Ophelia DeVore

Ophelia DeVore was born on the twelfth of August, most sources say 1921 (some record 1922), in Edgefield, South Carolina, one of ten children. Her father, John Walter DeVore, was of German-American descent and ran a road-contracting business; her mother, Mary Emma Strother, an educator and musician, carried African-American and Native (Cherokee) ancestry. From her parents she absorbed a lifelong regard for education, bearing, and the dignity of appearance.

As a girl she moved north — first to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, then to New York City — graduating from Hunter College High School and studying mathematics at New York University. She began modeling at sixteen, one of the earliest women of African-American descent to work professionally in an industry that had shut its doors to her.

In 1946, refusing to accept those closed doors, she founded the Grace Del Marco Agency, one of the first agencies in America to represent non-White models. Soon after, in 1948, she opened her school of self-development and modeling, which over the decades trained more than twenty thousand students. Through her rooms passed Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Richard Roundtree, and Helen Williams. She later became publisher of The Columbus Times in Georgia and, in 1985, was named to a presidential arts advisory committee.

She died on the twenty-eighth of February, 2014, in Manhattan, aged ninety-two. Ophelia DeVore opened a stage where beauty of every complexion could at last be seen — and we honor the grace and stubborn courage with which she held that door open for generations to come.