Caroline "Carrie" M. Williams (née Edwards) (c. 1866January 22, 1930) was an African-American educator in the U.S. state of West Virginia. 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. Edwards taught as a schoolteacher in Ohio before relocating to West Virginia, where she continued teaching. 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. The influx of timber workers and coal miners between 1890 and 1900 doubled Tucker County's population from 6,459 people to 13,433. The increased population included the county's African-American population, which increased from 183 in 1890 to 253 in 1900; the majority of the county's African-American population resided in Coketon.
School board establishment of unequal school terms
The residents of Tucker County's Fairfax District 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.
For the 1892–1893 school year, the Board of Education of Fairfax District tendered a five-month contract to Williams, which she refused to sign at the board's repeated request. Despite the lack of a signed contract, the school board allowed Williams to teach for five months. J. R. Clifford, West Virginia's first African-American practicing attorney, 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: 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.
At the conclusion of the district's five-month school term for the African-American students, the school board demanded that Williams close the Coketon Colored School while the white schools remained open. Williams refused and, with the support of the Coketon community's African-American parents, kept the school open for the additional three months. When the school year ended in June 1893, Williams presented the school board with a bill for her final three months teaching. 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.
Lawsuit and appeals
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. 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. 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.