Word: ayers
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That morning Mrs. Gertrude Elsie Johnson McDougald Ayer became the first Negro woman to head a New York public school, one of the few colored educators to have charge of white pupils and teachers. Since New York appoints principals only for its biggest schools, she remains on the records as an assistant principal but her duties are the same as those of a full principal. Public School No. 24 has 22 white teachers, three colored. Its 825 elementary pupils are mostly ragged Negro moppets with a scattering of even more ragged Irish, Finns, Jews...
...pupils, had they cared one way or the other, would have had to look twice to be sure that their new principal was not white. One of Harlem's handsomest women, tall, scholarly Gertrude Ayer has a creamy complexion, set off by kinkless grey hair with a streak of black running straight back from the forehead...
...Ayer's birthplace is now a noisy midtown block opposite Gimbel's department store. One of the first things she learned from her father, New York's second Negro doctor, and her mother, a white woman from the Isle of Wight, was to despise racial prejudice. That attitude and the New York Board of Education's steadfast insistence on racial equality kept her career from being blocked...
...married to a doctor, Mrs. Ayer has two children by a previous marriage to a Tammany politician named McDougald. Son Cornelius is in Fordham Law School. Daughter Elizabeth, graduated from Hunter College, is doing social service work. With them she has traveled over most" of the U. S. and three years ago Cornelius indulged his mother's liking for motoring and track athletics by driving her to Los Angeles for the Olympic games...
Goals: H. Gerry, Brooks, Palmer 2; E. Gerry, F. Ayer. Fouls: Palmer...