Helen Elsie Austin

In 1872 Rev. Dotson was elected as a Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives, during Reconstruction.

Austin believed that her mother was highly regarded by Booker T. Washington and his wife because of Rev. Dotson's achievements.

Helen Elsie Austin is generally recorded as having been born at Tuskegee.

Her parents married June 10, 1906.

They encouraged their children to become educated and to work for advancement of their race.

Helen Elsie Austin (May 10, 1908– Oct 26, 2004), known as H. Elsie Austin as an adult, was an American attorney, civil rights leader, and diplomat from the Midwest.

Helen Elsie Austin was born in 1908 to Mary Louise Austin, née Dotson (sometimes spelled Dodson), and George J. Austin at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama; both parents taught and lived at the Institute.

Her mother taught Household Science and her father was Commandant of Men; he was a veteran of the Spanish-American War.

She had a brother, George J. Austin Jr. The family was still at Tuskegee in 1910, according to the US Census,

George's sister Jennie Charlotte Austin was among African-American students admitted to the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati in the early 20th century; she graduated in the class of 1911.

Austin's mother was the daughter of Mentor Dotson, an Alabama minister and teacher, and his wife.

By 1912, her father worked as Commandant of Men at the Prairie View Normal School in Austin, Texas, established for African-American students.

This normal school, initially founded to train teachers for lower grades, developed over time as Prairie View A&M University.

In 1914, her father wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Age, a prominent black newspaper in New York City.

He took issue with a photograph showing African-American attendees at a fancy ball, noting that all the men were with women of lighter skin.

He argued that it was an example of colorism in the black community, which favored light-skinned women.

Further, he wrote that concubinage of black women in the South (and elsewhere) was still a problem.

Before the US entered Great War started, George Austin sought to join officer training at a camp in New York.

He was not accepted because of the policy of the US War Department, He entered Fort Des Moines Provisional Army Officer Training School, newly created to train African-American officers to lead troops in the US Army, as a first lieutenant; the training ran from June to October, 1917.

Like other men of a range of ages, he registered for the draft.

After the war, the family settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, by January 1920.

Her father was secretary of director of a civic league supported by the black community in Port Huron, Michigan, located on Lake Huron of the Great Lakes.

He moved to Ohio to become director of the nearby Zanesville Civic League, which served black students in the city of the same name.

It was financially supported by black and white citizens.

Her mother Mary Louise Austin worked at Stowe School in Cincinnati, named after Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Decades later, she recorded the following anecdote about her first day at Walnut High School, in what was then a suburb of Cincinnati:

"(After a reading by the teacher from a textbook about the contributions by all the races, but that said the black race made no significant contribution and had been created to be subservient to the more fortunate races.) Can you imagine? Two little black girls in a school full of white children, and a classroom of white children, and with all the candor and cruelty of the young, the entire class looked at us and there were of course a few snickers and grins. It was then that I remembered my grandmother. I felt as if the klan was standing there with the guns trained on me. With great resentment and resolve I stood up and said 'I was taught in a black school that Africans worked iron before Europeans knew anything about it. I was taught that they knew how to cast bronze in making statues and that they worked in gold and ivory so beautifully that the European nations came to their shores tho buy their carvings and statues.

That is what I was taught in a black school.

In 1934 Austin became a member of the Baháʼí Faith in Cincinnati.

Ten years later she was elected on the National Spiritual Assembly in the United States, the institution in charge of the affairs in the country.

She was a Bahá'i for the rest of her life.

Decades later, while serving in Africa, she joined what was then the regional national assembly of North West Africa.

The first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Cincinnati School of Law, Austin was appointed in 1937 as an assistant attorney general in Ohio.

She was the first black and the first woman to hold this position.

Austin held legal positions in Washington, DC for several federal agencies during the New Deal.

She also worked to advance civil rights for African Americans, serving on numerous committees, and in executive positions.

She consulted for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Council of Negro Women.

She also served as president for the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, "one of the largest African American women's organization in the world."

From 1960 to 1970, she served for 10 years with the United States Information Agency (USIA) on various cultural projects in Africa.

He was later credited with serving with the 65th Machine Gun Company (which might be the UK unit of the same name).