03/20/2026
The amazing woman behind our name! Mrs. Josephine Dobbs Clement! 🦅🦅🦅
A postal worker who sorted mail on trains sent all six of his daughters to Spelman College. His fourth daughter, Josephine Dobbs Clement, moved to a city she'd visited once and became the first Black woman to chair its school board.
The school named after her graduated 100% of its students.
Six Spelman diplomas hung in one house on Houston Street in Atlanta, Georgia. Not one, not two, not three, but six.
John Wesley Dobbs sorted mail on trains for thirty-two years. He married Irene Ophelia Thompson in 1906, and they had six daughters, and every single one of them walked across a stage at Spelman College with a degree in her hand.
He worked extra jobs to make it happen. He forbade his girls from attending segregated theaters or amusement parks because there was no pleasure in going in the back door.
He did not want them to learn to accept a lesser version of themselves. They did not.
Irene, the eldest, earned a doctorate in French from the University of Grenoble. Willie became the chair of the language division at Jackson State University.
Millicent became a college professor specializing in African history. Mattiwilda sang at La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera and refused every invitation to perform before a segregated audience.
June became one of the first African American sexologists in the country. And then there was Josephine.
Josephine Ophelia Dobbs was the fourth daughter, born February 9, 1918. She graduated from Spelman in 1937 and had her master's from Columbia University by the following year.
She taught at Morris Brown College in Atlanta for two years while the war loomed over everything. On Christmas Eve of 1941, she married William Clement.
William worked for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest Black-owned business in the United States at the time, founded on Parrish Street in Durham in 1898. Washington and Du Bois alike had visited that street to admire what Black enterprise had built there.
When William was transferred to the home office in Durham in 1946, Josephine packed up her family and followed. She knew almost nothing about the city.
She had been there exactly once. She and William had driven through on their way to New York and spent one night at the home of James Shepard, president of what would become North Carolina Central University.
Her father and Shepard were both Grand Masters of their respective Prince Hall Masonic lodges. That was the connection, one handshake between two Masons in two different states.
That one night was the sum total of her knowledge of Durham. People in Atlanta thought they were out of their minds for leaving, because in those days, you did not leave Atlanta to go anywhere.
But Josephine went. She arrived in October with a baby on her hip, moved into a house William had prepared on Lincoln Street, and started building a life in a city that did not yet know her name.
She found Durham organized by the same rules as everywhere else in the South. The YWCA was segregated, and so was the League of Women Voters.
Both were organizations that spoke publicly about fairness and civic participation. Both drew lines at who could participate.
Josephine walked into them and helped take those lines apart. She did not make speeches about it and she did not wait for permission.
She joined, she pushed, and she desegregated both organizations from the inside. Her father had not sent her to Spelman to sit quietly at the back of any room.
For years after that, she raised five children and taught part-time at North Carolina Central University, fitting her classes around her family's schedule. She volunteered at the Durham Children's House, served on the city-county library board, and directed the Better Health Foundation.
Nobody was writing about her. Nobody had to be.
In 1973, the Durham City Council appointed her to the city's Board of Education. She was the first Black woman to serve on it.
She was not elected that first time. She was chosen, placed there by a council that could no longer pretend the board did not need the voice of someone who understood what the children on the other side of the color line were actually experiencing.
Two years later, in 1975, the North Carolina General Assembly made the school board an elected body. Josephine ran and won.
She won again in 1979. She became part of the first Black-majority school board in the entire state of North Carolina.
In 1978, she became the first Black woman to chair the board. She held that position for five years.
During her tenure, the courts ordered Durham's schools to desegregate, and white families left. The racial composition of the city's school system shifted dramatically.
Josephine did not flinch from it. She had watched her father register twenty thousand Black voters in Atlanta between 1936 and 1946 when fewer than six hundred had been registered before, and she understood that change does not arrive gently.
The people who stay in the room when the room empties out are the ones who decide what gets built next. Under her chairmanship, Durham selected its first African American superintendent of schools.
She had taken the same system that once had no room for a woman who looked like her and placed a Black man at the top of it. After a decade on the board of education, she resigned and became a Durham County Commissioner.
She was elected in November 1984 and served three terms until 1990. She co-chaired Governor James Hunt's campaigns in Durham County in both 1980 and 1984.
There is a detail about her father that holds the shape of this whole family's story. John Wesley Dobbs spent his entire adult life fighting for the vote and for the schools.
He registered those twenty thousand voters in Atlanta. He co-founded the Atlanta Negro Voters League and was called the unofficial mayor of Sweet Auburn, the spine of Black Atlanta, the street he loved so deeply that he gave it its name.
On August 30, 1961, the evening of the day Atlanta's city schools were finally desegregated, John Wesley Dobbs died. He had lived his entire life under segregation and left this world on the exact day the schools opened.
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at his funeral. Thurgood Marshall was a pallbearer.
Twelve years later, in a different state, the man's fourth daughter sat on a school board. She was the first Black woman to hold that seat, finishing what he started, in a city he barely knew, because that is what the Dobbs daughters did.
Josephine Dobbs Clement died on March 23, 1998, of Sjogren syndrome. She was eighty years old.
Six years after her death, a school opened on the campus of North Carolina Central University. It was the same university whose president had hosted her for that one night in the 1940s, the one night she knew of Durham before she knew everything about it.
The school was a partnership between Durham Public Schools and NCCU, housed in the old Robinson Science Building. They named it the Josephine Dobbs Clement Early College High School.
When the planners chose the name, Cecelia Steppe-Jones, the former dean of NCCU's School of Education, said they wanted the name of someone who had been an advocate for children. They chose Josephine.
The school receives over four hundred applications a year for roughly one hundred openings. In the 2012-2013 school year, it achieved a 100 percent graduation rate.
In 2019, the United States Department of Education named it a Blue Ribbon School. Every student who entered that building walked out with a diploma.
Her father sorted mail on trains for thirty-two years so six daughters could walk across a stage at Spelman. His fourth daughter left Atlanta for a city she visited once and spent fifty-two years making sure somebody else's children could walk across a stage too.
Six diplomas in one house on Houston Street. One hundred percent graduation in a building that carries her name.
That is the math of what it means when a family decides that education is not a gift but a debt you pay forward until every child you can reach has what your father made sure you had. The street where Josephine grew up is no longer called Houston Street.
Her nephew Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta, renamed it John Wesley Dobbs Avenue in 1994. But the stepping stone at the front of the old family house still reads the old address, 540 Houston Street, carved into marble.
The old name is carved into the marble. The new name hangs on the sign above it, and somewhere between the two, the Dobbs family did their work.
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