COLORED VASSAR GIRL.Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2016-06-15 21:58Z by Steven |
The Saint Paul Globe
Sunday, 1897-09-05
page 21, column 7
People at Poughkeepsie Thought Miss Hemmings Was a Spaniard.
Anita Florence Hemmings, the Boston girl who has stirred up such a sensation by daring to complete a course at exclusive Vassar when she new that there was negro blood in her veins, is a handsome, modest and refined young woman. Both her mother and father are mulattoes, the father of each being white. Miss Hemmings herself shows few traces of her black ancestors. She is a decided brunette, but her black hair is as straight as that of an Indian’s, and it was supposed by most of her college mates that she was a Spaniard.
The Hemmings have lived in Boston for twenty-five years. Anita was always a studious girl. She attended the Boston grammar school and was afterward graduated from the girls high school. Then she expressed a desire to go to college. Vassar was her choice, and there she went. Mr. Hemmings denies the report that a wealthy lady who had taken an interest in Anita paid the bills. He says he paid them himself, as he was amply able to do. Anita did not think it necessary to announce that her parents were mulattoes, and no one suspected that she was not of pure Caucasian blood.
Miss Hemmings’ friends say that the report that she waa a reigning social favorite at Vassar is an exaggeration. She was modest and retiring, making few friends and not seeking to take a prominent part in social life. Her pure, sweet soprano voice won for her a place in the college glee club, but she did not belong to any other of the various college societies. Miss Hemmings spent her summers at Cottage City, where she was received in the best of society. The fact that there is a trace of Ethiopian blood in her veins was discovered after she left college by the publication, in a Boston paper, of an item concerning her brother, who was recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.