Florence Cole Talbert

Florence Cole was born on the seventeenth of June 1890 in Detroit, Michigan, into a household already rich in song. Her mother, Sadie Chandler Cole, was a mezzo-soprano who had sung with the celebrated Fisk Jubilee Singers, and her father, Thomas A. Cole, was a basso admired as a dramatic reader. From such a lineage the child drew both her gift and her calling, beginning piano at the age of six and resolving, it is said, to become a singer after she first beheld a performance of Verdi's Aïda.

She trained at the University of Southern California and at Chicago's Musical College, and on the sixteenth of April 1916 gave a recital at Aeolian Hall in New York. Through the years that followed she toured widely across the United States, her concert soprano carrying the dignity of the spiritual and the grandeur of the operatic stage into halls that had rarely welcomed a Black artist as a leading voice.

In March 1927, at the Teatro Comunale in Cosenza, Italy, she sang the title role of Aïda with a European professional company — becoming the first Black singer to perform a leading operatic role with such a company, and winning acclaim across the Continent. It was the fulfillment of the dream kindled in her girlhood.

Returning home, she gave her later years to teaching, shaping voices at Bishop College, Tuskegee Institute, and Fisk University, and encouraging a young Marian Anderson. She died on the third of April 1961 in Memphis, Tennessee. May the pioneer who opened the great stages be forever honored.