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Overview
Leila Amos Pendleton was an African-American community activist and a teacher in Washington’s public schools. She was the founder and president of the Alpha Charity Club of Anacostia and the Social Purity Club of Washington, DC. She was also active in several other women’s race organizations, both as a secretary and vice president.

 

Biography
Leila Amos Pendleton was born to Joseph and Maria Amos in 1860 in Washington, DC. She went to Washington public, high and normal schools. In 1893, she married Robert Lewis Pendleton. The date of her death is not known for certain.

 

Career
Pendleton was a strong influence in her community. As a community activist, she dedicated herself to the improvement of African Americans through children’s education. Based on her personal experiences as an educator and activist, she wrote A Narrative of the Negro, published in 1912. She considered this book, which offers a comprehensive and readable history of blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, to be one of her most noteworthy accomplishments. She describes the book in the preface as a “sort of ‘family story’ to the colored children of America." The primary audience for her book was African-American schoolchildren, a group that was largely unschooled about the accomplishments of African people and their descendants. Pendleton did her research at the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library and the libraries of Yale and Harvard. She also wrote A Alphabet for Negro Children, Frederick Douglass: A Narrative, and two stories for children that were published in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1910.

A Narrative of the Negro, 1912
(14 editions published between 1912 and 2012 in English)

Pendleton describes A Narrative of the Negro as a volume that “contains, in story form, a brief outline of the history of the Negro”. This twenty-two-chapter book presents the history of Africans and their decedents in a chronological order. Pendleton starts from describing the geographical conditions and natural resources of the African continent, and then she goes from the early African civilizations to the terms slavery in Europe and Americas, and eventually to the African Americans in her contemporaries. In A Narrative of the Negro, Leila Amos Pendleton's approach to history is described as "multidimensional", different from the stereotypical views on Africans and their descendants from traditional history textbooks at the time.

Frederick Douglass: A Narrative, 1921
(2 editions published in 1921 in English)

In the book Frederick Douglas: A Narrative, Leila Amos Pendleton, as a narrator, provides a survey of Frederick Douglass's life, including his early life as a slave, his escape from slavery and his career as an abolitionist.

Fragments of Rhyme, 1921
(1 edition published in 1921 in English)

Publications on the Crisis magazine
An Apostrophe to the Lynched, June 1916 (Volume 12, No. 2).

The Foolish and the Wise, March 1921 (Volume 21, No. 5).