Haynes, Euphemia Lofton (Martha)

Impact on the world

Earned her PhD in mathematics from the Catholic University of America in 1943, becoming the first African American woman in U.S. history to hold that degree, a fact not widely recognized for decades since Marjorie Lee Browne and Evelyn Boyd Granville, both already profiled in this collection, were initially believed to share that distinction after earning their own doctorates in 1949; she founded the mathematics department at Miner Teachers College in 1930, chairing it for nearly three decades, and became, in 1959, the first woman elected president of the District of Columbia's Board of Education, where she successfully pushed to abolish the district's discriminatory school tracking system.

Life & background

Born Martha Euphemia Lofton in Washington, D.C. in 1890 to a prominent dentist father and a kindergarten teacher mother active in the city's Black Catholic community, Haynes graduated valedictorian of M Street High School in 1907, earned a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1914, and married fellow educator Harold Appo Haynes in 1917, who himself became a deputy superintendent of D.C. schools. After earning a master's degree in education from the University of Chicago in 1930, she founded the mathematics department at Miner Teachers College, a Washington institution dedicated to training Black teachers, chairing the department for nearly 30 years while simultaneously completing her doctorate at Catholic University in 1943; her dissertation addressed sets of independent conditions characterizing symmetric correspondences. Across 47 years teaching at every level of D.C.'s public school system, she campaigned consistently against the district's segregationist policies, and in 1959, the same year she retired from teaching, became the first woman elected to chair the D.C. Board of Education, using that position to successfully abolish the district's discriminatory student tracking system the following year, just before a federal court separately ruled the practice unconstitutional. A devout Catholic, she co-founded the Catholic Interracial Council of the District of Columbia and remained active in social welfare organizations until her 1980 death; she left a $700,000 bequest to Catholic University establishing a professorial chair in her name, and Smith College, the American Mathematical Society, and the National Association of Mathematicians have each since established awards or fellowships honoring her legacy.

Sources

1. Biography.com; Encyclopædia Britannica; Catholic University Advancement; Smith College archives