Dora Cole

Dora Cole Norman (1888–1939) was an African-American educator, dancer, theater producer, playwright, and sportswoman whose career spanned athletics, community organizing, and the performing arts. Born to Robert Allen Cole Sr., a carpenter, and Isabella Thomas Weldon, she grew up in a family that had settled in Athens, Georgia after emancipation before relocating to Atlanta. Her eldest brother was Bob Cole, a leading figure in Black musical theatre, and the family received musical education as a matter of course. Norman attended Wadleigh High School for Girls in New York, and by 1904 had formed a friendship with W. E. B. DuBois, who inscribed a copy of The Souls of Black Folk to her.

As a young woman, Norman played basketball alongside her sister Carrie for the New York Girls, one of the first African-American women's basketball teams in the country. The club was founded in 1909 as the female auxiliary of the Alpha Physical Culture Club, America's first all-Black athletic club. Norman played center and served as team captain, with her sister Carrie among the forwards. During the team's first two seasons, 1909–10 and 1910–11, the New York Girls won all their games in the New York–New Jersey championship. In February 1910 the team faced the Jersey Girls in what is recorded as the first game between two independently organized all-Black women's basketball teams, and newspaper accounts praised Norman's teamwork on that occasion. She later married Conrad Norman (1883–1986), one of the Alpha Club's Jamaican-born founders, who had coached the New York Girls. Norman's athletic pursuits extended beyond basketball; she reached number six in the 1921 American Tennis Association rankings.

Norman worked as a reader and theatrical agent in New York while also teaching dancing at the Music School Settlement for Colored People in Harlem, an institution founded in 1911 by Polish-American violinist David Mannes. Her 1914 lectures at the settlement were advertised in the New York Age. In 1913 she served as Director of Dancing for DuBois's historical pageant The Star of Ethiopia, a production directed by Charles Burroughs with musical assistance from Daisy Tapley and a cast of over 300 performers. DuBois later approached her in 1919 about reprising the pageant in Columbus, Ohio. During the First World War, Norman helped lead the Circle for Negro War Relief, which supported the psychological welfare of African-American soldiers and provided assistance to their families. Her daughter Doretta was born in 1915.

Following the war, Norman founded the Colored Players Guild of New York to produce original plays, and she later served as founder-director of the Colored Players Guild at the Harlem YWCA. In 1920 she persuaded Paul Robeson, then an aspiring law student, to perform with her all-Black troupe, the Amateur Players. Robeson took the lead role in Ridgely Torrence's Simon the Cyrenian at the Harlem YMCA. In March 1921 Norman performed interpretive dances at Hampton University's annual gymnastic exhibition, including a piece set to Melville Charlton's Poem Erotique and another to the first number of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Scenes from an Imaginary Ballet. That same year she contributed a game to the inaugural volume of The Brownies' Book, a children's magazine published by DuBois and A. G. Dill, and served alongside DuBois and NAACP figure James Weldon Johnson on the executive committee of America's Making, a New York exposition held in October and November 1921 celebrating the immigrant contribution to American society.

In March 1922 Norman persuaded Robeson to return to the stage as a Broadway lead in Mary Hoyt Wiborg's debut production Taboo, set on a Louisiana plantation, in which he played a wandering minstrel. The cast was coached by Charles Gilpin and included English actress Margaret Wycherly, though the play closed after a short run. Norman's Broadway career included her 1924 appearance in Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings, in which she played Hattie alongside Robeson, who portrayed Jim Harris.

In 1926 Norman took a year's leave of absence from the New York Public School System to work as a dramatic specialist with the Playground and Recreational Association of America. She wrote and directed Loyalty's Gift, a historical pageant play combining acting and music. On July 12, 1926, an all-Black cast that included a chorus of 800 singers performed Loyalty's Gift before a mixed-race audience of more than 8,000 people as part of the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. That same year she served on the executive committee of the Fourth Pan-African Congress, held in New York City in 1927, and was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Her daughter Doretta died in June 1938, and Norman herself died the following year, in 1939.