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Article

Boynton Robinson, Amelia  

Mary A. Waalkes

Article

Publication History:

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

civil rights and voting rights activist, was born in Savannah, Georgia, the seventh of ten children born to Anna Eliza Hicks and George Platts, the latter of whom owned and operated a wood supply business for years before moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and engaging in real estate.

Amelia Platt's childhood was idyllic; she was raised in Savannah and its outskirts in an affectionate middle-class family and community that encouraged her aspirations. She graduated from Tuskegee Institute (later Tuskegee University) in 1927 later adding course work from colleges in Tennessee Virginia and Georgia She briefly taught school in Georgia before being named home demonstration agent for the Dallas County Alabama Cooperative Extension Service In the early 1930s she served alongside Samuel William Bill Boynton who was the county agent for Dallas County The Cooperative Extension Service at that time was segregated by both race and gender in the South ...

Article

Dahmer, Vernon Ferdinand  

Mark Newman

Article

Publication History:

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

civil rights activist, was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the eighth of twelve children of a white father, George Dahmer, and a mother of mixed racial heritage, Ellen Kelly. Vernon Dahmer's complex heritage derived from both sides of the family. Born the illegitimate son of a German immigrant and a white American mother, George Dahmer had been raised with eight younger black siblings, the result of his mother's later marriage to a former slave. Ellen Kelly was the daughter of a white planter father, who gave Ellen and George Dahmer part of his land near Hattiesburg, Kelly Settlement. The Dahmer children looked white and three of Vernon's five brothers migrated to the North, where they married white women and passed as white. Some members of the family on both sides of the color divide were ignorant of the existence of relatives on the other. In adulthood, Vernon Dahmer ...

Article

Doyle, Henry Eman  

DeCarlous Spearman

Article

Publication History:

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

attorney, judge, poet, and activist, was one of ten children born to Albert, a laborer, and Mary Burleson Doyle, a laundress, in a four room house in Austin, Texas. In 1928 Doyle graduated Salutatorian from Anderson High School and magna cum laude from Samuel Huston College (later Huston-Tillotson College) in 1933. After college he taught in the Austin public school system and later took graduate courses at Columbia University.

On 4 March 1947 the Texas State University for Negroes (later Texas Southern University) was established to keep Heman Sweatt, a black applicant, from entering law school at the University of Texas (UT). This new school offered something unavailable to blacks in Texas, the opportunity to attend law school in their own state. On 22 September 1947 Doyle was the first student to register at the new law school This would be ...

Article

Hill, Oliver White  

Brian J. Daugherity

Article

Publication History:

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

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

Hulett, John  

Bergis K. Jules

Article

Publication History:

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

civil rights activist, sheriff, and probate judge, was born in Gordonville in Lowndes County, Alabama, to Jim Hulett and Daisy (Baker), both farmers. Before 1950 John Hulett was eager to travel outside the Black Belt to see more of America. After graduating from Central High School in Gordonsville around 1945 and already planning to be a policeman, he took classes in law enforcement at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Alabama in preparation for his future career. Upon his return to Alabama in 1950 he settled in Birmingham and began working for the Federal Rural Housing Alliance as a housing consultant Hulett traveled throughout six southern states helping to provide homes for the poor in rural areas While in Birmingham he also became affiliated with the organized labor movement working to secure jobs for African Americans in the city During this time ...

Article

Loving, Mildred Delores Jeter  

Robert A. Pratt

Article

Publication History:

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

a housewife, whose marriage in 1958 to Richard Loving sparked one of the nation's most important civil rights cases, was born Mildred Delores Jeter, of African American and Native American ancestry. Loving was one of five children born to Theoliver Jeter, a sharecropper, and Musiel Byrd, a homemaker. She also had four half brothers. She graduated from Union High School in Bowling Green, Virginia in 1957. In 1958 she married her childhood sweetheart who was white Both Jeter and Loving were born in Caroline County Virginia an area with a well known history of black white interracial sexual liaisons As was the local custom however and true for most of the South these unions occurred under cover of darkness and without legal sanction Many states had laws prohibiting interracial marriages some with restrictions dating back to the nineteenth century While enforcement of these laws ...

Article

Lynn, Conrad J.  

Brian Gilmore

Article

Publication History:

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

civil rights lawyer and activist, was born in Newport, Rhode Island. Lynn was one of seven children of Nette (Irving) Lynn, a domestic worker, and Joseph Lynn, a laborer. Lynn's parents were originally from Augusta, Georgia. They had been married in 1904 and migrated north in 1906 when their multimillionaire employer also moved north. Eventually they came to live in Rockville Centre, on New York's Long Island, where they settled in a black ghetto set in a swampy lowland. The mortality rate in Lynn's neighborhood was very high, but even though he was a somewhat sickly young child, he survived.

In 1926 Lynn graduated from Malverne High School as its salutatorian His academic skills were so exceptional that Syracuse University awarded him a debating scholarship With funds raised partially from a bake sale the mothers club of Lynn s high school presented Lynn s mother with ...

Article

Miscegenation  

Lola Young

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Term used to refer to sexual relations between different races resulting in ‘mixed’ offspring. It comes from the combination of two Latin words: miscere (to mix) and genus race Across the centuries miscegenation has been the subject of heated discourse and debates about the desirability or otherwise of cross ...

Article

Nutter, Thomas Gillis  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

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

attorney, West Virginia state legislator, business owner, founder and president of the West Virginia conference of NAACP branches, sometimes known in public as T. Gillis Nutter, was born in Princess Anne, Somerset County, Maryland, the son of William Nutter and Emma Henry Nutter.

He was educated in public schools in Maryland, and awarded the L.L.B. degree from Howard University Law School on 28 May 1898. For two years afterward he taught school and was a principal in Fairmount, Maryland. Nutter was admitted to the bar in Marion County, Indiana, in 1900, and moved to Charleston, West Virginia, in 1903 He established his reputation as a defense lawyer by convincing a jury in the Grice murder case to convict a black man charged with killing a white man of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder then in the case of Campbell Clark charged ...

Article

Randall, William P. “Daddy Bill”  

Don Schanche

Article

Publication History:

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

elected county official and Macon, Georgia, civil rights leader, was born in Valdosta, Georgia, the fourth of six children of Harry and Carrie Randall. He was reared in Macon, where his father, formerly the Valdosta manager for the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, had returned to work for his own mother's grocery wholesale and retail business. William P. Randall graduated from Hudson High School and Beda Etta Business College in Macon before going to work as a carpenter. He worked for a large construction company but after World War II went into business with his brother, a bricklayer. Eventually he became one of the major black contractors in the Southeast, working on large-scale commercial and residential projects.

In an era when Jim Crow custom forced African Americans to step aside when a white approached on the sidewalk Randall s father taught him not to give way As ...

Article

Reynolds, Grant  

Christine Knauer

Article

Publication History:

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

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

Rhinelander, Alice Jones  

Angelita D. Reyes

Article

Publication History:

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

cause célèbre, was born Alice Beatrice Jones, the daughter of a white mother and supposedly “black” father, both of whom had emigrated from England to the United States in 1891. While the race of her mother Elizabeth Jones was familiar and recognizable enough for Americans to classify as white, the racial background of George Jones, her father, was not as clearly determined. While general references considered him to be British of West Indian descent, he was distinctly not African American according to an array of witnesses and census documentation in the United States.

Various newspapers of the period described Alice Jones as “dusky,” “a tropical beauty,” or of a “Spanish complexion” (Lewis and Ardizzone, 63–66, 163). Not considering herself black in the American rhetorical denotation of race, Alice Jones Rhinelander affirmed during the annulment trial of the interracial marriage to Leonard Rhinelander (1903 ...

Article

Sweet, Ossian H.  

Daniel Wein

Article

Publication History:

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

physician, was born Ossian Haven Sweet in Orlando, Florida, the eldest of nine surviving children of Dora DeVaughn and Henry Sweet. In the summer of 1898 the Sweets bought a plot of land in the town of Bartow, approximately forty-five miles east of Tampa, where they ran a successful farm and lumberyard. Ossian attended Union Academy (Bartow's all-black public school) through the eighth grade. In September 1909, at the age of thirteen, he began preparatory work at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, the nation's first black college. He was initially awarded a scholarship, but it was rescinded due to lack of funds. Sweet did odd jobs around campus to help cover expenses. He started the college program in the fall of 1913 concentrating in the sciences with the goal of entering medical school Sweet earned his BS a general science degree that focused on biology chemistry ...

Article

Terry, Roger C.  

Lisa M. Bratton

Article

Publication History:

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

Tuskegee Airman who was court-martialed at Freeman Field, was born Roger Cecil Terry in Los Angeles, California, the son of Edith Frances (Ross) Terry and Joseph Roger Terry, a driller for Standard Oil. In 1920 Joseph Terry had secured employment in the oil fields in Venezuela, but before departing for Venezuela, he worked in the California oil fields where a drilling accident took the life of his partner. Fearing for her husband's life, Roger's mother decided that her husband should not continue as an oil driller and the family remained in California.

Terry attended elementary and high school in Compton, California, attended Compton Junior College, and graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) at the age of nineteen. At UCLA Terry played basketball, and he and Jackie Robinson the first African American to play in major league baseball were the only two African Americans ...

Article

Wright, Binkley T.  

Teresa A. Booker

Article

Publication History:

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

Tulsa Race Riot participant and survivor, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His parents' names are now unknown, although it is known that his father worked as a bank janitor.

In the late evening of 30 May 1921 eleven-year-old Binkley Wright was attending the 10:00 p.m showing of a play held at the Dixie Theater in downtown Tulsa with some friends The theater which was restricted to use by blacks only was nonetheless located in the white section of the town Ten minutes or so into the show Wright and the other audience members were dismissed because of disturbances outside of the theater On his way home to Greenwood in the northern part of Tulsa Wright witnessed blacks running in the streets and talking about an impending race riot When he arrived home he told his parents what had happened and asked what a race riot was While corroborating his ...