Reaching for the Moon: Chapter 2

Determined that all their children would receive the education they deserved, Daddy and Mama decided to leave the love and support of their family and community in White Sulphur and uproot us to Institute, West Virginia, home of the West Virginia Colored Institute.

In 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in the states that had rebelled.

White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan had a history of publicly hanging, or lynching, Colored teachers and burning down schools, homes, and churches.

He found himself in a grandiose lobby with white marble floors, ceilings almost two stories high, and pendant lights hanging from the ceiling.

Daddy would have stood for a moment, taking in all the details and admiring the bookish young men and women scurrying past on their way to class.

“Good morning, Mr. Coleman,” President Davis said, reaching out his hand. “Good day, President Davis,” Daddy said, gripping the president’s hand and giving it a vigorous shake.

“Your vision for your family is commendable,” President Davis said.

I was extremely curious, just a busybody.

Little did I know that moment would prove pivotal in my professional career.

Not only would the porters regale them with tales of their travels and the lives of the super wealthy, but the porters often brought delicacies—unfamiliar foods, mixed nuts, and cakes from the train or beyond— which they would exchange for a discount on their room or the meals that the family prepared for them.

This was the Roaring Twenties, a time of great affluence and extravagance among wealthy Whites.

Its eight columns stretching three stories high made the building look like a cross between the White House and a Southern plantation home.

They would go on to become the president and attorney general of the United States, respectively.

Coal mining companies failed, and thousands of miners found themselves out of work and their families destitute.

Among Colored people there developed an adage: “You have to be twice as good in order to be thought of as half as good” as your White counterparts.

To help pay for my schooling, I began to work in President Davis’s office, my willingness to learn typing over the previous summer paying off with a coveted office job.

By then I was well known for being precocious—what today we might term “gifted.”

The learning environment was very fertile.

Unlike other positions afforded to Colored people, where the pay was low and the work was demeaning, teachers were well respected by the community.

By then I’d really grown to love math—its simplicity, its elegance, how in a world rife with the dangers of racism and economic uncertainty, it provided clear-cut answers: Either you were right or you were wrong.

Du Bois believed that one in every ten Colored men ought to become leaders, so they needed the same classical education that White men received.

During 1934, I was invited to join Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated (AKA).

We celebrated when the famous track athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany, delivering a sharp rebuke to Adolf Hitler’s Nazism and belief in the White supremacy of a subset of Germans called Aryans.

Students rolled up their sleeves and got involved in the campaign to end racial violence against Colored people, including lynchings.

In 1937, at age eighteen, I graduated from West Virginia State summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French.