How Black Women From Southern West Virginia Shaped the 20th Century

From Politics to Professional Sports, Medicine to Entrepreneurship Women from Bluefield Led the Way

In the 1920s, Bluefield, WV emerged as a cosmopolitan city of the highest degree. In the heart of Appalachian coal country, it was a seedbed of black entrepreneurship and empowerment. When W.E.B. Du Bois arrived to deliver a speech in Bluefield, the Bluefield Institute (now Bluefield State College, an HBCU formed in 1895) was a blossoming institution with an impressive faculty. A local black real estate developer, attorney, and West Virginia congressman, Harry Capehart, had just led the successful passage of the Capehart Anti-Lynch Law, which Historian Arthur Bunyan Caldwell called “the most progressive piece of legislation that has been enacted on the racial issue.” Residents had every reason for optimism, but I suspect that no one could have guessed the world-changing roles that local black women would soon play.

Angie Turner King was a student at the Bluefield Institute when Du Bois visited. She would go on to earn a Master’s degree in Physical Chemistry from Cornell University and a Ph.D from the University of Pittsburg. King became a teacher and passed along her passion for math and science to countless young black students including a 13-year-old Katherine Johnson whose story was told in the movie “Hidden Figures”. Johnson later taught math in a segregated school in Bluefield before she began working…