Robert A. Grigsby, the sixth chief executive of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore – when it was known as Princess Anne College – penned a heartfelt tribute to a deceased colleague in early 1942.
“The (college’s) history cannot be written without a large portion of it being centered around the life of the late Daniel J. Pinkett, who gave … the best days of his life as a teacher of mathematics and related subjects,” Grigsby wrote.
Daniel James Pinkett died Jan. 22, 1942 and is buried in the John Wesley Cemetery affiliated with Princess Anne’s Metropolitan United Methodist Church, where he was a congregant for many years in the early 20th century. The 1880 U.S. Census for Vienna, Md. estimated he was born in either 1857 or 1858, and at that time listed his occupation as “teacher.”
According to Pinkett’s obituary, passed down to his descendants, he was born in Baltimore but “educated in the public schools of Dorchester County, Md.”
Documents in Morgan State University’s archives indicate he earned a degree in 1885 from the Baltimore school when it was called Centenary Biblical Institute. He also studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Pinkett eventually became a teacher at a “colored school” in Kent County, Md., where he met his wife Sarah E. Peaker of Galena, a fellow educator.
The couple moved to Salisbury in the mid-1890s, where “he became principal of the public school for a number of years,” the obituary says.
In 1902, Pinkett accepted an appointment from Frank Trigg to join Princess Anne Academy’s faculty as a math instructor, a job he held for the next three decades.
“Anything that was for the development of the school gained his interest and hearty support,” reads the tribute written by Grigsby, who came to Princess Anne to teach English and train teachers.
By the second decade of the 20th century, Pinkett’s name was featured prominently in school publications that listed faculty – just below those of Principal Thomas H. Kiah and Kiah’s first wife, Mary Roberta.
“No one more prompt of duty than Professor Pinkett ever served the Institution,” Grigsby wrote. “He was loved and respected by all students whom he taught and faculty members with whom he served.”
Pinkett and his wife raised eight children – four boys and four girls – all of whom presumably matriculated at the academy, including Maslin Frysinger Pinkett (class of 1915), who later became a faculty colleague.
According to great-grandson Steven M. Pinkett Sr., oral history passed down through the generations has it the family patriarch so admired Centenary’s William Maslin Frysinger that he named one of his sons after the white minister who played a key role in the 1886 founding of the private prep school that eventually became the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
Grigsby described the Pinkett family as “an inspiration and wholesome example to all.”
Despite a “meager salary,” Grigsby wrote, “he not only maintained his children in a comfortable home, but educated them and sent them forth with a family background and training, which has made them respectable and successful citizens where ever they have lived.”
At least three of the Pinkett children followed in their parents’ footsteps as educators, and one was a doctor. One served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. One of his grandsons became an attorney. Great grandson Steven M. Pinkett Sr. and his son are trained as system analysts; i.e. they work with interpreting numbers. A great-great-granddaughter, entertainer Jada Pinkett Smith, is known to millions of TV and movie fans.
Pinkett’s obituary described him as a “devout Christian” who served in lay leadership roles and “exemplified his Christian life not only in church activities, but in his daily home life.”
Grigsby noted that Pinkett “knew well what he taught, and taught well what he knew. No student could ever satisfy him with lessons half learned.”
“He was loved and respected by all students whom he taught,” Grigsby wrote, “and all faculty member with whom he served.”
In 1987, Daniel Pinkett’s daughter Alice Pinkett McLeod (a 1925 Princess Anne Academy alumna) and siblings Roxie and McCullough Pinkett led an initiative to honor their father’s memory by establishing the Daniel J. Pinkett award to recognize a deserving mathematics student.
“Princess Anne College lives today and will live always,” Grigsby’s 1942 tribute reads, “because men and women like Professor Pinkett lived and labored there.”
