Naida McCullough

Naida Portia McCullough (c. 1901 – September 19, 1989) was an American educator, pianist, and composer based in Los Angeles. Early life Naida McCullough was born in Colorado, the younger daughter of George A. McCullough and Georgia A. McCullough. She was raised in Denver, where she began as a performer and learned to play the church organ, and graduated from Los Angeles High School in the winter class of 1917. She and her elder sister, Yolande McCullough (1898–1964), taught music classes together as young women. Yolande married Leonard Stovall, a doctor in World War I who worked on tuberculosis prevention after the war. College activities McCullough was described in 1921 as “the first colored girl to graduate from the music department of the University of Southern California”. She was the first African American woman to receive a Pi Kappa Lambda Key (Music). McCullough was a founding member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority chapter at USC, and she helped to found the chapter at UCLA in 1925, and was a founding member of the west coast graduate chapter, in 1927. She was president of the Los Angeles graduate chapter in the 1940s, succeeded by Audrey Boswell Jones in 1945. She perform