English: Biography: For 22 years, Inabel Burns Lindsay served as dean of the Howard University School of Social Work, which she helped establish in the late 1930s. The youngest in a family of six children, Inabel Burns was encouraged to attend Howard University by her mother, Margaret Hartshorn Burns, and her brother Ocie. After graduating in 1920, she was awarded an Urban League fellowship to the New York School of Social Work. She returned home because of her mother's failing health and taught in the public schools until her marriage in 1925 to Arnett Grant Lindsay, who had studied Negro history under Carter G. Woodson. The Lindsays moved to St. Louis, where Mrs. Lindsay worked as a case worker and later as district superintendent. In 1937 she received her master's degree in social work from the University of Chicago, and was asked to come to Howard University to teach and to assist in establishing a school of social work. The new school was approved in 1944, and she was made dean the following year. She received a doctorate in social work from the University of Pittsburgh in 1952. After her retirement from Howard in 1967, Dr. Lindsay acted as a special consultant to DHEW and to the Senate Committee on Aging, and was a board member of the National Council on Aging and the National Urban League. In 1974 the Metropolitan Washington chapter of the National Association of Social Workers named Inabel Lindsay "Social Worker of the Year."

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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