Nettie Craig Asberry

Asberry was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, the daughter of Violet Craig, a former slave, and William Wallingford, who owned the plantation where Craig had been enslaved. Asberry was the youngest of Craig's six children, and the only one who was born free. She started studying piano at age eight. Taking advantage of the free tuition at the time, she enrolled and graduated from the University of Kansas and then earned her Doctorate of Music from the Kansas Conservatory of Music and Elocution in Leavenworth, Kansas, on June 12, 1883, a month before her eighteenth birthday.[2] It is possible that she was the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate degree.[1][3]

After college, Asberry taught music and performed in choirs in Nicodemus, Kansas, Kansas City, Missouri, and Denver, Colorado.[1] She married Albert Jones, and the two of them moved to Seattle, Washington to take advantage of the opportunities available there in the midst of the rebuilding of the city after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Shortly after arriving, Asberry became first organist and music director for the First African Methodist Episcopal Church.[2] When Albert Jones died in 1893, however, she returned briefly to her family in Kansas.[1]

After her husband's death in 1893, Asberry moved to Tacoma with her family.[4] This was where she became one of the founding members of the Tacoma Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)[5] chapter. She tried to fight segregation in Tacoma and Fort Lewis and established the Tacoma City Association of Colored Women's Clubs before traveling around to promote similar ideas, and was provided a federation throughout the state. Asberry was a longtime resident of Tacoma and taught children music and was a choir director, which she was able to do using her PhD. It has also been considered that she was the first African American woman to ever receive a PhD.[3]