Johnnetta B. Cole

Johnnetta Betsch was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 19, 1936. Her family belonged to the African-American upper class; She was a granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, Florida's first black millionaire, entrepreneur and cofounder of the Afro-American Industrial and Benefit Association, and Mary Kingsley Sammis. Sammis' great-grandparents were Zephaniah Kingsley, a white slave trader and slave owner, who purchased African slave Anna Madgigine Jai in 1806, when she was 13 years old and he was 43 years old. Within 5 years, Anna bore three children, George, born June 1807; Martha, born July 1809; and Mary, born February 1811. When she was 18, Zephaniah freed Anna and she herself became a slave owner alongside her husband. It is claimed that Anna was a Wolof princess, originally from present-day Senegal. Today the Fort George Island Kingsley home is protected as Kingsley Plantation, a National Historic Landmark.

Johnnetta Cole enrolled at the age of 15 in Fisk University, a historically black college, and transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology in 1957. Cole attended graduate school at Northwestern University, earning her Master of Arts (1959) and Doctor of Philosophy (1967) degrees in anthropology. She conducted dissertation field research in Liberia, West Africa, in 1960–1961 through Northwestern University as part of the university’s economic survey of the country.

President-elect Bill Clinton appointed Cole to his transition team for education, labor, the arts, and humanities in 1992. He also considered her for the cabinet post of Secretary of Education. However, when The Jewish Daily Forward reported that she had been a member of the national committee of the Venceremos Brigades, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation had tied to Cuban intelligence forces, Clinton did not advance her nomination.