Papers of Deborah Wolfe, 1945-1970

Educator and minister, Deborah (Cannon) Partridge Wolfe was born in Cranford, New Jersey, in 1916, to Reverend David Wadsworth and Gertrude Moody Cannon. She attended New Jersey State Teachers College (BS 1937) and Columbia University (MA 1938, EdD 1945). From 1938 to 1950 she was on the faculty at Tuskegee Institute, serving as head of the Department of Elementary Education and as director of the graduate studies program. In 1950 she was appointed Professor of Education at Queens College of the City University of New York, a position she held for over thirty years. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Union Theological Seminary (1950) and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1952-1953).

From 1962 to 1965, Wolfe served as Education Chief for the United States House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor. Her publications appeared widely in professional, religious, and government journals. In 1970 she became the first black woman ordained by the American Baptist Church and served as associate minister in the First Baptist Church of Cranford, New Jersey.

In 1940 Wolfe married Henry Roy Partridge, a specialist in agricultural economics and commercial dietetics at Tuskegee Institute. They had one son (Henry Roy Partridge, Jr.) and separated in 1950. Wolfe later married Estemore Alvis Wolfe, a business executive, in 1959. Their marriage ended in 1966.

Wolfe was the Vice-President of the National Alliance for Safer Cities, an official nongovernmental organization represented at the United Nations, and was active in Delta Kappa Gamma, Zeta Phi Beta, and Kappa Delta Pi sororities. She died in 2004.