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.

[2][5][6] Williams and her husband had nine children: May, Nevada, Robert, Russell, Irving, Ethel, Josephine, Juanita, and Wendell Phillips.

[3][15][17] Clifford gave Williams this legal advice knowing that Third Judicial Circuit Court judge Joseph Thatcher Hoke was likely to be supportive:[3] Hoke was an advocate for the African American Storer College, and while serving as prosecuting attorney in Berkeley County, he offered boarding in Martinsburg to Free Will Baptist mission teachers who taught freedmen in Berkeley and Jefferson counties.

[8] Williams refused and, with the support of the Coketon community's African American parents, kept the school open for the additional three months.

[18] On June 30, 1893, Clifford and prominent Republican lawyer Alston G. Dayton filed a lawsuit on Williams' behalf against the Board of Education of Fairfax District in the Third Judicial Circuit Court in Tucker County.

[18] On August 20, 1893, Clifford received a letter from the secretary for the Tucker County Board of Education warning him not to move forward with the case.

[20] Clifford argued that because West Virginia state law required equal school terms for both white and African-American children, Williams was owed her salary for the additional three months.

[7][30] Williams' daughter Nevada died in 1918 during the influenza pandemic and was interred in an unmarked grave in Thomas' Rose Hill Cemetery.

Also in 2011, a historical marker for the Coketon Colored School was erected on Douglas Road (West Virginia Secondary Route 27) in Thomas.

[33][34] This marker reads:[33] Segregated school located along North Fork of the Blackwater that served Coketon, center of coal and coke empire of H. G. Davis.

In 1892 teacher Carrie Williams, represented by J. R. Clifford, state's first African American lawyer, sued when county reduced school's term.