Drusilla Dunjee Houston

There’s debate about who actually was the first black female director ... some say even though her project never made it onto film, the honor should still go to Drusilla Dunjee Houston. After seeing D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” Houston wrote a screenplay to challenge it titled, “Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob."

In 1999, the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc. was established in Buffalo, New York in honor of Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876 - 1941). The Institute is named after Houston's 1917 poem entitled, "America's Uncrowned Queens." Like many African American women writers swallowed up and languishing in the historical gap, Houston is one of the most prolific and all but forgotten African American women writers of the 20th century. Considered a "historian without portfolio" and dismissed as a serious historian and writer by leading Black male historians of Post Emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance, e.g., W.E.B. DuBois, Alaine Locke, Carter G. Woodson and others, Houston burst on the historical literary scene in 1926 with Volume I of her magnum opus "Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire Book 1: Nations of the Cushite Empire," thought to represent the crowning achievement of Drusilla Dunjee Houston's literary life. Houston is remembered as the earliest known and possibly the only African American woman to write a multi-volume study of ancient Africa where she unapologetically proclaimed in 1926, an African origin of civilization and culture during one of the most turbulent periods for black Americans in American history. Through this work, Houston left her own mark as a pioneering advocate of the study of Africa, especially ancient African history and is credited with creating a Pan African framework proclaiming the African origin of civilization.

Aside from her writings on ancient African history and later American history, Dunjee Houston was a multi-faceted figure, who, at one time or another during her wide-ranging career was an educator, elegist, racial uplift theorist, institution builder and journalist. Her writings cross multiple literary periods including the race writers, the Black Women's Era (1890-1900), and the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro era. Still, despite voluminous writings for more than four decades -- including editorials, pamphlets, poetry, elegy, screenplays and historical texts Houston remains one of the most overlooked African American women writers in African American women's history and is also one of the most important African American women in the American West. From her early days she taught in segregated schools of pre-Territorial Oklahoma, barely fifteen years of age -- devoted her life to providing the correct historical information on Africa to the black children she regarded as 'acres of diamonds'.

Houston was born into an extraordinary family. Her father, Rev. John William Dunjee was one of the most exciting and productive ministers of the American Baptist Home Missionary Society. One of ten children, only five of whom lived to adulthood, Drusilla Dunjee was born in 1876 in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Her father was a Baptist minister commissioned to travel across the country to establish Baptist congregations in areas inhabited by poor Black rural dwellers. During these times Houston lived in numerous states on the Eastern Seaboard, in the South, the Northeast and finally the Midwest in Oklahoma. A search for Houston over decades reveals an extraordinarily private woman who felt compelled to thrust herself into the major social and political dialogues of her era. She educated hundreds of students throughout her life but was one of her own best students as she was the consummate self-taught student fluent in French, German, Greek and Latin. These skills are especially evident in other writings, particularly her screen play, "The Maddened Mob," written in elegiac verse in 1915 as a refutation of Birth of a Nation. Arguably, Houston was the very first African American to write a blow by blow refutation of "Birth of a Nation," which she hoped to become a flashing photo play." Dr. Peggy Brooks-Bertram has located this material and is in the process of preparing this historic screenplay for publication.

On February 11, 1941, Houston died in Phoenix, Arizona after many years of illness from tuberculosis. Today, Houston is celebrated by the Association of Black Women Historians and the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc., [Bio: "Uncrowned Community Builders"]

The Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), have a scholarship in her honor .... the award recognizes an emerging female scholar of African descent. It fosters scholarly research in Africana Women’s history. Each year an award will be given for the best, unpublished original essay from either a graduate course or a chapter from a thesis or dissertation for the 2015 award year. The essay must be wholly focused on some aspect of history on black women from the U.S. and/or Africana Diaspora. The paper must involve interpretation of primary sources, focus on the ideas or actions initiated among black women, and make a significant contribution to Africana women’s history. The award will be presented at the Centennial ASALH Convention in Atlanta, September 23-27, 2015. The Black Classic Press of Baltimore inaugurated the award two decades ago, and it has been continued through the contributions of ABWH members.