Louise Stokes Hunter facts for kids

Ella Louise Stokes Hunter (died 1988) was an American math teacher. She made history by becoming the first African-American woman to earn a degree from the University of Virginia. She taught for many years at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute and Virginia State College, which are now known as Virginia State University.

Early Life and Schooling

Ella Hunter grew up in Petersburg, Virginia. She went to Peabody High School in Petersburg and then studied at the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. This school later became Virginia State University.

After that, she attended Howard University and graduated in 1920. While at Howard, she joined a sorority called Alpha Kappa Alpha. In 1925, she earned a master's degree in education from Harvard University. She might have been the first African-American woman to get a degree from Harvard itself.

Later, while she was teaching at Virginia State, Hunter decided to go back to school. She became a student at the University of Virginia. She studied how math is taught and did research for her highest degree (a Ph.D.) on how students move from high school math to college math.

In 1953, she finished her Ph.D. This made her the first African-American woman to earn a degree from the University of Virginia. This happened just two months after Walter N. Ridley became the first African-American man to get a degree from the same university.

Teaching Career and Later Years

After graduating from Howard University, Ella Hunter became a teacher at the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute. She taught there for many years.

In 1921, she was one of six teachers who helped start a new chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She later became its first historian and eighth president.

At the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute, she met John McNeile Hunter. He started teaching electrical engineering there in 1925. He later became one of the first African-American people to earn a Ph.D. in physics. Ella and John married in 1929. Their daughter, Jean, was born in 1938 and later became a research psychologist.

Ella Hunter was known for helping and guiding Black students, especially Black women who were studying math. Mathematician Linda B. Hayden remembers Hunter as one of the teachers who encouraged her to continue her studies after college. Another mathematician, Gladys West, saw Ella and John Hunter as a "power couple" – a great example of a strong team. Gladys West felt that Ella Hunter "still had something to prove, and maybe she felt like she was carrying the weight of other women on her shoulders." By 1948, Ella Hunter had become an associate professor.

After retiring from Virginia State University, Hunter continued to teach at Saint Paul's College (Virginia). She passed away in Petersburg in 1988.

Recognition

In 2020, the annual student research conference at the University of Virginia was renamed the Hunter Research Conference. This was done to honor Ella Hunter. The conference had been named after Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, but his name was removed because of his past actions and beliefs that were not fair to everyone.