Every day this month, the Center for Black Educator Development, in partnership with Education Post and Philly’s 7th Ward, will highlight a Black Educator Hall of Famer.
But, don’t forget, e’ry month is Black History Month and February is just the Blackest. All year are ongoing opportunities to learn and teach and the colossal impact Black educators have had on society.
Today, our featured Black educator is Johnnetta Betsch Cole.
Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole was born in Jacksonville Florida on October 19, 1936. She is the daughter of entrepreneurs and great granddaughter of Jacksonville’s first black millionaire, Abraham Lewis Lincoln. Growing up, Dr. Cole was exposed to African art at home. The depiction of African life and the African-American experience inspired her to think about the meaning of art and its way of expressing life and experience. This curiosity guided her career.
She enrolled at Fisk University at the age of 15. She transferred to Oberlin College and received her bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1957. She earned her masters from Northwestern University in 1959 and she received her doctoral degree from the same university in 1967. Initially, Dr. Cole considered a career medicine. That is until she attended her first anthropology class at Oberlin. For her, that anthropology class changed her life by giving her a different way of viewing the human experience. Dr. Cole looks at anthropology as if it is a pair of glasses “through which you see the human condition”.
Dr. Cole began her teaching career at Washington State University, where she was the founder of the first Black studies programs in the entire United States. She served as its first director. Dr. Cole would also teach at the University of Massachusetts to Amhurst and Hunter College in New York City.
Dr. Cole’s research is an anthropologist was multifaceted and interdisciplinary. She utilized history, politics, sociology, and culture to examine the way intersectional, identities impacted, or impact the life experience of people, specifically Black people or people of African descent. Her anthropological inquiries of span, a wide range of topics, including examining the impact of colonialism and globalism on indigenous communities and exploring the cultural significance of art and symbolism in African and African-American context.
In 1987, Dr. Cole became president of Spelman College. She was the first African-American woman to serve in the role of president, where she did from 1987 to 1997. She would also serve president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. Dr. Cole also served as the director of the Smithsonian national Museum of African art from 2009 to 2017. She is the author of numerous works, including All American Women: Lines that Divide, Ties that Bind, Dream the Boldest Dreams: and Other Lessons of Life, and Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African-American Communities.
Dr. Cole’s life’s work is an example of the use of scholarship to empower people to see themselves differently than they are portrayed as well as empowering students to challenge convention and go deeper in their explorations of how we define our own humanity. Dr. Cole’s commitment to justice, civil rights, and Black people serves as an inspiration to all educators who dedicate themselves to black students.
Johnnetta Betsch Cole; a member of the Black Educator Hall of Fame.
For more information on Johnnetta Betsch Cole, visit the following site.
