Born: 23 January 1890, United States
Died: 16 October 1939
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Blanche Beatty
American educator and activist Blanche Mae Armwood was the first African-American woman from Florida to graduate from an accredited law school. She was also the first Executive Secretary of the Tampa Urban League, which fought for civil rights for African-Americans, and co-founded five Household Industrial Arts Schools for African-American women in five different states.
In 1914, Armwood was comissioned to create an industrial arts school to train African-American women in the domestic sciences: Tampa School of Household Arts, founded around 1915. More than 200 women completed the course in the first year, and Armwood went on to found similar schools in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana. In 1918, she published the popular cookbook Food Conservation in the Home.
Serving as the first Executive Secretary of the Tampa Urban League from 1922, Armwood led efforts to create a public playground, a day care center and a kindergarten for African-American children, as well as developing a subdivision offering the African-American community decent and affordable housing. She was also assistant principal at Tampa’s Harlem Academy School during this time.
Armwood was appointed the first Supervisor of Negro Schools by the Hillsborough County School Board, serving from 1926 to 1934.In this role, her work was central to the school board establishing five new school buildings, improving the older schools, providing a vocational school for African-American students, increasing African-American teachers’ salaries, organizing parent-teacher associations at each school, and extending the school year for African-American students from six to nine months.She also established Booker T. Washington School in 1925, which began as Tampa’s first junior high school for African-American students and soon expanded to include senior high school students, and was the county’s first accredited school for African-American students.
Armwood also held positions in national organizations, including the Chair of the Home Economics Department of the National Association of Colored Women, National Campaign Speaker for the Republican Party and State Organizer for the Louisiana Chapter of the NAACP. She often spoke on national and international lecture circuits about voting rights and racial inequality. She was active in the fights for women’s suffrage and against lynching. Working closely with Mary McLeod Bethune, Armwood raised funds for Bethune-Cookman College and other African-American schools, and for Clara Frye. Frye, an African-American nurse, provided the first medical facilities for African-Americans in Tampa. Armwood helped organize the first training program for licensed African-American nurses and some of the first blood banks for African-Americans in Florida.
In 1934, Armwood began studying law at Howard Law School, earning her Juris Doctor in 1938 and becoming the first African-American woman from Florida to graduate from an accredited law school.