Expert on African-American art; Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles. Mary Jane Hewitt's birth is undocumented, but likely in the 1920s. She was the youngest of four children in a single-mother household. She was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, by her mother to whom she accredited her strong will and intolerance of discrimination (Ehrhart-Morrison). Hewitt first earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota before traveling to Paris, France in the 1950s. In France, Hewitt worked as a French interpreter and translator for the U.S.