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Article

Atkins, Jasper Alston  

Joy Gleason Carew

Article

Publication History:

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

civil rights lawyer, community activist, editor, and publisher, was born in Winston, North Carolina, the sixth and last son of nine children of Simon Green and Oleona Pegram Atkins. His father was the founder and first president of the Slater Industrial Academy, later known as Winston‐Salem State University. Atkins graduated from the Slater Academy in 1915 and then went to Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, graduating magna cum laude in chemistry in 1919.

When Atkins obtained his LLB cum laude at Yale University in 1922, he was the first African American to graduate with honors from that institution. While there, Atkins was a member of the debate team and served as a monitor of the Yale Law Library, where he oversaw the indexing of thirty‐one volumes of the Yale Law Journal. In 1921 he was the first African American elected to the editorial board of the Yale ...

Article

Clifford, John Robert  

Connie Park Rice

Article

Publication History:

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

newspaper editor and civil rights lawyer, was born in Williamsport, Virginia (later West Virginia), the youngest of three sons born to Isaac Clifford, a farmer, and Mary Satilpa Kent, free blacks living in Hardy County. John Robert joined the Union army on 7 March 1865, rising to the rank of corporal in the 13th U.S. Heavy Artillery. After serving in Kentucky, Tennessee, and eastern Virginia under General Ulysses S. Grant, Clifford volunteered for service at Chicago, Illinois.

After the Civil War, Clifford remained in Chicago, staying from 1865 to 1868 with the Honorable John J. Healy, an acquaintance of his father, and graduating from Chicago High School. Clifford worked as a barber before going to live with an uncle in Zeno, Muskingum County, Ohio, where he attended a school taught by Miss Effie McKnight and received a diploma from a writing school conducted by a Professor ...

Article

Davis, John Preston  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

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

lawyer, journalist, director of the National Negro Congress, publisher of Our World magazine, was born in Washington, DC, the son of Dr. William Henry Davis and Julia Hubbard Davis, who had moved to the capital in 1899 from Louisville, Kentucky. The elder Davis worked in several occupations; in addition to obtaining a doctorate of Pharmacology from Howard University, he developed a successful business school, became official stenographer for the National Negro Business League, and during World War I served as special assistant to Dr. Emmett Scott, special assistant to the United States secretary of war.

In 1922 the younger Davis graduated from Dunbar High School, in Washington, DC, and entered Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He was selected as editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper The Bates Student in 1925 served as president of the debating fraternity Delta Sigma Rho and represented Bates in an international debate with ...

Article

Martinet, Louis Andre  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, newspaper founder, and attorney, initiated the challenge to Louisiana's “Separate Car Law,” which led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold “separate but equal” public accommodations in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Martinet was born free, the second of eight children born to Pierre Hyppolite Martinet, a carpenter who arrived sometime before 1850 in St. Martinsville, Louisiana, from Belgium, and his wife, the former Marie-Louise Benoît, a native of Louisiana. Benoît is generally referred to as a free woman of color, but there is a record in St. Martin Parish Courthouse that Pierre Martinet purchased her freedom on 10 January 1848 from Dr. Pierre Louis Nee, along with her mother and their infant son Pierre. They were married on 7 December 1869 in St Martin de Tours Catholic Church St Martinsville Louisiana before the Civil War Louisiana law did not permit ...

Article

Molina, Jacinto Ventura de  

Alejandro Gortázar

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2019

in the first half of the nineteenth century, was born on 15 October 1766 in Rio Grande de San Pedro, a city in Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). His mother was Juana de Sacramento, a Benguela woman from Angola. His father was Ventura, a Mina Dajome man (from Dahomey, currently Republic of Benin). Molina was born on the ship that brought his family to Brazil to be sold as slaves. His parents married in 1765 in Rio Grande.

Molina’s parents were both personal servants to José de Molina (1707–1782), a Spanish military man who came in 1759 to Banda Oriental with the Cevallos expedition to delimitate the Spanish imperial territory in Banda Oriental. Ventura saved José de Molina’s life in 1765 and was rewarded his freedom in return but he preferred to remain with his master Juana his mother was enslaved in Portuguese territory and became a ...

Article

Overton, Anthony O., Jr.  

Debra Foster Greene

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
28 January 2022

was born into slavery in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana to Anthony O. Overton, Sr. and Martha Deberry Overton. His father, Anthony Sr., was a businessman and Reconstruction-era Republican politician in Louisiana. At age thirteen, Overton and his family, which included his twenty-year-old brother, Mack Wilson Overton, migrated to Topeka, Kansas in December 1877 as part of the African American exodus from the South to Kansas.

Overton attended school in Topeka and took the three-year English and business course at Washburn College. According to the college catalog, the course was designed for “many who have neither the time nor the means for pursing a more extended course of study.” He then went to Lawrence, Kansas to study law at the University of Kansas. There he met Clara Gregg, whom he married on 14 June 1888, and together they had four children, Everett (1889), Mabel (1891 Eva ...

Article

Rhodes, Eugene Washington  

Charles Pete Banner-Haley

Article

Publication History:

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

editor, publisher, and lawyer, was born in Camden, South Carolina, the son of Charles Rhodes and Laura Boyd, former slaves. Rhodes moved from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, where he attended college at Lincoln University. He received a BA from Lincoln in 1921. Rhodes pursued legal studies at Temple University and received his LLB in 1924. In 1926 Rhodes was admitted to the Philadelphia bar.

In 1922 Rhodes became the editor of the Philadelphia Tribune. He served in that capacity until 1941, at which time he became the paper's publisher, a position he held until the end of his life. Also in 1922 Rhodes married Bertha Perry of Philadelphia, daughter of the paper's founder and publisher, Christopher J. Perry. A member of the small black upper class often labeled the “Old Philadelphians,” Perry had started the Tribune in 1884 as a ...

Article

Vann, Robert L.  

Todd Steven Burroughs

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

lawyer, politician, and newspaper publisher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a newspaper publisher, Robert Vann's periodical, the Pittsburgh Courier, became a newspaper not ashamed to publish sensational news and not afraid to be controversial. He saw the paper as an agitation vehicle to improve all facets of black life in Pittsburgh.

Robert Vann was born in 1879 on a North Carolina farm near a town called Ahoskie. His mother, Lucy Peoples, worked for a family named Vann. When her son's father deserted them, she gave him the Vann surname. After attending the Waters Training School in Winston, North Carolina, and the Wayland Academy (the latter a preparatory school for Virginia Union University), he attended the Western University of Pennsylvania. He became the first African American to become the editor of the Courant, the campus newspaper. Vann earned his BA from Western in 1906 and his ...

Article

Vann, Robert L.  

Charles Pete Banner-Haley

Article

Publication History:

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

journalist, lawyer, and activist, was born Robert Lee Vann in Hertford County, North Carolina, the son of Lucy Peoples, who cooked for the Albert Vann family, and an unidentified father. His mother named him following a custom from slavery times, giving the last name of her employer to her children. The paternity of Vann, according to his major biographer Andrew L. Buni, is uncertain. It is thought that his father was Joseph Hall, a field worker, but there are no birth records to this effect. There is the possibility that his father was white but not the Vann that his mother worked for.

Vann spent his childhood on the Vann and Askew farms. He entered the Waters Training School in Winston, North Carolina, at age sixteen. In 1901 he enrolled in Virginia Union University in Richmond After two years Vann moved to Pittsburgh and ...

Article

Vann, Robert Lee  

Rayford W. Logan

Article

Publication History:

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

Robert Lee Vann was born on August 27, 1879, in Ahoskie, North Carolina to former slaves who eked out a living by operating a general store. As a youth, Vann enjoyed playing with boys of prominent white families in nearby Harrellsville. After graduating as valedictorian of Baptist-run Waters Training School in Winton, North Carolina, he enrolled at Wayland Academy in Richmond, Virginia in 1901. While at Wayland, Vann was influenced by John T. Mitchell, editor of the Richmond Planet, who opposed the disenfranchisement of blacks and the virulent segregation laws known as Jim Crow.

In 1903, with the aid of a $100 Charles Avery scholarship, Vann entered Western University of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh as a sophomore There he gained a reputation as an orator and debater and served for two years as a regular contributor to the school newspaper In his senior year ...

Article

Wesley, Carter Walker  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

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

military veteran, attorney, civil rights advocate, and publisher, was born in Houston, Texas, the son of Harry and Mabel Green Wesley.

Carter Wesley lived with his mother, a public school teacher, after his parents separated. Attending early grades in Houston's racially segregated public schools, he graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, then arrived at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, by 1910.

Like many students at historically black colleges and universities at that time, he may have taken college preparatory classes at Fisk, but did not enroll in college level courses until 1913–1917, earning a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude. He was listed in the 1910 census twice, once at a Fisk dormitory, and also at his mother's home, 3200 Washington in Houston, where his older brothers Harry and Freeman were working, respectively, as a general laborer and a Pullman car porter.

Registered ...