Olivia Davidson, a graduate from the Framingham Normal School, was born in what is now Mercer County, West Virginia in 1854 to Elias and Eliza Davidson. Because they were free blacks – Elias was a freed slave and Eliza was born free – the family experienced harsh treatment in the slave state of Virginia. The family moved across the border to the free state of Ohio, where, shortly after, Elias passed away. Following Elias’s death, the family moved further north, to Albany, Ohio, where Olivia continued to receive a common school education. At the age of sixteen, she began teaching in parts of Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas. In 1874, at age twenty, she took a position at the Clay School in Memphis, TN, teaching sixth grade. Her sister Margaret also taught in Memphis, and her brother Joseph lived there as well. In 1878, Margaret passed away and Joseph was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, prompting Olivia to return to Ohio.
That year, Davidson enrolled as a senior at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). Her tuition was financed by Lucy Hayes, wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Davidson’s commencement speech attracted the attention of Booker T. Washington, who was there to deliver the postgraduate address. After Hampton, Davidson attended the Framingham Normal School where she graduated in 1881 as one of six honor students. After graduation she was contacted by Washington. He had just opened the Tuskegee Normal School – a school intended to educate young black men and women – and wanted Davidson’s help in running the school. Davidson agreed, and arrived at Tuskegee on August 25, 1881. Washington wrote, “Miss Davidson’s services are inestimable,” a sentiment he repeated on several occasions.
In 1883, Washington, who was fundraising in the North, returned to Tuskegee due to Davidson’s failing health. Davidson had been exposed to numerous diseases in the rural areas where she had worked – yellow fever in Memphis and diphtheria in Framingham among others. Washington and Davidson married two-years after the death of his first wife, Frannie N. Smith, who died in May of 1884. Their first son, Booker, Jr., was born on May 29, 1887 and despite her declining health, she became pregnant again a year later. On February 6, 1889, her second son, Ernest Davidson, was born. On February 8, the Washington’s house burned down due to a defective flue. Olivia was exposed to the early morning cold that day and never fully recovered. She died of tuberculosis of the larynx on May 9, 1889, at the age of 34.