Portia Spennie Blackiston

Blackiston taught sewing at Tuskegee Institute, and at a summer teachers' institute in Elizabeth City, North Carolina in 1921.^[4][5] She taught domestic arts, including sewing,^[6] at West Virginia Collegiate Institute in the 1920s,^[7] with Exie Lee Hampton as one of her colleagues in the home economics department.^[8][9]

In St. Louis, Blackiston was active in clubwork, especially in the Women's Auxiliary of the People's Hospital,^[10][11] and in the Booklovers, one of the city's longest running women's literary clubs.^[12] She was secretary of the Booklovers in 1937.^[13] In 1955, she hosted a Booklovers meeting to discuss the Aeneid.^[14]

Spennie married German and Latin language scholar^[15] and World War I veteran Harry Spencer Blackiston in 1923.^[16] They had a daughter, also named Portia,^[17] and a son, also named Harry.^[18] They lived in St. Louis while Harry Sr. was a professor and dean at Harris-Stowe State University there.^[18] Her husband died in 1970.^[19] She lived with her son and his family in Los Angeles in her last years,^[20] and died in 1973, aged 75 years, in Culver City, California.

In 2021, Portia Spennie Blackiston was among the suffragists of color featured in the Champlain Valley Suffrage Centennial Auto Tour, and the tour's accompanying booklet.^[21][22]