OZELINE BARRETT (PEARSON) WISE, 1903-1988

Satyra (Pearson) Bennett and Ozeline Barrett (Pearson) Wise and their two brothers were the children of Frances Lavina (Gale) and William B. Pearson; their father was for many years pastor of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Mass., the oldest black church in the city (established in 1873).

SPB was born in 1892 in Rock Hill, Jamaica, and OPB in Worcester, Mass., in 1903. After the family moved to Cambridge, Mass., SPB graduated from Cambridge Latin School, and in 1913 from Wilberforce University in Ohio. She then taught at McKinley Institute in Lynchburg, Va., before her marriage in 1919 to Cyril George Bennett. Their son, George Barrett Bennett, was born a year later. SPB returned to Massachusetts and for more than thirty years worked as a linotype operator for a number of newspapers in the Boston area.

A member of St. Paul AME Church for over seventy years, SPB served as treasurer, trustee, superintendent of the Sunday School, and member of the Board of Christian Education. She was co-founder (1949) and president of the Citizens' Charitable Health Association, co-founder of the Cambridge Community Center, trustee of the Massachusetts chapter of the Arthritis Foundation, and vice-president of the Boston chapter of the NAACP. She died in June 1977.

OBW also completed high school in Cambridge, and held clerical jobs until she married John Wise in 1931. They adopted a son, Hubert Smith, in 1961. OBW worked for the Navy during World War II, and after the war was the first black woman employed by the banking department of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where she worked for nearly twenty years.

During the 1950s, the Wises lived in Billerica, Mass., in a house named Galehurst, which they ran as an inn. Some time after JW's death in 1963, OBW returned to Cambridge to live with her sister. She devoted herself to St. Paul AME Church, serving as Sunday School teacher, trustee, and chair of the building fund. OBW also worked with her sister in many of the same community organizations, and was a charter member of the Citizens' Charitable Health Association.

After 1965 OBW lived with SPB, who had suffered a series of strokes, and cared for her sister until the latter's death in 1977. OBW died in 1988.

From the guide to the Papers, 1854-1988, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)