After graduating from Smith College, Otelia returned to teaching in D.C’s public schools which were still segregated. She taught English, German, and Latin at the M Street High School and Armstrong Manual Training School.
While teaching she continued her on edcuation. She took classes over the summer at Columbia recieving her MA in 1910. She continued taking courses at Columbia till 1920 and also took summer course at the University of Chicago in 1915.
She entered Yale’s PhD program in English at age 48 with more credits under her belt than the average applicant and was offered an academic scholarship by the school.
Cromwell Family Papers, Smith College Archives,
CA-MS-01228, box 10
In 1926, Otelia was the first Black woman to receive a doctorate from Yale. She then became a professor at Miner Teachers College in Washington, D.C where she taught English Language and Literature until she retired in 1944. Otelia Cromwell spent much of her academic career working to advance the cause of civil rights and racial/gender equality. She was an editor of the text Readings From Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges in 1931 and in 1932 served as the only woman on the board of directors of The Encyclopedia of the Negro with W.E.B. DuBois. Her most significant and well known scholarly work was the biography of suffragist and abolitionist Lucretia Mott(The Life of Lucretia Mott). Otelia was also a lifelong member of the NAACP. She passed away in her family home in 1972 at the age of 98.
Cromwell Family Papers, Smith College Archives,
CA-MS-01228, box 54, Photos of Adelaide, 1920-2010s
After Smith, in 1946 Adelaide worked at Hunter College in New York City, breaking the race barrier as the first Black faculty member. She then did the same at Smith College by joining the faculty in the late 1940s.
Adelaide went on to get a masters from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate from Radcliffe in 1953. Her dissertation was published more than four decades later titled The Other Brahmins: Boston’s Black Upper Class 1750–1950.
Adelaide kept her focus on Back leadership. She traveled numerous times to Africa, visiting Ghana, Liberia, and the then Belgian Congo. (Her trip predated its 1960 independence and later rebirth as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.)
Adelaide joined the BU faculty in 1951. In the late 1960s, she founded Boston University’s African American Studies program. This was the country’s second program and she started the program as a response to the civil rights movement and the shock following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She retired from BU in 1985. Passing away in hospice care June 8th, 2019.
Cromwell Family Papers, Smith College Archives,
CA-MS-01228, box 54, Photos of Adelaide, 1920-2010s
Cromwell Family Papers, Smith College Archives,
CA-MS-01228, box 54, Photos of Adelaide, 1920-2010s
Cromwell Family Papers, Smith College Archives,
CA-MS-01228, box 54, Photos of Adelaide, 1920-2010s
(cutting a cucumber)
Cromwell Family Papers, Smith College Archives,
CA-MS-01228, box 54, Photos of Adelaide, 1920-2010s
(hands over face)
Cromwell Family Papers, Smith College Archives,
CA-MS-01228, box 54, Photos of Adelaide, 1920-2010s