chief minister of Barbados (1948–1958); premier of Barbados (1954–1958); and prime minister of the West Indian Federation (1958–1962), was born on 28 April 1898 in Government Hill, Barbados. The third of seven children born to Fitz Herbert and Rosa Adams (née Turney), Adams attended St. Giles’ Primary and later Harrison College. In 1918 Adams was awarded the Barbados Scholarship, which enabled him to attend Oxford University to study law. At Oxford, he regularly participated in political debates and became a member of the Liberal Party there. He campaigned for the Liberal candidate Frank Gray in 1922–1923 and canvassed for C. B. Fry in 1924. He returned to Barbados in 1925. Adams met and eventually married Grace Thorne in 1929 One year later she gave birth to their only child John Michael Geoffrey Adams otherwise known as Tom Adams prime minister of ...
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Adams, Grantley Herbert
Shani Roper
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Adams, John Michael Geoffrey Manningham
Leslie R. James
popularly known as “Tom,” was born on 24 September 1931 into the politically prominent Barbadian Adams family. He was the son of Sir Grantley Adams, a Barbadian lawyer who later served as the only Premier of the failed West Indian Federation (1958–1962) and Grace Thorne. Tom Adams’s political philosophy and career were significantly influenced by his father, Sir Grantley Adams, his early Barbadian education and upbringing, study at Oxford University, work at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and membership and leadership of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP).
The political upheavals of the 1930s altered the political landscape of the Caribbean and impacted the role that the Adams family and Barbados played in the region’s political evolution. By 1938 Tom s father Grantley Adams became a leading political figure in the struggle for civil rights in Barbados when he founded the Barbados Progressive League later called the Barbados ...
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Adams, Robert
Leticia Franqui-Rosario
was born Wilfred Robert Adams, in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), the son of Robert Adams, a boat builder. He was educated in Georgetown at St. Stephen’s Scots School, and St. Joseph’s Intermediate. He studied engineering drafting, but then trained as a teacher at the leading British West Indian teachers’ training college, Mico College in Jamaica. After his marriage broke down, he left for England, arriving there in September 1930. Failing to study law because of a lack of the necessary qualifications, he did a number of menial jobs and even became a professional wrestler with the name “The Black Eagle” (there is a 1934 painting by William Roberts of one of his bouts).
Acting then took over. His stage debut, with Paul Robeson in Stevedore, received favorable reviews. A year later he played Jean-Jacques Dessalines to Robeson’s Toussaint Louverture in C. L. R. James’s Toussaint Louverture ...
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Adderley, Alfred Francis
Patricia Glinton-Meicholas
was born in Nassau, The Bahamas, on 16 November 1891, the son of Wilfred Parliament (W. P.) Adderley (1861–1944) and his wife, Letitia Eliza (née McMinn; d. 1939). Letitia’s first husband had died, leaving her with two sons and a daughter. Alfred became one of the most distinguished members of an outstanding Bahamian family of African descent. Adderley’s accomplishments belied race-based strictures in a country where the ambitions of people of color were often scuttled by prejudice, economics, and law.
The family was founded by Alliday, a West African Yoruba whom the British Navy had liberated from a slave ship circa 1838. Despite his inauspicious start in The Bahamas, Alliday was a man of considerable property and social standing at the time of his death in 1885 Four of his descendants would become members of Parliament including his son William Campbell Adderley His grandson ...
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Adderley, Paul Lawrence
Patricia Glinton-Meicholas
was born in Nassau, Bahamas, on 15 August 1928 to Alfred Francis Adderley (A. F.), a prominent attorney and politician, and his wife Ethel (née Lunn). Paul’s elder brother Francis Ethelbert (1926–1996) became a physician. The family’s founder was a man named Alliday, a West African Yoruba, whom the British Navy had liberated from a slave ship, and brought to The Bahamas circa 1838. At his death in 1885, Alliday was a man of considerable property and social standing.
A F and Paul Adderley are widely regarded as two of the most accomplished Bahamians of the twentieth century and the son s education career civic pursuits and achievements mirrored his father s in many ways but exceeded them in others Paul received his primary and secondary education at the private Mrs Maude Wright s School and the Government High School At St Catharine s College University ...
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Akuffo-Addo, Edward
Ebenezer Ayesu
lawyer, chief judge, and president of Ghana, was born at Dodowa in the Greater Accra region of the Gold Cost (now Ghana) on 26 June 1906. His father was William Martin Addo-Danquah of Akropong, Akuapem. His mother was Theodora Amuafi, also from Akropong, Akuapem. After receiving his elementary education at the Presbyterian primary and middle schools at Dodowa, he enrolled in Achimota College in 1929, from where he was awarded scholarship to study mathematics, philosophy, and politics at Saint Peter’s College, Oxford University. Akuffo-Addo was one of the first students at Saint Peter’s College, matriculating in 1930, a year after the college was established. He went on to graduate with honors in philosophy and politics in 1933. He was later made an honorary fellow of the college, and in 1971 he was made a doctor of civil law at Oxford University.
In 1940 Akuffo Addo ...
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Albizu Campos, Pedro
Mónica A. Jiménez
was born in the Tenerías barrio of Ponce, Puerto Rico, on 12 September 1891 to Alejandro Albizu Romero, the son of a Basque sugar planter who worked as a US customs officer, and Juliana Campos, the daughter of a former slave who worked as a domestic in the residence of Albizu Romero.
A brilliant student, he graduated from Ponce High School in 1912 and attended the University of Vermont on a scholarship. In 1913 he transferred to Harvard University, where he studied literature and chemistry. Upon graduation, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, but took a leave in 1917 to join the US armed forces during World War I. He was assigned to the all-black 375th Regiment and stationed in Ponce, where he trained noncommissioned officers. He achieved the rank of first lieutenant before being honorably discharged in 1919 and returning to Harvard to complete his legal studies He ...
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Alcazar, Henry A.
Bridget Brereton
was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on 30 September 1860, into a light-skinned, mixed-race family of the upper middle class. His parents’ names were John and Pauline (née Durand de Beauval). He was educated at the Roman Catholic high school, St. Mary’s College, in Port of Spain, and qualified as a barrister at Gray’s Inn, London, being called to the Bar in Trinidad in 1882.
As a barrister engaged in private practice in Trinidad from 1882 to his death in 1930, he enjoyed the largest such practice in Trinidad in the first decades of the twentieth century, with important companies among his clients. He was appointed Queen’s (later King’s) Counsel—that is, he was recognized as a senior member of the Trinidad Bar—at the unusually young age of 37 (1897).
Alcazar entered the public life of colonial Trinidad as a young man He was elected ...
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Alemseged, Tesfai
Christine Matzke
Eritrean lawyer, writer, and researcher, was born on 19 October in the southern Eritrean market town of Adi Quala. His father was Tesfai Gebremichael, a government employee, his mother, Hiwet Tesfabruk, a housewife. Alemseged was the sixth of seven siblings, four boys and three girls. From the age of six he attended various elementary and secondary schools in Eritrea and Ethiopia before matriculating in 1962 from Haile Selassie Secondary School in the Eritrean capital, Asmara. After a nine-month work experience as a junior clerk with Ethiopian Airlines in Asmara (to avoid forced conscription into the Ethiopian military academy), he joined the Faculty of Law at Haile Selassie I University in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, graduating in September 1969 with an LLB (bachelor of laws). Thereafter Alemseged was briefly employed as a legal expert in the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance, a post he left in May 1970 to pursue ...
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Alexander, Clifford L., Jr.
André Willis
Clifford L. Alexander Jr. was born in New York, New York. He graduated from Harvard University in 1955 and Yale Law School in 1958. Alexander worked on a number of community development initiatives in Harlem, New York, before being appointed to a series of political positions in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and 1970s.
Alexander served as a National Security Council foreign affairs officer under President John F. Kennedy in 1963. He was appointed to three high-ranking advisory positions between 1964 and 1967, including deputy special counsel to the president, by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1967 Johnson named Alexander chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), a position he filled until Richard Nixon took office in 1969.
After a brief return to private practice in Washington D C Alexander resumed a role in public life as host and producer of ...
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Alexander, Clifford Leopold, Jr.
Antje Daub
lawyer, businessman, and secretary of the army, was born in New York City, the only child of Clifford Leopold Sr. and Edith McAllister. Alexander's father, a Jamaican native, became an apartment building manager of Harlem's Young Christian Association. His mother was from Yonkers, New York, where she worked for a real estate firm. Later she headed the New York City welfare department. She was the first African American woman to get elected to the Democratic Party's Electoral College. In this position she became a prominent figure in the broader civil rights struggle. Both parents inspired Alexander's later work to end racial discrimination.
Alexander spent his childhood in New York City. He received his early education at the Ethical Cultural School and Fieldston Schools in the Bronx. After graduating from high school, Alexander went to Harvard University. Here he met McGeorge Bundy Harvard s Dean of Arts ...
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Alexander, Raymond Pace
David Alvin Canton
lawyer and judge, was the third of five children born to Hillard Boone Alexander, a laborer from Mecklenburg County, Virginia, and Virginia Pace, from Essex County, Virginia. Alexander's parents were born slaves, but were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment following the Civil War. In 1880 they migrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where they lived in the Seventh Ward, a community that would later be made famous by W. E. B. Du Bois's seminal 1899 study The Philadelphia Negro. In 1903Alexander's mother died of pneumonia. Because his father worked long hours, Alexander and his siblings moved to North Philadelphia to live with his maternal aunt, Georgia Chandler Pace From the age of seven Alexander attended school and worked at various jobs including dockworker newspaper boy general helper at the Metropolitan Opera House in North Philadelphia Pullman porter and when he was in his early twenties ...
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Alexander, Raymond Pace
André Willis
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Alexander graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1920 and Harvard Law School in 1923, a time when very few African Americans gained admittance to Ivy League schools. Alexander enjoyed a successful career in private practice, directly challenging racism and discrimination and helping end segregation in a number of Philadelphia institutions, before becoming counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Between 1933 and 1935 Alexander served as president of the National Bar Association and sought a federal appointment. Although the prevailing racial climate made it difficult for him to break into national politics, Alexander was appointed honorary consul to the Republic of Haiti in 1938. He was considered for an ambassadorship to Ethiopia in 1951, but although he had President Truman's support, he was not confirmed. From 1951 to 1958 Alexander committed himself to ...
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Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell
Lia B. Epperson
attorney and civil rights activist, was born Sadie Tanner Mossell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children of Aaron Albert Mossell Jr., an attorney, and Mary Louise Tanner. In 1899 Mossell's father deserted the family and fled to Wales. During elementary school Sadie and her mother divided their time between Mossell's grandparents' home in Philadelphia and an aunt and uncle's home on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C. When her mother returned to Pennsylvania, Mossell remained under the care of her aunt and uncle in Washington until she graduated from M Street High School.
Mossell entered the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1915 and majored in education Her years as a student in an institution with so few women students and even fewer African Americans were extremely challenging Yet with her family s financial and emotional support she prospered academically and graduated ...
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Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell
Sadie Mossell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a prominent black Philadelphia family. Her father, Aaron Mossell, was the first African American to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her grandfather, Benjamin Tucker Tanner Tanner, edited the first black scholarly journal in the United States, the A.M.E. Church Review.
Mossell received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921. She worked as an actuary in North Carolina, then left to marry Raymond Pace Alexander, a graduate of Harvard Law School. With her husband's encouragement, she returned to the University of Pennsylvania, earning her law degree in 1927. The two entered law practice together. Their civil rights work began in 1935 when husband and wife fought to end racial segregation in Philadelphia The Alexanders visited segregated city theaters hotels and restaurants to demand rightful admittance under law and agitated for ...
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Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell
Nancy Elizabeth Fitch
Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell (03 January 1898–01 November 1989), economist and lawyer, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Aaron Mossell, an attorney and the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Mary Tanner. While a young girl her father abandoned the family, and she was raised by her mother with the assistance of relatives.
Alexander received her degrees from the University of Pennsylvania With her Ph D in economics awarded in 1921 she became the first African American woman to receive a doctorate in economics and among the first three African American women to receive a doctorate in any field in the United States Her doctoral dissertation The Standard of Living among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia was a thorough social survey investigating spending patterns from 1916 to 1918 of African American migrant families newly arrived from the South ...
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Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell
V. P. Franklin
Alexander, the first black woman to earn a PhD in Economics, in a 1981 interview provided this advice for young black men and women: “Don’t let anything stop you. There will be times when you’ll be disappointed, but you can’t stop. Make yourself the best that you can make out of what you are. The very best.”
Sadie Tanner Mossell was born into a prominent Philadelphia family. Her father, Aaron Albert Mossell, had been the first African American to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her grandfather, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was a well-known author, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the editor of the country’s first African American scholarly journal, the African Methodist Episcopal Review. The famous painter Henry Ossawa Tanner was her uncle At the turn of the century the Tanner home was a gathering place and intellectual center ...
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Alexander-Ralston, Elreta
Andre D. Vann
lawyer and judge, was born in Smithfield, North Carolina, the youngest of the three children of Reverend Joseph C. Melton, a Baptist minister and teacher, and Alian A. Reynolds Melton. She received her early education in the public school system of Danville, Virginia, and at the age of fifteen graduated from the James B. Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1937 she graduated from the neighboring North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College with a bachelor's degree in music. The following year, at the age of eighteen, she married Girardeau Alexander, a surgeon, and had a son, Girardeau Alexander III.
Alexander worked as a mathematics and history teacher and directed music in South Carolina and North Carolina for four years before deciding that music would not be her lifelong vocation Instead she longed for a career in law despite the profession s being largely ...
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Alfonsín, Raúl Ricardo
María de Lourdes Ghidoli
Alfonsín was born on 12 March 1927 in the city of Chascomús, Buenos Aires Province, with Spanish and German heritage on his father’s side and British on his mother’s. He was the eldest of Ana María Foulkes and Serafín Raúl Alfonsín’s six children. He married María Lorenza Barreneche on 4 February 1949, and they also had six children: Raúl Felipe, Ana María, Ricardo Luis, Marcela, María Inés, and Javier Ignacio. Only Ricardo followed in his father’s footsteps, though he entered politics in the 1990s, after his father’s presidency.
Alfonsín spent his childhood in Chascomús, where he attended primary school. As an adolescent, he entered the Liceo Militar General San Martín (General San Martín Military High School), located in Villa Ballester (Greater Buenos Aires). From there, he graduated in 1945 at the level of second lieutenant of the reserve Later he studied at the law school of the Universidad ...
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Allen, Macon Bolling
Johnie D. Smith
lawyer and judge, was born A. Macon Bolling in Indiana; the names of his parents and the exact date of his birth are unknown. He changed his name to Macon Bolling Allen by an act of the Massachusetts legislature on 26 January 1844. Details of Allen's early life and education are sparse and contradictory. His birth name is given in some sources as Malcolm B. Allen, and his birthplace as South Carolina. Evidence suggests that he lived in Maine and Massachusetts as a young man. Maine denied his initial application to the Maine bar because of allegations that he was not a state citizen, but he purportedly ran a Portland business before 1844. It is known that he read law in the Maine offices of two white abolitionist lawyers, Samuel E. Sewell and General Samuel Fessenden and that Fessenden promoted his admission to the Maine ...
