academicgown

Jim Crow at Play: Race, Manliness, and the Color Line in American Sports, 1876-1916, a dissertation by Gregory Bond at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, includes some info on Cyrus Spottswood Shippen. The same year this photo was taken he was the second African-American to compete in the US Open, alongside his brother John who had been the first (in just the second US Open, in 1896). According to Bond, Cyrus Shippen went on to be "a long-time teacher at Washington, DC's famed Dunbar High School where he started a golf team". (Bond's discussion of the Shippens and the color line in the USGA is mostly on pp. 217-220.) Cyrus is also discussed a bit in this interview with Hanno Shippen Smith, grandson of John Shippen (which I think would make him grand-nephew of Cyrus?).

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/32573662@N00] This is pretty amazing, severinus. Really enjoyed that interview. Thank you for adding this information! Susannah Smithsonian Institution Archives

tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=E016 from the link Sarah Barnwell Elliott, novelist, short story writer, and advocate of women's rights, was born in Savannah, Georgia, the daughter of Stephen Elliott, a bishop of the Episcopal Church who was a leader in the founding of the University of the South at Sewanee. Her education consisted of private tutoring and some study at Johns Hopkins University in 1886. Though she lived for a time in New York (1895-1902), Elliott's principal home was Sewanee, where she died and was buried. She never married. My guess it was an honorary degree.

"The responsibility of raising her nephews drew Elliott back to Sewanee in 1904, where she continued her energetic support for women's rights as a lecturer essayist, and suffrage leader. These efforts served as the catalyst for Tennessee's becoming the critical thirty-sixth state and the only southern state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment (1921), which guaranteed women the vote. In 1913 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree by the University of the South." -----Southern Local Color: Stories of Region, Race and Gender (2002), p. 232.

I started a Wikipedia entry for her: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Barnwell_Elliott