Edna Meade Colson

Edna Meade Colson left Virginia to get her PhD because the state's segregated universities would not admit her. She later challenged this reality by chairing the committee that developed graduate courses for Black students at Virginia State College, in the same state that had refused her. A 1953 tribute in the Virginia Education Bulletin estimated that more than fifty percent of the teachers then employed in Virginia's public schools “were taught personally” by Colson or had graduated from the Virginia State College education department she led. The BTA places Colson alongside other pioneering educators like Mary McLeod Bethune, John Hope, and Fannie C. Williams, a network of Black educators whose full story lives here.

Here is a curated selection of her name mentioned in the collection.