clergyman, community activist, denomination organizer, and black nationalist was born Albert Buford Cleage Jr., one of seven children of Pearl (whose maiden name is now unknown) and Albert Cleage Sr., in Indianapolis, Indiana. Shortly after Agyeman's birth, Cleage, Sr., a medical doctor, relocated with his family to Detroit, Michigan, where the father helped to establish the city's first African American hospital. After an undergraduate education that included a stay at Fisk University in Tennessee, Agyeman received his BA in Sociology from Wayne State University in 1937, serving as a caseworker for the Department of Public Welfare from 1931 to 1938. Subsequently Agyeman felt the call to ministry and obtained a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Oberlin College Graduate School of Theology in 1943. Also in 1943Agyeman married Doris Graham, to which union was born two children, Kris and the ...
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Agyeman, Jaramogi Abebe
Sandy Dwayne Martin
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Beman, Amos Gerry
Clifton H. Johnson
clergyman and abolitionist, was born in Colchester, Connecticut, the son of Jehiel C. Beman, a clergyman. Nothing is known of his mother. He grew up and received a basic education in Middletown, Connecticut, where his father was pastor of the African church. A Wesleyan University student, L. P. Dole, volunteered to tutor Beman after the university refused his application for admission because he was an African American. Dole and Beman suffered ridicule and harassment from other students, and an anonymous threat of bodily harm from “Twelve of Us” caused Beman to give up the effort after six months. He went to Hartford, where he taught school for four years, and around 1836 he briefly attended the Oneida Institute in New York.
Beman was ordained as a Congregational minister in 1839. At about this time he married a woman whose name is not known. In 1841 ...
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Booth, Lavaughn Venchael
Eric R. Jackson
pastor, community servant, and civil rights activist, was born in Collins, Mississippi. The 1930 Census lists his parents as D. Douglas Booth and Mamie Booth, both of whom lived on a farm in Mississippi. He graduated from Collins's Old Hopewell High School in 1936. That year young Booth preached his first sermon. Booth attended Alcorn A & M College, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1940. Booth then enrolled in Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia to obtain his degree in divinity. Several years later he entered Howard University in Washington, DC. In 1943 he graduated with honors from Howard University School of Religion, earning his bachelor of divinity degree, and was elected president of his class. While a student at Howard, in 1942, Booth married Georgia Anna Morris. Several years later, in 1944 Booth became the pastor of small Baptist ...
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Brazier, Arthur
Kathryn Lofton
community organizer and Pentecostal bishop, was born in a Hyde Park apartment on Chicago's South Side. His parents were among the waves of African Americans who migrated from the South to the North in pursuit of greater economic opportunity and social mobility during the Great Migration. His mother, Geneva, was a household domestic and lay Pentecostal preacher, eventually leading the Universal Church of Christ in Chicago. His father, Robert, was a maintenance man at the Hyde Park Laundry Company from 1921 to 1940. One of five children, Brazier grew up in a highly segregated black community, since restrictive covenants bound blacks to certain areas of the city.
From his early teenage years, Brazier worked whenever he wasn't in school, first as a milkman's helper for the Bowman Dairy Company and later as a parking attendant at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and 1934 During the Depression Brazier ...
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Brown, H. Rap
Jennifer Jensen Wallach
civil rights activist and religious leader. Hubert Gerold “H. Rap” Brown was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1943. He attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, studying sociology from 1960 to 1964. He then relocated to Washington, D.C., where he became chairman of the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), a civil rights organization. During his brief tenure with the NAG, Brown attended a high-profile meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Much to the chagrin of more moderate black leaders, Brown refused to show deference to the president, instead rebuking him for the state of American race relations.
In 1966 Brown joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming director of the Alabama Project. In 1967 at the age of twenty three he was elected chairman of the organization Brown led SNCC in a transition away from the nonviolent philosophy of the early days of the civil ...
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Brown, Hubert G. (“H. Rap”)
Alonford James Robinson
Hubert Brown was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1962 he dropped out of Southern University to join the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) at Howard University. In 1965 he became chairman of NAG. Labeled an extremist by the media for his nationalist views, Brown was an outspoken advocate of Black Power in the United States. In May 1967, when Stokely Carmichael stepped down, Brown was elected national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
That same year, Brown was charged by the states of Maryland and Ohio with inciting violence. He was harassed by the police and targeted by the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). While under indictment, Brown was arrested for transporting weapons across state lines. He resigned as SNCC chairman in 1968 Later that year he was sentenced to five years in prison on federal weapons charges ...
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Current, Gloster B.
Donald Yacovone
civil rights advocate, musician, and minister, was one of six children born to Earsey Bryant Current and John T. Current, a bank employee, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He grew up in Chicago and Detroit and credited the “outspokenness” of his parents and his grandfather the Reverend Gloster Bryant for his long career in the struggle for black rights (New York Times, 9 July 1997). Current's mother was an officer in the Women's Society of Christian Service, a black women's Methodist organization, and both parents played active roles in their local church. Gloster attended the Detroit Institute of Musical Art and in 1941 received an AB degree from West Virginia State College, near Charleston. In 1951, he earned a master's degree in Public Administration from Wayne State College in Detroit.
On 6 September 1941 he married Leontine Teenie Turpeau of Cincinnati whom Current had met at ...
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Estes, James F., Sr.
Richard Saunders
lawyer and minister, was born James Frank Estes to Melvoid Estes and Bertha Lee Walker Estes in Jackson, Tennessee. Graduated from Lane College in 1942, Estes captained the football team and married a friend and classmate, Frances D. Berry. Enlisting in the Army the same year, he served on active duty in Europe and was one of the few African Americans accepted to Officer Candidate School. Estes was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1943 for the racially segregated 1317th Engineers General Service Regiment. The 1317th engaged in the Normandy landings on D-Day, as well as the Allied Forces Rhineland Campaign and battle for Central Europe. At his discharge in 1945 Estes remained in the reserves and enrolled at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which conferred on him an LL.B. degree in 1948 Returning to Tennessee Estes opened a law office on Beale Street the economic center ...
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Gray, William Herbert, Jr.
Rose C. Thevenin
college president, pastor, and educator, was born in Richmond, Virginia, and attended public schools. He received his undergraduate degree in Education from Bluefield State College in West Virginia in 1933. The following year he earned a master's degree in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. Gray began his teaching career as professor of chemistry, professor of education, principal of the demonstration schools, and field director of Extension Services at Southern University in Louisiana. In the 1930s he married Hazel Yates in Louisiana. The couple had two children, a daughter Marion and a son William Herbert Gray III.
Upon the death of Nathan White Collier, the president of Florida Normal and Industrial Institute (FNII) in 1941, Gray was appointed president of that institution in 1942 and moved his family to St Augustine Florida There he sought to improve the financial crisis of FNII which ...
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Harvey, Clarie Collins
Rebecca L. Hankins
businesswoman, civil rights and peace activist, and United Methodist Church leader, was born Emma Augusta Clarie Collins in Meridian, Mississippi, the only child of Malachi C. and Mary Rayford Collins, owners of a funeral home and insurance business. The Harveys lived comfortably, despite the impositions of Jim Crow segregation. Collins began her education at two of the South's most important black institutions: Tougaloo College and Spelman College—the renowned Atlanta school for African American women—where she completed her BA degree in Economics in 1937. She went on to attend Indiana Institute of Mortuary Science, in 1942 becoming one of the first African Americans to receive a degree in Mortuary Science. She continued her education and in 1950 received an MA in Personnel Administration from Columbia University and then attended New York University's Graduate School of Business Administration.
On 1 August 1943 Collins married Martin Luther Harvey ...
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Hill, “Rabbi” David
Donna L. Halper
religious leader, fugitive, and political activist, was born David Hill in Nashville, Arkansas. Details of his early years are sketchy, although in interviews he claimed to have served in the navy during World War II and said that he spent many years as a civil rights activist and was persecuted by the government for it.
The government told a different version of Hill's story: it sought him because he was a con man with an arrest record dating back to the 1940s who had jumped bail after being arrested for defrauding people in several states. In 1957, for example, under the name “Reverend Frank Williams Hill had a small church in Chicago where he claimed to be either a bishop or a minister In reality he had never been ordained He also won the trust of a number of Chicago residents including at least ...
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Lawson, James
Jeff Bloodworth
civil rights activist and minister, was born James Morris Lawson Jr. in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the oldest boy in a family of nine children. His parents, James Lawson Sr., a minister, and Philane Cover both were immigrants to the United States, Lawson from Canada and Cover from Jamaica. Lawson Jr.'s paternal great grandfather was a runaway slave who settled in Canada and took the last name Lawson to honor the man who helped him escape via the Underground Railroad. Thereafter the family always greatly valued education, and Lawson's father became one of McGill University's first black graduates before he moved to the United States to serve as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church. Though the Lawsons moved throughout the country, they finally settled in Massillon, Ohio, where young James Lawson grew up.
Raised by a pacifist mother and strict father Lawson was converted to nonviolence ...
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Lawson, James M.
Anja Becker
civil rights leader and theorist and advocate for nonviolent resistance. The Reverend James Morris Lawson Jr. was an associate of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and was involved in many direct-action projects of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He is best known for his role in the Nashville movement.
Lawson's belief in nonviolence can be traced to his childhood. He was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Massillon, Ohio, the sixth of nine children and the oldest son. Lawson and four of his siblings obtained a higher education. His father, James M. Lawson Sr. the grandson of an escaped slave who made his way to Ontario with the help of the Underground Railroad was one of the first black graduates of McGill University He came to the United States as a minister of the AME Zion Church Although Lawson s father believed in self defense ...
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Lawson, James Morris
Robert Fay
James Morris Lawson was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He served as a low-profile leader of the Civil Rights Movement, but his influence was profound and lasting. He first made his mark on the civil rights struggle by teaching the nonviolent techniques of civil disobedience of Indian activist Mohandas Gandhi during the Nashville, Tennessee, Sit-Ins of 1960. Lawson, an ordained minister and pacifist who in the early 1950s had gone to prison rather than fight in the Korean War had traveled to India as a missionary after his release and studied Gandhi s tactics firsthand A divinity student at Vanderbilt University when the sit ins began he was dismissed from the school when he refused to accede to the university s demand that he discontinue his organizing activities Lawson s willingness to accept expulsion from the seminary rather than cease his civil rights work moved its sympathetic ...
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Love, Emmanuel King
Barbara McCaskill
minister, political activist, missionary, writer, and editor, was born a slave near Marion, Alabama. As was the case with many African American men of the post-emancipation era, Love's early schooling was scattershot; still it was substantive enough to prepare him for theological study and a lifelong commitment to service and leadership. Ordained on 12 December 1875, he graduated at the head of his class two years later in 1877 with a BA from the Augusta Institute, a forerunner of Atlanta's historic Morehouse College and a training ground for future African American ministers, politicians, and educators.
The highlight of Love's ministry was to pastor the influential First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia, from 1885 to 1900. Tracing its origins to as early as 1773, before the birth of the American nation, First African Baptist was officially instituted in 1788 and it ...
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Magee, James Henry
Roger D. Bridges
minister, civil rights advocate, and political activist, was born in Madison County, Illinois, to Lazarus, a free black, and Susan, who was a slave until Magee's father earned enough to buy her from her Louisville, Kentucky, owner and move to Illinois, settling in Upper Alton. Like most African Americans James Magee found his opportunities for education limited but managed to acquire more than a rudimentary education. Magee and his siblings attended the local township school with white children until some parents objected and officials forced the withdrawal of the Magee children. They were then provided with an inadequately prepared “colored” teacher. Eventually the Magee children were withdrawn and sent, in the autumn of 1855, to Racine, Wisconsin, where, as the only blacks, they attended for less than a year.
Returning to Shipman in the autumn of 1856 Magee became a teacher in a black Jerseyville ...
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Newman, Isaiah DeQuincey
Sadye L. Logan
minister, civil rights activist, and state senator, was born in Darlington County, South Carolina. He was the youngest child of Charlotte Morris, a schoolteacher, and Milton C. Newman, an itinerant minister. Newman, who had three older sisters, was raised in the home of his paternal grandmother in Hartsville, South Carolina, after his mother died when he was six years old. His father's second wife, Serena a member of the Hamilton family of Charleston South Carolina was also a teacher Eleven children were born to this union Newman s white paternal grandmother and his biracial paternal grandfather owned a mill and two plantations in Hartsville South Carolina Unlike many other less privileged rural black families the Newmans held a vision of hope and progress and tenaciously clung to the goal of attaining higher education As a youngster Newman attended public school in Williamsburg County and ...
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Perkins, John M.
Louis B. Gallien
community activist, minister, author, lecturer, and racial reconciler, was the last child born to Maggie and Jasper Perkins in New Hebron, Mississippi, sharecroppers whose family worked on cotton farms on the smaller white plantations of south central Mississippi. Perkins's mother died of pellagra—a vitamin deficiency disease that ravaged poor families in the Deep South, seven months after his birth. Little is known of the circumstances of his father's life except that he was an itinerant sharecropper and bootlegger.
Perkins's early life was shaped by the brutal murder of his brother, Clyde, after arriving home from World War II. Clyde was shot by a white police officer outside a theater after he reached for the officer's baton when the policeman threatened him. Perkins graduated from Wiggins Vocational School and soon afterward decided to move to California where he married his childhood friend, Vera Mae Buckley ...
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Poindexter, James P.
Frank R. Levstik
James P. Poindexter was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Evelina Atkinson, a woman of African American and Cherokee descent, and Joseph Poindexter, a white journalist for the Richmond Enquirer. Poindexter attended school in Richmond until his tenth year, when he began an apprenticeship as a barber, an occupation he practiced for many years. In 1837 he married Adelia Atkinson. During 1837 the Poindexters moved to Dublin, Ohio, a village sixteen kilometers (ten miles) north of Columbus. Dissatisfied with life in this farming community, they moved to Columbus the following year, residing there for the remainder of their lives.
Soon after settling in Columbus, Poindexter joined Second Baptist Church, where he preached and officiated when there was no regular minister. In 1847 an African American family that had previously owned slaves in Virginia joined the church Although the family had sold the slaves ...
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Proctor, Samuel DeWitt
Sholomo B. Levy
minister, educator, and humanitarian, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of Hughes Proctor, who worked at the Norfolk Navy Yard, and Velma Gladys. His parents had met as students at Norfolk Mission College, the same college attended by Velma's parents; Hughes's mother had attended Hampton Institute during Reconstruction. It was unusual for a black family to have such educated parents and grandparents so soon after slavery, and Samuel and his six siblings were raised to believe that educational attainment was natural and expected. Music and religious devotion also helped shape Samuel's childhood. His father played the violin, he played the clarinet, and the other children were each encouraged to learn an instrument. They entertained themselves at home, and they all sang in the choir of the Baptist church founded by his great-grandfather Zechariah Hughes.
As a boy Samuel shined shoes at local barbershops one ...
