Sarah Delany
*Sarah Delany was born on this date in 1889. She was a Black educator and activist.
Sarah Louise "Sadie" Delany was born in what was then known as Lynch Station, Virginia, at the home of her mother's sister, Eliza Logan. She was the second eldest of ten children born to the Rev. Henry Beard Delany, the first Black Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, and Nanny Logan Delany, an educator.
She was raised on the campus of St. Augustine's School (now University) in Raleigh, North Carolina, where her father was the Vice-Principal and her mother a teacher and administrator. Delany was a 1910 graduate of the school. In 1916, she moved to New York City, where she attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then transferred to Columbia University where she earned a bachelor's degree in education in 1920 and a Master of Education in 1925. She was a New York City schoolteacher until her retirement in 1960.
She was the first Black person permitted to teach domestic science on the high school level in New York City. Delany was the subject, along with her younger sister, Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany, of the New York Times bestselling oral history biography, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, with the publication of the book, at the age of 103. Sarah Delany died on January 25, 1999 at the age of 109 in Mount Vernon, New York, where she resided in the final decades of her life. She is interred at Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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