Gladys Byram Shepperd

Gladys Byram was born in Memphis, the daughter of George Washington Byram and Rebecca J. Busby Byram.[1] Her mother was a teacher and her father was a barber. In 1923, she read the Emancipation Proclamation at a Memphis event marking the 60th anniversary of its publication.[2] She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1927.[3]

Shepperd taught history in the segregated high schools of Baltimore from 1927 to 1956.[4] She was eastern regional director of Delta Sigma Theta after college.[5] She was the fifth national president of Delta Sigma Theta, serving as the sorority's leader from 1931 to 1933.[6] She succeeded Anna Johnson Julian, and was in turn succeeded as president by Jeanette Triplett Jones.[7]

Shepperd wrote a biography of civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell, published in 1959.[8] In 1960 she was one of the "several women of national reputation" invited to the annual Women's Week at Morgan State College.[9][10] In 1966, she spoke at the dedication of the Mary Church Terrell Memorial Research Library in Washington, D.C.[11] In the 1960s she was appointed by Spiro Agnew to the Gubernatorial Study Commission on Maryland Folklife.[10][12]

• Mary Church Terrell: Respectable Person (1959)[13]

Byram married physician James Douglass Shepperd by 1930.[14] They lived in Baltimore and had children Sandra and James.[15][16] Her husband died in 1972.[17] Gladys Byram Shepperd died in 1985, in St. Louis, Missouri, at the age of 83.[18]