Johnnetta B. Cole

Johnnetta B. Cole
Johnnetta B. Cole
Born	(1936-10-19) October 19, 1936 (age 80) Jacksonville, Florida
Nationality	American
Fields	Anthropology
Institutions	National Museum of African Art Spelman College Bennett College
Alma mater	Oberlin College (B.A) Northwestern University (M.A.) (PhD)

Johnnetta Betsch Cole (born October 19, 1936) is an American anthropologist, educator and museum director. Cole was the first African-American female president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007.

Since 2009, she has been Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, located in Washington, DC. In 2013, the Winston-Salem Chronicle described Cole as a distinguished educator, cultural anthropologist, and humanitarian.

Johnnetta Betsch was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1936. She is a granddaughter of Florida's first black millionaire Abraham Lincoln Lewis and Mary Kingsley Sammis. Sammis' great-grandparents were Zephaniah Kingsley, a slave trader and slave owner, and his wife and former slave Anna Madgigine Jai, originally from present-day Senegal. Her Fort George Island home is protected as Kingsley Plantation, a National Historic Landmark.

Cole enrolled at the age of 15 in Fisk University, a historically black college. She transferred to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she completed a B.A. in anthropology in 1957. She did field research in Liberia, West Africa, in 1960-61. She attended graduate school at Northwestern University, earning her master's (1959) and Ph.D. (1967) in anthropology.