Slowly and surely, step by step, Miss Cook has risen to this high plane of usefulness and her life is an inspiration, modestly displaying the great unselfish heart of the woman, whose highest ambition is to be of use to her race and humanity.
MISS HATTIE A. GIBBS.
Miss Hattie A. Gibbs is the youngest of five children of Hon. Mifflin W. Gibbs, of Little Rock, Ark., and his amiable wife, Mrs. Anna Alexander Gibbs.
Miss Gibbs entered the Oberlin Public School at six, and began the study of music at nine under the direction of her sister, who at that time had made considerable advancement in that study. At eleven she entered the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and also kept up her studies in school for three years, after which she entered the high school and devoted all her time to those studies. After two years of hard study of Greek, Latin and Mathematics, she graduated with honors before her fifteenth birthday.
As a student she was an untiring worker, her hours for study encompassed almost the entire day. She accustomed herself to rising at four o'clock to begin her practice.
PROF. HATTIE A. GIBBS.
In the Conservatory Department of Oberlin College the attendance is about 500, and out of this number the average attendance of colored students is eight or ten. Students are required to finish a course of three studies before a diploma is awarded. Besides finishing the studies of piano, pipe organ and harmony, she had the advantage of several terms in voice culture, and since her graduation she has made special study of the violin in order to better prepare herself as director of Eckstein Norton Conservatory of Music, of which she was a founder and of which she is now in charge.
The women of the race should be proud of her. The people of Kentucky should be proud that one so able has placed her services within reach, and ought to show the colored peoples' appreciation, by contributing money toward erecting such suitable buildings, as will stand long after the founder is numbered with the dead—a race monument in itself.
In disposition Miss Gibbs is amiable; in mind she is great; in heart she is noble; in manners she is gentle; she has a steadfast and undeviating love of truth, fearless and straightforward in action and integrity and an honor ever unsullied by an unworthy word or deed, and after all, these traits so prominent in her make-up make her greater than her worldly success in her art, for in themselves they constitute greatness.