English: Biography: Muriel Sutherland Snowden was cofounder and codirector of Freedom House, a nationally-known social service agency developed to promote interracial understanding and cooperation and effective citizen participation in urban renewal. The daughter of Reiter Thomas and William Henry Sutherland, a dentist, she was born and educated in New Jersey. Following her graduation from Radcliffe College in 1938, she worked with the Essex County (N.J.) Welfare Board as a social work investigator for old age assistance. For the first time in her life she was exposed to the kind of desperate conditions in which the poor Black citizens of Newark, N.J., lived. After five years, she felt that systematic change could be accomplished more readily by community organization than through individual casework. She entered the New York School of Social Work on an Urban League fellowship to study community organization and race relations. Following her marriage to Otto Snowden and the birth of a daughter, in 1945 she returned to Boston. She and her husband were determined to make changes in the community where they lived, and in 1949 began to lay the groundwork for what was to become Freedom House. Mrs. Snowden was executive director of the Cambridge (Mass.) Civic Unity Committee until 1950, then she left to devote full-time efforts to Freedom House. Beginning in 1958, she taught community organization for twelve years at the Simmons College School of Social Work. She served on the boards of many organizations, including the University of Massachusetts, the Associated Harvard Alumni, the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association, Babson College, the Shawmut Bank, the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, and the Racial Imbalance Committee of the Massachusetts Department of Education. She received the Radcliffe College Alumna Award in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts in 1968. She retired from Freedom House in 1984.

Description: The Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African American women between 1976 and 1981. With support from the Schlesinger Library, the project recorded a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society during the first half of the 20th century. Photograph taken by Judith Sedwick
Repository: Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
Collection: Black Women Oral History Project
Research Guide: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/schlesinger_bwohp

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