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A Phenomenal Woman - by Jennifer Bailey Woodard

In 1919 Frances Marshall became the first black woman to graduate from IU. Here is her story.

In the fall of 1915, a young black woman from Rushville, Ind., arrived at Indiana University to begin her freshman year. She carried with her all her worldly possessions, her hopes and dreams, her intellect, and $1.25. This would be enough. It had to be because back home the only career open to black women was domestic servant or housewife (if your husband could afford to keep you at home). Frances Marshall knew she wanted more.

In a time when it was rare for a black man to go to college, Marshall was an oddity. In an interview with the Indiana Daily Student in 1982, she recalled that when she said she was going to college, "people thought I was crazy." She had been the only black person in her high school graduating class, but her high school principal recommended her to IU, writing that she was "worthy and has an ambition to do something."

Her father, Clinton B. Marshall, was a brickmason, and his wife, Elizabeth, had the luxury of staying at home. They were part of the upper class of black society, but by the time Frances finished high school, her father had died and there was only her mother and grandmother at home. To help the family, Frances worked for a Dr. Green and his wife as a domestic. Dr. Green's wife encouraged her to continue her education.

"Her mother told her, 'We cannot afford to send you to college, but we will not stand in your way if you find a way,'" recalls Rosalind Eagleson Exum, MAT'52, Frances's daughter.

In those days, tuition was supplied wholly by the state. Indiana residents paid a $7.50 per semester contingency fee and a $1.50 per semester library fee. In July 1915, Marshall wrote the university about enrollment and a job. The letter she received in response said,

"Concerning the matter of self support I beg to say that a good many of our students do make a part or all of their expenses while attending the University. It is more difficult for a girl to do this than it is for a boy. There are more opportunities for work open to the boys."

In 1919, Frances Marshall became the first black woman to graduate from Indiana University. Because of this accomplishment, her name and that of Marcellus Neal, the first black man to graduate, will grace the new Theatre/Neal-Marshall Education Center, which is being built in the heart of the Bloomington campus. On Oct. 16, 1998, 83 years after Frances Marshall first came to IU, ground was broken for a structure that will hold the enlarged Neal-Marshall Education Center and the department of theater and drama.

"This building is a reminder that we can rejoice in our differences and at the same time embrace our commonalties," said Winona Fletcher, PhD'68, professor emerita of Afro-American studies and of theater and drama, at the dedication ceremony. This is indeed progress for a university that did not even allow African- Americans to live on campus when Neal and Marshall were in school.

Marshall first boarded with the Evans family, a black family who often gave room and board to incoming black students. Then she went to work as a domestic in the home of limestone executive Hiram P. Radley, in exchange for room and board. According to her daughter, in this home her mother picked up a taste for what she termed "gracious living," things like good china and fine linens.

Frances, who valued quality education, also valued quality living. Anything less than the best was unacceptable, a fact attested to by her niece, Betty Bridgwaters, '68. Bridgwaters says her "Aunt Frank," as she called her, was "very much a lady in every respect," who would "push you to do better, to maximize your achievements."

Exum says her mother went to the west side of town, where the black people lived, for her social activities. She attended church there, went to movies, and was often escorted to parties given by Kappa Alpha Psi, a black fraternity founded at IU in 1911.

In an interview with the Indiana Daily Student in 1982, Marshall said her years at IU were fairly uneventful. "I never worried about being a woman going to school," she said. "I never worried about being black going to school. I just went on with what I had to do. I got my lessons, did my work, and went home."

As for race relations on campus, Marshall reported, "We lived in a world of our own. There was no intermingling between white and black. You went your way, and they went theirs. They were pleasant, and that was all."

She said there was "no animosity" but plenty of prejudice. Exum says her mother surprised professors by performing as well as her white peers.

In 1919, the same year she received her degree, Frances Marshall married Wilson Vashon Eagleson, a chemistry major. Her new husband was the son of Preston E. Eagleson, who in 1896 had become the second black man to graduate from Indiana University.

Exum says her mother fit into the Eagleson clan perfectly. And since the Marshall line had died out, Frances proudly took on the mantle of her husband's family.

"She became an avid Eagleson," her daughter and her son, Wilson Vashon Jr., both laughingly agree. "An Eagleson wouldn't do that" became the family motto as she quickly and sternly rebuked her son and daughter when they misbehaved or wanted to do something their mother thought unseemly.

"There were great family standards," Exum says. "We lived according to the standards of our family, not the standards of the broader society."

Wilson met Frances while he was living in the Army barracks on campus. While she waited for her husband to graduate, Frances Marshall Eagleson began her career. After a brief stint teaching in Cincinnati, she taught one year at Edward Waters College in Florida. In 1921, she began her long tenure at what is now North Carolina Central University, then a private high school for blacks called the National Training School.

After graduation in 1922, Wilson joined her there as the football coach and as a chemistry teacher. By this time, they had two young children, Wilson Vashon Jr. (called Vash), born in 1920, and Rosalind, born in 1922. Frances did whatever was needed at this growing school, from making theater costumes to fund raising to co-signing loans for students who had potential but no money.

Meanwhile, her husband was working on a doctorate in chemistry at Cornell University. During this period, Frances also found time to attend graduate school and study educational administration at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University. The children stayed with Frances's mother, who was now living in Bloomington in a house her daughter bought her. In 1933, a week before his degree was to be conferred, Wilson Eagleson was killed in an automobile accident.

After she had recovered sufficiently from her grief to go and collect her husband's things at Cornell, Frances found his room had been broken into and his research and dissertation stolen. They were never recovered. Frances moved the children back to North Carolina and put them in boarding school. And she continued to work.

"She worked day and night," Exum recalls. "She said she was moonlighting before that phrase became popular. She'd work in the office all day (as the registrar), and then she'd go teach extension classes for the university at night."

"She would go to Oxford, to Henderson, to six or seven different places," son Vash chimes in. "Several of the teachers at North Carolina Central would teach at night to make a living, to make ends meet."

Says Exum, a mathematics professor at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., "That was how she earned additional money to be able to send us to college. It never crossed her mind that Vash and I were not going to college."

Vash, a retired, decorated Tuskegee Airman with the Flying 99th out of Pensacola, Fla., spent one semester at Bloomington before the love of airplanes took over. (The Tuskegee Airmen are a distinguished all-black Army Air Force squadron who trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama and fought courageously in World War II.) He proudly recalls that his mother was "a registrar, an English teacher, a dietitian, and a historian" at North Carolina Central. She retired in 1964, after 43 years of service.

"By the time she retired, she'd been there practically longer than anyone else," Exum says.

So important was Frances Marshall Eagleson to the school that a dormitory was named for her on May 18, 1979. The program on that occasion cited her as "the third most influential person in the development of North Carolina Central University, the other two persons being the first two presidents." According to the same program, the football team the Fighting Eagles was named after her husband.

At North Carolina Central, Frances Marshall Eagleson was known as "the resourceful Mrs. E." She possessed an incredible memory. "She had a Rolodex in her brain that kept track of everybody," her niece Betty Bridgwaters exclaims.

She was the registrar at North Carolina Central from 1928 to 1964, and until the day she died, her family relates, she could tell you about students she'd known 50 years ago. She remembered not just their names, but the names of their parents, their grade point averages, their hometowns, and their characters.

When Florida Memorial College in St. Augustine heard that she had retired from North Carolina Central, they called to see if she would come there as the registrar. She had moved to Virginia to be near her daughter and was the official hostess of the Holly Tree Inn at Hampton University. But in the fall of 1965 Eagleson accepted Florida Memorial's offer and moved to Florida.

When she retired in 1968, Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga., called her. Spelman needed a registrar, and everyone knew about Eagleson's extraordinary memory and ability to organize. She stayed at Spelman until 1970. At one point she even served as the president of the National Association of Deans and College Registrars. But at the age of 72, she retired for the third time, finally ready to quit working.

Eagleson then moved into private quarters in her daughter's home. By the time she died in 1987 at age 88, she had more than proved correct her high school principal's prediction that she "has an ambition to do something."

Together with Marcellus Neal, IU's first African-American graduate in 1895, Frances Marshall Eagleson will be remembered through the Neal-Marshall Education Center, which had its beginnings in the Black Culture Center established in 1972. She was, in Maya Angelou's words, a phenomenal woman.

Jennifer Bailey Woodard is a Knight Fellow completing her doctorate at the IU School of Journalism. Formerly a journalism instructor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, she also has worked as a reporter for the Nashville Banner.

Photos of her mother courtesy Rosalind Exum.