Florence Cole Talbert

Florence Cole was born on the seventeenth of June 1890 at Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Sarah Cole, a singer who had been a soloist of the Fisk Jubilee Singers under Ella Sheppard Moore in the 1880s, and Thomas Cole, a railroad porter. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1900 when her father took a Southern Pacific Railroad posting at the new Los Angeles terminus.

She was placed at twelve at the Cumnock School of Expression at Los Angeles and at sixteen at the University of Southern California Music Conservatory. She transferred in 1909 to the Chicago Musical College, where she completed the bachelor’s degree in voice in 1916 — among the first Black graduates of the institution — and won the institution’s gold medal at graduation for her performance of the Mad Scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

She made her New York concert debut at Aeolian Hall on the twenty-third of April 1918 in a programme of Italian opera arias and German Lieder.

She was admitted in 1925 to the Chicago Musical College’s graduate programme in vocal pedagogy and at the same time to private study under the Italian baritone Mario Sammarco at Milan from 1925 to 1927. She sang at the Milanese Teatro alla Scala studio concerts of 1926 and at the Roman Teatro Lirico of January 1927.

She was engaged on the recommendation of Sammarco by the Cosenza Municipal Opera at Cosenza, in Calabria, southern Italy, for the title role of Verdi’s Aïda in the 1927 spring season. She performed the role on the twenty-second of May 1927 at the Teatro Comunale Alfonso Rendano of Cosenza — the first Black singer to perform a leading operatic role with a European opera company.

She gave further European performances at Verona, Pavia, Rome and Venice across the closing years of the 1920s, and returned to the United States in 1930.

She was named in 1930 head of the voice department of the Bishop College at Marshall, Texas, the position she held until 1934, and from 1934 to 1942 head of the voice department of the Tuskegee Institute, succeeding her predecessor in the post Carl Diton.

She died at Memphis, Tennessee on the third of April 1961 of complications of cancer, at seventy.

She is honored here as the first Black singer to head a European operatic cast.