia's desire to pursue higher education.

Simpson attended Miner Normal School for African-American girls where she studied pedagogy. She took a job teaching elementary school-aged children in 1885. Because Simpson exceled in her German language studies, Dr. Lucy E. Moten, the first African-American principal at Miner Normal School, persuaded her to study abroad. From 1900 to 1901, Georgia studied German language and literature at a girls' boarding school in Germany. When her mother became very ill, she returned home to be with her family. Simpson started teaching German at M. Street High School, now known as Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.

In 1907, she began to attend the University of Chicago to study German language with a minor concentration in French. However, because she was black, many white southern students did not want her to live in the dormitories. Sophonisba Breckinridge, Head of Green Residence Hall, asked Simpson to stay in the dormitory. In protest, five students left Green Hall. As a result, Harry Pratt Judson, the University's President, disagreed with Breckinridge and forced Simpson to live off-campus. This prompted Celia Parker Woolley, president of the Chicago Women's Club and the Frederick Douglass Woman's Club, to write a letter requesting Judson to reconsider his decision. Judson never honored Woolley's request. Consequently, Simpson continued to live off-campus and took many classes during the summer to avoid the upset students. She received her bachelor's degree in 1911.

While attending college, Georgia immersed herself in efforts to gain recognition of African-American women's rights. Having faced discrimination as an African American and a woman, Georgia was among the first members of the College Alumnae Club, founded in March 1910. The College Alumnae Club was founded because the Association of Collegiate Alumnae did not admit African-American women who received their degrees from historically black colleges. In March 1913, she attended the women's suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. with several other club women. Georgia was the third president of the club from 1913 to 1915. During her presidency, she briefly lived and studied at a girls' boarding school in Tours, France. At the school, she observed the separation of men and women in the classroom. A victim of racial and gender-based segregation, she argued for integration despite opposing beliefs that doing so would confuse people's socially defined gender roles.

At the beginning of the First World War in 1914, she returned to the United States where she continued to teach German at Dunbar High School. She began taking graduate-level classes in 1915 and completed her master's thesis, "The Phonology of Merigarto," in 1920. In 1921, she graduated with a doctorate in German language from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation,