Delaware State University honors three women of achievement
Delaware State University held its annual Ladies Hats & Gloves Tea March 31. For their achievement and community involvement, honors were presented to Dr. Hanifa Shabazz, Peggy Joyce Hunter Swygert, and the Rev. Jean Wylie. More than 300 women and a few brave men attended the DSU Hats & Gloves Tea in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center.
An elected member of the Wilmington City Council since 2004, Shabazz is currently the first woman ever to serve as that body’s president. She has been critically instrumental in economic development initiatives that benefit low- to middle-income neighborhoods in that city such as the Neighborhood Assistance Act, and the forming of pioneering community coalitions that encourage businesses to invest and partner in local communities and thereby create jobs for residents. She is a Wilmington native and lifelong resident.
Swygert is a DSU alumna who graduated in 1962 from then-Delaware State College with a bachelor of arts degree in sociology. She enjoyed a long career in social work in Delaware and elsewhere. As a military wife to Arnold Swygert, the couple and their children moved around to a number of different assignments in the U.S. and abroad. Their move back to Dover Air Force Base was their final assignment. While she later earned a master’s degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she and her late husband of 58 years remain devoted to Delaware State University through their involvement in campus events and their establishment of a scholarship that continues today.
Wylie, a 1968 alumna of then-Delaware State College, is a lifelong educator. She served for 46 years as a teacher, assistant principal and principal in the Milford School District. A native of Ellendale, she is an ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and currently serves as the pastor of Bethel AME Church in Milford. Wylie is also the current president of the Milford Slaughter Neck NAACP and the Dover District Ministerium.
