produce it out of fear for her life. Houston became an independent historian. Beginning in 1901, she conducted research into a variety of sources and published a multi-volume history of Africans in their homeland, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926). While the work is now dated, it was influential as part of an early 20th-century effort by African Americans in the United States to document their African ancestors as peoples with complex, ancient history and civilizations. Houston was a co-founder of Oklahoma chapters of the YWCA, the Red Cross, and the NAACP, all based in Oklahoma City. She was an early leader of the Oklahoma Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. In 1932, her brother Roscoe Dunjee led several NAACP chapters to come together to form a state organization. She was a co-founder of the Dogan Reading Room of Oklahoma and served as its president. She died of tuberculosis on February 8, 1941, in Phoenix, Arizona. She had moved there for her health, as the dry climate was believed to benefit people with lung disease, and TB was incurable at the time. Selected works Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926) Spirit of the South, The Maddened Mob (1915) Legacy The Black Classic Press of Baltimore established Drusilla Dunjee Houston Memorial Scholarship Award for "an emerging female scholar of African descent to foster scholarly research in Africana Women’s history" References 1876 births 1941 deaths People from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia 20th-century American writers African-American activists American women writers Women film pioneers Clubwomen 20th-century African-American women writers 20th-century American women writers 20th-century African-American writers 20th-century deaths from tuberculosis Tuberculosis deaths in Arizona