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Green, Calvin Coolidge  

Brian J. Daugherity

pastor, educator, civil rights activist, was born Calvin Coolidge Green at Laneview, Essex County, Virginia, the son of James H. Green and Levalia C. Green. One of eleven children, Green spent most of his youth and adolescent years in Middlesex County, Virginia, graduating from high school in Stormont (later Saluda), Middlesex County, in 1950. Green's father worked a variety of different jobs, often as a lumberman, but also as a farm laborer and general laborer. His mother was a homemaker. Green himself worked many of the same jobs, supplementing the family income until he left Middlesex after high school.

In 1950 Green attended Virginia State College (later Virginia State University) for a semester, before leaving for financial reasons, and joined the military, spending the next two years overseas. In 1951 he fought and earned commendations in the Korean War with the First Cavalry Division ...

Article

Greer, Hal  

John Bryan Gartrell

basketball player, was born Harold Everett Greer in Huntington, West Virginia. After graduating from Douglass High School in Huntington, Greer would become one of the greatest high school basketball players in the history of West Virginia. He broke a significant racial barrier when he enrolled at Marshall University in his home state in 1954. He became the first African American to receive a scholarship to Marshall and the first African American to play a sport at the university. Listed at six feet two inches and 175 pounds, Greer averaged 19.2 points per game during his college career, earning all-conference honors in 1957. In his senior year of 1958 he not only made the all-conference team for a second consecutive year, but he was also named a college All-American.

Greer was known as a quick shooting guard with a near unstoppable mid range jump shot Following his graduation ...

Article

Henry, Aaron  

Jennifer Jensen Wallach

civil rights activist and politician. Born in Dublin, Mississippi, to sharecroppers who encouraged him to get an education, Aaron Henry joined the U.S. Army after high school and then, with the help of the GI Bill, attended Xavier University in New Orleans. He graduated with a pharmacy degree in 1950 and that same year opened a drugstore in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

A charismatic and successful businessman, Henry was a natural civil rights leader. In 1951 he was a cofounder of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, and in 1959 he was elected president of the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP, a position that he held until 1993. During the 1960s he was arrested thirty-eight times for civil rights activities. In an attempt to damage his effectiveness as a leader and to prey upon local prejudices, Henry's opponents spread rumors that he was a homosexual. In 1962 he ...

Article

Henry, Aaron E.  

Françoise N. Hamlin

civil rights activist, was born to sharecroppers in Coahoma County in the Mississippi Delta. When Henry was five years old, his birth parents died, and he went to live with his maternal uncle and his wife, Ed and Mattie Henry, whom he considered his parents thereafter. He spent his early years on the Flowers Plantation in Coahoma County before the family moved to Clarksdale and he could attend the black Coahoma Agricultural High School, graduating in 1943.

As with many men who played major roles in the civil rights movement, including his fellow Mississippians Medgar Evers and Amzie Moore Henry s World War II experience in the segregated military affected him profoundly He remembered that his fellow black servicemen knew little about the rich African American history crediting his teachers for supplementing the curriculum with black history lessons When he returned home from his station in ...

Article

Hill, Oliver W.  

Daniel Donaghy

civil rights attorney. Oliver White Hill was born in Richmond, Virginia, to William Henry White Jr. and Olivia Lewis White. His parents separated when he was very young, and Hill eventually took his stepfather's surname. His family lived in Roanoke for a time and then moved to Washington, D.C., where Hill attended Dunbar High School. After graduation, he attended Howard University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1931 and his law degree in 1933. At Howard, Hill befriended the future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.

From the beginning of his law career, Hill was interested in civil rights work. He opened a practice in Richmond in 1939, and the next year he worked with Marshall and others to win Alston v. School Board of Norfolk, Virginia which secured equal pay for African American teachers As World War II mounted in Europe Hill enlisted he ...

Article

Hill, Oliver White  

Brian J. Daugherity

NAACP attorney, politician, and civil rights activist, was born Oliver White in Richmond, Virginia, the son of William Henry White Jr. and Olivia Lewis White, both resort employees. His parents divorced in 1911, and when his mother married Joseph C. Hill, Oliver took his stepfather's last name.

Oliver Hill spent much of his youth and adolescent years in Roanoke, Virginia. For most of these years he lived with friends of his family—the Pentecosts—while his mother and stepfather lived and worked in Hot Springs, Virginia, and then in Washington, D.C. Hill went to school in Roanoke until the eighth grade, when he moved to Washington, D.C., to join his mother and stepfather. He then went to Dunbar High School there, which enjoyed a reputation for academic excellence.

Hill obtained his bachelor's and law degrees from Howard University, completing his studies in 1933 He was ...

Article

McPhatter, Thomas Hayswood  

Yvonne Latty

U.S. Marine Corps sergeant, U.S. Navy captain, World War II and Vietnam veteran, Montford Point marine, and Iwo Jima survivor, was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, the eleventh and last child and only son of Elizabeth Morrissey and Thomas Matthew McPhatter, a master barber. During the Depression his family lost everything they had in the bank and they struggled for food and clothing. On 19 May 1941 he graduated from high school, registered for the draft, and enrolled at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, intending to study history. His parents could not afford to pay his tuition so he worked summers and during the school year.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 McPhatter did not want to go to war He was exempted as an only son and had a deferment as a pre theological student because he ...

Article

Poole, Cecil F.  

Donnamaria Culbreth

circuit court judge, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the third of four children born to William and Eva Poole. In 1918 the family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when Poole was four years old.

In 1932 Poole entered the University of Michigan, graduating in 1936 and earning a law degree in 1938. A year later Poole went on to earn a master of law degree from Harvard University. In 1940 Poole passed the Pennsylvania bar, and in 1941 he obtained a job as an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which investigates unfair labor practices. Poole studied federal laws covering labor and labor relations and advised the NLRB board members on cases.

Poole was drafted into the army in 1942 and married Charlotte Crump that same year Poole s experiences in the segregated army were harsh From Poole s experience the duties of black soldiers ...

Article

Reynolds, Grant  

Christine Knauer

civil rights activist, army chaplain, and lawyer, was born in Delray Beach, Florida, the son of Frank Reynolds and Emma. He attended Hampton Institute (later Hampton University), an institution of higher education for blacks in Virginia.

When he graduated from Hampton in 1928, Reynolds intended to study medicine; however, because he lacked financial resources, he had to give up this dream. With the financial support of a white patron, Reynolds entered Michigan State University, but he was later expelled due to racial flare-ups. He continued his education at the Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, which wanted to integrate its facility and granted Reynolds a scholarship. Graduating in 1937, he became the minister of the Mount Zion Congregational Temple in Cleveland, Ohio. Little is known about his personal life.

With the onset of World War II, Reynolds joined the army in 1941 ...

Article

Rivers, Francis Ellis  

Simon Topping

prominent New York City judge, was born in Kansas City, Kansas, the son of the Reverend David Foote Rivers, the last African American member of the Tennessee state legislature during Reconstruction, and Silene Gale Rivers. In 1898 his family moved to Washington, D.C., where he completed elementary and high school. He had considered becoming an athlete, but an attack of gout prevented this. He began studying law at Howard University, but in 1911 he entered Yale, where he graduated with Phi Beta Kappa distinction in economics and history in 1915. In 1916 he went to Harvard Law School but left to become an inspector for Winchester Firearms, a post he kept until the United States declared war on Germany in 1917 During the war he attended the segregated officer training school in Des Moines Iowa and served as a first lieutenant with New York s 367th ...

Article

Yates, James  

Wendy Pflug

activist and volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish civil war, was born in Quitman, Mississippi, the middle child of sharecroppers Ida and George Washington Yates. In the year Yates was born the State of Mississippi did not register the birth of African Americans, so the exact date of his birth is unknown. When James was about six years old, in 1912, his parents and some other families pooled their money to hire a private teacher. Because of the cost most of the families could not pay the teacher; as a result Yates's schooling was sporadic. Determined that their son would receive an education, George and Ida Yates sent him walking ten miles one way to a one-room schoolhouse that operated only five months of the year. Jim Crow laws permeated the South and from an early age Yates witnessed racism and intimidation against African ...