Black History Monday: Ophelia DeVore

Ophelia DeVore is considered by many to have been the first woman of color to become a fashion model in the United States. She was born in Edgefield, South Carolina in 1922, the daughter of parents who were of European, African-American and Native-American heritage.

As a teenager, Ophelia was sent to New York to live with relatives. While there she developed an interest in modeling. She attended the Vogue School of Modeling, an institution which excluded woman of color. The school assumed she was a white girl with a suntan. In a 2002 interivew with Kerry Burke of the Columbia News Service, she talked about how naive she had been, thinking she'd been accepted for who she was. "I didn't know they didn't know...I never pretended to be anything I wasn't. I just sold talent," she said.

After modeling for two years she no longer felt the work was challenging. Like other people of color in early 20th Century America, Ophelia DeVore had grown up watching the media's negative protrayal of them, and she wanted to do something to help change it. She and a few friends started the Grace Del Marco Modeling Agency to sell the idea of black modeling to the advertising industry. Shortly after that she began the Ophelia DeVore School of Self Development and Modeling. Thousands of upon thousands of people have benefited from these two organizations, including such big names as Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Richard Roundtree, and Camille Cosby. Many success stories, indeed, but two of the earliest occurred in 1959 and 1960, when two of Ms DeVore's models were crowned Queen of The Cannes Film Festival.

Ms DeVore attended New York's prestigious Hunter College High School and majored in mathematics at New York University. In addition to her modeling businesses, she was a fashion columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1970 she became the publisher of the Columbus Times, after its previous publisher, her husband, had passed away. She has served as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, has received appointments to Presidential committees and has been the recipient of hundreds of awards.

I first heard about Ophelia DeVore when, as a young child, I went to live with my aunt. Her only daughter, a 20-year-old, had attended the Ophelia DeVore school and both she and my aunt were devotees of a cosmetics line of Ms DeVore's. I still remember the little containers with pink labels sitting in our bathroom. I also remember a day when I was about 8 or 9 years old, when my aunt and I went to the school to pick up some foundation she needed. There were no parking spaces nearby so my aunt double-parked and stayed in the car while I went upstairs for the makeup. When I walked into the small space I saw a woman who seemed to be doing a million things at once and was under a lot of stress. When she saw me it was like she forgot about all of it and I was the most important person in the world. She looked at me smiled. "What does mommy want?" she said gently. I rattled off what my aunt had drilled into my head and gave her the money. She kept smiling, placed the bottle in my hand and wished me a wonderful day. No, that woman wasn't Ophelia DeVore. But if an over-worked clerk employed by her could make a small child feel like a princess, it was a good indicator of who Ophelia DeVore was: a beautiful woman, inside and out.

Buzzing off for now...