26 Facts About Mabel Byrd

Mabel J Byrd was a civil rights activist and the first African American to enroll at the University of Oregon.

In 1988, Byrd died at age 92 in St Louis, Missouri.

Mabel Byrd requested that money be donated to a scholarship fund in lieu of a memorial service.

Mabel Byrd was born in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, in the United States on July 3,1895.

Mabel Byrd's father Robert Byrd was a bricklayer who moved his family to Portland, Oregon when she was a youth.

Mabel Byrd was the only student of her heritage in her Portland high school.

When Mabel Byrd moved to Eugene for school she was not the first African American to live in the town, as there were a few African Americans living in poverty around Alton Baker Park.

In 1927, Mabel Byrd received a Quaker scholarship to study settlement housing in England.

Mabel Byrd did this inspired by another Oregonian woman, Esther Lovejoy, who had earlier directed the Portland Young Women's Christian Association African American branch.

Mabel Byrd's work led her to speak at the Sixth Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in '29.

In 1929 Mabel Byrd began working as a research assistant in Fisk University's sociology department.

Mabel Byrd later worked for economist Paul Douglas at the University of Chicago.

Mabel Byrd was hired under Franklin Roosevelt's National Recovery Act to "observe possible exploitation of colored workers" during the implementation of minimum wage laws.

On February 21,1934, Mabel Byrd was barred from the Senate restaurant.

Mabel Byrd denied this version of events saying there were plenty of tables available.

Accounts from the police recall Mabel Byrd acting in a tantrum shouting and cursing when being escorted out, while Mabel Byrd's associates say she acted completely reasonably, not cursing, simply stating no crime was committed.

Mabel Byrd continued to deny that the restaurant publicly barred African Americans.

Mabel Byrd was the first African American woman to work for the National Recovery Administration.

Mabel Byrd was in charge of the application of new rules regarding both pay equality and fair working conditions.

Mabel Byrd then joined the Joint Committee for National Recovery, investigating possible hate crimes such as lynchings, as well as unsafe working conditions.

Mabel Byrd was still associated with New York's YWCA, and became the president of the Alpha Beta Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Mabel Byrd was selected in 1927 to travel to England, where she studied settlement housing.

Not only was she an activist for the African American community, Mabel Byrd fought for women's rights as a strong believer that women deserved to be treated equally with men.

In 1929, Mabel Byrd returned to America and started working for Fisk University in the sociology department, where she later almost lost her job for accusing the president of the university of discrimination against black and white professors.

Mabel Byrd began working as the executive director of St Louis' People's Art Center.

Rather than a memorial service, Mabel Byrd requested that money be given to a scholarship fund.