Frances O. Grant

Frances Olivia Grant was born in Boston on June 30, 1895, the eldest daughter of Fannie Bailey and George Franklin Grant. Her father was a Harvard-educated dentist and an inventor who held patents for both an artificial palate used to treat patients with a cleft palate and the first golf tee. Dr. Grant (D.M.D. 1870) was the second Black person to graduate from Harvard Dental School (now Harvard School of Dental Medicine), and therefore only the second Black person to graduate from any dental school in the United States. He was hired by the school’s Department of Mechanical Dentistry as an assistant in 1871, and went on to serve as an instructor from 1883 to 1903 — the first Black faculty member in Harvard history. He served as the president of the Harvard Dental Alumni Association in 1882 and as president of the Harvard Odontological Society in 1883.

Grant’s father was not her only tie to the University. Her cousin Gertrude Baker (A.B. 1900) was the second Black woman to graduate from Radcliffe College.

The Grant family’s history exemplifies the spirit of Black resilience. Grant’s paternal grandfather, Tudor E. Grant, escaped from bondage and became a fervent abolitionist who helped enslaved people gain their freedom via the Underground Railroad. In an interview for the Schlesinger Library Black Women Oral History Project, Grant, whose maternal grandmother was enslaved by a family in Fairfax County, Virginia, recalled how her father shared memories of his family helping enslaved people cross the border into Canada at Oswego, New York.

Thanks to her father’s successful dental practice and academic career, Grant told the Oral History Project interviewer, she led a charmed life in her early childhood on Charles Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. “His appointment book read like the social register,” she recalled. The family owned summer houses, first in Massachusetts and then New Hampshire. When asked whether she felt “different” from her presumably white neighbors, her answer was, “No, never.” She was raised to have complete confidence in herself, which she attributed to the sense of security her parents instilled in her. And, as an adult, “I never went in anywhere, feeling that I … was not going to be served … that I was not going to get whatever was there” (ellipses in original).

Grant thrived academically at the highly competitive Girls’ Latin School, the first public college preparatory school for girls in the United States, where her teachers’ dedication to and passion for their work influenced her decision to become an educator.

The death of her father in 1910 was an eye-opening experience for Grant in more ways than one. The family had to leave their Charles Street home, and her mother returned to work at the Riverside Press in Cambridge. Finding housing elsewhere proved challenging because of racial discrimination. Grant’s fair-skinned mother eventually found an apartment near the Latin School, but after she turned up with her darker-skinned daughters, the landlord sold the building to break the lease.

The apartment incident was, she recalled in her Oral History Project interview, “my first real poignant introduction to prejudice.”

Despite her family’s reduced circumstances, Grant thrived academically. Upon her graduation from the Girls’ Latin School in 1913, she was named valedictorian and also received the school’s highest honor, the Griswold Scholarship of $25 — a significant sum, given that Radcliffe’s annual tuition was then just $150. She also earned scholarships that funded most of her education for the next four years.

Because of the college’s racist housing rules, Grant lived a half-mile from campus in a Cambridge apartment with her mother and sister.

Grant was involved in several student clubs, including the Classical Club, for which she served as treasurer and then secretary; the English Club; the Art Club; the theatrical club, the Idler; the Music Committee; the Radcliffe Guild; the Student Government Treasurer’s Assistants Committee; and the Yearbook Committee. Perhaps surprisingly, she was also a member of the Anti-Suffrage Club.

She was equally active and successful in the classroom. When Grant first arrived at Radcliffe, she was delighted to find her friend and former Latin School classmate, Natalie Walker — who was white — had been assigned as her senior advisor. When Radcliffe’s Iota Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was established in 1914 and Walker became a member, Grant recalled in her Oral History Project interview, she set her sights on being elected as well: “I always felt that if I could […] I’d be very much delighted. Fortunately, I was able to do that.” In 1916, she became the first Black person elected to the Iota Chapter and the second Black woman in the nation to hold the key.

Grant’s social life flourished at Radcliffe. She had a “very cosmopolitan” group of young women of all ethnic and social classes. She visited some of her friends’ homes, but mixed-race social events with men and women “were practically out of the question.” Like W.E.B. Du Bois (A.B. 1890, A.M. 1891, Ph.D. 1895) before her, Grant also happily spent time with other Black students at Boston-area colleges who attended parties, football games, and other activities together.

Grant graduated magna cum laude in 1917, with an A.B. in classics, marking “the close of four delightful years at Radcliffe.” She later earned a master’s degree in education from New York University.

Grant went on to have a long and influential teaching career. There were not many teaching opportunities for Blacks in Boston, but with the help of fellow Radcliffe alumna Eva Hall (A.B. 1903) she secured a position teaching English, history, and Latin at the New Jersey Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, located in Bordentown, New Jersey — often referred to simply as the Bordentown School.

There, she told the Black Women’s Oral History Project, “I found myself for the first time in life in a completely segregated outfit.”

When she arrived, the school ran from sixth to 10th grade and its curriculum focused primarily on vocational skills. Grant — an active member in the National Organization of Teachers of Colored Children and the National Association of College Women, which advocated for quality education for Black students — joined forces with the principal, Harvard graduate W. R. Valentine (A.B. 1904), to transform the school into a model, state-certified ninth through 12th grade high school from which students graduated with a traditional diploma as well as a vocational skill.

Speaking in her Oral History Project interview about this increased emphasis on academic learning, Grant said,

As part of these reforms she introduced a course on “Negro history,” using Harvard graduate Carter G. Woodson’s (Ph.D. 1912) The Negro in Our History (1922) as a textbook.

In addition to enhancing the curriculum, Grant founded a drama club and a school newspaper, The Ironsides Echo. She was confident that the paper was worthy of comparison with other school newspapers on a national level, and under her leadership it won multiple prizes from organizations including the National Scholastic Association. In keeping with her insistence on preparing her students for the world beyond their segregated school, the paper became an important form of outreach and connection. Grant recalled in her oral history interview:

Grant’s teaching career spanned 50 years. She had strong relationships with her students and was honored with a testimonial dinner in 1975. Describing Grant’s approach to teaching, one of her former students — who was also a participant in the Black Women’s Oral History Project — said,