Cole, Johnnetta

née Betsch

(born Oct. 19, 1936, Jacksonville, Fla., U.S.) anthropologist and educator who was the first African-American woman president of Spelman College.

Among Cole's early influences in education were her mother, who taught college English, pioneering educator Mary MacLeod Bethune, and writer Arna Bontemps, who was the school librarian at Fisk University when Cole matriculated at age 15. She left Fisk to study sociology at Oberlin College (B.A., 1957) and anthropology at Northwestern University (M.A., 1959; Ph.D., 1967).

After teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (1964) and directing the black studies program at Washington State University at Pullman (1969–70), Cole taught in the anthropology department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1970–83), where from 1981 to 1983 she was provost of undergraduate education. A pivotal figure in the development of the school's African-American Studies program, she became closely associated with the academic journal Black Scholar. In 1983 she moved to Hunter College, where she directed the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program.

In 1987 Cole became the seventh president of Spelman College, the oldest African-American women's college in the United States. She was committed to making the school a centre for scholarship about African-American women. Calling herself “Sister President,” she became known as a strong advocate for the liberal arts curriculum in a changing society. She retired from the presidency in June 1997.

Cole's writings focus on race, gender, and class in the pan-African world. In addition to many scholarly articles and a regular column in McCall's magazine, she wrote Anthropology for the Eighties: Introductory Readings (1982), All American Women: Lives that Divide, Ties that Bind (1986), Anthropology for the Nineties (1988), and Conversations: Straight Talk with America's Sister President (1993).