ABSTRACT
William Wilson Cooke was born on December 27, 1871, in Greenville, South Carolina. His father, Wilson Cooke (1819-1897), was the slave son of Vardry McBee, the putative founder of Greenville, South Carolina. Wilson Cooke and his free Black wife, Margaret Magdelena Walker Cooke, lived on West Coffee Street in a house provided by McBee. Wilson Cooke variously was a tanner, owned a barber shop, and owned a grocery. A prominent colored citizen of Greenville during the Reconstruction era, he was a Republican delegate to the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention. William completed normal and parochial schools before he was fourteen. A sickly child, he was pulled out of school and went to work as a clerk in his father’s grocery. Later when his health improved he was an apprentice carpenter starting in 1885. William’s older three sisters and brother all attended CLAFLIN UNIVERSITY, where their father had a building named after him. Claflin University would also figure prominantly in William’s destiny. He enrolled there in the fall of 1888, in the Literary and Industrial Department.
