Born in North Carolina, Flemmie Kittrell (1904-1980) has an inspiring story. Read about her long career here. She was eighth child of share croppers and had to earn her own money for her education. After getting a BS at Hampton Institute in Virginia, she was accepted to the graduate program at Cornell University. At that point, Cornell was one of premier institutions in Home Economics, then a very broad field guiding women into many areas of science. Her dissertation was on the nutritional needs of poor children, particularly Black children. She was the first Black woman to earn a PhD at Cornell and the first Black woman in the US to get a PhD in nutrition.
Her career after that was far reaching, working first at Bennet College and then becoming chair of the Home Economics program at Howard University in Washington DC. It was there that she made her most important contribution to American childhood education, developing the principles that would serve as the foundation for the Head Start Program. She also served with the US State Department and the UN to bring her ideas about childhood nutrition to countries around the world.
According to one of her Howard students, she was a very proper lady who always wore skirts and dresses, never pants. We can see this in the two pictures I found. In the top one, from the sixties, she wears a neat suit. In the bottom one, from the fifties, she is the only one wearing a hat. Although she encouraged play in children, she herself was quite reserved. I imagine she believed she had to look serious in order to be taken seriously. After all, she was a path breaker.
