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  • 1941–1954: WWII and Postwar Desegregation x
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Article

Dennis, Lawrence  

Steven Leikin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

diplomat, preacher, and author, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Sallie Montgomery. Nothing is known of his biological father. His mother, however, was an African American, and Dennis was of mixed race parentage. In 1897 he was adopted by Green Dennis, a contractor, and Cornelia Walker. During his youth Dennis was known as the “mulatto child evangelist,” and he preached to church congregations in the African American community of Atlanta before he was five years old. By the age of fifteen he had toured churches throughout the United States and England and addressed hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite his success as an evangelist Dennis had ambitions to move beyond this evangelical milieu. In 1913, unschooled but unquestionably bright, he applied to Phillips Exeter Academy and gained admission. He graduated within two years and in 1915 entered Harvard.

Dennis s decisions to ...

Article

Fields, Alonzo  

Steven J. Niven

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

White House chief butler, was born in Lyles Station, Indiana, an all-black community founded by freed slaves in the 1850s, where his father ran a general store and his mother kept a boarding house. Fields's early love of music was influenced by his father, who directed the only African American brass band in southern Indiana. In 1920 the family moved to Indianapolis, where Fields and his father played together in a YMCA military brass band; Alonzo trained the choir, studied voice, and learned Irish ballads. His dream of becoming a professional singer had to be balanced, however, with his need to make a living, and he again followed in his father's footsteps by running a grocery store. When his business began to decline in 1925 Fields left Indianapolis for Boston where he enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music There he trained at first to be a ...

Article

Horne, Frank  

Hugh Davis

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

optometrist, educator, administrator, and poet, was born Frank Smith Horne in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Edwin Fletcher and Cora Calhoun Horne. He attended the College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York), and after graduating from the Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology and Otology (now Illinois College of Optometry) in 1922 or 1923, he went into private practice in Chicago and New York City. He also attended Columbia University and later received a master's degree from the University of Southern California (c. 1932). He was married twice, to Frankye Priestly in 1930 and to Mercedes Christopher Rector in 1950, ten years after his first wife's death.

In 1926 Horne was forced to leave his optometry practice and move to the South owing to poor health He became a teacher ...

Article

Parks, Lillian Rogers  

Martin J. Manning

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

White House seamstress and author, was born Lillian Adele Rogers, the daughter of Emmett E. Rogers Sr., a waiter, and Margaret “Maggie” Williams. Source information is sketchy regarding her early years, but her godchild, Peggy Holly, believed that Lillian Parks was born in the District of Columbia and as a child spent summers with relatives in Virginia. Her father—by Parks's account an alcoholic unable to hold a job—left his family when she was a child. In 1909 her mother took a job at the White House at the beginning of William Howard Taft's presidency and often found it necessary to take her daughter along with her when she went to work A victim of polio at the age of six Parks used crutches for the rest of her life She attended St Ann s Catholic School and Stephens Elementary School in the District of ...

Article

Weaver, Robert Clifton  

Wendell E. Pritchett

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

government administrator, writer, and educator, was born in Washington, D.C., the second son of Mortimer Grover Weaver, a postal clerk, and Florence Weaver Freeman. Robert's grandfather, Robert Tanner Freeman, was the first African American to graduate from Harvard Dental School (in 1869), and he practiced in Washington, D.C. Robert grew up in the middle-class, integrated neighborhood of Brookland and graduated from the prestigious Dunbar High School in 1925.

Robert then enrolled at Harvard College, which his older brother, Mortimer, also attended. Among his friends in college were Ralph Bunche, William Henry Hastie, Rayford W. Logan, and John P. Davis. Robert and his brother had intended to become lawyers and open a joint practice, but when Mortimer died suddenly at age twenty-three, Robert decided to pursue an economics degree. He received his bachelor's degree in 1929 and his master ...