Elbert Frank Cox was born Dec. 5, 1895, in Evansville, Indiana, and attended segregated public schools that were chronically underfunded for Black students.
When Cox was six, a mob of white residents stormed the county jail after the murder of a white police officer, setting off a four-day riot that left as many as 13 people dead; it took a state militia of 300 men, called in by the governor, to end it, and roughly 2,000 of the city’s 8,000 Black residents fled in its aftermath. The Ku Klux Klan later established its Indiana headquarters in Evansville in 1920. Cox’s family stayed. Cox looked up to the Black teachers in his segregated schools, who pushed literacy and academic achievement despite having few resources to work with.
Cox enrolled at Indiana University Bloomington in 1913 to study physics and mathematics, one of just three Black students in his undergraduate class alongside his brother, Avalon. He took a wide range of coursework beyond his major, including German, English, Latin, history, hygiene, chemistry, education and philosophy, and earned A’s in every math course.
That achievement came despite treatment that made clear he was not considered an equal member of the student body: his transcript carried the word “colored” printed across the top, as did every Black students at the time, and in at least one class, Black students were made to sit in the hallway with the classroom door propped open so they could listen in rather than sit alongside their white classmates…