Katherine Stewart Flippin (1906-1996) was a special educator in San Francisco and only daughter of lawyer

McCants Stewart McCants Stewart (July 11, 1877April 14, 1919) was an American lawyer. Born to a prominent attorney in New York, Stewart studied law in Minnesota and became the first African American lawyer in the state of Oregon. His lack of financial success ...

Biography

In Portland, Oregon, Katherine Flippin was born ''Mary Katherine Stewart'' to parents McCants and Mary Weir Stewart. During her final year of high school, she dropped out and began a fifteen-year stint working in a department store. Stewart married Robert Browning Flippin, a

community activist Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. Forms of activism range fro ...

and future executive director of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center. In 1918, they moved to San Francisco. Their marriage is featured in the 2010 book ''Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages Between the Two World Wars''. After getting married, Flippin finished high school and went on to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degrees in early childhood education at

San Francisco State College San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different b ...

. During this time, she was a supervising teacher in the nursery school at the college. In 1949, Flippin was appointed to the faculty. She established Aid for Brain-Damaged Children, Inc., an experimental unit focused on how non-motor disabled, brain-injured children deviate in visual and auditory areas. Flippin also was a teacher at the Northern California School for Cerebral Palsied and Others. In 1966, Flippin started as a coordinator for the Head Start program in

Pacifica, California Pacifica ( es, Pacífica, meaning "Peaceful") is a city in San Mateo County, California, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Half Moon Bay. Overview The City of Pacifica is spread along a stretch of coastal beaches and hi ...

. From 1968 until her retirement in 1972, she acted as the director of Cooper's Corner Child Care Center. In 1967, Flippin donated the papers of her father,

, to Howard University. A former president of Kappa Delta Pi, she was also an active member in the

NAACP The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&nb ...

, San Francisco Consumer Action, and Children's Home Society. She was the niece of

Carlotta Stewart Lai Carlotta Stewart Lai (September 16, 1881 – July 6, 1952) was an educator and administrator in the Hawaiian public schools for four decades. She was the first African American school principal in Honolulu. Lai, an African American from New York, ...

, who was a teacher and educator in Hawaii's public school system for about four decades.

References

External links

Katherine Flippin Interview Transcript, 1976-1981
OH-31. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. {{DEFAULTSORT:Flippin, Katherine Stewart Black Women Oral History Project 20th-century African-American educators 20th-century American educators 20th-century American women educators 1906 births 1996 deaths Special educators Educators from Portland, Oregon San Francisco State University alumni 20th-century African-American women