Harriet Lummis Smith

Harriet Lummis Smith (November 29, 1866 – May 9, 1947) was an American novelist and the first African-American teacher in Boston Public Schools.

[1] Smith had a half-brother, Charles Fletcher Lummis, by a previous marriage of her father.

Her parents moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where her father accepted a teaching post at Lawrence College.

In 1890, she became Boston Public Schools first Black teacher where she taught mathematics and Latin in Boston Public Schools until 1917[2] before turning to writing full time after a publisher said she was "wasting her time teaching.

[4] She was a member of the Woman's Literary Club of Baltimore and was made president in 1915.