| Home / College Guide / Columbia City of Women April 2020 Honoree: Ethel Bolden | Columbia Star |
| Posted on Friday, April 03 @ 00:00:08 PDT |
Ethel Evangeline Martin was born December 14, 1918, in Charleston to Ethel Sinkler and Thomas John Martin. Her childhood could easily be called tragic. During the beginning of the Great Migration in the early 1920s, her father moved to Chicago in search of work, where he was severely injured in a car accident. Her mother, separated from a husband who could no longer work or afford to return home, moved her children to Columbia. She was hired as the Superintendent of the Fairwold Industrial School for Delinquent Negro Girls.
Until 1927, Ethel Martin and her siblings split their time between Columbia and Peak, South Carolina, where their father’s mother ran a missionary school. For Martin, it was “a wonderful life†split between her two greatest influences — her mother and grandmother — that ended abruptly in January of that year when her mother passed away. In 1929, her grandmother died, effectively orphaning Martin and her younger brother.
Martin attended Booker T. Washington High School from 1932-36, where she learned from some of Columbia’s most notable educators, including Celia Dial Saxon. Like all local schools, B.T. Washington’s library contained books locally published by R.
L. Bryan. Unlike most students, B.T. Washington’s pupils and their parents were required to purchase their own textbooks as well as many of those found in the school library. Outside of the classroom, students only had access to one of Richland Library’s branches. Created as part of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, this branch was another of Saxon’s projects and acquired books through a grant from the Rosenwald Fund. A lack of access to books would inform Martin’s educational philosophies for decades to come.
Booker T. Washington proved transformative for Martin in another way. According to the June 1936 issue of The Comet, the school’s newspaper, a bit of gossip that “a Student of B.T.W. Should Know†was that “Ethel Martin and Charles Bolden spent a great deal of time together at the Scholarship Party.â€
After graduating from Barber-Scotia Junior College and Johnson C. Smith University, Martin returned to Columbia in 1940. She secured a position at Waverly Elementary School as an “intern teacher†just days before the semester began. She performed the normal duties of a teacher, but was paid for each day worked rather than on a yearly contract.
She signed a contract the following year only to lose it months after marrying Charles F. Bolden in 1941. At the time, women couldn’t remain teachers after marriage.
In 1944, Bolden received permission to become Waverly’s first teacher-librarian. In this role, she taught part-time and established the city’s first library in a black elementary school. That year, the school’s PTA raised funds, which were matched by the Rosenwald Fund, to purchase an “R.L. Bryan Library.†Each “library†was a box of books designed for a specific reading level. This purchase, according to Bolden, allowed Waverly to own “Black history books†like A Booker T. Washington School by Emma Akin, at a time when students weren’t “talking about black history.†Bolden then supervised the establishment of libraries in most of Columbia’s black elementary schools.
In 1968, Bolden was invited to join the faculty of Dreher High School as head librarian. Although she believed that administrators offered the job because librarians would have less of an impact than traditional teachers, she accepted, knowing that her role could have a transformational effect on both students and other faculty.
Under her tenure, the library at Dreher became a meaningful resource for all.
Even as Bolden personally paved the way for the forthcoming integration of Richland County District One schools, she weighed in on strategies for wide-scale peaceful integration across the community as a member of the Greater Columbia Community Relations Council, a multiracial taskforce founded by Mayor Lester Bates in the 1960s. She also served on the South Carolina Council on Human Relations and on the Board of Directors of its successor, the Greater Columbia Community Relations Council.
Bolden retired from Dreher in 1982 but remained active in the local library community.
To learn more about Ethel Bolden and all the women honored by Columbia City of Women, visit columbiacityofwomen.com .
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