Sadie Chandler Cole
*Sadie Chandler Cole's birth is celebrated on this date in 1865. She was a Black singer, music educator, and activist.
Sadie Chandler was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was the daughter of Abraham Washington Chandler and Sarah Hatfield Chandler. Her parents were involved in the Underground Railroad movement and helped found a Baptist church in Cincinnati. Around 1891, Chandler was a young woman and a member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
Soon after, Sadie Chandler married Thomas A. Cole. They lived in Detroit, Michigan, before they moved to Los Angeles, California. Her husband became a deputy in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. They had two daughters, Florence and Eunice. Her daughter Florence Cole Talbert became a professional soprano singer and voice teacher. In 1903, she sang at a Los Angeles scholarship fundraiser for Vada Watson to attend the University of Southern California.
As early as 1908, she was active in Black political organizing in California; that year, she attended a rally of the Los Angeles branch of the National Negro American Political League, speaking on "The Part Women Have Played in the Settlement of the World's Great Problems." She was active in the Los Angeles chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. in 1913, serving as the chapter's first vice-president, and attended national conferences. She broke dishes and removed a "Negroes Not Wanted" sign from a lunch stand on Broadway in Los Angeles in the 1920s after she was refused service, then overcharged.
The police arrived at the scene and sided with Cole. In 1926, she sang at the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs' special memorial service for Margaret Murray Washington. She also helped to desegregate the beaches in Los Angeles County. After the closure of Bruce's Beach, a beach resort for black swimmers, she participated in a 1927 "swim in" at a whites-only beach in Manhattan Beach, California. She was one of four women representing the national association at the Pan-Pacific Conference in Hawaii in 1928.
In later adulthood, she directed choruses in jubilee-style singing. Sadie Chandler Cole died in 1941, aged 76 years. Her gravesite is in Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles.
