PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Beatrice Coleman, a member of the Brown University Class of 1925, died in Providence on Thursday, April 3, 2014. She was 109, a little more than two weeks shy of her 110th birthday, April 20.
“Meeting and talking with Bea Coleman was a great privilege,” said Brown President Christina Paxson, who first met Coleman at a celebration of her 109th birthday last year. “She sat down at the piano and played Brown’s alma mater for us. Her time at Brown was plainly of great value to her.”
The granddaughter of slaves, Coleman grew up in Providence, reared by her mother, who worked as an errand girl for a local dressmaker, and by her grandparents, a watchman and practical nurse-midwife. She wanted to attend Howard University, where two of Rhode Island’s first black doctors had gone, but her family couldn’t afford to send her so far away. So she remained in Providence and attended Brown, living at home because black students weren’t allowed to live in college dormitories then. “They had to lodge with colored families in town,” she said in an oral history for the Pembroke Center’s Christine Dunlap Farnham ’48 Archives. She majored in Latin and history and joined the African American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. Brown and AKA became her lifelong passions.
Even with a Brown degree, Coleman had difficulty finding a teaching job after graduation because of racial restrictions in the Providence schools. So she began her career teaching Latin in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When Providence eliminated its restrictions, she returned home, where she directed a nursery school before joining the Emma P. Bradley Hospital’s school department. Announcing her appointment to its permanent staff in 1961, the hospital newsletter described her as “a Negro with attractive coloring and a mobile face that lights up when she talks about the children in her charge.” Coleman is quoted as saying that her devotion to her work stemmed from “my love for children, my tremendous interest in the mind, a chance for practical application of theories learned in college, and the many notes received from former patients.”
A permanent member of the NAACP, Coleman was secretary of the New England Regional Conference. She was president of the African American women’s club — The Criterion Club — and served on the scholarship and the public relations committees of the Rhode Island Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. She was also active in the Providence and Cranston Girl Scouts and the Salvation Army Settlement and Day Care Center.
A longtime church organist Coleman played the piano for her neighbors at Tockwotten House, the Providence assisted living home where she spent her last years.
She had no children and remained single all her life. “I didn’t want no man telling me what to do,” she told the Brown Alumni Magazine in typically forthright fashion. “It’s bad enough having a governor or president.”
— Brucie Harvey
Brown Alumni Magazine