Sister President: that's what they call Johnnetta Cole, who has brought Bennett College back from the brink of bankruptcy.

• Author: Murray, Arthur O.

She still remembers her introduction to racial lines. It was around 1941 in her hometown of Jacksonville, Fla. Johnnetta Cole can even smile now, her warm, deep voice almost belying the terror she must have felt as a child of 3 or 4. Except for the one she does not utter, each word is measured, rolled off the tongue as if part of a poem. Every syllable of responsibility gets its turn. That's how the president of Bennett College in Greensboro speaks.

She had tagged along when her mother went to a beauty parlor. "I was to play outside. Well, you know how hard it is for kids to do what we're told to do, so I went walking and crossed a line in a neighborhood." Immediately, the call was raised: "Nigger." A boy chased her back across the street, out of the white world.

Cole, now 67, expected to be punished for wandering off when she told her mother. "But my mother did not chastise me for going across the line--she chastised a system that would do that to her child." Cole has kept crossing lines, as a student, teacher and administrator in both historically black and predominantly white schools, from being a member of Bill Clinton's transition team to recruiting Bob Dole as a partner in her latest venture. Call it a crusade: reviving Bennett, a small, historically black college for women that in 2002 was nearly $4 million in debt and tapping its meager endowment to stay afloat.

Now she's not crossing a line but drawing one to protect an institution many consider an anachronism. After all, the civil-rights movement was about breaking down barriers, about separate being inherently unequal. But Cole says Bennett must survive. It's one of two black women's colleges in the nation. The other, Spelman in Atlanta, is thriving, mostly because of a fund-raising campaign jump-started by a $20 million gift from entertainer Bill Cosby. He handed the check to Johnnetta Cole. Yes, she's done this before.

She's known as Sister President--a nickname that fits her fervor in keeping both colleges alive. A relentless fund-raiser and positive thinker, she starts most meetings trying to pump up teacher, student and school self-esteem. A critic calls it "hallelujah stagecraft."

She grew up the middle of three children. Both parents graduated from college. John Betsch ran Afro American Life Insurance Co., founded in 1901 by her grandfather, Jacksonville's first black millionaire, and six other black men. Mary Betsch was a professor at Edward Waters College. "Education was very, very pushed, but it had to be pushed within the context of segregated schools. I remember having to learn, as all African-American and Caucasian kids had to learn, the color of water. Meaning, which water is for me? And within the realm of education, coming to grips with tough questions like, 'Why do we get the hand-me-down books?'"

She was a good student, finishing high school at 15 and enrolling at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., in 1953. "It was such an important experience for me, to still be in the South but to be in such an intellectually charged environment." But her first stint in a historically black college was cut short. During her freshman year, her father died. The family got together and decided it would be best for Cole to enroll at Oberlin College, where her older sister was. The private, liberal-arts school near Cleveland bills itself as the first truly coed college in the United States and among the first colleges to admit blacks. "I think going to Fisk helps me to be a better president of a historically black college. I know that going to Oberlin really did an enormous amount to shape me intellectually."

She graduated in 1957 with a clear career path in mind. She had wanted to be a doctor. But a freshman course in anthropology steered her in that direction. She earned her master's at Northwestern University in 1959 and started work on a...