Era Bell Thompson - Early Years

Early Years

In 1914, her parents moved Thompson and her three brothers to Driscoll, North Dakota where they were the only black family in the small community, and she and her brothers were often the only African-Americans in the schools they attended. Thompson would find herself in similar situations for much of her youth and into early adulthood. She wrote years later of her ignorance of blacks before she moved to Chicago following her graduation from college.

Thompson graduated from Bismarck High, where she had excelled in sports and pursued journalism, often to cope with the isolation she often felt. She enrolled at the University of North Dakota in 1925, and she excelled in track and field, breaking several school records, tying two national records and earning the distinction of being one of the state’s greatest athletes. However, during her second year of college, an extended bout with pleurisy left her too debilitated to run track and forced her to leave school.

She moved to Chicago and worked in a variety of short-lived clerical jobs before landing one at a magazine. For three months and for a pay of ten dollars a week, she “learned how to run a magazine on hope, patience, and a very worn shoe string; to proofread and write advertising copy—and keep warm by burning magazines in an old fireplace,” Thompson writes in her autobiography. After an illness to her father she was forced to return to North Dakota, where she worked for the Riley family doing chores in exchange for financial support for her and her family