Katherine Stewart Flippin

Katherine Stewart Flippin (1906–1996) was a special educator in San Francisco and only daughter of lawyer McCants Stewart.

Biography 1907 photo of (from left to right) McCants Stewart (1877 - 1919), first African American lawyer in Oregon, along with his daughter Mary Katherine Stewart, sister Carlotta Stewart Lai (standing), wife Mayme Delia Weir (seated), and sister-in-law Harriett Anna Weir. In Portland, Oregon, Katherine Flippin was born Mary Katherine Stewart to parents McCants and Mary Weir Stewart. During her final year of high school, she dropped out and began a fifteen-year stint working in a department store.

After getting married, Flippin finished high school and went on to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degrees in early childhood education at San Francisco State College. During this time, she was a supervising teacher in the nursery school at the college. In 1949, Flippin was appointed to the faculty. She established Aid for Brain-Damaged Children, Inc., an experimental unit focused on how non-motor disabled, brain-injured children deviate in visual and auditory areas. Flippin also was a teacher at the Northern California School for Cerebral Palsied and Others.

A former president of Kappa Delta Pi, she was also an active member in the NAACP, San Francisco Consumer Action, and Children's Home Society. She was the niece of Carlotta Stewart Lai, who was a teacher and educator in Hawaii's public school system for about four decades.