Alston, Melvin Ovenus (07 October 1911–30 December 1985), educator, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of William Henry “Sonnie” Alston, a drayman, and Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Smith, a laundress. Of middle-class background in terms of an African-American family in the urban South in the 1920s, he grew up in a house that his family owned, free of any mortgage. After attending Norfolk’s segregated black public schools and graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, he graduated from Virginia State College (B.S., 1935), honored for his debating and for excellence in scholarship, and began teaching math at Booker T. Washington High School in 1935. Beginning in 1937 he served as president of the Norfolk Teachers Association, and he also held local leadership positions in the Young Men’s Christian Association and the First Calvary Baptist Church....
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Alston, Melvin Ovenus (1911-1985), educator
Peter Wallenstein
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Blackwell, Randolph Talmadge (1927-1981), attorney, educator, and civil rights activist
Ralph E. Luker
Blackwell, Randolph Talmadge (10 March 1927–21 May 1981), attorney, educator, and civil rights activist, was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, the son of Joe Blackwell and Blanche Mary Donnell. He attended the city’s public schools for African-American youth and earned a B.S. in sociology from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in Greensboro in 1949. Four years later Blackwell earned a J.D. degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. In December 1954 he married Elizabeth Knox. The couple had one child. After teaching economics for a year at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College in Normal, Alabama, near Huntsville, Blackwell became an associate professor of social sciences at Winston-Salem State Teachers College in North Carolina....
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Bruce, John Edward (1856-1924), journalist and historian
David A. Canton
Bruce, John Edward (22 February 1856–07 August 1924), journalist and historian, was born in Piscataway, Maryland, the son of Martha Allen Clark and Robert Bruce, who were both enslaved Africans. In 1859 Major Harvey Griffin, Robert Bruce’s slaveholder, sold him to a Georgia slaveholder. Raised by his mother, Bruce lived in Maryland until 1861 when Union troops marching through Maryland freed him and his mother, taking them to Washington, D.C., where Bruce lived until 1892. In 1865 Bruce’s mother worked as a domestic in Stratford, Connecticut, where Bruce received his early education in an integrated school. One year later they returned to Washington, where Bruce continued his education. Although he did not complete high school, he enrolled in a course at Howard University in 1872. Bruce married Lucy Pinkwood, an opera singer from Washington, D.C. They had no children. In 1895 Bruce married Florence Adelaide Bishop, with whom he had one child....
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Clark, Peter Humphries (1829-1925), educator, politician, and civil rights leader
David A. Gerber
Clark, Peter Humphries (1829–21 June 1925), educator, politician, and civil rights leader, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Michael Clark, a barber, and his wife (name unknown). Clark was the product of a complex, mixed racial ancestry that provided the basis for a lifelong struggle to find a place for himself in both the white and African-American worlds. The oral tradition of Peter Clark’s family and of the Cincinnati African-American community contends that Michael Clark was the son of explorer ...
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Cook, George William (1855-1931), educator and civil rights leader
Michael R. Winston
Cook, George William (07 January 1855–20 August 1931), educator and civil rights leader, was born a slave in Winchester, Virginia. The names of his parents are unknown. In May 1862 the Cook family, which included seven children, became war refugees after the Union capture of Winchester. The family eventually settled in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where young George Cook’s most important early experience as a free person was working as a servant for David D. Mumma, a Pennsylvania state legislator. Permitted to use the Mumma family library, Cook developed the ambition to seek higher education, which would have remained beyond his grasp except for several fortunate events. After he moved to New York in 1871, Cook learned of Howard University from the Reverend ...
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Dillard, James Hardy (1856-1940), educator and promoter of racial harmony
Dan R. Frost
Dillard, James Hardy (24 October 1856–02 August 1940), educator and promoter of racial harmony, was born in Nansemond County, Virginia, the son of James Dillard and Sarah Brownrigg Cross, planters. Dillard spent most of his early years on the family’s plantation with its over three hundred slaves. At the age of twelve he was sent to school in Norfolk. He enrolled in Washington and Lee University in 1873 where he excelled in history and received a master’s degree in 1876 and a bachelor of laws in 1877. Although Dillard considered building a legal practice, his parents’ poverty in the aftermath of the Civil War forced him to accept the principalship of the Rodman School in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1877 in order to immediately assist his family. Five years later he married Mary Harmanson and accepted an administrative position at Norfolk Academy....
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Drake, St. Clair, Jr. (02 January 1911–15 June 1990), anthropologist
Frank A. Salamone
Drake, St. Clair, Jr. (02 January 1911–15 June 1990), anthropologist, was born John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, Jr., in Suffolk, Virginia, the son of John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, Sr., a Baptist pastor, and Bessie Lee Bowles. By the time Drake was four years old his father had moved the family twice, once to Harrisonburg, Virginia, and then to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania....
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Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868-1963), African-American activist, historian, and sociologist
Thomas C. Holt
Du Bois, W. E. B. (23 February 1868–27 August 1963), African-American activist, historian, and sociologist, was born William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Silvina Burghardt, a domestic worker, and Alfred Du Bois, a barber and itinerant laborer. In later life Du Bois made a close study of his family origins, weaving them rhetorically and conceptually—if not always accurately—into almost everything he wrote. Born in Haiti and descended from Bahamian mulatto slaves, Alfred Du Bois enlisted during the Civil War as a private in a New York regiment of the Union army but appears to have deserted shortly afterward. He also deserted the family less than two years after his son’s birth, leaving him to be reared by his mother and the extended Burghardt kin. Long resident in New England, the Burghardts descended from a freedman of Dutch slave origin who had fought briefly in the American Revolution. Under the care of his mother and her relatives, young Will Du Bois spent his entire childhood in that small western Massachusetts town, where probably fewer than two-score of the 4,000 inhabitants were African American. He received a classical, college preparatory education in Great Barrington’s racially integrated high school, from whence, in June 1884, he became the first African-American graduate. A precocious youth, Du Bois not only excelled in his high school studies but contributed numerous articles to two regional newspapers, the Springfield ...
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Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868-1963)
Maker: Carl Van Vechten
In
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Farmer, James (1920-1999), founder and national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), civil rights activist, and educator
Betty Kaplan Gubert
Farmer, James (12 January 1920–09 July 1999), founder and national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), civil rights activist, and educator, founder and national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), civil rights activist, and educator, was born James Leonard Farmer, Jr., in Marshall, Texas, the son of James Leonard Farmer (known as “J. Leonard”), a Methodist minister and the son of ex-slaves, and Pearl Houston Farmer, who had been a teacher. Farmer's father, who earned a doctorate of religion from Boston University, was one of the first blacks in Texas to hold a Ph.D. When Farmer was six months old the family, which included an older sister, moved to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where his father had accepted teaching and administrative posts at Rust College. Able to read, write, and count by the age of four and a half, Farmer was accepted into the first grade. The family soon moved again, as Professor Farmer joined the department of religion and philosophy at Samuel Houston College in Austin, Texas....
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Farmer, James (1920-1999)
In
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Holland, Annie Welthy Daughtry (1871-1934), educator and promoter of public education for blacks
Debi Hamlin
Holland, Annie Welthy Daughtry (1871–06 January 1934), educator and promoter of public education for blacks, was born in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, on land adjacent to the Welthy (also spelled Wealthy) plantation, the daughter of Sarah Daughtry and J. W. Barnes. (Her parentage, incorrectly reported in some earlier sources, has been confirmed by her death certificate; see Littlefield, pp. 569–70.) Her grandfather Friday Daughtry had been born and raised a slave but during the 1860s was freed by the Welthy family. Annie had been named after Annie Welthy of the Welthy plantation. Sometime between 1872 and 1879 her mother divorced her father. Her mother later remarried, and the family moved to Southhampton County, Virginia. In 1880 Friday Daughtry brought Annie back to Isle of Wight, where she lived with her grandmother, Lucinda, and worked on the farm while studying at the county school. In 1883, at the age of eleven, she enrolled as an eighth-grade student at Hampton Institute, an agricultural and industrial school for blacks founded in 1868 at nearby Hampton, Virginia. To help pay for her second year of study she spent the summer of 1884 in New York working for a wealthy white family. She had to leave school before the end of the following summer, however, owing to a bout with malaria, which made her unable to work, as well as her grandfather’s financial troubles; failing health had made it difficult for him to continue to pay her tuition. She then returned to Isle of Wight where for two years after taking the teachers examination and receiving a second-grade certificate, she taught in the county elementary school. In 1888 she left her teaching post and went to work in New York but soon returned because of the illness of her grandmother. Just before her grandmother died in 1888, she married Willis B. Holland, a Hampton graduate and educator; they would have at least one child, a daughter....
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Jackson, Luther Porter (1892-1950), historian and activist
Edgar Allan Toppin
Jackson, Luther Porter (11 July 1892–20 April 1950), historian and activist, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Edward William Jackson, a dairy farmer, and Delilah Culverson, a schoolteacher. He was the ninth of twelve children of parents who had been slaves. Jackson attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, completing his A.B. in 1914 and his M.A. in 1916. Meanwhile, he began teaching in 1915 at Voorhees Industrial School in Denmark, South Carolina, where he was also director of the academic department. In 1918 he left South Carolina to become instructor of history and music at the Topeka Industrial Institute in Topeka, Kansas....
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Horton, Myles (9 July 1905–19 January 1990), co-founder of the Highlander School, educator and activist in the labor and civil rights movements
Dale Jacobs
Horton, Myles (9 July 1905–19 January 1990), co-founder of the Highlander School, educator and activist in the labor and civil rights movements, was born Myles Falls Horton in Savannah, Tennessee, the eldest son of Elsie Falls Horton and Perry Horton. Both parents were schoolteachers prior to Horton’s birth, but lost their jobs when the qualifications to teach were increased to include a year of high school, which neither of them possessed. After a number of years of low-paying jobs, Horton’s father became an active participant in the Worker’s Alliance, the union of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), while Horton’s mother volunteered to teach literacy in the community. Horton later said that he took from his mother a belief in the power of love, “the principle of trying to serve people and build a loving world” (Horton, p. 7). These lessons in working for the greater good of society would serve as the guiding force throughout his life....
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La Farge, Oliver Hazard Perry (1901-1963), anthropologist, author, and advocate of American Indian reform and welfare
Robert A. Hecht
La Farge, Oliver Hazard Perry (19 December 1901–02 August 1963), anthropologist, author, and advocate of American Indian reform and welfare, was born in New York City, the son of Christopher Grant La Farge, an architect, and Florence Bayard Lockwood. A descendant and namesake of ...
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La Farge, Oliver Hazard Perry (1901-1963)
Maker: Louis Fabian Bachrach
In
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Lanusse, Armand (1812-1868), writer, civil rights activist, and educator
Caryn Cossé Bell
Lanusse, Armand (1812–16 March 1868), writer, civil rights activist, and educator, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Nothing is known of his personal life except that he married and had five children, four sons and a daughter. A brother, Numa Lanusse, also displayed considerable literary talent until his death at the age of twenty-six in a riding accident....
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Logan, Rayford Whittingham (1897-1981), historian of the African diaspora, university professor, and civil rights and Pan-Africanist activist
Kenneth Robert Janken
Logan, Rayford Whittingham (07 January 1897–04 November 1981), historian of the African diaspora, university professor, and civil rights and Pan-Africanist activist, was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Arthur Logan and Martha Whittingham, domestic workers. Two circumstances of Logan’s parents are germane to his later life and work. Although he grew up in modest circumstances, his parents enjoyed a measure of status in the Washington black community owing to his father’s employment as a butler in the household of Frederic Walcott, Republican senator from Connecticut. And the Walcotts took an interest in the Logan family, providing them with occasional gifts, including money to purchase a house. The Walcotts also took an interest in Rayford Logan’s education, presenting him with books and later, in the 1920s and 1930s, introducing him to influential whites in government. Logan grew up on family lore about the antebellum free Negro heritage of the Whittinghams. It is open to question how much of what he heard was factual; nevertheless, he learned early to make class distinctions among African Americans and to believe that his elite heritage also imposed on him an obligation to help lead his people to freedom and equality....
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Mays, Benjamin Elijah (1 Aug. 1894 or 1895–28 March 1984), educator, college president, and civil rights activist
Orville Vernon Burton
Mays, Benjamin Elijah (1 Aug. 1894 or 1895–28 March 1984), educator, college president, and civil rights activist, was born near Rambo (now Epworth), South Carolina, the son of Hezekiah Mays and Louvenia Carter, tenant farmers who had been enslaved. Benjamin, the youngest of eight children, grew up in the rural South when whites segregated and disfranchised African Americans by law (he himself was not allowed to vote until 1945, when he was fifty-one years old). His first childhood memory was the 1898 Phoenix Riot in South Carolina where, he recalled, white vigilantes murdered his cousin....
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