James Major Colson (15 October 1855–22 May 1909), educator, was born in Petersburg and was the son of Fannie Meade Bolling Colson and James Major Colson, a prosperous shoemaker whose family had been free for at least three generations. His grandfather, William Nelson Colson, was a merchant who traded between Liberia and the United States. After his mother taught him to read, Colson attended a local private school established for African American children. In 1868 the city of Petersburg, with additional money from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands and the Peabody Education Fund, established segregated public schools. Colson received instruction at Elementary School Number 1 (also called the Harrison Street School) and beginning in January 1870 at the new Colored High School (forerunner of Peabody High School).

In 1872 Colson left school to become an apprentice in his father's shop. Setting out on his own, he traveled to Danville, where he worked part-time as a cobbler and also taught in nearby Henry County. Determined to resume his education and with assistance from an uncle living in Middleborough, Massachusetts, Colson enrolled in high school there in the autumn of 1877. After graduating in June 1879, he matriculated at Dartmouth College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and in 1883 received an A.B. His diaries from the period reveal an introspective, self-critical student longing for improvement and advancement. Later in life he reported that he had received an A.M. from Dartmouth in 1893, but the college has no record of awarding him that degree.

Colson returned to Petersburg in 1883 and worked briefly as a clerk in the United States Internal Revenue office. He secured an appointment as instructor at the new Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (after 1902 the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute and after 1979 Virginia State University) and on 20 September 1883 became a member of the school's founding faculty. After the head of the school resigned, Colson served as acting principal from 10 September to 31 December 1885, at which time John Mercer Langston became the college's first president.

On 3 February 1886 Colson married Kate Deaver Hill, assistant principal at the Petersburg Colored High School. In 1887 she joined her husband at the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, where she served for one year as principal of the normal preparatory department. Their three sons and two daughters included Edna Meade Colson, who also became an influential Petersburg-area educator.

Colson taught various subjects, including Latin. Credited with establishing the school's science program, he was elected chair of the Department of Natural Science in 1887. That year he also organized Kappa Gamma Chi, the school's honor society, which held its initial exercises in June. Colson urged the college administrators to add agricultural education to the curriculum. He contacted state and federal agencies in an effort both to develop his own understanding of the subject and to build a library of information on modern farming methods. Colson invited outside lecturers to his classes and appealed to the college to provide him with an appropriate classroom, adequate supplies, a plot of land for experimental cultivation, and an assistant. He believed that the institution should be a resource for Black farmers in adjacent counties and provide them with services that they could not obtain elsewhere.

Colson's interests extended beyond the Ettrick campus. He was a founder and first secretary of the African American chapter of Petersburg's Young Men's Christian Association. In May 1898 he traveled to Atlanta University and at the third in a series of conferences on the Study of Negro Problems presented a paper entitled "Organized Efforts of the Negro for Social Betterment in Petersburg, Virginia." At the recommendation of W. E. B. Du Bois, on 28 December 1899 Colson was elected a member of the American Negro Academy, which invited him to read a paper before the membership in January 1901. A regular participant in the annual Hampton Negro Conference, he served on its executive committee and chaired the Committee on General Statistics in 1902 and the Committee on Charities and Corrections in 1903 and 1904.

Unable to realize his plans for an agricultural program at the underfunded normal school, Colson resigned in 1904 to become superintendent of the John A. Dix Industrial School, at Dinwiddie, in Dinwiddie County. His wife joined him as the school's matron and housekeeper. A modest facility with a single unfinished building and one instructor on opening day in 1900, the school (under Colson's guidance renamed the Dinwiddie Agricultural and Industrial School) by 1908 boasted a faculty of twelve and a student body of 114. In February 1908 its main building burned at a loss of about $20,000, but several smaller buildings were saved.

Colson held Farmers' Conferences at the school in 1904 and in 1906. In the latter year he delivered an address on "The Education Element in Agriculture" at the annual meeting of the Virginia State Teachers Association at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Colson was treasurer of the National Association of Colored Teachers (in 1907 renamed the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools) from 1906 until his death. He served as president of the Dinwiddie County Colored Teachers Association, of the Negro School Improvement League of Dinwiddie County, and in 1908 and 1909 of the Virginia State Teachers Association. James Major Colson died of stomach cancer at his Petersburg home on 22 May 1909 and was buried in Eastview Cemetery. On the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute campus, Griffin House was renamed Colson Hall in his honor. A new science building, erected on the same site and dedicated in 1940, became the James Major Colson Science Hall.

Sources Consulted:
Alumnus file and necrology, Dartmouth College Archives, Hanover, N.H.; "The Colson Family," Negro History Bulletin 10 (1946): 3–7 (portrait on 4), 9; Colson family Bible (with birth and marriage dates), diaries, autobiographical information, and correspondence in Colson-Hill Family Papers, Virginia State University, Ettrick; Marriage Register, Petersburg, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Luther P. Jackson, A History of the Virginia State Teachers Association (1937), 50–52; Edgar Toppin, Loyal Sons and Daughters: Virginia State University, 1882 to 1992 (1992), 17, 22–25 (portrait on 23), 29; obituaries in Petersburg Daily Index-Appeal, 23 May 1909, and Dartmouth Alumni Magazine 1 (1909): 319; memorial in Hampton Bulletin 5 (1909): 11–12.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Donald W. Gunter.

How to cite this page:
Donald W. Gunter, "James Major Colson (1855–1909)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Colson_James_Major, accessed [today's date]).

Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.