Clara Belle Drisdale Williams, An Amazing Life

In the Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives, we are usually the ones dispensing information, but that wasn’t the case recently when a young man called asking what we knew about Clara Belle Drisdale Williams. We had to admit that we had never heard of her, but we soon learned her rather remarkable story.

Clara Belle Drisdale was born on October 29, 1885 near Plum. Her grandfather, Stephen Drisdale, was brought from North Carolina to Fayette County as a slave about 1854. Her father, Isaac, was a sharecropper born into slavery here in 1862. According to a recorded interview that Mrs. Williams gave in 1980, her father only attended two weeks of school and her mother, Carrie Melinda Moppins Drisdale, could not read or write until her children were in school and taught her what they had learned. However, she said her father’s sister was a teacher who attended the Mary Allen Seminary, Texas’ first black women’s college at Crockett, and the value of an education was stressed in the Drisdale home.

Her grandfather, Stephen Drisdale, was brought from North Carolina to Fayette County as a slave about 1854. Her father, Isaac, was a sharecropper born into slavery here in 1862. According to a recorded interview that Mrs. Williams gave in 1980, her father only attended two weeks of school and her mother, Carrie Melinda Moppins Drisdale, could not read or write until her children were in school and taught her what they had learned. However, she said her father’s sister was a teacher who attended the Mary Allen Seminary, Texas’ first black women’s college at Crockett, and the value of an education was stressed in the Drisdale home.

Clara Belle left Fayette County when was awarded a scholarship to Prairie View Normal and Industrial College. She graduated as valedictorian of her class of forty-three students in 1908 with a certificate in Domestic Arts. She had worked evenings in the school laundry to pay for her room and board. After graduation, she was hired as head of the sewing department at Prairie View.

She later taught at Cameron, where she married a fellow teacher, Jasper R. Williams, in 1917. Within a few years, the Williams had three sons and owned a drug store in El Paso. Unfortunately, their insurance had lapsed when the drug store caught fire, leaving them without income. This led the family to move to the Las Cruces, New Mexico area where an African-American teacher was needed and would be paid $100 per month for nine months and given housing. Through the years, Mrs. Williams taught in several schools in that area, including more than twenty years at Booker T. Washington in Las Cruces. Her husband also taught for a while in New Mexico. However, his pride kept him from working under his wife in a school in which she was the principal. The couple filed as homesteaders on 540 acres of land in the Las Cruces area.

Beginning in 1928, every summer Mrs. Williams took classes toward a bachelor’s degree at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts. She studied English, with a minor in Mathematics, despite having to listen to lectures from the hallways of that segregated school. In 1937 at the age of fifty-one, Clara Belle Williams graduated, making her the first African American to graduate from the college which later became New Mexico State University. When others refused to walk with her, the graduation ceremony was cancelled.

All three of the Williams boys served in the military, which enabled them to further their education. In fact, James Buchanan Williams, was one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. Their father died in 1946, while the two youngest sons were still in college. All three of the Williams’ sons became doctors and, in 1961, Clara Belle helped them established the Williams medical center in Chicago, where she served as receptionist until 1978. Several of her grandchildren also became doctors. A lifelong learner, she was still studying Spanish when she was ninety-one years old.

In 1980, she finally wore a cap and gown when New Mexico State University bestowed upon her an honorary Doctorate of Laws degree, given along with an apology for how she had been treated earlier. Williams Street on the NMSU main campus had already been named for her in 1961. Clara Belle Williams died in Chicago on July 3, 1994 at the advanced age of 108.

On February 13, 2005 Clara Belle Williams Day was celebrated at NMSU with the renaming of the English Department building as Clara Belle Williams Hall. There are two scholarships at NMSU given in her name. Who could have predicted this acclaim when she was born at Plum in 1885?

Sources:

Chicago Sun-Times obituary, July 7, 1994 Stock, Christina. “A Woman to Remember,” Roswell Daily Record,

Stock, Christina. “A Woman to Remember,” Roswell Daily Record, June 15, 2020

https://www.pvamu.edu/news-old/2016/02/24/down-the-road-clara-belle-drisdale-williams-1885-1994/

“Discussion with Clara Belle Williams and family, May 10, 1980.” YouTube, uploaded by New Mexico State University Library:

www.findagrave.com

Footprints Of Fayette

Fayette County is one of the most historic counties in Texas. In this weekly feature from the County Historical Commission, a rotating group of writers looks back at local history.