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Bertha Pitts Campbell, Seattle, ca. 1975
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| Title | Bertha Pitts Campbell, Seattle, ca. 1975 |
| Photographer | Unknown |
| Date | ca. 1975 |
| Caption | Bertha Pitts Campbell attended Howard University from 1909 to 1913 and then taught for two years in Topeka, Kansas. She was one of the 22 founding members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1913 at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She married Earl Campbell in 1917. Their son was killed in an accident as a baby, and her husband died just a few years later. She was a lifelong activist, participating in a women's suffrage march in Washington DC in 1913; the March on Washington in 1963; and a Seattle march for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1980. She was active in the Christian Friends for Racial Equality, the Urban League, and the YWCA. In 1987 she was honored by the Washington State House of Representatives. She died in 1990 at age 100. |
| Notes | Handwritten on verso: Bertha Campbell.
Stamped on verso: Oral History Program, Washington State Archives, Olympia, Washington.
Document filed with image (oral history of Bertha Campbell): I was born in Winfield, Kansas in 1889 and reared in Colorado where I went to school. When I graduated high school in 1909 I went to Howard University. I helped found Delta Sigma Theta in 1913. There were twenty-two of us and there are now eight living founders. Upon finishing Howard in 1913 I went to Topeka, Kansas to teach for a year, then returned to Howard University to work in the dormitory with the Dean of Women. After working there for a year I returned to Colorado and married Earl Allen Campbell. We were in Colorado for about six or seven years, and moved to Seattle in 1923. My husband was a railroad man, but he decided that he'd like to change to something else. So we came to Seattle looking for work. He did different types of jobs for about four years until he could get something permanent. After that time he was able to get into government service and he worked at the Immigration Station until he died in 1954.
When we came here you could sit anywhere, but you couldn't always EAT anywhere. Not really until World War II did the whole city open up. Until then you couldn't eat in [...] Tea Room. Nor would they try gloves on me. I tried on clothes everywhere. We didn't have much outright discrimination, but several suggestions of it, such as offering Negroes a beach of their own, but we fought it and that died out. There didn't seem to be too much agitation on things. One reason, of course, is that there were not many Negroes here. There were only about 2500 to 3000 Negroes in the whole town. There was no Urban League, or similar organization. I did find the Y.W. organized... as a colored branch, in the colored neighborhood on 21st and Madison. The wife of the pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church founded the branch Y.W.C.A. I was a volunteer for thirty-five or forty years in the Y.W. I was on the Branch Board for two terms, and on the downtown Y Board for two terms. - Bertha Pitts Campbell. |
| Subjects | Women--Washington (State)--Seattle
African Americans--Washington (State)--Seattle |
| Personal Names | Campbell, Bertha Pitts |
| Location | United States--Washington (State)--Seattle |
| Digital Collection | Black Heritage Society Collection |
| Image Number | 1997.17.2 |
| Ordering Information | To order a reproduction or inquire about permissions, contact: TheBoard@blackheritagewa.org. Please cite the Image Number. |
| Repository | The Black Heritage Society of Washington State, Inc. |
| Physical Description | 1 photographic print: b&w; 6 x 9 in. |
| Type | Image |
| Digital Reproduction Information | Scanned as a 400 ppi TIFF image in 8-bit grayscale, resized to 640 pixels in the longest dimension and compressed into JPEG format using Photoshop 6.0 and its JPEG quality measurement 3. |
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