Caroline Bond Day

Day flourished in her three years at Tuskegee and, despite struggling with a chronic illness, went on to earn her first bachelor’s degree in 1912 at Atlanta University (today Clark Atlanta University). There she was mentored by Adrienne Herndon, the director of dramatics, and by Harvard alumnus, W.E.B. Du Bois (A.B. 1890, A.M. 1891, Ph.D. 1895), who encouraged her to pursue anthropology at Radcliffe. After graduation she spent a year teaching at the Normal School for Colored Students (now Alabama State University), followed by three years as director of the Montclair, New Jersey, Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) “For Colored Women.”

When she finally entered Radcliffe in 1916, the College would not recognize her degree from Atlanta University because, like many other Black institutions in this era, it was denied accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges. She enrolled as an undergraduate; her profile in the 1919 Year Book noted that she “[t]ransferred from Atlanta University.” Despite her interest in anthropology — a field populated almost exclusively by men — she focused on her other passion, majoring in English and Classical Literature. Denied housing on campus in the 1916–1917 academic year, she commuted from lodgings five miles away in Boston’s South End.

After the United States entered World War I in 1917, Day stepped away from her studies for a year to work for the Circle for Negro War Relief in New York City.

After the United States entered World War I, Day left Radcliffe for the 1917–1918 academic year to serve as executive secretary of the Circle for Negro War Relief. Robert Edmond Jones, illustrator. “Soldiers Number.” The Crisis 16, no. 2. New York, NY: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, June 1918/Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Bobbie Ross in memory of Elizabeth Dillard (Public Domain)

The Circle for Negro War Relief was expressly “founded for the purpose of making the conditions under which the colored soldier trains and fights the same as those which exist for the white soldier.” Circle for Negro War Relief advertisement. The Crisis 15, no. 4. February 1918/Public Domain

The organization was made up of local units across the country — The Crisis reported in June 1918 that there were 50 units in 25 states — that fundraised to support Black soldiers in training and at the front, as well as the families they left behind. Circle for Negro War Relief advertisement. The Crisis vol. 15, no. 6. April 1918/Public Domain

The organization had a working agreement with the American Red Cross that allowed it to raise funds to manufacture supplies and provide other supports to Black American soldiers and their families. Bulletin of Circle for Negro War Relief Incorporated. July 1, 1918/Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

Caroline Bond Day served as executive secretary of the national organization, where her mentor W.E.B. Du Bois served on the integrated leadership team as both a vice president and director. Bulletin of Circle for Negro War Relief Incorporated. July 1, 1918/Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

The organization’s work included knitting and making clothes for Black soldiers and their families, as well as buying equipment for segregated troops. One unit donated an ambulance to a Black regiment bound for France. Bulletin of Circle for Negro War Relief Incorporated. July 1, 1918/Neighborhood Union Collection, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

She returned to Radcliffe in the fall of 1918, once again living several miles from campus in Boston’s South End neighborhood. She socialized with Black women enrolled at universities around the city, joining the chapter of the historically Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta organized that year by fellow English student Marita Bonner.

It was during her senior year that Day began her historic study of mixed-race families in the United States under renowned Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton’s tutelage. Hooton later recalled that when he first got to know her, he was impressed by “her abilities, her admirable strength and uprightness of character.” Furthermore,

When she graduated from Radcliffe with an A.B. — her second — in 1919, the project remained incomplete.

After graduating, Day returned to New York to work at the national YWCA. The following year she married Aaron R. Day Jr. and joined him in Texas, where he taught chemistry at Prairie View State College (now Prairie View A&M University). Day found teaching positions of her own, first at the historically Black Paul Quinn College and later as head of the English Department at Prairie View. The couple moved to Georgia in 1922, where she taught English and directed theater productions at her alma mater, Atlanta University.

During the 1927–28 and 1929–30 academic years, Hooton secured funding from the Bureau of International Research at Harvard and from Radcliffe College to fund Day’s return to Cambridge. She took leave from her position at Atlanta University to continue her earlier anthropological research at Radcliffe.

Writing about Day’s work, Hooton acknowledged that Black Americans were an “inaccessible class” for white anthropologists — and justly so:

Day, by contrast, was able to leverage her personal connections and her extended social networks to recruit participants. Her groundbreaking study ultimately included more than 2,500 multiracial individuals from 346 families, including her own. Exercising what Hooton described as “infinite tact and patience,” she recorded physical measurements and other descriptions, such as skin color and hair texture, and conducted in-depth interviews with her subjects about their family backgrounds and personal experiences. Many participants entrusted her with “treasured photos,” hair samples, and family stories that could be both deeply personal and difficult to share.

Day’s thesis, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States, was published in 1932 by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University as part of a Harvard African Studies series. Pushing back against the race scientists and eugenicists at Harvard and beyond, Day’s highly technical work used the same tools deployed by racist scientists to demonstrate that race is not a fixed category and that people of color are not, as a group, inferior to whites by any measure. Her work is still hailed today as a groundbreaking.

“It is at once my magic-carpet, my enchanted cloak, my Aladdin’s lamp,” says Sarah. But the magic ends when she falls and breaks an ankle while leaving a play at a local university. Homebound with her “colored family” in a “colored section of town,” Sarah is once again refused service — this time by the doctor she sought to treat her injury. When she has finally recovered and returned to work, the pink hat becomes “useless” as she finds new joy in her family, her students, and her community. Her “brown boys and girls” are again “reservoirs of interest,” and she celebrates that one of them is off to Radcliffe. She concludes: “Health, a job, young minds and souls to touch, a friend, some books, a child, a garden, Spring! Who’d want a hat?”

Alexander’s daughter is renowned poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, who holds degrees from Yale University, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her Ph.D. in English in 1992. Alexander, who read an original poem at the first inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009, has held teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Smith College, Yale University, and Columbia University, and was a 2007–2008 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is currently the president of the Mellon Foundation. In 2006, Alexander was the Phi Beta Kappa poet at Literary Exercises held by the organization’s Harvard chapter. Her original “Poem of a Thousand Stories” celebrated the importance of every individual’s story, and highlighted the achievements of her great-aunt Caroline Bond Day.