Daddy was well known throughout the community for another reason: he had the gift of healing. People had noticed his special way with horses and began bringing their own troubled animals to him. He could calm even the most agitated horse and cure obscure maladies in them. He was a self-taught veterinarian who treated everyone’s animals at no cost. Neighbors and friends began trusting him for their healing, too. I suspect Daddy’s special gift and the healing remedies he used were linked to his Native American heritage and traditions. This was an era when there were no doctor’s offices on every corner, particularly in neighborhoods where colored people lived, and so people often relied on home remedies handed down for generations. Or they turned to healers like Daddy. The word around town was, if you had something wrong, go to Josh Coleman and he would take care of it. That’s what our neighbors from across the street, Robert and Ruth Core, did one day with Mrs. Core’s nephew. The boy was visiting from out of town and needed help to stop stuttering, they explained. Daddy spent a few moments talking calmly to the boy, touched his throat, and then pronounced that he would be fine. The boy never stuttered again, according to the Cores, who shared the story with their twin daughters, Annette and Janette. The couple also told their daughters about the time Daddy healed an unusual growth on Mrs. Core’s forefinger. The growth looked like a large wart, but it wouldn’t go away. Mrs. Core marched across the street one day and explained the situation to Daddy. He quietly took her hand, rubbed his fingers gently across the wart several times, and mumbled something. “Go on home now,” he told her. “It will be okay in a couple of days.” Sure enough, Mrs. Core told her daughters, the wart disappeared, just as Daddy had said.
Those kinds of stories added a mythical lore to a man who was already bigger than life to me. But I would witness Daddy’s “healing hands” myself as an adult when on different occasions he removed a cluster of warts from my baby’s eye and my oldest child’s hands. Removing warts was his specialty, and his remedy was connected to the Farmer’s Almanac, which he read faithfully, and based on phases of the moon. Apparently the moon was right for such healing at only a certain time of the month. During that time, White Sulphur Springs residents, colored and white, would make their way to our house, form a line outside the door, and wait for Daddy’s touch.
As a child, I was just a little girl in awe of her daddy, and I beamed when friends and family told me I was just like him. I heard that often when it came to numbers. It was well known that I loved counting everything I saw, and I always pushed myself to go higher and higher. Math just made sense to me, and I caught on easily, even before I started school. I loved sitting with my older siblings when Mamà helped them with their homework. Sometimes I’d even come up with the answers before Charlie, who was two years older. One day, when I was about four years old, I slipped away from home. Mamà came outside to look for me, but I was not in the yard. She knew exactly where she’d find me, and there I was, sitting inside the school with my oldest brother.
I vividly remember our neighborhood school, which was initially a two-room building called White Sulphur Grade School. But while I was a student there, the school was rebuilt into a white, wooden, three-room building and renamed the Mary McLeod Bethune Grade School, in honor of the legendary educator and activist who dedicated her life to the advancement of our people. Born to former slaves, Mrs. Bethune was blessed to receive formal schooling and believed education was key to racial advancement. She began teaching in the 1890s and in 1904 established a private school, the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls. The school later merged with another institution to form what is today Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona, Florida. Mrs. Bethune became a powerful advocate for civil and women’s rights and later would establish the National Council of Negro Women. Her influence rippled throughout the nation, reaching even a West Virginia mountainside, where a tiny schoolhouse, named in her honor, dedicated itself to educating Negro children. Charlie’s classroom held a total of about twenty students in first through fourth grades. Horace and Margaret were in the other classroom, with about the same number of fifth through seventh graders.
One of the teachers was named Mrs. Rosa Leftwich, who taught the lower grades. She decided to visit Mamà at our home one day after I slipped away to join my older siblings at school. I was playing nearby as the two women talked, and Mrs. Leftwich began spelling her words to keep me from understanding what she was saying. Mamà gestured frantically with her hands to let the teacher know that was unnecessary. Then, eager to show the teacher what I could do, I burst into the conversation.
“You don’t have to spell around me because I can spell,” I said cheerfully. “Want to hear me read?”
I had just broken one of the cardinal rules of home training: stay out of adult conversations. But I was so proud of my reading abilities and so eager to show off what I knew that I couldn’t help myself. Mamà had taught me to read. My never-ending questions always exhausted her, and to keep my curious mind occupied, she had taught me the alphabet, their sounds, and how the sounds came together to make words. It was like a game to me, and I loved figuring out how to spell everything I saw almost as much as I loved counting. That summer, Mrs. Leftwich started a private kindergarten class in her home with me and a few other children, and I officially started school at four years old. When the Bethune school opened in the fall, I had just turned five and was starting first grade. But it didn’t take long for the teacher to discover that I needed more challenging work, and in the middle of the year, I was skipped to the second grade. That wouldn’t be the last time I skipped a grade. In the beginning of my fifth-grade year, the school was rebuilt, and a third teacher, Miss Lottie Leftwich, was added. To even the class load, the principal, Mr. Charles S. Arter, visited my class one day and asked if anyone in the fifth grade wanted to move to the sixth grade. Mr. Arter was living in our home as a boarder at the time. There were either no or very few hotels or apartments available to young colored teachers, particularly in small communities, so it was common throughout the South for them to stay with other colored families who had an extra room. As usual, I hopped right up. I always wanted to learn more, and I figured moving ahead to the sixth grade would give me that opportunity. My teacher agreed that I could do it, and just like that, I skipped fifth grade and became a sixth grader.
By the time I entered sixth grade, I had skipped a few grades and was much younger than my classmates. I never thought of myself as advanced, no matter how much of a fuss other people made of me at church and in the community. I always wanted my classmates to know what I knew and was eager to share information. I don’t recall ever being scared or intimidated that they were older, and I never doubted that I could keep up. I may have been younger than everybody else, but even then, I knew for sure that I was just as good.
Chapter 2
Education Matters
My parents never wavered on their commitment to education, even when it required great personal sacrifice. They gave up Daddy’s beloved farm in the country and moved to White Sulphur Springs so that my brothers, sister, and I could attend the only grade school in the area for colored children. Then, as we grew older, they faced another education decision and another huge sacrifice. There was no high school for colored children in White Sulphur Springs or even nearby. Most of the students had to end their formal education at Bethune Grade School after seventh grade. But not the Coleman children. Our parents were determined to do all within their power to give us the best possible education. Maybe we could become teachers, they imagined, because that was as high as they could see. The path to that dream was education. Education was their hope.
So in the mid-1920s, my parents knew their prayers had been answered when they heard about a school, the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, that was offering colored children the chance to get a high school education and a college degree. Sister, a star student, was finishing grade school, so Daddy and Mamà arranged to send her more than 122 miles from home
to attend the institute.
Born in the late 1800s, my parents were just a generation removed from slavery, a time when it was illegal for our people to learn how to read, and breaking the rules for a slave could result in a severe beating or even death. Dred Scott wasn’t a name in the history books to them. Their parents were alive when Scott, a Virginia slave, had the courage to challenge the laws of slavery for his freedom in a case that made its way to the US Supreme Court. The devastating 1857 ruling, known as the “Dred Scott decision,” said that people who had been brought to this country from Africa were not considered American citizens and had no rights under the Constitution, whether they were enslaved or free. The decision added further insult, saying the nation’s Founding Fathers believed colored people to be “a subordinate and inferior class of beings” and that white people were “the dominant race.” This view remained prevalent among white southerners long after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery and was often used to justify segregation and the mistreatment of colored people.
Nevertheless, my people hung onto their own self-worth and kept pushing to be educated. As early as 1837, a benevolent white philanthropist established the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheney University) in Cheney, Pennsylvania, the first institution of higher learning for colored students in the country. But most Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were created after the Civil War, by black and white religious organizations and the federal government’s Land-Grant College Acts of 1862 and 1890. Those federal laws are perhaps better known as the Morrill Acts, named in honor of Justin Morrill, the Vermont congressman who authored them. They were designed to help states finance colleges that would offer practical training in needed fields, such as agriculture, mechanical arts (engineering), and military science. At the time, colleges tended to focus more on classical studies. The first legislation, in 1862, granted each state at least ninety thousand acres of government land, which were to be sold to generate money for the colleges. However, the measure excluded the Confederate states, which had seceded when the legislation passed during the Civil War. When the war ended, the first Act was amended to include the states that had made up the Confederacy. A second Morrill Act was approved in 1890 to secure the future of those land-grant schools by providing an annual appropriation and to assure that colored people had equal access to the schools. The law required the land-grant schools to show that race was not among their admissions criteria or to establish separate colleges for colored students. A total of sixty-nine land-grant institutions, including seventeen black colleges, were created from both legislations.
West Virginia Collegiate Institute was one of those schools. It was established in 1891 under the second Morrill Act as the West Virginia Colored Institute and initially offered the area’s colored students a high school education with an emphasis on vocational and teacher training. The location of the school in the community of Institute, just outside Charleston, was heavily influenced by educator Booker T. Washington, who had spent his formative years in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia. Washington, who had been born into slavery in Virginia and moved to West Virginia with his family, was by then the founding president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and one of the most influential Negro leaders at the time. He lectured often on the West Virginia campus and even gave the school’s first commencement address. Washington believed strongly in the mission of vocational education—so much so that his views, urging our people to focus more on the practical skills that would lead to economic independence, rather than rushing integration, put him at odds with Negro intellectuals of the day.
In 1915, the school was renamed the West Virginia Collegiate Institute to reflect its new college degree status. Four years later, a confident young intellectual named John W. Davis was hired to take the school to the next level. Davis had graduated from the prestigious Morehouse College in 1911, studied at the University of Chicago, served on the faculty at Morehouse, and was executive secretary of the Twelfth Street Branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association in the nation’s capital at the time of his appointment. When he arrived at the Institute, less than half of the 24 faculty members had college degrees, and just 9 percent of the 297 students were enrolled in college courses. He immediately began recruiting highly educated professionals and strengthening the curriculum. Among the recruits was Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who had earned a PhD in history from Harvard University in 1912. Dr. Woodson was the second Negro to earn a doctorate from Harvard (after W. E. B. Du Bois, who became a prominent historian and scholar). Dr. Woodson served as academic dean at the institute for two years, from 1920 to 1922, and dedicated the rest of his life to teaching and helping others understand the history of our people. He would go on to establish Negro History Week, which ultimately evolved into the celebration known today as African American History Month. He would return to the college as a speaker during my time there.
It must have been difficult for my parents, providing for Sister so far away, while maintaining our family at home. But somehow they made it work for the next two years. Then Charlie finished grade school, and once again my parents made a life-altering decision for the sake of their children’s education. They agreed to leave behind the comfortable life we’d known in White Sulphur Springs and move our entire family to the town of Institute so that all of their children could attend the school. At about this time, Daddy also sold the farm. For a man whose life and history had been so connected to that land, giving it up must have been a tough decision. But there was something else just as important to him: education. When Daddy was in school, colored children could go only as high as the sixth grade. He wanted to be sure that his children got the education he had been denied. Our family didn’t have a home in Institute, nor did Daddy have a waiting job. But my parents had what mattered most: lots of determination, dreams, and hope. With an education, just maybe their children’s lives wouldn’t have to be limited to cleaning, cooking, and serving the rich white guests at the Greenbrier. Maybe we could have something better. So in September 1928, the six of us piled our belongings into a truck with a driver Daddy had hired for the trip, climbed inside, and waved good-bye to the Big House and our old life.
Once our family arrived in Institute, we stayed for a while with Mamà’s cousin, Nannie, and then rented a house from Nannie’s husband. Mamà enrolled Horace and Charlie with Margaret in high school, and I entered the primary school. Both schools were on the Institute’s campus, across the yard from the buildings where the college students attended classes. A critical part of my parents’ plan did not go as expected, though. No matter how hard Daddy tried, he could not find work. He even met with Dr. Davis and asked if there was available work on campus, but the answer was an unfortunate no. This must have been quite a surprise and disappointment to a man who always had been able to provide for his family by working multiple jobs. But this town on the Kanawha River was not White Sulphur Springs, where Daddy had lots of connections and everyone knew about his multiple talents and stellar reputation. Still, giving up was not an option. Our parents just came up with another plan. Daddy returned to White Sulphur Springs and the Big House alone and began taking on extra work so he could maintain two households.
My parents’ actions in those years spoke to me louder than any words they ever said about how much education mattered to them. They were sacrificing mightily, and that set the expectations high for my siblings and me. How could we do anything but work hard in school when our parents were working so hard to provide us such an opportunity to be educated? My brothers and sister also worked hard outside school by getting odd jobs to help with our tuition and expenses. Horace and Charlie became newspaper and milk delivery boys, and they worked on campus. Sister assisted Mamà, who had begun ironing white people’s clothes in our home, a common way for colored women of that era to earn money. Mamà was such a talented seamstress that she sometimes made us replicas of the dresses she and Sister saw in their pressing piles. At just ten years old, I too
k on more chores around the house to do my part. I had never been separated from Daddy for such long periods of time, and missing him was the most difficult challenge of our new life. I wrote him letters to share the details of our days, and I looked forward to summer and long holidays, when the five of us returned home to White Sulphur Springs to be with him. This would become our routine for the next decade or so, until all four of us children had completed high school and four years of college.
Eventually we all adjusted to our new reality. I loved being on the Institute’s campus, which was like its own community. But to a country girl who had never traveled much farther than White Sulphur Springs, this was a different kind of place. One of the first things I noticed was that every class had a different room and a different teacher. I had never before seen so many educated colored men and women, as well as students pursuing high school diplomas and college degrees, all in one place. There were other students like me, who were carrying the dreams of parents whose own education had been stunted, and there were children of privilege whose parents were middle-class teachers, scholars, and business owners. We were on this journey together. Many of our instructors had studied at colleges in the North, and they even sounded smart with their big words and perfect diction. The men wore suits and ties, and the women wore dresses and heels. They believed we all were part of the “Talented Tenth,” the exceptional, highly educated class of Negro leaders who would lift our race, as described by W. E. B. Du Bois in a much-publicized 1903 essay. This gave our instructors a sense of mission and purpose. They got to know us, but they also challenged us and demanded excellence.
My Remarkable Journey Page 4