Cora Catherine Calhoun Horne

Biographical Database of Black Women Suffragists

Biography of Cora Catherine Calhoun Horne (Horn), 1865-1932

By Nancy Page Fernandez, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Fullerton

“Service was her religion. She enjoyed life to the fullest and was not forgetful of life’s responsibilities.” Letter from E.F. Horne to W.E.B. Du Bois, Sept. 16, 1932

Cora Calhoun Horne lived a fascinating and complicated life, one dedicated to serving her family and African American struggles for dignity, equality and social justice. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 1865, to newlyweds Moses and Atlanta Mary Fernando Calhoun. Cora’s 35-year-old freedman father had been the house slave butler owned by Andrew Bonaparte (A.B.) Calhoun, one of Georgia’s wealthiest and most powerful men; Cora’s mother was born free in 1845. Moses Calhoun started a small grocery, followed by a restaurant and boardinghouse. As a successful entrepreneur and landowner, he quickly joined Atlanta’s black bourgeoisie.

Cora Calhoun and her sister Lena, born in 1869, grew up belles of Atlanta’s black society. They received the best education available, attending the Storrs Elementary School founded by the American Missionary Association to serve black youth. In 1881 Cora earned a teaching degree from Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta). The Calhoun family participated actively in the First Congregational Church where the integrated membership openly defied Jim Crow. Sisters Cora and Lena enjoyed an active social life filled with dances, picnics and opportunities to meet eligible bachelors including a rising thinker named W.E.B. Du Bois.

Around 1886 Cora met Edwin F. Horn, born in 1859 in Tennessee to a British father and indigenous or mixed race mother. The Horns raised their family in Evansville, Indiana, where Edwin grew up to love poetry, music and writing. When they met, Edwin, already twice a widower, was a successful newspaper owner and teacher with striking hazel eyes and wavy brown hair. The pair married October 26, 1887, in her parents’ Birmingham home.

The couple’s first child, Errol Stanley, was born in 1889, followed by Edwin “Teddy” Fletcher in 1893. Their third son Frank Smith was born in 1899 by which time the family had left the increasingly segregated and violent South for New York city. After living briefly in the West Fifties “Black Bohemia” area of the city with its rich literary and cultural milieu, the Horns moved to a respectable brownstone on Chauncey Street, joining Brooklyn’s Black middle class. Their final child, John Burke, arrived in 1905.

While motherhood demanded much of Cora’s time and energy, organizational and political connections provided avenues for exercising her social consciousness. In the late 1890s she became a founding member of the Brooklyn chapter of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). After a white instructor with less seniority was promoted over him, Edwin left teaching and took a position as secretary with the United Colored Democracy, better known as the Afro-American Tammany Hall Organization. He changed his party affiliation to Democrat and added an “e” to the family name. Edwin worked closely with T. Thomas Fortune, editor of The New York Age and his new mentor. Fortune was also a supporter of women’s rights, publishing and speaking about the “New African American Woman.” Both Cora and Edwin became early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Like-minded women friends and Edwin’s political circles informed and sustained Cora’s civic interests while she focused on family responsibilities.

In the early-1910s John Burke entered primary school, and Cora could begin to work actively for Black and women’s causes. Family members recall that she became a passionate supporter of woman suffrage. She does not appear to have participated in a group devoted solely to votes for women, however, suffrage weaves throughout her organizational affiliations and personal networks. The Equal Suffrage League, an organization of “colored women suffragists,” was active in Brooklyn as early as 1910 and associated with the NACW. In September 1912 Cora attended a social gathering to honor Mrs. Carrie W. Clifford Carrie W. Clifford--a NACW national leader, prominent African American writer, NAACP member, and suffrage activist--held at the Brooklyn home of Addie Waites Hunton who was a founding member of the NACW, active in the Equal Suffrage League and employed in outreach by the National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Clifford was also honored at a reception hosted by the Equal Suffrage League. Other guests at Hunton’s event were Dr. Verina Morton-Jones—a black woman physician who was President of the Equal Suffrage League, co-founder of the Lincoln Settlement House, and a local NAACP leader as well as Mrs. Minta Trotman, an NACW member and future President of the Civic League, who also assisted Hunton during the celebration. Cora no doubt knew these women and other attendees from her NACW and NAACP affiliations. Her personal and organizational networks advanced multiple social causes, including equal suffrage for women.

Cora quickly expanded her civic service. In 1913, perhaps encouraged by Hunton, she became active in the YWCA. Cora organized the girls work program and directed a Red Cross unit to make and repair surgical bandages. In recognition of her contributions, Cora was appointed to the mayor’s Victory Committee. She continued actively participating in the NACW and the NAACP and by 1918 was also involved with the Brooklyn League on Urban Conditions and the Big Brother and Big Sister Federation, organizations in which she would hold many leadership positions and with which she would continue working until the end of her life.

During the mid-1910s the woman suffrage campaign gained momentum nationally, and especially in New York. Black women organized into suffrage study clubs. White suffragists canvassed New York neighborhoods to recruit black women to march in suffrage parades. The Colored Woman’s Suffrage Club, Brooklyn, hosted Mrs. D.W. Barker, Woman’s Suffrage Party, at their February 1914 meeting and organized “the first colored mass meeting planned for this city” for March 2. October 1917, in a final drive to support the New York suffrage amendment, 25,000 supporters—including Black women--marched down Fifth Avenue. Wives, mothers and sisters with relatives in military service paraded as a group, each carrying a flag to recognize their loved one. Perhaps Cora, whose eldest son Errol was in the army under General Pershing in Mexico, marched with them. The New York suffrage amendment won in 1917 due, in part, to black women’s activism.