Rebecca Dallis

Rebecca Dallis (December 21, 1896 – February 13, 1971) was an American educator and activist for the education of African American children.

Biography Rebecca Huey was born on December 21, 1896, in Connersville, Indiana. Dallis married William Curtis Dallis in 1923. In 1924, she graduated from Swift Memorial College with a Bachelors of Arts and an Elementary Teaching. By 1932, she was a teacher in Mobile, Arizona, a largely African American community.

In 1935, the Casa Grande community built a separate, segregated school for the children of African American cotton laborers moving to the city. In 1939, Dallis took over as the teacher of Southside Colored Grammar School. She taught between forty and seventy students between kindergarten and eighth grade, for a third of the pay of the white teachers and in poor conditions. When she learned students needed to know Spanish to enroll in college, she ordered a correspondence course and learned it with her students.

Dallis was named one of Arizona’s notable women honored in the history project “Making a Difference: Arizona Women Building Communities, 1900-1980. ”

In 2017, Dallis was inducted into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame.