February 13th is Clara Belle Williams Day
A friend texted me a picture one evening saying that I favored the woman so much she thought it was me. I didn’t agree. Less than 15 minutes later, a whole ‘nother friend texted me a picture saying that I resembled the woman in that picture. This time, though, I agreed.
I read the caption in the photo of Clara Belle Drisdale Williams and was hella intrigued and impressed, so I did some research to see what else I could find out. But I really couldn’t find much more than what’s on that meme. So I started digging into the history of where she’s from and the time periods she made her moves, starting with her birthplace: LaGrange, Texas, a small town in Fayette County. She was born in 1885, only 20 years after slavery was outlawed. Her parents were sharecroppers, and she was too for a while, as were many black folk in the South after slavery ended.
African Americans with more skills and education in Fayette County, Texas “enjoyed a brief period of political power.” They teamed up with German and Czech immigrants, who were also oppressed, and started voting for each other and actually winning political positions. Then, “in the 1890s, a white backlash stripped African Americans of many political and social gains.” [Those quotes are from the University of Texas.]
That brief period of political power was during what’s called the Reconstruction Era. Reconstruction is just what it sounds like: The country was tryna put itself back together after the Civil War. The Confederacy rejoined the United States, and the government gave black folk the right to vote, run for office, become judges, police chiefs, etc. Racist white folks shut that down real quick though, through the kkk especially.
I don’t know when, but Clara got the hell out of Fayette County and moved to Prairie View, Texas. When she was 23, she graduated valedictorian from Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College with a teaching certificate. After graduating, she got what sounded like a good job as the head of the sewing department at the college.
At some point, she moved to El Paso, Texas. And, in 1917, she married a pharmacist named Jasper Williams. She was 32 and he was 38. He owned a drug store that they ran it together. In 1918, they had their first son. They had the second one the following year. And the last son came along in 1923.
In 1924, the family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico where they homesteaded 640 acres of land. The Homestead Act gave away free land. All you had to do was live on it and develop it for at least 5 years or purchase it within 6 months of claiming it. I don’t know which option they chose, but 640 acres is A LOT of land.
Lemme back up and give you a little history of the new place they called home. In 1896, a Morehouse educated black man named Francis Boyer, along with two of his students, walked from Pelham, Georgia to New Mexico. The kkk had been harassing Francis, so his father, who’d been to New Mexico while serving in the Mexican-American war, advised Francis to move out West. So he did.
In 1903, he got some land and established Blackdom. Just like it sounds, it was meant to be a self-sustaining black kingdom. They farmed the land; installed a water system; built homes, a church, and a school; then started advertising for black folk to move there. They even put an ad in the Chicago Defender. About 300 black people ended up moving there.
It was obviously successful, because the kkk paid a 12-year-old boy to burn his house down. Then, around 1920, a drought ran ’em out of town. So Blackdom’s residents scattered to different cities across New Mexico to cities like Las Cruces, where Clara Belle and her family moved to in 1924.
The year after they got there, New Mexico gave local governments the option to segregate schools. Schools in Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas had been been segregated, but it was new to New Mexico. I’m assuming too many black folk were moving into the state, and white folk weren’t feeling it. Clara taught at Lincoln High School, which black folk scrambled to open in a baptist church after segregation was legalized.
In 1928, she decided to go back to school and enrolled at New Mexico State University. Not many women were going to college then, let alone black women. And a 43-year-old black woman? A 43-year-old married black woman whose youngest child was only 5? That was unheard of, and it says a lot about her determination. It also says a lot about her husband, because many black women were divorcing their men during this time for getting in the way of their dreams (e.g. Zora Neale Hurston and Ida B. Wells).
New Mexico State University is where racist professors wouldn’t let her in class and made her stand in the hallway to take notes. And it took her 9 years to do it, but, in 1937, at the age of 51, she became the first black graduate of New Mexico State University. After graduating, she taught at the segregated Booker T. Washington in Las Cruces for 27 years.
In 1961, New Mexico State University named a street after her. Two years later, according to her obituary in the Chicago Tribune, “she invested her life savings in a 22-room medical center on East Marquette Road, to which her three sons…brought their respective specialties of obstetrics and gynecology, surgery and internal medicine.” Her husband passed away in 1946, so she really didn’t have a reason to stay in New Mexico. She moved to Chicago and worked in her sons’ medical office as the receptionist.
In 1976, at 91 years old, she retired. In 1977, the National Education Association named her to its teaching hall of fame. In 1980, New Mexico State University awarded her an honorary doctorate (and an apology for how she had been treated). In 1994, she joined the ancestors, but the earthly blessings kept on. In 2005, New Mexico State celebrated its first Clara Belle Williams Day on February 13th, named the building the English department is in after her, and started a scholarship in her name/memory.
She was 108 when she passed away. Came into this world 1885 and left in 1994, she saw a lot! And made a helluva lotta moves and history! I’m forever inspired and so honored to favor her.