Appalachian Figures
In June 1917 readers of the Indianapolis News opened their paper to find a Black woman schoolteacher explaining why the new suffrage law mattered to her community. Frances Berry Coston urged that “colored people should be awakened to their own needs and should use their political influence” in ways that would not harm them, a careful, strategic appeal in a city where Black voters still faced harassment at the polls.
For many Hoosiers she was already a familiar name, the woman whose byline appeared on book reviews and feature stories about Indianapolis’s Black neighborhoods. Yet the path that led her to that newsroom desk began not in Indiana but in the hills of southeastern Kentucky, in a small Whitley County community called Rockholds.
Today historians remember Coston as a suffragist, educator, and journalist whose work shaped generations of Black Hoosier children and helped usher Black women into the voting booth. For Appalachian history, she stands as a reminder that the region’s daughters carried their mountain training into cities and institutions far beyond the ridgelines.
Rockholds Roots
Frances M. Berry was born on March 1, 1876, in Rockholds, a Whitley County settlement a few miles north of Williamsburg where a post office had been operating since the 1830s and small farms clustered along the rail and wagon roads.
Later biographical work by historian Thomas Dublin, drawing on the 1880 and 1900 federal censuses, places her in the household of James and Mary Berry, a Black farming family in the Rockholds area. The censuses show James Berry working the land and raising six children, with Frances second in age, part of a household that combined subsistence farming with the fragile opportunities available to Black Kentuckians in the post-Reconstruction era.
Kentucky did not yet maintain consistent statewide birth registration when Frances was born, so census entries, later biographies, and cemetery records carry much of the weight in reconstructing her early years. Those records agree on the essentials: a Black girl born in Rockholds, Whitley County, on March 1, 1876, who would eventually be buried far away in Indianapolis’s Crown Hill Cemetery.
The Rockholds of her childhood was a small place whose official population would still number only a few hundred in the twenty first century. For Frances Berry, it was the starting point for an education that carried her from Whitley County classrooms to some of the most elite institutions in the country.
From Berea To The Big Cities
Frances left Whitley County to attend Berea College, the interracial school in central Kentucky founded by abolitionist John G. Fee. Berea had become a rare space where Black and white students studied together until Kentucky’s 1904 “day law” forced formal segregation. A surviving class photograph from Berea shows her seated among other young men and women, a Whitley County farmer’s daughter stepping into a world of classical languages, literature, and public speaking.
After Berea she kept going. Both the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis and contemporary Black reference works agree that Berry completed postgraduate work in literature and languages at the University of Chicago, became the first Black student to graduate from Columbia University’s Pulitzer School of Journalism, and finished Harvard’s advanced “Starred Course” in English for authors and journalists. For a Black woman born in a small Appalachian community in the 1870s, this educational trajectory was extraordinary.
By the early twentieth century she was teaching at Kentucky State College in Frankfort, a historically Black college that served students from across the upper South. That appointment kept her in Kentucky a little longer, but her next move would shift her center of gravity permanently northward.
Teacher And Literary Correspondent In Indianapolis
In 1906 Berry moved to Indianapolis to teach English and mathematics in the city’s segregated Black schools. The Indianapolis Public Schools assigned her first to School No. 26 and later to School No. 17, where she remained through 1919. Colleagues and reporters treated her as part of a rising cohort of well educated Black teachers who linked classroom work with wider civic obligations. “Teacher Will Speak at Patriotic Meeting,” an Indianapolis Star headline announced in 1909, introducing her to a broader readership as a public lecturer as well as a schoolteacher.
In 1912 the Indianapolis News hired her as a correspondent and book reviewer. It was rare for a Black woman to hold a regular position at a major white daily, and her work attracted national notice. In 1921 William Henry Harrison Jr., in his book Colored Girls and Boys’ Inspiring United States History, singled her out as “among America’s foremost Colored women newspaper writers,” noting that she focused on feature articles and stories and listing her advanced studies at Berea, Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard as proof that she was “well prepared and fully capable” for the role.
Harrison emphasized that the Indianapolis News allowed her unusual freedom to select books from the literary editor’s desk and to choose her own subjects for articles, a testament both to her skill and to the respect she commanded in a white-run newsroom.
“Colored Women Study Problem Of Suffrage”
Coston’s most widely cited article, “Colored Women Study Problem of Suffrage,” ran in the Indianapolis News on June 6, 1917, during Indiana’s turbulent struggle over partial woman suffrage. The state legislature had granted women limited voting rights in certain elections earlier that year, but legal challenges loomed, and Black women faced the added burden of racist hostility at the polls.
In the article Coston urged readers that “colored people should be awakened to their own needs and should use their political influence” wisely, while also worrying about women whose lives left little time for constitutional debates. Historian Laura Kalvaitis, in a study of Indiana’s suffrage movement, quotes this passage as an example of how Black clubwomen tried to translate abstract rights into practical advice for factory workers, domestic laborers, and mothers who could not attend long meetings or read thick pamphlets.
Coston’s influence did not come from writing alone. In June 1912 she attended a key suffrage organizing meeting at the Indianapolis home of hair care magnate Madam C. J. Walker, where Branch 7 of the Equal Suffrage Association brought Black and white activists together. Later accounts in the Indianapolis Star and modern summaries of Black Hoosier suffragists place her alongside fellow teacher Carrie Barnes Ross as a regular speaker and organizer in Black women’s clubs.
During World War I the federal government appointed her publicity director for “colored women’s war work” in Indiana. From that position she reported Black women’s contributions to the War Department and used her connection to the News to highlight food conservation drives, Liberty Loan campaigns, and Red Cross work in Black neighborhoods. Her suffrage journalism and war publicity intertwined, arguing that Black women’s public service on the home front strengthened their claim to the vote.
Orphans, Education, And The Educational Aid Society
In 1919 Indianapolis Public Schools moved Coston from classroom teaching into one of the city’s hardest assignments. She became principal of School No. 68, the school attached to the Indianapolis Asylum for Friendless Colored Children, a Quaker-founded orphanage often called the “Colored Orphans Home.”
Conditions there were poor. A letter she wrote as principal, discussed in Marc Hardy’s dissertation on Indianapolis philanthropy, describes overcrowding, inadequate facilities, and the difficulty of providing a real education within the walls of an underfunded institution. During her five years at the asylum she tightened policies, secured better equipment, and publicly criticized the cramped and outdated buildings. Her efforts helped push Marion County officials to take over management of the home in 1922 and to authorize a new county orphanage at Keystone Avenue and East 25th Street.
That work convinced Coston that education usually stopped too soon for orphaned children. In 1921 she organized the Educational Aid Society, a scholarship fund dedicated to helping those children finish high school and attend boarding schools, normal schools, or colleges. Indianapolis News coverage during the 1920s shows her planning concerts and subscription campaigns, working both Black and white donors, and steadily building the endowment. One 1926 article noted that she had doubled the fund from fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars.
With that money the Society sent former orphanage residents on to institutions such as Tuskegee Institute, Hampton Institute, Fisk University, Indiana State Normal at Terre Haute, Butler University, and the John Herron Art Institute. Bess Watson’s 1960 obituary in the Indianapolis News remembered her most vividly for this work, summing up a lifetime in the headline “Frances Coston Helped Orphans.”
Clubs, Party Politics, And Continuing Public Work
Coston’s network extended through many of Indianapolis’s leading Black women’s organizations. She served as treasurer and fundraiser for the Woman’s Improvement Club, a group founded in 1903 that became nationally known for its tuberculosis “fresh air” camps and school-based health work. She also belonged to the Phyllis Wheatley branch of the YWCA, the Flanner House Guild, and Second Christian Church, where clubwomen often organized lectures and charity drives.
Her sense of civic responsibility led her into party politics as well. After the war she served as publicity chair for the Negro Women’s National Republican League in Indiana, tasked with helping Black women learn to register, understand party platforms, and use their votes effectively. She later chaired publicity for the Indiana Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, a post she held well into the 1940s.
Alongside these visible roles she quietly volunteered as a probation officer for the Marion County Juvenile Court, working with both Black and white youth. It was another space where her classroom experience and newspaper work converged, turning observation into advocacy for vulnerable young people.
Family, Chicago Connections, And Final Years
In 1916 Frances Berry married George Ellsworth Coston. They would have at least two children who appear frequently in the record: Jean, born in 1916, and Ray, born in 1918.
Jean Coston, later known as Jean Coston Maloney and sometimes as Jean Lee, became a concert pianist who studied at Oberlin Conservatory and Juilliard and built a career in Chicago. A 1929 item in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis and later newspaper features chart her rise as a young Black musician, with Frances appearing in those stories as the mother who had insisted on serious musical training. Ray G. Coston became a physician in Chicago, another symbol of the educational ladder she had tried to build for other children through the Educational Aid Society.
By the late 1940s the Coston family’s ties to Chicago grew stronger. George’s 1949 obituary still identified Frances as a teacher in Indianapolis, but when she died on July 19, 1960, she did so at her daughter’s home in Chicago, closing a life that had begun in rural Whitley County eighty four years earlier. Notices in both the Indianapolis News and the Black weekly Indianapolis Recorder recorded her death and the settlement of her estate. Crown Hill Cemetery records confirm her burial there, placing a Rockholds-born Black woman among the city’s prominent dead.
She retired from teaching in 1951 after fourteen years at Indianapolis’s segregated Crispus Attucks High School and decades in the elementary schools. By that point she had educated thousands of students, helped send orphans to college, and trained a generation of Black women to see the ballot as a tool rather than an abstraction.
An Appalachian Life In A Midwestern City
Frances Berry Coston rarely appears in standard narratives of Appalachian history, which tend to focus on coal miners, mountaineer politicians, or white reformers. Yet her story fits squarely within the region’s history of Black mobility and activism. Born to a farm family in Whitley County, she took advantage of Berea’s interracial experiment, rode the broader Great Migration pattern that took many southern Black families to Midwestern cities, and then used the tools she picked up along the way to fight for education and political power.
Her life complicates the assumption that Appalachian-born activists had to stay in the mountains to count as “Appalachian figures.” Coston’s classrooms in Frankfort and Indianapolis, her suffrage speeches in Madam C. J. Walker’s parlor, and her newsroom desk at the Indianapolis News all grew out of skills sharpened in an Appalachian childhood. From Rockholds to Crown Hill, she carried the memory of a small Kentucky farming community into struggles over citizenship, education, and representation that shaped Black life far beyond Whitley County.
Sources & Further Reading
Frances Berry Coston, “Colored Women Study Problem of Suffrage,” Indianapolis News, June 6, 1917, p. 20; quoted and analyzed in Laura Kalvaitis, “Votes for Women: Women’s Suffrage, Gendered Political Culture, and Progressive Era Masculinity in the State of Indiana” (2012). IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks+1
Frances Berry Coston, “Greater Interest in Education is Shown,” Indianapolis News, June 23, 1919, p. 16; and other social-issue and book review pieces cited in the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis entry on Coston. Encyclopedia of Indianapolis+1
Jyoti A. Verderame, “Frances Berry Coston,” Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, first published 2022 and revised December 2022, which provides the most complete overview of her education, teaching, suffrage work, Educational Aid Society, and burial at Crown Hill. Encyclopedia of Indianapolis
Thomas Dublin, “Biographical Sketch of Frances Berry Coston, 1876–1960,” in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, for genealogical details from the 1880 and 1900 censuses and analysis of her career. Alexander Street Documents
William Henry Harrison Jr., Colored Girls and Boys’ Inspiring United States History: And a Heart to Heart Talk About White Folks (1921), especially the section listing “Frances Berry Coston of Indianapolis, Ind.” among “foremost Colored women newspaper writers” and summarizing her education and literary work. gutenberg.org
Marc Hardy, “Defining Community Need Through the Lens of the Elite: A History of Elite Philanthropy in Indianapolis” (Ph.D. dissertation, 2012), for discussion of Coston’s tenure as principal of School No. 68 at the Indianapolis Asylum for Friendless Colored Children and her letter on conditions there. Encyclopedia of Indianapolis+1
Christine Fernando, “ ‘Black history is American history’: How Black Hoosiers contributed to suffrage movement,” Indianapolis Star, August 27, 2020, and related biographical sketches of Black suffragists, for context on Coston’s partnership with Carrie Barnes Ross and other Black women in Indianapolis. IndyStar+1
“Frances Berry Coston,” Wikipedia, drawing together the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis entry, Dublin’s sketch, Bess Watson’s 1960 obituary “Frances Coston Helped Orphans,” and numerous Indianapolis News and Indianapolis Star articles about her teaching, club work, and family. Wikipedia+1
Rockholds, Kentucky entries in the Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer and U.S. Census material for basic information on the history and scale of the community where Frances Berry was born. Kentucky Atlas+1