After Dunbar, Mary enrolled at Howard University, the historically Black university in Washington, D.C., that had become one of the primary institutions through which African Americans gained access to higher education during the era of segregation.

Howard offered what most white universities explicitly denied: admission, instruction, and degrees granted on the basis of academic merit rather than racial exclusion.

The university had produced distinguished graduates in virtually every field, and its faculty included scholars of the first rank who had been driven to Howard not by second-choice but by the exclusions of American academic racism.

Mary’s time at Howard was cut short, however, by economic circumstances.

The early 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, and the Davidson family, like most American families, felt the economic pressure intensely.