civil rights pioneer, lawyer, and educator, was born Ada Louis Sipuel in Chickasha, Oklahoma, the daughter of Travis B. Sipuel, a minister and later bishop of the Church of Christ in God, one of the largest black Pentecostal churches in the United States, and Martha Bell Smith, the child of a former slave. Her parents moved to Chickasaw, Oklahoma, shortly after the Tulsa race riot of 1921.Ada s brother Lemuel had initially planned to challenge the segregationist policies of the University of Oklahoma After returning from service in World War II however he went to Howard University Law School because he did not want to delay his career with protracted litigation Ada who was younger and had been in college during the war was willing to delay her legal career for the opportunity to challenge segregation She entered Arkansas A M College on ...
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Paul Finkelman
The daughter of a minister, Ada Lois Sipuel was born in Chickasha, Oklahoma. Her brother had planned to challenge the segregationist policies of the University of Oklahoma but instead went to Howard University Law School, in part because he did not want to delay his career, having already been delayed by serving in World War II. Ada, who was younger and who had been in college during the war, was willing to delay her legal career in order to challenge segregation.
In 1946 Fisher applied for admission to the University of Oklahoma Law School but was denied because of her race. A lengthy court battle ensued. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Oklahoma must provide instruction for blacks equal to that given whites Unfortunately since this decision did not invalidate segregated education the regents created the Langston University School of Law located at the ...
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Xiomara Santamarina
civil rights litigant, known as Mum Bett, was born a slave in Claverack, New York, most likely to African parents. Mum Bett and her sister were owned by the Dutch Hogeboom family in Claverack. At an uncertain date, the sisters were sold to the family of John Ashley, a judge in the Massachusetts Court of Common Pleas and a prominent citizen of Sheffield, Massachusetts. Little is known about Mum Bett's life with the Ashleys, but it probably resembled the life of many northern slaves during the eighteenth century. Most slaves lived in small households in close proximity to their owners and performed a wide range of tasks to support the North's diversified economy.
Mum Bett's decision to sue for freedom was sparked by an incident of cruelty that is prominent in accounts of her life. When her mistress, Hannah Ashley struck Mum Bett s sister in ...
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Taunya Lovell Banks
in Massachusetts in 1781. “I heard that paper read yesterday that says, ‘all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom.’ I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?” According to Catherine Sedgewick, Elizabeth Freeman said this to Theodore Sedgewick, a young Massachusetts lawyer who was Catherine’s father.
Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved black woman also known as Mum Bett (or Mumbet), was born in Claverack, New York, and sold to Colonel John Ashley of Sheffield Massachusetts She approached Theodore Sedgewick after hearing the Declaration of Independence read at the village meetinghouse in Sheffield Another account claims that Freeman overheard talk about the Massachusetts state constitutional provision while waiting on tables There is at least one possible explanation for the conflict over the legal source of Freeman s claim She may have asked about the Declaration of ...
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Shana L. Redmond
taxi driver whose videotaped beating by police officers in March 1991 provoked international outrage, was born in Sacramento, California, to working-class parents. His father was a construction worker and cleaner, and as a child Rodney worked long hours as a cleaner along with his father. His work schedule along with a learning disability contributed to his lack of academic success, and despite considerable athletic ability, he dropped out in 1984 during his senior year of high school. Afterward King found work in construction. During his early adulthood he had two daughters and married Crystal Waters, a woman with two children of her own. Prior to 1991 King was in and out of jail for crimes ranging from robbery to intoxication.King became an international celebrity and emblem of police abuse in 1991, when a videotape, shot by the amateur cameraman George Holliday was broadcast by Los Angeles ...
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Linda W. Reese
educator and civil rights pioneer, is a person about whom. Little is known prior to his residence in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1942. He earned a bachelor's degree from Langston University and in 1943, a master's degree in Education from the University of Kansas. Throughout his career McLaurin taught education courses at Langston University, Oklahoma's segregated institution of higher education for African Americans. McLaurin and his wife, Peninah, placed a high value on education. Peninah also graduated from Langston, taught there, and operated a bookstore out of their home. In 1923 she applied for admission for a graduate degree at the University of Oklahoma and was rejected because of her race. However, Peninah and all three of their children, Dunbar, J. C., and Phyllis completed master s degrees McLaurin s sons Dunbar and J C completed doctorates after their military service during World War ...
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Mamie E. Locke
shoemaker and plaintiff in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), was born Homère Patris Plessy in New Orleans, to carpenter Adolphe (Joseph) Plessy and seamstress Rosa Debergue. Louisiana's antebellum caste system designated both parents as free people of color. Homer Plessy's grandfather was a white Frenchman named Germain Plessy, who arrived in New Orleans from Haiti in the early 1800s. His union with a free woman of color named Agnes Mathieu produced eight children including Homer's father, Adolphe.
Homer Plessy was born two months after the Emancipation Proclamation, and his early life was marked by the Reconstruction era in the state. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution freed the enslaved (1865); granted equal citizenship rights (1868); and prohibited the denial of suffrage based on race (1870 Plessy thus reached adulthood with the right to ...
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Walter Ehrlich
slave and plaintiff in the 1857 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sanford, was born of unknown parentage in Southampton County, Virginia, the property of plantation owner Peter Blow. After brief sojourns in Huntsville and Florence, Alabama, in 1830 the Blow family settled in St. Louis where, strapped for funds, Blow sold Scott to Dr. John Emerson. In 1833 Emerson's career as an army surgeon took him, among other places, to Illinois and to what was then a part of Wisconsin Territory (now Minnesota). Scott accompanied him into these areas, one a free state and one a territory that had been declared free by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1836 or 1837, while at Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory, Scott married Harriet Robinson, whose master, Major Lawrence Taliaferro transferred her ownership ...
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John R. Howard
civil rights plaintiff and social worker, was born in Houston, Texas, to James Leonard Sweatt and Ella Rose (Perry) Sweatt, whose occupations are unknown. Sixteen years before Heman's birth the United States Supreme Court had held in Plessy v. Ferguson that state-imposed racial segregation did not offend the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and hence the Texas in which Sweatt grew up was rigidly segregated. He attended the all-black Jack Yates High School, graduating in 1930, and went from there to the all-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, graduating in 1934.
The decade following his graduation from college saw Sweatt trying to find himself. He taught in a public school for a couple of years and then in 1937 entered the University of Michigan matriculating in biology in hopes of attending medical school He left after a year returned to Houston took a ...
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James Sellman
Sojourner Truth was one of the best-known black women of her time, rivaled only by African American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, yet her life remains surrounded by mystery. Truth, who was illiterate, left no written record apart from her autobiographical Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated to white abolitionist Olive Gilbert in the late 1840s. Much of what we know about her was reported or perhaps invented by others. More so than Frederick Douglass, her prolifically autobiographical contemporary, Truth has been transformed into myth. Feminists emphasize her challenge to restrictive Victorian codes of femininity; Marxist historians proclaim her solidarity with the working class. Her spirit has been invoked on college campuses in the United States in struggles to create African American and Women's Studies programs. Yet most interpretations of Truth fail to understand the centrality of her evangelical religious faith.
In their writings, both Harriet Beecher Stowe and ...
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Nell Irvin Painter
Sojourner Truth is one of the two most widely known nineteenth-century black women; the other, Harriet Tubman, was also a former slave without formal education. While Tubman is known as the “Moses of her people” for having led hundreds of slaves to freedom, Truth is remembered more for a few memorable utterances than for her acts. Before the Civil War, she was a feminist abolitionist; after the war, she worked in freedpeople’s relief. Truth is closely identified with a phrase she did not utter, “and ar’n’t I a woman?” She often made the point that women who are poor and black must be included within the category of woman, but not in these precise words. A white feminist journalist, Frances Dana Gage, invented these particular words in 1863 Truth s twentieth and twenty first century persona worked most effectively within the politically minded worlds of black ...
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Alfreda S. James
By the time Sojourner Truth met Frederick Douglass in the early 1840s she had evolved from a fugitive slave to a Pentecostal preacher and a member of the Northampton Association for Education and Industry, an egalitarian community in Massachusetts that honored work and rejected slavery and other class distinctions. In the twenty years since Truth had liberated herself from slavery, she had developed a reputation as a simple yet razor-sharp commentator on religion and people.
Her name at birth was Isabella, and she was the youngest child of two Dutch-speaking slaves, James and Elizabeth Baumfree (or Bomefree). The Baumfrees lived in the town of Hurley in Ulster County, New York, and were the human property of Johannis Hardenbergh, a Revolutionary War veteran. When Hardenbergh died in either 1807 or 1808 his estate sold Isabella to an English speaking family in Ulster County The early circumstances of Isabella s life ...
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Nell Irvin Painter
abolitionist and women's rights advocate, was born in Hurley, Ulster County, New York, the daughter of James and Elizabeth Baumfree, who were slaves. Named Isabella by her parents, she took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. As a child, Isabella belonged to a series of owners, the most memorable of whom were the John Dumont family of Esopus, Ulster County, to whom she belonged for approximately seventeen years and with whom she remained close until their migration to the West in 1849. About 1815 she married another of Dumont's slaves, Thomas, who was much older than she; they had five children. Isabella left Thomas in Ulster County after their emancipation under New York State law in 1827, but she did not marry again.
In the year before her emancipation Isabella left her master Dumont of her own accord and went to work for the ...
