Minniebelle Derrick

Miss Minniebelle Derrick, the daughter of the late Bishop W.B. Derrick, is the founder of the largest, youngest business enterprises of the day --- the Derrick Shorthand School of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Miss Derrick is a graduate of Wendell Phillips High School, and Columbia University. After her graduation from the latter institution, she was teacher of French at Wilberforce University until the illness and death of her father. On moving to Philadelphia she took a thirty-day business course from a local college, and was placed twenty-six days after enrollment. She then secured permission from Robert Boyd, author and inventor of the famous thirty-day course, to teach his system exclusively to Negro students. With a typewriter and no capital. Miss Derrick began her work. Today this school is the only one of its kind run by Negroes.

The Derrick Business School has within the past five years made such rapid growth and progress under the sound establishment, expert teaching and sane management of Miss Derrick that it is now centrally located in its own building in one of the most exclusive business sections of Philadelphia. This school also has its own dormitories for the accommodation of its students living out of the city and state.

The next time you visit Philadelphia call at her recitation rooms, Childs Building, Chestnut Street, and you will feel proud of this woman who is contributing such splendid well trained material to our business world.

In later life a bad marriage and divorce drained her resources and hampered the progress of her school. Once she got everything started up again, the Depression hit. She sold the building and regrouped, and carried on in different locations in Philadelphia until the 1930s, when she moved to Chicago, her home town.

She restarted the business and was doing well, but sadly died in Provident Hospital after an operation for gallstones on September 20, 1938. She was only forty-nine.

The Competitor, 'Women of Interest vol. 1, 1920 and Colored Boys and Girls Inspiring United States History and a Heart to Heart Talk About White Folks by William Henry Harrison, Jr.] (1921); The Competitor vol. 1, 1920