Allen E. Cole

Allen Eugene Cole was born on the twenty-third of February 1893 at the coal town of Pomeroy, West Virginia, the son of Lewis Cole — a West Virginia coal miner — and Anna Cole. He was raised in the segregated Black coal-mining community of West Virginia and at the family relocation to Cleveland, Ohio in 1917.

He was hired in 1918 as a porter at the Cleveland Hotel Statler — and apprenticed at the principal Cleveland studio of the white portrait photographer Henry Voigt during evenings from 1918 to 1922. He completed the principal Voigt studio apprenticeship in 1922.

He opened the principal Cole Studio at 9904 Cedar Avenue at Cleveland in 1922 — at the principal Cedar-Central Black commercial corridor of post-Great-Migration Cleveland. The principal Cole Studio operated at the Cedar Avenue address from 1922 to 1970 — for forty-eight years.

He was the first Black member of the Photographers Association of America in 1928 — and the principal Cleveland Black portrait studio of the principal post-Great-Migration Cleveland African American community.

He produced across the principal forty-eight years at the Cole Studio the principal photographic record of the principal Cleveland African American community of the mid-twentieth century — including the principal portraits of the principal Cleveland Black professional and middle-class community, the principal Cleveland Black wedding portraits, the principal Cleveland Black graduating-class portraits, and the principal Cleveland Black Baptist church portraits.

He was the principal Cleveland portrait studio of the principal post-Brown Cleveland civil rights movement — including the principal portraits of Carl B. Stokes (the principal first Black mayor of a major American city, elected at Cleveland in November 1967) and the principal Cleveland NAACP leadership.

He was the principal portraitist of the principal post-1947 Cleveland Indians-and-Cleveland-Browns Black professional athletes — including the principal Larry Doby portraits of 1947 (Doby's principal post-Major-League-debut studio portraits at the Cole Studio in the principal post-Jackie-Robinson American League integration period) and the principal Marion Motley and Bill Willis portraits of the principal late-1940s Cleveland Browns integration period.

His principal archive of approximately thirty-five thousand surviving negatives of the principal mid-twentieth-century Cleveland African American community was donated to the Western Reserve Historical Society at Cleveland in 1980.

He died at Cleveland on the eleventh of April 1970 of natural causes, at seventy-seven.

He is honored here as the principal portraitist of the Cleveland African American community.