DR. JOHNNETTA COLE

HUMANITIES MEDAL AWARDEE “STILL HAS WORK TO DO”

BY DR. CRYSTAL A de GREGORY

Ask almost any graduate of historically Black colleges and universities, and they’ll likely know her name. At 86, Johnnetta Betsch Cole is unquestionably among the most beloved figures, not just in HBCU culture but in Black America and beyond.

And for good reasons too. The resume of the anthropologist, educator, museum director, and two-time HBCU college president reads like a veritable “who’s who” and “what’s hot” for well over the last half-century. This March, United States President Joe Biden awarded Cole the 2021 National Humanities Medal in a ceremony that the COVID-19 pandemic had long delayed.

First awarded in 1997, the annual award succeeded the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities, established in 1988.

Today, the award is bestowed on no more than twelve persons annually, recognizing “individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities and broadened our citizens’ engagement with history, literature, languages, philosophy, and other humanities,” according to The White House.

As America’s “Sister President,” Cole was hailed “for being a celebrated leader of sanctuaries of higher learning and culture. A scholar, anthropologist, and academic pace-setter, Johnnetta Betsch Cole’s pioneering work about the ongoing contributions of

Afro-Latin, Caribbean, and African communities have advanced American understanding of Black culture and the necessity and power of racial inclusion in our Nation,” her White House Citation declared.

Born October 19, 1936, her extraordinary life began in Jacksonville, Florida; Cole’s connections to HBCUs are lifelong. Cole’s great-grandfather of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, founder of the AfroAmerican Life Insurance Company and Florida’s first African American millionaire, formerly served as a board member at the local Edward Waters College, now University. And her mother worked there as an English professor and registrar.

Naturally, her mother, who was in many ways a tour de force of Black art and culture for their family, was among Cole’s earliest educational influences. Joining her was another powerful Black woman teacher, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder and president of nearby Daytona Beach’s now-BethuneCookman University, and whose social and political leadership included the founding and presidency of the nowNational Council of Negro Women, Inc., of which Cole was most recently seventh national president and chair.

Cole would find inspiration next at Fisk University, where she enrolled early at 15. There, she was mentored by poet and novelist Arna Bontemps, who was the University’s librarian.

More than a handful of years ago, Cole told me that she would’ve finished at Fisk had it not been for the unexpected death of her father following her exchange stint-turned-academic career at Oberlin College, for which she graduated along with the future Dr. Niara Sudarkasa, who later became the first woman to serve as president of Lincoln University of Pennsylvania in 1986.

The following year, Cole became the first Black woman to serve as president of Atlanta’s Spelman College, one of only two surviving Black women's colleges in the nation, where she secured one of the largest financial gifts in HBCU history for several decades to come.

She later assumed the role of Presidential Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Women’s Studies, and African American Studies at Emory

University before becoming president of Greensboro’s Bennett College, the second women’s HBCU, in 2002.

In 2009, she became director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

“To bring the experience of art into one’s life,” she said of her museum headship, “is to become entangled in, maybe to fall in love with, human creativity.”

Referring to March as “Herstory Month,” Cole, in a flared black suit declared, “We as Black women, as Francis Beal said many years ago, we carry a ‘double jeopardy,’ victimized by our race, victimized by our gender…we have never ceased to be in this struggle. And I think when Ella Baker used these words, of course she thought about all her people, but I believe she had a particular thought about Black women, when she said, ‘we, who believe in freedom, cannot rest,’ until it comes.”

“Johnnetta… takes the study of Black history and culture to new heights. She has strengthened American education, advanced American scholarship, and enriched the lives of students of all ages and the future of our nation,” said President Biden.

“[W]e’ve still got a lot of work to do,” Cole remarked of social activism. “Retirement is not in my vocabulary.”

Crystal A. deGregory, Ph.D. is a graduate of Fisk, Tennessee State and Vanderbilt universities. She currently serves as a research fellow at Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Historic Preservation and is the founder of two digital storytelling projects HBCUstory as well as Dorian and Beyond, the story of Hurricane Dorian in The Bahamas.