Carrie Williams

Caroline "Carrie" M. Williams (née Edwards) (c. 1866 – January 22, 1930) was an African American educator in West Virginia in the United States. Williams fought and won a significant 1898 civil rights case, Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District, which upheld West Virginia's law requiring equal school terms, and established equal pay for teachers regardless of their race.

Early life

Edwards was born in Chillicothe, Ohio circa 1866, the daughter of Jacob and Rachel Edwards. On November 20, 1889, she married Abraham L. Williams, a coal miner, in Thomas in Tucker County, West Virginia. Williams and her husband had nine children: May, Nevada, Robert, Russell, Irving, Ethel, Josephine, Juanita, and Wendell Phillips.

Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District Employment at Coketon Colored School

In 1892, while 26 years old and pregnant with her third child, Williams was hired by the Board of Education of Fairfax District to teach at the two-room Coketon Colored School in the mining community of Coketon. Coketon was located along the western side of North Fork Blackwater River on the Western Maryland Railway, within Tucker County's Fairfax District. The community was established by the Davis Coal and Coke Company of Henry Gassaway Davis for the purposes of producing coke for the coal mines of nearby Thomas; the company's headquarters were also located here. voted for an eight-month school term. However, while the Board of Education of Fairfax District decided to set term length for white schools at eight months, it set the term for Coketon Colored School at only five months. This was presented as a cost-cutting measure, and because the school board expected limited enrollment in the district's African American schools. advised Williams to teach at the Coketon Colored School for eight months and present the school board with a bill for her final three months of wages; should the school board refuse to pay, he would file a lawsuit on her behalf.

Clifford gave Williams this legal advice knowing that Third Judicial Circuit Court judge Joseph Thatcher Hoke was likely to be supportive: This period of pay totaled $120 ( dollars), less $1 for failure to return a term report required by law. The school board refused to pay Williams because she had continued to teach knowing that she had been presented with a five-month contract. That following November, he proceeded in filing a lawsuit against the Fairfax District school board for the $120 owed to Williams, plus the $1 that had been withheld. Third Judicial Circuit Court judge Hoke presided over the court's proceedings and the jury found in Williams' favor. The school board appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. On June 11, 1898, the case was submitted to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the circuit court's ruling in Williams' favor on November 16, 1898. Clifford and Dayton represented Williams' case at the Supreme Court. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in African American National Biography (2013), this case was "one of the few, if not the first, cases in the South to state that discrimination on the basis of color was illegal." Williams' daughter Nevada died in 1918 during the influenza pandemic and was interred in an unmarked grave in Thomas' Rose Hill Cemetery.

In 2011, Williams and her case were recognized with a highway historical marker as part of the West Virginia Highway Historical Marker Program, which is managed by West Virginia Archives and History, a part of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. The marker, located at the Tucker County Courthouse in Parsons, reads: This marker reads: