Joan Howard
*Joan Howard was born on this date in 1848. She was a Black educator and principal.
Joan Imogen Howard was born in Boston. Her father, Edwin Frederick Howard, was a well-known citizen of that City, and her mother, Joan Louise Turpin Howard, was a native of New York.
She had one sister, Adeline Turpin Howard, the principal of the Wormley School, Washington, D. C., and one brother, Edwin Clarence Joseph Turpin Howard, M. D., the first African American graduate of Harvard Medical School and a prominent physician in Philadelphia. She was a cousin of the well-known elocutionist Ednorah Nahar.
She graduated from the Wells Grammar School, Blossom Street, Boston. Her parents encouraged her to pursue a higher course of instruction, and after a successful entrance examination, she became a student at the Girls' High and Normal School. She was the first African American woman to enter, and after a three-year course, to graduate from, which was, at that time, the highest institution of learning in Boston. She was immediately offered a job as an assistant teacher in Colored Grammar School No. 4 and later Grammar School No. 81.
For several years, an evening school, which was largely attended, and she became principal, was carried on in the same building. Later, she took a course in "Methods of Instruction" at the Saturday sessions of the Normal College of New York City, receiving a Master of Arts diploma from this institution (1877). 1892, she received the Master of Pedagogy degree from the University of the City of New York. She held a unique position on the Board of Women Managers of the State of New York for the Columbian Exposition, one of five of the Committee on Education. Joan Imogen Howard died on November 8, 1937, in Philadelphia.
To Become a School Principal
To Become an Elementary School Teacher
