One of those teachers was Mrs. Rose Evans, who was hired to teach my eighth-grade class when the regular teacher became ill at the beginning of the school year. Mrs. Evans was married to Professor James C. Evans, head of the college’s Mathematics Department. Professor Evans was a superintelligent man who was born in Tennessee and graduated from Roger Williams University there. He also received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mrs. Evans was just as smart and had a teaching degree, but in those days, married women were expected to be homemakers and to focus on their families. Many schools, including the Institute, even had a clause in their teaching contracts that allowed a female teacher to be fired if she got married. Perhaps out of necessity, the Institute had relaxed the rule that year, enabling Mrs. Evans to teach my eighth-grade class. My good friend and classmate Constance Davis, nicknamed Dit, and I were both excellent students, and we were always eager to help our teacher with after-school chores. That must have caught Mrs. Evans’s eye, and she began inviting the two of us to her home for tea, homemade cookies, or cakes. The couple lived a short walk from campus, and Dit and I visited often. Mr. and Mrs. Evans were both great motivators, and they made us feel special. They talked to us about the importance of doing well in school. As colored students, we represented more than ourselves, they said. They reminded us that we carried on our shoulders the hopes of our entire race. Our successes would help to dispel the lies of whites that our people were inferior. When we rose, so did our people.
“You have to be better today than you were yesterday,” Mrs. Evans often said. Then she challenged us: “What do you know today that you didn’t know yesterday?” To two curious girls, who loved a good challenge, Mrs. Evans’s words became like a game, and we hungrily sought new information and current events so we were ready to respond when she popped the question.
It wasn’t difficult to learn something new on the campus of the Institute, which was full of interesting history, including the story of how the state acquired the land to build the school in the first place. It dates back to a rich, white slaveowner and the enslaved woman with whom he shared his life, riches, and many children. The slaveowner was Samuel I. Cabell, who was connected to the powerful Cabell family that in Virginia includes military generals, politicians, judges, and even a former governor. But Sam Cabell left a different legacy. He fathered at least thirteen children—some accounts say the number is fifteen—with one of his slaves, Mary Barnes. Though Sam owned his woman and children all of his life, he is said to have devoted his life to them. He lived with them and other slaves on a plantation he developed along the Kanawha River, just outside Charleston. Between 1851 and 1863, he went to great lengths to protect Mary and the children legally, writing several different wills that granted them freedom upon his death and bequeathed to them all of his riches. But the same slaveowner penned an angry diatribe in his final will in 1863 against the slaves who had fled his plantation or were taken away by federal troops. He rescinded an earlier will that had laid out plans for the freedom of his nonfamilial slaves, and he declared that the runaways should remain slaves for the rest of their lives. Sam was murdered on July 18, 1865, about two months after the Civil War. Though there was much speculation that he was killed by white townspeople who disapproved of his affection for his interracial family, the reason for his murder was never determined. Several men, who were known to be Union sympathizers, were arrested in the killing, but they claimed self-defense and were acquitted.
Sam’s wills were later determined to be valid, and Mary was successful in her petition to the court to have her last name changed to Cabell. The Kanawha property was divided among Mary and the couple’s children. In 1891, when the state created the West Virginia Colored Institute under the Morrill Act, officials initially had trouble finding a location for the school because white landowners wanted no part of it. But when one of Sam’s daughters, Marina, heard about plans for the school, she ultimately sold the state the first thirty acres for the project, and the state gradually acquired another fifty acres to build an eighty-acre campus. The Cabell descendants recognized the value of the West Virginia Colored Institute because there was no other school in the entire state or nearby fulfilling such a mission. Sam and Mary had been forced to send their own children as far away as Ohio to be educated. Some of them ultimately returned to their Kanawha River community as doctors, teachers, and other professionals, and their descendants built one of the largest communities of colored people in West Virginia. Sam and Mary Cabell, as well as some of their children, are buried in a family cemetery on the grounds of the Institute.
I loved exploring that campus with my best friend, Dit, who was smart, funny, and down-to-earth despite her upbringing in a well-educated, well-to-do family. In some ways the two of us were from different worlds. She was the daughter of our highly regarded college president, Dr. Davis. He and his wife, Bessie, had two daughters—Constance and Dorothy—nicknamed Dit and Dot, a playful reference to the military’s secret telecommunications system (Morse code) and the hard work it took to keep up with two fast-moving girls. The family lived on campus in the president’s residence, called East Hall, which had been built in 1893. It was a two-story, white frame, antebellum-style house, and though it was much more elegant, it reminded me a bit of the Big House in White Sulphur Springs.
Under Dr. Davis’s leadership, the Institute continued to grow and attain greater status. In 1927, the year after my family arrived, the school became the first of the seventeen original black land-grant schools to be certified by a regional education association, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Dr. Davis and his staff also were very proud that this certification made the Institute the first public college in West Virginia, black or white, to be accredited by the organization.
My first year at West Virginia Collegiate Institute passed quickly, and before I knew it, I finished eighth grade at just ten years old. I was so excited about attending high school, partly because I adored a certain math teacher, Angie Turner. Miss Turner had taught my siblings both algebra and geometry, and those subjects fascinated me. I often sat next to Sister at the kitchen table and watched eagerly each night as she pored over her homework, figuring out equations and calculating angles. Of course, I asked question after question, and she patiently answered each one. Sister was just as smart as everyone said I was, but she was very shy and quiet. She had a condition we called “lazy eye” because one of her eyes did not move properly, which may have taken away some of her confidence. Sister talked to me endlessly about Miss Turner, and because Sister loved her as a teacher, I knew I would, too. But to my great disappointment, Miss Turner left the Institute to pursue an advanced degree just as I was entering high school. Many of the Institute’s teachers, from the primary school instructors to the college professors, had their master’s or doctorate degrees. So as bad as I felt that I didn’t get to have Miss Turner as a teacher for algebra and geometry, I understood our teachers’ desire to improve themselves continually. They had been taught—and they taught us—that to have a chance in this world, we as colored people had to be twice as good as our white counterparts. Miss Turner earned her master’s degree in chemistry from Cornell University in 1931. By my senior year in high school, she had returned to the Institute, and I had the pleasure of being a student in her chemistry class. When we went off to college, Miss Turner, just thirteen years older than I, allowed her former students to call her Angie. That made me feel like a grown-up.
Angie Turner is a perfect example of the caliber of teachers I was so fortunate to encounter on my journey. She eventually was offered a teaching position on the college side of the Institute, where she continued mentoring students. In 1946, she got married, becoming Angie Turner King. She later earned a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh and would spend her entire career at the Institute and the rest of her life in that town.
I continued to excel throughout high school
, including in my nonacademic courses, such as home economics, which taught girls how to cook, sew, and manage a household. Sister and I had learned most of those things already at home in the kitchen with Mamà, who sewed most of our clothes and baked delicious cobblers and cakes. The prospect of learning something new always excited me. I learned how to read music and play the piano during music classes at school. I learned how to play tennis by tagging along with my brothers and bombarding them with questions. They also taught me how to ride a motorcycle and drive a car later in life, at a time when most women still did not do such things. I suspect that too often the fear of failure keeps people from trying to learn new things, and they miss out on wonderful experiences.
High school was full of excitement for me, but there was sadness, too. On February 24, 1931, Dit lost her mother to liver cancer, and our campus lost our First Lady. It was such a sad time. Mrs. Bessie Davis was an intelligent, dignified woman who had been born into a wealthy Negro family in Atlanta. I would learn later that her father, Henry A. Rucker, had been born into slavery in Washington, Georgia, but moved to Atlanta with his parents and siblings after the Civil War. He became educated and opened some businesses, including a barbershop that was frequented by white politicians. In 1897 he was named the head of revenue collection in Georgia, a powerful position for a Negro during the Reconstruction era. Mr. Rucker held that position until 1911, becoming one of the most powerful Negro Republicans in Atlanta. At the time of his death in 1924, he was widely considered one of the wealthiest Negroes in the country. When the daughter of this powerful politician died seven years later, at just forty years old, the Rucker family held the funeral in the family home in Atlanta. Many of the faculty and staff from the Institute traveled there to support Dr. Davis and his family. I wasn’t totally aware of Mrs. Davis’s prominence at the time, though. To me, she was simply my best friend’s mom, and at just twelve years old, I hardly knew what to do or say to help Dit cope with such a huge loss. But happier times did come when Dr. Davis remarried in September 1932. His new wife, Ethel McGhee, was an accomplished woman who had been Dean of Women at Spelman College, the sister school to Morehouse in Atlanta. The students loved her as well, and when the couple later had another daughter, named Caroline, the students nicknamed her “Dash.” So that’s how the Davis girls became Dit, Dot, and Dash.
Through it all, I never lost sight of my parents’ determination to keep my siblings and me at the Institute, especially during the Great Depression. When the stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, the nation’s economy spiraled, causing banks to fail, businesses to close, farms to foreclose, and millions of people to lose their jobs. Thousands of families across the nation relied on soup kitchens and the generosity of strangers for food to survive. The suffering was even more acute in West Virginia with the collapse of its coal mines, the state’s main industry. In some parts of the state, the unemployment rate was as high as 80 percent, and people were struggling mightily. Like everyone else, my family had to cut back on the food items we usually bought at the store and stretch our meals as much as possible, but Daddy still managed to keep us all fed and clothed. I don’t think I realized then just how fortunate we were, even in those meager times. Fortunately for Daddy and the other servants at the Greenbrier, the resort still bustled with rich guests entertaining (or perhaps consoling) themselves on the golf courses and in the fine restaurants, pools, and spas. They still wanted their bags carried and unpacked, their children watched, and their carriage waiting, so there was work. During the summers, Horace and Charlie joined Daddy at the Greenbrier as bellboys, and Sister worked in the valet shop, taking care of the guests’ personal services, including ironing their clothes. When I grew older, I joined her there. In the meantime, I helped out by getting a job on campus in President Davis’s office during the school year.
I graduated from high school in the spring of 1933 and started college the following fall at just fifteen years old. By then, the school’s name had been changed again, to West Virginia State College, and its enrollment had grown to about a thousand students. My family lived in a house just across the street from campus, and it was ideal for me. I loved being around smart people. Of all the Coleman kids, I was the busybody. I got to know practically every student at the university by name, in part because I met people along the way as I roller-skated from one end of the campus to the next. When one of the first highways was being built through Institute, we students skated right on top of it. On Saturdays, small groups of us enjoyed hiking through the mountains. We just made our own paths through those woods. In 1934, I would even follow Dit into the sisterhood of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. My sister and brothers had no interest in joining a sorority or fraternity. But I loved being part of such an esteemed group. The AKAs, as we were called, were popular on campus, but beyond that, I found a lifelong tribe of like-minded ladies who are committed to promoting education and serving our community.
Meanwhile, West Virginia State was making a name for itself and becoming a focal point of intellectual and cultural activity for Negroes in the area. All college students were required to attend “Sunday Night Chapel,” and it seemed all of the famous Negro scholars, activists, and entertainers made their way there to visit at one time or another. Negro colleges and universities were the high-end, academic equivalent of the “Chitlin Circuit,” presenting our community’s best and brightest to malleable minds. I recall such bright lights as Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Many of them stayed at the Davis home, and because I was in and out of there all of the time with Dit, I got to meet them personally. At the president’s house they were just like everybody else, and I must admit that I was too naive even to be starstruck. Some of the speakers were lesser known, but they were passionate in their crusade against one of the biggest issues of our time: lynching. It was shocking to hear that our people were being shot, hanged, and tortured in public venues all over this country, particularly in the South, for minor infractions or none at all, as entertainment for the participating white mobs.
One of the most disturbing cases occurred in late December 1933, when seventeen-year-old Cordie Cheek was lynched in Maury County, Tennessee. The teenager had been falsely accused a month earlier of raping a white girl in Maury County, but a grand jury refused to indict him for lack of evidence. After being released from a Nashville jail, he went to stay with an aunt and uncle in Nashville, on the edge of the Fisk University campus. Three white men, including the county magistrate, showed up there, took him from the home, and transported him back to Maury County, where an excited white mob was waiting. The boy was blindfolded, castrated, and hanged from a cedar tree. The crowd then passed around their pistols and celebrated. Historian John Hope Franklin, who was a student at Fisk at the time, recalled those horrible days decades later in his 2005 autobiography: “Those of us who had remained in Nashville over the Christmas holidays were obsessed with discussing the Cordie Cheek lynching. Indeed, the entire remainder of our junior year was shadowed by this tragic event. There were investigations, interviews, and other actions. The conclusion that many of us reached was that if it could happen to Cordie Cheek, who had been seized within three blocks of the Fisk Chapel, it could happen to any of us.”
Word about such incidents traveled quickly among colored college students on campuses across the country and prompted many of them to get involved with the campaign of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to end racial violence against our people. These were weighty issues that reminded us of our dangerous times. Yet we were still young, idealistic, and hopeful for our futures. Heavy on my mind was choosing a major. As a college freshman, I wasn’t required to declare a major right away, and I was unsure which one I would choose, so I didn’t enroll in math. My grades were proof that I was just as good in all of my subjects as I was in math, but I had fallen in love with English and French, especially French. I loved the
exotic way the language sounded. Soon I would love it even more.
After my freshman year in college, my family returned home to White Sulphur Springs for the summer, as usual, and I joined Sister, working in valet services at the Greenbrier. I was unpacking and ironing a guest’s clothes one day when a woman, who had identified herself as Countess Sala, began talking on the phone to her husband in French. My ears perked up. At one point I must have looked up at her in a knowing way. Our eyes met, and I quickly looked down. I hadn’t meant to stare. Her conversation stopped. She asked if I understood what she was saying.
“Yes, ma’am,” I responded, unsure what would happen next.
She didn’t seem upset and began asking me lots of questions—my name, age, where I’d learned to speak French, and more. I felt relieved that she wasn’t angry. I answered her questions and told her I was a student at West Virginia State College. She seemed impressed and arranged for me to practice speaking French with a Parisian chef in a restaurant at the resort. It was an amazing opportunity. The chef and I agreed to meet once a week, and I could hardly wait for each session. He corrected my diction, taught me new words and phrases, and most of all, helped me become conversational in French. That summer I added a French accent to Mamà, and that became my name for my mother. The rest of the family picked up on it, too, and it lasted for the rest of her life. By the time I returned to West Virginia State, my French had improved dramatically, and I was certain that French would be my choice for a major. But then the math professors had their say.
My Remarkable Journey Page 5