Introduction

Ethel Hedgeman Lyle born as Ethel Hedgeman on February 10, 1885 in St, Louis, Missouri. She is the daughter of Albert Hedgeman and Maria Hubbard Hedgeman. Her father worked for the YMCA and her mother cared for her two sisters, Iota and Thelma. She attended public schools in St. Louis and graduated with honors from Sumner High School in 1904 with a scholarship to Howard University. She entered the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University in 1904. That year she had to stop due to some health issues she was having. She graduated in 1909 with a B.A. in liberal arts. After graduating she went to Enfala, Oklahoma. During that summer she taught music in the Summer Normal School and continued to teach in the public school of Enfala until 1910. Ethel Hedgeman Lyle was the first Black woman college graduate to teach in a normal school in Oklahoma and the first to receive a Teacher's Life Certificate from the Oklahoma State Department of Education. During the school year 1910-1911 she taught in the public schools of Centralia, Illinois. After she was done teaching in Centralia, she married her high school and college sweetheart, George Lyle, in New York on June 21, 1911, they resided in Philadelphia where their only child, George, Jr., was born. Mrs. Lyle continued her career in Philadelphia in 1922 she taught English at the Thomas Purham School and then at the Arthur School after that she retired in 1948.