Gertrude Mahorney 

(ca. 1863–unknown). Gertrude Mahorney was an educator in the Indianapolis Public School system. She grew up in a progressive home, traveled throughout Europe, and was the first African American woman to graduate from Butler University during a period when most Indianapolis institutions and organizations were customarily racially segregated.

Mahorney was born in Indianapolis to John Todd Mahorney and Ann Elizabeth Gray Mahorney. Her parents owned a wig shop near the Bates House in Indianapolis. They were active in the antislavery movement and local politics and labor causes. Mahorney and her brother grew up speaking German alongside English, due to tutelage in the former language from their Prussian step-grandmother.

Mahorney’s father maintained iconoclastic ideas about education. He took the family from Indianapolis to the East End of London in 1877. They lived in a diverse community and spent time traveling throughout Europe. Mahorney’s father worked on technical products for which he received patent protection. He also wrote a biography of Charles Sumner, drawing material from his personal acquaintanceship with the famed abolitionist and US senator. These experiences and her father’s progressive social views laid the groundwork for Mahorney’s eventual educational and professional path.

The family returned to the US in 1879, settling in Irvington, a suburb of Indianapolis. Mahorney, followed by her brother, attended Butler University. In 1887, she became the first African American woman to graduate from the university, as one of four women in a class of 18 graduates. Officials described her as the only Black graduate and an excellent speaker. She continued her education at Butler, earning a Master of Philosophy degree in German in 1889.

Upon graduation, she took a job at The Indianapolis Recorder. She was a columnist and also translated stories from the region’s German-language press into English, to be reprinted for The Recorder’s readers. These translations allowed for the sharing of news and perspectives between Indianapolis’s large German immigrant population and the broader English-reading public.

After her father and brother died in 1890 and 1892, respectively, Mahorney and her mother moved to Leavenworth, Kansas. Here, Mahorney took a job as a teacher. She and her mother returned to Indianapolis within a few years. Mahorney taught third and fourth graders at IPS 23 and German at IPS 24 from 1898 to 1906.

In 1905, Mahorney traveled to Pittsburgh. Her uncle, president of Avery College and Trade School, arranged for a tour of the institute. A year later, Mahorney resigned from IPS 24, moved to Pittsburgh, and took a position as a teacher at Avery. This did not last long. She returned to Indianapolis but could not find a full-time teaching position, prompting her move in 1910 to take a job in Rockville, Indiana, where she taught until the end of the 1913–14 school year. At times, enrollment there was so low that Mahorney was the only teacher at the school. In Rockville, Mahorney became active in the Rockville Suffrage Club, serving at one point as the organization’s president.

Sometime between her Rockville years and the start of 1915, Mahorney moved to Detroit, Michigan. Tax records show Mahorney’s delinquency on property taxes owed on an Indianapolis lot registered in the name of her deceased brother. Early in 1915, she contacted Thomas Carr Howe, president of Butler University, to assess whether the university might purchase the lot; it is unclear whether it eventually did so.

Mahorney disappears from the historical record after her correspondence with Howe. In February 2016, Butler University posthumously honored Mahorney during its Founder’s Week celebration with a restored graduation photo. During her life, Mahorney’s proficiency in the German language propelled her career as a trailblazing African American public-schools educator. It also facilitated her work as a translator of journalism, whose output connected Indianapolis’s Black and white English-reading communities to the city’s German immigrant population.

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