Marcella Ford (August 30, 1900 - ?) was one of the founders of what became the African American Museum and Library of Oakland.
Ford was born in Athens Georgia and raised in Chicago, Illinois the daughter of a Baptist minister. She married a minister and began taking seminary classes in Chicago at Northern Baptist Seminary, but following the death of her first husband, she moved to Oakland, California where she married Jesse William Ford in 1934.
Upon arriving in Oakland, she became active in in the Beth Eden Christian Education Program and helped to establish the Board of Education at the church. While working on her master's degree in Christian education from American Baptist Seminary of the West, she began teaching classes in the Oakland public schools.
Following graduation from the seminary she received an appointment to teach from the Education Ministry at Valley Forge and taught at two American Baptist schools. After a year of teaching at the Mather Boarding School for Girls in Beaufort, South Carolina, she returned to her alma mater, Shaw University, where she worked for ten years as an assistant director and teacher in the School of Christian Education.
In 1946, the Fords, along with Eugene and Ruth Lasartemay, began collecting oral histories and artifacts that documented the activities of African Americans in and around Oakland.
With fellow Beth Eden member and teacher, Katheryne Favors, Ford developed the first course on teaching African American history to elementary and high school students. In the fall of 1962, Ford taught the first course, History and Culture of the American Negro, at Berkeley Adult Evening School, the first course of its kind in the Bay Area. After two years of teaching, she became an education consultant helping Bay Area schools establish curriculum on black history.
For her contributions to education and dedication to African American history, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Shaw University in 1982.
