updated again: Found new picture of Eva Dykes. Amherst has uploaded a huge number of photographs from Du Bois’ Crisis and Personal files. It’s great. 3-19-2010
updated: Added a link to the edition of The Crisis on google books in which the picture of Dykes appears. 2/14/2010
Three black women received their Ph.D.s in 1921, making all three “firsts.” One, Sadie Mossell Alexander, was from a prominent Philadelphia family and went on to an influential career. She was shut out of economic work, what she got her Ph.D. in, but returned to school for a law degree and eventually became a judge. Her papers, and those of her husband, are stored at the University of Pennsylvania.
But the other two, Eva B. Dykes and Georgiana Simpson, seemed locked in a kind of mist where a short biography gets mentioned every where “firsts” are discussed, but not much else is known. I’m too lazy at the moment to look it up (and given Wikipedia’s track record with African Americans, I won’t link–I’ve had to fix its posts several times. Interested folks look at this in your local library), but I do think there is a bit more known about Dykes than Simpson (I wanted to study Simpson at the beginning of my diss process, but couldn’t find enough). Anywho, the point of this post is to tell anyone interested that there is a gorgeous photograph of Dykes in the July 1914 edition of The Crisis, p140. It is a graduation picture from Howard University. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of Dykes.
I just happened to be looking up information on Eva B. Dykes and came upon your post. My great-grandmother attended church with her in Washington, DC and she taught at the college I attended, Oakwood in Huntsville, AL where the library is named after her.
Here is a link to a biography that was done on her life called “She Fulfilled The Impossible Dream”: http://books.google.com/books?id=hqdHaBrxgGsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=eva+dykes&source=bl&ots=vDgodM6hoL&sig=UcYBmXThhyvLF33v7HCNTgyn6X8&hl=en&ei=mvR1S53-FZHS8AaqyqH0CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false
You can contact the author at 301-680-6000, just ask for him by name.
Thank you! Many people researching Dykes seem to be finding their way to this post. Hopefully they will use your link to find the biography of her. I’m glad to know there is one on her. I ran across that picture while doing other research in _The Crisis_ and wanted to make sure that interested folks knew where to find it.
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I attended Oakwood College. beginning in January 1962, Dr. Eva B. Dykes was my freshman English professor. Needless to say she was good! Because of her I appreciate/love many poems in American literature.
[...] personal, I can’t see what they’d be stealing. Unless it’s something about Eva B. Dykes, whose page is one of the few of mine that gets visited through a search term and not through my [...]