Josephine Silone Yates (1859–1912)

Josephine Silone was born in Mattituck, New York, in 1859, the youngest daughter of Alexander and Parthenia Reeve Silone. She attended a local school until, at the age of eleven, she was sent by her parents to the Institute for Colored Youth, a famous school in Philadelphia directed by noted African American educator Fannie Jackson Coppin. At age fourteen Silone moved to Newport, Rhode Island, to attend Rogers High School while living with an aunt. She completed the four-year course in three years and graduated valedictorian of her class in 1877. Silone next attended the Rhode Island State Normal School, graduating with honors in 1879. She was the first African American certified to teach in the schools of Rhode Island.

In 1881 Silone moved to Jefferson City, Missouri, to take a teaching job at Lincoln Institute, the state’s all-black normal school. She was among the first faculty members hired by Inman Edward Page, the school’s first black president, whose goal was to replace all the white teachers with black instructors. Silone taught chemistry, elocution, and English literature.

Silone left Lincoln Institute in 1889 when she married William W. Yates, the principal of the black Wendell Phillips School in Kansas City. In 1890 she gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Josephine Silone Yates Jr. In 1895 she bore a son, William Blyden Yates, called “Blyden,” presumably in honor of the famed pan-Africanist Edward W. Blyden.

In 1893 Yates became the leading force behind and first president of the Women’s League of Kansas City, a self-help and social-betterment organization of African American women. The Women’s League was among the black women’s clubs that joined the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. Yates was elected fourth vice president of the national organization at its first biennial meeting, held in Nashville in September 1897. She was elected president in 1901, succeeding Mary Church Terrell, and held that office until 1906.

During her years as president of the NACW, Yates spoke and wrote widely on issues of racial uplift. Her writing appeared in, among others, the Southern Workman, the Voice of the Negro, the Woman’s Era, the Indianapolis Freeman, and the Kansas City Rising Son. Yates returned to teach at Lincoln Institute in 1902. In addition to serving as an instructor of English and drawing, she served as the women’s adviser. She also served as a faculty sponsor of the Olive Branch, “a musical and literary society composed of the young ladies of the senior and junior classes.” The Olive Branch held membership in the NACW.

Yates moved back to Kansas City after the death of her husband in 1910. She taught for a time at Lincoln High School. Yates died in Kansas City on September 3, 1912, after a two-day illness, at the age of fifty-­three. The Indianapolis Freeman, a black newspaper, eulogized her as a person “who was especially concerned . . . for the betterment of colored women, and for the betterment of the race generally.”