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Naomi Willie Pollard Dobson (October 11, 1883 – August 14, 1971) was an American librarian, educator, and civic leader. In 1905, she became the first Black woman to graduate from Northwestern University.

Early life and education

Dobson was born Naomi Willie Pollard in Mexico, Missouri, on October 11, 1883. She was the third of eight children of John W. Pollard, a barber and Union army veteran, and Catherine Amanda Hughes Pollard, a seamstress. Her siblings all met with professional and personal success. Her brothers included NFL Hall of Famer player and coach Fritz Pollard and advertising executive and businessman Luther J. Pollard.

The Pollard family moved to Chicago in 1886, where Naomi grew up as a member of the Black middle class and lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood, where the Pollards were the only Black family at the time. She entered Lake View High School in 1898 and graduated in June 1901. She entered the College of Liberal Arts at Northwestern University in the fall of 1901 and graduated in 1905, becoming the first Black woman to receive a degree (a Bachelor of Arts or AB) from the university. One of only two Black students at Northwestern at the time, she probably lived with her parents, as Black students were barred from campus housing. Most white students reportedly either resented or ignored her.

Career and civic leadership

After graduating, Dobson embarked on a career as a teacher at segregated public high schools in Baltimore and East St. Louis from 1905 to 1910. She took education courses at the University of Chicago in the summers of 1910 and 1911. In the fall of 1911, Dobson decided on a career change and enrolled in the newly formed Library Training School at the Chicago Public Library, a six-month program to train senior library assistants. Completing the program in 1912, she worked at the CPL branch at the Hebrew Institute of Chicago, serving a mostly Jewish immigrant population, from 1912 to 1915, first as a page and then as a senior assistant children's librarian. Dobson and fellow Black librarian Vivian G. Harsh were both appointed children’s librarians on April 26, 1913.

In 1914 Dobson became an instructor at Wilberforce University, a historically Black university in Ohio. The head and sole instructor of her department of library economy, Dobson taught two courses on library classification, collection development, and research methods to aspiring teachers. She managed the college library and expanded it to 10,000 volumes, implementing a new subject-based classification system. She married Dr. Richard Allen Dobson in 1916 and moved to Sioux City, Iowa, where she worked as a homemaker and civic leader while her husband practiced medicine. Their only child, Richard Allen Dobson Jr., was born in 1917. She participated in the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, and the Iowa Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, of which she was elected president in 1931. A charter member of the Sioux City NAACP, Dobson helped lead a campaign that blocked the segregation of Sioux City swimming pools in the 1940s. She also helped secure passage of the city's first fair employment laws.

Later life and death

In 1952, Dobson and her husband retired to New York City, where their son was a pediatrician at Harlem Hospital. She served as president of the Sydenham Hospital Women's Auxiliary and became a life member of the NAACP. After being hospitalized at Roosevelt Hospital, she died at her home in New York City on August 14, 1971, at the age of 87. Her obituary appeared in the New York Amsterdam News and on the front page of the Sioux City Journal.

References

1. ^ Gray, LaVerne (2022-03-01). "Naomi Willie Pollard Dobson: A Pioneering Black Librarian". Libraries: Culture, History, and Society. 6 (1): 1–20. doi:10.5325/libraries.6.1.0001. ISSN 2473-0343.
2. ^ Houser, Hanna (2024-06-30). "The Pioneering Spirit of Naomi Pollard Dobson (1883-1971)". Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society. Retrieved 2025-01-14.
3. Thompson, Jenny (2022-02-24). "Evanston Dimensions | Brief portraits of pioneering Black Evanston residents". Evanston RoundTable. Retrieved 2025-01-14.

• 1883 births
• 1971 deaths
• 20th-century American librarians
• 20th-century African-American women
• 20th-century American women librarians
• African-American librarians
• American librarians
• Chicago Public Library
• Librarians from Illinois
• Northwestern University alumni
• People from Chicago
• People from Mexico, Missouri
• Wilberforce University faculty