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Article

Blackburn, Alpha  

Rita Kohn

Article

Publication History:

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

designer, businesswoman, and civic leader, was born Alpha Coles in Lynchburg, Virginia, the youngest of eight children of Alphonso Carroll Coles and Minnie Pugh Coles. Growing up, Blackburn attended a segregated school system, and went on to win a scholarship to Howard University, from which she graduated with honors, attaining a bachelor of arts in Design and a master of fine arts in painting and Art History. In 1964 she moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, with her husband, Walter Scott Blackburn, who had completed his degree in architecture at Howard. She commenced work as a freelance designer of clothing and interiors.

Blackburn's petite figure and radiant good looks created opportunities for her to model, and she accepted a steady job at the prestigious L. S. Ayres & Company in downtown Indianapolis. Concurrently, she hosted a half‐hour daily talk show from 1972 to 1978, Indy Today on WISH ...

Article

Bowser, David Bustill  

Susan B. Iwanisziw

Article

Publication History:

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

commercial painter, artist, and activist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only known child of Jeremiah Bowser from Maryland and Rachel Bustill, daughter of the prosperous black abolitionist and educator Cyrus Bustill. The intermarriage among the region's free black Quaker families headed by Cyrus Bustill, Robert Douglass Sr., Jeremiah Bowser, and David Mapps created a dynamic force that benefited all African Americans and particularly spurred David s personal growth and accomplishments Jeremiah a member of the Benezet Philosophical Society served as a steward on the Liverpool lines and later it seems he was the proprietor of an oyster house near the intersection of 4th and Cherry Streets where David Bowser first hung up his sign as a commercial painter Later the Bowser family moved to the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia into a house at 481 North 4th Street where Bowser remained for the ...

Article

Chanticleer, Raven  

Ingrid Schorr

Article

Publication History:

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

curator, fashion designer, dancer, and artist, was born James Watson in rural Woodruff, South Carolina, to sharecropper parents whose names are unknown. Little information about his early years is available except that he attended the Fashion Institute of New York and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris before moving to New York in the 1960s.

As Chanticleer established himself as a fashion designer in New York City he also began to propagate the biographical embellishments and falsehoods that would be repeated until his death: that he was born in Harlem to a Barbadian concert pianist and a Haitian high school principal; that he completed a master's degree at the Sorbonne; that as a five-year-old he designed a prize-winning folding chair for a competition at the 1940 World's Fair.

Whether or not he grew up in Harlem Chanticleer identified so strongly with its place at the center of black history and ...

Article

Chelor, Cesar  

Cynthia Staples

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
21 September 2023

lived in Wrentham, Massachusetts, near the Rhode Island border. His birthplace and birthdate are unknown, as are the names of his parents. Tax records suggest that by 1736, a young, perhaps teenaged, Chelor was enslaved by Wrentham woodworker Francis Nicholson. Nicholson is considered the earliest documented American planemaker.

The plane was an especially important tool at this time designed to hold a sharpened blade to accomplish precise woodworking tasks. During Chelor’s life, planes were handmade from wood. The plane could be pushed or pulled to smooth, shape, and straighten the surface of wood. A carpenter required a great variety of planes, each with a specialized function. Different planes were needed for making window frames and doors or for producing architectural moldings. Nicholson was known for his innovative plane designs.

Nicholson s Wrentham woodshop operated during a historic period when there was enormous population growth in New England Demand for ...

Article

Day, Thomas  

George W. Reid

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Thomas Day was born either on the British West Indies island of Nevis or in the rural portion of Caswell County, North Carolina, approximately 3 km (2 mi) from Milton. The date of his birth is also uncertain: either between 1785 and 1795 or between 1794 and 1804. He became well known in Milton for his beautifully carved chairs, small tables, and footstools made first of walnut and later of mahogany imported from the West Indies. By the time of his death, which was before the Civil War (1861–1865), he was reputed to be the wealthiest free black in his part of the state, with an estate worth about $100,000.

Evidence about Day s life is in many respects uncertain There appears to be no information about his father His mother is said to have been given her freedom in North Carolina and to have sent him ...

Article

Day, Thomas  

Lisa E. Rivo

Article

Publication History:

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

furniture maker and entrepreneur, was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, to free landowning parents, John Day and Mourning Stewart. John Day was a furniture maker and plantation owner, whose periodic financial difficulties may have been exacerbated by struggles with alcohol and gambling.

According to John Day Jr. Thomas s older brother their father was the son of a white South Carolina plantation owner and her black coachman After becoming pregnant she was sent to a Quaker community with which she left the newborn when she returned to her family On several occasions when John Sr met financial failures and briefly abandoned his family John Jr was left to cover his father s debts Thomas Day s mother Mourning Stewart of Dinwiddie County Virginia was the descendant of mixed raced landowners and the daughter of Dr Thomas Stewart owner of an eight hundred acre plantation and as many as ...

Article

Fortune, Amos  

Jeffry D. Schantz

Article

Publication History:

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

tanner and bookbinder, was born in Africa and brought to the colonies as a slave while very young. Nothing is known of Fortune's parentage, birth, or early years. It is thought that he arrived in America around 1725, but little is known of his life in the colonies prior to the mid-1700s. Ichabod Richardson of Woburn, Massachusetts, purchased Fortune around 1740, kept him as a slave apprentice, and taught him the art of tanning. In December 1763 Richardson drafted a “freedom paper” granting Fortune's freedom but died without signing it. Fortune remained a slave of the Richardson family until 1770, when a valid article of manumission signed by Ichabod's sister-in-law, Hannah, secured his freedom.

Remaining in Woburn for several years, Fortune purchased a small homestead from Isaac Johnson in 1774 and continued to run the Richardsons tannery During his Woburn years Fortune married twice ...

Article

Fortune, Amos  

Scott A. Miltenberger

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Little is definitively known of Amos Fortune, who lived in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Purportedly an African prince sold into slavery at a young age, Amos spent fifteen years as a slave of the Boston bookbinder Deacon Fortune. In the course of his servitude, Amos learned to read and write and converted to Christianity.

In 1738Ichabod Richardson, a tanner living in Woburn, Massachusetts, apparently purchased Amos and began to train him in his profession. In his will, Richardson granted Amos his freedom in 1768, but two years passed before Richardson's heirs lived up to the promise, in fact requiring Amos to purchase his freedom. In 1778 he purchased the freedom of another slave, Lydia Somerset, and married her; within a few months, however, she died. A year later Fortune purchased and married another woman, Violate Baldwin in ...

Article

Hathaway, Isaac Scott  

Renée R. Hanson

Article

Publication History:

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

sculptor, illustrator, ceramicist, and entrepreneur, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the first of three children born to the Reverend Hathaway and Mrs. Hathaway. Hathaway's mother died when he was only two years old, and his father and grandmother raised him and his two sisters, Fannie and Eva.

A trip with his father to a local museum inspired Hathaway to become an artist. Walking through the museum's galleries, which were filled with busts of famous white American heroes, Isaac noticed the absence of-many African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass. He asked his father why they were absent, and the elder Hathaway simply stated that there were no trained African American sculptors to sculpt prominent African American people. The young Hathaway determined to change this by becoming a trained artist.

Hathaway began his career as an artist at Chandler College in Lexington and continued it ...

Article

Howard, Milton  

Beverley Rowe Lindburg

Article

Publication History:

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

Civil War soldier, cabinetmaker, and fifty-two-year employee of the Rock Island (Illinois) Arsenal, was born free but was kidnapped by slave traders at around the age of five along with his mother, father, brother, and a sister (all of whose names are unknown) from their home near Muscatine, Iowa. He was first sold as house slave to a man named Pickett from Alabama, and later to an Arkansas planter whose last name he took for a surname; he was generally known as “Milt.” Reports of his age vary greatly: census, military, and burial records indicate he was born between 1821 and 1845.

Howard and another house slave were married in a formal ceremony at the Pickett Plantation a privilege that was customarily afforded only to house servants Several children were born to the couple but all family ties were severed when Howard was sold to the Arkansas ...

Article

Jones, James Monroe “Gunsmith”  

Verity J. Harding

Article

Publication History:

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

gunsmith and engraver, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the eldest son of Allen Jones, a slave and a blacksmith, and Temperance Jones, a slave. He was one of eight children, a daughter and seven sons, born into a long line of slavery. His paternal grandfather, Charles Jones, was born in Africa around 1770 and brought to America to be sold into slavery some years later. Although born a slave, Gunsmith Jones was freed in 1829 when his father purchased liberty for his entire family Allen Jones was a skilled blacksmith who labored intensely for himself and his family while simultaneously performing his slave duties to earn the vast sum of money necessary to buy his family s freedom After saving the extraordinary amount of $2 000 he was cheated out of the money by his master and left with nothing With admirable determination he ...

Article

Kelly, Patrick  

Lisa E. Rivo

Article

Publication History:

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

fashion designer, was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Letha Kelly, a home economics teacher, and Danie Kelly, variously a fisherman, cabdriver, and insurance agent, who left the family when his son was a boy. Patrick and his siblings were raised by their mother and grandmother, Ethel Rainey, a maid and cook.

As a young boy Patrick was struck by the absence of black models in the fashion magazines that his grandmother brought home from her work in the homes of local white families. By junior high Patrick was designing and sewing dresses for neighborhood girls, and by high school he was designing display windows and drawing newspaper ads for local stores. Following his 1972 graduation from Vicksburg High School he spent two years at Jackson State University before dropping out and moving to Atlanta where he volunteered to design the shop windows at the Yves ...

Article

Lowe, Ann  

Elizabeth Way

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2014

fashion designer, was born in Clayton, Alabama, to Jack Lowe and Janey Cole Lowe. Little is known of Jack Lowe, however Janey Lowe and her mother, Georgia Cole, were talented dressmakers. The family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, when Ann was a young child, and her mother and grandmother ran a successful business, designing gowns for the wealthy white women of the city. They taught Ann their skills, and by the age of five she could recreate flowers from the garden with their fabric scraps. Though many women could sew in the early twentieth century, Lowe learned advanced dressmaking techniques that equipped her to create couture-quality gowns, as well as to own and operate her own business, a rare achievement for a black woman at the time.

In December 1914 Janey Lowe died leaving the sixteen year old Ann to finish four gowns ordered by the first lady of ...

Article

Outlaw, Wyatt  

Carole Watterson Troxler

Article

Publication History:

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

slave, entrepreneur, civic leader, and murder victim, probably was born in Alamance County, North Carolina. His mother gave her name as Jemima Phillips; she may have been a member of a free African American family named Phillips who lived in Caswell County, North Carolina, in the early nineteenth century. His father is unknown. Some of Outlaw's contemporaries thought he was the son of Chesley Farrar Faucett, a merchant with agricultural and tanning operations in northern Alamance County who served in the state legislature from 1844 to 1847 and from 1864 to 1865.

The judge and writer Albion Tourgée knew both Outlaw and Faucett and characterized them fictionally in Bricks without Straw (1880 Tourgée depicted Faucett sympathetically as an aged justice of the peace known for kindness as a slaveholder quiet wartime Unionism and cooperation with the Union League during Reconstruction Outlaw ...

Article

Piper, Rose  

Sarah Powers

Article

Publication History:

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

artist, illustrator, and textile designer, was born in the Bronx, New York. Her father was a public school teacher of Latin and Greek from Augusta, Georgia, while her mother was from Roanoke, Virginia. Piper was raised and spent most of her life in New York City. Her interest in painting began when she was in high school. Although she was offered a four-year scholarship to the Pratt Institute, a New York art school, in 1936 she instead enrolled in Hunter College with the intention of becoming a teacher. In 1940 she graduated, receiving a BA in Fine Arts, with a minor in geometry. From 1943 to 1946 she continued her art education at the Art Students League in New York City, where her most influential teachers were painters Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Vaclav Vytlacil.

Piper was awarded a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation in 1946 allowing ...

Article

Smith, Willi  

Eleanor D. Branch

Article

Publication History:

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

fashion designer, was born Willi Donnell Smith in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Willie Lee Smith, an ironworker, and June Eileen (Bush) Smith, a homemaker. He had two siblings, a brother Norman and a sister Doris, known as Toukie. As a child Smith showed an interest in art and, encouraged by his parents, also took an interest in clothing design. He attended Mastbaum Technical High School, where he studied commercial art. In 1962 he studied fashion illustration at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art but knew almost immediately that he would rather be a fashion designer. At seventeen his ambitions took him to New York City and the Parsons School of Design. During his two years at Parsons, he worked as an illustrator for designers like Arnold Scaasi. When he left Parsons in 1967 he freelanced for the Bobbie Brooks Company and did ...

Article

Valdes, Zelda Barbour Wynn  

Nancy Deihl

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2015

costume and fashion designer, was born Zelda Barbour in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. She was the eldest of seven children of Blanche Christian Barbour, a homemaker, and James Barbour, a cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Zelda received a Catholic school education that included training in music. As was typical for girls growing up in the early twentieth century, she learned to sew as a child by making doll clothes. She refined her technique observing her grandmother's skilled dressmaking and recalled in a 1994 interview (Gonzalez, 1994) that at a young age she made a dress for her grandmother that so pleased the older woman that she was buried in it.

During her long career Zelda Valdes was known by various names including Zelda Valdes Zelda Wynn Valdes and Zelda Wynn Her career in fashion began when she moved to White Plains New York as a teenager where she worked in ...