Born near Bardstown, Kentucky, Joseph Seamon Cotter had to leave school at age eight to work at a variety of jobs because of family financial exigencies. Cotter had been a precocious child, learning to read at the age of three from a mother who had the gifts, as Cotter wrote later, of “a poet, storyteller, a maker of plays.” When Cotter was twenty-two the prominent Louisville educator William T. Peyton encouraged the promising young man to return to school. After some remediation and two night school sessions, Cotter was able to begin his teaching career. His first Louisville position was at the Western Colored School, where he began in 1889. He went on to a career of more than fifty years as teacher and administrator with the Louisville public schools. In 1891 Cotter married his fellow educator Maria F. Cox with whom he had three children including the ...
Article
Cotter, Joseph Seamon, Sr.
James Robert Payne
Article
Cotter, Joseph Seamon, Sr.
W. Farrell O'Gorman
author, teacher, and civic leader, was born in Bardstown, Kentucky, the son of Michael (also spelled Micheil) Cotter, a boardinghouse owner who was known as an avid reader, and Martha Vaughn. Cotter was raised largely by his mother, a freeborn woman of mixed English, Cherokee, and African heritage. It was from her naturally dramatic manner—she orally composed poems and plays as she worked at chores—that he acquired his love of language and stories. Having taught herself, she also taught her son to read and enrolled him in school. When he was eight, however, economic necessity forced him to drop out of school to begin work at various jobs, first in a brickyard, then in a distillery, and finally as a ragpicker and a teamster. Until age twenty-two, manual labor consumed much of Cotter's life.
The friendship of the prominent black Louisville educator William T. Peyton who sensed Cotter ...
Article
Cotter, Joseph Seamon, Sr.
W. Farrell O'Gorman
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr., was born in Bardstown, Kentucky, the son of Michael (also spelled Micheil) Cotter, a boarding house owner, and Martha Vaughn. Although his father was known as an avid reader, Cotter was raised largely by his mother, a freeborn woman of mixed English, Cherokee, and African blood. It was from her naturally dramatic manner—she orally composed poems and plays as she worked at chores—that he acquired his love of language and stories. Having taught herself, she also taught Cotter to read and enrolled him in school, but at age eight economic necessity forced him to drop out and begin working at various jobs: in a brickyard, then a distillery, and finally as a ragpicker and a teamster. Until age twenty-two, manual labor consumed much of Cotter's life.
The friendship of prominent black Louisville educator Dr. William T. Peyton who sensed Cotter s natural intelligence ...
Article
Cuthbert, Marion Vera
Marilyn Demarest Button
educator, administrator, writer, and activist, was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the daughter of Thomas Cornelius Cuthbert and Victoria Means. She attended grammar and secondary school in her hometown and studied at the University of Minnesota before transferring to Boston University, where she completed her BA in 1920.
Following her graduation, Cuthbert moved to Florence, Alabama, and became an English teacher and assistant principal at Burrell Normal School. Promoted to principal in 1925, she began to lead students and faculty in bold new perspectives on gender equality and interracial harmony.
In 1927 Cuthbert left Burrell to become one of the first deans of Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama. In her essay, “The Dean of Women at Work,” published in the Journal of the National Association of College Women (Apr. 1928 she articulated her belief that covert sexism at the administrative level of black colleges limited their ...
Article
Davis, Edward Porter
Michele Valerie Ronnick
classical and modern philologist and university administrator, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Mary Ann Fennick Davis (1853–1892) and Prince Nelson Davis (1838–1910). After early training at the Avery Normal Institute in his hometown, Davis matriculated at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Upon graduation he taught Greek and Latin at the Howard Academy from 1907 to 1911. In June 1911 he earned his M.A. from the department of Latin at the University of Chicago, with a forty-nine-page thesis titled “The Conditional Sentence in Terence” (1911) on the use of the conditional clause in the work of the African-born playwright Terence (fl. 170 bce). After returning to Howard, Davis served as associate professor of Greek and German from 1913 to 1919 and professor from 1919 on. By 1920 he was teaching courses on Demosthenes and Euripides as well as Goethe Lessing ...
Article
Payne, Daniel A.
Zachery R. Williams
Daniel Alexander Payne was born to free black parents in Charleston, South Carolina. A prominent minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Payne was influential in standardizing worship services and improving the quality of religious education. He also wrote a comprehensive history of the AME Church. Payne was elected bishop at the church's general conference in 1852, an event that the author and social critic Benjamin Brawley declared was as significant as the 1816 election of the church's first bishop, Richard Allen. Payne expanded the church's missionary programs, revamped its publications, and spearheaded the establishment of numerous congregations. On 10 March 1863 Payne persuaded the AME Church to purchase Wilberforce University, in Wilberforce, Ohio, for ten thousand dollars. The institution had been founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856 as a school for young African American men and women Shortly after the purchase Payne was ...
Article
Payne, Daniel A.
Sharon Carson
Long recognized as a leading nineteenth-century Christian activist and theologian, Daniel Payne's literary achievements are varied and equally important. From his childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was born to free and deeply religious parents, through his long ministry with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and eventual presidency of Wilberforce University, Payne pursued a rigorous program of self-directed study. He began to write and teach at an early age, starting his first school in Charleston in 1829 when he was only nineteen years old, and teaching there until 1835, when the South Carolina legislature made it illegal to teach slaves to read or write. Forced to close his school, Payne moved to the North, where he published a collection of poetry in 1850. In The Pleasures and Other Miscellaneous Poems, Payne included a poem heralding the emancipation of the West Indies in 1838 ...
Article
Scott, Emmett J.
Maceo Crenshaw Dailey
private secretary and influential assistant to Booker T. Washington, advocate of racial uplift who displayed a lifelong commitment to the goals of the Tuskegee Institute–based educational and political machine and was a prominent black representative in Republican politics. Born in Houston, Texas, in 1873 to Horace and Emma Kyle Scott, Emmett Scott was surrounded with parents, relatives, and later friends who knew the horrors of enslavement either through experience, folklore, or history and were determined to rise in the American order. Scott was thus reared in a community that focused on establishing uplift institutions and organizations to enable them to realize and enjoy first-class American citizenship and life. After attending Houston's Gregory Institute, Emmett enrolled at Wiley College from 1887 to 1889 The economic circumstances of his family he was one of eight siblings did not afford Scott the opportunity to complete his college education Upon his ...
Article
Scott, Emmett Jay
Edgar Allan Toppin
educator and publicist, was born in Houston, Texas, the son of Horace Lacy Scott, a civil servant, and Emma Kyle. Scott attended Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, for three years but left college in 1890 for a career in journalism. Starting as a janitor and messenger for a white daily newspaper, the Houston Post, he worked his way up to reporter. In 1894 he became associate editor of a new black newspaper in Houston, the Texas Freeman. Soon he was named editor and built this newspaper into a leading voice in black journalism in its region. Initially, he tied his fortune to the state's preeminent black politician, Norris Cuney, and was his secretary for a while.
When Cuney retired, Scott turned to Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Scott greatly admired Washington, praising his 1895 Atlanta Compromise ...
Article
Thompson, Charles Henry
Stephen Truhon
educator and psychologist, was born in Jackson, Mississippi. Both of his parents (Reverend Patrick Henry Thompson and Mrs. Sara Estelle [Byers] Thompson) taught at Jackson College. After completing his high school education at Wayland Academy in Virginia, he enrolled at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, in 1914 and earned his bachelor's degree in 1917. He received a second bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1918. He was drafted into the army and was stationed at first at Camp Grant in Illinois. He later served in France, rising to the rank of infantry personnel regimental sergeant major.
After his discharge he returned to the University of Chicago, where he earned his master's degree in 1920. From 1920 to 1921 he served as psychology instructor at Virginia Union University. He was director of instruction at the Alabama State Normal School from 1921 ...
Article
Vashon, George B.
Joan R. Sherman
George Boyer Vashon was the first African American to graduate from Oberlin College and the first to become a lawyer in New York State. Born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Vashon attended school in Pittsburgh and served there as secretary of the first Juvenile Anti-Slavery Society in the nation (1838). He earned a BA from Oberlin (1844) and studied law in Pittsburgh but was denied admittance to the bar because of his race. Embarking on a thirty-month exile in Haiti, Vashon stopped in New York, where he was admitted to the bar in 1848. He taught at College Faustin in Port-au-Prince; then from 1850 to 1854 he practiced law in Syracuse, New York, and for the next three years was professor of belles lettres and mathematics at New York Central College in McGrawville. Returning to Pittsburgh, Vashon married Susan Paul Smith (1857 with whom he ...
Article
Vashon, George Boyer
Diane L. Barnes
George Boyer Vashon was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to the abolitionist and black rights activist John Bethune Vashon and Anne Smith. In 1829 the family relocated to Pittsburgh, where John Vashon operated first a barbershop and then a prosperous bathhouse. His business success gave him status as a leader in Pittsburgh's black community and allowed him to contribute financially to local antislavery activities. He was involved in the Negro convention movement of the 1830s and was well known to prominent abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Born into this activist household, George Vashon seemed destined to follow in his father's footsteps. In his youth, Vashon attended a private school for African American children that his father helped to organize, and in 1838 he became secretary of the first youth-oriented abolition organization west of the Alleghenies, the Juvenile Anti-Slavery Society.
Vashon continued his education in Pittsburgh public ...
Article
Wesley, Charles Harris
Robert L. Harris
historian, educator, minister, and administrator, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the only child of Matilda Harris and Charles Snowden Wesley. His father, who had attended Atlanta University and worked as a clerk in a funeral home, died when Charles Wesley was nine years old. Wesley grew up in his maternal grandparents' comfortable home, completed Louisville Central High School in two years, and entered the preparatory division of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of fourteen. He later enrolled in Fisk's collegiate division, where he developed a strong interest in music. He joined the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, which had been organized in 1867 to raise much-needed funds for the fledgling school, founded two years earlier by the American Missionary Association. The Jubilee Singers secured funds from national and international tours to construct the university's first permanent building, Jubilee Hall, in 1875 Wesley ...
