Justine Tyrrell, class of 1943

Full Metadata

Overview

Year:: 1998
Contributor:: Tyrrell, Justine (interviewee); Anton, Barbara J. (interviewer)
Genre:: oral histories (literary works)
Subject:: 1940s; City girls; Family; Employment; Activism; Race relations; World War II

Abstract:: In this interview, Justine discusses her family's connections to the Brown community and how they affected her decision to attend; the campus-wide reactions and attitudes towards the events of World War II; her correspondence with soldiers abroad; her work with the Noyes Foundation; and her career in journalism including her job with The New York Amsterdam News. In Part 2, she describes her relationship with Malcolm X, racism in the South. She ends by briefly reviewing what life has been like since her retirement.
Notes:: Class year: 1943; Biographical note: Justine Tyrrell was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1921 and received an academic scholarship to join the Pembroke College class of 1943. Justine majored in English, and following graduation, became a cryptanalyst for the Army Security Agency in Washington, DC. In the 1950s, she served as Executive Director of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, which gave educational grants to minority students. She became a reporter for The New York Amsterdam News in 1961, writing under the name Gertude Wilson. Her work is chronicled in By Gertrude Wilson: Dispatches of the 1960s from a White Writer in a Black World (Vineyard Stories.) She died on August 4, 2004, at the age of 83.

"Justine Tyrrell, class of 1943" (1998). Pembroke Center Oral History Collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:705199/

Pembroke Center Oral History Collection

This collection contains oral history interviews with alumnae of Brown University, which admitted its first women students in 1891. The Women's College at Brown was renamed Pembroke College in 1928, and in 1971, Pembroke College merged with the Men's College …
...