As we observe Black History Month, we must be honest, candid and frank with ourselves and admit we have much work to do to encourage our people to “Know Thyself.”
In 2024, we must face the fact we live in a society hellbent on suppressing our history and negating our contributions to the global human family. Thus, it is our responsibility. It falls on us to lead the initiative to educate our people. To do so, we must discover, honor, and pay homage to those stalwart Brothers and Sistahs who blazed the path toward self-knowledge and learning about the glories of Black people and our accomplishments.
One such person was Drusilla Dunjee Houston, a largely forgotten author, poet, musician, educator, researcher, historian, screenwriter, and activist who contributed mightily to the knowledge of Africa and African people.
Drusilla Dunjee Houston was born on January 20, 1876, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the daughter of Rev. John William Dunjee, a Baptist minister, educator, and church founder for the American Baptist Home Missionary Society, and his wife Lydia Taylor Dunjee.
The American Baptist Home Missionary Society was responsible for establishing churches in rural areas inhabited by Blacks in the South, Eastern seaboard, Northeast, and Midwest. It also contributed to founding twenty-seven colleges for newly freed Blacks following the War Between The States. Drusilla was born on the campus of Storer College, a Feedman school in Harpers Ferry.
Drusilla moved and traveled with her parents and demonstrated an early talent for writing, music, and learning. She taught herself French, German, Greek, Latin, and African history! She attended Northwestern Conservatory of Music in Minnesota. Although trained in classical music and Drusilla earned a decent living performing, she became one of the most prolific women writers in the country. She and her parents eventually settled in Oklahoma in 1892, where they made an indelible impact on the surrounding communities.
Much of Houston’s written work has been lost or forgotten. What is known and unchallenged is the fact that Houston was a pioneer in the research and publication of ancient African history. “Houston is remembered as the earliest known and possibly the only African American woman to write a multi-volume study of ancient Africa, where she unapologetically proclaimed in 1926 an African origin of civilization and culture during one of the most turbulent periods for black Americans in American history. Through this work, Houston left her own mark as a pioneering advocate of the study of Africa, especially ancient African history, and is credited with creating a Pan-African framework proclaiming the African origin of civilization. Obadeli Williams, in a review of Houston’s second book, noted the Cushitic background and origin of the ancient Egyptians recorded by Dunjee Houston has been confirmed by Cheikh Anta Diop’s 12 categories of evidence of their African origins. Fifty years before Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1984) and a generation before George G.M. James’ Stolen Legacy (1954) while predating Diop’s African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality? (1974) by 40 years, Dunjee Houston pioneered African-centered historiography.”
https://www.uncrownedcommunitybuilders.com/person/drusilla-dunjee-houston-1
The possible reasons for Houston’s lack of notoriety are that she was a female, she was not a lettered academician, and many of her male peers rejected her as an historian! Undeterred by any of this, Houston conducted her research without financial backing and research assistants, and she traveled on her own dime to various libraries and locations to conduct her research and gather background information for her editorials, articles, and screenplays.
Drusilla Dunjee Houston saw her mission as righting the wrongs done to African people by Europeans using her research and writing skills. Her work included volumes of historical research, poems, and screenplays. She refuted the lies and distortions of white racist propaganda and helped uplift her people using the truth. Houston often told people her work was not for whites; it was designed to uplift her own people.
Mrs. Houston was also a newspaper writer assisting her brother Roscoe Conklin Dunjee with his paper, The Oklahoma Black Dispatch in Oklahoma City. There, she wrote over three thousand editorials covering topics like the violence, riots, and lynchings against Blacks, the devastation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Houston, Texas, and the East St. Louis massacre, as well as a myriad of diverse issues. “While Drusilla was a versatile writer, capable of discussing a number of significant issues, all of her articles focused on uplifting her people. With that aim in mind, she often elaborated on practically every topic of interest to her readers, advising them on health, economics, child care, nutrition, cleanliness, education, religion, and how to exercise the best etiquette…Among the themes that ran through most of her columns were Black Nationalism, self-help, and separation. Many of her ideas on racial vindication—the idea of elevating Blacks from the swamp of inferiority and triumph—were acquired from her father–but after a while, she put her own unique stamp on them, and this placed her right along with some of the ‘race women’ of her generation, including Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Pauline Hopkins.” The wonderful historian Drusilla Dunjee Houston by Herb Boyd
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2014/03/20/wonderful-historian-drusilla-dunjee-houston/
Mrs. Houston was also an educator. From 1892 to 1899, she was a kindergarten teacher in Oklahoma City. She became disheartened with the education system for black students and opened her own school, McAlester Seminary for Girls, for twelve years. In 1917, she began working in Sapulpa at the new Baptist College. Although the principal, she remained an educator. It offered two-year teaching degrees above a high school education as well as domestic science in sewing, cooking, laundering, housekeeping, and sanitation.” Black History in Sapulpa: Teacher College and Training School for Women and Girls by Micah Choquette
https://sapulpatimes.com/black-history-in-sapulpa-teacher-college-and-training-school-for-women-and-girls/
Drusilla Dunjee Houston used her skills in a myriad of ways. She wrote books, poems, and screenplays challenging the racist narratives omnipresent in American culture. Unfortunately, her screenplays were not produced by the motion picture industry. Imagine what might have been produced if contemporary Black filmmakers and artist/activists like Oscar Micheaux
(https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/micheaux-oscar-1884-1951/) and Spencer Williams (https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/williams-spencer-1893-1969/) had partnered with her and taken advantage of her talents.?!
Her best-known work is the 1926 book Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, which, in many ways, is the foremother of Pan-African historiography. She subsequently wrote several volumes of ancient African history, but many of them were lost when she was unable to secure the funding to get them published.
Drusilla married Price Houston when she was twenty-two years old. They eloped, and he was almost twice her age. Drusilla Dunjee Houston made transition on February 11, 1941. We owe a deep gratitude for the life work and mission of Drusula Dunjee Houston.
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