Era Bell Thompson probably is the most famous woman athlete in UND and North Dakota history. She grew up near Driscoll, N.D. and attended high school at Bismarck, N.D. In 1927 she broke five UND women's track records in the dashes, hurdles and broad jump and tied the national intercollegiate 60-yard dash and broad jump records.
She went on to earn a degree at Morningside College in 1933, and she attended graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Thompson became Ebony Magazine international editor (1947-1970) and has traveled the world and authored numerous articles. She has written two books, American Daughter, and autobiography; and Africa, Land of My Father; and was co-editor of another book, White on Black. She received an honorary doctorate from UND in 1969. The UND Black Cultural Center was named in her honor in 1979.
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Humble beginning was asset to former student Thompson
By ERA BELL THOMPSON
Reprinted from the University of North Dakota Alumni Review. Miss Era Bell Thompson, who attended the University of North Dakota in 1930 and 31 submitted the following autobiographical article at our request. While a student here, she established five state women's track records and tied two national intercollegiate women's track records. She graduated from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa and has done graduate work at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Miss Thompson is active in a number of professional organizations including the Chicago Press Club, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, NAACP, Urban League and Zonta International. -Grand Forks, ND ? March, 1977
Mr. Levi read my theme to the class. "You write well," he said. "I guess you know that. You spell abominably, and I guess you know that too. It' s about time, Miss Thompson, that you forgot that you are clever and learned to put your cleverness into civilized art!"
Those cutting comments were made 50 years ago in a freshman rhetoric class at UND. Since then, out of the not so civilized are of journalism, I've made a living.
To the University I have brought nothing but the literary dreams of a young black girl fresh from the prairies. Mr. Levi, and the professors who followed him, taught me how to give form to those dreams. For the past 30 years, EBONY magazine has been my launching pad. As international editor, I have flown to Tanzania on a hunting safari, to Tasmania in search of a lost tribe of Aborigines, to Tonga to interview the last South Sea Island queen, to the edge of the Sahara Desert to visit the centuries old mosques of Timbuktu. I've even spent rather pleasant night in a Johannesburg jail.
People ask about those faraway places, but first they want to know how I got to North Dakota . When I applied for a Rockefeller fellowship to write a book about the state, the committee-also curious-suggested an autobiography. Hence, "American Daughter," a book explaining how Uncle Jim Garrison, who homesteaded near Driscoll, coaxed our family out of urban Iowa into rural North Dakota. And how Barbara Register, a Bismarck High School class and teammate, coaxed me away from my father's secondhand furniture store in Mandan, by describing the athletic bonanza awaiting me in Grand Forks.
The first year I worked for board and room with a Jewish family, often walking the four miles to school to save money. In an attempt to save time one morning, I and two other students hooked a ride on a passing freight train. Instead of slowing down, as usual, at the campus siding, the train gathered speed, forcing us to jump. A deep snowbank broke our falls and saved our necks.
Most of my college time was divided between my two loves: gym and journalism. I made all of the sports teams and with the school's only pain of women's track shoes, broke a few track records. I also wrote a humor column and reported women's sports for Dakota Student editor, Ed Thompson. No relation.
An advice-to-the-lovelorn column was abruptly terminated when the random initials I had assigned to fictitious letters, turned out to be those of a popular campus couple. The semester was nearly over before I realized that no one expected the three pages of humor, I so laboriously produced four days a week, to be original.
Many instructors and professors influenced my career, but Mr. Levi probably impressed me the most. It was, I believe, mutual. At year's end I gifted him with a long dead garter snake, pink ribbon bedecked and encased in a quart jar. He said he would not forget me.
Pluerisy, followed by the death of my father, took me out of school in the middle of my sophomore year. I returned later, thanks to the encouragement of Rev. Robert O'Brian. In his home, I again worked for my keep. When the good pastor became president of Morningside College, the family moved to Sioux City, Iowa, taking me along. Since graduation I have lived in Chicago, but North Dakota will always be my home. And with ample reason.
In 1969, I received an honorary decorative from the University, and returned later to participate in a black studies seminar. In 1972, the Gay 30's Club of Driscoll staged a three-day celebration in my honor. The memorial park they later erected in memory of the 1862 "Battle of Stony Lake," is only yards from the site of our first farm house. In 1975, I planted two trees there in memory of my parents who are buried in Driscoll.
Last year, Governor Arthur A. Link presented me with North Dakota's highest honor, the Roosevelt Roughrider Award. Eventually, my portrait will hang in the state capitol, which replaced the old one in which my father served as a messenger to Governor Lynn J. Frazier.
I still can't spell.
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