Ruby Middleton Forsythe was a well-respected educator in Charleston, SC.

Forsythe earned her license of education certificate from Avery Institute. The school provided its students with the best liberal education and cultural experience. She later received her BS degree from South Carolina State College and started her teaching career in 1924 in Mount Pleasant’s Laing School, run by the American Missionary Society.

She taught at the North Charleston Schools and in 1938, she began teaching in a one-room school on Pawley’s Island, the only educational facility to blacks on the island.

Forsythe once said about life as an educator: “You got to start with little things that are not in the book to teach respect. The schoolteacher today has to be mother, father, counselor, everything. The majority of children have nobody to sit down with them and teach them the little things that are right from the things that ‘Let’s Talk,’ because their parents just don’t have the time.”

Forsythe was married to the Reverend William Essex Forsythe, an Episcopal priest, who was in charge of Holy Cross-Faith Memorial Church and School on Pawley’s Island. Ruby Middleton Forsythe died in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina on May 29, 1992.

sources:

http://coastalobserver.com/articles/2018/062818/6.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/38616718/ruby-forsythe