Remembering Charles Price Donald

July 7, 1933 - January 5, 2026

On July 7, 1933 Charles Price Donald was born in Charlotte, North Carolina and named for his maternal grandfather. Charles did not get to know his father’s family who were in Jamaica, but he grew up within walking distance of his mother’s family. 

May 7 was a very special day for his mother Josephine; it was her birthday, her mother’s birthday, the date of her college graduation, and her wedding date. She graduated from Bennett College, a normal school in Greensboro, and she served as an elementary school teacher. His father was a graduate of the Shaw Baptist Seminary, and he served as a Presbyterian minister. Charles is the middle of five sons in this family. There was a deep sadness over the death of the first child, a girl, who died so soon after birth that she did not receive a name.

Charles loved the water from the time he was a child and would swim every chance he got in any lake, stream, pond or pool. At 17 he began teaching swimming in the local swimming pool. He enjoyed school—which was, of course, segregated at that time. He started playing the clarinet at age 12 and loved playing in the high school band. That 17-piece band must have been very professional, because they traveled—especially at Christmas time—when they might go 150 miles for one engagement, come back, and then head off the next day for the next place.

After high school, Charles attended Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte for a year and a half. Not ready to settle into studies yet, he joined the Marine Corps and served for four years. At boot camp at Paris Island, he was classified as a musician and sent to play clarinet in his Marine base’s band, where he was the only black player. The band played goodwill tours to places as far away as Japan.

After his military service, Charles enrolled at San Francisco State University to study music in order to become a music teacher. While he was there he had a summer job teaching swimming in Marin County, where he taught Shirley Temple’s children to swim. In his later teacher training, he was told that, because he came from the south, he would not be able to relate to white children. When he told about his experience teaching swimming to Shirley Temple’s and other children, the administrator said, “You’ll be fine!”

In San Francisco Charles learned of the opportunity to study for a Master’s degree in an elementary education and school counseling program. To meet the program requirement for community service, Charles was asked to teach swimming at the Martin Luther King pool in San Francisco’s Hunters Point. That black community would not have accepted a white water safety instructor.

Charles worked at the USF medical center managing the pool for students and faculty and participated in the related recreation clubs, which led to the opportunity to ski with these groups on the weekends in Squaw Valley. He later managed transportation for the SCUBA training program and learned SCUBA diving himself. The program was part of an introduction to hyperbaric medicine. This training to learn to be comfortable in the water also provided the students important skills for potential employment in such work as underwater construction.

In San Francisco, when he was 35, Charles met and married a woman who was working in the office of the university Teacher Training program. A beautiful daughter was born to them in 1973. Because he felt such a strong connection to his many beloved family members, he would have liked to name his daughter Laura Margaret Willie Josephine Sue-Ann Price Kahl Donald. His wife must have vetoed having such a long name, because their daughter is Laura Joanne. Charles’s daughter has been the light of his life and followed his footsteps going into a career in education. She lives close-by in not far away in New York’s Hudson Valley with his beloved grandchildren Otis and Olivia (born in 2011 and 2015).

For many years, Charles worked in the San Francisco Bay Area as a high school counselor. In 1983, when he was 50 years old, he was working with a peer counseling program. He asked an assistant to go to the library and bring back books on education that might be useful. One she brought was Rudolf Steiner’s A Modern Art of Education. Reading that book, Charles felt that, even after spending many years in education, he knew nothing. He was in kindergarten—maybe pre-kindergarten! He studied Rudolf Steiner’s insights on child development, and he graduated from Rudolf Steiner College’s Waldorf Teacher Training program in San Francisco. He joined the Anthroposophical Society. Charles taught the first graduating class of the Waldorf School of the Peninsula (in California) during their combined 7th/8th grade year. The parents provided the opportunity for him and the class to make a trip to Mexico to work on their Spanish. He also served on the Peninsula school’s Board of Trustees. Charles is happy to be living now in a place where he can continue meaningful study.

Charles has maintained some important friendships over long years—one since first grade. He is also a kind of bridge builder as he has been the only black member of several communities at various times in his life. Now he has come to live as the first black member of the Fellowship Community.

Charles' biography was written in 2023.

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To make a gift to the Fellowship Community in honor of Charles Donald please visit

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