Rachel B. Noel (1918-2008) knew the importance of education and was passionate about making schooling available to children of all races at a time of intense segregation.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. And this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s Local Legend knew the importance of education and was passionate about making schooling available to children of all races at a time of intense segregation. She helped bring the fight for integrated schools in her hometown of Denver all the way to the Supreme Court. She was an educator, an advocate, and certainly a hometown hero: please welcome Rachel B. Noel.
Rachel was born Rachel Bassette in Hampton, Virginia on January 15, 1918. From birth, she was surrounded by a family that recognized the power of a good education. Her grandfather was formerly enslaved and became one of the first African American lawyers in the country. He also went on to found one of the first schools for Black children in the U.S. Rachel’s father was also a successful lawyer, and her mother was a college-educated teacher at a time when very few women held a degree.
Rachel followed in her family’s footsteps to earn multiple degrees of her own. She attended Hampton University, graduated top of her class, and traveled to Tennessee’s Fisk University to earn a master’s degree in sociology. There, she met a medical student named Edmond Noel, and the two quickly became a couple. Rachel graduated in 1940 and headed to D.C., where she worked at a home for troubled girls.
In 1942, Rachel and Edmond got married just before Edmond was sent to serve in World War II. While he was abroad, Rachel returned to Fisk and worked as a researcher in race relations.
In 1949, Edmond took on a new job as a staff physician at Rose Medical Center in Denver. With this title, he became the first African American doctor to work in a Denver hospital. Rachel’s job search in their new home was far less fruitful. She was continually turned away from positions due to her race. It took six years for her to finally get a position at the Denver Human Rights Commission.
The Noels first settled in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, where most residents were African-American. But when Rachel and Edmond’s children grew old enough to go to school, the family moved to the mostly-white Park Hill neighborhood to get access to better-performing schools.
Rachel’s family quickly began to feel the effects of deep-seated racism around them. When Rachel’s daughter tried to join the local Girl Scouts Troop, she was turned away. In response, Rachel and another Black mom founded Troop 508, a group specifically for minority girls in the neighborhood.
In 1960, Rachel learned her daughter would be transferred from the nearby Park Hill school to Barrett Elementary. Barrett was a much smaller school. It was underfunded, equipped with outdated textbooks, and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Its students were almost all Black and Hispanic. Rachel saw this pattern repeated when her son entered middle and high school. Both times, he was sent to a different school than his white neighbors, and became part of a majority student of color cohort.
Rachel realized early on that her children’s reassignments were part of a larger problem. The district was redrawing attendance lines in order to corral white kids into the better-funded schools, and boxing children of color out. She took it upon herself to investigate further. In 1965, she ran for the Denver Board of Education. There, she became the first African American member of the Board, and the first Black woman to hold public office anywhere in the State of Colorado.
On the Board, Rachel’s committee found the state’s public schools were guilty of de facto segregation. In other words, although the separation of white and minority students wasn’t written into law, the state held the right to redraw school boundaries as they saw fit. More often than not, they did so any time a student of color was about to enter a white school.
Rachel became an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement. She even met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during one of his visits to Denver. Though she practiced peaceful protest, she found new urgency in April of 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated. That same month, Rachel introduced Resolution 1520, also known as the “Noel Resolution,” to the Denver Board of Education.
The resolution explained the findings of de facto segregation in Denver schools and called for an immediate end to the practice. It proposed integrating students from the overpopulated schools in the state into the larger, better-funded ones. It also called for revisions to white-washed textbooks in order to recenter people of color as part of historical narratives.
The resolution incited a deep divide in Denver. White parents protested violently against it. Rachel even received death threats by mail and phone warning her to step away from the issue. She remained steadfast in her work, and gained the support of hundreds of students across the city who joined counter-protests.
The Noel Resolution passed in January of 1969, but the success was short-lived -- just six months later it was repealed by a new school board.
Parents and students alike fought against the reversal. One group of parents organized and sued the district for discrimination in a case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Rachel supported the leader of the case, a parent named Wilfred Keyes, as he received threats and even had his house bombed.
In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that the Denver Public Schools were guilty of de facto segregation and were complicit in keeping schools for minority students in worse condition than those for white students.
Still Rachel’s battle continued.Though the Supreme Court directed Denver schools to integrate, the state dragged its feet. The Court eventually had to order a mandatory busing program, a decision that sparked so much outrage that the Denver Public Schools bus depot was bombed. Even so, the program remained in place until 1995.
After finishing her time on the Board of Education, Rachel accepted a position as a professor of African American Studies at Metropolitan State University and eventually became the head of the department. In 1976, she was appointed by the state governor to the University of Colorado Board of Regents and became its first Black member. After the end of her initial term, she beat 22 opponents to keep the position. She eventually became the first ever woman to serve as Chair of the Board.
Rachel held many other positions in her career. She worked as a consultant for Denver Public Schools, a commissioner for the Denver Housing Authority, and the head of the Black Advisory Committee for the Mayor. She won several Civil Rights awards and honors. In 2004, the Rachel B. Noel Middle School was named in honor of her work in public education. Rachel died peacefully in her sleep in 2008, at 90 years old.
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