Robinson, Ethel (1878-1942)
Role: graduate of Women's College of Brown UniversityDates: Class of 1905
Portrait Location: Faculty Club 105
Artist: Laycraft, Jenna (b. 1992)
Portrait Date: 2017
Medium: oil paint on canvas
Dimensions:
Framed Dimensions:
Brown Portrait Number: 321
Brown Historical Property Number: 9999
Ethel Robinson was the first African American female graduate of Brown University. The historical record of her life is sparse, documented primarily by early school and employment records supplemented by census and other official documents. Jenna Laycraft, Brown University AM 2017, prepared the following biography:
Ethel Ester Maria Tremaine Robinson was born in Washington, D.C., to Julia Ann Freeman and Edward W. Robinson, both natives of the state of Virginia. The US Census for 1900 records her date of birth in July 1878, although other references give a date several years later. She moved to Rhode Island with her mother and sister, where her mother ran a boarding house at 27 Beacon Ave in Providence and, in 1902, married William E. Smith, a Black veteran of the Civil War.
Ethel Robinson graduated from Providence’s Classical High School in 1901 and matriculated at the Women’s College of Brown University in the fall of that year. She is not recorded as participating in any sororities, clubs, or extracurricular activities on campus, and it is likely that she continued to live at home during her time at Brown. She excelled in her studies and graduated with honors in 1905, winning the Class of 1873 Prize Essay competition’s “collateral prize.” Her younger sister Cora Robinson followed her to Brown, graduating from the Women’s College in 1909. Upon graduating from Brown Ethel returned to Washington, where she was appointed as an instructor in “Methods of Teaching and Rhetoric” at Howard University. She would go on to give instruction in English and Literature at Howard, and was remembered there for mentoring Ethel Hedgeman Lyle in founding the first Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She resigned her position at Howard some time between 1912 and 1914, and on June 30th, 1914, in Manhattan, she married Joaquin Pineiro, a member of the Cuban diplomatic mission to the US. Joaquin and Ethel then moved to France, where Joaquin was appointed Chancellor of the Cuban Consulate in Bordeaux. They returned to the US after war broke out, departing from Gibraltar aboard the S.S. Cretic on March 28th, 1916. After arriving safely in Boston on April 7th 1916 they returned to Washington, D.C. After the death of her husband Ethel returned to Providence, where she is listed in the 1930 US Census as a widow living on Pine Street. She cultivated a rich life, receiving an elite education, teaching at a renowned Black university, and experiencing cosmopolitan life in Europe with her diplomat husband. Ethel Tremaine Robinson is buried in St. Francis Cemetery, Pawtucket, RI. She died at St. Joseph's Hospital in Warwick, RI of "cardiac and renal insufficiency" on December 7, 1942.
Ethel Robinson’s portrait is based on her photograph in “Brun Mael,” the yearbook of the Women’s College in Brown. It was painted in 2017 by Jenna Laycraft, a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at Brown, as part of her research into the subjects pictured in, and omitted from, the Brown portrait collection, with the intention of creating a portrait of a significant historical figure in the history of the university who was not previously represented in the collection.