Comfort Baker: Omaha’s First Black High School Graduate and a Life in Education

In 1889, inside Omaha’s Grand Opera House, Comfort Baker stood before a crowd of graduates and delivered an original essay titled “One More Plea for the Negro.” The applause, according to reports, came in waves. That night, she became the first African American to graduate from Omaha High School.

Born around 1869 in New Bern, North Carolina, Baker’s early life was marked by loss. Her father died when she was young. After moving to Raleigh with her mother, she lost her within a year. Orphaned, she relocated to Omaha to live with her uncle, Andrew Hendricks, and his wife. At 15, she enrolled at Omaha High School. That same year, her uncle died and her aunt was institutionalized.

To stay in school, Baker worked as a domestic for the family of Watson B. Smith. Later, she lived with several Black families in Omaha to focus on her studies. She also wrote for The Enterprise, a Black newspaper edited by Thomas P. Mahammitt, and volunteered as corresponding secretary for a St. Philip’s Episcopal Church guild supporting civil rights leader Rev. John Albert Williams.

After graduating with honors in 1889, she planned to attend Memphis Normal School but instead earned her degree from Fisk University in 1893. Her tuition was supported by an Omaha High teacher, Belle H. Lewis.

Baker went on to teach across the South and Southwest, including Arkansas and Texas. In 1918, she became the first African American teacher at Phoenix Union High School District, and in 1925, its first African American principal. She later founded a school for Black students in Phoenix and taught for more than five decades.

Often called a mother of Black education, Comfort Baker’s legacy lies in classrooms built, barriers broken and generations lifted.