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Article

Abdulah, Clive Orminston  

Erica Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born the son of Mildred Abdulah (née Hughes), a housewife, and Walter Abdulah, a civil servant, in Woodbrook, Trinidad. He attended Queen’s Royal College, a secondary school in Trinidad and Tobago’s capital, Port of Spain, from 1937 to 1944. From there, he moved on to earn a bachelor of arts degree, with a major in zoology, at the University of Pennsylvania (1946–1950); a bachelor’s in theology at Trinity College in Canada (1951–1954); a master’s of theology at Union Theological Seminary (1962–1965); and a doctor of ministry degree at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (completed in 1993).

It is clear that education played an important role in Abdulah s life as revealed not only by what he achieved academically but also by what he did when he attained those academic credentials His has been a lifelong journey of learning which has been the foundation ...

Article

Abernathy, Ralph  

Clayborne Carson

Article

Publication History:

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

clergyman and civil rights leader, was born David Abernathy near Linden, Alabama, the tenth of twelve children of farm owners Will L. Abernathy and Louivery Bell Abernathy. Abernathy spent his formative years on his family's five-hundred-acre farm in rural Marengo County in southwestern Alabama. His father's economic self-sufficiency and industry spared the family from most of the hardships of the Great Depression. “We didn't know that people were lining up at soup kitchens in cities all over the country,” he would recall in his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down Abernathy 6 Along with other family members he attended Hopewell Baptist Church where his father served as a deacon and decided early to become a preacher a commitment strengthened by a conversion experience at the age of seven Abernathy attended high school at all black Linden Academy a Baptist affiliated institution Having little exposure to whites during ...

Article

Abernathy, Ralph David  

Robert Fay

Article

Publication History:

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

Ralph Abernathy was born in Linden, Alabama, to William and Louivery Abernathy. He earned a B.S. degree from Alabama State College, and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1948. In 1951 Abernathy received an M.A. degree in sociology from Atlanta University and became pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He and Martin Luther King Jr., protesting segregated public transportation, led the successful boycott of the Montgomery bus system in 1955.

In 1957 Abernathy helped Dr. King found the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to coordinate nonviolent resistance to segregation. After King's assassination in 1968, Ralph Abernathy became SCLC president until he resigned in 1977, after which he served as a pastor of a Baptist church in Atlanta. His autobiography, titled And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, was published in 1989.

See also Montogomery Bus Boycott.

Article

Abernathy, Ralph David  

Kenneth H. Williams

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
21 January 1999
Published online:
01 December 2006

Abernathy, Ralph David (11 March 1926–17 April 1990), civil rights leader and minister, was born David Abernathy in Linden, Alabama, the son of William L. Abernathy and Louivery Valentine Bell, farmers. A sister’s favorite professor was the inspiration for the nickname “Ralph David,” and although Abernathy never made a legal change, the name remained with him from age twelve.

Abernathy’s parents owned a 500-acre farm, one of the more successful in Marengo County. His father, a community leader, served as head deacon of the local Baptist church for nearly forty years, became the first black in the county to vote and serve on a jury, and contributed heavily to building and maintaining schools in the area, including Linden Academy, the high school Ralph attended.

From the time he was a child Abernathy aspired to the ministry As he related in his autobiography The preacher after all was ...

Article

Abernathy, Ralph David  

Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Article

Publication History:

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

minister, civil rights activist, and close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. An Alabama native, Abernathy was one of twelve children born to successful farmers who had managed to rise from sharecropping to owning a five-hundred-acre farm. Abernathy's father was a deacon in a local church, and from a young age Abernathy wanted to join the ministry. He became an ordained Baptist minister in 1948. In 1950 he received a BS in mathematics from Alabama State University. He began what became a career in political activism while in college by leading demonstrations to protest the poor quality of food in the campus cafeteria and the lack of heat and hot water in campus housing. While in college he became interested in sociology, and he earned an MA in the subject from Atlanta University in 1951.

Abernathy became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery ...

Article

Adair, Thelma Cornelia  

David B. McCarthy

Article

Publication History:

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

Presbyterianeducator and activist, was born Thelma Cornelia Davidson at Iron Station, North Carolina, one of five children of Robert James Davidson, a Baptist minister, schoolteacher, and principal, and Violet Wilson Davidson a schoolteacher mortician and community organizer Her grandfather six uncles and three brothers were all ministers as would be her future husband She grew up in Spindale North Carolina where her mother was a teacher and her father was principal and superintendent of Western Union Baptist Academy and later in Kings Mountain North Carolina where her father served as a high school principal and as the pastor of several local churches After her early years in public school she enrolled in Lincoln Academy a boarding school run by the American Missionary Society of the Congregational Church Just before her thirteenth birthday she enrolled in Barber Scotia Junior College in Concord North Carolina a school of ...

Article

Agré, Bernard  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2013

Roman Catholic cardinal from the Ivory Coast, was born in the Ivoirian town of Monga on 2 March 1926. At the age of six, he received his baptism and began his education at a Catholic mission school in the town of Menni. Agré entered a Catholic seminary school in Bingerville in 1941 and remained there until 1948. He then attended seminary at the Beninese city of Ouidah from 1958 until his ordination as a Catholic priest on 20 July 1953. From his ordination to 1965, he was a priest in the town of Dabou. Agré then joined the teaching staff at the Bingerville seminary he had once attended and served there from 1956 to 1957. From 1957 to 1960 Agré studied canon law at the Pontifical Urbanian University and he graduated with a doctorate His return to Côte d Ivoire coincided with the country ...

Article

Agyeman, Jaramogi Abebe  

Sandy Dwayne Martin

Article

Publication History:

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

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 ...

Article

Akinola, Peter Jasper  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
29 February 2016

Anglicanarchbishop, was born on 27 January 1944 in Maga Adeniregun a village near the Nigerian city of Abeokuta Akinola s father Ttitus Oke Akinola a poor farmer and hunter died when the boy was just four years old Janet Amoke Oyedele his mother lost two children in infancy before Akinola s birth Akinola s maternal uncle Soge agreed to help raise the child as his mother s trading could not support the entire family Soge began Akinola s training as a carpenter although he did attend primary school at the same time Around the age of fourteen Akinola then joined the business of his paternal uncle Gabriel Faneye Oyedele since he no longer could afford the cost of attending school This relationship ultimately did not work out Frustrated Akinola went back to carpentry and moved to the Nigerian capital Lagos He has claimed that he barely survived ...

Article

Akudri, Dada, Yoane  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Congolese evangelist and translator was born in Gombe a village inhabited by Kakwa speaking clans in the northeastern corner of the modern day Democratic Republic of Congo This community suffered greatly from slave raids launched by Zande chieftains like Zémio and Mopoï living to their north in the late nineteenth century However the threat of northern raiders was hardly the only challenge for the young boy His name Akudri signified one who waited since he was born after his mother was pregnant for more than nine months He also bore his father s name Dada which means one who has no family This would indeed be Akudri s own fate since an epidemic of meningitis killed his parents and all his siblings when he was very young The boy barely survived himself A grave was dug to prepare for his funeral by other people in the village but he managed ...

Article

Alaketo, Olga de  

Robson Cruz

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

Brazilian Candomblé high priestess (or Iyalorisha), also known as Ọyafunmi (her initiatic name), was born Olga Francisca Régis in Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, to Mateus Cassiano dos Reis and Etelvina Francisca Régis (Ogunlona), members of a family of Candomblé Ketu priests and priestesses. She was the fifth high priestess of the Ile Maroialaji terreiro (Ile Ọmọ Aro Alaji, or the House of the Children of Alaji of the Aro clan). The terreiro was founded in the early nineteenth century by Otampe Ojaro (Maria do Rosário Régis) and Baba Alaji (João Porfírio Régis), both of whom belonged to the Ọja Aro clan—one of the five clans from which the king of Ketu is chosen.

According to the terreiro’s oral account, Otampe Ojaro and her twin sister, Obokô Mixobi—allegedly granddaughters of the Alaketu (ruler of the Yoruba kingdom of Ketu) Akebiowu (1780–1795 were abducted in a ...

Article

Alexander, Avery C.  

Nathan Zook

Article

Publication History:

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

minister, civil rights leader, and member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, was born Avery Caesar Alexander in the town of Houma in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, to a family of sharecroppers. The names of his parents are not known. Seventeen years later, his family moved to New Orleans. Avery Alexander maintained an active life there and in Baton Rouge for the next seventy-two years.

Prior to his election to the Louisiana legislature, Alexander was employed as a longshoreman. At the same time, he pursued an education by taking night courses, receiving his high school diploma from Gilbert Academy in 1939. He became politically active by working as a labor union operative for a longshoreman's union, Local 1419. He also held the occupations of real estate broker and insurance agent.

Alexander received a degree in theology from Union Baptist Theological Seminary and became an ordained Baptist minister ...

Article

Aline, Sitoue Diatta  

Robert Baum

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Senegalese prophetess was born in the southwestern Senegalese township of Kabrousse a member of the Diola ethnic group Today the Diola number approximately six hundred thousand people primarily in Senegal but there are significant communities in Gambia and Guinea Bissau Generally the Diola are considered the best wet rice farmers in West Africa though they have been increasingly troubled by droughts since the 1930s Although many Diola are Muslim or Catholic in their primary religious affiliation they include the largest number of adherents of an indigenous African religion in the Senegambia region Before the colonial occupation by the French British and Portuguese the Diola had a tradition of direct revelation from the supreme being but it was limited to male prophetic leaders Shortly after colonization in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth women prophets began to gain influence especially among the southern ...

Article

Alston, Melvin Ovenus  

Peter Wallenstein

Article

Publication History:

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

educator and civil rights litigant, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of William Henry “Sonnie” Alston, a drayman, and Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Smith, a laundress. The Alstons owned their home, and Melvin grew up in a middle-class environment. After attending Norfolk's segregated black public schools and graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, he graduated in 1935 from Virginia State College, where he was honored for his debating and for excellence in scholarship. Following graduation he began teaching math at Booker T. Washington High School. Beginning in 1937 he served as president of the Norfolk Teachers Association, and he also held local leadership positions in the Young Men's Christian Association and the First Calvary Baptist Church.

Alston played a key role in an effort by black teachers in the Norfolk city public schools to challenge racial discrimination in their salaries. In 1937 the Virginia Teachers Association VTA and ...

Article

Anderson, Moses B.  

Vincent F. A. Golphin

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2014

the seventh African American to be named a Roman Catholic bishop in the twentieth century, was born in Selma, Alabama, the eldest son of Nancy King and Henry Anderson. He attended Payne and Clarke Elementary Schools, then went to Knox Academy High School in Selma, where the class of 1949 chose him valedictorian.

Born on the eve of the Great Depression, Anderson came into a life of financial desperation and racial fears caused by hard-drawn racial, religious, class, and caste divisions. Poverty and color lines were thick in Selma, and the teenager was inspired by the white Roman Catholic missionaries of the Society of St. Edmund who came south to aid black development. They and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Rochester, New York, arrived in Selma in 1937 and built a hospital school and youth outreach center in response to Pope Pius XI s call for Catholics to ...

Article

Anderson, William T.  

Sherrow O. Pinder

Article

Publication History:

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

clergyman, army chaplain, and physician, was born a slave in Seguin, Texas. Little is known about his parents except that his mother was a slave, and during the Civil War she and William fled to Galveston, Texas. As a young boy, he joined the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which took on both local and national responsibility for the religious, intellectual, and social uplift of African Americans, often taking a leading role in promoting both secular and religious education. The AME Church, in fact, sponsored Anderson's education for three years at Wilberforce University in Ohio. The remainder of Anderson's education was financed by an Ohio sponsor, Stephen Watson, who was then the vice president of the London Exchange Bank of Madison County. In 1886 Anderson received a theology certificate from Howard University and two years later graduated from the Homeopathic Medical College of Cleveland Much ...

Article

Aoko, Gaudencia  

Matthew Kustenbauder

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

a Luo woman, helped to found and lead two African-initiated churches. The third of four children, Aoko was born in July 1943 in the town of Awasi, nineteen miles east of Kisumu in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Her educational background is uncertain. In interviews she called herself “uneducated” and claimed to know neither Kiswahili nor English, suggesting that she did not attend school beyond the primary level. Young Aoko was winsome by all accounts—“photogenic,” “tall with a smooth blackness,” and a “beautiful well-proportioned face” (Dirven, 1970, p. 126).

Against Aoko’s wishes not to marry, in 1957 her conservative father arranged a marriage to Simeo Owiti, a Catholic friend from Njoro near Nakuru. Three years later, the couple relocated south of the Kenya border to Bugire in the North Mara district of Tanganyika. Here, Aoko attended Tatwe a Catholic mission run by the Maryknoll fathers where she learned the catechism ...

Article

Arias Almánzar, Aurora Bienvenida Libertad “Aurora Arias”  

Zaida Corniel

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

born on 22 March 1962 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Her mother was Ana Almánzar, a saleswoman, and her father, the journalist Fermín Arias Belliard, was well known for his humorous political column “Bocadillo” (A Snack) published from the 1970s through the 1990s in different newspapers throughout the country (La Información, El Sol, El Nacional, and El Siglo), and his satirical political radio show Con Pique y Sin Pique (With or Without Rage). Arias has three daughters from her first marriage to Rafael Castillo in August 1982 (Paloma, Lucero, and Violeta). This marriage ended in February 2002; she wed the American scholar Christopher McGrath, in August 2008.

Aurora Arias grew up surrounded by the political and social instability that followed the assassination on 31 May 1961 of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Within a few years of the formal end of the ...

Article

Arinze, Francis  

Chima Anyadike

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Nigerian Roman Catholic cardinal, was born on 1 November 1932 to Arinze Nwankwu later baptized Joseph and Bernadette Ekwoanya in the rural town of Eziowelle in southeastern Nigeria Of humble beginnings he was in his early years raised in the Igbo traditional religious system until he was nine when he was baptized into the Catholic church by Father Michael Iwene Tansi the first and only Nigerian to date to be canonized by the church As a teacher and parish priest Father Tansi could not but notice that the young Arinze was humble hardworking and intelligent since he came out in the first position in his class examinations Arinze s aspiration to priesthood was largely a result of Father Tansi s influence and interest in him His father was however initially opposed to that aspiration As a cardinal Arinze still remembers the terms of that opposition You will not become ...

Article

Armstrong, Henry  

Luckett V. Davis

Article

Publication History:

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

boxer, was born Henry Jackson Jr. near Columbus, Mississippi, the son of Henry Jackson. His mother, whose name is unknown, was a full‐blooded Iroquois, and his father was of mixed Indian, Irish, and black ancestry. He was the eleventh child in a family of sharecroppers. When he was four years old his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where his father and older brothers worked in the food‐processing industry. His mother died a few years later, after which he was reared by his paternal grandmother. Jackson graduated from Toussaint L'Ouverture Grammar School and Vashon High School, working during his school years as a pin boy at a bowling alley and becoming the inter‐alley bowling champion in midtown St. Louis. He gained his first boxing experience by winning a competition among the pin boys.

Lacking funds to attend college, Jackson worked at a series of unskilled jobs At the ...