Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr.

Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr. was a poet, writer, playwright, and community leader raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Cotter was one of the earliest African-American playwrights to be published. He was known as "Kentucky's first Negro poet with real creative ability." Cotter was born at the start of the American Civil War, and was raised in poverty with no formal education until the age of 22. He later became an educator and an advocate of black education.

Cotter grew up in a family of mixed racial heritage. His father, Michael J. Cotter, was a white man of Scots-Irish ancestry, and his mother, Martha Vaughn, was a freeborn black woman of mixed heritage.

On July 22, 1891, Cotter married Maria F. Cox, a fellow teacher, with whom he had four children: Leonidas, Florence, Olivia, and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.

After completing the third grade, Cotter dropped out to help support his family. Cotter worked in manual labor and various odd jobs until the age of 22, where he joined the first and newly created Louisville night school for black students. Cotter attended night school for ten months, earning his high school diploma and teaching credentials.

According to Metzger (1989): "There is little specific information about either the extent of Cotter's education—it seems certain that he never attended college or completed a degree-granting program—or his professional life as an educator. Although some writers had felt that Cotter must have attended college, his love of writing and of literature might just have well stemmed from the many books that his mother had read to him as a child. And although Cotter's contributions to black education are now seen as extremely important, at the time he was working, few details of such work were preserved for later study. What is now certain is that Cotter became a respected writer, although when he first began to write is not clear."

Once becoming qualified to teach, Cotter got his first job in the Cloverport Public School system. The conditions at Cloverport were extremely poor. Cotter made the best of teaching children in a small one-roomed school house with dirt flooring and no heating. This marked the start of Cotter's long dedication to the education of black children and a commitment to his community. After two years teaching at Cloverport, Cotter taught at a nearby private school before moving to the Louisville Public School system two years later. His first job within the Louisville Public School system was at Western Colored School, which was located in an all-black neighborhood. Here Cotter would teach for the next four years, from 1889 to 1893. Attesting to his belief in black education, in 1893 Cotter founded the Paul Laurence Dunbar School, named after the poet and friend Paul Laurence Dunbar. Cotter served as principal of this black high school until 1911, whereupon he took the position of principal at Samuel Coleridge-Taylor School and held the post until 1942.

Along with his 53-year career as an educator, Cotter worked for racial advancement with many local and national organizations, including Louisville Colored Orphans Home Society, Kentucky Educational Association, Author's League, Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and NAACP.