As the first African American woman to receive a four-year scholarship from the Philadelphia Board of Education and first African American graduate of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (PSDW), now Moore College of Art & Design,[2] Anna Russell Jones's educational achievements mark only the beginning of a life that not only challenged but also transcended the racial myths, stereotypes, and abject definitions of blackness and Black life that pervaded 20th century America.
[4] After the war ended, Jones returned to Philadelphia for graduate work in textile work at PSDW, and subsequently studied medical illustration at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She was employed as a practical nurse at Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia and then with the civil service as a medical illustrator and graphic designer.
As Walls points out in her narrative, “The school remained all-white through the early twentieth century; this policy was made explicit in the Moore Institute charter from 1932 until after 1945.
The only recorded exception to this was the school’s first African-American graduate, Anna Russell.”[5] Notwithstanding the racist, patriarchal, and paternalist attitudes that often accompanied the allocation and distribution of scholarship funds, the philanthropic spirit of the period opened up many avenues for Black and African American populations of America's urban manufacturing and industrial cities such as Philadelphia to obtain the financial means of pursuing the ends of social and class mobility through education.
Despite outreach efforts to other neighborhoods, most scholarship students through the 1920s came from the same North and West Philadelphia neighborhoods described above..[5] A significant amount of the history and scholarship concerning black life and industrial education during the late 19th and early 20th centuries have focused on the activities of black male figures such as Booker T. Washington who is best known for his influence on southern race relations as well as the founding of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama.