Guide to the Nellie B. Nicholson scrapbook, 1906-1917

(bulk 1910-1911)


John Hay Library, University Archives and Manuscripts
Box A
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: Manuscripts: 401-863-3723; University Archives: 401-863-2148
Email: Manuscripts: hay@brown.edu; University Archives: archives@brown.edu

Published in 2025

Collection Overview

Title: Nellie B. Nicholson scrapbook
Date range: 1906-1917, (bulk 1910-1911)
Creator: Nicholson, Nellie B.
Extent: 0.25 linear feet
(1 half-file box)
Abstract: This collection contains a scrapbook compiled by Nellie B. Nicholson, Brown University class of 1911. Nicholson is believed to be the fifth Black woman graduate from Pembroke College, the women's college in Brown University, and was a leading advocate for Black women's right to vote. She was an educator in Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, for over 40 years. The scrapbook includes 172 photographs of friends and family members, Pembroke College campus buildings and women's athletics, house mates at 45 East Transit Street in Providence, and post-graduation travels and work. Many of these include handwritten captions. The scrapbook also includes programs for various events primarily at Brown, ribbons from events, and dried flowers and stems. Materials in this scrapbook date from 1906 to 1917, but the bulk of the items date from 1910 - 1911.
Repository: John Hay Library, University Archives and Manuscripts
Collection number: OF.1ZP.2025.004

Scope & content

This collection contains a scrapbook compiled by Nellie B. Nicholson, Brown University class of 1911. Nicholson is believed to be the fifth Black woman graduate from Pembroke College, the women's college in Brown University, and was a leading advocate for Black women's right to vote. She was an educator in Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, for over 40 years. Materials in this scrapbook date from 1906 to 1917.

Photographs include portraits of fellow students, a few campus views, images taken during a summer vacation to Maine, a "Baby Page" containing photos of children, a couple of images of Nicholson dressed to play tennis (Nicholson was a student athlete while at Brown), and many images of Black friends and students, some of whom were studying elsewhere as indicated by the handwritten notes. Nicholson and other Black students were barred from living in campus dormitories, and instead lived in Working Women's Houses - a boarding house for single women working or attending college - in Providence. 13 photos are present in the album, headed "45 East Transit," the address of the local home where Nicholson lived. These consist mainly of portraits of residents, five of whom are identified. Towards the end of the album, there is also a page titled "Transit Street Colloquialisms," containing numerous phrases used by residents of the home such as "the midianite" and "oh! you dirty orange." Another page, containing seven photos, is headed "Beuzard Cottage & Inmates," likely a reference to the home of a local Black family (the Beuzards), where Nicholson may have boarded. Ephemera within the scrapbook includes Nicholson's student handbook, a lengthy manuscript poem relating to education signed by "A.D. Bayard," programs from various groups and organizations including the Alpha Beta Sorority, The Komians (a dramatic society at Pembroke College), The Dekadelphians (a secret society at Pembroke College), the Athletic Association, the Debate Team, the Rhode Island Society for the Collegiate Education of Women, and the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. Ribbons of various colors are also included as each class at Pembroke College had designated colors represented at various events including commencement and masques. Dried flowers and stems are also present.

Additional images date from 1912-1917, after Nicholson graduated from Brown, and are only accompanied by a few captions. In 1912, Nicholson joined the faculty of the Colored Training School in Baltimore, and there are a series of images of students in uniform, a group of photos of an "Annapolis spring vacation," and a couple of photos of Nicholson playing tennis. The next series of images date from Nicholson's time at Howard High School, a school for Black students in Wilmington, Delaware, prefaced by a page captioned "En Route to Howard High Feb. 1914." Nicholson joined Howard in that year and formed close bonds with the other faculty there, together founding the Equal Suffrage Study Club and marching in the city's first suffrage parade. Nicholson lived at the home of Caroline B. Williams, the geography teacher at Howard, on East 10th Street. This album contains a group of photographs of life in this Black neighborhood, including tennis, women in costume, and women and children posed in gardens and backyards.

Access Points

Subject Organizations Subject Topics

Arrangement

This collection is arranged into 1 series.

Biographical/Historical Note

The following was copied from the Biographical Database of African American Suffragists and slightly edited on April 14, 2025. Original text was written by Helene Carey, University of Delaware and edited by Anne M. Boylan, University of Delaware. Some information was added for this finding aid.

Nellie B. Nicholson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 22, 1888, the youngest of five children of George W. and Charlotte Nicholson. Her father, a waiter and then a janitor, had served in the 39th Regiment Maryland Infantry as part of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. Her mother was a skilled seamstress and dressmaker. After attending Baltimore Colored Training School for her high school education, Nicholson moved to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1906 to attend Pembroke College, the women's college in Brown University. There, she played on the basketball, bowling, and tennis teams. She received her A.B. in 1911. While in Providence, she lived at a "Working Girls Club" at 45 East Transit Street. Brown's few Black students were not permitted to live on campus. Founded in 1898 and incorporated in 1902, the club was one of a number of such urban institutions established by middle-class Black women's associations to provide low-cost, safe living quarters for young single working women and college students. During Nicholson's time in Providence, the residence's executive board was headed by Roberta J. Dunbar, who provided energetic service to the New England Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, an affiliate of the National Association of Colored Women as well as to the Rhode Island Federation of Women's Clubs, of which she later became president.

Upon completion of her studies, Nicholson returned to Baltimore to join the faculty at the Colored Training School, teaching education, arithmetic, and English. By 1914, she had moved to Wilmington, Delaware, to fill a position as a mathematics teacher at Howard High School where she also later taught English. In Wilmington, she lived on East 10th Street, where so many Howard School teachers lived that students referred to it as "Teachers' Row." The 1920 census found her living in the household of Caroline B. Williams, Howard's geography teacher, at 202 East 10th Street, where other residents included another teacher, Helen Henderson, a Howard High School student from Maryland, Cora Berry, and Caroline Williams's sister, Elizabeth Williams Tyler, a nurse staffing a local health clinic.

Nicholson married William H. Taylor, a widower with three children, in 1928. She continued to teach at Howard High School, commuting daily from her new home in Philadelphia until her husband's sudden death in 1930, when she returned to live in Wilmington. Two of her step-daughters then attended and graduated from Howard High School. She undertook further study at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving her Master's degree in Mathematics Education in 1931 with a thesis on the teaching of algebra. She completed additional coursework toward a doctoral degree, but did not finish a dissertation. After a brief stint as advisor for girls at the high school, she was promoted to vice-principal in 1931, an appointment she filled until her retirement in 1958.

During her teaching career, Nicholson was surrounded by many other Black women, particularly fellow teachers and other college-educated women. This led to her involvement in groups such as the Zeta Omega chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority in Wilmington, of which she became the second chapter president in 1923, following her colleague, Oberlin College graduate, Latin teacher Anna Brodnax. For the National Association of College Women, of which Brodnax was vice-president, Nicholson served on the executive board, beginning in 1925, and became a life member in 1943. With another colleague, English teacher Sadie L. Jones, she founded a local Delaware affiliate, the Women's College Club of Delaware. The group dedicated itself to improving the "educational condition of Negro girls," ending "dormitory discrimination," promoting "equality of opportunity," and sponsoring scholarships for Black college women. In 1925, she also joined the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, one of only ten Delaware teachers who belonged to the association.

Howard High School teachers formed a core element of the Equal Suffrage Study Club, founded in March 1914, at the home of Nicholson's neighbor, Emma Gibson Sykes. Nicholson was a founding member. With Howard's renowned English teacher, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar (later Dunbar-Nelson) as president, the group quickly organized to study and agitate for Black women's voting rights, meeting regularly, marching as a separate unit in Wilmington's first suffrage parade in May 1914, and lobbying for both state and national suffrage amendments between 1915 and 1920. Once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the Suffrage Club reorganized in order to encourage Black women to register and vote. Many of the Suffrage Club members were also involved in initiating a Wilmington chapter of the NAACP, chartered in January 1915. Along with colleagues Alice Dunbar, Caroline B. Williams, and Alice G. Baldwin, Nicholson signed on as an early supporter, and agreed to take charge of press relations for the fledgling group. She remained an active member for decades, during which the group successfully protested the screening of the film "The Birth of a Nation" in Wilmington, campaigned to get newspapers to capitalize the word "Negro," worked to ring in justice through lawsuits seeking fair treatment in jobs and equal benefits for Black soldiers, and supported the Dyer anti-lynching bill.

Throughout her years as Howard High School vice-principal, Nicholson was heavily involved in the Wilmington community; well after her retirement, she continued to live an active life. She was a long-time member of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church, where two colleagues in the Equal Suffrage Study Club, Blanche Williams Stubbs and Emma Gibson Sykes, also worshipped. She gave time to the Red Cross, the United Negro College Fund, and the Wilmington "colored" YWCA, that Nicholson founded in 1935. She was also the President of the New Castle County Retired Teachers' Association. In 1957, as Delaware was responding to a Supreme Court order to desegregate its schools, and shortly before she retired, she took the lead in facilitating conversations across racial lines at a three-day conference of the Delaware Council of Churches and United Church Women of Delaware.

Nicholson died at her Wilmington home, 1509 West 6th Street, on December 20, 1965. Her estate, valued at almost $12,000, was managed by lawyer Louis Lorenzo Redding, who in the early 1950s had prepared and argued three major court cases leading to university and public school desegregation in Delaware, and who, in his youth, had been her neighbor on "Teachers' Row" and her student at Howard High School. She was buried in the historic Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, the final resting place not only of her late husband, but also of such notable human rights advocates as James Forten, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and William Still.

Access & Use

Access to the collection: There are no restrictions on access, except that the collection can only be seen by prior appointment. Some materials may be stored off-site and cannot be produced on the same day on which they are requested.
Use of the materials: All researchers seeking to publish materials from the collections of the John Hay Library are requested to complete a Notice of Intent to Publish, prior to reproducing, quoting, or otherwise publishing any portion or extract from this collection. Although Brown University has physical ownership of the collection and the materials contained therein, it does not claim literary rights. It is up to the researcher to determine the owners of the literary rights and to obtain any necessary permissions from them.
Preferred citation: Nellie B. Nicholson scrapbook, OF-1ZP-2025-004, Box [#], Folder [#], Pembroke Center Archives, John Hay Library, Brown University.
Contact information: John Hay Library, University Archives and Manuscripts
Box A
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: Manuscripts: 401-863-3723; University Archives: 401-863-2148
Email: Manuscripts: hay@brown.edu; University Archives: archives@brown.edu

Administrative Information

ABOUT THE COLLECTION  
Acquisition: This collection was purchased from Caroliana Books in 2025.
ABOUT THE FINDING AID  
Author: Finding aid prepared by Amanda Knox, on behalf of the Pembroke Center for the Teaching and Research on Women and the Brown University Library.
Encoding: This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2025-04-18.
Descriptive rules: Finding aid based on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)
Sponsor: Curatorial work provided by Mary O. Murphy, on behalf of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and the Brown University Library.

Additional Information

Inventory

Box [31236104065761] 1 Scrapbook
 1906-1917