Helen Maria Chesnutt

Helen Maria Chesnutt was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1880. == Education ==

Helen Maria Chesnutt attended Smith College with her sister Ethel, living off-campus as did Otelia Cromwell, the only other black student attending Smith College at this time. The Chesnutt sisters moved to four different addresses during their time at Smith: boarding houses at 95 West Street (1st year), 10 Green Street (2nd year), 36 Green Street (3rd year), and as seniors at 30 Green Street. A diary entry by English Professor Mary Jordan gives a glimpse of the sisters' experiences at Smith College, which appear not to have been happy. She wrote that the "Chesnutt girls are having a hard time with the color line...". In 1902 Helen Chesnutt graduated with a B.A. from Smith College, only a year after Otelia Cromwell became the college's first African American graduate, but it was not until 1925 that she would earn an M.A. in Latin from Columbia University. ==Career and wider influence==

Helen Chesnutt taught Latin for many years at Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, including to the poet Langston Hughes, who found her inspiring. She said that: "Roman costumes were gay in color, a fact which seemed to surprise the pupils, who were accustomed to think of them as made of white marble. The dresses and scarfs and tunics had to be dyed, and so the laundry classes spent some days in dyeing and tinting the garments. Their great achievement was a royal toga for Augustus to wear, dyed a perfect Roman purple and stenciled in gold." The book and teaching methods, which relied on oral presentation of Latin, intensive rather than extensive reading, and a paraphrase method, were discussed and appraised positively in research into teaching of Latin in the US at that time. One reviewer noted that original edition had a "plain cover, on which the title is lettered in black together with a cameo-like oval in gilt showing a slave taking two Roman boys to school." Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line, her biography of her father Charles Chesnutt published in 1952, remains an important source of information about this novel and short story author. In 2018 she featured in an exhibition at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC celebrating the role of African Americans within classics, whose important contributions to the discipline have often been ignored by historians. She was one of only two women to feature in the exhibition, the other of whom is Frazelia Campbell. ==References==