Drusilla Dunjee Houston, born January 20, 1876, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, was the daughter of Rev.

[1][2] Her father was an alumnus of Storer College, a preacher and teacher, working at what was then a normal school under the auspices of the Baptist Missionary Association.

Drusilla was sent to finishing school in the North and studied classical piano at the Northwestern Conservatory of Music in Minnesota.

[1] At the same time, around that year, she wrote Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob,[4] a script objecting The Birth of a Nation, by David Wark Griffith, but she was never able to produce it out of fear for her life.

Beginning in 1901, she conducted research into a variety of sources and published a multi-volume history of Africans in their homeland, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926).

She had moved there for her health, as the dry climate was believed to benefit people with lung disease, and TB was incurable at the time.