Clara Belle Drysdale Williams
Why have we not heard of Clara Belle Drysdale Williams? She too needs a film made about her. Like Katherine Johnson who calculated the flight paths for the Project Mercury and other space missions. The film Hidden Figures was very timely in that it revealed to many that brains were not just an exclusive white thing. Since it’s the only film saying this, there is an inevitable tendency to believe that Johnson was an exception. The film, unwittingly reinforces the belief that we, the coloured races have had little contribution to make in certain domains. It is true that we do not figure proportionally in the elite professions and disciplines. Why not? you ask. A participant in a pool of swimming competitors with a weight attached to their feet is unlikely to shine. The obstacles placed in the way of Black people have been many, and not of their own making, as is often repeated. Clara Williams is only one of many people whose achievements have been as astounding as they have been invisible. I will quote my favourite lines from Gray’s Elegy:
“Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
We do not know too much about the others, but I bet that they are there, blushing unseen and wilting in the desert air.
She was the first African-American to graduate from New Mexico State University. Imagine the courage of being the only black face in a campus of white students, where the great majority, if not all, must have considered her an incongruity. Imagine the sarcasm and the insults. And not only from her fellow tutees. Imagine how you would feel if you take a seat in the lecture hall to be told by no less than the professor, as indeed happened to Clara, that he would not begin his lecture unless the unwanted black face left. Clara often had to stand in the hallway to listen to the course being given. She worked jolly hard, and passed all her exams, but she was not allowed to collect her diploma with her class. She became a valued teacher of black students by day, and taught the parents, former slaves, home economics by night. Her three sons all became physicians.
But the times they are a’changing, although only at a snail’s pace. In 1961, New Mexico State University named a street on is campus after her, and in 2005
the English department was renamed Clara Belle Williams Hall. In 1980 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university, which apologised to her for the treatment she was subjected to at their hands. She lived to the ripe old age of 108.
