Ruth DeMond Brooks

Ruth Watkins DeMond was born in New Orleans, the eldest of five children born to Abraham Lincoln DeMond and Lula Irene Watkins Patterson DeMond. Her father was an Episcopalian minister, born and educated in New York, and at Howard University.[1][2] Her mother, from Alabama, studied music in Boston and taught at several black colleges; she was also active in temperance work.[3]

Ruth DeMond earned a bachelor's degree from Syracuse University in 1924,[4] and earned a master's degree in history at the University of Chicago.[5][6]

Brooks taught at Douglass High School in Baltimore for five years as a young woman,[7][8] and taught history at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C.[5] for 28 years, with a permanent appointment granted in 1932.[9] She was teaching at the school when it integrated in 1954.[10][11] She retired from teaching in 1957.[6]

In 1928, Ruth DeMond was a bridesmaid at the wedding of her friend and school colleague Yolande Du Bois (daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois) to poet Countee Cullen, in New York.[12][13] In December 1931,[7] at her father's church in Nashville, she married Robert William Brooks, pastor of Lincoln Temple Congregational Church in Washington, D.C.[14] She was widowed when Rev. Brooks died in 1952,[5] and she died in 1987, aged 85, at a nursing home in Wheaton, Maryland.[6]

Brooks' sister Marguerite DeMond married Harlem Renaissance journalist John P. Davis. In 1989, a library book borrowed by Ruth DeMond in 1926 was returned to the Nashville Public Library system by Brooks' nephew, journalist Michael DeMond Davis.[15]