English: Biography: A noted journalist and author, Era Bell Thompson worked for Johnson Publishing Company and Ebony for more than 30 years. The youngest child of Stewart C. and Mary V. Logan Thompson, she grew up in North Dakota and attended the University of North Dakota, where she had an outstanding athletic record in track. While at college she resided with the Dr. Robert E. O'Brian family, and accompanied them when he became president of Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. She transferred her college credits and received a degree in English in 1933. Miss Thompson soon left for Chicago where she worked as a domestic. After taking the civil service examination, she became a senior interviewer for the U.S. Employment Service. In 1947 she went to Ebony magazine as a journalist and editor and in her work has traveled extensively throughout the world. Awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship given by the Newberry Library in 1945, the followlng year she published American Daughter, her recollections of growing up in North Dakota. Africa, Land of my Fathers, an account of her first trip to Africa, appeared in 1954. She was named Iota Phi Lambda's Outstanding Woman of the Year in 1965 and received the Capitol Press Club Award for journalism and the NCNW'S International Year plaque. She served on the boards of Hull-House and the Metropolitan YWCA, and was a trustee of the Chicago Public Library. Other affiliations included membership in the Associatlon for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, the Society of Midland Authors, and Zonta International.

Description: The Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African American women between 1976 and 1981. With support from the Schlesinger Library, the project recorded a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society during the first half of the 20th century. Photograph taken by Judith Sedwick
Repository: Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
Collection: Black Women Oral History Project
Research Guide: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/schlesinger_bwohp

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