≤Cole, Johnnetta1936╨ anthropologist and educatorBorn on October 19, 1936, in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnnetta Betsch was expected to join the African-American life insurance firm her maternal great-grandfather had founded and for which her father worked. Instead, she followed in the footsteps of her educator mother, who taught college English before joining the company herself after her husband╒s death. Besides her mother, Betsch╒s earliest influences were African-American women schoolteachers and librarians; she also credited Mary MacLeod Bethune, the pioneering African-American. At the age of 15, she entered Fisk University, where her contact with the writer Arna Bontemps, then the school╒s librarian, introduced her to an intellectual world that deeply attracted her. She left Fisk and followed an older sister to Oberlin, where she graduated with a degree in sociology in 1957. While a doctoral student in anthropology at Northwestern University, she met Robert Cole, a fellow graduate student; they were married from 1960 to 1982. Cole received her Ph.D. in 1967, after field work on traditional and wage-earning labor in Liberia. After teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Washington State at Pullman, Cole worked for 13 years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she taught in the African-American Studies and Anthropology departments. In time she was promoted to the position of 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 and the first African-American woman president of Spelman College, the oldest African-American women╒s college in the U.S. Describing herself as the first Spelman president with an explicitly feminist vision, she expressed a commitment to making the school a center 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.Her writings focused 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. She was president of the Association of Black Anthropologists and the International Women╒s Anthropology Conference, and the recipient of numerous awards. εstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ 7 !I í 5¬ ó !I è 5¬ ï !I e !I r !I ß 5¬ Γ !I ╚ 5¬ ╔ !I R !I Z !I o !I ú !I ½ !I α !I Φ !I
