The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 236, July 1883, U. of Illinois Press

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The BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Papers School in Massachusetts, where she studied music and Latin. She was under the watchful eye of Mary C. Moore, an English teacher at Framingham, and Ellen Hyde, the principal, both friends of Olivia Davidson Washington. She lived in the dormitory there for four academic years, 1895-99. The summers she usually spent at Hopedale, Mass., the home of Miss Moore's sister, near enough to her father's summer headquarters in Boston to see him frequently. While at Framingham, attracted by the ritual and music of the local Protestant Episcopal church and influenced by Miss Moore, Portia left her father's Baptist faith and was confirmed as an Episcopalian. She returned to Tuskegee for the 1 g-~goo school year and graduated. She was required at Tuskegee to learn dressmaking, which she hated, but her father wisely insisted that she take chemistry from the school's most distinguished faculty member, George Washington Carver. Another Tuskegee instruetor tutored her in German, for she had ambition for further education. In the fall of egos Portia Washington entered Wellesley College as a special student. She studied German, music theory, and piano. Ostensibly because she was not a full-time student but also because of pressure from southern students in the college, Portia Washington was denied accommodations in the college yard. She found quarters in a nearby boarding house, but life there surrounded by older people was dull and lonely for one of her lively temperament. Besides, musical training was not emphasized at Wellesley, and she realized she was not prepared for college work. At the end of a year she withdrew. Enrolling in Bradford Academy (later Bradford Junior College) in Bradford, Mass., she received kind and helpful attention from Miss Laura A. Knott and the other teachers. Her grades had been poor at Wellesley, but at Bradford she made As and Bs. She received a scholarship in piano, studying under Samuel Downes. She graduated in 1905, being the first Negro to graduate from Bradford. Portia Washington sailed for Europe in the summer of 1905, accompanied by Tuskegee's lady principal, Miss Jane E. Clark. They spent much of the summer in London and Paris. She went on to Berlin for two years of piano study under Professor Martin Krause, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. She considered herself fortunate to win admission to his classes, and he gave close attention to his first Negro pupil and the Negro music that she introduced him to, arranged by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the Afro-British composer. In the summer of ~ 907 her stepmother and brother, E. Davidson Washington, came over to meet her; they traveled to Rome, Venice, and elsewhere in Europe. Soon after her return home, Portia Washington married William Sidney Pittman, a Washington, D.C., architect, on Oct. 3 I, ~ 907. Pittman, who was born in Montgomery, was one of Tuskegee's brightest graduates and, with a loan from BTW, spent three years, 1 7-~goo, studying architecture at Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia. He returned to Tuskegee to teach drafting and to supply drawings for the mechanical shops. Quarreling with the school's chief architect, Robert R. Taylor, and complaining that he was underpaid, Pittman left in 1904 to establish his own architectural once. He lived in and promoted the development of Fairmount Heights, a black suburb of Washington. He designed the lath Street YMCA in Washington. Portia Pittman moved into the home her husband had designed. That winter BTW bought her a piano as a wedding present, and on May 3~, 1908, she gave a concert in Washington to raise money to send Clarence Cameron White, a black violinist, to Europe. She played Chopin and Liszt, but one of her numbers was ''Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,'' by Coleridge-Taylor. As a child she had been fondest of Chopin, but in 236