Fortson, Bettiola Heloise · Notable Kentucky African Americans Database

(born: 1890  -  died: 1917) Bettiola Fortson, poet, essayist, and suffragist, was born in Hopkinsville, KY, the daughter of James Fortson.

At the age of nine, she was a boarder with the William Evans family on E. 13th Street in Hopkinsville, KY, according to the 1900 U.S. Federal Census. When she turned 12, she went to live with her aunt, Toreada Mallory, on Armour Avenue in Chicago, IL. When her aunt went abroad, Fortson lived with her mother, Mattie Arnold, in Evansville, IN, where she attended Clark High School. The family of four lived on Oak Street (Mattie, a widow, and her children Robert, Bettie, and James Jr.) [source: 1910 U.S. Federal Census].

Bettiola Fortson would become a poet who became poet laureate of her high school class. She graduated in 1910 and returned to Chicago where she worked in the feather industry and owned her own millinery business. She was a journalist and president of the University Society Club, 2nd vice president of the Alpha Suffrage Club, and city organizer of the Chicago Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. She was the author of the 1915 collection Mental Pearls: original poems and essays.

For more see Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood, by A. M. Knupfer; Six Poets of Racial Uplift, by E. T. Battle, et. al.; Black American Writers Past and Present, by T. G. Rush; and "Miss Bettiola Fortson," Broad Ax, 8/1/1914, p. 2 [picture with article].