Minerva Brooks

Minerva Cozens Kline Brooks (December 1, 1882 – May 5, 1929) was a Broadway performer, dance educator, and advocate for women's suffrage. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to attorney Virgil P. Kline and Minerva E. Cozens Kline, she lost her mother during early childhood. Her father subsequently married Effie Hinckley Ober, a real estate investor who had founded and managed the Boston Ideal Opera Company. Brooks attended Hathaway Brown School and went on to graduate from Vassar College in 1903, the same year she made her Broadway appearance in the musical Running for Office.

Brooks spent her summers as a young person in Blue Hill, Maine, where her father and stepmother had established a summer colony that drew prominent Clevelanders, among them Walter Teagle of Standard Oil and associates of industrialist Mark Hanna. On October 12, 1907, she married writer Charles S. Brooks. Three years later, in 1910, she joined the Cleveland chapter of the College Equal Suffrage League and was additionally a member of both the Cleveland Suffrage Association and the Cleveland Suffrage Party.

In 1915, Brooks was among the group of friends who helped establish the Cleveland Play House, which included Ernest and Katherine Angell, the parents of Roger Angell. She participated in the organization's first production, a puppet show. The following year, Brooks and her husband relocated to New York City. Upon returning to Cleveland, she taught interpretive dance at the Cleveland branch of the Noyes School of Rhythm. The couple divorced in 1925.

Brooks died on May 5, 1929, in Boston. She left her house on Magnolia Drive to The Music Settlement of Cleveland, a music school that remains active.