Coralie Franklin Cook
American educator and government official
Coralie Franklin Cook (March 1861 – August 25, 1942) was an African-American educator, public speaker, and government official. She is also the first known descendant among those enslaved at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate to graduate from college. Cook, along with Mary Church Terrell, Anna J. Cooper, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, "exemplified the third generation of African American woman suffragists who related to both the Black and the white worlds."
Early life
Coralie Franklin was born in Lexington, Virginia in March 1861. Coralie was the younger of two daughters from Albert Barbour Franklin and Mary Elizabeth Edmondson, both of whom were enslaved by a Southern aristocratic family. Franklin was a descendant of Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings, an enslaved mixed-race woman, whose children and many descendants occupied the most valued household and tradesman positions at Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello. Franklin's maternal great-grandfather, Brown Colbert, was a former slave and nailer at the Monticello estate. Colbert was the son of Betty Brown and the grandson of Elizabeth Hemings.
Franklin had one older sister named Mary Elizabeth. In 1870, their father, Albert Franklin, a "very well respected man amongst his community", placed his two daughters in the Storer Normal School at Harpers Ferry. At the time, Storer was administered as a Normal Academy and was the only institution for higher learning available for African Americans in West Virginia.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28731197. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1861, 1942 and 1870.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coralie Franklin Cook” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.