James Baxter Cole was born on July 5, 1897, in North Carolina. During World War I, Cole served overseas from September 1918 to July 1919 with the Quartermaster Corps. He was honorably discharged on July 28, 1919, with the rank of sergeant. That fall, he joined a militia unit, the Durham Machine Gun Company, for which organization he served as lieutenant. In July 1920, he and his unit successfully protected the lives of three wrongfully accused Black men from an angry lynch mob in Alamance County, North Carolina. Cole died in Durham on October 12, 1977.