African American Lives

The decade of the 1870s brought further changes and challenges. Once the federal government passed the Fifteenth Amendment, blacks in California could vote, but Bell realized that they also needed to become politically involved. Although he supported the Republican Party of Lincoln, Bell urged his readers to vote not for a party’s candidate, but for the most qualified individual. In the late 1870s he warned African Americans to be wary of Denis Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party and its anti-Chinese platform, not because he was sympathetic to the Chinese, but because he feared repercussions for African Americans. In 1878 Bell supported the National Labor Party, and at its state convention in San Francisco, he held the position of sergeant-at-arms. Bell realized that the problems of workers—white, black, and Asian—overshadowed group identity; he simply wanted all workers to benefit from the land, and from economic, social, and political reforms through effective political leadership.

Philip Bell had other talents besides political activism. With his stuttering under control, he appeared as an actor in the Colored Amateur Company productions of Ion and Pizarro. As a literary critic, he wrote reviews of both white and black community productions of Shakespeare’s Richard III, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice. In a review of the latter, Bell commented, “I have always sympathized with Shylock, have considered him ‘more sinned against than sinning.’”

The late 1870s and early 1880s saw a still vigorous Bell continuing his efforts towards achieving equal rights and “elevating the character of our race.” In the mid-1880s, however, his health began to decline, forcing him to retire. During his newspaper career Bell had made very little money, and since he never married or had children, he had to depend for his support on the charity of local women. Bell never fully regained his health, and he died in San Francisco in 1889. Judge Mifflin W. Gibbs described Bell as “proud in his humanity and intellectually great as a journalist,” but perhaps the best summation of Bell’s life comes in his own words, “Action is necessary. Prompt and immediate. Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!”

BENGA, OTA. See Otabenga.

BERRY, CHUCK

(18 Oct. 1926–), singer, songwriter, and guitarist, was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry in St. Louis, Missouri, the fourth of six children of Henry William Berry, a carpenter and handyman, and Martha Bell Banks. The industrious Henry Berry instilled in his son a hunger for material success and a prodigious capacity for hard work, traits which were not entirely apparent in Berry as a youth. Martha Berry, a skilled pianist and accomplished singer, passed on to her son her love for music. By the time he was a teenager, however, Berry preferred jazz, blues, and the “beautiful harmony of country music” to his mother’s Baptist hymns (Berry, 14).

Chuck Berry, who helped shape rock and roll and moved the guitar to center stage, 1956. Frank Driggs Collection

In 1944 Berry and two friends hatched an ill-considered plan to drive across the country to California. They soon ran out of money and committed a series of armed robberies in an attempt to return home. All three were arrested, convicted, and given ten-year sentences. In prison, Berry began to take music seriously, cofounding a gospel quartet and a rhythm and blues band popular with both black and white inmates. The quartet sang during services in the prison chapel and met with such success that prison officials allowed the group to sing for African American church congregations in Kansas City and St. Louis.

Berry was released on parole in 1947, and returned to St. Louis. In 1948 he married Themetta Suggs, with whom he had four children. While working menial day jobs, he studied guitar with Ira Harris, who laid the foundation of his guitar-playing style. The recordings of guitarists Charlie Christian, T-Bone Walker, and Carl Hogan, who played in Louis Jordan’s band further shaped his sound. NAT KING COLE, MUDDY WATERS, and Joe Turner were among the singers whose diverse styles he sometimes emulated. Berry’s taste, although eclectic, was firmly rooted in both the urban blues and rhythm and blues of the era.

By 1952 Berry was playing regularly in local St. Louis clubs and had developed a reputation as a capable sideman, whose flamboyant stage presence and willingness to indulge in “little gimmicks,” such as singing country and western songs, delighted audiences. Among those who noticed the rising bluesman was pianist Johnny Johnson, leader of a popular trio whose repertoire included blues, rhythm and blues, and popular songs. When one of Johnson’s sideman was indisposed, Johnson asked Berry to sit in with the band at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis.

Audiences at the Cosmopolitan Club responded enthusiastically to Berry and the club’s owner immediately asked Johnson to hire him permanently. Johnson readily agreed, explaining that Berry’s showmanship “brought something to the group that was missin”’ (Pegg, 25). Berry’s performance with Johnson’s trio on New Year’s Eve 1952 marked the beginning of a remarkable musical collaboration that produced “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), “School Day” (1957), and “Rock and Roll Music” (1957), which, more than any other songs, defined the new musical genre of rock and roll. Although Johnson helped to shape the melodies, and his powerful left hand supplied much of the songs’ rhythmic drive, the men were not equal partners. The lyrics were Berry’s alone, and he was the sole author of songs such as “Maybellene” (1955), his first hit, and “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), one of the most honored songs in rock and roll history.

Within a few years, Berry’s role in the trio overshadowed Johnson’s, and he began to look beyond St. Louis’s African American nightclubs toward a wider audience. In 1955 he visited Chicago, hoping to build on his local success by signing a recording contract. The blues musician MUDDY WATERS, whom Berry met after a concert, directed him to Leonard Chess, who ran a small independent record company. Like many of the era’s independent labels, Chess Records produced the African American music that major labels tended to ignore. Chess agreed to record “Maybellene,” a song similar to the country and western novelties that Berry often sang, and “Wee Wee Hours,” a standard blues tune.

“Maybellene” fired Leonard Chess’s imagination. He knew that young white consumers, bored with the music that major labels produced, were searching for something new. Many had gravitated towards rhythm and blues, which, beyond its musical excellence, possessed the lure of the forbidden.

Independent labels courted this emerging market; and disk jockeys, such as Alan Freed, who began calling the music “rock and roll,” expanded it. Chess believed that “Maybellene,” with its fusion of country and western and rhythm and blues, was the perfect song for the times. It proved to be a dazzling success.

Like most of Berry’s songs, “Maybellene” sold well to both whites and blacks. Like all of his songs, it was an exercise in “signifyin’,” drawing on African American vernacular forms to speak, simultaneously, in more than one voice. While whites heard something both familiar and unexpected—a frenetic homage to country and western—African Americans heard an affectionate parody. The song reached number two on Billboard magazine’s pop chart (the “white” chart) and number one on the rhythm and blues chart (the “black” chart). “Maybellene” amalgamated black and white musical styles, exalted cars, girls, and—implicitly—sex, and moved the electric guitar to center stage, creating a musical template that generations of rock and roll musicians would follow.

Determined to repeat the success of “Maybellene,” Berry began the process of transforming himself from a competent bluesman into a brilliant rock and roller. With one eye on the cash register and the other on his growing legions of young white fans, he wrote songs that were, above all, marketable. Although producing great art was the least of his concerns, many of the songs that Berry wrote between 1955 and the early 1960s were nothing less than miniature masterpieces. His lyrics blended irony, parody, and literal-minded observation into a coherent whole. His music, while grounded in rhythm and blues, continued to draw on country and western and other popular forms.

In late 1959 and early 1960, Berry’s string of successes ended when he was arraigned on two counts of having violated the White Slave Traffic Act (Mann Act), a federal statute. The federal prosecutor in St. Louis alleged that Berry had, on two separate occasions during concert tours, transported Joan Mathis Bates, a white woman in her late teens, and Janice Norine Escalanti, a fourteen-year-old Native American girl, across state lines for immoral purposes. When the case involving Bates went to trial, both she and Berry admitted to having had a consensual sexual relationship, and Bates added that she was in love with him. The jury acquitted Berry, noting that the charges involved a voluntary relationship between two adults.

The Escalanti case, however, ended in a conviction. The jury accepted Escalanti’s testimony that she and Berry had engaged in consensual sexual relations on several occasions. The fact that the relationship was consensual had no impact on the charges; prosecutors were only required to prove that, after transporting Escalanti across state lines, Barry’s behavior had been “immoral.” While Berry denied that he had had a sexual relationship with Escalanti, he proved a nervous and unconvincing witness. The behavior of trial judge George Moore, who repeatedly interjected remarks of a racial nature into the proceedings, compounded Berry’s difficulties. Berry appealed his conviction, arguing that Moore’s hostile and prejudicial conduct had deprived him of a fair trial. A federal appellate court agreed, and sent the case back to the district court. However, in 1961 Berry was convicted a second time, and entered federal prison in 1962.

By the time Berry was released in 1963, his music had begun to sound old-fashioned. Even though songs that he wrote in prison, such as “Promised Land” (1964), rank among his best, his career as a recording artist was waning. Berry enjoyed a brief revival in 1972, when he scored his first number one hit on the pop chart with the trifling, double-entendre-filled “My Ding-A-Ling.” Although he rarely recorded after this point, Berry continued to tour, often with great success, well into his seventies.

In 2000 Johnny Johnson sued Berry, claiming that he had never received credit for cowriting many of the songs that Berry recorded in the 1950s and that he had thereby been defrauded of millions of dollars in royalties. Parts of the case were dismissed in 2001, with the court ruling that it would be impossible for Johnson to prove that he had cowritten the songs. The court also noted that because so much time has passed, many potential witnesses had died and that the memories of others had faded. In addition, Johnson had admitted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he spent much of the 1950s in an alcoholic fog, rendering his testimony suspect. Although the precise nature of the relationship between the two men is likely to remain disputed, Johnson’s role was almost certainly that of an arranger of Berry’s musical ideas.

In his later years, Berry accrued honors that acknowledged his central role in reshaping popular music. He is a member of the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame, the National Academy of Popular Music Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and, in 1986 he was among the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

BERRY, HALLE MARIA

(14 Aug. 1966–), film actress and model, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of Jerome Berry, a hospital attendant, and Judith Hawkins, a psychiatric nurse. Her father, an alcoholic, abandoned the family when she was four, leaving her mother to raise Halle and her sister Heidi, first in predominantly black innercity Cleveland and later in that city’s white suburbs. Berry’s childhood was troubled, in part because of the economic hardship of growing up in a single-parent household. But as the light-skinned child of an interracial couple—her mother was white, her father African American—she also endured racial taunts from both blacks and whites. Fellow students called her “zebra” and on one occasion left an Oreo cookie in her school locker. Berry never had any doubts about her own identity, however, and states on her Web site that her “race” is African American and English.

An extremely shy teenager, Berry craved acceptance from her peers and worked energetically to be the most active and popular young woman at her high school. As a cheerleader, editor of the school newspaper, an honor student, and class president, she appeared to have succeeded, but when fellow students accused her of stuffing the ballot box in the voting for prom queen, she was forced to share the title with a white student. Although this reversal suggested to Berry that whites would not accept a standard of beauty that included people of color, her success in beauty pageants suggested otherwise. By the mid-1980s an African American woman as flawlessly beautiful as Halle Berry could win Miss Teen Ohio and Miss Ohio. As a runner-up in the 1986 Miss U.S.A. pageant, Berry, then a student at Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College traveled to London to represent the United States in Miss World, the leading international beauty contest. Although Miss Trinidad & Tobago won the title, Berry placed sixth and created a sensation by appearing in the “national costume” segment of the pageant wearing a skimpy bikini with strands of beads and shooting stars. The outfit was purported to express “America’s advancement in space,” but it drew the ire of other contestants such as Miss Holland, who wore the traditionally bulky and much less revealing Dutch costume with clogs.

Berry found participation in beauty pageants an ideal preparation for a career in Hollywood, since it taught her how to lose and not be devastated. Considered too short at five feet six inches to be a runway model, she won bit parts in the television sitcoms Amen and A Different World, but she was rejected at her first audition for a major television role in Charlie’s Angels ’88. She did win a regular spot as a teenage model in 1989’s shortlived sitcom on ABC, Living Dolls, but increasingly found that her stunning looks and beauty pageant past kept her from landing the serious acting roles she desired. A minor but critically praised role as a crack addict in SPIKE LEE’s Jungle Fever (1991) signaled a change in her fortunes. That performance marked Berry’s first, but by no means last, effort to overcome critics, including Lee himself initially, who could not envision her as anything less than glamorous. In preparation for the role, she interviewed drug addicts and refused to bathe for ten days before shooting. Her next role, as a radio producer on the prime-time soap opera Knots Landing, was much less gritty, but it did ensure greater exposure and led to a series of prominent appearances in the film comedies Strictly Business and Boomerang (1992) and the television miniseries of ALEX HALEY’s Queen (1993).

In the 1990s Berry became one of the most bankable actors in Hollywood, appearing in popular, though not critically acclaimed movies such as Fatherhood (1993), The Flintstones (1994), and Executive Decision (1996). She received favorable reviews for these parts, but the praise—film critic Roger Ebert described her as “so warm and charming you want to cuddle her”—may have reinforced the view in Hollywood that she was best suited to light roles. At the same time, Berry’s beauty and poise earned her an MTV award in 1993 for “most desirable female,” an assessment shared by People magazine, which since 1992 has consistently listed her among the most beautiful and best dressed women in the world, and by the manufacturers of Revlon makeup, who named her their main spokesmodel in 1996. In an age of celebrity, when fashion has come to mean as much to the corporate world and consumers as films and television, such accolades have greatly enhanced Berry’s fame, fortune, and clout. Indeed, in 2002 the Wall Street Journal reported that the financially ailing Revlon Company was relying on a line of Halle Berry cosmetics as the primary means of halting its plummeting profits and share price.

Berry’s growing fame and celebrity came at the price of endless media scrutiny. Her 1993 marriage to David Justice, a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, delighted the tabloids, who printed scores of articles on the glamorous newlyweds, but the couple’s troubled relationship and acrimonious divorce three years later was like manna from heaven for the National Enquirer and the Star. Though she continued to play an increasing variety of film roles, including a drug-addicted mother forced to give up her child to adoption by white parents in Losing Isaiah (1995), Berry’s personal life provided greater publicity than her movies. In February 2000 a judge placed her on three years probation and ordered her to pay $13,500 in fines and perform 200 hours community service for leaving the scene of a traffic accident. Berry enjoyed better press in 2001, when she married singer Eric Benet and became stepmother to his daughter, India.

Her first leading role, as DOROTHY DANDRIDGE in the television drama Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), gave Berry the critical success she had long craved and won her an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actress. As a longtime admirer of Dandridge, Berry co-produced the biopic and lobbied hard to publicize this HBO film about an African American actress renowned for her poise and beauty who suffered from depression and several unhappy and tempestuous relationships. Although Berry never faced the full force of Jim Crow segregation, she strongly identified with Dandridge’s determination to broaden the diversity of roles open to women of color.

The parallel with Dandridge continues with Berry’s performance in Monster’s Ball (2001), when she became the first black woman to win the Academy Award for best actress; in 1955, nearly half a century earlier, Dandridge had been the first African American nominated in that category. Some critics ridiculed the speech in which Berry accepted her award in the name of “every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” They noted that actresses like HATTIE MCDANIEL and Dandridge, let alone thousands of unsung women in the civil rights movement, had already given that door an almighty push. Yet Berry was hardly the first Oscar-winning actress—or actor, for that matter—to be overcome by gushing hyperbole in receiving their profession’s highest award. Others, including the members of the Academy, praised her portrayal of a poor southern black woman struggling to raise a son after the execution of her husband, and her complex relationship with one of his white executioners. In the Nation Michael Eric Dyson, a prominent black academic, lauded Berry’s bravery in using her speech to speak up for “ordinary brothers and sisters.”

Berry’s breakthrough in winning an Academy Award and the sharp criticisms of her acceptance speech capture nicely the ambiguities facing prominent African Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Black American talents and achievements are recognized and rewarded by America’s dominant culture as never before, yet that same culture continues to debate those successes in highly racialized ways.

BERRY, LEONIDAS HARRIS

(20 July 1902–4 Dec. 1995), physician and public service and church activist, was born on a tobacco farm in Woodsdale, North Carolina, the son of the Reverend Llewellyn Longfellow Berry, general secretary of the Department of Home and Foreign Missions of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and Beulah Harris Berry. Leonidas acquired the desire to become a doctor at the age of five, when a distinguished-looking local doctor treated a small wound on his foot. The young boy was impressed by this “miraculous” event. His aspiration to go to medical school intensified while he was attending Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1924 Berry graduated from Wilberforce University and went on to obtain the SB in 1925 from the University of Chicago. In 1930 he also received his medical degree from the University of Chicago’s Rush Medical College. Berry continued his medical training, earning an MS in Pathology at the University of Illinois Medical School in 1933. He completed his internship at Freedmen’s Hospital (1929–1930), one of the nation’s first black hospitals, and then his residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago (1931–1935).

For most of his career, Berry resided in Chicago, becoming a nationally and internationally recognized clinician. His practice and research were centered at Chicago’s Provident, Michael Reese, and Cook County Hospitals. From 1935 until 1970 Berry was a mainstay of the physician staff at Provident. This institution, which had been founded by DANIEL HALE WILLIAMS, was one of the nation’s leading black hospitals. In 1946 Berry became the first black physician admitted to the staff at Michael Reese. At Cook County he was the first black internist, rising from assistant to senior attending physician during his long affiliation with this institution (1946–1976). He also served as clinical professor in medicine at the University of Illinois from 1960 until 1975.

Beginning in the 1930s Berry developed into a leader in the emerging specialty of gastroenterology. This branch of medicine focuses on the physiology and pathology of the stomach and intestines as well as their interconnected organs, such as the liver, esophagus, gallbladder, and pancreas. Berry’s clinical accomplishments were at the forefront of his specialty. He became an international authority on digestive diseases and the technique of endoscopy. Berry helped revolutionize his field when he became the first American doctor to employ the fiberoptic gastro-camera to examine the inside of the digestive tract. The use of this instrument became increasingly refined, enabling physicians to diagnose at much earlier stages various diseases, especially cancers, of the gastrointestinal organs. He invented the Eder-Berry gastrobiopsy scope, a device that made it possible to retrieve tissue samples from the stomach for microscopic study. This instrument has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

In addition to his extraordinary clinical achievements, Berry was a superb medical academician. During the course of his career, he authored or co-authored twelve books and eighty-four medical research articles and presented more than 180 medical lectures, exhibitions, and academic papers nationally and internationally. In 1941 Berry presented a research paper before the gastroenterology and proctology section at the American Medical Association’s (AMA) annual convention in Cleveland, Ohio, the first time a black physician made a national presentation before this prestigious group.

The church activities and travels of Berry’s father and mother deeply impressed him throughout his early life—so much so that Berry’s autobiography, I Wouldn’t Take Nothin’ for My Journey (1981), was written primarily as a memoir dedicated to his parents and their lives. Even while achieving his clinical and academic successes, Berry, raised in the swirl of his parents’ church work and community service, never lost touch with the traditional ideals of the black American community—ideals that emphasize charitable work and resistance to racial discrimination. He realized these ideals by expanding his duties and resources at the hospitals and medical schools where he worked, as well as by taking on leadership positions in AME Church and community organizations. From the early 1950s Berry served as president of the mostly black Cook County Physicians Association. He led a citywide movement to set up medical services for young drug addicts and to prevent the spread of drug addiction. His plan involved organizing medical counseling clinics and follow-up services for drug addicts—a plan that became a program that he administered for eight years with finances provided by the Illinois state legislature and the Illinois Department of Public Health.

In 1965 Berry served as president of the National Medical Association (NMA), the nation’s premier organization established for black physicians. The highlight of his tenure was spearheading the NMA’s activities to integrate the AMA. At this time the AMA still maintained segregated local chapters throughout the nation. In addresses to his NMA constituents, Berry described his disdain for this discriminatory barrier faced by black doctors. He called this practice “a senseless social embargo . . . against licensed and practicing physicians based upon a criterion of race in some [AMA] societies and tokenism in others” (Morais, 220). In order to place the NMA on higher ground regarding the integration of physician associations, at the August 1965 annual convention, the association passed Berry’s proposal that the NMA recruit white physicians. At the convention’s press conference, Berry stated his rationale clearly: “We cannot remain a segregated [medical] society when we are pressing for integration ourselves” (Morais, 196).

Under Berry’s leadership the NMA next held a series of formal meetings with AMA officials and trustees. These meetings, which took place between September 1965 and August 1966, resulted in the adoption of several cooperative measures. First, the two organizations agreed to increase recruitment efforts to attract more black Americans into medical careers. Second, the AMA resolved to appoint more black members of the two organizations to high-standing councils and committees of the AMA. Finally, the AMA appointed a special committee of the AMA board of trustees to serve as a watchdog body to work against segregation in local chapters and physician practices. The committee contacted segregated local chapters to persuade them to comply voluntarily with the AMA’s national resolutions prohibiting racial discrimination in local societies, hospitals, and medical care.

Berry also was a deeply committed “churchman” for the AME Church. He strove to use his church ties to work with other denominations on projects for community betterment. For example, for many years Berry served as the medical director of the Health Commission of the AME Church. In this capacity, in the mid-1960s he developed means to support the integration drive in Cairo, Illinois. In response to Ku Klux Klan activities and entrenched neighborhood poverty, local community activists in Cairo launched an antiracism campaign known as the Black United Front. Berry organized a “flying health service to Cairo” called the Flying Black Doctors to assist the Cairo activists. Berry’s group of thirty-two physicians, nurses, and technicians flew down to Cairo and gave medical exams to some three hundred persons. The Cairo activities of the Flying Black Doctors attracted the attention of the national news media, including NBC’s famed television news show, the Huntley Brinkle Report, with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

Berry liked to refer to himself as a “multidimensional doctor.” In his autobiography he emphasizes that although he was a successful clinician, he was most pleased that he had never given in to the tendency to become too “circumscribed and perhaps obsessed with the pursuit of excellence in . . . matters purely medical” (405). Berry viewed his medical and public service achievements as much more than solo endeavors. Instead, he believed that they were the direct outgrowth of family and religious influences that stemmed from the slave communities of the pre-Civil War United States. In his autobiography Berry writes: “The success of my career [was] a high water mark in the destiny of the Berry family in its long odyssey through the generations. The strength of Afro-American culture to a great extent lies in the unique common bonds which tie together many [such] successful Black nuclear and multinuclear families in America” (Berry, 407). Berry and his extended family have left a permanent contribution at the highest levels of American and black American medical science and religious life.

BETHUNE, MARY JANE McLEOD

(10 July 1875–18 May 1955), organizer of black women and advocate for social justice, was born in Mayesville, South Carolina, the child of the former slaves Samuel McLeod and Patsy McIntosh, farmers. After attending a school operated by the Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen, she entered Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, North Carolina, in 1888 and graduated in May 1894. She spent the next year at Dwight Moody’s evangelical Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago, Illinois. In 1898 she married Albertus Bethune. They both taught briefly at Kindell Institute in Sumter, South Carolina. The marriage was not happy. They had one child and separated late in 1907. After teaching in a number of schools, Bethune founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Training Negro Girls in Daytona, Florida, in 1904. Twenty years later the school merged with a boys’ school, the Cookman Institute, and was renamed Bethune-Cookman College in 1929. Explaining why she founded the training school, Bethune remarked, “Many homeless girls have been sheltered there and trained physically, mentally and spiritually. They have been helped and sent out to serve, to pass their blessings on to other needy children.”

In addition to her career as an educator, Bethune helped found some of the most significant organizations in black America. In 1920 Bethune became vice president of the National Urban League and helped create the women’s section of its Commission on Interracial Cooperation. From 1924 to 1928 she also served as the president of the National Association of Colored Women. In 1935, as founder and president of the National Council of Negro Women, Bethune forged a coalition of hundreds of black women’s organizations across the country. She served from 1936 to 1950 as president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, later known as the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. In 1935 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded Bethune its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. She received honorary degrees from ten universities, the Medal of Honor and Merit from Haiti (1949), and the Star of Africa Award from Liberia (1952). In 1938 she participated along with liberal white southerners in the annual meetings of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

Bethune’s involvement in national government began in the 1920s during the Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover presidential administrations, when she participated in child welfare conferences. In June 1936 Bethune became administrative assistant and, in January 1939, director in charge of Negro Affairs in the New Deal National Youth Administration (NYA). This made her the first black woman in U.S. history to occupy such a high-level federal position. Bethune was responsible for helping vast numbers of unemployed sixteen-to twenty-four-year-old black youths find jobs in private industry and in vocational training projects. The agency created work-relief programs that opened opportunities for thousands of black youths, which enabled countless black communities to survive the Depression. She served in this office until the NYA was closed in 1944.

During her service in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, Bethune organized a small but influential group of black officials who became known as the Black Cabinet. Prominent among them were WILLIAM HENRY HASTIE of the Department of the Interior and the War Department and ROBERT WEAVER, who served in the Department of the Interior and several manpower agencies. The Black Cabinet did more than advise the president; they articulated a black agenda for social change, beginning with demands for greater benefit from New Deal programs and equal employment opportunities.

In 1937 in Washington, D.C., Bethune orchestrated the National Conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, which focused on concerns ranging from better housing and health care for African Americans to equal protection under the law. As an outspoken advocate for black civil rights, she fought for federal anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation. Bethune’s influence during the New Deal was further strengthened by her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

During World War II, Bethune was special assistant to the secretary of war and assistant director of the Women’s Army Corps. In this post she set up the first officer candidate schools for the corps. Throughout the war she pressed President Roosevelt and other governmental and military officials to make use of the many black women eager to serve in the national defense program; she also lobbied for increased appointments of black women to federal bureaus. After the war she continued to lecture and to write newspaper and magazine columns and articles until her death in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Urged by the National Council of Negro Women, the federal government dedicated the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Statue at Lincoln Park in southeastern Washington, D.C., on 10 July 1974. Bethune’s life and work provide one of the major links between the social reform efforts of post-Reconstruction black women and the political protest activities of the generation emerging after World War II. The many strands of black women’s struggle for education, political rights, racial pride, sexual autonomy, and liberation are united in the writings, speeches, and organization work of Bethune.

BETHUNE, THOMAS.

See Blind Tom.

BIBB, HENRY WALTON

(10 May 1815–1854), author, editor, and antislavery lecturer, was born into slavery on the plantation of David White of Shelby County, Kentucky, the son of James Bibb, a slaveholding planter and state senator, and Mildred Jackson. White began hiring Bibb out as a laborer on several neighboring plantations before he had reached the age of ten. The constant change in living situations throughout his childhood, combined with the inhumane treatment he often received at the hands of strangers, set a pattern for life that he would later refer to in his autobiography as “my manner of living on the road.” Bibb was sold more than six times between 1832 and 1840 and was forced to relocate to at least seven states throughout the South; later, as a free man, his campaign for abolition took him throughout eastern Canada and the northern United States. But such early instability also made the young Bibb both self-sufficient and resourceful, two characteristics that were useful against the day-to-day assault of slavery: “The only weapon of self defense that I could use successfully,” he wrote, “was that of deception.”

In 1833 Bibb met and married Malinda, a slave on William Gatewood’s plantation in nearby Oldham County, Kentucky, and the following year she gave birth to Mary Frances, their only child to survive infancy. At about this time Gatewood purchased Bibb from the Whites in the vain hope that uniting the young family would pacify their desire for freedom. Living less than ten miles from the Ohio River, Bibb made his first escape from slavery by crossing the river into Madison, Indiana, in the winter of 1837. He boarded a steamboat bound for Cincinnati, escaping the notice of authorities because he was “so near the color of a slaveholder,” a trait deemed undesirable by prospective slave buyers and for which he endured prolonged incarcerations at various slave markets. Bibb situated this first escape historically as “the commencement of what was called the underground railroad to Canada.” Less than a year after achieving freedom, Bibb returned to Kentucky for his wife and daughter. He was captured and taken to the Louisville slave market, from which he again escaped, returning to Perrysburg, Ohio.

In July 1839 Bibb once more undertook to free his wife and child. Betrayed by another slave, Bibb was again taken to Louisville for sale; this time his wife and child accompanied him on the auction block. While awaiting sale, Bibb received the rudiments of an education from white felons in the prison, where he was forced to work at hard labor for a summer. Finally, a speculator purchased the Bibbs for resale at the lucrative markets of New Orleans. After being bought by Deacon Francis Whitfield of Claiborn Parish, Louisiana, Bibb and his family suffered unimaginable cruelty. They were physically beaten and literally overworked to the point of death, and they nearly perished for lack of food and adequate shelter. Bibb attempted two escapes from Whitfield, preferring that his family risk the perils of the surrounding Red River swamps than endure eighteen-hour days in the cotton fields.

The final escape attempt resulted in Bibb’s permanent separation from his family in December 1840. First staked down and beaten nearly to death after his capture, Bibb was then sold to two professional gamblers. These men took him through Texas and Arkansas and into “Indian Territory,” where they sold him to a Cherokee slave owner on the frontier of white settlement in what is probably present-day Oklahoma or southeastern Kansas. There Bibb received what he considered his only humane treatment in slavery. Because he was allotted a modicum of independence and respect, and because he was reluctant to desert his master, who was then terminally ill, Bibb delayed his final escape from slavery by a year, departing the night of his master’s death. He traveled through wilderness, occasionally stumbling onto Indian encampments, before crossing into Missouri, where his route took him east along the Osage River into Jefferson City. From there he traveled by steamboat through St. Louis to Cincinnati and on to freedom in 1841.

In Detroit in the winter of 1842, Bibb briefly attended the school of the Reverend William C. Monroe, receiving his only formal education. Bibb’s work as what he called an “advocate of liberty” began in earnest soon after his final escape from slavery; for the next decade he epitomized the black abolitionist, making his voice heard through lectures, a slave narrative, and the independent press. Like his contemporaries FREDERICK DOUGLASS, WILLIAM WELLS BROWN, and WILLIAM and ELLEN CRAFT, Bibb was among a first generation of African American fugitives from the South who used their firsthand experience in slavery as a compelling testimony against the atrocities of the southern institution.

Although his highly regarded Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave was not published until the spring of 1849, Bibb began telling the story of his life before antislavery crowds in Adrian, Michigan, in May 1844. His story proved so poignant in its depiction of human suffering and endurance, so heroic in its accounts of ingenious escapes, and so romantic in its adventures in the territories of the West that the Detroit Liberty Association undertook a full-scale investigation to allay public incredulity, an unprecedented response to a nineteenth-century slave narrative. Through correspondence with Bibb’s former associates, “slave owners, slave dealers, fugitives from slavery, political friends and political foes,” the committee found the facts of Bibb’s account “corroborated beyond all question.”

Lecturing for the Michigan Liberty Party, Bibb was sent to Ohio to speak along the north side of the Mason-Dixon Line, a region notorious for its proslavery sympathies. Bibb returned to the South one final time in the winter of 1845 in search of his wife and daughter. While visiting his mother in Kentucky, Bibb learned that his wife and daughter’s escape from certain death on Whitfield’s plantation came at the expense of their marriage; Malinda had been forced to become the mistress of a white southerner. In 1848, on a sabbatical from lecturing, Bibb met and married Mary E. Miles, an African American abolitionist from Boston. It is not known whether they had children. With the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the Bibbs fled to Sandwich, western Canada, where, in January 1851, Henry and Mary established the Voice of the Fugitive. This publication was a biweekly antislavery journal that reported on the condition of fugitives and advocated the abolition of slavery, black colonization to Canada, temperance, black education, and the development of black commercial enterprises.

With the aid of the black abolitionists JAMES T. HOLLY and J. T. Fisher, Bibb organized the North American League, an organization evolving out of the North American Convention of Colored People, held in Toronto and over which Bibb presided in September 1851. The league was meant to promote colonization to Canada and to serve as the central authority for blacks in the Americas. Although the league survived but a few short months, Bibb continued to work toward colonization, encouraging Michigan philanthropists a year later to help form the Refugee Home Society—a joint-stock company for the purpose of acquiring and selling Canadian farmland to black emigrants—to which Bibb attached his journal as its official organ. Tension among prominent black Canadians, however, brought about the society’s demise. Bibb died in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, without realizing his vision for an African American colony.

BLACKWELL, DAVID

(24 Apr. 1919–), mathematician and professor, was born David Harold Blackwell in Centralia, Illinois, the oldest of four children, to Grover Blackwell, a locomotive mechanic for the Illinois Central Railroad, and Mabel Johnson. Although much of Blackwell’s hometown was segregated, he attended an integrated elementary school. He first became interested in mathematics in high school where, although not particularly interested in algebra or trigonometry, he immediately took an interest in geometry—the scientific study of the properties and relations of lines, surfaces, and solids in space. Later in his life Blackwell credited his high school geometry instructor for showing him the beauty and the usefulness of mathematics. He joined his high school’s mathematics club where his instructor pushed students to submit solutions to the School Science and Mathematics Journal, which published one of Blackwell’s solutions. It was with geometry that Blackwell first began to apply mathematical methods and formulas to games such as “crosses” in order to determine the probability of winning for the first player.

When Blackwell entered college at the age of sixteen, he intended at first to become an elementary school teacher. In 1938 he earned an AB degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and went on to receive an AM in 1939 and a PhD in 1941. Here, his interest in probability and statistics emerged and flourished. His dissertation, written under the direction of Joseph L. Doob, was entitled “Some Properties of Markoff Chains.” When he completed the PhD, Blackwell was only twenty-two years old and was only the seventh African American to receive a PhD in Mathematics.

David Blackwell, an innovator in statistical analysis, game theory, and mathematical decision-making. Schomburg Center

After completing the PhD, Blackwell accepted a Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, prompting outrage from some in the university community who vehemently opposed the appointment of an African American to this position at Princeton, which had not yet even enrolled African American students. The University’s president, Harold D. Dodds, admonished the institute for making such an appointment against the wishes of the university community and sought unsuccessfully to block Blackwell’s appointment.

Perhaps because of his experience in the Ivy League, Blackwell seemed to be aware of the limited opportunities for African American scholars in higher academia, and with the exception of an application and interview at the University of California at Berkeley, he applied for faculty positions at only historically black colleges and universities. After one year at Princeton he took short-term professorships at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Clark Atlanta University.

In 1944 Blackwell joined the faculty of Howard University as an assistant professor at a time when the Washington, D.C., institution was a mecca for black scholars, including the historian RAYFORD W. LOGAN, the philosopher ALAIN LOCKE, and the sociologist E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER. Shortly after arriving at Howard, Blackwell married Ann Madison, and in just three years he had risen to the rank of full professor and chairman of the mathematics department.

At Howard, Blackwell also launched his career as a widely recognized and honored researcher in mathematics. Hearing a lecture and attending a subsequent meeting with the well-known statistician Abe Girshick stimulated Blackwell’s interest in statistics and sequential analysis. Even while teaching and chairing the Department of Mathematics at Howard, Blackwell published over twenty research papers in mathematical statistics. Between 1948 and 1950 his interest in the theory of games—the method of applying logic to determine which of several available strategies is likely to maximize one’s gain or minimize one’s loss in a game or military solution—was revived by three summers of work at the Rand Corporation. Blackwell became particularly interested in the art of dueling with pistols and in determining the most statistically advantageous moment for a dueler to shoot. In the midst of the cold war, such statistical analyses of games became useful and pertinent for the federal government in thinking about U.S. military strategy, and Blackwell’s work and Blackwell himself became a leader in the field of statistical analysis and game theory. In 1950–1951 Blackwell spent one year as a visiting professor of statistics at Stanford University.

All of Blackwell’s work in game theory (including the art of dueling and the statistical analysis of bluffing as a strategy in poker) culminated in 1954 when he and Abe Girshick jointly wrote Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions. This book served as a mathematical textbook for students in statistical decision functions. Building upon the prior works of John von Neumann and A. Wald in the statistical and conceptual aspects of decision theory and theory of games, Blackwell and Girshick developed new and innovative concepts of mathematical decision making that were later used in military tactics, the business world, and engineering.

By the time of the book’s publication in 1954, Blackwell’s career was rising rapidly. Shortly after he gave an address on concepts of probability at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam, he was offered and accepted a position as professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Serving as chair of the Berkeley statistics department from 1957 to 1961, Blackwell continued to be a prolific academic writer, publishing over fifty articles in the field of statistical analysis. Prominent appointments and accolades soon followed. In 1955 he was elected president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and later served as president for the International Association for Statistics in Physical Sciences and the Bernoulli Society, and vice-president of the International Statistical Institute, the American Statistical Association, and the American Mathematical Society.

In 1965 Blackwell became the first African American named to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a body used by the federal government and other agencies to investigate, experiment, and report on scientific matters. (Remarkably, nearly three decades later in 1996, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found that Blackwell had been joined by only two further black inductees at the NAS, the chemist PERCY LAVON JULIAN and the sociologist WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON). In 1979 Blackwell received the prestigious von Neumann Theory Prize from the Operations Research Society of America for his work in dynamic programming, and in 1986 Blackwell received the R.A. Fisher Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies. All of these awards and prizes acknowledged the continued relevance of his research in statistical analysis and game theory. In addition to being known as one of the world’s best mathematicians, his scholarly work and professional activities have brought Blackwell honorary degrees from Howard, Harvard, Yale, the University of Illinois, Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Southern California, Michigan State, Syracuse, Southern Illinois University, the University of Warwick in England, and the National University of Lesotho. Blackwell retired from Berkeley in 1989, although he remains on the faculty as professor emeritus and continues to publish in mathematical journals. Blackwell has also advised over fifty graduate students. Blackwell’s legacy in teaching and researching, and the path-breaking trail he made for African Americans in the mathematics field, makes him one of this century’s most notable figures in this highly specialized area.

BLACKWELL, UNITA Z.

(18 Mar. 1933–), civil rights activist and mayor, was born in Lula, Mississippi, the daughter of sharecroppers in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Her father had to leave Mississippi when he refused to obey his plantation owner’s order to send his young daughter Unita to the fields to pick cotton. He found work in an icehouse in a neighboring state. Her mother was illiterate and determined that her children would learn to read and write. In the Mississippi Delta, everyone was required to pick and chop cotton, and the schools closed down to allow for this work except for two or three months a year. Consequently, Unita Blackwell and her sister took the ferry across the Mississippi River to West Helena, Arkansas. She lived with her aunt for eight months of the year and attended Westside Junior High School, where she completed the eighth grade. Later, she received her high school equivalency diploma. Blackwell spent her younger years picking cotton—as much as three hundred bales a day. After she married, she and her husband went to Florida to pick tomatoes and work in a canning plant. She moved to Mayersville, Mississippi, in 1962 and picked cotton, while her husband worked for U.S. industries.

In 1964 she became a field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee under the supervision of STOKELY CARMICHAEL. She was in charge of voter registration in the Second Congressional District in Mississippi, and, along with seven other people, she registered to vote in Issaquena County. She became a close friend of FANNIE LOU HAMER, and they both became founding members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), formed in 1964 to challenge the white supremacist Democratic Party in Mississippi. Along with Hamer, Blackwell was an MFDP delegate to the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic City. Members of the MFDP challenged the seating of the all-white delegates from Mississippi, and Blackwell, Hamer, and others testified before the credentials committee. When Hamer presented her famous testimony before the committee, President Lyndon Johnson called a press conference to prevent television coverage of the powerful and inspirational speaker from Mississippi. After much political wrangling, the MFDP was awarded only two delegate seats, which the members refused.

In the summer of 1965 the MFDP marched on the state legislature in Jackson to support Governor Paul Johnson’s request that the legislators repeal Mississippi’s discriminatory voting laws. Over half of the five hundred demonstrators were in their teens. Police arrested more than two hundred of the marchers, including Blackwell, placing them in the stockyards of the state fairgrounds, where many of the women were tortured. Blackwell herself was imprisoned for eleven days (USM oral history interview, 35–36).

Blackwell continued to press for change in the Delta. In 1965 she demanded that the school board provide decent facilities, teachers, and books for her son’s school. The board refused to hear the demands, and Blackwell sued for desegregation of the schools in Sharkey and Issaquena County Consolidated Line v. Blackwell. The black principal followed the orders of the school board and refused to cooperate and, in Blackwell’s view, left them with no alternative but to sue. “Desegregation of school was not one [of] our favorites” she recalled. “Our thing was to have good schools, didn’t care what color they were. . . . We was asking for books; we was asking for fixing of the schools, that they would be just as nice” (University of Southern Mississippi oral history interview, 44). She won her case.

Undaunted by intimidation, Blackwell continued her struggle for justice. In the winter of 1965 and 1966 poor people in the Delta were hungry and cold. Indeed, two people froze to death. Conditions were made worse when planters evicted sharecroppers for registering to vote and participating in civil rights activities; the planters then saw to it that officials denied the evicted sharecroppers access to the federal food commodity program. With no food to eat and no place to live, sharecroppers formed the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union in January of 1965. The union launched a strike, and domestic workers, tractor drivers, and field hands walked off of their jobs all over the Delta.

As evictions and starvation continued, the union members Blackwell, Ida Mae Lawrence, and Isaac Foster, in the face of the federal government’s refusal to answer their plea for help, decided to set up their own community and government. They led over seventy men, women, and children onto the empty Greenville Air Base, consisting of two thousand acres and three hundred buildings. There Blackwell eloquently expressed the goals of the group: “I feel that the federal government have proven that it don’t care about poor people. Everything that we have asked for through these years has been handed down on paper. It’s never been a reality. We the poor people of Mississippi is tired,” she continued. “We’re going to build for ourselves, because we don’t have a government that represents us” (Grant, 501). A group of Air Police removed the squatters after thirty hours, but Blackwell and others had forced national attention on the dire poverty that many lived in and the limits of federal programs to address poor peoples’ concerns.

Blackwell continued her efforts on behalf of poor people, becoming a national spokesperson on the issues of community economic development and low-income housing. In 1967, along with Hamer, Annie Devine, and Amzie Moore, she helped organize the Mississippi Action for Community Education Inc. (MACE) “to build and strengthen local human capacities and indigenous community development efforts” in the Mississippi Delta. MACE has trained local community organizers and leaders; conducts literacy, job training, career development, and arts education programs; and sponsors the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Blackwell worked with the National Council of Negro Women as a community-development specialist, establishing cooperative ventures in ownership of low-income housing. In 1983 she received a master’s degree in Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Blackwell has remained politically active on both a local and a national level. In 1976 she was elected mayor of Mayersville, becoming the first African American to hold mayoral office in Mississippi. In 1979 she attended President Jimmy Carter’s Energy Summit at Camp David, and in 1984 she addressed the National Democratic Convention in San Francisco. In 1989 she chaired the National Mayor’s Conference and, in 1991, the Black Women’s Mayor’s Conference. From 1976 to 1983 she was president of the U.S.-China Peoples’ Friendship Association and traveled to China on numerous occasions. She has traveled extensively throughout Asia, Central America, and Europe.

In recognition of her achievements, in 1992 Blackwell was awarded the prized MacArthur Fellowship, also called the “genius” award, and the University of Massachusetts invited her to become the Eleanor Bateman Alumni Scholar. Her fighting spirit and faith in humanity persists. In 2000 she observed: “It seems like the whole century has been about overcoming. Fighting and then overcoming. You had women’s suffrage, and apartheid and segregation. And we blacks lived in that lock-in, and somehow survived. How, I do not know. Nothing but a God I say. The whole era was full of hate, but we’re trying to overcome it, and we’re headed for something new, I just feel it. Maybe we are the group of people, the blacks in America, that brought everyone to their worst, and then to their best. Including ourselves” (UMASS Online Magazine).

BLAKE, EUBIE

(7 Feb. 1883–12 Feb. 1983), composer and pianist, was born James Hubert Blake in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of John Sumner Blake, a stevedore, and Emily Johnston, a launderer. His father was a Civil War veteran, and both parents were former slaves. While the young Blake was a mediocre student during several years of public schooling, he showed early signs of musical interest and talent, picking out tunes on an organ in a department store at about age six. As a result, his parents rented an organ for twenty-five cents a week, and he soon began basic keyboard lessons with Margaret Marshall, a neighbor and church organist. At about age twelve he learned cornet and buck dancing and was earning pocket change singing with friends on the street. When he was thirteen, he received encouragement from the ragtime pianist Jesse Pickett, whom he had watched through the window of a bawdy house in order to learn his fingering. By 1898 he had steady work as a piano player in Aggie Shelton’s sporting house, a job that necessitated the lad’s sneaking out of his home at night, after his parents went to bed. The objections of his deeply religious mother when she learned of his new career were overcome only by the pragmatism of his sporadically employed father, once he discovered how much his son was making in tips.

In 1899 (the year SCOTT JOPLIN’s famous “Maple Leaf Rag” appeared), Blake wrote his first rag, “Charleston Rag” (although he would not be able to notate it until some years later). In 1902 he performed as a buck dancer in the traveling minstrel show In Old Kentucky, playing briefly in New York City. In 1907, after playing in several clubs in Baltimore, he became a pianist at the Goldfield Hotel, built by his friend and the new world lightweight boxing champion Joe Gans. The elegant Goldfield was one of the first establishments in Baltimore where blacks and whites mixed, and there Blake acquired a personal grace and polish that would impress his admirers for the rest of his life. Already an excellent player, he learned from watching the conservatory-trained “One-Leg Willie” Joseph, whom he often cited as the best piano player he had ever heard. While at the Goldfield, Blake studied composition with the Baltimore musician Llewellyn Wilson, and at about the same time he began playing summers in Atlantic City, where he met such keyboard luminaries as Willie “the Lion” Smith, Luckey Roberts, and James P. Johnson. In July 1910 he married Avis Lee, the daughter of a black society family in Baltimore and a classically trained pianist.

In 1915 Blake met the singer and lyricist NOBLE SISSLE, and they quickly began a songwriting collaboration that would last for decades. One of their songs of that year, “It’s All Your Fault,” achieved success when it was introduced by Sophie Tucker. Sissle and Blake also performed in New York with JAMES REESE EUROPE’s Society Orchestra. While Sissle and Europe were in the service during World War I, Blake performed in vaudeville with Henry “Broadway” Jones. After the war Sissle and Blake formed a vaudeville act called the Dixie Duo, which became quite successful. In an era when blacks were expected to shuffle and speak in dialect, they dressed elegantly in tuxedos, and they were one of the first black acts to perform before white audiences without burnt cork. By 1917 Blake also had begun recording on both discs and piano rolls.

In 1920 Sissle and Blake met the successful comedy and dance team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, who suggested combining forces to produce a show. The result was the all-black Shuffle Along, which opened on Broadway in 1921 and for which Blake was composer and conductor. The score included what would become one of his best-known songs, “I’m Just Wild about Harry.” Mounted on a shoestring budget, the musical met with critical acclaim and popular success, running for 504 performances in New York, followed by an extensive three-company tour of the United States. The show had a tremendous effect on musical theater, stirring interest in jazz dance, fostering faster paced shows with more syncopated rhythms, and paving the way in general for more black musicals and black performers. Shuffle Along was a springboard for the careers of several of its cast members, including JOSEPHINE BAKER, Adelaide Hall, FLORENCE MILLS, and PAUL ROBESON.

Sissle and Blake worked for ten years as songwriters for the prestigious Witmark publishing firm. In 1922, through Julius Witmark, they were able to join ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), which did not at that time include many blacks. They also appeared in an early sound film in 1923, Sissle and Blake’s Snappy Songs, produced by the electronics pioneer Lee De Forest. In 1924 they created an ambitious new show, The Chocolate Dandies. Unable to match the success of Shuffle Along, the lavish production lost money, but Blake was proud of its score and considered it his best.

The team returned to vaudeville, ending their long collaboration with a successful eight-month tour of Great Britain in 1925–1926. The two broke up when Sissle, attracted by opportunities in Europe, returned to work there; Blake, delighted to be back home in New York, refused to accompany him. Over the next few years Blake collaborated with Harry Creamer to produce a few songs and shows; reunited with “Broadway” Jones to perform the shortened “tab show” Shuffle Along Jr. in vaudeville (1928–1929); and teamed with the lyricist Andy Razaf to write songs for Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1930, including “Memories of You,” later popularized by Benny Goodman. After Lyles’s death in 1932, Sissle and Blake reunited with Miller to create Shuffle Along of 1933, but the show failed, in part because of the Depression. The remainder of the decade saw Blake collaborating with the lyricist Milton Reddie on a series of shows, including the Works Progress Administration-produced Swing It in 1937, and with Razaf on several floor shows and “industrials” (promotional shows). Blake’s wife died of tuberculosis in 1939, but despite his grief he managed to complete, with Razaf, the show Tan Manhattan.

During World War II, Blake toured with United Service Organizations shows and worked with other collaborators. In 1945 he married Marion Gant Tyler, a business executive and former showgirl in several black musicals. She took over management of his financial affairs and saw to the raising of his ASCAP rating to an appropriate level, enhancing their financial security considerably.

After the war, at the age of sixty-three, Blake took the opportunity to attend New York University, where he studied the Schillinger system of composition. He graduated with a degree in music in 1950. Meanwhile, the presidential race of 1948 stirred renewed interest in “I’m Just Wild about Harry” when Harry Truman adopted it as a campaign song. This resulted in a reuniting of Sissle and Blake and in a revival in 1952 of Shuffle Along. Unfortunately, the producers’ attempts to completely rewrite the show had the effect of eviscerating it, and the restaging closed after only four performances.

Following a few years of relative retirement, during which Blake wrote out some of his earlier pieces, a resurgence of popular interest in ragtime in the 1950s and again in the 1970s thrust him back into the spotlight for the last decades of his life. Several commemorative recordings appeared, most notably, The Eighty-six Years of Eubie Blake, a two-record retrospective with Noble Sissle for Columbia in 1969. In 1972 he started Eubie Blake Music, a record company featuring his own music. He was much in demand as a speaker and performer, impressing audiences with his still considerable pianistic technique as well as his energy, audience rapport, and charm as a raconteur. Appearances included the St. Louis Ragfest, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Tonight Show, a solo concert at Town Hall in New York City, and a concert in his honor by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops in 1973, with Blake as soloist. In 1974 Jean-Cristophe Averty produced a four-hour documentary film on Blake’s life and music for French television. The musical revue Eubie!, featuring twenty-three of his numbers, opened on Broadway in 1978 and ran for a year. Blake was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House in 1981.

Blake’s wife, Marion, died in June 1982; he left no children by either of his marriages. A few months after his wife’s death, his hundredth birthday was feted with performances of his music, but he was ill with pneumonia and unable to attend. He died five days later in New York City.

Over a long career as pianist, composer, and conductor, Blake left a legacy of more than two thousand compositions in various styles. His earliest pieces were piano rags, often of such extreme difficulty that they were simplified for publication. As a ragtime composer and player, he, along with such figures as Luckey Roberts and James P. Johnson, was a key influence on the Harlem stridepiano school of the 1930s. In the field of show music, Blake moved beyond the confines of ragtime, producing songs that combined rhythmic energy with an appealing lyricism. Particularly notable was his involvement with the successful Shuffle Along, which put blacks back on the Broadway stage after an absence of more than ten years. Over his lifetime he displayed a marked openness to musical growth, learning from “all music, particularly the music of Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Victor Herbert, Gershwin, Debussy, and Strauss,” and, indeed, some of his less well known pieces show these influences. Finally, his role in later years as an energetic “elder statesman of ragtime” provided a historical link to a time long gone as well as inspiration to many younger fans.

BLAKEY, ART

(11 Oct. 1919–16 Oct. 1990), jazz drummer and bandleader, was born Art William Blakey in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Burtrum Blakey, a barber, and Marie Roddericker. His father left home shortly after Blakey was born, and his mother died the next year. Consequently, he was raised by a cousin, Sarah Oliver Parran, who worked at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Mill in Pittsburgh. He moved out of the home at age thirteen to work in the steel mills and in 1938 married Clarice Stuart, the first of three wives. His other wives were Diana Bates and Ann Arnold. Blakey had at least ten children (the exact number is unknown), the last of whom was born in 1986.

As a teenager Blakey taught himself to play the piano and performed in local dance bands, but he later switched to drums. Like many of his contemporaries, Blakey initially adapted the stylistic drumming techniques of well-known swing era drummers, including Chick Webb, Sid Catlett, and Ray Bauduc, to whom he frequently paid tribute. As a result, his earliest playing experiences away from Pittsburgh centered around ensembles fronted by well-known, big-band leaders.

Although some sources indicate Blakey first worked with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in 1939, it seems unlikely. Drummer Pete Suggs joined the Henderson band in June 1937 and remained with him until the group disbanded two years later, when Henderson became an arranger and pianist for the Benny Goodman band. However, Blakey did join a newly formed Henderson band in the spring of 1943 after playing with Mary Lou Williams’s twelve-piece band and briefly leading his own group at a small Boston nightclub in 1942.

During the early 1940s Blakey was assimilating the innovative bop drumming styles of Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, as evidenced by his selection as drummer for the Billy Eckstine big band organized in 1944. This group (with trumpeter DIZZY GILLESPIE as musical director) started at the Club Plantation in St. Louis and was among the first big bands to play bebop-influenced arrangements. Although somewhat unsuccessful as a commercial venture, the band rehearsed and recorded from 1944 to 1947. Blakey’s playing with this ensemble indicates that regardless of the bebop bent of the repertoire, he played mainly late, swing-style drums. But it was during his tenure with Eckstine that Blakey came in contact with several major bop luminaries, including Gillespie, CHARLIE PARKER, MILES DAVIS, Dexter Gordon, and Kenny Dorham. His association with these musicians placed him firmly in the bop camp, where he remained throughout his career. After the dissolution of Eckstine’s band, Blakey joined THELONIOUS MONK for the pianist’s first Blue Note recordings in 1947; theirs was a complementary collaboration that continued off and on for the next decade. That same year Blakey organized a rehearsal band, the Seventeen Messengers, and in December made several recordings for Blue Note with his octet, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, which included Dorham on trumpet. This group was the first to bear the name through which Blakey would later become famous.

In 1948 Blakey made a brief, nonmusical trip to Africa, at which time he converted to the Islamic religion, changing his name to Abdullah Ibn Buhaina. By mid-1948 he had returned to the United States, recording once again with Monk that July and with saxophonist James Moody in October. The next year he joined Lucky Millinder’s R&B–based band and recorded with him in February. Although Blakey never recorded under his Muslim name, several of his children share this name with him, and later he was known to his musical friends as “Bu.”

During the early 1950s Blakey solidified his bop drumming style by playing with well-known bop musicians such as Parker, Davis, Buddy DeFranco, Clifford Brown, Percy Heath, and Horace Silver. In the mid-1950s Blakey and Silver formed the first of the acclaimed Jazz Messengers ensembles that initially included Dorham, Hank Mobley, and Doug Watkins. When Silver left in 1956, Blakey retained leadership of the group that with constantly changing personnel became an important conduit through which many young, talented jazz musicians would pass. For the next twenty-odd years the Jazz Messengers’s alumni comprised a list of virtual “who’s who” in modern jazz, including Donald Byrd, Bill Hardman, Jackie McLean, Junior Mance, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, Mobley, Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton, Reggie Workman, Keith Jarrett, Chuck Mangione, McCoy Tyner, Woody Shaw, Joanne Brackeen, Steve Turré, WYNTON MARSALIS, and Branford Marsalis.

Despite impaired hearing, which ultimately left him deaf, Blakey continued to perform with the Jazz Messengers until shortly before his death in New York City. Throughout his dynamic and influential career he worked with nearly every major bop figure of the last half of the twentieth century, and his Jazz Messengers ensembles provided a training ground for dozens more. He was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1981, and the Jazz Messengers received a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Group Performance in 1984. The group recorded several film soundtracks (mainly overseas) from 1959 to 1972, and a documentary film, Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger (Rhapsody Films), containing interviews with Blakey and other musicians as well as performances by the Jazz Messengers, was released in 1988. Blakey also appears in a jazz video series produced by Sony called Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Jazz at the Smithsonian (1982).

Blakey’s recorded legacy spans forty years and documents his prodigious and prolific career as drummer and leader. His earliest big-band recordings with Eckstine (De Luxe 2001, 1944) demonstrate an advanced swing style comparable to the best of the late swing era drummers. Although his early Monk recordings (The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, Mosaic MR4–101) are clearly bop-oriented, he retains some of his earlier swing characteristics. By the beginning of the 1950s, however, several of Blakey’s well-defined playing characteristics emerge, including his heavy and constant high-hat rhythm and effective use of both bass drum and high-hat as additional independent rhythmic resources, which identify him as a progressive and influential bop drummer.

The Jazz Messengers’ recordings are numerous and contain performances of varying degrees of success; however, Blakey’s playing remains somewhat consistent, regardless of whom he is accompanying. The most impressive of the Messengers’ playing is in a collection of recordings the group made in 1960 (The Complete Blue Note Recordings of the 1960 Jazz Messengers, Mosaic, MD6–141). Here, the group, consisting of Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, Jymie Merritt, and Blakey, demonstrates exceptional talent and produces some of the Messengers’ most memorable numbers, including Blakey’s signature tune, “Night in Tunisia,” composed by Gillespie. Later Messenger recordings with such notables as Jarrett and Mangione (The Best of Art Blakey, EmArcy 848245–2 CD, 1979) and the Marsalis brothers (Keystone 3, Concord CJ 196/CCD 4196, 1980), provide excellent examples of the continued influence Blakey’s leadership had on the growth of jazz in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The harshest criticism of Blakey’s playing was directed at his loud, often overpowering drumming style, which developed in the 1950s and may have contributed to his early hearing loss. Nevertheless, he could also be a sensitive and unobtrusive drummer, as many of his ballad accompaniments demonstrate. Furthermore, his frequently recorded, unaccompanied, improvised drum solo pieces provide numerous examples of his imaginative and flashy, but somewhat musically misdirected, solo ability.

BLIND TOM

(25 May 1849–13 June 1908), pianist and composer, was born Thomas Greene Wiggins to Domingo Wiggins and Charity Greene, field slaves on the Wiley Jones Plantation in Harris County, Georgia. In 1850 Tom, his parents, and two brothers were auctioned off to General James Neil Bethune, a prominent attorney and anti-abolitionist newspaper publisher from Columbus, Georgia. The discovery two years later of the toddler, newly renamed Thomas Greene Bethune, blind from birth, possibly mentally impaired, and unusually captivated by random sounds, playing one of the general’s daughters’ piano pieces “totally ’stonished us,” according to Charity (New York Times, 27 Nov. 1886).

Blind Tom, pianist, composer, and slave, had a phenomenal memory for music and began giving concerts at the age of eight.

The general, however, viewed Tom’s unforeseen musical ability as an opportunity. Eulogized in 1895 as “almost the pioneer free trader in this country” and “the first editor in the south to openly advocate secession” (New York Times, 21 Jan. 1895), Bethune saw the potential for this helpless, prodigiously talented boy to become a symbol of what Bethune would argue were “sufficient reasons why we should keep our slaves as they are . . . a class of laborers . . . incapable of taking care of themselves, and controlled by individuals who are not only capable of taking care of them but interested in doing it” (Corner Stone, 3 Feb. 1859). Soon Tom would be even more valuable to him as a cash cow.

Ensuring Tom’s musical success became Bethune’s top priority. Otherwise uneducated, Tom began his piano studies under Mary, the eldest Bethune daughter. Her expertise was soon eclipsed, and more professionally recognized teachers were engaged. Tom’s acute ear, phenomenal auditory memory, and natural keyboard facility allowed him to assimilate the repertoire they favored so quickly that in 1857 Bethune produced a debut for the eight-year-old at Columbus’s Temperance Hall that led to numerous other concerts around the state of Georgia. But the death in May 1858 of Bethune’s wife, Frances, and the increasingly active role the Georgia attorney was assuming in the emerging debate over states’ rights made it impossible for the general to stay on as Tom’s manager. So, in 1859, he leased Tom out for three years to the Savannah impresario Perry Oliver, whose savvy promotion of the pianist paid dividends well in excess of the fifteen thousand dollars Bethune received in return.

Trading on long-standing racial stereotypes and on the public’s fascination with the freak show during this period, Oliver advertised Tom as “The Wonder Negro Child . . . whose feats at the piano baffle the most scientific and learned men in the land” (New Orleans Times Picayune, 5 Feb. 1861). Further fueling the carnival atmosphere was the incorporation of an onstage master of ceremonies, a by-request format, and a series of sensational pianistic and extra-musical stunts designed to shift attention away from the legitimate aspects of the boy’s talent. Still guaranteed were concert performances rendered “with all the taste, expression, and feeling of the most distinguished artist” (New Orleans Times Picayune, 5 Feb. 1861) of compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Gottschalk, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Thalberg, Verdi, and even Wiggins himself, chosen by members of the audience off a list of eighty-two items drawn from the pianist’s purported repertoire of seven thousand established works. But these mainstream pieces increasingly gave way to a series of sensational pianistic and extra-musical stunts. Among these stunts were Tom’s flawless re-creations of original compositions played moments earlier by a local pianist onstage; performances of complicated classical works with his back to the piano; on-the-spot improvisations of an accompaniment to any piece presented, even one he had never heard before; and simultaneous renderings of three different songs, one using the right hand, another using the left, and the third sung, each in a different key. Other program innovations were Tom’s recitations of texts in foreign languages he could not even speak and famous political speeches of the era in the same rhythm and pitch pattern in which they were originally uttered. A final otherworldly touch was the verbal introduction by Tom of each of his own compositions in the third person.

Significant in this era before recordings was the deal Oliver cut in 1860 with Horace Waters in New York and Oliver Ditson in Boston to publish “Oliver Galop” and “Virginia Polka,” the first of nineteen solo piano pieces by Wiggins to make it into print. On the surface, most of Tom’s keyboard works come off as run-of-the-mill rehashings of nineteenth-century European dance and concert music—waltzes, gallops, a mazurka, a polka, a theme and variations, and a nocturne. A deeper probing, however, reveals in them sophisticated compositional materials and evocative imagery that offer a window onto Wiggins’s unique and insular world. “The Rainstorm” (composed when Wiggins was just five years old), “Cyclone Galop,” “Voice of the Waves,” “Water in the Moonlight,” and “Daylight” all grew out of Tom’s documented fascination with sounds of nature. The hypnotic ostinato of mechanical devices, yet another of Tom’s obsessions, was realized musically by him in both “Sewing Song: Imitation of a Sewing Machine” and “Battle of Manassas,” Wiggins’s signature piece. Based on a firsthand account by one of Bethune’s sons of that important Confederate victory, “Manassas” employed tone clusters and mouthed effects, materials not adopted again by composers until the twentieth century.

Leading up to the Civil War, the annual revenue from Wiggins’s concerts and the sale of his sheet music reached $100,000, equivalent today to $1.5 million per year, making Blind Tom undoubtedly the nineteenth century’s most highly compensated pianist. Wiggins, of course, saw almost none of this money, as it was deposited directly into the Bethune bank account. So widespread had the pianist’s reputation become under Oliver that in 1860 he gave a command performance for the president at the White House, the first African American to do so.

Traveling became so difficult after the beginning of the Civil War that in 1861 Oliver and Bethune were forced to void the final year of their contract. Wiggins, however, continued to give concerts south of the Mason-Dixon Line, ironically often arranged by Bethune for the benefit of the Confederate war machine. In response to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, the general persuaded Wiggins’s parents to sign an indenture agreement in 1864. This arrangement bound their son to his former owner for the next five years in exchange for “a good home and subsistence and $500 a year” for the parents and “$20 per month and two percent of the net proceeds” for Tom (Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 20 June 1865). It was at this time that “Blind Tom,” the stage name assigned to Wiggins, first appeared in broadsides and newspapers advertising his concerts.

The Confederate surrender in 1865, however, opened the door for Bethune’s guardianship to be challenged. That year, in fact, a habeas corpus petition was filed against Bethune in a Cincinnati court, not by Tom’s parents but by Tabbs Gross, a former slave turned show business promoter, known publicly as “the Barnum of the African Race.” The six-day trial, covered nationally in the press, culminated on 26 June 1865 in a controversial verdict leaving Wiggins in the care of General Bethune.

Blind Tom’s only tour of France and England, the following year, earned his handlers an additional $100,000 and written testimonials by Ignaz Moscheles and Charles Hallé, the first praise of Tom’s ability from pianists of international repute. That year, too, the French physician and educator Edouard Seguin included a profile of Blind Tom’s behavior in his seminal work on autism, Idiocy and Its Treatment by the Physiological Method (1866). Whether Wiggins had a mental disorder is a question that may never be fully answered.

Increasingly dependent on income from Tom’s concerts after the war, Bethune decided in 1868 to move his immediate family and Tom to a more centrally located base of operations in Warrenton, Virginia, just forty miles southwest of Washington, D.C. The general’s indenture contract with Wiggins’s parents was soon to expire, but with Domingo recently dead and Charity still living in Georgia, no one was present to object when, in 1870, Bethune had a Virginia probate judge declare Tom mentally incompetent and name Bethune’s son John as Wiggins’s new legal guardian.

In 1875 John Bethune, acting as Wiggins’s manager, moved with Tom to New York City, where in 1882 John married Eliza Stutzbach, owner of the boardinghouse he and the pianist shared in Greenwich Village. The bloom was soon off the rose, and in 1884 annulment proceedings were initiated against the bride, characterized in John’s will as “a heartless adventuress who sought to absorb my estate” (New York Times, 23 Mar. 1884). Before any resolution could be worked out, John Bethune was accidentally killed while attempting to board a moving train in Wilmington, Delaware.

The repercussions for Wiggins were enormous. Eliza Bethune, finding that she had been frozen out of her deceased husband’s will, persuaded Tom’s mother to file a second habeas corpus petition in 1885 against General Bethune, with the understanding that, should Charity prevail, guardianship of Tom would be turned over to Eliza herself. Exactly that improbable scenario played out when, on 30 July 1887, Judge Hugh L. Bond, a federal judge in Baltimore, extricated Thomas Wiggins from the thirty-eight-year custody of Bethune and his immediate family.

Reports that Wiggins lapsed into a self-imposed semiretirement for the last twenty years of his life, as a silent protest against his forced separation from his former owner, appear exaggerated. Clearly, he was distraught over the new arrangement, but he continued to give concerts, albeit not at the same tireless pace as before, and to compose new pieces for publication, their copyright now assigned to Eliza Bethune. Wiggins’s occasional absence from the stage, however, did spawn both rumors of his death, most notably in the 1889 flood of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the appearance of various Blind Tom impersonators on the nascent vaudeville circuit. Retired in 1908 and well on his way to musical obscurity, Wiggins suffered a stroke and died at age fifty-nine in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he had moved from Manhattan with Eliza in 1903. His body was taken to the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn for burial in a grave that remained unmarked until 1 July 2002. Blind Tom may have been the first in a long line of black musicians, including many of the bluesmen that followed him, to have been canonized and exploited in life and marginalized and all but forgotten in death.

BLYDEN, EDWARD WILMOT

(3 Aug. 1832–12 Feb. 1912), educator, diplomat, and advocate of Pan-Africanism, was born on the island of St. Thomas, part of the present-day Virgin Islands, the son of Romeo Blyden, a tailor, and Judith (maiden name unknown), a schoolteacher. The family lived in a predominantly Jewish, English-speaking community in the capital, Charlotte Amalie. Blyden went to the local primary school but also received private tutoring from his father. In 1842 the Blydens left St. Thomas for Porto Bello, Venezuela, where Blyden showed his facility for learning foreign languages. By 1844 the family had returned home to St. Thomas. Blyden attended school only in the morning, and in the afternoons he served a five-year apprenticeship as a tailor. In 1845 the Blyden family met the Reverend John P. Knox, a famous white American minister who had assumed pastorship of the Dutch Reformed Church in St. Thomas, where the Blydens were members. Knox quickly became Blyden’s mentor and encouraged his academic studies and oratorical skills. Because of Knox’s influence, Blyden decided to become a clergyman, an aspiration his parents supported.

Edward Wilmot Blyden, Liberian diplomat and an early proponent of Pan-Africanism. Library of Congress

In May 1850 Blyden accompanied Mrs. John Knox to the United States and attempted to enroll in Rutgers Theological College, which was Reverend Knox’s alma mater, but was refused admission because he was black. Blyden’s attempts to gain admission to other theological colleges also failed. During this time he met important white Presbyterian clergymen, such as John B. Pinney, Walter Lowrie, and William Coppinger, who became his lifelong supporters. All three men were involved with the American Colonization Society. They convinced Blyden to go to Liberia, which had become an independent nation in 1847.

Blyden left the United States for Liberia on 21 December 1850 and arrived at Monrovia on 26 January 1851. Initially, he worked as a part-time clerk for a merchant and resumed his studies at Alexander High School, a new Presbyterian institution headed by the Reverend D. A. Wilson, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. Blyden’s intellectual abilities impressed Wilson, who then persuaded Knox to support Blyden as a full-time student. By 1853 Blyden was a lay preacher, and by 1854 he was a tutor at his high school and acted as principal during Wilson’s frequent absences due to illness. Blyden published one of the first of his many provocative pamphlets on African affairs, A Voice from Bleeding Africa, in 1856, the year he married Sarah Yates, the mulatto niece of B. P. Yates, the vice president of Liberia. Their marriage was an unhappy one, though they had two children. Blyden blamed his marital troubles on his wife’s loyalty to what he termed the “mulatto clique” that dominated Liberian politics. However, other important reasons for the marriage’s collapse were financial problems due to Blyden’s insufficient income and his wife’s disinterest in her husband’s intellectual pursuits. In 1858 he was ordained a Presbyterian minister, succeeding Wilson as principal of Alexander High School.

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s Blyden became intensely involved in the educational and political affairs of Liberia. In 1861 he was appointed Liberian educational commissioner and traveled to the United States and Britain on a lecture and fund-raising tour. He encouraged African Americans to immigrate to Liberia, “back home to the Fatherland,” where he contended they could live free from slavery and racial inequality. From 1860 to 1871 he taught classics at Liberia College; he was also the Liberian secretary of state (1864–1866). In 1871 Blyden was forced to leave Liberia temporarily for Sierra Leone after a coup d’état against the Edward Roye administration (1870–1871) endangered his life. He returned to Liberia in 1872 to become principal of Alexander High School again, a post he held until 1878. As the Liberian ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in Britain from 1877 to 1879, Blyden unsuccessfully tried to win financial support for Liberia from Britain. He then served as president of Liberia College (1880–1884) and was minister of the interior (1880–1882). In 1885 he ran unsuccessfully for president of Liberia, though he had left the country to live in Sierra Leone.

From the late 1880s to the early 1900s Blyden wrote his most important work on Pan-Africanism, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887), and maintained his diplomatic and educational commitments. The Liberian government again appointed him ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in 1892, and he served as a special envoy to London and Paris in 1905. From 1901 to 1906 he was director of Mohammedan education in Sierra Leone. Poor and frail, he underwent an operation for an aneurysm in the knee at the Royal Southern Hospital in Liverpool, England, in 1909. His friends in the Colonial Office in London helped secure a small pension for him in 1910. He died in Sierra Leone two years later. His funeral service represented the unity he tried to forge among Africans during his lifetime: it was a Christian service in which Muslim men bore his coffin from his residence. His long career as an educator, diplomat, and proponent of Pan-Africanism attracted scholarly attention from African, Caribbean, and African American historians, biographers, and political scientists.

BOLDEN, BUDDY

(6 Sept. 1877–4 Nov. 1931), jazz musician, was born Charles Joseph Bolden in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Westmore Bolden, a drayman, and Alice Harrison. Although Bolden is one of the earliest known figures in the development of jazz in New Orleans, there was little factual information about him until the publication in 1978 of Donald M. Marquis’s In Search of Buddy Bolden. In this admirable piece of investigative research, Marquis dispels much of the rumor that had grown around Bolden’s life in New Orleans and establishes him as an important member of the founding generation of jazz musicians. Marquis confirms that Bolden was not a barber and did not own a barbershop, as popularly believed, although he apparently spent considerable time at barbershops, which served as musicians’ meeting places, where information on jobs could be exchanged. Nor did he edit a “scandal sheet” called the Cricket. He did drink a lot, played a loud cornet, and was eventually committed to an asylum for erratic behavior resulting from chronic alcoholism.

Like most other New Orleans musicians of that period, Bolden pursued a part-time career performing jazz (then called ragtime). Not until 1902 did city directories begin listing him as a “musician.” Before that year he was identified as a “plasterer” and resided in his family’s uptown home on First Street in New Orleans. Sufficient documentation and testimony exist to verify that in about 1895 Bolden became active as a cornetist and bandleader at various indoor and outdoor locations in New Orleans. These venues included Lincoln and Johnson parks, Longshoreman’s Hall, and Tulane University in the uptown area; the Milneburg and West End resorts on Lake Pontchartrain; the Masonic Hall in Algiers; the Fairgrounds Race Track; and a number of “social clubs” whose halls lined the Perdido–South Rampart Street area. The period from 1897 to 1906 marked the prime of Bolden’s tenure as a jazz musician—a time when he enjoyed a sort of preeminence among other players for his boldness and audacity and the barrelhouse nature of his music.

Essentially an “uptown” musician, Bolden had limited contact with the more learned downtown musicians and performed primarily for black audiences. As an untutored musician with little if any formal education, and as one who played mostly by ear, he made music of the “rough blues” variety used to accompany the “slow drag” and other enticing dances of prostitutes. The downtown Creoles called it “honky tonk” music, and Bolden’s repertoire was reputed to be particularly coarse. According to Marquis, it appealed “especially to a liberated, post–Civil War generation of young blacks.” One number in particular, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” also known as “Funky Butt,” was popular enough to cause Union Sons Hall (a location where Bolden’s band frequently played) to be commonly referred to as Funky Butt Hall in his honor.

The principal difficulty in assessing the musical contributions of Bolden stems from the total absence of audio recordings. Although he was active during a period when early recordings were being made, no cylinders or records of his playing are known to exist. The search for a cylinder allegedly made by Bolden and his band in the late 1890s, and first reported by one of Bolden’s sidemen, Willie Cornish, to the Jazzmen editor Charles Edward Smith in 1939, proved fruitless. The only photograph (the original now lost) of Bolden shows him with a six-piece ensemble that included cornet, trombone, two clarinets, guitar, and string bass. Nonetheless, legendary accounts abound of his playing and bandleading and even his lifestyle.

As his celebrity as a cornetist and bandleader grew, so did his appetite for high living. Even as early as 1895 he had become a “ladies’ man,” known to have consorted with the sporting crowd and prostitutes, one of whom, Hattie Oliver, gave birth to his illegitimate son. Their common-law marriage lasted only a few years, and in 1902 Bolden met Nora Bass and entered into a second common-law marriage that produced his only daughter. The Boldens’ domestic environment was anything but tranquil, as contemporary police records and testimony from family members attest. Early in 1906 Bolden began suffering severe headaches, fits of depression, and episodes of violent behavior—all apparently related to his excessive drinking. An attack on his mother-in-law on 27 March, during which he struck her in the head with a water pitcher, led to his arrest and detainment by police, initiating the only apparent newspaper coverage he was to receive during his lifetime. Continued episodes of depression and violent behavior left him in a deranged state that placed him in conflict with many of his former musical cohorts as well as members of his family. Finally, in April 1907, having been confined to the house of detention, Bolden was moved to the state hospital for the insane in Jackson, Louisiana. There he lived out the remaining twenty-four years of his life, separated from his family and largely forgotten for the role he had played as one of the earliest identifiable jazz pioneers.

BOND, HORACE MANN

(8 Nov. 1904–21 Dec. 1972), college professor and administrator, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of James Bond, a Congregationalist minister, and Jane Alice Browne, a graduate of Oberlin College and a schoolteacher. Horace Bond’s paternal grandmother, Jane Arthur Bond, was a slave who raised two sons by herself. These two sons, Bond’s father and his uncle, Henry, both earned college degrees and embarked on professional careers. Three of Bond’s four siblings earned college degrees, and his cousins on his father’s side also distinguished themselves academically. This family achievement was important to Horace Bond, because it exemplified the way in which numerous scholars of his generation were nurtured within the African American community. He published a book on the family origins of African American scholars near the end of his life, Black American Scholars: A Study of Their Beginnings (1972).

Bond was an intellectually precocious child. He was educated at schools attached to colleges and universities in towns where his father served as a minister—Talladega, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia. He finished high school at the age of fourteen at the Lincoln Institute in Shelbyville, Kentucky. He then attended Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) and graduated at the age of eighteen in the class of 1923. He stayed on at Lincoln for a year as a teaching assistant, attended graduate school for a summer at Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State University), and earned master’s (1926) and doctoral (1936) degrees from the University of Chicago. Bond married Julia Washington in 1929; they had three children. Their second child, JULIAN BOND, became famous as a member of the student civil rights movement in the 1960s and served as a Georgia state legislator.

Horace Mann Bond (right), with W. E. B. DU BOIS (left), E. Franklin Frazier, his daughter Jane Marguerite, and his son JULIAN BOND. Courtesy of Julian Bond

Bond’s major field was education, and he specialized in both the history of education and the sociology of education in his graduate studies. He served on the faculties of Langston University in Oklahoma (1926–1928), Alabama State College in Montgomery (1928–1929), Fisk University in Nashville (1929–1931), and Dillard University in New Orleans (1932–1935). He also was chairman of the education department at Fisk and the founding academic dean at Dillard. In the first two decades of his academic career he was closely associated with the Julius Rosenwald Fund and its president, Edwin Embree. In part because of this relationship, he was chosen as president of Fort Valley (Georgia) State College in 1939. He served in that position until 1945, when he became president of his alma mater, Lincoln University. Bond remained as president of Lincoln until 1957, when he resigned amid controversy over a plan to increase the number of white students at the institution; his relations with older, white faculty, many of whom had taught him as an undergraduate and had difficulty seeing their former student as their superior; and his frequent trips away from campus. He then moved to Atlanta University, where he served as dean of the School of Education for five years and then as director of its Bureau of Educational and Social Research. He retired in 1971 and died in Atlanta one year later.

Bond was the author of six books and numerous articles. In the 1920s he published articles critical of the racial bias in tests assessing intelligence quotient (IQ). His two most enduring books were published in the 1930s, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934), a study of the inferior conditions in black schools and colleges, and Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel (1939), an economic interpretation of educational conditions for blacks in Alabama. His articles from the 1930s until the end of his life were published in both academic and popular journals, and he made numerous speeches to black church and civic groups in his later years. His scholarly output was a lifelong concern for Bond, but it diminished in the 1940s and 1950s as he took on the duties of a college president. Bond worked as a historian for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as it prepared a legal brief answering historical questions asked by the U.S. Supreme Court in deliberating the famous Brown v. Board of Education (1954) school desegregation case.

Bond became particularly interested in Africa and Africans in the late 1940s, and he took nearly twenty trips to that continent in the 1940s and 1950s. He was a founder of the American Society for African Culture and was active in numerous groups that advocated cooperation between Africans and African Americans. He developed the Institute for African Studies at Lincoln University and made sure that African students were welcome at Lincoln and were supported financially whenever possible. In this regard he built on a long-standing commitment of Lincoln to Africa and Africans. Bond was especially interested in Liberia, Nigeria, and Ghana. During Bond’s university presidency, the Gold Coast (later called Ghana) political leader and Lincoln alumnus Kwame Nkrumah was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lincoln.

During his career Bond carefully balanced concern for personal survival and professional advancement with a pursuit of social and political activism on behalf of his race that often risked reprisals. He was a representative of the middle generation of African American intellectuals that followed the generation of W. E. B. DU BOIS and BOOKER T.WASHINGTON of the early twentieth century and preceded the civil rights activists of the 1960s. He was one of the first of his race to be recognized for his professional academic accomplishments and also was one of the first to head an institution of higher learning.

BOND, JULIAN

(14 Jan. 1940–), activist and politician, was born Horace Julian Bond in Nashville, Tennessee, the second of three children of HORACE MANN BOND, a college professor and administrator, and Julia Washington, a librarian. Although the family lived near Macon, Georgia, where Horace was president of Fort Valley State College, Julia insisted on driving to Nashville, Tennessee, to secure better hospital care for Julian’s birth. This pride in the Bond lineage can be traced through four generations: Jane Arthur Bond, Julian’s great-grandmother, had been a slave who raised two sons fathered by her white master. Her first son was the Reverend James Bond, an educator and preacher in Tennessee and Kentucky; his son, Horace, held professorial and administrative posts at five colleges and universities before fathering Julian. In 1943 Horace Bond called upon his colleague W. E. B. DU BOIS (who was in Fort Valley at the time to deliver a speech) to participate in a small ceremony for young Julian’s benefit. “With champagne and mock solemnity, [they] decreed that Julian Bond should follow in their footsteps” (Williams, 181).

Horace Bond became president of Lincoln University, the oldest black college in America, but Julian did not seem destined to follow the path that had been laid for him. He approached grammar school fecklessly, frustrating the teachers who spotted his charismatic intelligence. He scored the highest in his class on a sixth-grade reading test, and his mother later quipped that he “never opened a book since” (Williams, 184). Nonetheless, when Bond finished eighth grade, he was recruited by George School, a Quaker preparatory school in eastern Pennsylvania. His inconsistent academic record continued—though by all accounts he was quite popular—and he required a year more than the standard four to graduate. Apart from athletic accolades on the diving and wrestling teams, Bond’s most steady success came in literature, and in 1957 he enrolled at Morehouse College as an English major.

His academic performance was lackluster, but Bond’s extracurricular activities reflected a thoughtful mind at work. Bond had become a dedicated poet by this point, and his poetry was published in multiple anthologies while he was still an undergraduate. (LANGSTON HUGHES would anthologize Bond’s poems in New Negro Poetry U.S.A. in 1964.) He also founded a literary journal and took summer classes at Boston University.

On 1 February 1960 four black college students integrated a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. A few mornings afterward, Bond was in an Atlanta drugstore, skipping compulsory chapel, when an acquaintance rushed in with news of the sit-in. He implored Bond to help him do something similar in Atlanta. Bond agreed, mostly just to end the conversation. That afternoon a student meeting was held, and before he knew it Bond had helped found the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. COAHR bought a full-page advertisement in Atlanta’s newspapers, taking the city government to task for limiting African American employment to menial positions and for not proportionally representing the black community on the city’s police force.

Whites were aghast at the discontent brewing in their city. They were further taken aback when COAHR rapidly organized sit-ins at public buildings, lunch counters, and restaurants. When Morehouse students departed for summer vacation, Bond and a handful of others remained. When students returned in the autumn, they faced two lines of registration on the first day: one for class and one for upcoming demonstrations. Bond would later describe COAHR as a “masterpiece of precision”—it was well funded and mobilized thousands of volunteers, and every project was planned with intricate forethought of strategic gain. But the organization did have its opponents: the Daily World, Atlanta’s only African American newspaper, criticized COAHR for being too confrontational. Bond and his colleagues consequently raced to publish their own paper, the Atlanta Inquirer. First as a reporter and eventually as managing editor, Bond helped diversify the movement’s outreach methods and establish critical media contacts as he honed his public demeanor.

In 1961, under the combined strain of working for COAHR, editing the Inquirer, and his engagement to a Spelman coed, Alice Clopton, Bond withdrew from Morehouse halfway through his senior year. By then the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had emerged as a catalyst in the civil rights movement, and it hired Bond as its communications director. He married Clopton later that year (they would eventually have five children) and proceeded to work for SNCC until 1965, when the Georgia legislature reapportioned voting districts as a gesture toward reeling in decades of racial gerrymandering. A newly created West End district in Atlanta became the logical place for an African American candidate. Bond was reluctant, but his fellow SNCC worker JOHN LEWIS urged him to run. Initially campaigning as a publicity move, Bond soon became absorbed in the effort, introducing himself to voters door-to-door; he won with 82 percent of the vote.

Shortly before Bond took his seat, a reporter called him to inquire what he thought about SNCC’s recently released statement condemning the Vietnam War. The reporter covertly taped the conversation, in which Bond supported the statement. The political backlash was intense. The legislature accused him of giving “aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States and the enemies of Georgia” and by a tally of 184–12 refused to seat him. Two years and two elections later—both of which Bond won—the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the legislature’s action.

In 1968 Bond again challenged Georgia politicos by heading a rival delegation to the Democratic National Convention, one that more accurately represented Georgia’s racial demographics. When his delegation successfully won its place in the convention, Bond was approached about the nomination for vice president. Although he was, at twenty-eight, seven years too young to hold office, Bond still kept his name on the ballot while the first few states voted. He then withdrew when the point had been made: African Americans were a vital force in the Democratic Party, as signaled by the first African American nomination for vice president.

Bond rode the crest of his popularity for over a decade. In 1969, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) honored Du Bois by dedicating his childhood home as a memorial park, they called on Bond to give the address. In reference to Du Bois’s proclamation of the color line as the twentieth century’s most looming problem, Bond opined that problems had worsened. They now included “the new colonization of people, both here and abroad, the new imperialism practiced by Western democracy, and the continuing struggle of those who have not against those who have” (Williams, xiv). Simultaneously with his tenure in the Georgia legislature, Bond completed his degree at Morehouse in 1971; became a coveted speaker; and published A Time to Speak, A Time to Act (1972), a volume of essays on race and politics. In 1974 he moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate, and in 1976 he waged a short-lived campaign for president of the United States before bowing out because of insufficient funds.

Bond’s tendency to impress upon people the possibility that he was still an underachiever continued to resurface. When Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election, his administration invited Bond to join them in Washington. Bond refused, but whether he did so out of pride, fear of shouldering more responsibility, or simple disagreement with Carter only he could say. He found himself a political outsider, and his performance in the Georgia legislature increasingly began to resemble the scholastic effort of his youth. Bond was chastised for apathy toward racial causes and excessive absenteeism in the legislature, and when he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1986 against his former SNCC comrade John Lewis, his opponent conducted a spirited campaign that vanquished Georgia’s former political prodigy. Within the next couple of years Clopton would accuse Bond of cocaine use (though she quickly retracted the charge) and divorce him. Bond’s mistress and purported drug dealer was sentenced to over twenty years in prison, and Bond was later named in a paternity suit that he eventually conceded.

In the late 1980s and through the 1990s Julian Bond rededicated himself to his strength: communications. He narrated the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize (1987) for the Public Broadcasting System; continued hosting the nation’s preeminent television show on black politics, America’s Black Forum; and wrote a syndicated column. Bond also reentered academia, accepting a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1989 and joining the faculties of both the University of Virginia and American University shortly thereafter. In 1990 he married Pamela Horowitz, a lawyer from Washington, D.C. Bond continued his speaking tours and professorial work and in 1998 was elected chair of the NAACP board of directors.

BOUCHET, EDWARD ALEXANDER

(15 Sept. 1852–28 Oct. 1918), educator and scientist, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the youngest of four children of William Francis Bouchet, a janitor, and Susan Cooley. Part of New Haven’s black community, the Bouchets were active members of the Temple Street Congregational Church, which was a stopping point for fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad. During the 1850s and 1860s New Haven had only three schools that black children could attend. Edward was enrolled in the Artisan Street Colored School, a small (only thirty seats), ungraded school with one teacher, Sarah Wilson, who played a crucial role in nurturing Bouchet’s academic abilities and his desire to learn.

In 1868 Bouchet was accepted into Hopkins Grammar School, a private institution that prepared young men for the classical and scientific departments at Yale College. He graduated first in his class at Hopkins and four years later, when he graduated from Yale in 1874, he ranked sixth in a class of 124. On the basis of this exceptional performance, Bouchet became the first black student in the nation to be nominated to Phi Beta Kappa. In the fall of 1874 he returned to Yale with the encouragement and financial support of Alfred Cope, a Philadelphia philanthropist. In 1876 Bouchet successfully completed his dissertation on the new subject of geometrical optics, becoming the first black person to earn a PhD from an American university as well as the sixth American of any race to earn a PhD in Physics.

In 1876 Bouchet moved to Philadelphia to teach at the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), the city’s only high school for black students. ICY had been founded by the Society of Friends because African Americans had historically been denied admittance to Philadelphia’s white high schools. Members of the ICY board of managers like Cope, Bouchet’s Yale benefactor, believed firmly in the value of a classical education and were convinced that blacks were capable of unlimited educational achievement. In 1874 Cope had provided forty thousand dollars to establish a new science program at ICY, and soon thereafter recruited Bouchet to teach and administer the program.

Although Philadelphia was as segregated as any southern city, it offered a supportive environment for a man of Bouchet’s abilities. The city’s black population, the largest in the North, had made considerable progress in education during the decades preceding his arrival. As early as 1849 half the city’s black population was active in one or more of the many literary societies established by the black community. After the Civil War the ICY played an important role in training the thousands of black teachers that were needed throughout the country to provide freedmen with the education they sought.

Bouchet joined St. Thomas’s Church, the oldest black Episcopal church in the country, served on the vestry, and was church secretary for many years. The bishop also appointed Bouchet to be a lay reader, which gave Bouchet the opportunity to take a more active part in church services. Bouchet took his scientific interests and abilities beyond the ICY into the broader black community, giving public lectures on various scientific topics. He was also a member of the Franklin Institute, a foundation for the promotion of the mechanic arts, chartered in 1824. Bouchet maintained his ties with Yale through the local chapter of the Yale Alumni Association, attending all meetings and annual dinners.

By the turn of the century, a new set of ICY managers emerged, more receptive to the industrial education philosophy of BOOKER T. WASHINGTON than to academic education for blacks. In their efforts to redirect the school’s programs, the all-white board fired all the teachers, including Bouchet, in 1902 and replaced them with instructors committed to industrial education.

Over the next fourteen years Bouchet held five or six positions in different parts of the country. Until November 1903 he taught math and physics in St. Louis at Sumner High School, the first high school for blacks west of the Mississippi. He then spent seven months as the business manager for the Provident Hospital in St. Louis (November 1903–May 1904), followed by a term as a United States inspector of customs at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis (June 1904–0ctober 1906). In October 1906 Bouchet secured a teaching and administrative position at St. Paul’s Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia. In 1908 he became principal of Lincoln High School of Gallipolis, Ohio, where he remained until 1913, when an attack of arteriosclerosis compelled him to resign and return to New Haven. Undocumented information has Bouchet returning to teaching at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, but illness once again forced him to retire in 1916. He returned to New Haven, where he died in his boyhood home at 94 Bradley Street. He had never married or had children.

Bouchet had the misfortune of being a talented and educated black man who lived in a segregated society that refused to recognize his particular genius and thus hindered him from conducting scientific research and achieving professional recognition. Segregation produced isolation as Bouchet spent his career in high schools with limited resources and poorly equipped labs. Even with Bouchet’s superior qualifications, no white college would have considered him for a position on its faculty. Completely excluded from any means of utilizing his education and talent, Bouchet languished in obscurity. The ascendance of industrial education also served to limit his opportunities, since his academic training in the natural sciences made him unattractive as a candidate at the increasing number of black institutions that adopted a vocational curriculum.

The absurdity of the claims made by some proponents of vocational education concerning the innate inability of blacks to undertake an academic education could not have been more obvious to Bouchet. From his own accomplishments and those of his students, it never occurred to Bouchet that blacks could not master the fields of classical education or excel in science. In the face of personal setbacks and a changing public mood on black education, Bouchet maintained his standards and never altered his educational ideals.

BOWSER, MARY ELIZABETH

(1839?–?), Union spy during the Civil War, was born a slave on the Richmond, Virginia, plantation of John Van Lew, a wealthy hardware merchant. Very little is known about her early life. Upon Van Lew’s death in 1843 or 1851, his wife and daughter, Elizabeth, manumitted his slaves and bought and freed a number of their family members, Mary among them. Like most of their former slaves, Mary remained a servant in the Van Lew household, staying with the family until the late 1850s. Noting her intellectual talent, Elizabeth, a staunch abolitionist and Quaker, sent Mary to the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia to be educated.

Mary returned from Philadelphia after graduating to marry Wilson Bowser, a free black man. The ceremony was held on 16 April 1861, just days before the Civil War began. What made the ceremony so unusual was that the parishioners of the church were primarily white. The couple settled outside Richmond. There is no record of any children. Even after her marriage, Bowser was in close contact with the Van Lew family, clearly sharing their political goals. As a result, their wartime record was very much intertwined, and information about Bowser can be gleaned through the records of Elizabeth Van Lew.

Despite her abolitionist sentiments, Elizabeth Van Lew was a prominent figure in Richmond. Shunned by many before the war began, her loyalty to the Union during the war earned her further enmity. Unlike other spies, Van Lew used this enmity as a cover for her serious efforts on behalf of the Union. Adopting a distracted, muttering personae, she was dubbed “Crazy Bet.” During the war, Van Lew helped manage a spy system in the Confederate capitol, went regularly to the Libby Prison with food and medicine, and helped escapees of all kinds, hiding them in a secret room in her mansion.

Perhaps Van Lew’s most trusted and successful source of information was Mary Bowser. Like Van Lew, Bowser had considerable acting skills. In order to get access to top-secret information, Bowser became “Ellen Bond,” a slow-thinking, but able, servant. Van Lew urged a friend to take Bowser along to help out at functions held by Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Bowser was eventually hired fulltime, and worked in the Davis household until just before the end of the war.

At the Davis’s house, Mary worked as a servant, cleaning and serving meals. Given the racial prejudice of the day, and the way in which servants were trained to act and seem invisible, Mary was able to glean considerable information simply by doing her work. That she was literate, and could thus read the documents she had access to—and, in that way, better interpret the conversations she was hearing—could only have been a bonus. Jefferson Davis, apparently, came to know that there was a leak in his house, but until late in the war no suspicion fell on Mary.

Richmond’s formal spymaster was Thomas McNiven, a baker whose business was located on North Eighth Street. Given his profession, he was a hub for information. His bakery was an unexceptional destination for his agents, and McNiven was regularly out and about town, driving through Ricmond making deliveries. When he came to the Davis household, Mary could daily—without suspicion—greet him at his wagon and talk briefly. In 1904, just before he died, McNiven reported his wartime activities to his daughter, Jeannette B. McNiven, and her nephew, Robert W. Waitt Jr., chronicled them in 1952. According to McNiven, Bowser wass the source of the most crucial information available, “as she was working right in the Davis home and had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the rebel president’s desk, she could repeat word for word. Unlike most colored, she could read and write. She made a point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis’ home to drop information” (quoted in Waitt, Thomas McNiven Papers).

By the last days of the Confederacy, suspicion did fall on Mary—it is not known how or why—and she chose to flee in January 1865. Her last act as a Union spy and sympathizer was an attempt to burn down the Confederate White House, but this was not successful.

After the war ended, the federal government, in an attempt to protect the postwar lives of its Southern spies, destroyed the records—including those of McNiven’s and Van Lew’s activities—that could more precisely detail the information Bowser passed on to General Ulysses S. Grant throughout 1863 and 1864. The journal that Bowser later wrote chronicling her wartime work was also lost when family members inadvertently discarded it in 1952. The Bowser family rarely discussed her work, given Richmond’s political climate and the continuing attitudes toward Union sympathizers. There is no record of Bowser’s postwar life, and no date for her death.

Bowser is among a number of African American women spies who worked on the Union side during the Civil War. Given the nature of the profession, we may never know how many women engaged in undercover spy operations, both planned and unplanned. HARRIET TUBMAN is the most well known, especially for her scouting expeditions in South Carolina and Florida that resulted in the freedom of hundreds of slaves. In 1995 the U.S. government honored Mary Elizabeth Bowser for her work in the Civil War with an induction into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

BRADLEY, THOMAS

(29 Dec. 1917–29 Sep. 1998), mayor of Los Angeles, was born in a log cabin on a cotton plantation near Calvert, in Robertson County, Texas, the son of Lee Thomas Bradley and Crenner Hawkins, sharecroppers. Calvert had thrived in the late nineteenth century, buoyed by the cottonseed industry and the Southern Pacific Railroad, but its economy had declined by the time of Thomas’s birth. Life for sharecroppers like the Bradleys was precarious—little better, in fact, than it had been for Lee’s father, a slave in the Carolinas. They knew the certainty of picking cotton for eighteen hours a day and the annual uncertainty of the price of that cotton. Heavily indebted to white landlords, Lee and Crenner struggled to provide their family with vital necessities, such as food and health care; five of their children died in infancy. Like many southern blacks in the 1920s, the Bradley family saw only one answer to the restrictions of Jim Crow: migration, first to Dallas; then briefly to Arizona, where even the six-year-old Tom picked cotton for a while; and, finally, in 1924, to Los Angeles.

The Bradleys struggled in their new home. Unable to find steady employment in Los Angeles, Lee served as a crewman on Pacific Coast ocean liners. Crenner found work as a maid, and Tom’s elder brother dropped out of school to work on farms in Orange County. Even so, as a boyhood friend of Tom’s recalled, the Bradleys “were poorer than a lot of folks were poor” (Sonenshine, 59). His parents’ enforced absences left Tom as the de facto head of the household. As a teenager, he had to balance the family budget, negotiate sibling rivalries, and take care of his handicapped younger brother, experiences that he would later draw upon as a politician. Although Crenner relied heavily on Tom, she was also determined that her son, a studious child, should take advantage of the educational opportunities available to him in the Los Angeles school system. A combination of academic success and prowess on the track brought him to Polytechnic High School, one of the best schools in the city. As one of the few black students at Poly, and one of the poorest, Tom faced discrimination, but he quickly earned a reputation as a mediator, often called on by the administration to ease tensions among the diverse student body. Those skills and his high profile as the captain of the track team and as a star football player helped Tom win his first political campaign, as president of the Poly Boys’ League. They also helped him win a full athletic scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1937.

Tom Bradley is sworn in as mayor of Los Angeles by a former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren, in 1973. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Bradley thrived at UCLA. He continued to star on the track and also played football on a team that included the future baseball legend JACKIE ROBINSON. Fraternity politics occupied much of Bradley’s time in college; his membership in Kappa Alpha Psi helped him create a network of black professionals who would later back his political ambitions. Bradley continued to help his family in the summertime by shoveling scrap iron, gardening, and working as a photographer for the comedian Jimmy Durante. That connection to Hollywood would later prove invaluable in Los Angeles politics. In 1940, his junior year, Bradley took the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) entrance exam, placed near the top, and decided to leave UCLA to join the police force. With a steady income of $170 a month, Bradley felt secure enough to propose marriage to Ethel Arnold, a fellow member of the New Hope Baptist Church; they married in May 1941. Tragically, their first child died the day she was born, the Bradleys’ first wedding anniversary. Two daughters were born later.

Although Bradley had broken racial barriers at UCLA with ease, the LAPD presented a far greater challenge. Only three of his seventy-one colleagues at the police academy and one hundred of the four thousand members of the force were black, a situation that changed little in Bradley’s twenty years on the force. By the time he resigned in 1961, Bradley had risen to lieutenant, the highest rank held by an African American on the force at that time. Bradley did much to improve race relations, most notably in his role as head of the LAPD’s community-relations detail. Bradley’s superiors, however, resisted his efforts to bolster the image of the force in nonwhite neighborhoods. In 1960 Police Chief William Parker vetoed Bradley’s unilateral decision to integrate the radio cars in his division. That reversal undermined the lieutenant’s authority and also suggested that reform of the LAPD—and the city’s other racist institutions—would have to come from outside.

After Bradley resigned from the police force, he became increasingly active in the Democratic Party, and in 1961 he was elected city councilman for Los Angeles’s ethnically diverse Tenth District, defeating his white opponent by a two-to-one margin. The Tenth District did not include Watts, but when that neighborhood rebelled against police brutality, overcrowding, and high unemployment in August 1965, Bradley emerged as the leader of all Angelenos opposed to the policies of Mayor Sam Yorty and Chief Parker. Parker inflamed black opinion by blaming the riots on “monkeys in a zoo.” Yorty was less offensive, but equally inaccurate, in reproaching “Communists for agitating Negroes with propaganda over past police brutality” (Payne and Ratzan, 73).

Bradley knew from his own experience on the force that police brutality was no myth, and over the next four years he became the most visible critic of the LAPD excesses and the most vocal proponent of increased federal and local efforts to improve equal economic opportunity. In 1969 Bradley challenged Yorty for the position of mayor. The election was racially divisive, though most of the mud was flung by Yorty, who disingenuously, but successfully, linked the moderate Bradley to militants such as the Black Panther ELDRIDGE CLEAVER. Bradley chose not to respond in kind, a stance that some commentators viewed as a tactical error. In a rematch in 1973 Bradley won easily. Yorty again tried to paint his opponent as an extremist, but this time Bradley responded with a television campaign that highlighted his police experience and charming, far-from-militant demeanor. Bradley energized his base of African American voters, made gains among Asians and Latinos, and won over significant sections of the city’s white business community, most notably in Hollywood. Yorty had misread the electoral dynamics of an increasingly diverse Los Angeles.

Over the next twenty years Bradley tried to govern the city as inclusively as he had run his campaign; this was no easy task, given the city’s rapid growth and the increasing diversity of its population. In his first term in office Bradley attempted to redevelop the crumbling downtown of Los Angeles. He skillfully deployed state and federal funds to bring jobs to depressed neighborhoods, but the antitax crusade of the late 1970s wreaked havoc with any meaningful effort to use government to solve the city’s problems. In 1978 Californians approved Proposition Thirteen, a referendum measure that cut property taxes and drastically reduced the revenues available to local governments. Given that Bradley had already cut property taxes in 1976, the revenue loss proved devastating to those impoverished Angelenos most dependent on government services. Downtown business leaders, however, were delighted by what they saw as Bradley’s fiscal rectitude and worked closely with him in the late 1970s and 1980s on his three flagship projects: revitalization of the downtown business district, expansion of the Los Angeles International Airport, and bringing the Olympic Games to the city in 1984. The latter undertaking was particularly rewarding to Bradley, the UCLA track star who, as a child, had read avidly about the ancient Games and who, as a teenager, had peered through the L.A. Coliseum fence to catch a glimpse of the 1932 Olympians. Despite a Soviet boycott, the Los Angeles Olympics, the first privately funded games, proved to be a resounding commercial success. That year Bradley was the recipient of the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal.

Bradley succeeded in diversifying the city workforce, but the deep-rooted racism of the LAPD proved intractable. After 1978 he faced a formidable foe in Daryl Gates, the new police chief. In the 1980s a rash of police shootings and beatings of minorities provoked anger in the black community, not only at Gates but also at Bradley for failing to fire him. Constitutionally, however, the mayor did not have the power to do so. The 1991 police beating of a black motorist, Rodney King, videotaped by a bystander and later relayed worldwide on television, however, was the final straw for Bradley, who worked behind the scenes to remove Gates. The acquittal of King’s attackers in 1992 was an “outrage,” Bradley told a news conference.

Many of the citizens of South Central Los Angeles agreed. Within hours of the acquittal, the city experienced its greatest civil unrest since the Watts riot. More than fifty people were killed, four hundred were injured, and seventeen thousand were arrested. Property damage amounted to one billion dollars. In his last year in office, Bradley worked hard to bring the city’s fractious communities together. Although all races had participated in the riots, relations between African Americans and Korean Americans were particularly fraught, since many of the black rioters had targeted Korean shopkeepers. While Bradley had his share of political disappointments, notably his defeat in two gubernatorial campaigns in 1982 and 1986 and a 1989 financial disclosure scandal, the South Central riots would remain the low point of his career. Bradley had earned a law degree at Southwestern University while still a policeman, and on leaving office in 1993 he practiced law until he suffered a heart attack and a stroke in 1996. He died of a heart attack two years later in Los Angeles.

Mourners at Bradley’s funeral recalled his electoral victories and losses and agreed upon his warmth, courtliness, and charm. Bradley’s abiding legacy, however, was an ability to craft and to maintain for two decades a broad, multiracial, and ideologically diverse political coalition in one of the world’s most fragmented cities.

BRAGG, GEORGE FREEMAN, JR.

(25 Jan. 1863–12 Mar. 1940), Episcopal clergyman, was born in Warrenton, North Carolina, the son of George Freeman Bragg Sr. and Mary Bragg (maiden name unknown). He was two years old when the family moved to Petersburg, Virginia, where he studied at the elementary school and at St. Stephen’s Parish and Normal School. His family helped found St. Stephen’s Church for Negroes in 1867. At age six he was employed as a valet by John Hampden Chamberlayne, editor of the Petersburg Index. In 1879 he entered a school founded by Major Giles B. Cooke, a former chaplain on Robert E. Lee’s staff; the school had become a branch of Virginia Theological Seminary. The next year he was suspended for not being “humble” but was appointed a page in the Virginia legislature by the Readjuster Party. After a severe case of typhoid fever and a period of teaching school in 1885, he returned to his theological studies at Cooke’s school, renamed the Bishop Paine Divinity and Industrial School. He was ordained deacon on 12 January 1887 and priest on 19 December 1888 by Bishop Francis M. Whittle. He married Nellie Hill in 1887; they had four children.

Bragg’s parish ministry began in 1887 at St. Luke’s Church in Norfolk, Virginia, where within four years he built a new church and rectory, renovated a school, organized the Holy Innocents (which became Grace Church), and founded the Industrial School for Colored Girls. After becoming rector of St. James First African Church in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1891, he opened St. James Mission in Portsmouth, Virginia. Under his leadership, St. James Church became self-supporting, purchased a rectory, and built a new church. By 1931 there were five hundred communicants, and the church made annual charitable contributions of a thousand dollars. At least four young men entered the priesthood under Bragg’s guidance. In addition, he established the Maryland Home for Friendless Colored Children and was associated with St. Mary’s Home for Boys and St. Katharine’s Home for Little Girls. For thirty-five years he was general secretary of the Conference of Church Workers among Colored People and a special chaplain to the bishop of the diocese of Maryland.

George Freeman Bragg Jr. (seated), with two of his sons, also clergymen. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, Rare Book Collection

Beyond his service within his denomination, Bragg performed many duties. In 1884 he was honorary commissioner to the New Orleans Exposition. Virginia’s governor Fitzhugh Lee appointed him a curator to the Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute in 1887. He also served as chaplain to the second battalion of Virginia Colored Militia. In Maryland he was on the board of managers for the House of Reformation for Colored Boys and a member of the State Inter-Racial Commission. He started the Committee of Twelve, a group of black leaders, including BOOKER T. WASHINGTON and W. E. B. DU BOIS, that campaigned against the Poe Amendment, designed to disfranchise blacks in Maryland. He led the fight to have Negro teachers assigned to Negro schools in Baltimore. In 1905 he joined the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the NAACP, and became a supporter of Du Bois, its founder.

Bragg’s early association with the Petersburg Index had generated a lifelong interest in journalism. At age nineteen he had begun publishing the Virginia Lancet, a pro-Republican paper involved in Virginia politics. In 1886 he founded a new paper, the Afro-American Churchman, published, he said, in the interests of the Colored Episcopal church. Also that year he founded the Afro-American Ledger, which he later merged with the Baltimore Afro-American. The Church Advocate served for many years as the unofficial organ of the Conference of Church Workers among Colored People and was filled with biographical sketches of clergy, histories of local black Episcopal churches, and commentary on the continuing struggles of blacks in the Episcopal Church. In later years it served as a parish paper for Bragg’s church. The Maryland Home was a monthly, published to promote the Maryland Home for Friendless Colored Children.

Some of his published works, all of which contain biographical data, are The Colored Harvest in the Old Virginia Diocese (1901), Afro-American Church Work and Workers (1904), The Story of Old St. Stephen’s, Petersburg, Va. (1906), The First Negro Priest on Southern Soil (1909), Bond Slave of Christ (1912), Men of Maryland (rev. ed., 1925), The Pathfinder ABSALOM JONES (1929), and Heroes of the Eastern Shore (1939). A major work still of prime importance is History of the Afro-American Group of the Episcopal Church (1922). Many of these volumes were printed on Bragg’s own printing press, under the imprint of the Church Advocate Press.

FURTHER READING

BENGA, OTA. See Otabenga.

BERRY, CHUCK

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BERRY, HALLE MARIA

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BERRY, LEONIDAS HARRIS

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BETHUNE, MARY JANE McLEOD

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BETHUNE, THOMAS.

BIBB, HENRY WALTON

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BLACKWELL, DAVID

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BLACKWELL, UNITA Z.

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BLAKE, EUBIE

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BLAKEY, ART

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BLIND TOM

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BLYDEN, EDWARD WILMOT

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BOLDEN, BUDDY

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BOND, HORACE MANN

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BOND, JULIAN

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BOUCHET, EDWARD ALEXANDER

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BOWSER, MARY ELIZABETH

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BRADLEY, THOMAS

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BRAGG, GEORGE FREEMAN, JR.