Educator Marie Davis Gadsden dies

Marie Davis Gadsden, a top administrator of education and philanthropic foundations who became the first black woman to chair the board of the relief group Oxfam America, died March 14 in Washington. She was 92.

She died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, said her niece Laura Vault.

Gadsden, the daughter of a physician and a teacher, grew up in segregated Georgia and won scholarships to finance her college and postgraduate education on her way to a doctorate in English from the University of Wisconsin in 1954.

Her academic specialty was language and how to teach it.

She was an associate professor at American University when the U.S. Information Agency sent her in 1959 to the West African country of Guinea to train teachers.

Gadsden subsequently taught English as a foreign language with the Peace Corps.