Anna Louise James was born in Hartford, Conn., on January 19, 1886, the ninth child of Anna Houston and Willis Samuel James. Her father had escaped to Hartford from a plantation in Virginia at the age of 16. The name recorded on ALJ's birth certificate is Louise Clegget James. Anna Houston James died in 1894, leaving WSJ to raise his eight surviving children with the help of relatives. ALJ graduated from Arsenal Elementary School (Hartford) in 1902 and Saybrook (Conn.) High School in 1905. Following something of a family tradition, she decided to become a pharmacist, graduating from the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy in 1908, and in 1909 becoming the first African American woman licensed pharmacist in Connecticut.
ALJ ran her own drug store in Hartford from 1909 until 1911, when she moved to Old Saybrook to join her brother-in-law, Peter Lane, at the pharmacy he had opened there in about 1900. When PL left (ca.1917), ALJ bought his half of the business and ran James Pharmacy until her retirement in 1967. She lived in an apartment above the pharmacy. An historical marker indicates that the building once housed a shop in which Lafayette made a purchase.
Active in Republican Party politics, ALJ was one of the first women in Old Saybrook to register to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. She was a well-known and admired figure in the community, as for generations young and old alike stopped in to have prescriptions filled and to enjoy her soda fountain treats and sage advice. ALJ died in Old Saybrook on December 12, 1977.
ALJ's sister, Helen "Lou" Evelyn James Chisholm, attended college briefly, then had an opportunity to live in Hawaii, teaching at an orphanage there in 1903. She returned to the U.S the following year, and attended Atlanta University, where she was a student of W.E.B. Du Bois. She was later a student at the State Normal School in Tallahassee, Fla. Their sister Bertha married Peter Lane; their daughter is Ann Lane Petry, the well-known writer and donor of these papers. The other James siblings were Willis S. (1877-1940), Harriet "Hattie" (1879-1902), H. Fred (1880-1881), Fuller (1881-?), Fritz Morris (1882-1957), Harold Edward (1884-1945), and Fuller Houston (1887-1888).
From the guide to the Papers, 1874-1991, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)
