From NKAA, Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (main entry)
Yancey, Sadie Mae
(born: 1907 - died: 1958) Sadie M. Yancey was the top honor student when she graduated from Kentucky State College in 1935 [now Kentucky State University]. She was the first graduate of the college department at Kentucky State College to earn a Ph.D. Yancey received her doctorate from Cornell University, September 1950; she had earned her master's degree in education from the University of Cincinnati in 1942. Yancey was an advocate for education: in 1940 she was a member of the Kentucky Negro Educational Association, serving on the Committee of Expenditures of Funds on Educational Inequalities [source: KNEA Journal vol. 10, no. 2, p. 8]. Yancey gave a presentation, "What Guidance Techniques I Am Using," at the Guidance Workers Conference during the 1942 KNEA Conference in Louisville, KY.In 1950, she was the dean of women and a psychology professor at Florida A&M and was later dean of women at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She was the first president and a founding member of the National Association of Personnel Workers (NAPW), founded in 1953. The association was a combined effort of the National Association of the Deans of Women and Advisers of Girls in Colored Schools and the National Association of the Deans of Men in Negro Educational Institutions. The NAPW was renamed the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals (NASAP), and the Sadie M. Yancey Professional Service Award was established as the second highest honor that a member of that organization can receive. Yancey was also vice president of the National Council of Negro Women. She was a member of Delta Sigma Theta, and chaired the Scholarship and Standards Committee.
Sadie Yancey was born in Lexington, KY, the daughter of Minnie Jackson Yancey, a domestic, and Charles Yancey, a Lexington grocer who was from Canada [source: Sadie Yancey's Certificate of Birth]. The family lived at 120 South Upper Street in Lexington. Sadie Yancey was also the granddaughter of Belle Mitchell Jackson and Jordan C. Jackson, Jr. [source: 1910 U.S. Federal Census].
For more see "Two Kentucky state graduates...," The Crisis, vol. 57, no. 11 (Dec. 1950), p. 736; "Professional Associations" in Student Services: a handbook for the profession, by S. R. Komives and D. Woodard; Sadie Yancey in The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, by S. B. Thurman, et al.; under the heading "Died" see "Sadie M. Yancey, 51,...," Jet, Oct 16, 1958, p.43; H. A. Davis and P. Bell-Scott, "Association of Deans of Women and Advisers to Girls in Negro Schools" in Black Women in America, vol. 1 A-L, edited by D. C. Hine, pp. 49-51; and In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the challenge of the Black sorority movement, by P. Giddings. See also Yancey's Ph.D. dissertation, A Study of Racial and Sectional Differences in the Ranking of Occupations By High School Boys, and her master's thesis, A Follow-up Study of Five Graduating Classes of the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.
