Ozeline Wise

Ozeline Pearson Wise (1903 - 1988)was the first black woman to be employed in the banking department of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a position she held for 20 years. She and her sister Satyra Bennett co-founded the Citizens Charitable Health Association and the Cambridge Community Center.

Wise took the civil service exam but was denied a job with the post office because of her gender. She later took a job at the banking department of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the early 1950s.

Wise grew up in Michigan and Massachusetts. Her parents were Frances Lavina (Gale) and William B. Pearson, her grandfather Josiah Pearson had been an enslaved person in Jamaica. She graduated from high school in Cambridge, Mass. She married John Wise in 1931 and they adopted a son, Hubert Smith, in 1961. They lived in Billerica, Massachusetts in a house named Galehurst, which they ran as an inn that was listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book. Wise died in 1988 and left her papers, as well as those of her sister and her father, to the Schlesinger Library.