Intergenerational Dialogue on the Great Migration: Delores Washington

Sat, 10/01/2022 - 3:22pm

Legacies Project Oral History: Carolyn Houston

Wed, 01/15/2020 - 9:46am

Carolyn Houston was born in 1925 and grew up in Lakewood, Ohio. She spent the majority of her working years as a homemaker and mother of four boys. During World War II she was a nurse’s aid, and she was a secretary in Stanford’s civil engineering department to support her husband’s graduate studies. Her children grew up near Dexter, Michigan. After she divorced her husband in 1980, Houston worked at Rackham as a secretary to the associate dean. She married Bill Houston and moved to Pittsburgh in the late 80s, but returned to Ann Arbor in 2001.

Carolyn Houston was interviewed as part of an internship at Applied Safety and Ergonomics in Ann Arbor in 2008 as part of the Legacies Project

Legacies Project Oral History: Anna Noble

Wed, 01/15/2020 - 9:40am

Anna Noble was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Pittsburgh with 11 siblings. She worked as a launderer as a young woman. She applied to several nursing schools, but faced discrimination due to segregation. She attended Mercy Douglass School of Nursing in Philadelphia, which was an all-Black nursing school. In 1950, Noble moved to Detroit to take a nursing position at Haynes Memorial Hospital. She became the director of nursing at DMC Harper University Hospital, where she worked for 23 years. Later in life, she volunteered at the Lula Belle Stewart Center, which offered parenting assistance to single mothers.

Anna Noble was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.