Joella Hardeman Gipson-Simpson (January 8, 1929 – January 31, 2012) was an American musician, mathematician, and educator who became the first African American student at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles.[1][2]
Joella Gipson | |
---|---|
Born | California, Los Angeles | January 8, 1929
Died | January 31, 2012 Windsor, California | (aged 83)
Nationality | African American |
Occupation | Professor at Wayne State University in 1972 |
Known for | She was an American musician, mathematician, and educator who became the first African American student at Mount St. Mary's College |
Notable work | Consumer and Career Mathematics, Black Mathematicians and their Works, Impetus (1978), the Black Woman: Proceedings of the Fourth National Congress of Black Women of Canada (1978), and Changing Faces of Romania (2000). |
Spouse(s) | Theodore Horace Gipson who died in Los Angeles in 1972. Then she remarried to William Lawrence Simpson, in 1980 who then died in 2005 |
Awards | Outstanding alumna of the year for 1990 And In 1993, she won the Wayne State University Alumni Faculty Service Award |
Joella Hardeman was born in Los Angeles on January 8, 1929, and began studying music at age eight. After graduating from Saint Agnes High School,[1] a Catholic school in Los Angeles that operated from 1919 to 1953,[3] she entered Mount St. Mary's College, becoming the first African American student accepted there.[1] She majored in music performance and minored in English and philosophy, graduating in 1950,[1][2] and won a graduate scholarship to the State University of Iowa, where she earned a master's degree in music education in 1951.[1]
With this, she began a career in music education, teaching at a number of institutions including Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,[1] where she was listed in 1955 as a faculty sponsor for the local chapter of the Music Educators National Conference.[4] At Southern University, she met Theodore Horace Gipson, who became her husband and the father of her daughter.
Joella Gipson and her husband moved back to Los Angeles,[1] and Joella Gipson became a teacher and supervisor for the Los Angeles Unified School District.[1][5] It was in this part of her life that her interests shifted to mathematics, and she became certified as a mathematics teacher,[1] regularly attending National Science Foundation sponsored mathematics institutes from 1958 to 1969.[5] Her husband Theodore Gipson died in Los Angeles in 1972.[1]
In 1971, Gipson earned a doctorate in mathematics education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,[5][6] with the dissertation Teaching probability in the elementary school: an exploratory study, supervised by John A. Easley Jr. Her dissertation also cites the mentorship of Max Beberman, who died before it could be completed.[6] After completing her doctorate, she became an associate professor at Wayne State University in 1972, and was promoted to full professor in 1978.[7] She served as a Fulbright Scholar in Belize in 1994,[8] and again in Romania in 1998.[7] At Wayne State, she also directed the master's program in teaching, the Women, Minorities, and Handicapped Program in Education, and a mathematics education institute, and chaired a commission on the status of women at the university.[5]
Gipson married her second husband, William Lawrence Simpson, in 1980.[1] While teaching at Wayne state, she lived across the nearby Canadian border in Windsor, Ontario. Her husband died in 2005,[1] and she retired as a professor emerita after 35 years of service at Wayne State in 2007.[7] She died in Windsor on January 31, 2012.[1]
Gipson was the coauthor of Consumer and Career Mathematics (with L. Carey Bolster and H. Douglas Woodburn, Scott & Foresman, 1978)[9] and Black Mathematicians and Their Works (with Virginia Newell, L. Waldo Rich, and Beauregard Stubblefield, Dorrance & Company, 1980).[10] She also edited Impetus, the Black Woman: Proceedings of the Fourth National Congress of Black Women of Canada (1978), and self-published Changing Faces of Romania (2000).
Mount St. Mary's College named Gipson their outstanding alumna of the year for 1990.[2][5] In 1993, she won the Wayne State University Alumni Faculty Service Award "for her outstanding work on behalf of women, minorities, and the disabled in educational leadership programs".[11] In 2010, the Wayne State University Center for Peace and Conflict Studies gave her their lifetime achievement award.[12]
A scholarship at Wayne State University, the Joella Gipson Endowed Scholarship for Peace and Human Rights Education, is named for her.[13]
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