Helen Elsie Austin (May 10, 1908– Oct 26, 2004), known as H. Elsie Austin as an adult, was an American attorney, civil rights leader, and diplomat from the Midwest. From 1960 to 1970, she served for ten years with the United States Information Agency (USIA) on various cultural projects in Africa. The first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Cincinnati School of Law, Austin was appointed in 1937 as an assistant attorney general in Ohio. She was the first Black and the first woman to hold this position.
Austin held legal positions in Washington, D.C. for several federal agencies during the New Deal. She also worked to advance civil rights for African Americans, serving on numerous committees, and in executive positions. She consulted for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Council of Negro Women. She also served as president for the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, "one of the largest African American women's organization in the world."
In 1934 Austin became a member of the Baháʼí Faith in Cincinnati. Ten years later she was elected on the National Spiritual Assembly in the United States, the institution in charge of the affairs in the country. She was a Bahá'i for the rest of her life. Decades later, while serving in Africa, she joined what was then the regional national assembly of North West Africa.
Early life, family and education
Helen Elsie Austin was born in 1908 to Mary Louise Austin, née Dotson (sometimes spelled Dodson), and George J. Austin at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama; both parents taught and lived at the Institute. Her mother taught Household Science and her father was Commandant of Men; he was a veteran of the Spanish-American War.
Her parents married June 10, 1906. They encouraged their children to become educated and to work for advancement of their race. George's sister Jennie Charlotte Austin was among African-American students admitted to the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati in the early 20th century; she graduated in the class of 1911.
Austin's mother was the daughter of Mentor Dotson, an Alabama minister and teacher, and his wife. In 1872 Rev. Dotson was elected as a Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives, during Reconstruction. Austin believed that her mother was highly regarded by Booker T. Washington and his wife because of Rev. Dotson's achievements.
Helen Elsie Austin is generally recorded as having been born at Tuskegee. She had a brother, George J. Austin Jr. The family was still at Tuskegee in 1910, according to the US Census,
By 1912, her father worked as Commandant of Men at the Prairie View Normal School in Austin, Texas, established for African-American students. This normal school, initially founded to train teachers for lower grades, developed over time as Prairie View A&M University.* In 1914, her father wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Age, a prominent black newspaper in New York City. He took issue with a photograph showing African-American attendees at a fancy ball, noting that all the men were with women of lighter skin. He argued that it was an example of colorism in the black community, which favored light-skinned women. Further, he wrote that concubinage of black women in the South (and elsewhere) was still a problem.
Before the US entered Great War started, George Austin sought to join officer training at a camp in New York. He was not accepted because of the policy of the US War Department, He entered Fort Des Moines Provisional Army Officer Training School, newly created to train African-American officers to lead troops in the US Army, as a first lieutenant; the training ran from June to October, 1917.* Like other men of a range of ages, he registered for the draft. He was later credited with serving with the 65th Machine Gun Company (which might be the UK unit of the same name).
After the war, the family settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, by January 1920. Her father was secretary of director of a civic league supported by the black community in Port Huron, Michigan, located on Lake Huron of the Great Lakes. He moved to Ohio to become director of the nearby Zanesville Civic League, which served black students in the city of the same name. It was financially supported by black and white citizens.* Her mother Mary Louise Austin worked at Stowe School in Cincinnati, named after Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Decades later, she recorded the following anecdote about her first day at Walnut High School, in what was then a suburb of Cincinnati: (After a reading by the teacher from a textbook about the contributions by all the races, but that said the black race made no significant contribution and had been created to be subservient to the more fortunate races.) Can you imagine? Two little black girls in a school full of white children, and a classroom of white children, and with all the candor and cruelty of the young, the entire class looked at us and there were of course a few snickers and grins. It was then that I remembered my grandmother. I felt as if the klan was standing there with the guns trained on me. With great resentment and resolve I stood up and said 'I was taught in a black school that Africans worked iron before Europeans knew anything about it. I was taught that they knew how to cast bronze in making statues and that they worked in gold and ivory so beautifully that the European nations came to their shores tho buy their carvings and statues. That is what I was taught in a black school. There was an electrical silence. But friends can you imagine; if there had been no protest, what ingrained prejudice and hostility would have been implanted in the minds of those children, and what humiliation and degradation would have been stamped upon us."
Austin graduated in 1924 from the high school.
College, the Law, and Baháʼí Faith In 1928 Austin and seven other African-American women were admitted as students to University of Cincinnati (UC). Historically the number of black students had been limited here; the first known black attendee was not named in university records.
By the 1920s more blacks were being admitted to the university, as they were gaining preparation in the lower grades. Most were initially women, as blacks were admitted only to the College of Education to prepare for teaching careers, and most in that field were women. There were no black faculty members. Blacks were not allowed to live in the dorms and often boarded with families in town. They had limited access to the university pool or other amenities. Austin recalled that she and the other black students were advised by an administrator to avoid being 'conspicuous', to keep in mind they were 'members of a subject race', and to have 'low expectations'.
Decades later Austin commented on this meeting in her oral history: We were young, sensitive, full of hope and aspiration for university education. That speech traumatized us. We sat down and discussed the situation. And then all 8 of us decided that we were going out for everything in the university. We almost took an oath in blood that we were all to finish that first year with honors in something. By the end of the year each one of us did take an honor. At the beginning of the next year that same official who had called us in and insulted us, apologized for her remarks.
Austin joined an inter-racial club on campus, and the young chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority. Pictures of members of the black sororities or fraternities at the time were not published in the school yearbooks.
Austin was encouraged by her friends but angered by their treatment at the university. She later recounted talking with her father about this. I was young, angry, incensed and hostile. I went to my father and told him I was going to become an agnostic or an atheist because 'I just don't believe anymore in these religions that are all separate, all fighting with each other, all enforcing prejudice against some group, and yet they say God is the father of all mankind.' My father heard me out, and then said 'Well before you do it, why don't you go and talk to these Cincinnati people who are talking about the Baháʼí Faith. He was not a Baháʼí but he said they have some interesting views.
She received her BA degree in 1928. Austin attended the University of Colorado Law School for a year, where she also worked on the student staff of the Rocky Mountain Law Review, which had a national reputation. When she returned to Ohio, she completed her law degree at University of Cincinnati, where she also earned a place on the Cincinnati Law Review. In April 1930 she represented Liberia in a mock League of Nations event on campus.
Austin received an LLB degree in 1930, becoming the first black woman to graduate from the University of Cincinnati Law School. Her father died before she graduated.
Career Austin passed the Indiana Bar that year, and was among the 22 black women lawyers in the state in 1930. She was one of the pioneers noted in the late 20th century by Goler Teal Butcher, a professor of international law at Howard University who established a scholarship for black women.
Austin's grandfather Robert Austin did live to see these achievements; he died in October 1930. By then Austin had returned to live with her widowed mother,* who was inspired to go back to college.
In 1931 Austin opened a law practice in Indianapolis, Indiana, the state capital, with Henry J. Richardson Jr., also an African American. They were partners for two years, and he became active in the Democratic Party. (In 1932 he was one of the first two African Americans elected on the Democratic Party ticket to the state house of Indiana.)
Austin began to be active with the NAACP, sometimes speaking about its work, and also representing the organization in civil suits challenging segregation and restrictions. Austin also began taking a leadership role in Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
The Baháʼí community in Cincinnati is dated to at least to 1910. Austin began to learn about their practice. A joint meeting of Baháʼí communities of Ohio met in Cincinnati in June 1930, and the group held monthly public meetings in the city. A Baháʼí Local Spiritual Assembly, an administrative group of nine adults, was established in Cincinnati in 1933. Austin considered the religion, reading about it and attending meetings. She met Louis George Gregory, an African-American lawyer and leader in the Bahá'i faith, and Dorothy Baker, who were both influential members who helped her overcome her feelings of bitterness. In 1934 she joined the Baháʼí Faith.
Move to Ohio Austin had moved her law practice to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1933. That year, she represented the NAACP in its protest of allocations of public school funding, as segregated black schools were underfunded in comparison to ones for white students. She was approved to plead cases before the Ohio Supreme Court. She was also appointed to the Board of Trustees of Wilberforce University, an HBCU in Ohio that had been owned and operated by the AME Church since the Civil War.*
Outside of work, Austin led a private study class on the Bahá'i Faith in 1935. The following year, she served on an all-Cincinnati, biracial YWCA committee that met at the West End YWCA, which served blacks who predominated in that part of the city. Affordable housing was a critical issue for lower income people in the city, but the YWCA had room for only 125 residents, and some could not afford to pay both room and board. The committee also met at a site for girls in the Y in Walnut Hills, then a predominately white suburb of the city.
Assistant attorney general In 1937 Austin was confirmed in her appointment as an assistant attorney general for Ohio under Herbert S. Duffy which made news in a number of venues,*
still living at the address of her family.