Rose Leary Love

Leary was from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina,^[1] the daughter of John Sinclair Leary and Nannie Latham Leary. Her father was a lawyer^[2] and state legislator, the second Black man admitted to the North Carolina bar during Reconstruction; he was also dean of the law department at Shaw University. Her mother was a teacher.^[3] Her uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary worked with abolitionist John Brown, and was killed in the raid at Harpers Ferry;^[4] through his widow, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, she was related to writers Carrie Langston Hughes and Langston Hughes.^[5] She graduated from Barber-Scotia Seminary and Johnson C. Smith University.^[6] She earned her teaching certificate in 1917.^[7]

Love taught at schools in Greensboro and Charlotte from 1925 to 1964.^[8] She wrote plays and musicals for her students, and published poetry, stories, and magazine articles. Love's stories "present the healthy and stable lives of children, particularly through farm life, as a means for finding value in the characteristics of Southern black communities."^[1] She contributed to The Brownies' Book, a short-lived literary magazine for children.^[9] She spent a year teaching in Indonesia while her husband was working there as a technical advisor. She was also a church organist and choir director.^[3][10] She taught summer methods courses for primary school teachers at Livingstone College.^[11]

• Nebraska and His Granny (1936, children's book)^[12]
• "A Few Facts About Lewis Sheridan Leary Who Was Killed at Harpers Ferry in John Brown's Raid" (1943)^[4]
• "Number Readiness in Grade One" (1954)^[13]
• A Collection of Folklore for Children in Elementary School and at Home (1964, edited by Love)^[14][15]
• "The Five Brave Negroes with John Brown at Harper's Ferry" (1964)^[16]
• "George Washington Carver: A Boy Who Wished to Know Why" (1967)^[17]
• Plum Thickets and Field Daisies (1996, memoir, published posthumously)^[18]

Rose Leary married World War I veteran George Bishop Love in 1925; he taught auto mechanics at Tuskegee Institute and North Carolina A&T State College.^[19] They had a son, George Leary Love (1937–1995), who was a photographer based in Brazil.^[20] Her husband died in 1961,^[21] and she died in 1969, at the age of 70, in Charlotte.^[22]

Her papers are in the special collections of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.^[23] The Leary Love Family Papers are in the special collections library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.^[24] Love's memoir of growing up in Brooklyn, North Carolina, Plum Thickets and Field Daisies, was published posthumously in 1996, after the neighborhood was razed for urban renewal and highway construction.^[25][26] Ruth Sloane's 1996 play, The Second City, commissioned by Theater Charlotte, adapted some material from Love's memoir.^[27]