Elizabeth Nolan, shipyard employee
Elizabeth Dunston Nolan, 97, the daughter of North Carolina sharecroppers, who worked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and for her church, died Saturday, July 9, at Saunders House in Wynnewood of complications from an earlier fall.
Elizabeth Dunston Nolan, 97, the daughter of North Carolina sharecroppers, who worked at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and for her church, died Saturday, July 9, at Saunders House in Wynnewood of complications from an earlier fall.
Mrs. Nolan, of West Philadelphia, was born in Franklin County, N.C., the eighth of 12 children of James and Harriett Dunston. In a sharecropper family, everyone was expected to work, she told her own daughters.
She and her siblings cared for the animals on the property and picked vegetables, cotton, and tobacco. The girls also were expected to do housework.
Because the segregated South did not offer quality education for African Americans, she lived with her married sister while attending South Philadelphia High School for Girls.
Her brother-in-law had to demand that she be allowed to take the college preparatory curriculum, because at that time black girls were routinely offered only a home economics curriculum, Mrs. Nolan told her family.
After graduating in 1937, she attended Virginia Union University in Richmond, working her way through while sending money home to help with the younger children.
She graduated in 1942, and returned to Philadelphia. Her first full-time job was caring for the children of a family on Rittenhouse Square.
At the peak of World War II, she worked briefly as a welder at the shipyard. After the war, she met and married William Nolan. The couple moved briefly to Phoenix, Ariz., then settled in Philadelphia, where they had two daughters.
In 1959, Mrs. Nolan and her husband separated and later divorced. She was rehired by the shipyard. Bolstered by graduate courses from Temple University, she rose to personnel administrator before retiring in 1980.
To keep busy and earn money, Mrs. Nolan became a travel agent and also seized the opportunity to travel.
"She never flew until she was 60, but once she started, she was a frequent traveler," daughter Adrienne Nolan Owens said.
Mrs. Nolan was a longtime member of the First African Presbyterian Church, where she taught Sunday school, supervised the nursery, and was a deacon and one of the first female elders. She also helped to assemble a church history, her family said, and for a time spearheaded an effort to feed and shelter homeless men at the church.
A strong advocate of social justice, she participated in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington in August 1963, and volunteered to be arrested on Aug. 29, 1985, during an antiapartheid protest in front of the South African embassy in Washington. The misdemeanor charge was dismissed.
She was a founding member of the African American Genealogy Group at the African American Museum, and an active member of the Parkside Historic Preservation Corp.
In 2013, she gave up her home and moved to Ohio to live near family, but earlier this year, she returned to Philadelphia. She was active until four months ago and mentally sharp to the end.
Besides her daughter, she is survived by daughter Angela Nolan-Cooper; three grandchildren; a great-granddaughter; a brother; and nieces and nephews.
A viewing starting at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, July 16, at the First African Presbyterian Church, 4159 W. Girard Ave., will be followed by a 10:30 a.m. funeral service. Interment is in Rolling Green Memorial Park, West Chester.
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