Mary Frances Gunner was born in Lexington, Kentucky and raised in Hillburn, New York, the daughter of Rev. Byron Gunner and Cicely Savery Gunner. Her parents, both born in Alabama,[1] were active in public life; her father was one of the 29 founders of the Niagara Movement and president of the National Equal Rights League, and her mother, a teacher, was president of the Empire State Federation of Women's Clubs.[2] Her grandfather William Savery, born a slave, was a founder of Talladega College.[3]
She finished at Suffern High School as the only black girl in her class, and as valedictorian.[4] She attended Middlebury College.[5] She also attended Howard University, and was an officer in that school's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.[6] In 1913, she was initiated into Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She served as President of Alpha Chapter from 1914-1915.[7] In her capacity as President, she requested that Mary Church Terrell write the Sorority's Oath. In 1923, she completed a master's degree in the Political Science department at Columbia University, with a thesis titled "Employment Problems Among Negro Women in Brooklyn."[8]
Career
Mary Frances Gunner worked at the YWCA in Montclair, New Jersey, and after 1921[9] at the Ashland Place YWCA[10] in Brooklyn.[11] She also taught school in New York.[12] Gunner was a branch manager for the New York State Employment Service from 1938 to 1950.[13] She was active in the National Association of College Women.[14]
Her pageant play, Light of the Women (1924), presents the stories of such African-American heroines as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Phillis Wheatley. It was intended for performance by community groups and schools,[15] to teach and celebrate the achievements of African-American women.[16] It was performed in 1927 at the YWCA in Orange, New Jersey.[17]
Personal life
Mary Frances Gunner married Jerry van Dunk, also from Hillburn, in 1946.[18] She died in Brooklyn in 1953.[19]
"Hillburn, N. Y."New York Age (July 24, 1943): 9. via Newspapers.com
Sallie L. Powell, "Byron Gunner", in Gerald L. Smith, Karen Cotton McDaniel, and John A. Hardin, eds., The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia (University Press of Kentucky 2015): 219-220. ISBN9780813160665
Howard University Yearbooks, The Mirror (1915): 39.
Howard University, The Mirror (1915 yearbook): 39.
Sallie L. Powell, "Mary Frances Gunner", in Gerald L. Smith, Karen Cotton McDaniel, and John A. Hardin, eds., The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia (University Press of Kentucky 2015): 220. ISBN9780813160665
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