Gladys (Duncan) Cunningham

Quick Facts

Place of Birth:

VA

Date of Birth:

April 11, 1906

Place of Death:

Falls Church, VA

Date of Death:

August 14, 1971

Place of Burial:

Arlington, VA

Cemetery Name:

Arlington National Cemetery

“To me, an education is more precious than rubies, and the only reason that I have ever desired to be rich was in order than I might help less fortunate young men and women just as you are helping me. I wonder if it would interest you to know something more about me.”
- Gladys Duncan to Alice Longfellow, 10 May 1925. Alice Mary Longfellow Papers.

In her 1925 letter thanking Alice Longfellow for funding her scholarship at Hampton Institute, Gladys Duncan gave autobiographical background and expressed her hopes of becoming a teacher. Duncan was born in Virginia in 1906 and moved to Sharon, Connecticut by 1910. In Connecticut, her widowed mother Fannie Duncan worked as a cook in a private school, working to support the family and fund Gladys’s education. Gladys Duncan reported, “I entered High School in 1920, and graduated valedictorian in 1924. I was the only colored person in my class, and had been all of my life – that is, my school life.” She entered Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in September 1924, majoring in French and English in the Teacher’s College.

Public records fill in an outline of her life after Hampton. By 1930, she worked as a clerk at an insurance company in Washington, DC, where her mother had joined her. In 1931, she married Simeon Cunningham in 1931, a fellow insurance clerk and later assistant manager at the Evening Star newspaper. In 1933, Gladys Duncan Cunningham was listed as a graduate of Howard University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Education. By 1940, the Cunninghams had two children, and Gladys Cunningham worked as a clerk for the Social Security Administration, and she finished her career in civil service.