SARAH A. COLLINS FERNANDIS
 The First African-American
 Female Social Worker In Maryland

By Erika Quesenbery
 Curator Paw Paw Museum Port Deposit, MD

 
   Sarah A. Collins Fernandis was born in Port Deposit in 1863 and was the first African American female hired in the State of Maryland as a social worker for a public welfare agency. She completed her undergraduate work at Hampton Institute, Virginia, in 1882, (where she penned the school’s song) and proceeded to teach public school in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. In 1900 she came to Baltimore as an elementary school teacher, but when she married John C. Fernandis in 1903 she had to give up her teaching career, as state law forbade married women to teach in public schools. Instead she moved to Washington D.C. and established the first neighborhood settlement house for African Americans in the United States, before going to New York University to study for a degree in social work.
Mrs. Fernandis opened a settlement house in Rhode Island and in 1913, back in Baltimore, opened a day nursery at Druid Hill and began working with the Cooperative Civic League in the City until 1917, seeking improvement in African-American communities. She became the first President of this organization, which stormed City Hall demanding neighborhoods be cleaned up – including streets and alleys. The Milk Committee of her organization pressured the Health Department to put milk in sanitary containers and be sold from clean shops. She fought to get trash collection in African-American neighborhoods, just like in white neighborhoods, and had City Hall raze a block of building, due to terribly high rates of tuberculosis in the area, with residents relocated to safer, sanitary homes.
A volunteer at the Family Welfare Agency and Henry Watson Children’s Aid Society, as well as the YMCA and Juvenile Court, she helped organize the fist inter-racial, inter-faith association in Baltimore, founded by Mrs. Francis King Carey and Dr. Peter Anslee. During World War I she helped construct a War Camp Community Center in Chester, Pa., and in 1920 the Baltimore Health Department finally hired this amazing woman as the First African American Social Worker in the City’s Venereal Disease Clinic.
She was instrumental in the erection of the Henryton State Hospital, a tuberculosis hospital for African-Americans in 1923, and the establishment of a second neighborhood house for African Americans in Baltimore in 1936. She also opened the National Youth Administration office at Druid Hill in 1936, sheltering homeless girls and leading them to employment. A room at the Madison YMCA in Baltimore was named in her honor.