Leila Amos Pendleton

Leila Amos Pendleton (1868 – December 7, 1938) was an author, community activist, and a teacher in Washington D.C.'s public schools. She was the founder and president of the Alpha Charity Club of Anacostia and the Social Purity Club of Washington, D.C. She was active in several other women's race organizations, both as a secretary and vice president. She wrote books and articles. She was African-American. Her husband, Robert Lewis Pendleton (1865–1929) was a publisher and printer. He published some of his wife's books, historical statements of African Americans, and community publications including the Constitution of the American Negro Academy for the American Negro Academy of Washington, D.C. in 1905.

Early life Leila Amos Pendleton was born in 1868 in Washington, D.C. She went to Washington public, high, and normal schools. In 1893, she married Robert Lewis Pendleton. Her father was Joseph Ferdinand Amos and her mother was Maria Louise Bruce. Her father was a policeman for 30 years. She had five brothers: James E., Ralph W., Ferdinand F., Ernest R., and Claude B. Amos.

Career Pendleton was a strong influence in her community. As a community activist, she dedicated herself to the improvement of African Americans through children's education. Based on her personal experiences as an educator and activist, she wrote A Narrative of the Negro, published in 1912. The work was well-received and led some to consider her to be the first black woman historian.

She considered this book, which offers a comprehensive and readable history of blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, to be one of her most noteworthy accomplishments. She describes the book in the preface as a “sort of ‘family story’ to the colored children of America." The primary audience for her book was African-American schoolchildren, a group that was largely unschooled about the accomplishments of African people and their descendants. Pendleton did her research at the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library

Pendleton describes A Narrative of the Negro as a volume that "contains, in story form, a brief outline of the history of the Negro". This 22-chapter book presents the history of Africans and their decedents in a chronological order. Pendleton starts from describing the geographical conditions and natural resources of the African continent, and then she goes from the early African civilizations to the terms slavery in Europe and Americas, and eventually to the African Americans in her contemporaries.

Frederick Douglass: A Narrative, 1921 (2 editions published in 1921 in English)

"The Foolish and the Wise", March 1921 (Volume 21, No. 5).

Death She died at her home in Washington, D.C., on December 7, 1938.