Charles Cornelius Coffin Painter (1832‐1895) was an ordained minister, educator and advocate for minority rights. Born in Virginia, one of 12 children of a clergyman and his wife, Charles attended Williams College (class of 1859) then trained at Andover Theological Seminary. His first pastorate was in New Marlborough, followed by calls to churches in Connecticut.

He accepted a professorship at Fisk University, the Congregational institution for African‐ Americans in Nashville, Tenn. Painter lectured locally about the education of African Americans. He became Fisk’s financial agent for New England. Maintaining a home in Great Barrington, he got to know a smart young black man then attending high school.

William E.B. Du Bois recalled in his Autobiography, “Mr. Painter was a Congregational minister and for a time served in the Federal Indian Bureau. There and elsewhere he saw the problem of the reconstructed South, and conceived the idea that this was the place for me to be educated and that in the South lay my future field of work.” Painter along with three other Congregational ministers secured a local scholarship for Du Bois to attend Fisk.

As an agent for the Indian Rights Association, which was founded in 1882 and headquartered in Philadelphia to monitor governmental action and educate the public on treatment and education of Native Americans, Painter worked with Samuel M. Brosius out of the organization’s Washington office. He traveled extensively to Indian settlements and reservations at San Ysabel, Cohuilla, Mesa Grande, Capitan Grande and San Jacinto.

Professor Valerie Sherer Mathes called Painter “one of the more powerful but lesser known Indian advocates.”

Painter spoke at the Mohonk Conference in 1886 on assimilation and the proposal that became the federal Dawes Act: “The time has fully come when the friends of the Indian, gathered in council as we are to‐day, should propound to themselves and to the Government — that is to the people — these simple but fundamental questions in regard to the complicated and expensive machine which, under the general name of ‘our Indian policy,’ we have been running these two hundred and odd years: What really is the end we are seeking? and What adaption has this machine to that end?”

The next year, speaking at a Massachusetts Indian Association, he quoted Gen. William

Tecumseh Sherman “as saying that the United States government had made 1000 treaties with the Indians, and had never kept one,” the Boston Post said.

One of Painter’s eight published reports on Cherokees, Arapahos and other tribes was Studying the Condition of Affairs in Indian Territory and California, issued in 1888. Painter was later secretary to the National Education Committee and in January 1894 President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the federal Indian Commission. He died a year later of heart disease.

•   “Death of Rev. C.C. Painter suddenly of heart disease in Washington, D.C.,” Berkshire Courier, 17 January 1895.

•   Drew, Bernard A. Dr. Du Bois Rebuilds His Dream House. Great Barrington: Attic Revivals Press, 2006.

•   Genetin‐Pilawz, C. Joseph, “’Friends’ and Fistfights: Federal Indian Policy debates and Late Nineteenth‐Century State Development,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era No. 14, October 2015.

•   Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868‐1963. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1994.

•   Mathes, Valerie Sherer, and Phil Brigandi, “Charles C. Painter, Helen Hunt Jackson and the Mission Indians of Southern California,” Journal of San Diego History, vol. 55 no. 3, summer 2009.

•   “Proceedings Mohonk Lake Conference, October 12, 13, 14, 1886,” Documents of the United States Indian Policy, Francis Paul Prucha, ed. 1975.

•   “Rights of the Indian,” Boston Post, 18 April 1887.

•   “Tribute to Prof Painter,” Berkshire Courier, 21 March 1895.