 When that order disbanded in 1912, she entered the novitiate of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore where she was received as a novice and given the name, Sister Mary Theodore.In 1915, while working at Trinity College in Washington, she learned that Father Ignatius Lissner, provincial of the Fathers of the Society of African Missions, needed a religious to found a congregation of black sisters in Savannah.A bill in the Georgia Legislature proposed to forbid white teachers from instructing black children.