Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Fisk Social Science Source Document No. 1)

Ophelia Settle Egypt (born in Clarksville, Texas on February 20, 1903 – died in Wash. DC on May 25, 1984), is also known as E. Ophelia Settle.

She was a social worker and sociologist who conducted some of the first oral history interviews with formerly enslaved people 10 years before WPA began their Slave Narrative project.

Image: top left photo, E. Ophelia Settle in her 1925 Howard University graduation photograph.

Bottom left image, the cover of her book, “Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Fisk Social Science Source Document No. 1)

Ophelia Settle was born near Clarksville, Texas in 1903, the daughter of Green Wilson Settle and Sara Garth Settle. Her father was a schoolteacher. Settle graduated from high school in Denver, Colorado in 1921, and from Howard University in 1925.

She earned a master's degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1944, and pursued further studies at Columbia University School of Social Work.

She studied medicine and sociology at Washington University on a fellowship from the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness, but as a Black woman she was considered a "special student", and required to take lessons privately from a tutor.

Over the course of her career Settle taught for a year at the Orange County Training School in Chapel Hill, in North Carolina.

Settle also helped expose the infamous Tuskegee study of syphilis among Black sharecroppers, and played a leading role in Charles Johnson’s “Shadow of the Plantation” study of the sharecropper system.

She was a researcher for the Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee from 1928 to 1930.

While in Nashville, Under Johnson, Egypt was responsible for conducting one hundred interviews with elderly men and women who had been enslaved as children.

Her interviews were part of Fisk University’s publication “Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Social Science Source Document No. 1).”

As the Depression wore on, she left Fisk University to assist with relief efforts in St. Louis. From 1933 to 1935, she was also a caseworker in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1935, Settle became director of social services at Dillard University in Louisiana.

She also became head of social services at a hospital in New Orleans, and five years later conducted research for James Weldon Johnson, about whom she wrote a children’s book.

She taught social work at Howard University in the 1940s.

In the 1950s, she was a probation officer and social worker in southeast Washington, D.C.

In the early 1950s, Mrs. Egypt, a social worker in Southeast Washington, DC saw a problem in her community, and set out to solve it. In the neighborhood where she lived and worked, she often came in touch with impoverished mothers of large families.

Many of them were hardly more than girls themselves, and they told her over and over that they felt that they had no options. They thought they’d never be able to obtain birth control information and services.

Mrs. Egypt thought otherwise. In 1956, Planned Parenthood hired her to bring family planning into her community. She did exactly that, with tireless commitment.

For eleven years was the director of the community’s first Planned Parenthood clinic, which was named for her in 1981.

Mrs. Egypt went door-to-door, visited in living rooms, spoke at informal neighborhood gatherings, handed out literature at public housing projects, and reached out to others in every possible way.

Single handedly and single mindedly, she persuaded community leaders, including clergy, that family planning was a means of empowerment that gave women and men more control over their economic condition.

In 1957, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. opened the first private family planning clinic in Southeast Washington, and for eleven years, Mrs. Egypt was its director.

In 1981, the Parklands Planned Parenthood Clinic was renamed Ophelia Egypt Center in her honor.

In 1973, Egypt was a member of the D.C. Black Writers Workshop, and wrote a biography of James Weldon Johnson for young readers, published in 1974.

She corresponded with writer Langston Hughes, among other notable acquaintances.

She gave an oral history interview in 1981 and 1982, to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

Ophelia Settle married educator Ivory Lester Egypt in 1940. They had a son, Ivory Lester Jr., born in 1942.

She died May 25, 1984

Washington, D.C. from lung problems in Washington, D.C., aged 81 years.

The Ophelia Egypt Papers, including photographs and manuscripts, are archived in the manuscript division, Howard University Library.