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Cornelia Welch often visited her daughter, Gayle Shockley, in Carlsbad, Calif.When Bill Travis called friend Cornelia Welch one evening in 1978, her slurred speech was a clear sign something was wrong.

She never drank alcohol, Travis knew. So he called her only son, Claxton Welch Jr., and they rushed her to the hospital.

Cornelia Welch’s scrambled words that night signaled a stroke. She would ultimately regain the ability to speak coherently but lose most of her vision.

She also lost her livelihood. After that night, Cornelia Welch never taught in a school again. But Welch, a pioneering African American teacher who brushed aside the slights of her colleagues, didn’t dwell on what went missing when she became blind, either. She continued to travel, dance and make new friends. She didn’t want to sit in her home day after day, her son says.

Welch died June 5 at home in her sleep. During 94 years of life, she finished college, married twice, left the Deep South for the Pacific Northwest and raised three children. Hired in 1961, she was the first African American teacher in the now-defunct Rockwood School District. During 17 years of teaching in the district, hers was often the only black face in the classroom.

The single-story house in outer Southeast Portland where Cornelia Welch lived to the end looks ordinary enough. As ordinary as a schoolteacher’s home. As ordinary as the many homes Claxton Welch Sr., a contractor, built in Portland.

When Claxton Sr. built his own family’s house in the late 1950s, many property owners in Portland refused to sell land to African Americans, recalls his son and namesake.

He found a way around that. He asked white friends to buy the properties for him. With their names on the deeds, he could build.

Determined duo

That was the kind of determination that marked the Welches’ lives in Portland from the beginning. They first came to the city in 1940, when they heard the federal government had jobs for African Americans in Oregon.

Riding an elephant in the late 1990s was not out of character for Welch (front), who continued to travel and seek out new experiences long after losing her eyesight.They got on a bus and traveled for six days from Alabama, where they were born, where they met and where they married. They worked in the Kaiser shipyards and lived in Vanport, two of the thousands of African Americans whose migration increased the Portland area’s black population many times over.

Over the course of the next decade, they moved back and forth between Alabama and Oregon before eventually settling in Portland for good in 1950.

Cornelia Welch earned her teaching certificate at Portland State University and looked for work, unsuccessfully at first. There was an elementary school four blocks from their home in Portland, Claxton Jr. recalls. The principal let her fill in as a substitute teacher but wouldn’t hire her.

Undaunted, Cornelia persistently searched until she found someone who would hire her. She once walked three miles in high heels to a job interview, recalls her son, now 63 years old.

“Whatever she wanted to do, she was going to do it,” he says.

When she was hired by Rockwood to teach at Hartley Elementary School, she was the only black teacher in a school district with mostly white students.

Pat Spence, a former colleague, remembers eating lunch with her during the beginning of their first year teaching at Hartley. They would sit together, just the two of them.

“Why were Cornelia and I sitting alone in the cafeteria? Where were the others?” she asks pointedly.

Perseverance

Not that Cornelia Welch would have said anything herself.

“My mom didn’t sit around talking about discrimination,” says Claxton Jr., who played college football at Oregon, went on to play four seasons in the National Football League and was a member of the Dallas Cowboys team that won Super Bowl VI.

If anything people ever said to her stung, she didn’t let on. She behaved as though she were just like every other teacher at her school. She believed that with perseverance and education, she could have the life she wanted, her son says.

After the stroke that took her out of the classroom, Cornelia Welch gradually lost what was left of her vision to glaucoma. By the early 1980s, she was entirely blind, a “devastating blow” to an outgoing woman used to independence, her son says.

But she handled her blindness as she had the other difficulties in her life. She kept going.

She took the bus to go to her two favorite senior centers every day. Occasionally, they held dances. She would go, and not only dance, but also sing, Spence says.

She kept up her visits to her daughters in California and New York. She went to college reunions at Tuskegee University in Alabama, where she had earned a degree in home economics in 1939. Last year, at the age of 93, she flew to Hawaii with her son for a convention of retired NFL players.

“She wouldn’t let anything slow her down,” he says.

In the last years of her life, she kept the lights off in her home. She had learned to navigate the house by memory and by feel.

One day she bought plants at a senior center. The woman who once kept her own garden by the side of the house called her friend and former colleague Allison Grewal, asking her to plant them outside the house.

She couldn’t see the plants, Grewal says, remembering that day.

It didn’t matter. She asked her friend to plant them there anyway.

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