The self-trained historian, educator, and journalist Drusilla Dunjee Houston was born in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia on January 20, 1876. Her parents were Rev. John William and Lydia Taylor Dunjee. The couple had nine children but only three including Drucilla would survive to adulthood. Rev. Dunjee was a graduate of Storer College in Harper’s Ferry.  He worked with Baptist church organizations and was eventually sent to Oklahoma City in 1892, only three years after the city was founded in the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. Drusilla, then only 16, became in 1892 one of the first kindergarten teachers in Oklahoma Territory.  Having been trained in various settings including a conservatory in Minnesota, she was, even at her young age, considered particularly well-educated in this frontier environment. In 1898, Drusilla Dungee met and eloped with Price Houston. The couple settled in McAlester, Oklahoma Territory. Drusilla’s younger brother, Roscoe, would become a prominent journalist and Civil Rights activist in Oklahoma City. In 1915 he founded the Black newspaper the Black Dispatch, and two years later, Drusilla began her journalism career, became a contributing editor and author of numerous columns dedicated to the racial uplift of African Americans.  Eventually those columns would be … Continue reading Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941)