Josephine Silone Yates
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Josephine Silone Yates (born 1852 - September 3, 1912) was an African American writer, teacher and civil rights advocate.
Her family lived for several generations on Long Island. She was born to Alexander and Parthenia Reeve Silone. Her older sister Harriet developed into a superior dress-maker. At the age of eleven, she was invited by her maternal uncle, Rev. J. B. Reeve of Philadelphia to his home, that better opportunity for education than that afforded by the district school might be hers. Here she came in contact with a large number of cultured people and especially with Mrs. Fanny Jackson Coppin, a woman of rare qualities, and in attending her Institute for Colored Youth, she made rapid progress. When her uncle was appointed to a charge in Washington, D.C., she accepted the invitation of a maternal aunt, Mrs. Girard, who lived in Newport, Rhode Island, to live with her and attend the high school there. Her brilliant qualities as a student soon attracted the attention of such men as Colonel Wentworth Higginson, a member of the school board. She was not only valedictorian of a large class, but was the only colored member of her class, and the first colored graduate of the school. To fit herself for the work of a teacher, she entered the Rhode Island State Normal School at Providence and graduated in 1879, again the only colored graduate.
In 1880 she came West and began teaching in Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri, as head of the department of science and held this position with marked success until 1889 when she resigned to marry Professor W. W. Yates, principal of the Wendell Phillips School of Kansas City, Missouri. A warm welcome was extended by Kansas City to a woman already known in educational circles as one of the best teachers in the state, and she was soon called for as a private teacher by a host of young and old aspirants for more learning. In later years she was called to teach again in Lincoln Institute and in the High School of Kansas City. For the greater part of her life she had been writing for the press and now enlarged her work in that line, often writing under the nom de plume of R. K. Potter. As a writer she had a clear, incisive style and a wide range of thought. She wrote often in verse, as "The Zephyr," "Royal To-day," "The Isles of Peace" and others.
With the beginning of the club work among our women, she became a zealous club worker, and was one of the organizers and the first president of the Kansas City Woman's League in 1893, one of the oldest clubs among the colored women. Later she became one of the State Presidents of the federated clubs. When the National Association of Colored Women was organized in 1896 she became one of its earnest supporters and later served four years as its treasurer and four as president. At the fourth Convention in St. Louis in 1904, and in Detroit, Michigan, at the fifth Convention in 1906 she presided with a quiet dignity, grace and tact. At the close of the Convention in Detroit the members of the Convention expressed their appreciation of her faithful service and impartial ruling by presenting her with a large silver loving cup.
She was a woman of rare intellectual power, she delighted in study and passed with distinguished success every examination she entered. To the many hundred students with whom she came in contact, she was an inspiration showing them the heights that could be reached without wealth, beauty or favor, by steady concentrated work.
In November 1910, Mrs. Yates was left a widow by the death of her husband whom the Board of Education esteemed so highly that they renamed the school of which he had been principal, the W. W. Yates School. She was later appointed a teacher in the high school where she taught with all her former success, until September 3, 1912, when she suddenly departed after an illness of two days.
