African American Lives

C

CAESAR, JOHN

(?–17 Jan. 1837), African Seminole (Black Seminole) leader, warrior, and interpreter, was born in the mid-eighteenth century and joined the Seminole nation in Florida, one of the many groups of African Seminole Indians who fought to maintain an autonomous and independent nation. There are few written records to reveal the early life histories of the many escaped Africans and American Indians in the maroon communities across the Americas, and Caesar’s life proves no exception. By the time his exploits were recorded in U.S. military records, Caesar was well acculturated to Seminole life and politics, and thus he had likely been a longtime member of the Seminole nation. His work as an interpreter between Native Seminoles and the U.S. military, however, reveals his early upbringing among English-speaking Americans. He grew up in a time of intense conflict between the Seminoles and European colonists, and had become a seasoned war veteran by the time of the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). Like many African Seminole women and men, Caesar had a spouse living on one of the local plantations, alongside the St. Johns River.

During the First Seminole War (1817), Caesar was a prominent leader who conducted raids on neighboring plantations and sought out runaway slaves and free African Americans to join the Seminole nation. He was closely associated with Seminole leader King Philip (Emathla), and together the two men battled the soldiers of the U.S. government during two wars. Acknowledged by U.S. military leaders and local plantation owners as a brilliant and powerful foe, Caesar followed a strategy of developing ties with enslaved African Americans on plantations in the St. Johns River area, using these relationships to acquire supplies and recruit slaves to join the African Seminole resistance.

African Seminoles like Caesar had a complex political and social relationship with Native Seminoles. The escape of slaves from plantations was encouraged by the early Spanish colonists who were in competition with English colonies over Florida territory. Although some Native Seminoles held African Seminoles as slaves, especially in the nineteenth century, African Seminoles had significant autonomy and political influence, particularly as the maroon nation grew in size and strength. There was significant intermarriage and cultural exchange among the various local communities which included African Seminoles, Native Seminoles, free and enslaved African Americans, and members of various Native American nations who joined forces with the Seminoles. Although some African Seminole slaves faced a form of slavery comparable to that practiced by European American plantation owners, others were adopted into Seminole clans, enslaved for a limited period of cultural adaptation to the new nation, and could marry and have children who would be free citizens of the nation. Caesar, like most African Seminoles, adopted the language and many of the cultural traditions of his Native Seminole counterparts, and African Seminoles brought their own African cultural traditions as well, which had a significant influence on the development of Seminole culture. Because African Seminoles were faced with the threat of enslavement on southern plantations, many served as fearless leaders in the Seminole wars against the United States in order to prevent the defeat of the Seminole nation. Many Native Seminoles also had their lives inextricably linked with those of African Seminoles due to intermarriage, and were unwilling to abandon their African Seminole family and friends to slave traders and plantation owners.

There were many other influential African Seminoles, including John Horse and Abraham, the latter serving as the chief associate, adviser, and interpreter to Seminole chief Micanopy. Like his counterpart Abraham, Caesar was the head adviser and interpreter to a Seminole chief, King Philip, father of Wild Cat and leader of the St. Johns River Seminoles. Caesar and Abraham worked together to sow the seeds of discontent among plantation slaves in Florida, and to develop relationships with free blacks and slaves who would assist in re-supplying the war effort. Caesar was successful in convincing numerous African slaves to join the Seminoles in their struggle for freedom.

In December 1835, with the beginning of the Second Seminole War, Caesar and King Philip attacked and destroyed numerous St. John’s sugar plantations. Slaves joined the Seminoles in further attacks, which continued into 1836. The Second Seminole War lasted for nearly seven years, and was characterized by the perspective of General Thomas Jesup, who declared: “This, you may be assured is a negro and not a Indian war” (Thomas S. Jesup Papers, The University of Michigan, Box 14). African Seminoles, Native Seminoles, and escaped African slaves fought together in battles that cost the U.S. military dearly.

The incident for which Caesar is perhaps best known occurred in early March 1836. General Gaines and his troops were suffering the effects of a lengthy siege by the Seminole warriors, when Caesar unexpectedly arrived at Gaines’s campsite to announce that the Seminoles wished to discuss a ceasefire agreement. Gaines agreed, and the parties met the next day in a series of discussions, with Caesar and Abraham serving as interpreters. Caesar’s role in initiating the negotiations remains a matter of debate; in any case, the talks ended abruptly with the arrival of General Clinch, whose advance forces fired on the Seminole participants. Although Gaines claimed a victory after his troops’ withdrawal, the Seminoles gained strategic advantages with the cease-fire holding long enough for the Seminoles to regroup and reinforce their position.

With the arrival of General Thomas S. Jesup in late 1836, the war took on a new and disturbing dimension, with Osceola’s fighters pushed back into King Philip and John Caesar’s St. Johns River territory. Caesar organized runaway slaves and a number of Native Seminoles into small bands of warriors, and attacked the plantations just outside St. Augustine. Caesar’s attacks were effective, and to strengthen his position he went on raiding parties to acquire horses. On 17 January 1837, he and his men were discovered attempting to steal horses from the Hanson plantation, and that evening, as they sat around their campfire, they were attacked by Captain Hanson’s men, who killed three warriors, including Caesar.

Caesar’s untimely death did not diminish the importance and influence of his life. His effectiveness at recruiting slaves from the plantations forced the U.S. military to negotiate over the issue of African Seminoles, and this resulted in the removal of African Seminoles alongside Native Seminoles, rather than their immediate re-enslavement on southeastern plantations. He was a major leader in a powerful maroon nation, which offered a unique opportunity for autonomy and freedom for Africans and American Indians who dared to escape plantations and European American colonial oppression. Caesar served as a potent symbol of an alternative vision for both African Americans and American Indians, that of merging cultures and political alliances. The two communities combined forces, and this new alliance proved a powerful and convincing tool in the hands of John Caesar, an African Seminole visionary, warrior, and political strategist.

CAILLOUX, ANDRÉ

(25 Aug. 1825–27 May 1863), first black soldier to die in the Civil War, was born in Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana, the son of André Cailloux, a slave skilled in masonry and carpentry, and Josephine Duvernay, a slave of Joseph Duvernay. On 15 July 1827 young André was baptized in St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans.

After the death of Joseph Duvernay in 1828, Joseph’s sister, Aimée Duvernay Bailey, acquired André Cailloux and his parents and brought them all to New Orleans. There André likely learned the cigar-maker’s trade from his half-brothers, Molière and Antoine Duvernay, the freed sons of his mother, Josephine, and her master Joseph Duvernay. After he was manumitted by his mistress in 1846, Cailloux married another recently freed slave, Félicie Coulon, on 22 June 1847. Cailloux adopted Félicie’s son, Jean Louis, and the couple had four more children, three of whom survived into adulthood.

Cailloux and his wife moved into the ranks of the closely-knit New Orleans community of approximately eleven thousand free people of color (gens de couleur libre, Creoles of color, or Afro-Creoles). African or Afro-French/Spanish in ancestry, French in culture and language, and Catholic in religion, free people of color occupied an intermediate legal and social status between whites and slaves within Louisiana’s tripartite racial caste system. Denied political rights, free people of color nevertheless could own property, make contracts, and testify in court. They constituted the most prosperous and literate group of people of African descent in the United States, with a majority earning modest livings as artisans, skilled laborers, and shopkeepers, while a few enjoyed greater wealth. Some free people of color owned slaves, either for economic reasons or as a way of bringing together family members. Although most free people of color were of mixed race, they ran the gamut of phenotypes. Cailloux, for example, bragged of being the blackest man in New Orleans.

By the mid-1850s Cailloux, who had learned to read and write, had become a respectable, independent cigar maker. He resided in a Creole cottage worth about four hundred dollars, and purchased his slave mother, reuniting his family. Cailloux had his children baptized in the Catholic church, and sent his two sons to L’Institution Catholique des Orphelins dans l’Indigence (Institute Catholique), a school run by Afro-Creole intellectuals influenced by the inclusive and egalitarian ethos of the 1848 French Revolution. Cailloux’s peers elected him an officer of Les Amis de l’Ordre (the Friends of Order), one of the numerous mutual aid and benefit societies established by free people of color during the decade. These provided forums in which people of color could exercise leadership and engage in the democratic process.

By the late 1850s, however, the legal, social, and economic position of free people of color had deteriorated, and in 1861, Cailloux sold his cottage at auction. After the Civil War began, free people of color answered the governor’s request that they raise a militia regiment by forming the Defenders of the Native Land, otherwise known as the Louisiana Native Guards Regiment. They did so out of fear of possible reprisals if they failed to respond positively, and in the hope of improving their circumstances. Mutual aid and benefit societies formed themselves into companies for service in the regiment. Cailloux, for instance, assumed the rank of first lieutenant in Order Company. Louisiana officials, however, intended the regiment more for show than for combat.

When Confederate forces abandoned the city of New Orleans to Federal forces in late April 1862, the Louisiana Native Guards disbanded. In August 1862, however, U.S. General Benjamin F. Butler, suffering from a shortage of troops and fearing a Confederate attack on the city, authorized the recruitment of three regiments of free people of color, the first units of people of African descent formally mustered into the Union Army. While the field grade officers were white, the company officers were free people of color.

Cailloux received a commission as captain in the First Regiment. He quickly raised a company of troops, the majority of whom were Catholic free men of color drawn from the city’s Third District, where he worked and attended meetings of Les Amis de l’Ordre. But despite a formal directive that restricted enlistments to free men, Cailloux also welcomed runaway slaves, both French and English speaking. He no doubt shared the hope expressed by Afro-Creole activists in the pages of their newspaper L’Union, that military service would give blacks a claim to citizenship. Gentlemanly, athletic, charismatic, and confident, the thirty-eight-year-old Cailloux cut a dashing figure, belying the stereotype of black servility and inferiority.

Cailloux and the men of the Native Guards, however, faced daunting challenges. They suffered discrimination and abuse at the hands of white civilians, soldiers, and their own national government. In the field, they found themselves consigned primarily to guard duty or to backbreaking manual labor. To make matters worse, General Nathaniel P. Banks, Butler’s successor, determined to purge the Native Guard Regiments of their black officers.

Yearning to prove themselves in combat, Cailloux and two regiments of the Native Guards received their chance on 27 May 1863 at Port Hudson, Louisiana, one of two remaining Confederate strongholds on the Mississippi River. There Cailloux’s company spearheaded an assault by the First and Third Regiments against a nearly impregnable Confederate position. As the Native Guards approached to within about two hundred yards of the entrenched Confederate force, they encountered withering musket and artillery fire and the attacking lines broke. Cailloux and other officers attempted to rally their men several times. Finally, in the midst of the chaos, Cailloux, holding his sword aloft in his right hand while his broken left arm dangled at his side, exhorted his troops to follow him. Advancing well in front, he led a charge. As he reached a backwater obstacle, he was struck and killed by a shell. The remaining Native Guards retreated, as did Union forces all along the battle line that day. Cailloux’s body lay rotting in the broiling sun for forty days until the surrender of Port Hudson on 8 July 1863.

Cailloux’s heroics encouraged those supporting the cause of using black troops in combat. L’Union declared that Cailloux’s patriotism and valor had vindicated blacks of the charge that they lacked manliness. To memorialize Cailloux, Afro-Creole activists orchestrated a public funeral in New Orleans presided over by the Reverend Claude Paschal Maistre, a French priest recently suspended by the archbishop of New Orleans for advocating emancipation and the Union cause. Emboldened by Cailloux’s heroism, blacks, both slave and free, asserted their growing political consciousness. They packed the city’s main streets in unprecedented numbers as the military cortege bearing Cailloux’s casket made its way to St. Louis Cemetery Number 2. Maistre eulogized Cailloux as a martyr to the cause of Union and freedom; northern newspapers gave extensive coverage to his death and funeral; George H. Boker, a popular poet, memorialized Cailloux in his ode, The Black Captain; and Afro-Creole activists in New Orleans elevated him to almost mythic status, invoking his name in their campaign against slavery and on behalf of voting rights.

In October 1864 delegates to the National Negro Convention literally wrapped themselves in Cailloux’s banner. With the First Regiment’s bloodstained flag hanging in a place of honor, numerous speakers invoked Cailloux’s indomitable spirit and heroism and launched a nationwide campaign for black suffrage through the creation of the National Equal Rights League. Both in life and in death, André Cailloux, whose surname means “rocks” or “stones” in French, served to unite and inspire people of color in their struggle for unity, freedom, and equality.

CALIVER, AMBROSE

(25 Feb. 1894–29 Jan. 1962), educator, college administrator, and civil servant, was born in Saltville, Virginia, the youngest child of Ambrose Caliver Sr. Little is known about his parents, but very early in his life he and his two siblings moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they were raised by an aunt, Louisa Bolden. Bolden, a widowed cook who took in boarders to make ends meet, allowed Caliver to accept a job at a very young age. According to one account, the young Caliver was working in a coal mine by the time of his eighth birthday. Early employment, however, did not prevent him from attending school regularly. After receiving an education from Knoxville’s public school system, he enrolled at Knoxville College, where he obtained his BA in 1915. He eventually earned an MA from the University of Wisconsin (1920) and a PhD from Columbia University (1930).

After graduating from Knoxville, Caliver immediately sought employment as an educator. In 1915 he married his childhood sweetheart, Rosalie Rucker, and they both took various teaching jobs, first in Knoxville and then in El Paso, Texas. By 1917 they had returned to Tennessee, where they received faculty positions at Fisk University in Nashville. Caliver’s acceptance of the position at Fisk was significant, because he became one of the few black faculty members hired on campus. Caliver began working at Fisk during one of the most tumultuous points in the university’s history. Under the leadership of Fayette A. McKenzie, Fisk gained the unwarranted reputation of being out of touch with the African American population. Caliver assisted in changing this perception. An ardent believer in the industrial and manual arts, he encouraged Fisk’s students to take woodshop and other courses that would teach them how to work with their hands. Caliver believed that these skills would not only benefit the students financially but also make them assets to the local black community. According to one observer, one of Caliver’s more memorable moments at Fisk was when he drove a bright red wagon that his students had made in his workshop across the platform during a university assembly.

Fisk administrators soon recognized the talent of their young faculty member and quickly gave him other responsibilities. In a continuing effort to strengthen the school’s ties to the local black community, Caliver organized the Tennessee Colored Anti-Tuberculosis Society. Serving four years as the organization’s director and chair of its executive committee, Caliver sought to increase awareness and prevent the spread of the disease among Tennessee’s African American population. His other major administrative appointments at Fisk included a spell as university publicity director in 1925, and as dean of the Scholastic Department the following year. In 1927 Caliver was appointed Fisk’s first African American dean of the university (1927).

Fisk only briefly enjoyed Caliver’s services as dean. Two years after his appointment, he took a one-year leave from his duties to complete the requirements for his doctorate at Columbia University. Caliver never returned to his position at Fisk. Shortly before his graduation, he received two job offers—one for a faculty position at Howard University and, shortly afterward, another for a position at the U.S. Office of Education. In 1930 he accepted the latter job and became the Office of Education’s Specialist in Negro Education. It was in this post that Caliver made what is arguably his most lasting contribution to African American education.

During his tenure in the U.S. Office of Education, Caliver participated in numerous studies and published several articles and monographs dealing with the status of African American education. These works included the pamphlets Bibliography on the Education of the Negro (1931), Background Study of Negro College Students (1933), and Rural Elementary Education among Negro Jeanes Supervisors (1933). Some of his monographs during this period were The Education of Negro Teachers in the United States (1933), Secondary Education for Negroes (1933), and the Availability of Education to Negroes in Rural Communities (1935). Caliver was also instrumental in creating the National Advisory Committee of the Education of Negroes. This group, consisting of many leading educators from across the United States, sought to discuss the problems and develop programs to enhance black education. Hoping to benefit the greatest number of African Americans, the organization tended to focus on issues in secondary schools, such as poor facilities and inadequate materials, rather than on inadequacies in African American institutions of higher learning.

The study of secondary schools undoubtedly contributed to what Caliver saw as the greatest problem facing black education: adult illiteracy. According to some estimates, approximately one quarter of the 12.6 million African Americans were illiterate. Caliver was determined to place this issue in the national spotlight. To accomplish this, he reached out to prominent African American organizations and leaders and encouraged them to take a more active role. Caliver also called for the preparation of instructional materials, the creation of teacher-training workshops, and the development of adult-education programs at historically black colleges and universities. He oversaw the creation of several readers to increase literacy. These readers, “A Day with the Brown Family,” “Making a Good Living,” and “The Browns Go to School.” not only increased literacy skills but also emphasized family living, thrift, and leisure activities.

In addition to his contributions to adult education, Caliver also succeeded in utilizing radio as a tool for education and instilling racial pride. In 1941, with funding from such philanthropic groups as the Julius Rosenwald Fund, he created Freedom’s People, a nine-part series examining African American life, history, and culture. From September 1941 through April 1942, the National Broadcasting Company broadcast the program, one of the first of its kind devoted exclusively to African Americans. Freedom’s People taught its listeners not only about famous black historical figures but also about the contributions of blacks in the areas of science, music, and industry. The program featured guest appearances by some of the most prominent African Americans of the day including JOE LOUIS, A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, and PAUL ROBESON.

For the next two decades Caliver’s efforts in adult education and literacy increased. From 1946 to 1950, he directed the Office of Education’s Literacy Education Project, and in 1950 he became the assistant to the commissioner of education. By 1955 Caliver was the chief of the Office of Education’s Adult Education Section. This new appointment, along with his election as the president of the Adult Education Association of the United States six years later, contributed to his reputation as one of the most ardent crusaders against illiteracy in the federal government. Ambrose Caliver died in January 1962, still working as diligently as he had in his youth. At the time of his death he was moving forward with plans to expand and increase the services of the Adult Education Association of the United States.

CALLOWAY, CAB

(25 Dec. 1907–18 Nov. 1994), popular singer and bandleader, was born Cabell Calloway III in Rochester, New York, the third of six children of Cabell Calloway Jr., a lawyer, and Martha Eulalia Reed, a public school teacher. In 1920, two years after the family moved to the Calloways’ hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, Cab’s father died. Eulalia later remarried and had two children with John Nelson Fortune, an insurance salesman who became known to the Calloway children as “Papa Jack.”

Although he later enjoyed a warm relationship with his stepfather, the teenaged Cab had a rebellious streak that tried the patience of parents attempting to maintain their status as respectable Baltimoreans. He often skipped school to go to the nearby Pimlico racetrack, where he both earned money selling newspapers and shining shoes and began a lifelong passion for horse racing. After his mother caught him playing dice on the steps of the Presbyterian church, however, he was sent in 1921 to Downingtown Industrial and Agricultural School, a reform school run by his mother’s uncle in Pennsylvania. When he returned to Baltimore the following year, Calloway recalls that he resumed hustling but also worked as a caterer, and that he studied harder than he had before and excelled at both baseball and basketball at the city’s Frederick Douglass High School. Most significantly, he resumed the voice lessons he had begun before reform school, and he began to sing both in the church choir and at several speakeasies, where he performed with Johnny Jones’s Arabian Tent Orchestra, a New Orleans-style Dixieland band. In his senior year in high school, Calloway played for the Baltimore Athenians professional basketball team, and in January 1927 he and Zelma Proctor, a fellow student, had a daughter, whom they named Camay.

Cab Calloway, propelled to stardom with his exuberant “Minnie the Moocher,” was photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933. Library of Congress

In the summer after graduating from high school, Calloway joined his sister Blanche, a star in the popular Plantation Days revue, on her company’s mid-western tour, and, by his own account, “went as wild as a March hare,” chasing “all the broads in the show” (Calloway, 54). When the tour ended in Chicago, Illinois, he stayed and attended Crane College (now Malcolm X University). While at Crane he turned down an offer to play for the Harlem Globetrotters, not, as his mother had hoped, to pursue a law career, but instead to become a professional singer. He worked nights and weekends at the Dreamland Café and then won a spot as a drummer and house singer at the Sunset Club, the most popular jazz venue on Chicago’s predominantly African American South Side. There he befriended LOUIS ARMSTRONG, then playing with the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra, who greatly influenced Calloway’s use of “scat,” an improvisational singing style that uses nonsense syllables rather than words.

When the Dickerson Orchestra ended its engagement at the Sunset in 1928, Calloway served as the club’s master of ceremonies and, one year later, as the leader of the new house band, the Alabamians. His position as the self-described “dashing, handsome, popular, talented M.C. at one of the hippest clubs on the South Side” (Calloway, 61) did little to help his already fitful attendance at Crane, but it introduced him to many beautiful, glamorous, and rich women. He married one of the wealthiest of them, Wenonah “Betty” Conacher, in July 1928. Although he later described the marriage as a mistake, at the time he greatly enjoyed the “damned comfortable life” that came with his fame, her money, and the small house that they shared with a South Side madam.

In the fall of 1929 Calloway and the Alabamians embarked on a tour that brought them to the mecca for jazz bands of that era, Harlem in New York City. In November, however, a few weeks after the stock market crash downtown on Wall Street, the Alabamians also crashed uptown in their one chance for a breakout success, a battle of the bands at the famous Savoy Ballroom. The hard-to-please Savoy regulars found the Alabamians’ old-time Dixieland passé and voted overwhelmingly for the stomping, more danceable music of their rivals, the Missourians. The Savoy audience did, however, vote for Calloway as the better bandleader, a tribute to his charismatic stage presence and the dapper style in which he outfitted the Alabamians.

Four months later, following a spell on Broadway and on tour with the pianist FATS WALLER in the successful Connie’s Hot Chocolate revue, he returned to the Savoy as the new leader of the Missourians, renamed Cab Calloway and His Orchestra. In 1931 the band began alternating with DUKE ELLINGTON’s orchestra as the house band at Harlem’s Cotton Club, owned by the gangster Owney Madden and infamous for its white-audiences-only policy. Calloway also began a recording career. Several of his first efforts for Brunswick Records, notably “Reefer Man” and “Kicking the Gong Around,” the latter about characters in an opium den, helped fuel his reputation as a jive-talking hipster who knew his way around the less salubrious parts of Manhattan. Although he denied firsthand experience of illicit drugs, Calloway did admit to certain vices—fast cars, expensive clothes, “gambling, drinking, partying [and] balling all through the night, all over the country” (Calloway, 184).

It was 1931’s “Minnie the Moocher,” with its scat-driven, call-and-response chorus, that became Calloway’s signature tune and propelled him to stardom. The most prosaic version of the chorus had Cab calling out, “Hi-de-hi-de-hi-di-hi, Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-ho” or, when the mood took him, “Oodlee-odlyee-odlyee-oodle-doo” or “Dwaa-de-dwaa-de-dwaa-de-doo,” while his orchestra—and later the audience—responded with the same phrase. Calloway recalled in his autobiography that the song came first and the chorus was later improvised when he forgot the lyrics during a radio broadcast. The song’s appeal was broadened in 1932 by its appearance in the movie The Big Broadcast and in a Betty Boop cartoon short, Minnie the Moocher. Radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club and appearances on radio with Bing Crosby made Calloway one of the wealthiest entertainers during the Depression era. The Calloway Orchestra embarked on several highly successful national tours and in 1935 became one of the first major black jazz bands to tour Europe.

Although the Calloway Orchestra was arguably the most popular jazz band of the 1930s and 1940s, most jazz critics view the bands of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and COUNT BASIE as more musically sophisticated. ALBERT L. MURRAY’s influential Stomping the Blues (1976) does not even mention Calloway, although it does list several members of his orchestra, including the tenor saxophonist Chu Berry and the trumpeter DIZZY GILLESPIE, who joined the band in 1939 and left two years later, after he stabbed Calloway in the backside during a fight. With the drummer Cozy Cole and the vibraphonist Tyree Glenn, the Calloway Orchestra showcased its rhythmic virtuosity in several instrumentals, including the sprightly “Bye Bye Blues” and the sensual “A Ghost of a Chance,” both recorded in 1940.

It was, however, Calloway’s exuberant personality, his cutting-edge dress style—he was a pioneer of the zoot suit—and his great rapport with his audiences that packed concert halls for nearly two decades. In the 1940s he was ubiquitous, appearing on recordings, radio broadcasts of his concerts, and in movies such as Stormy Weather (1943), in which he starred with LENA HORNE, BILL “BOJANGLES” ROBINSON, KATHERINE DUNHAM, and FATS WALLER. In 1942, he hosted a satirical network radio quiz show, “The Cab Calloway Quizzicale.” Calloway even changed the way Americans speak, with the publication of Professor Cab Calloway’s Swingformation Bureau and The New Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive (1944), which became the official jive language reference book of the New York Public Library. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Calloway’s song “Jitter Bug” as the first published use of that term.

The end of World War II marked dramatic changes in Calloway’s professional and personal lives. In 1948 the public preference for small combos and the bebop style of jazz, pioneered by Gillespie, among others, forced Calloway to break up his swing-style big band. One year later Calloway divorced Betty Conacher, with whom he had adopted a daughter, Constance, in the late 1930s, and married Zulme “Nuffie” McNeill, with whom he would have three daughters, Chris, Lael, and Cabella. His career revived, however, in 1950, when he landed the role of Sportin’ Life in the revival of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess on Broadway and in London and Paris. The casting was inspired, since Gershwin had modeled the character of Sportin’ Life on Calloway in his “Hi-de-hi” heyday. From 1967 to 1970 he starred with PEARL BAILEY in an all-black Broadway production of Hello Dollyl, and in 1980 he endeared himself to a new generation of fans, with his performance of “Minnie the Moocher,” in the film The Blues Brothers, with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. That role led to appearances on the television shows The Love Boat and Sesame Street and on Janet Jackson’s music video “Alright,” which won the 1990 Soul Train award for best rhythm and blues/urban contemporary music video.

In June 1994 Calloway suffered a stroke at his home in White Plains, New York, and died five months later at a nursing home in Hockessin, Delaware. President Bill Clinton, who had awarded Calloway the National Medal of the Arts a year earlier, paid tribute to him as a “true legend among the musicians of this century, delighting generations of audiences with his boundless energy and talent” (New York Times, 30 Nov. 1994). Calloway, however, probably put it best when he described himself in his autobiography as, “the hardest jack with the greatest jive in the joint.”

CALLOWAY, ERNEST

(1 Jan. 1909–31 Dec. 1989), labor activist, journalist, and educator, was born in Heberton, West Virginia, the son of Ernest Calloway Sr.; his mother’s name is unknown. The family moved to the coalfields of Letcher County, Kentucky, in 1913, where Calloway’s father, “Big Ernest,” helped organize the county’s first local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America. The Calloways were one of the first black families in the coal-mining communities of eastern Kentucky, and Ernest was, by his own description, “one of those unique persons . . . a black hillbilly.” Calloway attended high school in Lynchburg, Virginia, but ran away to New York in 1925 and arrived in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. He worked as a dishwasher in Harlem until his mother fell ill, when he returned to Kentucky at age seventeen and worked in the mines of the Consolidated Coal Company until 1930. During the early 1930s he traveled as a drifter around the United States and Mexico.

Calloway came to the end of his resources at a tent colony near the small town of Ensenada in the Baja Mountains of Mexico in 1933. There he had a frightening hallucinatory experience that changed his life. “Damnedest experience that whole night,” he later recounted to an interviewer. “I think this was the first time that, the morning after getting out of those mountains and that frightening experience, the first time that I really began thinking about myself and about people and what makes the world tick.” He returned to the coal mines of Kentucky determined to move beyond a drifter’s existence.

Inspired by his strange experience in the mountains, Calloway submitted an article on marijuana use to Opportunity, the magazine of the National Urban League, in 1933. Opportunity rejected it, and, sadly, a copy of it did not survive. The magazine did ask him to write another article, however, on the working conditions of blacks in the Kentucky coalfields. He submitted the second article, “The Negro in the Kentucky Coal Fields,” which appeared in March 1934. This article resulted in a scholarship for Calloway to Brookwood Labor College in New York, a training facility for labor organizers founded by the pacifists Helen and Henry Fink and headed by A. J. Muste. Moreover, the article began Calloway’s long involvement with labor issues.

From 1935 to 1936 Calloway worked in Virginia and helped organize the Virginia Workers’ Alliance, a union of unemployed Works Progress Administration workers. He helped organize a conference in 1936 to ally the labor movement with the unemployed—groups organized by socialists, communists, Trotskyists, and unemployment councils. After turning down an offer to recruit African Americans into a front group for the U.S. State Department and its intelligence services, Calloway moved to Chicago in 1937. There he helped organize the Red Caps, as railway station porters were known, and other railroad employees into the United Transport Employees Union. He also helped write the resolution creating the 1942 Committee against Discrimination in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). When the first peacetime draft law came into effect in 1939, Calloway was among the first African Americans to refuse military service as a protest against race discrimination. Although the case received national publicity, it was never officially settled, and Calloway never served in the Jim Crow U.S. Army.

Calloway’s career in news journalism began when he joined the National CIO News editorial staff in 1944. Two years later he married DeVerne Lee, a teacher who had led a protest against racial segregation in the Red Cross in India during World War II. DeVerne Calloway later served as the first black woman elected to the state legislature in Missouri. She did much to increase state aid to public education, improve welfare grants, and reform the prison system in the state.

In 1947 Calloway received a scholarship from the British Trade Union Congress to attend Ruskin College in Oxford, England, where he spent a year. He then returned to the United States and began working with Operation Dixie, the CIO’s southern organizing drive in North Carolina. Because of a dispute over organizing tactics in an attempt to unionize workers at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, Calloway left the CIO in 1950 and returned to Chicago. Harold Gibbons of the St. Louis Teamsters union enlisted him to establish a research department for Teamsters Local 688 in St. Louis, which was at that time one of the most racially progressive union locals in the nation.

In the 1950s Calloway played a pivotal role in civil rights and labor activism in St. Louis. In 1951, three years prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Calloway advised Local 688 on a plan to integrate the St. Louis public schools; the St. Louis Board of Education rejected the Teamsters proposals. The St. Louis branch of the NAACP elected Calloway president in 1955. Within the first two years of his presidency, membership grew from two thousand to eight thousand members. He led successful efforts to gain substantial increases in the number of blacks employed by St. Louis taxi services, department stores, the Coca-Cola Company, and Southwestern Bell. Under his leadership, the group helped defeat a proposed city charter in 1957 that did not include support for civil rights.

Calloway’s political involvement included serving in 1959 as campaign director for the Reverend John J. Hicks, who became the first black elected to the St. Louis Board of Education. Calloway also directed Theodore McNeal’s 1960 senatorial campaign. McNeal won by a large margin, becoming the first black elected to the Missouri Senate. In 1961 Calloway worked as the technical adviser for James Hurt Jr. in his successful campaign as the second black to be elected to the St. Louis school board. He also helped his wife, DeVerne, win her historic spot in the Missouri legislature in her first bid for public office.

In 1961 the couple began publishing Citizen Crusader, later named New Citizen, a newspaper covering black politics and civil rights in St. Louis. It provided Calloway with a larger platform for his writing than anything had previously. During this period he developed a passion for explaining in numbers and tables the arithmetic of African American political power in St. Louis. The newspaper lasted until November 1963, but even after it stopped publishing, the Calloways continued to produce newspapers, including one entitled Truth, in support of their political allies. As a testament to the effectiveness of these papers, in 1964 supporters of Barry Goldwater published their own version of Truth, complete with an identical masthead, solely to take a stand against a local Democratic Party candidate endorsed by the Calloways’ Truth.

Calloway worked with the Committee on Fair Representation in 1967 to develop a new plan for congressional district reapportionment. Supported by black representatives in the Missouri legislature and a coalition of white Republicans and Democrats, the plan created a First Congressional District more compatible with black interests. In 1968 Calloway filed as a candidate for U.S. Congress in the new district but was defeated in the Democratic primary by William Clay, who became the first black elected to the U.S. Congress from Missouri.

In 1969 Calloway lectured part-time for St. Louis University’s Center for Urban Programs. He became an assistant professor when he retired as research director for the Teamsters in June 1973 and, later, Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies at St. Louis University. From his modest roots, Calloway pursued a multifaceted life, all the while creating a record of thoughtful reflections on public events and history over a lifetime of change. He suffered a disabling stroke in 1982 and died after a series of additional strokes. His name is still spoken with reverence in his hometown and among people familiar with his work.

CANNON, GEORGE DOWS

(16 Oct. 1902–31 Aug. 1986), physician and political activist, was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of George E. Cannon and Genevieve Wilkinson. His father was a prominent and politically connected physician who graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and the New York Homeopathic Medical College. His mother, a teacher, was descended from a leading Washington, D.C., family that was free before the Civil War. Cannon and his sister, Gladys, grew up in an eighteen-room red brick house on a main Jersey City thoroughfare where their parents regularly received a retinue of prestigious visitors, including BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, numerous doctors from the all-black National Medical Association, and several Republican Party officeholders. Cannon greatly admired his father and emulated his professional and political involvements.

At his father’s alma mater, Lincoln University, a Presbyterian institution, Cannon performed acceptably but without academic distinction. He scored well enough in his premedical courses, however, to be eligible for medical school upon graduation from Lincoln in 1924. Cannon gained admission to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons through the intervention of his father, who knew the president of the university. Despite enduring racially prejudiced professors, Cannon completed his freshman year with passing grades on all of his exams. His father’s accidental death in April 1925 kept him from classes for a short time. Although Cannon fulfilled all of his class and laboratory assignments, his brief absence became a pretext for the dean to fail him in all of his courses. Cannon believed that racial prejudice and the manner of his admission had stirred a dislike for him. Because the Howard and Meharry medical schools would not admit him during the following fall, he entered Howard’s graduate school to study for a master’s degree in Zoology with the famed ERNEST EVERETT JUST. Impressed with Cannon’s proficiency and saddened by his sorrowful experience at Columbia, Just recommended him to Rush Medical College in Chicago. Though the staff at Rush was less racist than that at Columbia, Cannon and the other black student, LEONIDAS BERRY, were told that each had been admitted so that the other one would not be lonely. Nonetheless, Cannon excelled in his work and made up for the lost time resulting from his ouster at Columbia. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis, however, during the final month before graduation. Treatment at a sanatorium in Chicago for nearly two years preceded his reentry to Rush. He earned the MD degree on 18 December 1934 after an internship at Chicago’s all-black Provident Hospital. Continued health problems put Cannon into the Waverly Hills Hospital, a Louisville, Kentucky, sanatorium from 1934 through 1936, where he received treatment and pursued a medical residency. In the meantime, he had married his college sweetheart, Lillian Mosely, on 25 December 1931. The uncertainties surrounding his health compelled the couple to forgo parenthood, and they never had children.

Despite Cannon’s fragile health, he vigorously developed as a leading New York City physician. He did not want to be bound to Harlem Hospital for staff privileges, so he tried throughout the late 1930s and 1940s for admittance to other hospitals. He was accepted on the staff of the Hospital for Joint Diseases in 1944. At the Triboro Tuberculosis Hospital, a racist physician, who opposed his appointment, eventually died and thus cleared the way for Cannon’s appointment in 1947. He also gained privileges to treat and admit patients at the hospital for the Daughters of Israel. Cannon still encountered racist roadblocks at other facilities. He targeted hospitals with religious affiliations to admit black physicians to their staffs. Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian hospitals rebuffed him. In the latter case, his membership at St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem did not matter. At Lutheran Hospital a sympathetic white colleague made Cannon his substitute in the x-ray department, but hospital authorities overruled him. Jewish hospitals were more receptive. Mt. Sinai Hospital initially brought in Cannon as an assistant adjunct radiologist. Over time his radiology training at Triboro and his success at Mt. Sinai earned Cannon the respect he deserved among his black and white peers.

Cannon engaged in other struggles for black professionals and patients. He belonged to the integrated Physicians Forum, an alternative organization to the racially restrictive county medical societies and their parent group, the American Medical Association (AMA). Forum doctors focused on health care for the disadvantaged and fought racism in medical institutions. In Harlem he joined the Upper Manhattan Medical Group, a branch of the Health Insurance Plan of the City of New York, which rendered services through a prepaid health delivery system. Through the Physicians Forum, Cannon challenged the fee-for-service payment practice that most AMA doctors preferred. The improvement of conditions at Harlem Hospital also drew Cannon’s attention. As president of the all-black Manhattan Central Medical Society and chairman of its Subcommittee on Health and Hospitals, Cannon exerted pressure upon city officials, who then corrected the lack of x-ray equipment, the absence of psychiatric services, and the inadequate number of surgeons to perform tonsillectomies. They also pressed city officials to open to blacks all municipal nursing schools beyond the two at Harlem and Lincoln hospitals.

Though a maverick Democrat, Cannon did not hesitate to form coalitions with radicals, including communists. As chair of the Non-Partisan Citizens’ Committee in 1943 and 1945, he backed the successful candidacy of BENJAMIN JEFFERSON DAVIS JR., a Communist, as Harlem’s representative to City Council. Cannon himself was asked to run for city council and the state senate, both positions that he could have easily won. Whenever his party seemed too passive on civil rights matters, he supported candidates from other political groups. In 1948, for example, Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate, in Cannon’s opinion, was a stronger advocate for civil rights than either Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican, or President Harry Truman, the Democrat. Hence, Cannon became the Chairman of the Harlem Wallace-for-President Committee. Cannon held that it was possible to work with communists and Progressives on matters of race. Though he eschewed radical ideologies, Cannon’s involvement with the Physicians Forum and its efforts for government-guaranteed health care and his political cooperation with radicals suggested to zealous anticommunists that Cannon’s political sympathies were suspect. He was an enemy of Russia, he often said. Nonetheless, anyone who wished to work with him on black advancement was always a welcome ally.

Cannon’s affiliations with the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) complemented his political activism. He served as the chairman of the life membership campaign for the New York state NAACP, and between 1956 and 1966 he held the same position for the national organization. At a dinner that he attended with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, Cannon planned to challenge the future president to buy an NAACP life membership. Before Cannon could successfully press his point, a black Nixon supporter said that the vice president should not pursue this symbolic action. Cannon, however, never forgot Nixon’s affront to the NAACP. In 1962 Cannon became the secretary of the LDF, a position he held until 1984. Hence, during the height of the civil rights movement, he sided with the integrationist thrust of the NAACP and the LDF. The Black Power movement never drew support from Cannon.

His social and political activism extended to higher education. In 1947 Cannon became an alumni trustee of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and later chairman of the board of trustees. His Lincoln classmate HORACE MANN BOND had become in 1946 the first black president of the university, and each believed that Lincoln could become a model for racially integrated higher education. Though Cannon did not share Bond’s intense zeal for African studies and forging stronger connections with emerging African nations, both understood that training leaders in various professions for both sides of the Atlantic was a crucial mission for their institution. Cannon developed positions on the role of faculty, continuation of the theological seminary, the need for greater alumni support, and the necessity of confronting the hostility of whites in neighboring Oxford, Pennsylvania. Cannon’s frequent and detailed correspondence with Bond and his several successors showed a deep involvement in the affairs of Lincoln University that lasted through the 1980s. When Lincoln became the principal trustee of the Barnes Foundation, a repository of priceless modern art in suburban Philadelphia, Cannon delved into another area of educational and cultural affairs that further distinguished his alma mater.

When Cannon died in 1986, his Rush classmate Leonidas H. Berry eulogized Cannon and observed that his fragile health gave him a special empathy for his patients and motivated his extensive efforts for the uplift of African Americans. He lived to be an octogenarian despite diagnoses that belied the possibility for such a long and consequential career.

CARDOZO, FRANCIS LOUIS

(1 Feb. 1837–22 July 1903), minister, educator, and politician, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of a free black woman (name unknown) and a Jewish father. It is uncertain whether Cardozo’s father was Jacob N. Cardozo, the prominent economist and editor of an anti-nullification newspaper in Charleston during the 1830s, or his lesser-known brother, Isaac Cardozo, a weigher in the city’s customhouse. Born free at a time when slavery dominated southern life, Cardozo enjoyed a childhood of relative privilege among Charleston’s antebellum free black community. Between the ages of five and twelve he attended a school for free blacks, then he spent five years as a carpenter’s apprentice and four more as a journeyman. In 1858 Cardozo used his savings to travel to Scotland, where he studied at the University of Glasgow, graduating with distinction in 1861. As the Civil War erupted at home, he remained in Europe to study at the London School of Theology and at a Presbyterian seminary in Edinburgh.

In 1864 Cardozo returned to the United States to become pastor of the Temple Street Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut. That year he married Catherine Rowena Howell; they had six children, one of whom died in infancy. During his brief stay in the North, Cardozo became active in politics. In October 1864 he was among 145 black leaders who attended a national black convention in Syracuse, New York, that reflected the contagion of rising expectations inspired by the Civil War and emancipation.

Francis L. Cardozo became the first black state official in South Carolina during Reconstruction. Library of Congress

In June 1865 Cardozo became an agent of the American Missionary Association (AMA) and almost immediately returned to his native South Carolina. His brother Thomas Cardozo, the AMA’s education director, was accused of having an affair with a student in New York, and Francis Cardozo replaced him while also assuming the directorship of the Saxton School in Charleston. Within months the school was flourishing under his leadership, with more than one thousand black students and twenty-one teachers. In 1866 Cardozo helped to found the Avery Normal Institute and became its first superintendent.

Unlike many South Carolinians of mixed race, Cardozo made no distinction between educating blacks who were born free and former slaves, nor did he draw conclusions, then common, about intellectual capacity based on skin color gradations. Instead, he was committed to universal education regardless of “race, color or previous condition,” a devotion he considered “the object for which I left all the superior advantages and privileges of the North and came South, it is the object for which I have labored during the past year, and for which I am willing to remain here and make this place my home.”

Despite the fact that he claimed to possess “no desire for the turbulent political scene,” Cardozo soon found himself in the middle of Reconstruction politics. In 1865 he attended the state black convention in Charleston, where he helped draft a petition to the state legislature demanding stronger civil rights provisions. In 1868, following the passage of the Reconstruction Acts by Congress, he was elected as a delegate to the South Carolina constitutional convention. From the onset he was frank about his intentions, “As colored men we have been cheated out of our rights for two centuries and now that we have the opportunity I want to fix them in the Constitution in such a way that no lawyer, however cunning, can possibly misinterpret the meaning.”

Cardozo wielded considerable influence at the convention. As chair of the Education Committee, he was instrumental in drafting a plan, which was later ratified, to establish a tax-supported system of compulsory, integrated public education, the first of its kind in the South. Despite his support for integration, however, he also understood the logic articulated by black teachers of maintaining support for separate schools for blacks who wanted to avoid the hostility and violence that often accompanied integration. Consistently egalitarian, he opposed poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of what he called “class legislation.” Moreover, he fought proposals to suspend the collection of wartime debts, which he thought would only halt the destruction of “the infernal plantation system,” a process he deemed central to Reconstruction’s success. In fact, Cardozo argued, “We will never have true freedom until we abolish the system of agriculture which existed in the Southern States. It is useless to have any schools while we maintain the stronghold of slavery as the agricultural system of the country.” Thus, he called for a tripartite approach to enfranchisement: universal access to political participation and power, comprehensive public education, and reform initiatives that guaranteed equal opportunity for land ownership and economic independence.

After the convention, Cardozo’s career accelerated. A “handsome man, almost white in color . . . with . . . tall, portly, well-groomed figure and elaborately urbane manners” (Simkins and Woody), Cardozo played a central role in the real efforts to reconstruct American society along more democratic lines. In 1868 he declined the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in the wake of white claims of Reconstruction “black supremacy.” Later that year he was elected secretary of state, making him the first black state official in South Carolina history, and he retained that position until 1872. In 1869 Cardozo was a delegate to the South Carolina labor convention and then briefly served as secretary of the advisory board of the state land commission, an agency created to redistribute confiscated land to freedmen and poor whites. In this capacity, he helped to reorganize its operations after a period of severe mismanagement and corruption. As secretary of state, he was given full responsibility for overseeing the land commission. In 1872 he successfully advocated for the immediate redistribution of land to settlers and produced the first comprehensive report on the agency’s financial activities. By the fall of 1872, owing in large part to Cardozo’s efforts, over 5,000 families—3,000 more than in 1871—had settled on tracts of land provided by the commission, one of the more radical achievements of the Reconstruction era.

In 1870, the same year that the federal census estimated his net worth at an impressive eight thousand dollars, Cardozo was elected president of the Grand Council of Union Leagues, an organization that worked to ensure Republican victories throughout the state. His civic activities included serving as president of the Greenville and Columbia Railroad, a charter member of the Columbia Street Railway Company, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina. Some sources report that he enrolled in the university’s law school in October 1874; however, no evidence exists that he ever received a degree.

From 1871 to 1872 Cardozo was professor of Latin in Washington, D.C., at Howard University, where he was considered for the presidency in 1877. In 1872 and 1874 he was elected state treasurer, vowing to restore South Carolina’s credit. During his first term as treasurer he oversaw the allocation of more money than had been spent “for the education of the common people by the government of South Carolina from the Declaration of Independence to 1868, a period of ninety-two years” (Cardozo, The Finances of the State of South Carolina [1873], 11–12). In the words of one conservative newspaper editor, Cardozo was the “most respectable and honest of all the state officials.” Despite his longstanding reputation for scrupulous financial management, he was accused in 1875 of “misconduct and irregularity in office” for allegedly mishandling state bonds. Though he claimed reelection as treasurer in 1876, he officially resigned from the office on 11 April 1877. Subsequently tried and convicted for fraud by the Court of General Sessions for Richland County in November 1877, Cardozo was eventually pardoned by Democratic governor Wade Hampton before his sentence, two years in prison and a fine of four thousand dollars, was commuted.

Following the ascendancy of the new Democratic government and the final abandonment of Radical Reconstruction in 1877, Cardozo moved in 1878 to Washington, D.C., and secured a clerkship in the Treasury Department, which he held from 1878 to 1884. Returning to education in the last decades of his life, he served as principal of the Colored Preparatory High School from 1884 to 1891 and from 1891 to 1896 as principal of the M Street High School, where he instituted a comprehensive business curriculum. A prominent member of Washington’s elite black community until his death there, Cardozo was so revered by his peers, black and white, that a business high school opened in 1928 was named in his honor.

CARMICHAEL, STOKELY

(29 June 1941–15 Nov. 1998), civil rights leader, later known as Kwame Ture, was born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, British West Indies, the son of Adolphus Carmichael, a carpenter, and Mabel (also listed as May) Charles Carmichael, a steamship line stewardess and domestic worker. When he was two, his parents immigrated to the United States with two of their daughters. He was raised by two aunts and a grandmother and attended British schools in Trinidad, where he was exposed to a colonial view of race that he was later to recall with anger. He followed his parents to Harlem at the age of eleven and the next year moved with them to a relatively prosperous neighborhood in the Bronx, where he became the only African American member of the Morris Park Dukes, a neighborhood gang. But although he participated in the street life of the gang, he had more serious interests. “They were reading funnies,” he recalled in an interview in 1967, “while I was trying to dig Darwin and Marx” (quoted in Parks, 80). A good student, he was accepted in the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. When he graduated in 1960 he was offered scholarships to several white universities, but a growing awareness of racial injustice led him to enroll in predominantly black Howard University in Washington, D.C. Impressed by the television coverage of the protesters at segregated lunch counters in the South, he had already begun to picket in New York City with members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) before he entered college in the fall of 1960.

Carmichael became an activist while still in his first year at Howard, where he majored in philosophy. He answered an ad in the newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student desegregation and civil rights group, and joined the first of the interracial bus trips known as Freedom Rides organized in 1961 by CORE to challenge segregated public transportation in the South. He was arrested for the first time when the bus reached Mississippi. He was jailed frequently in subsequent Freedom Rides, once serving a forty-nine-day term in Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary.

After graduating in 1964, Carmichael joined SNCC full time and began organizing middle-class volunteers of both races to travel into the South to teach rural blacks and help them register to vote. From his headquarters in Lowndes County, Mississippi, he was credited with increasing the number of black voters of that county from 70 to 2,600. Lacking the support of either the Republican or the Democratic Party, he created the all-black Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which took as its logo a fierce black panther. Growing impatient with the willingness of black leaders to compromise, he led his organization to shift its goal from integration to black liberation. In May 1966 he was named chairman of SNCC.

In June of that year, after JAMES MEREDITH’s “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson had been stopped when Meredith was shot, Carmichael was among those who continued the march. On his first day, he announced his militant stand: “The Negro is going to take what he deserves from the white man” (Sitkoff, 213). Carmichael was arrested for trespass when they set up camp in Greenwood, Mississippi, and after posting bond on 16 June he rejoined the protesters and made the speech that established him as one of the nation’s most articulate spokesmen for black militancy. Employing working-class Harlem speech (he was equally fluent in formal academic English), he shouted from the back of a truck, “This is the 27th time I’ve been arrested, and I ain’t going to jail no more. The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothing. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!” (Oates, 400). The crowd took up the refrain, chanting the slogan over and over.

The term “Black Power” was not new with Carmichael—RICHARD WRIGHT had used it in reference to the anticolonialist movement in Africa, and ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. had used it in Harlem—but it created a sensation that day in Mississippi, and Carmichael instructed his staff that it was to be SNCC’s war cry for the rest of the march. The national press reported it widely as a threat of race war and an expression of separatism and “reverse racism.” ROY WILKINS, leader of the NAACP, condemned it as divisive, and MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. pleaded with Carmichael to abandon the slogan. But although King persuaded SNCC to drop the use of “Black Power” for the remainder of the march, the phrase swept the country. Carmichael always denied that the call for black power was a call to arms. “The goal of black self-determination and black self-identity—Black Power—is full participation in the decision-making processes affecting the lives of black people and the recognition of the virtues in themselves as black people,” he wrote in his 1967 book, written with Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (47).

In August 1967 Carmichael left SNCC and accepted the post of prime minister of a black militant group formed by HUEY P. NEWTON and BOBBY SEALE in 1966, the Black Panther Party, which took its name from the symbol Carmichael had used in Mississippi. As its spokesman he called for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the NAACP, and the Nation of Islam to work together for black equality. That year he traveled to Hanoi to address the North Vietnamese National Assembly and assure them of the solidarity of American blacks with the Vietnamese against American imperialism. In 1968 he married the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba; the couple had one child.

Carmichael remained with the Black Panthers for little more than a year, resigning because of the organization’s refusal to disavow the participation of white radicals, and in 1969 left America for Africa, where he made his home in Conakry, capital of the People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. By then completely devoted to the cause of socialist world revolution emanating from a unified Africa, he became affiliated with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, a Marxist political party founded by Kwame Nkrumah, the exiled leader of Ghana then living in Guinea as a guest of its president Sekou Touré. Carmichael changed his name, in honor of his two heroes, to Kwame Ture, and toured U.S. colleges for several weeks each year speaking on behalf of the party and its mission of unifying the nations of Africa. Divorced in 1978, he married Guinean physician Marlyatou Barry; the couple had one son. His second marriage also ended in divorce.

During the 1980s Ture’s message of Pan-Africanism inspired little interest in the United States, and the attendance at his public appearances fell off. As Washington Post reporter Paula Span noted shortly before his death, “Back in the United States, there were those who felt Ture had marginalized himself, left the battlefield. His influence waned with his diminished visibility, and with the cultural and political changes in the country he’d left behind.” He also came under criticism for anti-Semitism because of his persistent attacks on Zionism. A collection of fourteen of his speeches and essays published in 1971, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism, included such inflammatory assertions as “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist,” and was attacked in the press. The bulletin of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith criticized his campus addresses, calling him “a disturbing, polarizing figure” who caused hostility between blacks and Jews.

In 1986, two years after the death of his patron Sekou Touré, Ture was arrested by the new military government on charges of subversive activity, but he was released three days later. Despite the continued fragmentation of Africa and the diminished influence of Marxism, he never lost his faith in the ultimate victory of the socialist revolution and the fall of American capitalism. To the last he always answered his telephone “Ready for the revolution,” a greeting he had used since the 1960s. In 1996 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, with which he believed he had been deliberately infected by the FBI. Despite radiation treatment in Cuba and at New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center during his last year, he died of that disease in Conakry.

Kwame Ture left a mixed legacy. His provocative rhetoric was widely opposed by black leadership: Martin Luther King Jr. decried his famous slogan as “an unfortunate choice of words,” and Roy Wilkins condemned his militant position as “the raging of race against race.” But Ture’s childhood friend Darcus Howe wrote of him in a column in The New Statesman (27 Nov. 1998), “He will be remembered by many as the figure who brought hundreds of thousands of us out of ignorance and illiteracy into the light of morning.”

CARSON, BEN

(18 Sept. 1951–), pediatric neurosurgeon, was born Benjamin Solomon Carson in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Robert Carson, a minister of a small Seventh-Day Adventist church, and Sonya Carson. His mother had attended school only up to the third grade and married at the age of thirteen; she was fifteen years younger than her husband. After his father deserted the family, eight-year-old Ben and his brother, Curtis, were left with their mother, who had no marketable skills. Sonya worked as a domestic when such jobs were available, and she struggled with bouts of depression, for which, at one point, she had herself admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Despite her disabilities, she became the biggest factor in determining Ben’s later success, which she and Ben attribute to divine intervention.

Except for two years in Boston, Ben grew up in a dangerous and impoverished neighborhood in Detroit. Initially, he did so poorly in school that by the fifth grade even he classified himself as “the class dummy.” In part, his difficulties resulted from a failure to detect his need for eyeglasses. Nevertheless, when Sonya noticed the poor academic performance of her two sons, she instituted insightful strategies, curtailing their play activities and television viewing and demanding that the boys read two books each week and write reports on them for her to review—despite the fact that she could barely read herself. (Later she, too, went on to college.) Her stern intervention was also accompanied by positive reinforcement. When she learned of Ben’s nascent interest in medicine, she said reassuringly, “Then, Bennie, you will be a doctor” (Carson, Gifted Hands, 27). Her parenting techniques catapulted Ben from the bottom of the fifth grade to the top of his seventh grade class.

Ben then became a normal teenager, desiring both stylish clothes and acceptance from his peers. As a result of this shift in his priorities, his grades plummeted from As to Cs, and he even confronted his mother angrily because she would not buy the fashionable clothes that he craved. She devised a scheme for him to manage the household expenses with her salary, saying that the remaining money could be used to buy the things he wanted. When Ben began this exercise, he was astounded and wondered how she made ends meet, because the money was gone before he had paid all the bills. Ben learned an invaluable lesson; he appreciated his mother’s tenacity, curtailed his sartorial demands, and focused once again on his studies.

As a teenager Ben had a volatile temper, and at fourteen he attempted to stab a friend with a pocketknife simply because the boy would not change the radio station. Ben believes that it was through divine providence that his knife struck only his friend’s belt buckle. This experience initiated another transformation in his life. He began to pray for help controlling his anger, he avoided trouble outside school, and he ended up graduating third in his class.

During Carson’s freshman year at Yale University, he writes, “I discovered I wasn’t that bright” (Gifted Hands, 73), and he wondered if he had what it would take to succeed in the highly competitive premed program. Aubrey Tompkins, the choir director of the Mt. Zion Seventh-Day Adventist Church, encouraged him and helped him regain his confidence. In retrospect, Carson wrote that “the church provided the stabilizing force I needed” (Think Big, 65). After receiving his BA in 1973, Carson entered the University of Michigan School of Medicine, where he studied with Dr. James Taren, a neurosurgeon and dean, who advised his students, when confronted with the choice of whether or not to operate, to “look at the alternatives if we do nothing” (Think Big, 65). This statement has resonated throughout Carson’s professional career as a neurosurgeon. Another of his teachers, Dr. George Udvarhelyi, impressed upon him the importance of understanding the patient as much as the patient’s diagnosis. Through this advice, Carson developed the gentle bedside manner of a good country doctor. In 1975 Carson married Lacena “Candy” Rustin; they subsequently had three sons.

Carson received his MD in 1977 and fulfilled his residency at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was often mistaken for an orderly—despite the fact that he wore the white lab coat that should have identified him as a doctor. Carson was not only undaunted by such prejudice, he actually thrived on debunking racial stereotypes. From 1982 to 1983 he served as chief resident in neurosurgery at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Australia before Dr. Donlin Long recommended and engineered his appointment as chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. At the time of his appointment, Carson was only thirty-three years old and already considered a rising star in his field.

Carson gained international renown and made medical history in 1987, when he led a surgical team of seventy people in a twenty-two-hour operation that successfully separated the seven-month-old Binder twins, who were joined at the skull. In 1994 he performed a similar operation on conjoined South African girls, one of whom died during the operation and the other two days later; three years later he successfully separated six-month-old Zambian boys. Performing approximately four hundred operations per year in his pediatric unit, Carson is often called upon to assist surgeons all over the world.

In July of 2003 Carson was an assisting surgeon in a widely publicized attempt to separate twenty-nine-year-old Iranian sisters, joined at the backs of their heads, who themselves decided that a fifty-fifty chance that one or neither would survive the operation was better than continuing to live in a conjoined state, where they could not pursue their individual and distinct interests. Following the failure of this operation and the deaths of both sisters, Carson determined not to perform any more such operations on adults.

In August 2002, Carson successfully underwent surgery himself for prostate cancer, which had not metastasized. Throughout this ordeal, just as in surgery with his patients, Ben Carson relied on his faith and the will of God to carry him through.

In addition to his practice, Carson has written numerous articles for medical journals; an autobiography, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990); and two motivational books, The Big Picture (1999) and Think Big (1992). He has been an outspoken champion of such issues as racial diversity, affirmative action, and health care reform. In 1994 Carson and his wife founded the Carson Scholars Fund, which offers scholarships to encourage children to take an interest in science, math, and technology and to balance the attention given to sports and entertainment with an appreciation of academic achievement.

CARTER, EUNICE HUNTON

(16 July 1899–25 Jan. 1970), attorney, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of Canadian-born William Alphaeus Hunton, an executive with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and Addie Waites, a field-worker with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Europe. Carter’s parents had three other children, but only Carter and her younger brother lived to adulthood. After the race riots of 1906, Carter’s family left Atlanta for Brooklyn, New York, where Carter attended public schools. When her mother went to Strasbourg, which was at that time in Germany, to study at Kaiser Wilhelm University from 1909 to 1910, Carter accompanied her.

Carter attended Smith College in 1917, graduating cum laude with a BA and an MA in 1921. Her master’s thesis was titled “Reform of State Government with Special Attention to the State of Massachusetts.” Following in her parents’ footsteps, Carter went into public service. For eleven years she was employed as a social worker with family service agencies in New York and New Jersey. In 1924 she married Lisle Carter, a Barbados native and dentist who practiced in New Jersey. The couple had one child.

Eunice Carter worked internationally for equal rights for women. Archival Research International/Double Delta Industries Inc. and Pike Military Research

Eunice Carter took occasional classes at Columbia University, finally committing herself to night classes at the Fordham University law school, where she completed her LLB in 1932. She was admitted to the New York bar in 1934. That same year she made an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the New York state assembly. Between 1935 and 1945 she belonged to the National Association of Women Lawyers, the National Lawyers Guild, the New York Women’s Bar Association, and the Harlem Lawyers Association. She served as secretary of the Committee on Conditions in Harlem after the riots there in the spring of 1935.

An Episcopalian and a Republican, Carter began a private practice after law school and also started her active career in social organizations. In August 1940 an Ebony article listed Carter as one of seventy known Negro women who had become lawyers since 1869 (“Lady Lawyers,” 18). Carter remained in private practice only briefly before William C. Dodge hired her to be a prosecutor for New York City magistrate’s or criminal courts. As a prosecutor, Carter tried many cases against prostitutes, most of which she did not win. Because the same bail bondsman and lawyer represented these women, Carter suspected that a bigger organization was controlling prostitution. She told her boss, who dismissed her suspicions. However, Thomas Dewey, a special prosecutor investigating organized crime, took her suspicions seriously and eventually hired Carter as an assistant district attorney. She became part of a team that Dewey organized to investigate rackets and organized crime, particularly as it involved “Dutch” Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer). She is also acknowledged for developing valuable evidence in the case against “Lucky” Luciano. Because of Carter’s skills, in 1941 Dewey named her head of a Special Sessions Bureau overseeing juvenile justice. Eventually supervising more than 14,000 criminal cases per year, Carter served as a trial prosecutor until 1945.

Carter then returned to private practice and greater involvement in civic and social organizations and the movement for equal rights for women. She was a charter member, chairperson, trustee, and member of the Executive Board of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), founded in 1935 by MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE and twenty other women. Carter was also a member of the Roosevelt House League of Hunter College, and was active in the National Board of the YWCA (1949), the YWCA’s administrative committee for its Foreign Divisions, the Panel on Women in Occupied Areas under Communism, and the Association of University Women. In 1945, as the chair of the NCNW’s committee of laws, Carter, with her close associate Mary McLeod Bethune, attended a San Francisco conference that organized the United Nations. She was also very active in the local YWCAs of Harlem and Manhattan. Carter served as the secretary of the American Section of the Liaison Committee of International Organizations and the Conference on the Group of U.S. National Organizations; as a consultant to the Economic and Social Council for the International Council of Women (1947); as the chairperson of the Friends of the NAACP; as the vice president of the Eastern Division of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association and the National Council of Women of the U.S. (1964); and as the cochair of the YWCA’s Committee on Development of Leadership in Other Countries. In 1954 Carter visited Germany to serve as an adviser to the German government on women in public life. In 1955 she was elected to chair the International Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations of the United Nations. She was also a trustee of the Museum of the City of New York and a member of the Urban League. Carter retired from law in 1952. She died in New York City.

CARTER, ROBERT LEE

(11 Mar. 1917–), attorney and federal judge, was born in Careyville, Florida, the youngest of eight children of Robert Carter and Annie Martin. Shortly after his birth, Robert’s family joined tens of thousands of blacks migrating from the rural South to the big cities of the North, seeking a better life. Within months of settling in Newark, New Jersey, his father died, leaving his mother a widow at age thirty-nine and the sole support of a large family. Working as a domestic by day and taking in laundry at night, she managed to keep the family together.

Carter excelled as a student, encouraged by his mother, who hoped he would train to be a minister. In his teen years she moved the family to East Orange, New Jersey, to escape the increasing decay and desperation of Newark during the Great Depression. Graduating from East Orange High School in 1933, he entered Lincoln University in Pennsylvania on a scholarship. Upon graduating in 1937, Carter entered Howard Law School and came to the attention of its dean, WILLIAM HENRY HASTIE, and THURGOOD MARSHALL, who had preceded Carter at both Lincoln and Howard. After graduation from Howard in 1940, Carter attended Columbia University on a Rosenwald Fellowship, emerging on the eve of war with a master’s degree in Law.

When America entered World War II, Carter enlisted in the racially segregated army as a private and was sent to a military base in Georgia. There he encountered pervasive racial segregation and a demeaning, dismissive racial contempt. Black soldiers were confined to menial labor rather than being trained for combat or behind-the-lines technical support. Although he was accepted to Officers’ Candidate School, his career as a second lieutenant proved tumultuous. He brought charges against two white enlisted men who had made racial slurs, insisted upon entering the officer’s club at his base, and refused to live off base, as other blacks did. The matter came to a head when Carter successfully defended a black soldier accused of raping a white woman by establishing that she was a prostitute who had consented to the engagement. Charges brought against him in retaliation resulted in an administrative discharge that would have made him again subject to the draft. His Howard Law School mentor, William Hastie, a civilian aide to the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, intervened, however, to secure an honorable discharge.

Carter left the army in 1944 and returned to the practice of law as assistant counsel to Thurgood Marshall, then the lead attorney for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF). At that time racial segregation remained firmly entrenched by law and custom in the South and was sustained by custom and habit in much of the rest of the country. The “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) still guided judicial thinking and enjoyed popular support. Few could have expected that Carter, Marshall, and a handful of young lawyers working from a small set of offices near the New York Public Library would, within a decade, persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Plessy.

In the postwar years the NAACP challenged segregation along a number of fronts, including housing, transportation, and schools. Carter played an increasingly prominent role in these cases. On 3 April 1950 he found himself standing before the U.S. Supreme Court engaged in an oral argument in McLaurin v. Oklahoma. George McLaurin, a black man, had applied to graduate school at the University of Oklahoma. Claiming to uphold the “separate but equal doctrine,” the university had assigned McLaurin a separate table on the library’s mezzanine, a table in a corner of the cafeteria, and a seat just outside the classrooms where his courses were taught. Carter argued that the practice effectively denied McLaurin an equal education. On 5 June 1950 the Supreme Court handed down its decisions in McLaurin and in Sweatt v. Painter, a Texas Law School case that Thurgood Marshall had argued. Both Carter and Marshall won, delivering a fatal blow to segregation at the level of graduate and professional training.

The LDF’s efforts to dismantle segregation at the level of elementary and secondary education would prove more difficult. In 1950 Carter suggested gathering evidence of the damaging psychological effects of segregation on black children. Although the idea was met with skepticism by some of his colleagues, Carter found an ally in the psychologist KENNETH B. CLARK, who had developed experiments in which children selected and assigned characteristics to black and white dolls. Their results suggested that black children held negative perceptions of black dolls, the dolls that looked like them. Carter brought Clark and other social scientists into the legal struggle as it moved through the lower courts toward the Supreme Court.

In the spring of 1951, accompanied by the LDF’s Jack Greenberg, Carter journeyed to Topeka, Kansas, where Oliver Brown and other black parents were suing in federal court to integrate their elementary schools. Carter called Clark and other psychologists to the stand to testify that the races did not differ in intelligence and that segregation injured black children emotionally and psychologically. When Judge Walter Huxman ruled against the parents, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was joined with cases from South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. All challenged school segregation, and all were to be decided by the Supreme Court at the same time.

In December 1952 Carter, Marshall, and other LDF attorneys stood before the Supreme Court to argue the school segregation cases. Under tough questioning from some of the justices, Carter contended that the segregation laws of Kansas denied Linda Brown her constitutional right to an equal education. With the death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, a decision was delayed, and the cases were scheduled to be argued again before the new chief justice, Earl Warren, in December 1953. On 17 May 1954 the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education: it ruled unanimously that state-imposed racial segregation in the schools was unconstitutional.

The ruling provoked fierce opposition from southern whites. Alabama, for example, passed legislation requiring the NAACP to make its membership list public. Disclosure would have exposed members to intimidation or worse. To protect southern blacks’ First Amendment rights, Carter, who was general counsel for the NAACP from 1956 to 1968, argued NAACP v. Alabama before the Supreme Court in 1958. In June of that year the Supreme Court ruled in Carter’s favor, declaring that the free-speech rights of NAACP members would be violated if their names were made public and they were thereby exposed to threats from diehard segregationists.

Over the span of his career with the NAACP, Carter won twenty-one of twenty-two cases argued before the Supreme Court. He had always had a scholarly bent and in 1968 took a one-year appointment as a Fellow with the Urban Center at Columbia University. This was followed by a period in private practice. In 1972 Richard Nixon nominated him to the federal bench as a judge with U.S. District Court, the Southern District of New York. On the bench Carter presided over a range of cases, including those involving business executives charged with white-collar crimes and cases in which members of organized crime stood accused of violent offenses. The country’s continuing struggle for racial justice also engaged him, and he reflected in 1989 that the conservative public policies of the 1970s and 1980s had resulted in a racial climate that was bleaker than any he could recall. Under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, he wrote, the Supreme Court “has embarked on a studied program to return the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses and the federal civil rights law to the empty formalistic readings these provisions received before 1938” (85).

Carter recognized, however, that he and other more liberal minded members of the federal judiciary, such as A. LEON HIGGINBOTHAM, CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY, and DAMON KEITH, could still promote a form of jurisprudence based on the egalitarian principles exemplified by Brown. In 1998 Carter wrote an important opinion in Prey v. New York City Ballet, stating that lawyers hired by an employer to investigate claims of sexual harassment may have to make their findings known to the complainants. In October of 2000 he handed down a decision ordering the Sheet Metal Workers union to pay more than two million dollars in back wages to minority workers against whom it had discriminated. Along the way he also held adjunct faculty positions at New York University Law School and the University of Michigan Law School and published extensively.

If Carter had merely argued McLaurin, his name would be in the history books. If he had simply argued for bringing the insights of psychology to the fight against discrimination, he would be remembered. If he had only argued Brown, he would be celebrated. And if he had merely had a thirty-year distinguished career on the federal bench, he would be honored. That he did all of these things and more speaks to Carter’s extraordinary faith in using the American constitutional system to overcome the pernicious legacy of segregation and racial inequality.

CARVER, GEORGE WASHINGTON

(c. 1864–5 Jan. 1943), scientist and educator, was born in Diamond (formerly Diamond Grove), Missouri, the son of Mary Carver, who was the slave of Moses and Susan Carver. His father was said to have been a slave on a neighboring farm who was accidentally killed before Carver’s birth. Slave raiders allegedly kidnapped his mother and older sister while he was very young, and he and his older brother were raised by the Carvers on their small farm.

Barred from the local school because of his color, Carver was sent to nearby Neosho in the mid-1870s to enter school. Having been privately tutored earlier, he soon learned that his teacher knew little more than he did, so he caught a ride with a family moving to Fort Scott, Kansas. Until 1890 Carver roamed around Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa seeking an education while supporting himself doing laundry, cooking, and homesteading.

In 1890 Carver entered Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, as a preparatory student and art major. Convinced by his teacher that there was little future in art for a black man, he transferred the next year to Iowa State, where he was again the only African American student. By the time he received his master’s degree in Agriculture in 1896, Carver had won the respect and love of both faculty and students. He participated in many campus activities while compiling an impressive academic record. He was employed as a botany assistant and put in charge of the greenhouse. He also taught freshmen.

The faculty regarded Carver as outstanding in mycology (the study of fungi) and in cross-fertilization. Had he not felt obligated to share his knowledge with other African Americans, he probably would have remained at Iowa State and made significant contributions in one or both of those fields. Aware of deteriorating race relations in the year of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), he instead accepted BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S offer in 1896 to head the agricultural department at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Macon County, Alabama. Carver brought both his knowledge and professional contacts to Tuskegee. Two of his former teachers, James Wilson and Henry C. Wallace, became U.S. secretaries of agriculture, as did Wallace’s son, Henry A. Wallace. All three granted Department of Agriculture aid to Tuskegee and provided access to such presidents as Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Carver’s strong will led to conflicts with the equally strong-willed Washington over Carver’s incompetence at administration. His contacts and flair for teaching and research protected Carver from dismissal. In both his teaching and his research, his primary goal was to alleviate the crushing cycle of debt and poverty suffered by many black farmers who were trapped in sharecropping and cotton dependency. As director of the only all-black agricultural experiment station, he practiced what was later called “appropriate technology,” seeking to exploit available and renewable resources. In the classroom, in such outreach programs as farmers’ institutes, a wagon equipped as a mobile school, and in agricultural bulletins, Carver taught how to improve soil fertility without commercial fertilizer, how to make paints from native clays, and how to grow crops that would replace purchased commodities. He especially advocated peanuts as an inexpensive source of protein and published several bulletins containing peanut recipes.

Botanist George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute, 1940. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Carver never married, but he came to regard the Tuskegee students as his “adopted family.” He was a mentor to many, providing financial aid and personal guidance. Devoutly religious in his own way, he taught a voluntary Bible class on campus.

At the time of Washington’s death in 1915, Carver was respected by agricultural researchers but was largely unknown to the general public. Long in the shadow of Washington, Carver became the heir to the principal’s fame after being praised by Theodore Roosevelt at the funeral. In 1916 he was inducted into the Royal Society for the Arts in London. Then the peanut industry recognized his usefulness. In 1921 a growers’ association paid his way to Washington, D.C., so that he could testify at congressional tariff hearings, where his showmanship in displaying peanut products garnered national publicity. In 1923 Atlanta businessmen founded the Carver Products Company, and Carver won the Spingarn Medal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The company failed but obtained one patent and much publicity. In 1933, for example, an Associated Press release overstated Carver’s success in helping polio patients with peanut oil massages. Carver became one of the best-known African Americans of his era.

His rise from slavery and some personal eccentricities—such as wearing an old coat with a flower in the lapel and wandering the woods at dawn to commune with his “Creator”—appealed to a wide public. Advocates of racial equality, a religious approach to science, the “American Dream,” and even segregation appropriated Carver as a symbol of their varied causes. Carver made some quiet, personal stands against segregation, but he never made public statements on any racial or political issues. Thus his name could be used for contradictory goals. He relished the publicity and did little to correct the exaggerations of his work, aside from humble protestations regarding his “unworthiness” of the honors that came in increasing numbers.

Though some of this mythology was unfortunate, Carver served as a role model to African Americans and as a potent force promoting racial tolerance among young whites. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Young Men’s Christian Association sent him on lecture tours of white campuses in the 1920s and 1930s. On these occasions Carver converted many who heard his lectures to the cause of racial justice. To them Carver was no “token black” but a personal friend and confidant. Indeed, many people who met Carver, Henry Ford among them, were made to feel they were “special friends.”

Carver never earned more than $1,200 a year and refused compensation from peanut producers. Nevertheless he was able to accumulate almost $60,000 because he lived in a student dormitory and spent very little money. In 1940 he used his savings to establish the George Washington Carver Foundation to support scientific research—a legacy that continues at Tuskegee University. He died three years later in Tuskegee. Although his scientific contributions were meager relative to his fame, Carver did help hundreds of landless farmers improve the quality of their lives. And his magnetic personality and capacity for friendship inspired and enriched countless individuals.

CARY, LOTT

(c. 1780–10 Nov. 1828), Baptist preacher and missionary to Africa, was born on a plantation in Charles City County, Virginia, thirty miles from Richmond, the son of slave parents (names unknown). His grandmother Mihala had a strong influence on Lott’s early religious development. He married around 1800 and, with his first wife (name unknown), had two children. Lott’s master sent him to Richmond in 1804 as a hired slave laborer. He worked in the Shockoe Tobacco Warehouse first as a laborer and then as a shipping clerk. (The spelling of Cary’s name as “Carey” is probably due to confusion in some primary sources with the well-known English Baptist, the Reverend William Carey. Lott Cary, however, signed his name as “Cary.”)

Cary attended the predominantly white First Baptist Church, as did other blacks in Richmond. He experienced conversion in 1807 after hearing a sermon on Jesus and Nicodemus. Allowed to earn money by selling waste tobacco, Cary purchased his freedom and that of his two children in 1813. His wife had died by this time. Anxious to study the Bible, Cary enrolled in a night school taught by William Crane. There he learned to read, write, and do elementary arithmetic. His studies allowed him to assume greater responsibilities at the tobacco warehouse and achieve more economic independence; he eventually rose to the position of foreman with a salary of eight hundred dollars per year. He remarried about 1815; with his second wife (whose name also is unknown) he had one child.

Cary felt called to the Christian ministry and began to hold meetings for Richmond’s African American residents. The First Baptist Church licensed him around 1814 after a trial period. Contemporaries credited him with extraordinary abilities as an extemporary speaker. Cary’s strong interest in foreign mission work began when he heard Crane report on the plans of the American Colonization Society (ACS) for establishing colonies of African Americans in West Africa and conducting Christian missions. Cary sought to arouse interest in Africa among fellow blacks in Richmond and, along with Crane, was instrumental in organizing the Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society in 1815. Because of white opposition to unregulated black organizations in the wake of the insurrection of GABRIEL in 1800, Crane, one of the white members of First Baptist, served as president of the missionary society. Cary was recording secretary.

Cary developed an even stronger interest in going to Africa as a Christian missionary after the visit of Luther Rice to Richmond in 1817. He sought support from the white Baptist General Missionary Convention. When asked why he should want to leave America for the uncertainties of Africa, Cary said: “I am an African, and in this country, however meritorious my conduct, and respectable my character, I cannot receive the credit due to either. I wish to go to a country where I shall be estimated by my merits, not by complexion; and I feel bound to labor for my suffering race” (Gurley, 148). The Baptist Board of Foreign Missions and the ACS endorsed Cary in 1819. The ACS had been organized in December 1816 by whites who were interested primarily in removing blacks (especially free blacks) to West Africa; most ACS members did not oppose slavery as an institution. Cary’s reservations concerning the policies of the ACS apparently were overshadowed by his desire to see Africa and conduct mission work there. He served the ACS without pay.

Cary and a group of twenty-eight colonists, plus a number of children, departed from Norfolk, Virginia, onboard the brig Nautilus bound for Sierra Leone in January 1821. Before leaving America, Cary and six other colonists, including his close friend Colin Teague, organized a missionary Baptist church. As he boarded ship Cary told those who had assembled to see the Nautilus off, “It may be that I shall behold you no more on this side of the grave, but I feel bound to labor for my brothers, perishing as they are in the far distant land of Africa. For their sake and for Christ’s sake I am happy in leaving all and venturing all” (Gurley, 149). The Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society gave seven hundred dollars to support Cary. This was the first effort by black Baptists in America to do mission work in Africa.

After a voyage of forty-four days, Cary and the other colonists arrived at Freetown, Sierra Leone, which the British government had taken over in 1808 for the settlement of “Liberated Africans” whom the British navy freed from captured slave ships. Agents of the ACS had urged the U.S. government to establish a freed-slave colony on Sherbro Island, down the coast from Freetown, but when Cary arrived in 1821 no provisions had been made for them. The new arrivals were required to cultivate farms and do other labor in Sierra Leone. Soon after their arrival, Cary’s second wife died of tropical fever, leaving him to care for three children. While in Sierra Leone, Cary did missionary work among the Vai tribe at Cape Grand Mountain.

By December 1821 arrangements had been made for the purchase of land from King Peter, the principal chief around the cape, for another settlement. This later became part of the Republic of Liberia. In early 1822 Cary and his family moved to Mesurado (now Cape Monrovia). Jehudi Ashmun, a representative of the ACS, served as colonial agent of the colony of about 130 members, and Cary acted as health officer and inspector. In addition to assisting Ashmun in defense of the colony against the forces of King Peter, who was resentful of the colony’s expansion, in 1822 Cary established a Baptist church in Monrovia that grew to about seventy members by 1825. Known as Providence Baptist, the church had its nucleus in the missionary congregation Cary and fellow Baptists had organized before leaving the United States. Cary also established a day school in Monrovia, which was moved to Cape Grand Mountain in 1827 but eventually closed because of insufficient funding.

In 1823 conflict developed between the earliest colonists and Ashmun, who attempted to redistribute town lots because of the arrival of additional settlers. The controversy escalated to the point where some colonists were charged with sedition and stealing rations. Although Cary initially opposed Ashmun, he mediated the dispute between the disgruntled colonists and the governing authorities. Liberia was established with a permanent government in 1825 as a colony of the United States; Ashmun became governor. Cary was elected vice agent of the colony in September 1826. When Ashmun became ill and left for the United States in March 1828, the entire administrative responsibility of the colony fell into Cary’s hands. After Ashmun’s death in August 1828, Cary was appointed governor of the more than twelve hundred settlers of Liberia.

In late 1828 a native group known as the Bassa, with whom the colonists had been having periodic conflict, robbed a factory at Digby, a settlement north of Monrovia. Cary called for a show of force by the settler militia. On 8 November 1828 he was making cartridges in the old agency house when a candle was accidentally upset. The ammunition exploded. Seriously injured, Cary died two days later; he was buried in Liberia. A monument was later erected that bore the inscription “Lott Cary’s self-denying, self-sacrificing labors, as a self-taught Physician, as a Missionary and Pastor of a Church, and finally as Governor of the Colony, have inscribed his name indelibly on the page of history, not only as one of Nature’s Noblemen, but as an eminent Philanthropist and Missionary of Jesus Christ.” In 1897 black Baptists in America organized the Lott Cary Foreign Missionary Convention in honor of Cary’s pioneering labors in Liberia.

CARY, MARY ANN CAMBERTON SHADD

(9 Oct. 1823–5 June 1893), African American educator, journalist, editor, and lawyer, was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the daughter of Abraham Doras Shadd and Harriet Parnell. Although she was the eldest of thirteen children, Mary Ann Shadd grew up in comfortable economic circumstances. Little is known about her mother except that she was born in North Carolina in 1806 and was of mixed black and white heritage; whether she was born free or a slave is unknown. Shadd’s father was also of mixed-race heritage. His paternal grandfather, Jeremiah Schad, was a German soldier who had fought in the American Revolution and later married Elizabeth Jackson, a free black woman from Pennsylvania. Abraham Shadd had amassed his wealth as a shoemaker, and his property by the 1830s was valued at five thousand dollars. He was a respected member of the free black community in Wilmington and in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where the family had moved sometime in the 1830s, and he served as a delegate to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1835 and 1836.

Mary Ann Shadd continued her family’s activist tradition by devoting her life to the advancement of black education and the immediate abolition of slavery. As a youth she attended a private Quaker school for blacks taught by whites, in which several of her teachers were abolitionists. During the 1840s she taught in schools for blacks in Wilmington, West Chester, New York City, and Norristown, Pennsylvania. When passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 endangered the freedom of free blacks as well as fugitive slaves, Shadd joined the faction of black abolitionists who promoted the controversial cause of voluntary black emigration to Canada. This movement illustrated the depth of disillusionment with the United States that had developed among many blacks since the 1840s. Angered and disappointed in the continued tolerance of slavery and the upsurge of violence against free blacks, a faction of black activists broke from the American abolitionist organization and from those black abolitionists who preferred to stay and fight oppression in the United States.

Between 1850 and 1860 approximately forty thousand blacks fled to southern Ontario. Shadd found employment in 1851 as a teacher of blacks in Windsor, Ontario, and was later joined by several members of her family. Shadd taught school and became a fervent spokeswoman for the emigration movement. Like most teachers in the black settlements, she had to struggle to keep her schools open, facing such obstacles as inadequate supplies, ramshackle school buildings, inclement weather, and the frequent outbreak of cholera and measles.

In addition to teaching, Shadd was a talented writer. One of the most important enterprises was her participation with the Reverend Samuel Ring-gold Ward in the founding in 1853 of the Provincial Freeman, a newspaper dedicated to promoting the interests of Canadian blacks, in Toronto, Ontario. The Provincial Freeman functioned as Shadd’s vehicle for promoting Canada as a haven for the oppressed and for condemning the United States. In addition, she wrote extensively on the topics of temperance, antislavery, anti-colonization, black education, and women’s rights.

Shadd also used the podium effectively for promoting her ideas, despite the resistance she often encountered against women who engaged in the traditionally male activity of public speaking. After much debate, for example, she was given the opportunity to address the all-male delegation at the Eleventh Colored National Convention in Philadelphia in 1855. One man in the audience noted that her eyes were “small and penetrating and fairly flash when she is speaking.” He described her as a “superior woman . . . however much we may differ with her on the subject of emigration.” At another engagement, an observer praised her as “a woman of superior intellect, and the persevering energy of character.” On her lecture trips, however, she often found the platform closed to women. While in Rockford, Illinois, she wrote to her brother Isaac that the citizens were “so conservative . . . as not to tolerate lectures from women.” In both her writings and her speeches, Shadd spoke her mind, often roundly criticizing leading black men in the United States and Canada for providing inadequate support for Canadian black communities.

Her outspoken and candid manner often brought her into conflict with other black Canadian activists during the 1850s over such issues as the appropriate means for funding black schools and for raising money to help newly arrived blacks. Her most publicized feud was with HENRY BIBB and Mary Bibb, American-born free black activists who had helped in the establishment of the black settlement in Windsor the year before Shadd arrived. What began as a disagreement over policies escalated into a bitter personal feud between Shadd and the Bibbs that was well publicized in their rival newspapers and in Shadd’s lengthy correspondence with George Whipple, secretary of the American Missionary Association. In his Voice of the Fugitive, Bibb chastised her for criticizing him, calling her unladylike, while Shadd described him as “a dishonest man.”

The Bibbs favored all-black schools sponsored by the Canadian government, but Shadd sought to break down all racial barriers, favoring privately funded schools that made no distinctions about color. Although she encouraged black parents to make concerted efforts to sustain the schools, finding the necessary funds was a formidable barrier. Shadd finally was forced to appeal to the American Missionary Association for assistance.

Shadd also criticized the activities of the Refugee Home Society, an organization that Henry Bibb had started in 1850 to distribute land, clothing, and money to black refugees. Shadd accused Bibb of corruption and of perpetuating a “begging scheme.” According to Shadd, who charged that corrupt agents pocketed the money, few such resources actually went to the refugees. She argued further that too much assistance would prevent black settlers from becoming self-reliant.

Her marriage in 1856 to the widower Thomas F. Cary, a barber and bathhouse proprietor from Toronto, did not prevent her from continuing to write, lecture, and teach. When at home in Chatham, she worked on the newspaper and cared for Thomas Cary’s three children. They had two children of their own, one in 1857 and another in 1860. Shadd Cary continued to lecture and write for the Provincial Freeman. She also operated her school until 1864. During the Civil War she traveled to the United States to help recruit soldiers for the Union army. In 1869 Mary Ann Shadd Cary, by then a widow, moved to Washington, D.C., with her two children. Later, she lived with her older daughter, Sarah E. Cary Evans, a schoolteacher. Between 1869 and 1871 she began her studies in law at Howard University but stopped for unknown reasons. She resumed her studies in 1881 and received her degree in 1883, the only black woman in a class of five, although there is no evidence that she actually practiced law. She also continued her support for women’s rights. In 1878 she delivered a lecture at the annual National Woman Suffrage Association Conference. She died at home in Washington.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary stands as one of the most significant, yet least recognized abolitionists who worked on behalf of black emigration and the sustenance of black settlements in Canada. At the same time, her lifelong challenge of racism and sexism made Cary an important figure in the struggle for racial and sexual equality during the nineteenth century.

CASS, MELNEA AGNES JONES

(16 June 1896–16 Dec. 1978), civic leader and civil rights activist, was born in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of Albert Jones, a janitor, and Mary Drew, a domestic worker. Seeking broader employment and educational opportunities, the Jones family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when Melnea was five years old. Her mother died when she was eight, and she and her two sisters were entrusted to the care of an aunt, Ella Drew. After one year at Girls’ High School in Boston, she was sent to St. Francis de Sales Convent School, a Roman Catholic school for black and Indian girls in Rock Castle, Virginia. There household management was taught in addition to the academic curriculum; she graduated as valedictorian of her class in 1914.

When she returned to Boston, she was unable to find work as a salesgirl because of her race. Instead, she was employed as a domestic worker until her marriage to Marshall Cass in December 1917; she resumed domestic work during the Depression, when her husband lost his job as a dental laboratory technician. The marriage lasted until his death in 1958. The couple had three children.

While her husband was serving in World War I, Cass moved in with her mother-in-law, Rosa Cass Brown, who introduced her to community and church activities and persuaded her of the importance of the vote for women. At Brown’s urging, Cass became a leader in the local suffrage movement and also joined the NAACP.

In the 1920s Cass joined the Kindergarten Mothers, later renamed the Friendship Club, of the Robert Gould Shaw House, in the heart of the black community in Boston’s South End. With other neighborhood mothers, she raised money for Shaw House. Cass served twice as president and also as secretary of the Friendship Club. The group established the first nursery school in the black community, which became a model for later day care centers. The motto she selected for the Friendship Club, “If we cannot do great things, we can do small things in a great way,” exemplified Cass’s personal philosophy.

Her work at Shaw House started Cass on a lifetime of community service. She served as secretary, vice president, president, and chairman of the board for the Northeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs and in the 1960s was vice president of the national organization. During World War II, she was one of the organizers of Women in Community Services; in the 1960s she was community resources chairman and was active in recruiting girls for the Job Corps. In 1949 she was a founder and charter member of Freedom House, a private social service and advocacy agency, initiated by Muriel S. Snowden and Otto Snowden to aid and develop the black community. In the 1950s she joined the Women’s Service Club and was its sixth president, serving for seventeen years, during which time she oversaw the development of the Migrant Service Program and the initiation, in 1968, of a federally funded homemaker training program. It was said of Cass that “it would be difficult to find a single successful black individual in Boston who hadn’t been given a boost by her”; indeed, she was available to lend a helping hand to every individual in need, whatever his or her station in life.

The city of Boston began to call upon Cass’s talents in the 1950s when she was appointed the only female charter member of Action for Boston Community Development, an agency that was established to help people displaced by urban renewal and that later administered the city’s poverty program; she served as its vice president for eight years, retiring in 1970. For ten years she was a member of the Board of Overseers of Public Welfare for the city of Boston, an advisory group to the mayor and the Welfare Department.

Throughout her adult life, Cass was a leader in the struggle against racial discrimination. She participated in A. PHILIP RANDOLPH’S drive to organize the sleeping car porters. In 1933, nearly twenty years after she was denied employment as a salesgirl, she joined demonstrations led by WILLIAM MONROE TROTTER to get Boston department stores to hire blacks. The next year she demonstrated in favor of the hiring of black doctors and nurses at Boston City Hospital. For many years she was on the board of the Boston YWCA but left the organization in 1951 because of its discriminatory practices; she rejoined years later only after many policy changes had been made. A life member of the NAACP, she served in many capacities in the Boston branch and held the presidency from 1962 to 1964, when the NAACP organized demonstrations against the Boston School Committee and held sit-ins to support desegregation and protest inequality in the curriculum for black children. She continued the tradition started by William Monroe Trotter of annually laying a wreath in honor of CRISPUS ATTUCKS, and she successfully lobbied for Boston to observe the birthday of FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

In her seventies, Cass became a spokesperson for the elderly, serving as president of the Roxbury Council of Elders, chairperson of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee for Affairs of the Elderly (1975), and chairperson of the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the Elderly (1975–1976). National recognition came in 1973 when Elliott Richardson appointed her to represent consumers’ Medicare interests on the National Health Insurance Benefits Advisory Council.

Patriotic and church organizations also benefited from her participation. Among other affiliations and offices, as state president of the United War Mothers of America, she was the first black woman to hold that office in a national patriotic organization. She was also the first woman, black or white, elected state president of the Gold Star and War Parents of America. At St. Mark Congregational Church in Roxbury she was a charter member of the Mothers’ Club and chaired the Social Action Committee. In 1967 she was the first woman to deliver a sermon for Woman’s Day from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Boston.

On many occasions, the community expressed its appreciation for her contributions. As early as 1949 the Friendship Club of Shaw House gave a banquet in tribute to her “efficient leadership, wise counsel, dependability, and fair judgment.” In 1966 Mayor John Collins proclaimed 22 May “Melnea Cass Day,” and more than 1,000 people attended a salute to the “First Lady of Roxbury.” In 1974, at the recommendation of the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs, she was named Massachusetts Mother of the Year, and in 1977 she was designated one of seven “Grand Bostonians.” Several facilities were named in her honor: the Melnea A. Cass Metropolitan District Commission Swimming Pool and Skating Rink (1968), the Melnea A. Cass Clarendon Street Branch of the YWCA (1976), and Cass House, a mixed-income apartment development (1989). Malnea A. Cass Boulevard opened in Boston in 1981.

At age seventy-nine Cass expressed the philosophy that had guided her life of service: “I am convinced that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can, for the harder I work the more I live” (funeral program, St. Mark Congregational Church). She died in Boston. “By doing many small things in a great way” she had improved life for Boston’s black community and won the respect and admiration of Bostonians of all races.

CATLETT, ELIZABETH

(15 Apr. 1915–), sculptor, printmaker, and teacher, was born Alice Elizabeth Catlett to Mary Carson, a truant officer, and John Catlett, a math teacher and amateur musician who died shortly before Elizabeth’s birth. Elizabeth and her two older siblings were raised by their mother and paternal grandmother in a middle-class neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Encouraged by her mother and her teachers at Dunbar High School to pursue a career as an artist, she entered Howard University in 1931, where she studied with African American artists James Lesesne Wells, LOÏS MAILOU JONES, and JAMES A. PORTER. After graduating cum laude with a BS in Art in 1935, Catlett taught art in the Durham, North Carolina, public schools before beginning graduate training at the University of Iowa in 1938. Under the tutelage of artist Grant Wood, Catlett switched her concentration from painting to sculpture and undertook the study of African and pre-Columbian art. From Wood, Catlett gained a respect for disciplined technique, and when he encouraged her to depict subjects derived from her own experience, she focused on African American women and the bond between mother and child, themes that would occupy her for a lifetime. Catlett received the University of Iowa’s first MFA in 1940, and the following year Mother and Child (1940, limestone), a component of her thesis project, won first prize in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago.

Elizabeth Catlett’s Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968). © Elizabeth Catlett/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

After a summer teaching at Prairie View College in Texas, Catlett was hired as head of the art department at Dillard University in New Orleans in 1940. The following summer, while in Chicago studying ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago and lithography at the Southside Community Art Center, Catlett met artist Charles White. The couple married later that year and eventually settled in Harlem, New York, in 1942, where they thrived as part of the area’s African American creative community. Catlett continued her studies at the Art Students League and with sculptor Ossip Zadkine. She taught at the Marxist-based Jefferson School, and sat on the arts committee of one of the largest Popular Front organizations in Harlem. Catlett’s job as promotional director of the George Washington Carver School, a community school for working people, brought her into contact with working-class and poor people for the first time. As her politics crystallized, so too did her commitment to depicting the reality and courage of working Americans and to producing work for African American audiences. In 1945 she was awarded a grant from the Rosenwald Fund to produce a series depicting black women. The renewal of the grant for the next year allowed for the completion of the innovative series The Negro Woman, fifteen linoleum cuts documenting the epic history of African American women’s oppression, resistance, and survival. An integrated narrative of text and prints, the series depicts historic figures SOJOURNER TRUTH, HARRIET TUBMAN, and PHILLIS WHEATLEY along with images of field hands, washerwomen, segregation, and lynching.

Fellowship funds also brought Catlett and White to Mexico in 1946, where in addition to finishing The Negro Woman series, Catlett hoped to resuscitate her failing marriage. Although the couple returned to New York and filed for divorce several months later, this first trip to Mexico proved pivotal for Catlett both professionally and personally. In early 1947 she returned to Mexico City, where she had befriended a circle of Mexican artists that included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Soon after, she made Mexico her permanent residence and joined the printmaking collective, Taller de Grafica Popular (TGP), or The People’s Graphic Art Workshop, through which she had produced The Negro Woman series. The TGP supported progressive and nationalist causes through graphic materials that communicated directly with the primarily illiterate public. Attracted to the workshop’s creatively collaborative environment and its engagement with audiences, Catlett made the TGP her artistic home for the next decade. It was in 1947, as well, that Catlett met and married Mexican artist Francisco Mora. Between 1947 and 1951, the couple had three children, Francisco, Juan, and David, and remained TGP members until 1966.

In Mexico Catlett found a vital environment for politically committed art, which had become less permissible in the United States by the late 1940s, especially after the establishment of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. From her arrival in Mexico until the mid 1950s, Catlett focused on printmaking, primarily lithography and linoleum prints, inexpensive mediums that are easily reproduced. Topical and populated with both Mexican and African American families and workers, Catlett’s print work during this period is graphically bold, combining elements of expressionism and Soviet social realism with a visual vocabulary drawn from Mexican and African sources.

When her youngest child entered kindergarten in 1956, Catlett returned to sculpture, although she continued to make prints. Shortly after her arrival in Mexico, Catlett had studied ceramic sculpture and pre-Columbian art with Francisco Zuniga and in the mid-1950s she studied woodcarving with Jose L. Ruiz. In 1958, Catlett became the first woman professor of sculpture at Mexico’s National School of Fine Arts, and a year later she became head of the department, a position she held until her retirement in 1976.

Catlett had arrived in Mexico a highly educated and technically sophisticated artist with a developed style. In Mexico, her sculptures continued to feature simple and fluid forms with few embellishments and a reverence for materials. Whether in marble, onyx, bronze, terra cotta, or woods, her sculptures are concerned with volume and space. They convey a sense of monumentality even in small and mediumsize pieces. The influence of Henry Moore, Jan Arp, and Constantin Brancusi can be seen in her smooth and highly polished surfaces and organic forms. But while they flirt with abstraction, her sculptures remain figurative. Representations of ethnicity and the female body, specifically images of motherhood and the body of the black woman, Catlett’s pieces continually revisit themes and compositions of earlier works.

At the National Conference of Negro Artists in 1961, Catlett delivered a keynote address that called for politically engaged art: “We must search to find our place, as Negro artists, in the advance toward a richer fulfillment of life on a global basis. Neither the Negro artist nor American art can afford to take an isolated position” (Fifty-Year Retrospective, 20). The speech raised her profile within the art community but also increased pressure from the U.S. State Department, which identified her as an “undesirable alien.” Catlett became a Mexican citizen in 1962 and found herself barred from the United States until 1971, when she was finally granted a visa to attend her first solo exhibition in the United States, held at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Beginning with her initial Mexican exhibition in 1962, there was steady demand for her work in both Mexican and American exhibitions, and after the Studio Museum exhibition, she regularly received solo shows, seventeen in the 1970s alone, mostly in the United States.

Through the Black Arts Movement and the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Catlett renewed her interest in American politics and themes and, in turn, her work drew attention from intellectuals and curators in the United States. Her sculptural and print works from this period comment directly on topical issues, including the imprisonment of ANGELA DAVIS in Freedom for Angela Davis (1969, serigraph) and race riots in Watts/Detroit/Washington/Harlem/Newark (1970, hand colored linocut). Catlett’s support of black nationalism can be seen in such works as Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968, cedar), MALCOLM X Speaks For Us (1969, color linocut), The Torture of Mothers (1970, color lithograph), Negro es Bello (1968, lithograph), which includes renderings of Black Panther buttons, Homage to Black Women Poets (1984, mahogany), Black Unity (1968, mahogany), represented by a clenched fist on one side and a pair of faces on the other, and Target (1970, bronze), a bust of a black man as seen through the cross-hairs of a gun sight. Catlett’s commitment to the Black Arts Movement included exhibiting at black institutions where her work would be seen by African American audiences.

Upon her retirement from teaching in 1976, Catlett and Mora, who died in February 2002, moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico. In 1982 she took a second apartment in New York and began spending more time teaching and lecturing in the United States. Catlett continued to produce work through the 1980s, 1990s, and into the new century. Her work has been included in every major exhibition of black artists from the 1960s to the present, and she has received numerous exhibitions, awards, and commissions in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Recently called the “dean of black American female artists” by the New York Times, Catlett has received six honorary doctorates and honors from a host of institutions, including the cities of Atlanta, Cleveland, Little Rock, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Council of Negro Women. In September 2002, the Cleveland Museum of Art mounted Elizabeth Catlett: Prints and Sculpture, a major exhibition spanning the artist’s sixty-year career.

CESAR

(c. 1682–?), slave and medical practitioner who developed primitive pharmaceuticals, is thought to have been born in Africa or the Caribbean and transported to the southern colonies as a slave. He might instead have been born into slavery in South Carolina. (His name is often spelled Caesar.) The names of his parents are unknown. He may have been the descendant of skilled medicine men, who transferred medical knowledge from their native cultures to the colonies, sharing drug recipes and folk remedies that used herbs and roots, or of slave midwives, who had performed cesarian sections in Africa and taught other slaves that procedure.

Cesar might also have had Native American Indian ancestors, because many Carolina slaves had intermarried with native tribes. Southern Native Americans were known for their potent herbal remedies. Slave physicians either were self-taught or acquired some training from fellow slaves or masters, and they became celebrities within their communities for their healing powers. Their reputations boosted their social rank, and whites became aware of their “curative knowledge.”

Cesar was well known in his community for his use of roots and herbs as an antidote to poison. His pharmaceutical prowess attracted the attention of colonial leaders, and his successes were preserved in colonial records. The 24 November 1749 journal of the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly in Charleston noted that a “Member acquainted the House that there is a Negro Man named Caesar belonging to Mr. John Norman of Beach Hill, who had cured several of the Inhabitants of this Province who had been poisoned by Slaves.” The legislator stated that Cesar “was willing to make a Discovery of the Remedy which he makes Use of in such Cases for a reasonable Reward.” The following day the assembly appointed a committee to investigate the claim and “report what Reward the said Negro Man Caesar shall merit for his Services.” By Wednesday, 29 November, the assembly “Ordered that Doctor Glen and Doctor Brisband be added to the Committee who were appointed to . . . examine into the Services lately done by a Negro Man called Caesar . . . who have it in charge to desire the Aid and Observations of any skilful Physicians they shall think fit.”

Committee member Mr. Austin delivered a report to the clerk, which was read to the legislators. William Miles had informed the committee that his sister and brother had been poisoned and that Cesar had saved their lives. Miles’s son had recently been poisoned and “wants Caesar to his Relief.” Other testimonials included “Henry Middleton, Esq., [who] believed he was poisoned and after two doses was cured. His overseer had also been cured.” A Mr. Sacheverell “informed the Committee that Caesar had undertaken to cure a Man who was violently afflicted with Fits, and, in Appearance, will effect it.”

Cesar’s master, John Norman, told the committee that “to his Knowledge, Caesar had done many Services in a physical Way, and in particular had frequently cured the Bite of Rattle Snakes, and never knew him to fail in any one Attempt.” Norman elaborated that “Caesar had been frequently called upon as a Doctor in many Cases by the Neighbours,” mentioning an “Instance to the Committee of a Negro Man that had been cured of the Yaws by Caesar when he had been twice salivated, and was covered with an intire [sic] Scab from Top to Toe.” The committee noted that “another Point Caesar is very famous in is the Cure of Pleurisies many of which he had undertaken to the Knowledge of Mr. Norman which had had very deadly symptoms.”

Cesar was then asked “on what Conditions he would discover his Antidotes, and such other useful Simples as he was acquainted with,” and he replied “that he expected his Freedom, and a moderate Competence for Life, which he hoped the Committee would be of Opinion deserved one hundred Pounds Currency per Annum.” Cesar told the Assembly that “he proposed to give the Committee any satisfactory Experiment of his ability they please, as soon as he should be able to provide himself with the necessary ingredients.”

The committee supported Cesar’s request, suggesting that “he shall have his Freedom, and an annual Allowance of one hundred pounds for Life with such a further Allowance for any other useful Discovery he may make to the Public as this House shall think fit.” The house approved the committee’s recommendation and “Resolved that this House will make Provision for Payment to the said John Norman of the appraised Value of the said Negro Caesar.” Cesar was appraised by four people, two nominated by the house and two by Norman. On 7 December 1749 the house issued a statement “that upon due Consideration of all the Advantages the said Negro Slave Caesar (aged near sixty-seven Years) might be of to the Owner by his knowledge and Skill may be worth the Sum of five hundred Pounds Current Money of South Carolina,” which the public treasurer was ordered to pay “immediately” and also “advance the Sum of fifty Pounds to be paid to the Negro Man named Caesar.”

The house also requested that the South Carolina Gazette print Cesar’s prescription for public use, which appeared in the 14 May 1750 issue. Most historians consider this the first publication of a medical cure developed by an African American; the person who actually wrote the instructions is unknown but probably was Cesar’s master, an assemblyman, a local doctor, or the printer. One year later, issue number 877 of the South Carolina Gazette, dated 25 February to 4 March 1751, stated, “There having been so great a Demand for our Gazette of the 14th of May 1750, (wherein was published, by Order of the Commons House of Assembly, the Negro Caesar’s Cure for Poison) that none were left in a short time, ’tis hoped the Re-publication of that Cure, may not be unacceptable at this Time.”

Cesar described the symptoms of poisoning and revealed how he prepared his cure for poison, which called for boiling the “roots of Plantane and wild Hoar-hound, fresh or dried,” and straining it. “Of this decoction let the patient take one third part three mornings fasting successively, from which if he finds any relief, it must be continued, ’till he is perfectly recovered,” Cesar prescribed. “During the cure, the patient must live on spare diet, and abstain from eating mutton, pork, butter, or any other fat or oily food.” He advised that they boil goldenrod roots with sassafras and “to this decoction, after it is strain’d, add a glass of rum or brandy, and sweeten it with sugar, for ordinary drink.” For fevers that accompany poisoning, he suggested a wood-ash mash.

For rattlesnake bites, Cesar told physicians to “take of the roots of Plantane or Hoarhound, (in summer roots and branches together) a sufficient quantity, bruise them in a mortar, and squeeze out the juice, of which give as soon as possible, one large spoonful: if he is swell’d you must force it down his throat.” He noted that “this generally will cure; but if the patient finds no relief in an hour after, you may give another spoonful which never fails.” He also recommended that “to the wound may be applied, a leaf of good tobacco, moisten’d with rum.”

Cesar’s cures became well known and were also published, probably near the time of his death, in 1789 at Philadelphia, and in the 1792 Massachusetts Magazine. They were also mentioned in William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1797), which noted that Cesar’s detailed description “was in the grand tradition of Sydenham, the great English clinician of the seventeenth century.” Cesar’s work provided a foundation for future black physicians, including James Derham, considered the first African American doctor, who practiced in New Orleans after the American Revolution, and an unknown man described as “a Doctor among people of his color” in the 22 June 1797 issue of the Charleston, South Carolina, City Gazette and Daily Advertiser. Cesar’s career preceded by a century and a half the acceptance of African Americans into U.S. medical schools.

CHAMBERLAIN, WILT

(21 Aug. 1936–12 Oct. 1999), basketball player, was born Wilton Norman Chamberlain in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the sixth of nine surviving children born to William Chamberlain, a janitor and handyman, and Olivia Ruth Chamberlain, a domestic maid and cook. Although Chamberlain claimed in his 1973 autobiography that he was born measuring twenty-nine inches in length, much above average, he later stated that at birth “there was absolutely nothing special about me. I was a little over twenty-two inches long” (Chamberlain, 1991, 25). At any rate, young Wilton was always the tallest in his grade school classes and became known as the “Big Dipper” or “Dip,” both of which he preferred to “Wilt the Stilt,” a nickname later coined by a journalist. He was also among the most athletic students, participating as a nine-year-old in 1946 in the famed Penn Relays near his West Philadelphia home.

When he entered Overbrook High School in 1951, Chamberlain, by then six feet, seven inches tall, continued his interest in track and field, excelling at sprints, the high jump, and the shot put. Although he dreamed of participating in the Olympics as a decathlete, Chamberlain increasingly focused on basketball, a sport that had just begun to allow blacks in its professional ranks and which offered greater financial rewards for his talents. Over-brook won fifty-eight of the sixty-one games in which he played, one of those rare losses coming when West Catholic High School assigned four defenders to guard him. Chamberlain’s height and strength certainly gave him an advantage over most opponents, but it was his ball-handling skills and athleticism that enabled him to dominate the highly competitive Philadelphia high school leagues. He developed into an excellent dribbler and passer and, contrary to his later reputation, a highly reliable free-throw shooter. In one game, he scored a remarkable ninety points, a figure that he would surely have repeated in other games had his coach not benched the star center to prevent embarrassing opponents. Nonetheless, in his three seasons at Overbrook, Chamberlain set a statewide scoring record of 2,252 points.

Wilt Chamberlain comes up against his perennial rival BILL RUSSELL, 1966. Library of Congress

Chamberlain also excelled at the University of Kansas, though his performance did not quite match the unrealistic expectations that national journalists had raised about his prospects. In 1957 he led Kansas to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship game and was selected as Most Valuable Player (MVP) of the tournament, even though his side lost in triple overtime to North Carolina. That loss devastated Chamberlain, who showed much less intensity in his junior season. He found life in segregated Lawrence, Kansas, uncomfortable, suffered racial abuse from opposing fans, and missed crucial games after an opponent kneed him in the groin. He especially resented an NCAA rule change that prohibited offensive goaltending and thus prevented the seven foot, one inch player from guiding his teammates’ shots into the basket. A scandal involving improper payments of at least twenty thousand dollars further clouded his college career. Although Chamberlain received no official censure, the NCAA later placed Kansas on probation for buying him a Cadillac.

Forgoing his senior year at Kansas, Chamberlain joined the Harlem Globetrotters in New York City in 1958. He loved the showmanship of players like Meadowlark Lemon and claimed that he learned more from his one year on tour with the Trotters than from three years at Kansas. In that year—the happiest in his life, he stated in 1974—he improved his outside shooting, a consequence of being switched from his normal position of center to guard. He also began a love of foreign travel when the Globetrotters undertook a tour of Europe, including the first visit to the Soviet bloc by an American sports team, and were granted audiences with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Pope John XXIII.

In 1959 Chamberlain joined his hometown Philadelphia Warriors and transformed the team’s fortunes within a season. He established nine National Basketball Association (NBA) scoring records that season, including the highest average for both points and rebounds, and was voted Rookie of the Year, All-Star MVP, and the league’s MVP. In that season’s play-offs, however, the Boston Celtics defeated the Warriors, even though Chamberlain outscored and outplayed the Celtic’s BILL RUSSELL, the dominant defensive player of that era.

The Russell-Chamberlain rivalry endured throughout the 1960s. Chamberlain usually edged Russell in terms of individual scoring, but Russell’s Celtics invariably defeated Chamberlain’s teams. Chamberlain followed his amazing rookie season by breaking his own scoring and rebounding records in 1960–1961, averaging 50.4 points a game. Increasingly, Chamberlain stood out as a scoring phenomenon on an otherwise lackluster Warriors team, most famously amassing one hundred points against the New York Knickerbockers in 1962, a record unlikely to be broken. Most teams found that the only way to stop him was to foul him, a particularly useful tactic, given his relatively poor (.511) performance at the foul line; Chamberlain’s 5,805 missed free throws will almost certainly remain an NBA record. More impressively, given his powerful physical presence and aggressive reputation on and off the court, Chamberlain never fouled out from a game.

Although Chamberlain’s scoring feats declined in his final years in the NBA, his efforts for the Philadelphia 76ers in 1966–1967 and the Los Angeles Lakers in 1971–1972 finally earned him accolades as a great team player and his only NBA championship rings. In 1966–1967, he ranked third in the league in assists, a rejoinder to those critics and fellow players who viewed him as selfish. Indeed, Chamberlain had a highly driven ego and an even higher conceit regarding his considerable abilities, qualities that did not endear him to fellow players with equally large egos but somewhat lesser talents. He also believed that because of his greater size and strength, fans and fellow players did not credit his achievements as much as they should have. “Nobody roots for Goliath,” he famously complained. On the Lakers team in the 1971–1972 season, Chamberlain adopted an uncharacteristic defensive role and, playing with a broken hand in the finals, again won the NBA’s MVP award. He retired one season later and in 1978, his first year of eligibility, was elected to the NBA Hall of Fame.

Unlike many professional athletes, Chamberlain enjoyed his retirement more than his playing career. He pursued several other sports—most successfully, volleyball—although his former professional status prohibited his dream of appearing in the Olympics. Chamberlain also sponsored a women’s track team, Wilt’s Wonder Women. His second autobiography, A View from Above (1991), gained him notoriety for his claim to have slept with twenty thousand women, but it also depicts a man with a lively intelligence, a fierce competitive edge, and rather traditionalist tastes. He reminisces about home cooking and NAT KING COLE and regrets the arrival of vast sports arenas and shopping malls. This memoir, albeit somewhat rambling, deals humorously with his celebrity and with shorter people’s reactions to his height. Although he remained physically active throughout the 1990s, he also began to suffer from heart disease and died, apparently of a heart attack, in his Los Angeles home.

In the 1960s Chamberlain’s notoriety and his scoring records helped build the national audience for what had been a minor sport. Later basketball stars, such as Magic Johnson and MICHAEL JORDAN, may have been better liked, but none matched Chamberlain’s dominance in both scoring and rebounding.

CHARLES, RAY

(23 Sept. 1930–) singer, bandleader, and entrepreneur, was born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, the son of Bailey Robinson, a day worker, and Aretha (maiden name unknown). Charles’s younger brother and only sibling drowned at age four. By the age of seven Charles had lost his sight to glaucoma and was sent to the State School for the Blind and Deaf in St. Augustine, Florida, where he remained until his mother’s death when he was fifteen. It was during his time at the school for the blind, which was segregated by race, that he received formal piano lessons and learned to read braille. After his mother’s death, he set out on his own, traveling and working as a musician around Jacksonville, Florida.

Charles’s earliest influences as a musician were the jazz and blues pianist Charles Brown and the pianist and singer NAT KING COLE. His ability to learn the styles of both musicians allowed him to gain work in clubs where audiences were familiar with their music. Sensing the need to branch out beyond Florida, Charles moved to Seattle, Washington, at the age of eighteen. In Seattle, Charles formed a band, the McSon trio, and made his first recording, his own composition, “Confession Blues,” on the Swing Time label owned by Jack Lauderdale, who encouraged Charles to move to Los Angeles in 1950. In Los Angeles, Charles recorded two more singles for Swing Time before he began to tour nationally with the guitarist Lowell Fulson. Charles eventually became Fulson’s musical director. In 1952 Charles signed with the Shaw Agency and began to tour nationally as a solo artist. On the strength of his second single, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand,” Charles was signed to a recording contract by Ahmet Ertugen, the founder of Atlantic Records. Charles’s first release for the label was “It Should Have Been Me” (1952).

Charles’s early recordings with the Atlantic label favored the styles of Charles Brown and Nat Cole—styles that had earned him a minor reputation as a rhythm-and-blues artist. But it was with the single “I’ve Got a Woman,” backed by “Come Back Baby,” that Charles began to exhibit the innovative style that would become the foundation of soul music. At the core of Charles’s innovation was his use of chords and rhythms drawn from black gospel music to write and record music that had distinctly secular themes. “I’ve Got a Woman,” for example, was based on “Let’s Talk about Jesus,” a gospel hit for the Bells of Joy in 1951. Follow-up recordings by Charles, like “A Fool for You” (1955) and “Drown in My Own Tears” (1955), also adhered to Charles’s “soul” strategy, but “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” in May of 1956 became his first crossover hit.

As Charles’s new style became popular, he began to face criticism from black ministers and gospel audiences. The genius of his burgeoning style was his intuitive understanding that the “Saturday night sinner” and the “Sunday morning saved” were often one and the same. The addition of doo-wop girls called the Raeletts accentuated a feeling of call and response, the verbal interaction common between a black minister and his choir. By the time Charles scored with the gospel-frenzied “What’d I Say,” a top-ten pop single in 1959, he had inspired legions of followers, many of whom, like Sam Cooke and ARETHA FRANKLIN, went directly from the black church to the pop charts.

Ray Charles crosses both musical and racial boundaries to bring his music to a wide range of audiences. Library of Congress

Much of Charles’s early success was rooted in his ability to master many musical genres, most notably jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul. After Charles and his band made a successful appearance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, Atlantic capitalized on his growing popularity with the recording The Genius of Ray Charles (1959), which included the pop standards “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” “Come Rain or Shine,” “It Had to Be You,” and the big-band romp “Let the Good Times Roll.” The album was the last that Charles recorded for the label, though there were subsequent releases of previously recorded music. In November 1959 Charles signed with ABC-Paramount, which offered a larger advance on future royalties, a higher rate of royalties, and ownership of his own master recordings. Charles had mixed success with his first two singles for ABC-Paramount, but with the third release he achieved his biggest hit ever.

Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” (1960) was an old ballad that sentimentally recalls the American South. Charles infused the song with his unique soulful style and in the process made it one of his signature tunes. The song went to number three on the pop charts and earned Charles the first two of twelve Grammy Awards from the National Academy for the Recording Arts and Sciences. The following year Charles achieved his first number-one pop song and another Grammy with Percy Mayfield’s “Hit the Road Jack.”

The success of “Georgia on My Mind” signaled a new direction in Charles’s recording career. Always fascinated by country-and-western musicians, Charles finally recorded a full-fledged country song, Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On,” toward the end of his tenure at Atlantic. This was followed by Charles’s groundbreaking Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in April 1962. Though ABC-Paramount was fearful that Charles would lose his core fan base, Charles scored his second number-one pop single with “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Despite the label’s initial concerns, the song also topped the R & B charts for sixteen weeks. So successful was Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music that Charles released a follow-up in late 1962. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music 2 included versions of Hank Williams’s “Your Cheating Heart” and the popular standby “You Are My Sunshine.”

When Charles released Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul in 1963, it was clear that he had so successfully integrated so many genres into his repertoire that it was no longer possible to label his music simply jazz, soul, or country and western. Ray Charles was becoming widely known as a song stylist, as evidenced by the success of his renditions of tracks like “That Lucky Old Sun” and “01’ Man River,” both from Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul, and the singles “Without Love (There Is Nothing)” and “Busted,” a top-five single on both the pop and R & B charts. In 1964 Charles was arrested for drug possession in Boston. He received a five-year suspended sentence, kicked his twenty-year heroin addiction, and miraculously continued his music career unabated. Although taste in popular music changed during the 1960s, with the appearance of Motown and British groups like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, Charles continued to make quality recordings in his own style. He even covered “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles on his recordings Listen (1967) and A Portrait of Ray (1968). Charles also began to record themes for Hollywood films, the best known being “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965) and “In the Heat of the Night,” the latter from the 1967 film starring SIDNEY POITIER. The film’s soundtrack was arranged by Charles’s old friend QUINCY JONES, whom he had met when he moved to Seattle in 1948. Charles’s “Here We Go Again,” released in 1967, was his last major crossover recording until the late 1980s.

Although Charles largely remained on the periphery of the civil rights movement as a recording artist, preferring to provide financial assistance privately, he did offer his political vision on A Message from the People (1972). This album includes versions of STEVIE WONDER’s “Heaven Help Us All,” JAMES WELDON JOHNSON’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (often referred to as the “Negro National Anthem”), and Dick Holler’s “Abraham, Martin and John.” The recording also features a stirring version of “America the Beautiful” that was re-released as a single in 1976 to coincide with the U.S. bicentennial celebration. Charles also earned a Grammy Award in 1975 for his rendition of Wonder’s politically charged “Living for the City.”

Charles recorded regularly with little fanfare throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, though he was feted with awards and acknowledgements. In 1981 he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Boulevard “Walk of Fame.” He was among the first inductees into the Rock Hall of Fame in 1986, and in 1979 the state of Georgia declared his version of “Georgia on My Mind” the official state song. Charles released his autobiography Brother Ray, written with David Ritz, in 1978. He had a bit of a renaissance in the mid-1980s, making popular recordings with the country artists Willie Nelson (“Seven Spanish Angels”), George Jones (“We Didn’t See a Thing”), and Hank Williams Jr. (“Two Old Cats like Us”). In 1989 he teamed again with Quincy Jones to record “I’ll Be Good to You,” with Chaka Khan. The song reached number one on the R & B charts. Charles earned his twelfth Grammy Award in 1993 for “A Song for You.” Popular cameos on Sesame Street and commercial endorsements for Pepsi Cola kept his music and image firmly embedded in the minds of generations of Americans.

Ray Charles was married twice and has nine children, but his music always took precedence over all other activities. Throughout his career Charles has maintained an intense touring schedule, not simply for the economic benefit but also to bring various styles of black music to audiences that may have otherwise remained unfamiliar with them. Charles’s influence on American popular music has perhaps been rivaled only by figures like DUKE ELLINGTON, B. B. KING, and JAMES BROWN, all of whom toured well into their sixties and seventies, each holding up the banner for the particular brand of popular music he is best known for. Charles’s remarkable ability to draw from many styles of popular music made it possible for him to cross—and thereby diminish—musical, racial, political, and geographical barriers.

CHAVIS, JOHN

(1763–13 June 1838), Presbyterian minister and teacher, was born in Granville County, North Carolina; the names of his parents are unknown. He grew up as a free black near Mecklenberg, Virginia. By his own account, Chavis was born free and was a Revolutionary War army veteran. Details of his military service and the events of his life immediately following the war are not known, but he began his studies for the Presbyterian ministry in 1792 at the age of twenty-nine. According to an apocryphal account, one planter had a wager with another that it was impossible to educate a black man. In order to settle their dispute, they sent Chavis to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). More than likely, Chavis’s religious fervor and potential for scholarship attracted the attention of Presbyterian leaders in Virginia, who believed a black clergyman might do a better job of evangelizing slaves and free blacks than white ministers.

During his three years at the College of New Jersey, Chavis studied under the private tutelage of the college president, John Witherspoon, who often instructed one or two black students and several Native Americans as well. Chavis’s studies in New Jersey ended when Witherspoon died in 1794. The next year he resumed studies at Liberty Hall Academy (now Washington & Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, also a Presbyterian school. Chavis completed his studies there in 1799, and when it licensed him to preach in early 1800, the Lexington Presbytery expressed hopes that he would serve the blacks of the community.

After leaving the Lexington Presbytery in 1801 Chavis served the Hanover, Virginia, Presbytery before going to work under the supervision of the Synod of Virginia in 1804. Ultimately, he also preached in Maryland and North Carolina. At the beginning of each new assignment, Presbyterian leaders admonished Chavis to focus his efforts on the evangelization of slaves and free blacks, but his preaching attracted large numbers of whites and hardly any blacks. In 1883 one white North Carolinian remembered Chavis as a “venerable old Negro preacher,” who was “respected as a man . . . familiar with the proprieties of social life, yet modest and unassuming, and sober in language and customs.” Southern white admirers seemed to look beyond his race, while slaves and free blacks were unable to identify with one of their own who sounded and behaved like a white man.

By 1807 Chavis had opened a small school and devoted almost all of his attention to that endeavor. During the school’s first year of operation he taught both white and black children together, but some white parents objected. The next year he advertised daytime classes for white students and evening classes for blacks. At different times, Chavis operated his school in Chatham, Wake, Orange, and Granville counties of North Carolina, and it attracted prominent white students, including the sons of the state’s chief justice Leonard Henderson; James Horner, who later founded the Horner School in Oxford, North Carolina; Charles Manly, who later served as the state’s governor; Willie P. Mangum, a prominent Whig senator; and Abram Rencher, who became governor of New Mexico.

Chavis charged low tuition rates, which kept his school full while providing ample money for his own support and that of his wife. By March 1828 he was able to boast that the enrollment had reached sixteen. The small, orderly school ran for about thirty years before political developments forced it to close. The 1831 insurrection of NAT TURNER created a climate of fear and distrust among white southerners that resulted in severe restrictions on the black population. The North Carolina legislature passed a law that prevented blacks from preaching or teaching, thus creating economic hardships for Chavis.

By 1832 the sixty-nine-year-old Chavis turned to the Orange, North Carolina, Presbytery for support. After careful study, the Presbytery resolved to take up a collection for his support. The sums forwarded to Chavis were never sufficient, and there is evidence that he found his situation extremely embarrassing. In 1833 he hoped to earn money for himself by publishing an essay entitled “The Extent of the Atonement,” but he needed the Presbytery to pay publication costs. Many other religious leaders had already written on the subject, and the Presbytery decided that such an essay would not be interesting enough to sell. Chavis continued to depend on them for charity throughout the remainder of his life. From October 1834 to April 1835 the Presbytery expended $81.95 for his support, but the sum was not always as generous. In the fall of 1835, when the Orange Presbytery divided, the new Roanoke Presbytery assumed Chavis’s support. In 1837 it resolved to pay him fifty dollars annually.

John Chavis retained a close personal relationship with his former student, Senator Willie P. Mangum, and advised him to reject the demands of the abolitionists during the mid-1830s. His position on slavery was cautious because he feared for the plight of masses of black people who would face homelessness and uncertain futures. Chavis did not want them to be more miserable than they already were. His position seems startling, but no one was any more aware of the difficulties of living free than this impoverished man, who constantly depended on the charity of whites for support.

John Chavis died in North Carolina sometime between the April and October 1838 meetings of the Presbytery. At the October meeting, they resolved to continue support for his widow.

CHENAULT, KENNETH IRVINE

(2 June 1951–), lawyer and corporate leader, was born in Mineola, New York, to Hortenius Chenault, a dentist and a Morehouse and Howard University graduate, and Anne N. Quick, a dental hygiënist and Howard alumna. The second of three brothers and one sister, Ken grew up in middle-class, mostly white Hempstead, Long Island, and attended the innovative, private Waldorf School in Garden City through twelfth grade. Although both his parents had graduated top in their classes, Kenneth was at first a middling student. He improved academically and became class president and captain of the track and basketball teams. He also avidly read biographies of famous people, including FREDERICK DOUGLASS, W. E. B. DU BOIS, and Winston Churchill.

Starting Springfield College on an athletic scholarship, he transferred under the mentorship of Waldorf’s Peter Curran to Bowdoin College in Maine. There he joined two dozen black pioneers at the all-male (until 1972) and predominantly white elite college, graduating in 1973 with a BA in History, magna cum laude. He told a friend, “I’ve got to get into the system to help my people. If I get in, I can help somebody else” (Ebony, July 1997). Attending Harvard Law School, he became moot court champion and received a JD in 1976 (when he also got an American Express Gold card), joining the Massachusetts bar five years later. In 1977 Chenault married Kathryn Cassell, a Tufts University political science major and New York University law student who became a United Negro College Fund lawyer. They live in New York State with two sons, Kenneth Jr. and Kevin.

Chenault became an associate with the New York corporate law firm of Rogers & Wells from 1977 to 1979. Without an MBA, in 1979 he joined a Boston business-consulting firm, Bain & Co., which familiarized him with large corporations, executives, and business strategies. Among his Bain mentors was a Harvard Law School classmate, the son of a former Michigan governor and a future Massachusetts governor, W. Mitt Romney, who takes credit for hiring Chenault, saying, “He was able to process a lot of conflict . . . cut through the confusion . . . arrive at very powerful . . . recommendations and then see them through to their implementation” (Ebony, July 1997).

In 1981 Chenault was hired as director of strategic planning for American Express Company in New York City, whose “membership has its privileges” branding of “charge” cards (payable monthly) versus credit cards (revolving payment) differentiated it from Visa and MasterCard. In 1983 he was promoted to vice president of Merchandise Services, a foundering division that he reorganized from a $150-million to a $500-million department. In 1984 he became general manager of Merchandise Servicess and senior vice president of AmEx Travel-Related Services (TRS), with green, gold, platinum, and travelers’ checks lines. In 1986 he became executive vice president and general manager of the platinum/gold card division. Under his leadership AmEx became the fifth-leading direct marketer as he upscaled Merchandise Servicess to produce 20 percent yearly growth. But the old-line company, founded in 1850 and offering “charge cards” to compete with Diners Club since 1958, initially resisted his innovations.

In 1987 AmEx finally introduced for current members a credit card, Optima, to compete with Visa and MasterCard. While the company anticipated that existing AmEx members would be creditworthy, in fact, Optima defaults were twice as high as predicted, and company profits dropped. Although the Optima problems were not Chenault’s responsibility, he recognized that AmEx was “arrogant and felt entitled” to customer patronage (Current Biography, 1998), and he instituted innovations such as linking cards to frequent flyer mileage. In 1988 Chenault became executive vice president of the Consumer Card and Financial Services Group, again producing record growth. Black Enterprise named him among the twenty-five “most powerful black executives in corporate America.” In 1990 his listing appeared in Who’s Who in America and in 1992 Who’s Who among Black Americans.

In 1990 Chenault became president of AmEx Consumer Card and Financial Services groups, and by 1991 he managed relations with all firms accepting AmEx cards. Then he faced the “Boston Fee Party,” a revolt of one hundred restaurant owners unhappy with unresponsive AmEx treatment and steep transaction fees (3.5 percent vs. 2 percent for Visa and MasterCard). Chenault negotiated selective fee reductions for electronic transactions to keep the merchants as AmEx vendors and maintain the company’s competitive position. He also began extending and downscaling the brand by reaching mass markets at Kmart, Sears, and Wal-Mart.

In 1993, when Harvey Golub became CEO, Chenault became president of American Express USA, and his attention to consumer trends and developments in computer technology improved AmEx’s position. He increased company offerings to sixty co-branded cards. Merchants doubled to sixty thousand, with transaction fees of 2.7 percent. In 1994 the Optima True Grace card (later ended) was introduced, along with cards for groups like college students and seniors, though AmEx’s share of card transactions fell from 22.9 percent in 1990 to 15.9 percent in 1996.

In 1995 Golub named Chenault vice chairman of AmEx. Early in his term Chenault had to “restructure” by laying off 15,800 jobs to cut three billion dollars in costs, and he was recognized within the company as having handled the layoff professionally. Employment rose to 73,620 in 1997. In 1996 he became head of TRS International, and in 1997 AmEx market share rose for the first time in ten years. Even though AmEx faced falling share prices, card members grew to 54.3 million in 1998. In 1998 Visa still dominated the industry at 54 percent, with MasterCard at 28 percent, and AmEx at 13.7 percent, though antitrust efforts against Visa and MasterCard promised to reduce their market share.

In February 1997 Golub named Chenault president and chief operating officer, designated him heir apparent “as the primary internal candidate to succeed” as CEO when Golub retired in 2004, and placed Chenault on the company board. When it appeared that Chenault might become the first African American to run one of America’s largest corporations, he remarked that it would be “naïve and untrue to say that race is not a factor in our society” but at AmEx, “I have been totally judged on my performance” (quoted in Jessie Smith, Notable Black American Men, [1992], 192). In December 1998 Business Week ran a cover story on “The Rise of a Star.”

In May 1999 Golub announced that Chenault would become CEO in 2001 when Golub stepped down three years early to enable his successor to increase his responsibilities within the company. In September 1999 Chenault became Black Enterprise Corporate Executive of the Year and appeared in International Who’s Who. Although FRANKLIN DELANO RAINES became the first black CEO of a Fortune 500 company in 1999, Chenault would become the first black CEO of a Dow Jones blue chip firm.

In January 2001 Chenault became AmEx CEO and, in April, chairman of the twenty-two-billion-dollar enterprise. Early on he faced a financial crisis over write-offs of junk bonds. Soon after, he ably managed from afar the crisis at AmEx after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, evacuating the company headquarters in the nearby World Financial Center and helping 500,000 stranded cardholders by increasing credit limits. At an emotional meeting, he took command of comforting a shocked staff. “Ken epitomizes two attributes I think will be important here,” said Golub. “One is courage and the other is composure” (Business Week, 29 Oct. 2001). Not long afterward, Chenault stood at George W. Bush’s side at “ground zero,” stressing the need to improve security at airports and public sites, and he appeared with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor George Pataki on requests for federal funds to rebuild the city. In 2001 Fortune named him one of the fifty most powerful African American executives.

Following his philosophy that “part of being a leader is pulling people from disparate backgrounds together” and that minorities, “more than others, must give back to help our community and to ease the way of those who will follow” (Chenault, 11–12), Chenault is on the boards of Junior Achievement, the New York Medical Center, Bowdoin College, the NCAA, and the ARTHUR ASHE Institute for Urban Health. He was also named Corporate Arts Patron by the Harlem Studio Museum. Chenault belongs to the American Bar Association and the Council on Foreign Relations, and he has served on the boards of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, IBM, and Quaker Oats. He received honorary degrees from Adelphi, Bowdoin, Howard, Morgan State, Notre Dame, and SUNY Stony Brook. A team builder who shattered the glass ceiling, Chenault exemplifies his own dictum that “as barriers against us fall, we must not fail to move forward” (Chenault, 13).

CHESNUTT, CHARLES WADDELL

(20 June 1858–15 Nov. 1932), writer, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, a horse car driver, and Ann Maria Sampson. His parents were free African Americans who had left Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1856 to escape the oppressiveness of life in a slave state and its sparse opportunity. They were married in Cleveland in 1857. During the Civil War, Chesnutt’s father served four years as a teamster in the Union army, but the family returned to Fayetteville in 1866 because A. J. Chesnutt’s father, Waddell Cade (a local white farm owner—the name Chesnutt came from A. J.’s mother, Ann), helped his son establish a grocery store there. Young Charles helped in the store and over the years heard many things there about southern life and folkways that he recorded or remembered and that later became part of or informed his writings. Charles attended the Howard School, which existed through the efforts of local black citizens and the Freedmen’s Bureau, but after his father lost his store and moved to a nearby farm, Charles was forced at age fourteen to change his role in the school from that of eager pupil to pupil-teacher in order to help with family finances. He continued to read widely in various fields, especially in literature, thereby further educating himself.

Chesnutt began teaching in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1872 and in the summers in other North and South Carolina communities. In the fall of 1877 he returned to Fayetteville to work in the new state normal school there. The following summer he married one of the school’s teachers, Susan U. Perry, and the first of their four children was born the following spring. Though Chesnutt became principal of the normal school at age twenty-two and continued to study various subjects regularly, he felt restricted in opportunities and intellectually isolated in the post-Civil War South. In 1883 he used his self-taught ability to take shorthand at two hundred words per minute to escape, first to New York for a few months and then to Cleveland, where he was joined by his family in April 1884. He lived there the rest of his life.

In Cleveland, Chesnutt worked as an office clerk and court reporter, passed the Ohio bar exam in 1887 (with the highest grade in his group), and established a prosperous legal stenography firm, eventually after several moves acquiring a fourteen-room home. More importantly, he worked at becoming a writer. He had been moving in that direction for some time, and in 1872 a local weekly Negro newspaper had published his condemnation of the reading of dime novels. The growth of his interest in literature and his ambition to become a writer are reflected in numerous entries in his journals during the 1870s and 1880s, especially as he became more and more aware of what had been written and was being written about the South and black people, subjects about which he felt confident of his own better knowledge and understanding. His journal entry for 29 May 1880 spoke of a purpose for his intended writing that would improve the South and all of its people. It included the declaration, “I think I must write a book.” However, before he would accomplish that goal there were to be years of sketches, tales, and stories, beginning in 1885 published in various periodicals, including eventually such widely known magazines as Family Fiction, Puck, the Overland Monthly, the Crisis, the Southern Workman, the Century, the Outlook, Youth’s Companion, and various newspapers in some of the nation’s larger cities.

Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream, (1905). University of North Carolina

Chesnutt’s most important breakthrough came with the publication of his tale “The Goophered Grapevine” in the Atlantic Monthly for August 1887. Although the editors did not then know the author’s race, this was the first piece of short fiction published by an African American in a magazine with such prestige as to easily put the work before the majority of American readers. Chesnutt would publish short fiction and articles (both usually concerning racial matters) for much of the rest of his life, but very much tapering off after the early part of the twentieth century.

“The Goophered Grapevine” was the first of three of his stories in the Atlantic Monthly that focused on conjuring as an important aspect of black folklife. This is revealed in post–Civil War tales about earlier times in the Fayetteville area told by Uncle Julius, a shrewd and likable character who uses the stories to his own advantage and along the way also reveals much about what slavery meant in the daily concerns of its victims, of which he had been one. These three tales and four other Uncle Julius tales became Chesnutt’s first book, The Conjure Woman, published by Houghton Mifflin (1899). In these stories Chesnutt broadened the range of racial realism in American literature, and all of his five volumes of fiction would deal with various facets of racial problems, with strong focusing on the experiences and points of view of his African American characters, though his concerns were always for both blacks and whites in American society and particularly in the South.

The stories of his second book of fiction, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, also published by Houghton Mifflin (1899), are in most ways quite different from the conjure stories and illustrate the variety of Chesnutt’s skill and art. They are more contemporary and less rural and folk oriented, with more focus (sometimes ironically) on middle-class African Americans, especially those with light skin color. About half of these stories are set in North Carolina, and about half in Ohio. As its title suggests, this book intended to demonstrate the complex difficulties and sensitivities of those who (like Chesnutt himself) were of obvious racially mixed blood in societies both north and south, in which they aspired to rise even in the face of uncertainties about how that would be viewed. Chesnutt had very light skin and few Negroid features. He wrote about respect and injustice from personal concern and experience. These stories are sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, as he tried to write from a balanced and whole view of racial phenomena he had observed at close hand. Various reviews called attention to Chesnutt’s presentation of African American characters in other than stereotypes and his making them of real interest and concern as individual human beings. Notable among such reviews was high praise from William Dean Howells in the Atlantic Monthly for May 1900, which took note of both of Chesnutt’s volumes of fiction and of his biography of FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1899) in the Beacon Biographies Series. Howells also identified Chesnutt with various well-known contemporary writers of realistic fiction whom Howells championed.

On 30 September 1899 Chesnutt had closed his stenography business in order to pursue writing full time. In the autumn of 1900 Houghton Mifflin brought out The House behind the Cedars, the first of three novels Chesnutt would publish. It is a fuller and more straightforward exploration of some of the miscegenation themes that had been found in his second volume of stories. The primary setting of the novel is the Fayetteville area, and it focuses on the emotional and practical (and sometimes tragic) difficulties of relatively white African Americans who chose to pass as white in the post–Civil War South. Although Chesnutt himself chose not to pass even though he could have, he knew those who had done so and understood and sympathized with their motives. Another novel, The Marrow of Tradition, followed from Houghton Mifflin in October 1901. This work, with his largest cast and most complicated plot, also is set in North Carolina. It is based on the riot that occurred in Wilmington in 1898 when white supremacists took over the city government with accompanying violence against blacks. In addition to having concerns with racial justice, as had his first novel, this book also has some focus on the aspirations of African Americans who choose to participate in the more highly respected professions. However, this work is even more interracial, its principal characters are white, and there is more direct criticism of the white population. While Howells praised the straightforwardness of the novel’s moral concerns, he was disturbed by its bitterness. It did not sell well enough for Chesnutt to continue his attempt to succeed as a full-time author, and he reopened his stenography business before the year was over.

While disappointment and the need to gain financial stability slowed Chesnutt’s literary aspirations, he did publish one more novel. Another North Carolinian, Walter Hines Page, while an editor at Houghton Mifflin had praised Chesnutt’s accuracy of local color and had assisted his progress. Now Page persuaded Chesnutt to leave Houghton Mifflin, even though his relations with that firm had been good, and in September 1905 (the year in which Thomas Dixon’s racially negative novel The Clansman was a bestseller) Page’s firm (Doubleday, Page & Company) brought out The Colonel’s Dream. Its protagonist, a former Confederate officer, returns to his southeastern North Carolina hometown and proposes a plan to bring it out of the economic hardships caused by the Civil War and its aftermath. He is willing to invest his own resources, but the plan is rejected because of greed and racial prejudice in the community. Reflecting Chesnutt’s continuing loving concern for the area where he had spent his formative years, this book is dedicated to “the great number of those who are seeking, in whatever manner or degree . . . to bring the forces of enlightenment to bear upon the vexed problems which harass the South.”

However, the various-faceted message for the South (and the country as a whole) that pervades Chesnutt’s fiction and nonfiction, particularly concerning economic and social justice in relation to race, was not being accepted by those for whom it was most intended. He now turned his efforts more to other aspects of his life, among them his family, his business, and his involvement in several cultural organizations in Cleveland. One of these was the prestigious bibliophilie Rowfant Club, which refused membership to this nationally respected author three times before finally admitting him in 1910. His satiric “Baxter’s Procrustes” (Atlantic Monthly, June 1904) is based on that club, and many think it is his best-written story. His career as a writer resulted in his publishing between 1885 and 1931 sixty-one pieces of short fiction (including those in the two volumes); one biography; thirty-one speeches, articles, and essays; seven poems; and three novels. Also, he left unpublished a sizable correspondence, one play, six novels, fifty-three essays and speeches, eighteen short stories (most of which have now been published by Render), three journals, and one notebook.

Chesnutt’s published fiction, particularly his five books, was his most important accomplishment both artistically and in his attempts to improve social (particularly racial) relations. However, in addition to his fiction, his early work as an educator, his stenographic work in Cleveland, and his other writings, he also was active in various other pursuits that gave him pleasure, visibility, influence, reputation, and opportunity. He put his concerns, his knowledge of the law, and his respected reputation and personality to good use in speaking out on political and legal matters locally and nationally, particularly when they concerned the rights of African Americans. Early in his career as a writer he had made the acquaintance of George Washington Cable and through this association had joined in the efforts of the Open-Letter Club, a project of several persons interested in and knowledgeable about the South to provide accurate information about that region and racial matters. Chesnutt was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Cleveland and nationally, and there was mutual respect between him and both BOOKER T. WASHINGTON and W. E. B. DU BOIS. Though these two leaders took somewhat different approaches to the problems of African Americans and how best to solve them, Chesnutt saw merit in some aspects of the positions of both men and said so publicly, but also spoke up when he disagreed with them. He was a member of the General Committee of the NAACP and of Washington’s Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Interests of the Negro Race. He addressed immediate socioeconomic problems and in various ways tried to promote awareness of and concern over the racial situation in America (particularly in the South—William Andrews has referred to his three novels as a New South trilogy). Chesnutt felt that the racial situation was undermining American democracy and that solutions to it would require sensitive understanding, ethical and moral conscience, and courage. In both his fiction and non-fiction his view of the proper future for African Americans was for gradual assimilation of them into the mainstream of American life through education and hard work. His three daughters and his one son all graduated from well-known colleges, and he lived to see them established in their chosen endeavors and moving into that mainstream, as he had in his way before them.

Though the major part of Chesnutt’s literary career ended with the publication of The Colonel’s Dream in 1905, respect for him as a pioneering writer continued. Among the recognition given him was an invitation to attend Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday party at Delmonico’s in New York in 1905 and membership in the National Arts Club in 1917. In 1913 Wilberforce University gave him an honorary degree, and in 1928 he was awarded the NAACP’s prestigious Spingarn Medal for his “pioneer work as a literary artist depicting the life and struggle of Americans of Negro descent, and for his long and useful career as scholar, worker and freeman of one of America’s greatest cities.” That same year The Conjure Woman was republished by Houghton Mifflin in a special edition with a foreword by the literary critic and leader in racial concerns Joel Spingarn. In 1926 the committee to choose the first recipient of the newly established Harmon Foundation Award for the work of an African American writer during the preceding year recommended that the chronological stipulation be waived and the first award be given to Chesnutt to acknowledge his pioneering work and his continuing example to other African American writers. This was not allowed, and unfortunately Chesnutt never knew of this acknowledgment of high esteem from a distinguished panel of his literary peers both black and white.

Chesnutt was the first important African American writer whose primary genre was fiction and the first African American writer to be published primarily by major publishers and major periodicals. Writing and publishing during times that were not very socially, politically, or legally favorable to African Americans in general, Chesnutt wrote fiction to provide entertainment and to call attention to racism and social injustice, especially for middle-class light-skinned blacks and working-class blacks in small towns and the rural South. He believed that the sources of as well as the solutions to their problems were in the South, so he wrote about the South and in ways that he intended to be more accurate, realistic, and better than those of others using similar subject matter. He purposefully dealt with topics regarding racial problems, such as miscegenation, which he felt other southern writers were avoiding or mistreating. In doing this he used various literary devices, including accurate dialect and details of local color and black life, satire, humor, irony, pathos, and even first-person point of view for nonblack characters. However, while he wrote with unblinking truth and obvious strong social purpose, he also wrote without rancor and with attention to and faithful portrayal of both sides of problems, creating a variety of memorable characters. He especially hoped to counter the too often derogatory and stereotypical portrayal of black characters and to make readers more aware of the positive and often complex humanity and variety of African Americans, the mistreatment of minorities and their need for greater social justice, and the fallibility of human nature.

Sylvia Render has pointed out that Chesnutt promoted American ideals in popular American forms and in accord with accepted contemporary literary standards, and was published by very reputable firms. However, after his death his works were generally under-read and undervalued until attention to them revived in the 1960s. In his Spingarn Medal acceptance Chesnutt said, “I didn’t write my stories as Negro propaganda—propaganda is apt to be deadly to art—but I used the better types [of Negroes], confident that the truth would prove the most valuable propaganda.” A few months later he wrote to JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, “I wrote the truth as I saw it, with no special catering to anybody’s prejudices.” He died in Cleveland.

CHESTER, THOMAS MORRIS

(11 May 1834–30 Sept. 1892), lawyer and Civil War correspondent, was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the son of George Chester and Jane Maria (maiden name unknown), restaurateurs. When, as a young man of eighteen, Chester decided to emigrate to Liberia, he wrote Martin H. Freeman, his former teacher at the Avery Institute in Pittsburgh, that his passion for liberty could no longer “submit to the insolent indignities and contemptuous conduct to which it has almost become natural for the colored people dishonorably to submit themselves.” It was a bold assertion of independence for one who had come of age in a household long associated with the anticolonization sentiments of radical abolitionism. But the country’s willingness to appease southern interests, symbolized by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, persuaded Chester, sometime before his 1853 graduation, to emigrate.

Anxious to recruit the son of such a prominent black family, leaders of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society led Chester to believe that he could complete his education in Monrovia. But the colony could not meet his needs, and within a year Chester was back in the United States where, with the support of the New York Colonization Society, he attended Thetford Academy in Vermont from 1854 to 1856. Following graduation Chester returned to Monrovia, where he became active in politics and published and edited the short-lived Star of Liberia, which appeared intermittently between 1859 and 1861. He also taught school at the new settlement of Robertsport and in Monrovia. During this period he made frequent trips back to the United States, under the auspices of the Colonization Society, to promote emigration to Liberia.

Continued troubles with political rivals in Monrovia persuaded Chester in 1861 to return to the United States where he continued to work for the cause of colonization. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation prompted him to delay his return to Liberia in early 1863. Chester headed the recruitment drive in central Pennsylvania for the two black Massachusetts regiments but ceased his activities when it became clear that blacks would not be appointed officers. Before resigning the civilian appointment, however, Chester became the first black to be given a captaincy in the Pennsylvania state militia when he raised a company to help defend the state capital against Confederate forces in the weeks before Gettysburg.

In 1864 Chester was employed by John Russell Young, editor of the Philadelphia Press, as a war correspondent attached to the Army of the James. He was the first and only African American to report on the war for a major daily newspaper. Chester’s dispatches provide the most sustained accounts of black troop activity around Petersburg and Richmond in the last year of the war. He reported on the contributions of black troops to the war effort, sent moving accounts of the death and carnage of battle, and, with a rakish sense of humor, provided glimpses into camp life. Chester was one of the first reporters to enter Richmond, and with some bravado and a touch of irony he wrote his next dispatch seated in the chair of the Speaker of the Confederate House of Representatives. Chester remained in Richmond until June 1865, reporting on efforts to rebuild the city and on the activities of the African American community.

In 1866 Chester was commissioned by the Garnet League, the Harrisburg chapter of the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League, to undertake a fund-raising tour of Britain and the Continent. Even before his assignment with the Press Chester had been thinking of studying law in England and in 1863 had briefly visited London, where he made invaluable contacts in abolitionist circles. The tour was a rousing personal success although it is unclear exactly how much money he raised. During his visit to Russia, Chester was introduced to the royal court by Cassius M. Clay, U.S. minister to St. Petersburg. Chester was invited to join the annual review of the imperial guard and to dine with the royal family.

At the conclusion of his mission Chester applied and was admitted to Middle Temple, London, where he studied law from 1867 to 1870. In April 1870 he became the first African American to be called to the English bar. A few weeks later Chester argued his first case in the hallowed halls of the Old Bailey, defending a shoemaker charged with murder. Although all the evidence pointed to the defendant’s guilt, Chester’s skillful cross-examination saved his client from the gallows. The accused was sentenced instead to ten-year’s penal servitude.

A few months after his return to the United States in mid-1870, Chester decided to settle in New Orleans, having been impressed with the level of black political power in the city. By the time of his arrival in 1871, the Republican Party was immobilized by factionalism and violence. On 1 January 1872, in the streets of New Orleans, Chester was shot (but not seriously wounded) by members of one of the political factions.

In 1873 Chester was admitted to the Louisiana bar, the first black man to be admitted according to contemporary news accounts, and he played a prominent role in many of the civil rights suits brought by blacks under the state’s new antidiscrimination laws. In May 1873 he was commissioned a brigadier general in the Louisiana state militia by Governor William Kellogg. The militias had been formed by Republican administrations to fill the void left by departing federal troops. Two years later Kellogg appointed Chester superintendent of public education for the First Division, which included areas around New Orleans. The following year Chester was moved to head the Fifth Division with offices in Delta, Madison Parish. Chester retained both the rank of brigadier general and the position of superintendent until the return to power of the Democrats in 1876.

With the aid of powerful friends in Pennsylvania, particularly members of the Cameron family, Chester was appointed U.S. commissioner for New Orleans in 1878, a position he held for almost two years. In December 1882 he was sent, as an assistant to the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, on a special mission to investigate political violence in the area. But disputes with Washington over payments for expenses led to the termination of his appointment before he had completed his investigation.

Chester married Florence Johnson, twenty-one years his junior, in 1879. Little else is known of his life except that in 1884 he was named president of the North Carolina Wilmington, Wrightsville and Onslow Railroad, a company established by African Americans to build a rail system connecting the towns to important markets in Virginia. The plans never materialized, and Chester returned to his law practices in Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Chester died at his mother’s home in Harrisburg of an apparent heart attack.

Chester was fiercely independent, driven by what he called “self respect and pride of race.” As he told many audiences at home and abroad, he was descended from a long line of independent black men and women who had openly defied all forms of racial restrictions. In Liberia his work as editor and teacher contributed to the social and political life of Robertsport and Monrovia. In the United States he sought to push the country toward realizing the dream of full equality for all its people.

CHILDRESS, ALICE

(12 Oct. 1916–14 Aug. 1994), playwright and actress, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and brought up in Harlem, New York, by her grandmother, Eliza Campbell White. Although Alice’s grandmother had little or no formal education, she had an natural creative spirit, and fostered in her granddaughter a thirst for knowledge and an appreciation for the arts by exposing her to museums, galleries, libraries, theater, and concerts. She also encouraged Alice to role-play and create stories and skits, many of which grew out of Wednesday-night testimonials at Harlem’s Salem Church. These testimonials, Alice later realized, allowed poor people in their community to relieve themselves of burdens linked to race, class, and gender biases.

Alice lived on 118th Street between Lenox and Fifth Avenues and attended Public School 81 and the Julia Ward Howe Junior High School. She enrolled in Wadleigh High School, but dropped out after two years, forced to earn a living after the death of both her grandmother and mother in the early 1930s. Primarily self-taught, Alice worked as an assistant machinist, photo retoucher, domestic worker, salesperson, and insurance agent, jobs that tied her to working-class people who later found their way into her writing.

Unfulfilled by these odd jobs, Alice reinvented herself, gravitating toward theater because of her love of dialogue. In the 1930s she formed alliances with Harlem actors and won cameo roles in plays. During this time she met and married Alvin Childress. Best known for his role as Amos Jones in the 1950s show Amos ’n Andy, Alvin Childress one of the first African American actors to star on television. In 1935 a daughter, Jean, was born. The couple soon divorced but maintained a professional relationship throughout the 1940s, working side by side in the American Negro Theater (ANT), a training ground for black artists, including SIDNEY POITIER, OSSIE DAVIS, RUBY DEE, Frank Silvera, Hilda Simms, Canada Lee, and Earle Hyman. Childress developed as an actress, director, and playwright at the ANT from 1941 to 1952. After work in several ANT productions, Childress starred on Broadway from 1944 to 1954 in Anna Lucasta, a play by Philip Yordan first staged at the ANT and costarring Alvin, Canada Lee, and FREDERICK O’NEAL. The play ran for 957 performances and earned Childress a Tony Award nomination.

While at the ANT, Childress responded to a call for more plays by, for, and about blacks. In 1949 she directed and starred in her first one-act play, Florence. One of Childress’s major accomplishments during her tenure with the ANT was her role in the early 1950s in initiating guaranteed pay in advance for union off-Broadway contracts in New York. Childress’s Just a Little Simple (based on the short story collection Simple Speaks His Mind by LANGSTON HUGHES) and Gold through the Trees (1952) were the first plays written by black woman to be produced professionally and performed by unionized actors.

In 1955 Childress made theater history when she became the first African American woman to win an Obie Award, with Trouble in Mind (1955), which she directed off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theater. In July 1957 she married musician Nathan Woodard, with whom she collaborated on several creative projects. In 1966 Childress was awarded a two-year appointment to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute) at Harvard University, where she became friendly with playwrights Lillian Hellman and Tillie Olsen. While at Radcliffe she wrote Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, a play about interracial love and the racism of laws barring marriage between blacks and whites.

In 1972 Childress and Joseph Papp codirected the Wedding Band for the New York Public Theater’s Shakespeare Festival. Two years later she adapted Wedding Band for television. Childress’s other plays include String (1969), Wine in the Wilderness (1969), Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970), The World on a Hill (1974), When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975), Let’s Hear It for the Queen (1976), a piece she wrote for her only grandchild, Marilyn Alice Lee, A Portrait of FANNIE LOU HAMER (1978), Sea Island Song, renamed Gullah (1977 and 1981), and Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (1986), based on the life of MOMS MABLEY. In an attempt to improve the quality of the lives of African Americans, Childress’s plays underscore themes affecting the lives of American blacks: the need for self-determination and self-definition, the destructiveness of stereotypes, and the need for more creative, positive images.

Childress, who had spoken out against injustices in her column in Freedom, a newspaper edited by PAUL ROBESON, and in the Baltimore Afro-American (collected in Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life [1956]), became increasingly committed to the issue of poverty in America after her travels to Russia, China, and Ghana in the 1970s. She raised the social issues of poverty, addiction, child abuse, and racism in her fiction as well as in her dramatic works. Childress wrote a number of books, including three novels for young adults, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), which she later adapted as a screenplay; Rainbow Jordan (1981); and Those Other People (1989). Her novel for adults, A Short Walk (1979), traces black experiences in America from the MARCUS GARVEY movement through the 1940s. Like her plays, Childress’s novels incorporate black history and emphasize the importance of relying upon ancestors for strength and guidance.

Childress garnered many honors, particularly for Rainbow Jordan and A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, which won a National Book Award nomination, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and an American Library Association award for Best Young Adult Book. Childress was the recipient of the first Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Performing Arts, a Radcliffe Alumnae Graduate Society Medal for Distinguished Achievement, a Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in 1993, and election to the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.

Childress’s contributions to American life and letters are significant. Her novels created a much-needed space in American literature to view the dangers awaiting black adolescents in a hostile world. Her plays underscored her belief that black adults, too, were at great risk from the destructive forces in a racist society. She was an activist who saw a need for change and worked tirelessly both inside and outside of the theater to revolutionize American society. Childress, who died of cancer in 1994, wrote successfully for the American stage for over four decades and served as a major link in the development of African American theater.

CHINN, MAY EDWARD

(15 Apr. 1896–1 Dec. 1980), physician and cancer researcher, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the daughter of William Lafayette Chinn, a former slave who had escaped to the North from a Virginia plantation, and Lulu Ann Evans, a domestic worker. William Chinn had unsteady employment because of racial discrimination, but occasionally worked at odd jobs and as a porter. Raised in New York City, May Chinn was educated in the city’s public schools and at the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School (N.J.), and she attended Morris High School in New York. A severe bout with osteomyelitis of the jaw plagued her as a child and required extensive medical treatment. Though her family’s poverty forced her to drop out of high school in the eleventh grade for a factory job, she scored high enough on the entrance examination for Teachers’ College at Columbia University a year later to be admitted to the class of 1921 without a high school diploma.

Chinn’s early ambition was to be a musician. Despite the family’s poor economic situation, her parents financed piano lessons that gave her some professional opportunity in music as a young adult. For several years in the early 1920s she was a piano-accompanist for the famed singer PAUL ROBESON, and she initially majored in music education at Columbia. She was the only African American and female in her music classes, and ridicule from one professor caused her to abandon music for study in the sciences. The switch to science, combined with her childhood experience of being treated for osteomyelitis, led to her decision to become a medical doctor. After graduating from Columbia with a BS degree in 1921, she was admitted to the Bellevue Hospital Medical College (now New York University Medical College) and in 1926 became its first African American woman graduate. In 1926 she was one of the first three African Americans to be accepted as interns at New York City’s public Harlem Hospital. (The other two were men.)

Upon completion of her internship Chinn faced the “color” barrier confronted by all African American physicians; she could not gain admitting privileges for her patients at any hospital in New York City. She opened an office in a brownstone on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem next to the Edgecombe Sanatorium, a private hospital owned and operated by a group of black physicians. In return for living and office space, she answered all-night emergency calls at the sanatorium. During the 1930s she studied dermatology and gynecology at the Post-Graduate Hospital Medical School in New York, and in 1933 she received an MS degree in Public Health from Columbia University.

Chinn’s interest in cancer research was elicited by the clinical experience of seeing so many patients in advanced stages of the disease, and this led to the development of a “fanatical preoccupation” in understanding and treating cancer. No hospital in New York City would allow her to do cancer work because of her race, but she was unofficially allowed to work with resident physicians at Memorial Hospital and was instructed in how to perform biopsies. Between 1928 and 1933 she studied cytological methods for the diagnosis of cancer under George Papanicolaou, developer of the Pap Smear test for cervical cancer. African American physicians in Harlem, having learned of her connection at Memorial and her training and clinical experience there, began to send her specimens for biopsies. In 1944 she was appointed to the staff of the Strang Clinic affiliated with Memorial and New York Infirmary Hospital. While working at the Strang Clinic over the next twenty-nine years, she helped to devise ways to detect cancer in asymptomatic patients. Her evaluation of patients’ family histories to detect cancer in the early stages was recognized as a significant approach to cancer understanding and treatment at the time.

Over the course of her 52-year career Chinn became a legend in Harlem. She was one of a handful of pioneering African American women in medicine in the mid-1920s through the 1930s and 1940s who overcame barriers of race and gender in medical school, in postgraduate training, and in gaining hospital appointments. In addition to her family medical practice and cancer work, she was a clinician and medical adviser in New York State Department of Health-supported day care centers in New York City (1960–1977) and a staff member of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children (1945–1956). As the physician assigned to escort fifty severely handicapped persons of the St. Jeanne Valois Guild of New York City to Paris, Lourdes, and Rome in 1961, she was granted a special audience with Pope John XXIII and in 1978 served as a medical consultant to 100 refugees from southern Africa who were attending colleges throughout the United States. After her retirement from private practice in 1977, Chinn continued to work in three Harlem day care centers sponsored by the state department of health.

Chinn’s cancer research and clinical practice was recognized by her election as a member of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1954, and in 1957 she received a citation from the New York City Cancer Committee of the American Cancer Society. She was elected to the Society of Surgical Oncology in 1958, became a Fellow of the American Geriatrics Society in 1959, and was elected to medical membership of the American Society of Cytology in 1972 and as a Life Member of the American Academy of Family Physicians in 1977. In 1975 she was a founder of the Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Society, named for the first African American woman licensed to practice medicine in the state of New York. Chinn received a Teachers’ College Distinguished Alumnus Award from Columbia University in May 1980 and an honorary doctor of science degree from New York University in June 1980. She died while attending a reception in Avery Hall at Columbia University.

CHISHOLM, SHIRLEY

(30 Nov. 1924–), U.S. congresswoman, was born Shirley St. Hill in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest daughter of Charles St. Hill, a laborer born in British Guiana (now Guyana), and Ruby Seale, a seamstress born in Barbados. Shirley’s first three years were spent in Brownsville, a predominately Jewish area of Brooklyn. Finding the wages for unskilled factory work insufficient to care for three children properly, the St. Hills sent their three daughters to Barbados, where they lived with their maternal grandparents on the family farm. Shirley credits her grandmother Emily Seale with instilling in her a strong character and determination.

The girls returned to Brownsville in 1934, after their mother gave birth to another daughter. Despite the social and financial hardships of the Depression, Ruby encouraged her children to respect the values of civility, thrift, poise, humility, education, and spirituality, though the sisters endured a substantial amount of teasing in the neighborhood for upholding these values and the sense of decorum and respectability that their parents expected of them. Charles St. Hill’s influence on Shirley’s political development was also profound. His support for MARCUS GARVEY and his pride in his labor union were frequent dinner table discussion topics, and in her autobiography Chisholm recalls that she went to listen to many black nationalist orators with her father.

In 1936 the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, where the Caribbean and southern black residents constituted about half of the population. Unaccustomed to the animosity blacks faced in that neighborhood, Shirley felt the sting of racial epithets for the first time. During this time she also became aware of racial discrimination, when her father’s workdays in a burlap bag factory were inequitably reduced. As a result, Ruby was forced to find work as a domestic, leaving Shirley with the responsibility of looking after the home and caring for her younger sisters. Shirley entered Girls High School in 1939 but was still guarded closely by her parents. Shy and self-conscious because of her West Indian accent, she became a voracious reader, maintained superior marks in school, and was elected vice president of a girl’s honor society. Determined to pursue a career in teaching, one of the few career options available to black women at that time, Shirley entered Brooklyn College in September of 1942. Motivated by her increasing awareness of the racism at the college, she shed her shyness, joined the debating society, and began to speak out on racial issues. She also became active in the HARRIET TUBMAN Society for Negro History and formed Ipothia, a sorority for black women. Believing that “service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth” (a phrase also attributed to MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN), Shirley St. Hill volunteered with the Urban League and the NAACP, in hospitals, and at a home for the aged. While still in college, she publicly challenged the mostly Irish-American organization that ran Brooklyn’s old Seventeenth Assembly District for ignoring issues of concern to African Americans, even though two-thirds of the district’s constituents were black.

Despite graduating cum laude in 1946, Shirley had difficulty finding work, and she resented that whites with lesser qualifications appeared to have better job opportunities. Eventually hired as a classroom teacher at Mt. Calvary Child Care Center in Harlem, she later became the center’s director. Concurrently she enrolled in the master’s program in early childhood education at Columbia College, where she met fellow student and private investigator Conrad Chisholm, whom she married in 1949. Conrad Chisholm eventually became an investigator for the City of New York and was by her side through most of her political career until their divorce in 1977.

In 1953 she became director of the Friends in Need Nursery School in Brooklyn, but moved on after one year to become the director of the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. By 1959 she had become a program consultant for the New York City Division of Day Care, but she continued her community work in Bedford-Stuyvesant, setting up youth programs for children, petitioning for better postal service and sanitation, and serving on the board of directors of the Albany Houses public housing project. Through these activities she became involved with New York’s political clubs, which were organized by state assembly districts. In 1953 Chisholm joined with her political mentor Wesley McD. “Mac” Holder to help elect the first black judge in Brooklyn’s history. Through that effort, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League (BSPL) was launched, and Chisholm remained active in this club as well as the regular Democratic organization. In 1958 Chisholm unsuccessfully challenged Mac Holder for the presidency of the BSPL, which caused a schism between them for ten years.

Chisholm was inactive on the political scene for two years following her loss to Mac Holder, but she soon returned to politics to help form the Unity Democratic Club. The primary goal of this club was to oust the white political machine of the Seventeenth Assembly District. Victorious in this mission, Unity became the official Democratic club for the district, and in 1964 Unity nominated Chisholm to fill a vacated seat in the New York State Assembly. She was elected to the assembly, but her victory was marred by her father’s death during the campaign.

Chisholm soon earned a reputation in Albany as a maverick who voted her conscience and frequently went against the party line. During her tenure, she introduced more than fifty bills into the legislature, of which eight passed. The most notable of these was her creation of the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program, which enabled financially disadvantaged students to attend college. She also was a powerful advocate of extending unemployment insurance coverage to domestic employees and of providing state aid to daycare centers.

Determined to beat the political machine that had emerged in Brooklyn’s newly created black-majority Twelfth District, Chisholm ran for Congress in 1968. Reuniting with Mac Holder, she campaigned with the slogan “Fighting Shirley Chisholm—Unbought and Unbossed.” Emergency surgery for a stomach tumor caused Chisholm to lose some early ground to her opponent, the civil rights activist JAMES FARMER. Finding, however, that there were two and a half women for every man on the voter-registration rolls, Chisholm garnered the support of women’s organizations. Her fluency in Spanish also attracted the Hispanic vote, thus providing an ultimately victorious block against her Republican opponent.

As a freshman representative to the Ninety-first Congress in 1969, Chisholm asked to be assigned to the House Education and Labor Committee. Instead, she was assigned to the Committee for Rural Development and Forestry, whose agenda was totally unrelated to the needs of her urban district. After failing in her attempts to enlist the support of more senior representatives, she defiantly approached the Speaker’s dais to protest the assignment. Again, her diligence paid off, and she was reassigned to the Committee on Veterans Affairs. In 1971 she secured a seat on the powerful House Education and Labor Committee, which enabled her to focus on the economic and educational issues of greatest relevance to her constituents.

Chisholm became increasingly well known on Capitol Hill for her straightforward criticism of cozy bipartisan politics and the seniority system. In the late 1960s, the tap of Chisholm’s trademark stiletto heels struck a dissonant chord in the boys club atmosphere of the U.S. Congress. Her unabashed and uncompromising liberalism also stood out, even in that relatively liberal era. She fought passionately for greater racial and gender equality, demanded a lowering of the voting age, spoke out against the Vietnam War, and supported the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. In 1970 Chisholm headed a coalition of women’s groups to raise bail for a jailed Black Panther Party member.

Chisholm gained national recognition in January 1972, when she announced her intention to run for the presidency of the United States. Inspired by the young people with whom she maintained constant contact, she campaigned in six states while continuing to attend to her duties in Washington and Brooklyn. She did not receive the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, however, which severely dented her chance of winning the Democratic nomination. But her impressive showing of 151 votes to George McGovern’s 1,415 constituted the largest number of convention votes cast for a female candidate in U.S. party political history.

Continuing to serve in the House of Representatives, Chisholm emerged as a powerful advocate for fair housing programs and the educational rights of the poor and racial minorities. Her most significant legislative achievement came in the mid 1970s, when she successfully led the opposition in Congress to President Ford’s veto of federal support for state daycare services. By the time Chisholm retired from Congress in 1982, however, she had become less of a maverick, and, as a member of its Rules Committee, even something of a Capitol Hill insider.

She has subsequently held faculty appointments at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, where she taught politics and women’s studies from 1983 to 1987, and at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was a visiting scholar in 1985. Chisholm is the author of two autobiographies, Unbought and Unbossed (1970) and The Good Fight (1973), and in 1984 she cofounded the National Political Congress of Black Women. In 1993 President Bill Clinton asked her to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica, but she declined the appointment for health reasons. Chisholm lives in Florida with her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, whom she married in 1977.

Shirley Chisholm will be remembered as the woman warrior of American politics and as a champion for underrepresented Americans. CHARLES RANGEL and KWESI MFUME, who followed her into Congress, attained greater political clout on Capitol Hill. JESSE JACKSON earned more votes and delegates in his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Presidency. In each of these cases, however, their task was made easier by the precedents and the example set by Shirley Chisholm.

CINQUÉ

(c. 1814–c. 1879), slave mutineer, was born Sengbe (also spelled Singbe and Sengbeh) Pieh in the village of Mani, in the Mende territory of Sierra Leone, Africa, the son of a rice farmer. His mother died when he was young, and at about the age of twenty-five he lived with his father, his wife, and his three children. One day while working alone in his rice field, he was seized by four members of the Vai tribe, often employed by Europeans to capture slaves for the market. He was taken to Lomboko, an island at the mouth of the Gallinas River on the coast of Sierra Leone, where he was purchased by Pedro Blanco, a Spanish slave trader, for sale in Cuba. He remained in Lomboko for three months in chains before Blanco filled the ship that was to transport him to Havana.

Slavery was still legal in Cuba, but the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves had been abolished by international treaties in 1820. When Cinqué arrived he was thus technically contraband, but once landed he was legally a slave and was housed with many other recently transported Africans. Within ten days, he was purchased, along with forty-eight other able-bodied African men, by one of the leading Spanish dealers in Cuba, José Ruiz, who paid $450 each for them. Ruiz and a companion, Pedro Montes, who had made the more modest purchase of four children all under twelve years of age, loaded their fifty-three slaves on the schooner Amistad on 28 June 1839 and set sail for Puerto Principe, a short distance from Havana. Each slave had been provided with a false Spanish passport in case of search by English authorities while in transit.

Alarmed by the cruel joke of the ship’s cook, who communicated to the slaves that they were to be killed and eaten by the crew, Cinqué found a nail while exercising on deck and picked the lock on his iron collar. On the third night out, he freed his fellow slaves, all but three of whom were from Mende territory and spoke the same language. Arming themselves with machetes being shipped to the sugar plantations for cutting cane, the slaves quickly killed the cook and Ramón Ferrer, the captain. The two remaining crew members disappeared, presumably drowned trying to swim for shore. The mutineers, under Cinqué’s command, then ordered their former owners Ruiz and Montes to steer the ship back to Africa. Montes, who had been a sea captain, was put at the helm and told to head into the rising sun, but the Spaniard reversed the course every night in hopes of being picked up and freed by Americans or Cubans. This zigzag route continued for sixty-three days, during which ten of the Africans died. At last on 26 August, the need for food and water forced Cinqué to order a landing at the next island they saw, which proved to be Long Island, New York.

The vessel was immediately seized by U.S. Navy officers, and on 29 August the mutineers were arrested for piracy and murder. Ruiz and Montes were set free; they demanded the return of the ship and its cargo, including the slaves, as their property. Because New York was a free state, Coast Guard Lt. Thomas Gedney, who had seized the schooner, had the Amistad towed to Connecticut, where slavery was still legal, hoping to claim it and its forty-three surviving slaves as salvage. The Africans, including the four children, were jailed in New Haven while the courts undertook to clarify the local, national, and international issues involved. Lt. Gedney sued for possession of the boat and all its cargo; Ruiz brought a separate suit for the return of his human property; and because Cuba was a possession of Spain, the Spanish government demanded that the slaves be returned to Havana to be tried for murder. President Martin Van Buren, seeking to maintain good diplomatic relations with Spain, supported the claim.

Philadelphia abolitionist Robert Purvis commissioned this portrait by Nathaniel Jocelyn of Cinque or Sengbe, the leader of the rebellion on La Amistad in 1839. William K. Sacco/Courtesy of The New Haven Colony Historical Society

The trial of the Africans in the Circuit Court in Hartford on 17 September 1839 became a national sensation. The proslavery southern states opposed the freeing of the slaves, recognizing the threat to the institution on which their economy depended, and abolitionists in the north saw the case as an opportunity to promote their cause. The handsome, charismatic leader of the mutiny became a hero in the northern press, where his name took the form Cinqué (variously spelled Cinquè, Cinquez, or Cinquenzo, and sometimes embellished with the forename Joseph), and his status in Africa was elevated to royalty. William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The African Chief,” published in the Emancipator on 19 September 1839, said of him, “A prince among his tribe before, / He could not be a slave” (italics in the original). In the meantime, the Africans were kept in the New Haven jail, where they were given English lessons and instruction in Christianity. To help defray the costs of their incarceration, they were exhibited to the curious for twelve and a half cents a look. Both dignified and congenial, the Black Prince, as Cinqué was often called in the newspapers, cheerfully consented to perform native dances and turn somersaults on the lawn.

Lewis Tappan, a founder of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, organized an Amistad Committee to help free the prisoners and hired the prominent constitutional lawyer Roger Sherman Baldwin for their defense. Baldwin argued that they were not legally slaves but “kidnapped Africans” and that their mutiny was justified by “the inherent right of self defense.” Cinqué delivered a speech so dramatically in his native Mende that it moved the audience even before it was translated for them. The Circuit Court found in favor of the Africans and ordered them freed. The Spanish government protested the decision and persuaded Secretary of State John Forsyth to direct the district attorney to appeal the case. President Van Buren issued an executive order to have the defendants transported to Cuba immediately if the appeal succeeded, thus preventing an appeal by the Africans. When the Federal District Court affirmed the Circuit Court’s decision in January 1840, the government appealed again; in February of the next year the case was carried to the U.S. Supreme Court. The seventy-three-year-old former president John Quincy Adams, long an ardent supporter of abolition, was persuaded to join the defense, and his legendary eloquence carried the day. On 9 March, after trials that had dragged on for eighteen months, the Africans were once again declared free to return to Africa.

As the government refused to pay the costs of repatriation, several of the Africans went on a speaking tour, organized by the Amistad Committee, to raise money for their trip. Speaking in Mende, Cinqué was said to possess “a very graceful and animated manner” and became a popular spokesperson for the abolitionist cause. By November the mutineers, now reduced by death to thirty-five, had raised enough money for the long journey and embarked for Sierra Leone. They arrived in January 1842, accompanied by missionaries planning to establish a mission in Komende (spelled Kaw-Mendi in American sources), near Freetown. Cinqué continued inland to Mani in search of his family but, according to most reports, never saw them again. Little is known of his life after returning to Africa, but some accounts report that he made himself a powerful and prosperous chief among his people and even engaged in slave trading. Other versions have him returning to the mission to serve as an interpreter or returning there only in the last week of his life to die and be buried in the mission cemetery.

The leader of the only successful slave rebellion in American history, Cinqué set in motion a legal battle that was to provide an important precedent in American and international law. The Amistad case helped to establish the authority of the courts, and it constituted what historian Howard Jones described as “an historic milestone in the long struggle against slavery and for the establishment of basic civil rights for everyone, regardless of color.”

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