Henrietta Vinton Davis
| Henrietta Davis | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
Henrietta Vinton Davis August 25, 1860 Baltimore, Maryland, United States |
| Died | November 23, 1941 (aged 81) Washington, DC, United States |
| Occupation | Actress, elocutionist, dramatic reader, playwright, International Organizer of the UNIA, Vice President Black Star Line |
| Spouse(s) | Thomas T. Symmons |
Henrietta Vinton Davis (August 25, 1860 – November 23, 1941) was an African-American elocutionist, dramatist, and impersonator.
In addition to being "the premier actor of all nineteenth-century black performers on the dramatic stage", Davis was proclaimed by Marcus Garvey to be the "greatest woman of the Negro race today". She has come to be considered the physical, intellectual, and spiritual link between the abolitionist movement of Frederick Douglass and the African Redemption Movement of the UNIA-ACL and Marcus Garvey.
Henrietta Vinton Davis was born in Baltimore to musician Mansfield Vinton and Mary Ann (née Johnson) Davis. Shortly after her birth her father died. Within six months her mother had remarried to an influential Baltimorean, George A. Hackett, a member of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and worked to defeat the 1859 Jacobs bill crafted to enslave the children of free Africans and deport their parents from the state of Maryland.
Hackett died in April 1870 after a short illness. Upon his death Mary Ann Hackett moved with her daughter Henrietta to Washington, D.C., where Henrietta received her public school education. At the early age of fifteen she passed the necessary examination and was awarded the position of a teacher in the public schools of Maryland.
After a period of time teaching in Maryland, she went to teach in the state of Louisiana. She later returned to Maryland to care for her ailing mother bearing with her the certificate of the Board of Education. In 1878, and only in her late teens, she became the first African-American woman employed by the Office of the Recorder of Deeds in Washington, D.C. under George A. Sheridan as a copyist.
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