Born: 5 August 1877, United States
Died: 8 April 1969
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Margaret Briggs Gregory
American teacher, civil rights activist, and humanitarian Margaret Briggs Gregory Hawkins spent decades fighting injustices and working to make conditions better for residents of Baltimore, Maryland. The daughter of a school principal, she was raised to believe in education as a tool to fight racism.
After graduating from Boston University, Hawkins began teaching, and moved to Baltimore in 1903. There, she taught U.S. history at Frederick Douglass High School, marrying the school’s principal in 1905.
Hawkins served on the Board of Managers for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) Druid Hill branch, and was the first African-American woman to serve on the Board of Directors’s executive committee for the YWCA central branch.
Hawkins and her close friend Augusta T. Chissell used their homes to host meetings for women’s and human rights organizing. In 1906, she was a founding member and first president of the DuBois Circle. Hawkins also served as vice president of the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club, and worked on the 1909 campaign by African-American women to fight for voting rights for African-American men in the city.
Hawkins, Chissell and Estelle Hall Young became members of the National Association of Colored Women in 1912, which worked for the improvement of African-American lives across a range of areas. Hawkins also volunteered for the Progressive Women’s Suffrage Club, which Young founded in 1915.
In 1931, Maryland’s governor appointed Hawkins to the Board of Managers of the Maryland Training School for Colored Girls, and she was re-appointed to an additional six-year term in 1939.
She was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 2021.