African American Lives

(9 Nov. 1922–8 Sept. 1965), movie actress and singer, was born Dorothy Jean Dandridge in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of Cyril Dandridge, a Baptist minister, and Ruby Jean Butler, a movie and radio comedian. Dorothy, a child entertainer, was in and out of school while her mother directed and choreographed her two children in a sister vaudeville act. The “Wonder Kids” performed in Cleveland’s black Baptist churches and toured throughout the South for five years.

In the early 1930s Ruby, whose husband had left her just before Dorothy’s birth, moved her family to the Watts section of Los Angeles, California, to further their careers in show business. The Wonder Kids recruited another girl, Etta Jones, and formed a singing group called the Dandridge Sisters. In 1937 the act was sold to Warner Bros, for a movie called A Day at the Races. The Dandridge Sisters also made appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York, and toured with DUKE ELLINGTON, CAB CALLOWAY, and Jimmie Lunceford.

The outbreak of World War II interrupted the Dandridge Sisters’ international tour and initiated their demise. Around this time Dorothy Dandridge met Harold Nicholas, who was one of the famous dancing Nicholas Brothers, and in 1942 they were married. In 1945 Dandridge’s only child was born, and Harold immediately deserted his family because their child was severely brain damaged. In later years Dandridge teamed up with both Rose Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in an effort to help the mentally challenged under the auspices of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.

Dorothy Dandridge, the first black actor nominated for an Academy Award in a starring role, in 1955. Library of Congress

Dandridge’s first important film role was Queen of the Jungle in Columbia Pictures’ Tarzan’s Peril (1951). Dore Schary of MGM then hired Dandridge to play a compassionate black schoolteacher in Bright Road, costarring HARRY BELAFONTE. During this time, Dandridge began her nightclub and concert engagements. In 1951 bandleader Desi Arnaz agreed to temporarily employ Dandridge in his act at the Hollywood Mocombo. This appearance compelled Maurice Winnick, a British theatrical impresario, to offer Dandridge an engagement at the Cafe de Paris in London. The next year the Chase Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, which had never employed a black performer to entertain in its dining room, booked her for an engagement. Dandridge informed the management that she would not perform unless blacks were allowed to obtain reservations and be permitted to use the main entrance. These conditions were agreed upon by the hotel management, and a table was reserved for black members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on opening night.

The most memorable and award-winning screen performance for Dandridge was in the title role of Carmen Jones (1954) produced by Otto Preminger in association with Twentieth Century-Fox. Carmen Jones costarred PEARL BAILEY and Belafonte. In 1955 Dandridge became the first black actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a starring role and the first black woman to take part in the Academy Awards show, presenting the Oscar for film editing. Dandridge also won a Golden Globe Award of Merit for Outstanding Achievement for the best performance by an actress in 1959. Dandridge’s international acclaim led Twentieth Century-Fox to offer her a three-year contract that was the first and most ambitious offer given to a black performer by that studio. During the same year, Dandridge became the first black headliner to appear at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.

During the 1950s Dandridge starred in several films for Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia Pictures, and foreign film companies. Island in the Sun (1957), with James Mason, Joan Fontaine, and Belafonte, was Hollywood’s first major interracial film and was a box office success. In Tamango (1959), Dandridge portrayed an African slave in love with a white ship captain, played by Austrian actor Curt Jurgens. She costarred with SIDNEY POITIER in Porgy and Bess (1959). In addition to her film credits, Dandridge appeared on several television shows during the 1950s including “The Mike Douglas Show,” “The Steve Allen Show,” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” In November 1954 she also appeared on the cover of Life magazine, making history as the first black to do so.

In 1959 Dandridge married Jack Dennison (or Denison), a white restaurateur and nightclub owner; the marriage ended in divorce in 1962. In 1961 Dandridge costarred in a film with Trevor Howard, titled Malaga. Dandridge’s last concert appearances included engagements in Puerto Rico and Tokyo. Her death was reported as the result of acute drug intoxication, an ingestion of the antidepressant Tofranil, at her apartment in West Hollywood, California.

A retrospective article in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner lamented that Dandridge’s passing meant “the ceasing of exquisite music. . . she walked in beauty. . . regal as a queen.” In her lifetime Dandridge was named by a committee of photographers as one of the five most beautiful women in the world. She was an international celebrity who believed in breaking down barriers to achieve racial equality. Dandridge realized that a black male could become a big star without romantic roles, but a sexy black actress like her was limited because the American public was not ready for interracial romance on the screen. On 20 February 1977 Dandridge, the first black leading lady, was posthumously inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame at the annual Oscar Micheaux Awards presentation in Oakland, California. Vivian Dandridge, her sister, accepted the award. In December 1983 Belafonte, Poitier, and others petitioned to secure a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Dandridge, a trailblazer for blacks in the American film industry.

DAVIS, ANGELA YVONNE

(26 Jan. 1944–), radical activist, scholar, and prison abolitionist, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Frank and Sally Davis. Her father, a former teacher, owned a service station, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Both had ties to the NAACP and friends in numerous radical groups, including the Communist Party. When Angela was four years old, her family moved from a housing project to a white neighborhood across town. The experience of being the only African Americans surrounded by hostile whites taught Davis at a young age the ravages of racism. Indeed, during the mid- to late 1940s, as more black families began moving into the area, white residents responded with violence, and the neighborhood took on the unenviable nickname “Dynamite Hill.” Davis’s racial consciousness was further sharpened by attending the city’s vastly inferior segregated public schools.

As a junior at Birmingham’s Parker High School, at the age of fourteen, Davis applied to two programs that could get her out of Alabama: early entrance to Fisk University, where she wanted to pursue a degree in medicine, and a program sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee to attend an integrated high school in the North. After much deliberation and with the encouragement of her parents, she opted for the latter, and in 1959 she moved to New York City. Davis lived with a leftist Episcopalian priest and his wife in Brooklyn and each day went to the Elisabeth Irwin High School on the edge of Greenwich Village. Stimulated intellectually and politically, she read the Communist Manifesto for the first time and later recalled that it hit her “like a bolt of lightning” (Davis, 109). During this time Davis also began going to meetings of an organization called Advance, a Marxist-Leninist student group affiliated with the Communist Party, as well as attending the lectures of the historian Herbert Aptheker at the American Institute for Marxist Studies.

Although her interest in radical theory did not wane during her college years at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, it was tempered by what she viewed as the complacency of the student body there. One of only three African Americans in her freshman class in the fall of 1961, Davis often felt alienated and alone, but she eventually befriended a handful of international students. In the midst of white middle-and upper-class political apathy, she forged ahead in her own pursuit of knowledge and experience outside the confines of Brandeis. During the summer of 1962 she traveled to Helsinki, Finland, to participate in the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students. She spent 1963–1964, her junior year, in France and, upon her return, began an intense intellectual relationship with the German-born Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

After receiving a BA in French Literature in 1965, Davis entered the University of Frankfurt in West Germany to pursue a PhD in Philosophy. During her two years there, she followed a pattern that marked her entire career, combining intensive study with political activism. In Frankfurt, Davis joined numerous socialist student groups and regularly participated in protests and demonstrations. But as she watched, from across the Atlantic, the civil rights movement in the United States take a dramatic turn away from nonviolence and toward black power and black nationalism, she yearned to be involved in what she referred to in her autobiography as the Black Liberation Movement. Davis left West Germany for the University of California, San Diego, where Marcuse was teaching. There she worked with the Black Panther Political Party (which was not affiliated with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, led by ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, BOBBY SEALE, and HUEY NEWTON) and a fledgling Los Angeles branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1969, however, she left both groups after being frustrated by their ideological infighting, sexism, and anticommunism and officially joined the Communist Party. She became a member of a cell in Los Angeles known as the Che-Lumumba Club (named after Che Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary, and Patrice Lumumba, the radical Congolese independence leader).

Davis’s activism made her well known among southern Californian leftists, but she did not achieve national or international attention until the late 1960s, when two events catapulted her into the spotlight. Indeed, they would secure for Davis the near mythic status, depending on one’s political perspective, of an iconic hero or the country’s most dangerous subversive. The first episode occurred in 1969, when the Board of Regents of the University of California, supported by Governor Ronald Reagan, fired Davis from her teaching position at University of California at Los Angeles, where she had received a non-tenure-track appointment in the philosophy department while completing her PhD. They cited a 1949 law prohibiting the hiring of Communists in the state university system. After months of legal wrangling, the board finally voted in June 1970 not to extend her appointment to a second year. Davis filed an appeal, but the controversy was soon overshadowed by the defining moment in her life as a political activist, the Soledad Brothers case.

In February 1970 George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgo, three African American inmates at the Soledad prison in north-central California, had been indicted for the murder of a white prison guard. The lack of evidence or witnesses to the crime, which had occurred during a melee inside prison walls, led many to believe that this was yet another example of the entrenched racism within the justice system, a perversion of the very system that was designed to protect American citizens, and a frame-up. Angela Davis quickly became a leader in the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee and soon developed a close relationship with Jackson, the most visible of the three, whose letters from prison would be published in 1971. On 7 August 1970, Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan entered a courtroom in Marin County, pulled out a machine gun, and allegedly demanded the release of the Soledad Brothers. With the help of three San Quentin inmates who were present in the courtroom, Jackson took the judge and four other people hostage. Before they could get away, guards opened fire; in the ensuing gun battle Jonathan Jackson, two prisoners, and the judge were killed.

Less than ten days later a Marin County judge issued a warrant for the arrest of Angela Davis on one count of murder and five counts of kidnapping. According to the warrant, two of the guns used in the escape attempt were registered to Davis, which made her an accomplice. Thus began a high-profile manhunt, which included Davis’s appearance on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and a cavalcade of press coverage, in which she was nearly universally described as a “black militant,” “black radical,” or “militant black Communist.” She was finally caught in a Manhattan Howard Johnson’s on 13 October 1970 and imprisoned in a Greenwich Village jail for women. Davis was soon extradited to California, where her trial began in January 1971. Eighteen months later, during which time an international movement to “Free Angela Davis” flourished, she was acquitted on all charges.

Although Angela Davis would never again reach this level of notoriety, she was instantly enshrined in the pantheon of legendary African American freedom fighters, and she continued to wage a political and intellectual battle against all forms of inequality for decades after her imprisonment. In the classroom, as a professor at San Francisco State and, beginning in 1991, the University of California, Santa Cruz; on the campaign trail, as a candidate for vice president on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984; and on the lecture circuit, as an outspoken critic of the U.S. prison system and its basis and role in the institutional perpetuation of racial and economic inequality, Davis remained a vibrant and vital voice on the political left during a period of ascendancy of conservatism in the United States.

Davis published numerous books and articles, including her own autobiography in 1974 and a study of the interconnectedness of gender, racial, and economic oppression, Women, Race, & Class, in 1981. During the 1990s she appeared at rallies and demonstrations across the country, on issues ranging from the Million Man March, to the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal from prison, to the ballot initiative against affirmative action in California. By the early years of the twenty-first century Angela Davis was leading the fight against what she termed the “prison industrial complex,” calling for the abolition, rather than merely the reform, of prisons in the United States. Ever a lightning rod for controversy and a voice of true radicalism, this struggle was no less compelling for its unpopularity—something to which Davis had long been accustomed.

DAVIS, BENJAMIN JEFFERSON

(8 Sept. 1903–22 Aug. 1964), Communist Party leader, was born in Dawson, Georgia, the son of Benjamin Davis Sr., a publisher and businessman, and Willa Porter. Davis was educated as a secondaryschool student at Morehouse in Atlanta. He entered Amherst College in 1922 and graduated in 1925. At Amherst he starred on the football team and pursued lifelong interests in tennis and the violin. He then attended Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1928. He was a rarity—an African American from an affluent family in the Deep South; however, his wealth did not spare him the indignities of racial segregation. While still a student at Amherst, he was arrested in Atlanta for sitting in the white section of a trolley car. Only the intervention of his influential father prevented his being jailed. As he noted subsequently, it was the horror of Jim Crow—the complex of racial segregation, lynchings, and police brutality—that pushed him toward the political left.

After graduating from Harvard, Davis was well on his way to becoming a member of the black bourgeoisie. He worked for a period at a black-owned newspaper, the Baltimore Afro-American, and in Chicago with W. B. Ziff, who arranged advertising for the black press. He then returned to Georgia, where he passed the bar examination and opened a law practice.

At this point an incident occurred that led to Davis’s joining the Communist Party (CP). ANGELO HERNDON, a young Communist in Georgia, was arrested under a slave insurrection statute after leading a militant demonstration demanding relief for the poor. William Patterson, a black lawyer and Communist who led the International Labor Defense, recruited Davis to handle Herndon’s case. Through discussions with his client, Davis decided to join the party in 1933.

As Davis was joining the CP, those African Americans who could vote were in the process of making a transition from voting for Republicans to voting for the Democratic party of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The GOP—particularly in the South, where Davis’s father was a Republican leader—was pursuing a “lily-white” strategy that involved distancing itself from African Americans, who had been one of its staunchest bases of support; simultaneously, Roosevelt’s “New Deal” promised relief from the ravages of the Great Depression.

Davis did not favor the Democrats, because in the South they continued to lift the banner of Jim Crow. His joining the CP was not unusual, given the times: many prominent African American intellectuals of that era—LANGSTON HUGHES and PAUL ROBESON, for example—worked closely with the Communists, not least because theirs was one of the few political parties that stood firmly in favor of racial equality. Moreover, the Soviet Union and the Communist International, which it sponsored—unlike the United States and its European allies—stood firmly in favor of the decolonization of Africa. Davis felt that capitalism was inextricably tied to the slave trade, slavery, and racism itself, and that socialism was the true path to equality.

Davis handled the trial of Herndon, and after the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, with another lawyer dealing with the appeal, his client was freed. Davis went on to serve as a lawyer in the case of the SCOTTSBORO BOYS, African American youths charged falsely with the rape of two white women. They too were eventually freed because of decisions by the high court—after many years and many appeals—but Alabama then retried and convicted them.

Threats on Davis’s life and the CP’s desire to provide a more prominent role for him led to his moving to New York City in the mid-1930s. There he worked as journalist and editor with a succession of Communist journals, including the Harlem Liberator, the Negro Liberator, and the Daily Worker. At that last paper, he worked closely with the budding novelist RICHARD WRIGHT, with whom he shared a party cell; in this Communist organizational unit, Davis had the opportunity to comment on and shape some of Wright’s earliest writings.

At its zenith during the 1930s, the Communist Party in New York State had about twenty-seven thousand members, of whom about two thousand were African Americans. Davis played a key role in the founding of the National Negro Congress, which had been initiated by the Communists; for a while the NNC included leading members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the labor leader A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, and the Reverend ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR.

Davis developed a close political relationship with Powell, a New York City councilman. When Powell moved on to represent Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives, he anointed Davis as his successor. Davis was duly elected in 1943 and received a broad range of support, particularly from noted black artists and athletes such as BILLIE HOLIDAY, LENA HORNE, JOE LOUIS, Teddy Wilson, and COUNT BASIE. He received such support for a number of reasons. There were his qualifications—lawyer, journalist, powerful orator, and organizer. There was also the fact that at this time both the Democrats—who were influenced heavily by white Southerners hostile to desegregation—and the Republicans were not attractive alternatives for African Americans. Moreover, in 1943 the United States was allied with the Soviet Union, which had led to a decline in anticommunism, a tendency that in any event was never strong among African Americans.

On the city council Davis fought for rent control, keeping transit fares low, and raising pay for teachers, among other measures. He received substantial support not only from African Americans but also from many Jewish Americans, who appreciated his support for the formation of the state of Israel and for trade unions. In 1945 he was reelected by an even larger margin of victory. By the time he ran for reelection in 1949, however, the political climate had changed dramatically. The wartime alliance with the USSR had ended, and in its place there was a cold war internationally and a “Red Scare” domestically. Supporting a Communist now carried a heavy political price; simultaneously, many of Davis’s African American supporters were now being wooed by the Democratic administration of President Harry Truman.

During his race for the presidency in 1948, Truman was challenged from the left by Henry Wallace, nominated by the Progressive Party. Because Wallace received the support of such African American luminaries as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DU BOIS, there was fear among some Democrats that Truman’s support from black voters would be eroded; in a close race this could mean victory for Republican candidate Thomas Dewey. Furthermore, Truman found it difficult to portray his nation as a paragon of human rights in its cold war struggle with the Soviet Union when blacks were treated like third-class citizens. Those pressures led Truman to put forward a civil rights platform in 1948 that outstripped the efforts of his predecessors in the White House. The Democrats succeeded in helping to undermine electoral support for Wallace and for Davis. Not only was Davis defeated in his race for reelection to the city council in 1949; he was also tried and convicted, along with ten other Communist leaders, of violating the Smith Act, which made the teaching or propagation of Marxism-Leninism a crime. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1951 upheld these convictions in Dennis v. United States, Davis was jailed in federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, from 1951 to 1955. While there, he filed suit against prison segregation; Davis v. Brownell, coming in the wake of the 1954 High Court decision invalidating racial segregation in schools (Brown v. Board of Education), led directly to the curbing of segregation in federal prisons. After his release from prison, Davis married Nina Stamler, who also had ties to the organized left; they had one child, a daughter.

Davis’s final years with the CP were filled with tumult. In 1956, in the wake of the Soviet intervention in Hungary, the revelations about Stalin’s brutal rule aired at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and the Suez War, turmoil erupted in the U.S. party. Davis was a leader of the “hardline” faction that resisted moves toward radical change spearheaded by “reformers.” Some among the latter faction wanted the Communists to merge with other leftist parties and entities and become a “social democratic” organization, akin to the Socialist Party of France; others did not want the Party to be identified so closely with Moscow. There were those who disagreed with Davis’s opposition to the actions of Israel, Britain, and France during the Suez War. Some felt that Davis’s acceptance of the indictment of Stalin was not sufficiently enthusiastic; still others thought that Davis and his ideological allies should not have backed the Soviet intervention in Hungary. These internal party squabbles were exacerbated by the counterintelligence program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was designed, in part, to disrupt the party and ensure that it would play no role in the nascent civil rights movement.

When MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., the Atlanta minister and civil rights activist, was stabbed by a crazed assailant in New York City in 1958, Davis rushed to the hospital and provided blood for him. The Davis-King tie led J. Edgar Hoover to increase the FBI’s surveillance of the civil rights movement. But as the civil rights movement was blooming, the Communist Party was weakening. Nevertheless, during the last years of his life Davis became a significant and frequent presence on college campuses, as students resisted bans on Communist speakers by inviting him to lecture. The struggle to invite Communists to speak on campus was a significant factor in generating the student activism of the 1960s, from the City College of New York to the University of California at Berkeley.

By the time Davis died in New York City, the Party was a shadow of its former self. His life showed, however, that African Americans denied equality ineluctably would opt for more radical solutions, and this in turn helped to spur civil rights reforms. African slaves had been an early form of capital and a factor in the evolution of capitalism; that a descendant of African slaves became such a staunch opponent of capitalism was, in that sense, the closing of a historical circle.

DAVIS, BENJAMIN O., JR.

(18 Dec. 1912–4 July 2002), was born in Washington, D.C., the son of the U.S. army’s first black general, BENJAMIN O. DAVIS SR., and his wife, Elnora Dickinson. Davis spent most of his childhood living on different military bases. By the time he entered high school, his family had settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended a predominantly white school. At his high school, he began to prove his leadership ability, winning elections for class president. After high school, he enrolled in Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University and later the University of Chicago, before he was accepted in 1932, through the influence of the congressman OSCAR DEPRIEST, into the United States Military Academy at West Point.

At West Point, which discouraged black cadets from applying at the time, Davis faced a hostile environment and routine exclusion by his peers. His classmates shunned him and only talked to him when it was absolutely necessary. No one roomed with him, and he ate all of his meals in silence. Although he faced less humiliation, perhaps, than the black West Point cadets before him, such as the academy’s first black graduate, HENRY O. FLIPPER, Davis remembered his four difficult years at West Point as a time of solitude and loneliness that, in spite of its struggle, prepared him for life in and outside of the military. The anonymously written statement about Davis in the 1936 Howitzer, the West Point yearbook, alludes obliquely and evocatively to his experience and presages his later success, “The courage, tenacity, and intelligence with which he conquered a problem incomparably more difficult than Plebe year won for him the sincere admiration of his classmates, and his singleminded determination to continue in his chosen career cannot fail to inspire respect wherever fortune may lead him.” His endurance and subsequent success in the military permanently opened the doors of the prestigious military academy to African Americans.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr., shown here in training as one of the renowned Tuskegee Airmen, led the first regiment of African American pilots. Library of Congress

Davis graduated in the top 15 percent of his class, becoming one of the two African American line officers in the U.S. Army. The other was his father. Shortly after his graduation from West Point, Davis married Agatha Scott. Davis was commissioned as a second lieutenant upon graduation and, because of his high class standing, should have been able to choose which branch of the military he wanted to join. But when he applied to be an officer in the Army Air Corps, he was denied. The military was not ready to send a black officer to lead an all-white squadron. Instead, he was assigned to the all-black Twenty-fourth Infantry Regiment at the segregated Fort Benning Army Base and charged with a variety of inconsequential duties. He was even barred from the officers club at Fort Benning, an insult he later described as one of the worst he suffered during his service in the military.

In 1940, as the U.S. prepared for World War II, there was growing public support for increased African American participation in the war. In an effort to address those concerns and simultaneously reach out to African American citizens as he prepared for the upcoming election, President Roosevelt promoted Benjamin O. Davis Sr. to brigadier general, the highest post ever held by any African American in the U.S. Army. He also established a training program for black pilots at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama that prepared African Americans to join the Air Corps on an experimental basis. Davis entered this program with eleven other officers, a group that later attracted national attention and became known in history as the Tuskegee Airmen. During the program, Davis became the first black officer to fly solo in an army aircraft, and he received his wings in March 1942. About a year later, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, Davis was charged with leading the first African American regiment of pilots, the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Although he and the unit he commanded felt prepared to advance to the frontlines of battle, some senior military officers discouraged the idea of blacks fighting in the war, believing their tactical and judgmental abilities were inferior, and the 99th was assigned routine non-combat missions in North Africa. In Washington hearings, Davis fiercely defended his men before both Pentagon and War Department authorities.

Near the end of 1943, Davis was promoted to colonel and assigned to a larger black unit, the 332nd Fighter Group, commonly called the Red Tails. With the 332nd, Davis arrived in Ramitelli, Italy, in January 1944, where his unit set out to disprove the widely accepted notion that blacks were inferior soldiers and airmen. Upgraded from the P-40 War Hawk aircraft the unit had flown in North Africa to the highly sophisticated P-47 Thunderbolt and P-41 Mustang fighter planes, on 9 June 1944, the unit accomplished its most noted military mission. Escorting B-24 bombers to targets in Munich, Germany, Davis led thirty-nine Thunderbolts in a battle with one hundred German Luftwaffe planes that resulted in the downing of six German planes. Following this action, Davis was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for leadership and bravery.

Under the command of Colonel Davis, his squadron carried out more than 15,000 missions, shot down 111 enemy aircraft, and destroyed another 150 on the ground, losing only 66 aircraft of their own. More remarkably, Davis’s unit carried out 200 successful escort missions without a single casualty. In a highly classified report issued shortly after the war, U.S. General George Marshall declared that black soldiers were just as capable of fighting, and equally entitled to serve their country, as white soldiers.

After the war, President Truman, impressed and influenced by the shining performance of Davis and his unit, issued Executive Order 9981 requiring the integration of the armed forces. Davis was appointed to posts at the Pentagon and served again as Chief of Staff in the Korean War, when he led an integrated unit. In 1954 he was promoted to brigadier general and in 1965 earned the three stars of lieutenant general. Davis was the first African American in any branch of the military to climb to that rank. He later served in the Philippines as commander of the Thirteenth Air Force, followed by a position as commander of the United States Strike Command in Florida. He retired in 1970 after leading the Thirteenth Air Force unit in Vietnam. Other military decorations include the Silver Star, Legion of Merit with two oak leaf clusters, the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters, the Air Force Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters, and the Philippine Legion of Honor.

After his retirement from the military, Davis became director of public safety in Cleveland under that city’s first black mayor, Carl Stokes, though Davis soon quit because he could not abide the deal-making that occurred in municipal government and his by-the-book military style clashed with Stokes’s tolerance for civil disobedience exhibited by some black extremist groups. He later accepted a position with the Department of Transportation as Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Environment and Safety, where he directed the bureau’s anti-hijacking and anti-theft initiatives. He was instrumental in passing the 55 miles per hour speed limit set to save lives and gas. In 1998 President Clinton promoted Davis to full general.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr.’s rise to prominence followed in the remarkable path of his father’s career accomplishments. But his clear sense of purpose, evidenced by a record of professional advances in spite of blatant racism and legalized segregation, tell the story of a soldier not only inspired by his father’s career, but also determined to triumph on his own over all the odds stacked against him. Davis became one of the earliest notably honored African American military officers, breaking down racial barriers with honor, discipline, and an unflinching will.

DAVIS, BENJAMIN OLIVER, SR.

(28 May 1880–26 Nov. 1970), U.S. Army officer, was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of three children of Louis Patrick Henry Davis, a messenger for the U.S. Department of the Interior, and Henrietta Stewart, a nurse. Benjamin attended the Lucretia Mott School, one of Washington’s few integrated schools, and then the segregated M Street High School. Impressed in his interactions with Civil War veterans and black cavalrymen, Benjamin joined the M Street Cadet Corps, earning a commission in the all-black unit of the National Guard for his senior year.

General Benjamin O. Davis Sr. surveys operations in France, 1944. © CORBIS

Although he had taken courses at Howard University during his senior year of high school, and despite his parent’s objections, Davis chose a military career over college. He enlisted during the Spanish-American War in 1898 and joined the all-black Eighth U.S. Volunteer Infantry in Chickamauga, Georgia. A year later Davis reenlisted in the regular army. He served with the all-black Ninth Cavalry in Fort Duchesne, Utah, and quickly advanced to sergeant major, the highest rank for an enlisted soldier. In 1901 he underwent two weeks of officers’ exams, becoming, along with John E. Green, one of two black candidates to earn a commission at a time when Charles Young (West Point class of 1889) was the only African American officer in the U.S. armed forces. Other than Young, West Point’s only other black graduates, HENRY O. FLIPPER (class of 1877) and John Alexander (class of 1887), were, respectively, dishonorably discharged and dead. The next African American to graduate from West Point was Davis’s son, in 1936.

Davis’s first service as a commissioned officer was with the Ninth Cavalry in the Philippines, after which he was transferred to the Tenth Cavalry in Fort Washakie, Wyoming. He returned to Washington in 1902 to marry his childhood friend Elnora Dickerson. In 1905, following the birth of the couple’s first child, Olive, and his promotion to first lieutenant, Davis was made professor of military science and tactics at Wilberforce College in Ohio. After serving as military attaché to Liberia from 1909 to 1911, Davis was reassigned to the Ninth Cavalry at Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming. Davis’s next detail, patrolling the United States-Mexican border in Arizona, necessitated sending his family to Washington within a year of the birth of his son, BENJAMIN O. DAVIS JR., in 1912. Following his promotion to captain in 1915, Davis returned to Wilberforce and to family life. The reunion, however, was short-lived; Elnora died in 1916 several days after the birth of their third child, Elnora.

When Davis was assigned the command of a supply troop in the Philippines in 1917, he sent his children to live with his parents in Washington. Two years later he married Sadie Overton, a Wilberforce teacher. After World War I, Davis, now a lieutenant colonel, taught at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from 1920 to 1924. His next assignment was as instructor of the 372nd Infantry of the Ohio National Guard, a newly reorganized all-black unit. After four years, he was again transferred to Wilberforce for a year.

Davis became increasingly frustrated with teaching posts that undervalued his expertise and with assignments incommensurate with his rank. While the army routinely promoted Davis, he was assigned to noncombat positions, where he would not be in command of white personnel. He had spent World War I far away from the action and was repeatedly denied opportunities for more active duty. “I am getting to the point where I am beginning to believe that I’ve been kept as far in the background as possible,” Davis wrote to Sadie in 1920 (Fletcher, 54). Adding to his dissatisfaction was the social ostracism the Davises encountered from other military families. Davis was certainly aware that, in 1920 alone, more than seventy black World War I veterans had been lynched.

In 1930 Davis was promoted to colonel, becoming not only the highest ranking African American soldier in U.S. history, but—because John Green had retired in 1929—the only black officer in the U.S. Army. Despite repeated efforts to land a leadership position, Davis was reassigned to the Tuskegee classroom from 1930 to 1937. Davis’s first high-profile appointment as colonel—escorting mothers and widows of slain World War I soldiers to European cemeteries in the summers of 1930 through 1933—was the result of self-promotion. “Let a colored officer,” he successfully lobbied, “look after colored gold star mothers. . . . As you know I have traveled over the battlefields. I have a speaking knowledge of French” (Fletcher, 71). After another brief transfer to Wilberforce, Davis was finally put in charge of troops in 1938, when he was appointed regimental commander and instructor of the all-black 369th National Guard Infantry in New York City. Davis spearheaded the conversion of this service unit to an antiaircraft regiment, a move received by the black community as an indication that blacks could and should serve in all branches of the military.

In October 1940 Davis was promoted to brigadier general, becoming the first African American general. The timing of Davis’s appointment, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, just days before the 1940 presidential election, reflects pressure from African American leaders. When Davis’s name did not appear on the list of proposed promotions circulated in September, the African American press responded—“Pres. Appoints 84 Generals, Ignores Col Davis” headlined the New York Age.

Roosevelt had signed the Selective Training and Service Act (1940), establishing the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, and although it included an antidiscrimination clause and the potential for expanded roles for African American soldiers, the legislation maintained segregation. Agitation by African American leaders, especially A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, helped secure Davis’s promotion and other changes, including the establishment of a flight training program at Tuskegee (launched in January 1941), the appointment of Judge WILLIAM HENRY HASTIE as civilian aide to the Secretary of War, and the inclusion of an African American on the Selective Service board.

Davis retired in June 1941 but was immediately recalled to active duty and assigned to the Office of the Inspector General in Washington, D.C., as an adviser on racial matters. As was often the case, racial discrimination began close to home. Davis arrived at his new office to find two colonels refusing to make room for his desk. Because there were no facilities for blacks at the state department, Davis ate lunch at his desk while he worked to support the promotion and improve the morale of black soldiers. Davis investigated complaints of racial discrimination, including the assignment of inferior officers to black units, the banning of black soldiers from army base facilities, and incidents of racial violence. Although appointed a member of the War Department’s Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies in 1942, Davis’s recommendations—which included assigning African American officers to command black troops, discontinuing the policy of segregating blood and plasma, gradually removing black soldiers from southern posts, better supervision and racial integration of military police, desegregating base entertainment facilities, and instituting a mandatory course on racial relations and black history—were routinely omitted from final committee reports.

At the end of 1944, in response to a severe shortage of combat soldiers, Davis, then adviser to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, drafted a plan using black soldiers as replacements in all-white units. Although Eisenhower refused Davis’s suggestion of assigning soldiers based on “need not color,” he allowed black soldiers to be grouped into replacement platoons for white companies. Davis’s job included the production of public relations and educational materials related to issues of race, the most significant of which, The Negro Soldier (1944), was produced by the U.S. Army film unit run by Frank Capra. This film, which includes references to the history of African American soldiers and prominent blacks, was shown to all incoming soldiers. Davis was instrumental in arranging for the film to be released to the general public and for the production of a sequel, Teamwork (1946).

The longer he lived abroad, the more vocal became Davis’s opposition to the army’s segregationist policies. In a memo dated 9 November 1943, he lamented the difficulties facing the black soldier “in a community that offers him nothing but humiliation and mistreatment. . . . The Army, by its directives and by actions of commanding officers, has introduced the attitudes of the ‘Governors of the six Southern states’ in many of the 42 states” (Redstone Arsenal Historical Information papers). Davis was clear in his testimony before a 1945 congressional committee: “Segregation fosters intolerance, suspicion, and friction” (Fletcher, 147). Davis’s unprecedented visibility—there was even a story about both Benjamin Sr. and Jr. in True Comics in 1945—drew fire from those who criticized what they considered Davis’s accommodationist approach to combating disrimination within the army.

In 1945 Davis was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his work “on matters pertaining to Negro troops.” A year later he was reassigned to the Office of Inspector General and focused on the army’s postwar policy regarding black soldiers. The results of integrating the replacement program were encouraging; of the 250 white soldiers queried, 77 percent answered “Yes, have become more favorable towards colored soldiers since having served in the same unit with them” (U.S. Army report, 3 July 1945).

At a ceremony presided over by President Harry S. Truman in the White House Rose Garden, Davis retired on 14 July 1948 after fifty years of service. Twelve days later, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which established “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” The last racially segregated unit was abolished in 1954. Davis, who died of leukemia, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 1997 a commemorative U.S. postage stamp was issued in his honor.

DAVIS, MILES

(26 May 1926–28 Sept. 1991), trumpeter, band leader, and composer, was born Miles Dewey Davis III in Alton, Illinois, the son of Miles Davis II, a dentist, and Cleota H. Henry, both from Arkansas. When Miles was one year old, his family moved to a multiracial neighborhood in East St. Louis, Illinois, where his father prospered, buying a farm in nearby Millstadt. Young Miles first studied trumpet with Elwood C. Buchanan and Joseph Gustat, the principal trumpeter with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and he soon found work in local dance bands.

Caught up in the new music called bebop, Davis left for New York City after graduation and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music, where he was exposed to the music of such composers as Hindemith and Stravinsky, and where he studied trumpet with William Vacchiano, principal trumpeter with the New York Philharmonic. Davis’s nights were spent in the clubs on Fifty-second Street, where he first saw his heroes, CHARLIE PARKER, BILLIE HOLIDAY, Eddie Davis, and Coleman Hawkins, and soon began to perform with them. At a time when other trumpet players were emulating DIZZY GILLESPIE’S bravura runs into the upper register and highspeed improvising, Davis cultivated an elegant soft tone and a deliberative approach. His solos were filled with space—pauses and phrasing that let the rhythm section be heard—and he abandoned the fast vibrato that most trumpet players favored. Such a spare approach led some to hear what he was attempting as amateurish, the efforts of a second-rate musician, but many of his contemporaries appreciated his individuality.

In 1945 Irene Cawthorn, Davis’s high school sweetheart, was pregnant with their first child, and she joined him in New York during his second semester at Juilliard. He left school the next fall to join Charlie Parker’s quintet, and played and recorded with them off and on for the next few years. When Parker and Dizzy Gillespie left for the West Coast in 1946, Davis followed them and joined the Benny Carter Orchestra, then went back East with the Billy Eckstine Orchestra, a large bebop band filled with the music’s finest players. It was while in the Eckstine Orchestra that Davis first began to use cocaine and heroin.

Now recognized as an innovator in bebop, Davis began to explore other ways of playing, and he made musical change his defining feature. In 1948, with the help of arranger and composer Gil Evans, he withdrew from the heat of bebop to develop the chamberlike music of a nine-piece group. Later dubbed the “Birth of the Cool” band, the group was, paradoxically, modeled on the somber, understated Claude Thornhill Orchestra, a white dance band. Almost immediately afterward, Davis formed a quintet that abandoned the aesthetics of cool and formulated what some call “hard bop,” a music that intensified elements of bebop. Almost single-handedly, Davis had set into motion two warring styles that have been the subject of critical debate ever since.

After a trip to Paris in 1949, where he met writers and avant-gardists Boris Vian and Jean Paul Sartre, and fell in love with Juliette Greco, doyenne of the French bohemian world, Davis began making a number of important records in the 1950s with younger innovators such as Sonny Rollins and ART BLAKEY. In 1955 Davis put together a quintet with the innovative saxophonist JOHN COLTRANE, drummer Philly Joe Jones, bassist Paul Chambers, and pianist Red Garland. This popular group produced a series of recordings for Prestige Records, including Relaxin’ (1956) and Steamin’ (1956). The quintet’s stylish mix of bebop lines and show tunes came to define jazz in the 1950s and in years to come. In a move that paid off handsomely, Davis recorded with this band for Columbia Records while still on contract at Prestige. Columbia released ’Round About Midnight (1956) as soon as his contract with Prestige had expired.

Miles Davis in a pensive moment during a recording session at Fontana Records, c. 1973. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Columbia had big plans for Davis and promoted him as both a bebopper who had played with Charlie Parker and as a romantic figure who could play for a larger audience. After a few experimental recordings that blended classical and jazz music, released as The Birth of the Third Stream (1956), Davis followed with a series of albums that caught the public’s fancy. Miles Ahead (1957) paired him again with arranger Gil Evans, and extended the Birth of the Cool idea into a larger instrumental setting. Porgy and Bess (1958) was next, with Evans’s lush settings providing Davis the popular platform he had been seeking. For Sketches of Spain (1959–1960), Evans turned to compositions by Joaquim Rodrigo, Manuel de Falla, and Spanish folk melodies, allowing Davis to display the dramatic elements of his playing, and producing a jazz record that simultaneously gestured towards classical, world, and mood music. When the French film director Louis Malle asked Davis to improvise the score for his film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud in 1957, the results were so successful that Davis undertook additional film music work, scoring music for Siesta (1987), The Hot Spot (1990), and most notably A Tribute to JACK JOHNSON (1970).

Outside these side projects and recordings with large groups, Davis continued to work nightly with his quintet. In 1958 he added alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and pianist Bill Evans to the group, and in 1959 they recorded Kind of Blue, a largely improvised album of pieces based on modes rather than chord progressions. This turned out to be Davis’s most popular record, and possibly the best-selling jazz record of all time.

Just as Davis had disregarded the conventional wisdom on what jazz should sound like, he also rejected nostalgia, adulation, and the cultivation of fans. Dressed in designer suits, Davis left his Playboy-inspired house on New York’s Upper West Side and drove to gigs in his Ferrari. Once on the bandstand, he refused to announce songs or introduce musicians, ignored applause, and when not playing, either turned away from the audience or left the stage. By refusing even a smile, Davis gained a certain magisterial distance, an air of nobility that reversed a century of performance haunted by the obsequiousness of minstrelsy. He would soon insist that the white female models who routinely adorned jazz album covers in the 1950s be replaced by black models, and more often than not it was his own face staring emotionless into the camera.

All this was part of what drew crowds to Davis’s performances. He gained a sympathetic following among beats and hipsters. His persona and his onstage naturalism made him an exemplar for Method actors like James Dean, Dennis Hopper, and Marlon Brando. The Davis enigma was compounded by his silence about his work, both to the public and to his musicians, whom he seldom rehearsed or instructed about playing. On the rare occasions when Davis did speak, contradictions abounded. He might declare his allegiance to African American culture, and denounce white music, and then hire white musicians or proudly declare that he had learned to phrase on trumpet from listening to Frank Sinatra and Orson Welles. He would praise popular black performers like Sly and the Family Stone and JIMI HENDRIX, but just as quickly announce that he was studying the works of the Polish classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki and planning to record an instrumental version of Puccini’s Tosca. His political views were complex and contradictory. Too much the hipster to espouse causes in depth, Davis nonetheless sometimes played for leftist political rallies, and often spoke forcefully on the subject of white control of the entertainment business.

Davis’s stylish dress and modish lifestyle gave him a visibility that other jazz musicians never achieved, and made him popular in the world of show-business. He traveled widely, made a great deal of money, and married or lived with a number of women, most of whom were in show business, including dancer Frances Taylor and actress Cicely Tyson. In addition to music, Davis had a number of interests that endlessly fascinated his audience. A friend of the welterweight champion Johnny Bratton, Davis trained as a boxer, and he raised horses, which he entered into competitions. He appeared on screen in the television series Miami Vice (1984) and in such films as Dingo (1991), and late in life he took up painting, working collaboratively with another painter, in effect improvising collectively.

There were times when the facts of Davis’s social life threatened to overwhelm his music. Although he overcame heroin, other addictions plagued him for most of his life and contributed to his ongoing illnesses and physical ailments, including recurring nodes on the larynx (that led to his distinctive growl), diabetes, sickle-cell anemia, heart attacks and strokes, a degenerative hip, gallstones and ulcers, and what was rumored to be AIDS. In 1959 Davis’s picture—his head bandaged, blood streaming down his tailored khaki jacket, a policeman leading him by handcuffs—appeared in newspapers. After refusing a policeman’s order to move along from in front of New York City’s Birdland club, Davis had been beaten over the head with a nightstick. Charges against Davis were ultimately dropped, but the message of the event was clear to many—the beatings received by civil rights demonstrators in the deep South were also a danger in the North, even for the most famous of black Americans.

In the 1960s Davis tried various new combinations of musicians, eventually putting together an exceptional quintet composed of Wayne Shorter on saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. This group was abstract and earthy, traditional and free at the same time, and intensely rhythmic and full of melodic invention. Records such as E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1966), and Nefertiti (1967) redefined what jazz was capable of becoming.

Davis had always forced his audience to catch up with him, but now he went even further, adding electric piano and hinting at rock rhythms and tone color on Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968). He followed with In a Silent Way (1969), another shift in thinking. In a Silent Way was a surprisingly long, soft, and dreamlike work, closer to Ravel than to post-bop or rock, a purely textual piece, more sonic than improvisational. Davis now counted on the editing of producer Teo Macero to shape his work, and the two next recorded Bitches Brew (1969–1970), an album whose sound, production methods, cover art, and two-LP length signaled that Miles Davis—and jazz—were in motion again. Most critics and fans heard this music as Davis’s foray into a new hybrid jazz-rock, although he saw it as a new way of thinking about improvisation and the role of the studio. Recordings Davis made in the mid-1970s, including On the Corner (1972) and Dark Magus (1974), were so richly textured with electronics and underpinned by funk rhythms that they became even harder to categorize—Psychedelic jazz? Free rock?

Davis’s illnesses and addictions led to a breakdown in 1975, and he withdrew into the darkness of his house for the next four years. With the help of friends and lovers, he began to recover and play again, and in 1979 he formed a series of rock-inflected groups that made a series of uneven records, such as Star People (1982–1983) and You’re Under Arrest (1984–1985). Breaking with Evans and Macero in 1986, Davis began to record the synthesizer-driven albums, like Tutu (1986–1987) and Amandla (1988–1989), that made him an international superstar. Although these studio recordings show Davis as restrained and often being led through the paces by producers, his live recordings from this period, such as Live Around the World (1988–91), were spirited reinventions. His final recordings, including Miles and Quincy Live at Montreux (1991), which he recorded with QUINCY JONES, were a return to his old style. An effort at hip hop (Doo-Bop) was not completed before his death in Santa Monica, California, in 1991.

DAVIS, OSSIE

(18 Dec. 1917–), writer, actor, and director, was born in Cogdell, Georgia, the oldest of four children of Kince Charles Davis, an herb doctor and Bible scholar, and Laura Cooper. Ossie’s mother intended to name him “R.C.,” after his paternal grandfather, Raiford Chatman Davis, but when the clerk at Clinch County courthouse thought she said “Ossie,” Laura did not argue with him, because he was white.

Ossie was attacked and humiliated while in high school by two white policemen, who took him to their precinct and doused him with cane syrup. Laughing, they gave the teenager several hunks of peanut brittle and released him. He never reported the incident but its memory contributed to his sensibilities and politics. In 1934 Ossie graduated from Center High School in Waycross, Georgia, and even though he received scholarships to attend Savannah State College and Tuskegee Institute he did not have the minimal financial resources to take advantage of them. Instead, he spent a year clerking at his father’s pharmacy in Valdosta, Georgia, before hitchhiking to Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Ossie spent the next four years at Howard, but he did not receive a degree, as he had taken only the classes that appealed to him. However, at Howard, Ossie met the poet and scholar STERLING BROWN, who introduced him to the work of LANGSTON HUGHES and COUNTÉE CULLEN. Brown, Ossie later wrote, showed him that the “interest of my people was at stake, and I could only be a hero by serving their urgent cause. The Struggle opened a new chapter in my imagination” (Davis and Dee, 74–75). ALAIN LOCKE, his Howard theater teacher, began by introducing him to the world of black drama and ended up, according to Ossie, “giving me my life.”

Another early influence on Ossie was Eldon Stuart Medas, leader of a West Indian student bull-session group at Howard, who showed Ossie how to love English poets and playwrights and how to use them to win political arguments. As Ossie was preparing to leave Howard in 1939, he attended the 16 April concert given by MARIAN ANDERSON on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This event, he later reflected, “married in my mind forever the performing arts as a weapon in the struggle for freedom. . . . It reminded me that whatever I said and whatever I did as an artist was an integral part of my people’s struggle to be free” (Davis and Dee, 86–87).

Davis moved to Harlem at the suggestion of Locke, who recommended that the budding playwright apprentice himself to Dick Campbell, founder and artistic director of the ROSE MCCLENDON Players (RMP). At the RMP, Davis learned the fundamentals of acting and stagecraft and appeared in four plays between 1939 and 1941, including BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, a play by William Ashley starring Dooley Wilson. Davis later said of the RMP that “it cultivated and serviced the Harlem Community with high-grade entertainment that gave Negroes a chance to see their own lives. . . [and gave] Negro actors, stage managers, set designers, and assorted technicians, a chance to learn and practice their craft under the best instruction” (Davis, “The Flight from Broadway,” 15).

In 1942 Davis’s career was interrupted when he was drafted during World War II; he served as a medic in Liberia until 1945, after which he returned to New York, where the director Herman Shumlin cast him as the lead in Robert Ardrey’s play Jeb. The drama, the story of a returning African American veteran who faces down the Ku Klux Klan to marry his girlfriend, costarred RUBY DEE. Davis and Dee appeared together again later that year in the national tour of Anna Lucasta and in 1948 at the Lyceum Theater in The Smile of the World. The couple married in 1948 and had three children: Nora, Guy, and Hasna.

Although Davis performed in fifteen plays between 1948 and 1957—including Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures (1951) and Jamaica (1958) opposite LENA HORNE on Broadway, for which he received a Tony Award nomination—he thought of himself principally as a playwright. Since 1939, however, he had been struggling to complete “Leonidas Is Fallen,” the story of a slave hero—modeled after the slave revolt leaders GABRIEL, DENMARK VESEY, and NAT TURNER—who dies fighting for his freedom. Davis hoped to create a “new kind of drama,” different from contemporary black musical comedies and adaptations. During this period, Davis attended meetings of the Young Communist League in Harlem, paying close attention to the political speakers but also to the writers, from whom he hoped to find literary, as well as political, solutions. Davis never became a Communist, but he eventually became a playwright, with help from a playwriting class at Columbia University in 1947.

When Davis replaced SIDNEY POITIER opposite Dee in A Raisin in the Sun, it encouraged him to finish his play, Purlie Victorious (1961), which Davis described as the “adventures of Negro manhood in search of itself in a world for white folks only,” that revealed “a world that emasculated me, as it does all Negro men. . . and taught me to gleefully accept that emasculation as the highest honor America could bestow” (Davis, “Purlie Told Me!” 155–156). In 1963 Davis adapted the play into a film, Gone Are the Days, in which he and Dee starred. In 1970 he retooled the play as a musical for Broadway, Purlie, which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical.

Davis’s film and television work began in 1950 with the film No Way Out, in which he starred with Dee. Over the next fifty years, working with many of America’s best filmmakers and performers, he appeared in more than one hundred film and television projects, including The JOE LOUIS Story (1953); The Cardinal (1963), directed by Otto Preminger; The Hill (1965), directed by Sidney Lumet; A Man Called Adam (1966), featuring SAMMY DAVIS JR., Cicely Tyson, and Louis ARMSTRONG; The Scalphunters (1968), directed by Sidney Pollock; Let’s Do It Again (1975), directed by Sidney Poitier and starring Poitier and BILL COSBY; Harry and Son (1984), directed by Paul Newman; and I’m Not Rappaport (1996), costarring Walter Matthau. Davis has maintained a particularly rich creative relationship with the filmmaker SPIKE LEE, appearing in School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), and Get on the Bus (1996).

In addition to his many television guest appearances, Davis has had recurring roles in a number of television series, including the detective drama The Outsider (1967); B. L. Stryker (1989–1990), opposite Burt Reynolds; Evening Shade (1990–1994); and The Promised Land (1996). He has starred in numerous television dramas and miniseries, including many African American-themed works, such as Roots (1979), which also featured Dee; Don’t Look Back: The Story of Leroy “SATCHEL” PAIGE (1981); and King (1978), in which he played Martin Luther King Sr. Davis’s writing credits include For Us the Living: The MEDGAR EVERS Story (1983), which he cowrote with MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS for American Playhouse, and three children’s books: Just like Martin (1992) about MARTIN LUTHUR KING JR.; Escape to Freedom: A Play about Young FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1978), winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award and the American Library Association’s CORETTA SCOTT KING Award; and Langston, a Play (1982).

In 1970 Davis directed his first film, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), an adaptation of CHESTER HIMES’S detective novel about an armed robbery at a Back-to-Africa rally in Harlem. The commercial success of Cotton, for which Davis also wrote the screenplay and several songs, paved the way for what became known as the “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s. Although he was wary of many of the blaxploitation films, Davis agreed with the critic Clayton Riley that they constituted “part of a stage of development for a number of people” (Riley, “On the Film Critic,” Black Creation, 1972, 15), and he agreed to direct the film adaptation of J. E. Franklin’s play Black Girl in 1972. Davis chose the project—about a high school dropout who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer but settles for dancing in a bar—in order to demonstrate to Hollywood and to black filmmakers, in particular, that black film could be both entertaining and reflective of the lives of real African Americans. In the early 1970s Davis directed Kongi’s Harvest (1971), Gordon’s War (1973), and Countdown at Kusini (1976), which he also wrote, and he established the Third World Cinema Corporation, a New York-based production company that trained African Americans and Latinos for film and television production jobs.

In 1980 Davis and Dee founded their own production company, Emmalyn II Productions Company. Together they produced and hosted three seasons of the critically acclaimed PBS television series With Ossie and Ruby and three years of the Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour, a radio broadcast for the National Black Network. The couple has participated, separately and together, in the creation of numerous documentary and nonfiction projects, including Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum; Mississippi, America; and A Walk through the 20th Century with Bill Moyers for PBS. In 1998 they cowrote an autobiography, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. In 2002 Davis completed a new play, A Last Dance for Sybil, which ran in New York starring Dee.

Davis and Dee’s commitment to civil rights and humanitarian causes has been central to their life and work. They have labored to introduce staged productions and readings into schools, unions, community centers, and, especially, black churches, because they were repositories “of all we thought precious and worthy to be passed on to our children” (Davis and Dee, 253). In the 1950s they risked their careers by stridently resisting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s blacklisting activities. Highly active and visible during the civil rights movement, they served as masters of ceremonies for the 1963 March on Washington, and in 1964 they helped establish Artists for Freedom, which donated money to civil rights organizations in the name of the four little girls killed in Birmingham, Alabama. Davis’s stirring eulogy at the 1965 funeral of MALCOLM X flawlessly articulated black America’s loss: “Malcolm had stopped being a ‘Negro’ years ago. It had become too small, too puny, too weak a word for him. Malcolm was bigger than that. Malcolm had become an Afro-American and he wanted—so desperately—that we, that all his people, would become Afro-Americans too. . . . Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.” Davis and Dee’s political work continued unabated over the next decades.

In addition to their many individual honors, Davis and Dee have jointly received the Actors’ Equity Association PAUL ROBESON Award (1975), the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle Award (1994), and induction into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame (1989). In 1995 they were awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton, and in 2000 they received the Screen Actors Guild’s highest honor, the Life Achievement Award.

DAVIS, SAMMY, JR.

(8 Dec. 1925–16 May 1990), singer, dancer, and actor, was born in Harlem, New York, the first of two children of Sammy Davis Sr., an African American vaudeville entertainer, and Elvera Sanchez, a Puerto Rican chorus dancer. Sammy’s paternal grandmother, “Mama Rosa,” raised him until he was three years old, when his father, who had separated from Elvera, took his son with him on the road. Within a few years, the child’s role grew from that of a silent prop to that of a show-stealing singer and dancer, the youngest member of the Will Mastin Trio, featuring Sammy Davis Jr.

Fellow performers were the only family Sammy knew, and the world of the theater was the only school he ever attended. He was billed as “Silent Sam, the Dancing Midget” to hide him from truant officers and child labor investigators. After a period during which the group could not find work or shelter, Davis’s father thought about returning the boy to his grandmother, only to discover that the young ham had already become addicted to the stage, the spotlight, and the adulation of approving audiences. In retrospect, Davis said he had “no chance to be bricklayer or dentist, dockworker or preacher” (Early, 4). By age seven he had made his film debut in the comedy Rufus Jones for President (1933), in which he played the title role of a little boy who falls asleep in the lap of his mother, played by ETHEL WATERS, and dreams that he is elected president of the United States.

Sammy Davis Jr. with fellow “Rat Pack” members Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra following a Carnegie Hall benefit for MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. in 1961. © Bettmann/CORBIS

During the Depression, Davis traveled on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” a network of clubs that hired black acts to fill the time between performances by white headliners. Black entertainers had only a few minutes on stage and were prohibited from speaking directly to the audience; therefore, they often used a rapid variety of singing, dancing, and joking to hold the audience’s attention. This eclectic quality came to define Davis’s career. He believed it made him a superior entertainer; some critics believe he might have done better to focus on singing or dancing. Thus while Davis mastered several vocal and dance styles, nailed a number of impersonations, and played the drums, trumpet, vibes, and other instruments, he never developed his own style. BILL “BOJANGLES” ROBINSON, STEPIN FETCHIT, MOMS MABLEY, and REDD FOXX were among Davis’s early influences, but he made the transition from vaudeville to Vegas, from burlesque to Broadway more easily than any of his predecessors and became one of the first “crossover” African American celebrities in the United States.

Groucho Marx saw Davis perform at the Hillcrest Country Club and said, “This kid’s the greatest entertainer,” and then turned to Al Jolson, who was seated at his table, and remarked “and this goes for you, too” (Levy, 49). Davis’s big break, however, occurred in 1941, when the Will Mastín Trio was performing in Detroit as an opening act for Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was so impressed by the fifteen-year-old entertainer that he used his growing fame to help Davis get some of the recognition and respect he deserved. Later Sinatra, too, would say that Davis was the greatest performer he had ever seen, because he could “do anything except cook spaghetti” (Boston Globe, 17 May 1990).

Davis’s promising career was briefly interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving from 1943 to 1945. Although his unit at Fort Warren, Wyoming, was integrated, Davis suffered racial discrimination and beatings. After basic training, Davis was placed in Special Services, where he entertained enlisted men along with George M. Cohan. Throughout his life, Davis was determined to use his talent to make audiences love him even if they hated him. For him, performance was not only a way of transcending racial barriers, it was a means of gaining acceptance and distinguishing himself. As he wrote, “If God ever took away my talent I would be a nigger again” (Early, 20–21). Yet he realized that his success was Pyrrhic, that “being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted” (Curt Schleir, “The Public Acclaim and Private Pain of Sammy Davis Jr.,” Biography, 4.2 [Feb. 2000], 88).

After leaving the army, Davis made his first recording with Capitol Records and was named Most Outstanding New Personality of 1946 by Metronome magazine. The Will Mastin Trio regrouped and began opening for Mickey Rooney in Las Vegas in 1947 and the following year for Frank Sinatra in New York. These engagements led to television appearances on Eddie Cantor’s Colgate Comedy Hour and the Ed Sullivan Show. By the early 1950s Davis had enough clout to force the integration of many of the hotels at which he performed. In 1954 his career could have ended when his car smashed into another vehicle while driving from Las Vegas to California. Davis lost his left eye in the accident, but within ten months he was back on stage performing with an eye patch—and, because of the publicity, he was bigger than ever.

In 1956 Davis played the lead in the Broadway musical Mr. Wonderful, in 1958 he appeared opposite EARTHA KITT in the film Anna Lucasta, and in 1959 he played Sporting Life in the film version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Beginning with Ocean’s Eleven (1960), Davis made six films as part of a group of jet-setting actors dubbed the “Rat Pack,” including Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop. During this period, Davis’s flashy jewelry, ostentatious dress, and characteristic jive talk made him the epitome of “hip” and, along with MILES DAVIS, the king of the “Cool Cats.”

Controversy was an inseparable part of Davis’s popularity. In an effort to quell rumors about his relationships with white women, Davis rushed into a marriage with Loray White, an African American dancer, in 1958. The marriage lasted only a few months. His highly publicized conversion to Judaism, which began sincerely with Rabbi Max Nussbaum after his accident and was based on an affinity he felt with the Jewish people, was suspected by some of being an indication of his desire to escape his blackness by assimilating into another culture. His relationship with the black community became more problematic after his 1960 marriage to the Swedish actress May Britt, with whom he had one child, Tracey, and adopted two, Mark and Jeff. Despite the fact that Davis was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement and a generous contributor to black charities—qualities that helped him earn the NAACP’s Spingarn Award in 1969—his lifestyle was an easy target for the militants of the 1960s, and his embrace of Republican President Richard M. Nixon in 1972 brought his loyalties into question. Drinking, drug use, and his associations with people in the adult film industry and in satanic cults gave Davis a reputation that he both flaunted and regretted.

Davis was a top draw as a nightclub performer, earning fifteen thousand dollars for a single performance and as much as three million dollars a year, yet he always spent more than he earned. When his accountant expressed concern about his profligate spending, Davis bought him a gold watch with the inscription, “Thanks for the advice.” Although he had become a solo act by the 1960s, he continued to share his salary with his father and Will Mastin for many years thereafter. In 1965 he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in Golden Boy, and in 1966 he briefly hosted his own television program, the Sammy Davis Jr. Show. He also appeared as a guest star on such popular shows as Lawman (1961), Batman (1966), I Dream of Jeannie (1967), and The Mod Squad (1969–1970). His appearance on All in the Family (1972) set a Nielsen ratings record, and on several occasions he was a substitute host on The Tonight Show.

In 1970, two years after his divorce from May Britt, Davis married the African American dancer Altovise Gore and adopted another son, Manny. His recording “Candyman” hit the top of the chart in 1972, and other hits, such as “Mr. Bojangles,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “Birth of the Blues,” kept him in constant demand. His activities slowed during the 1980s as Davis struggled with various kidney and liver ailments and a hip replacement. President Ronald Reagan presented him the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1987.

Davis played his final role, as an aging dancer, in the movie Tap (1989), with his protégé Gregory Hines. He died the following year of throat cancer. He left three autobiographies, twenty-three films, and two dozen recordings to entertain future generations.

DAY, WILLIAM HOWARD

(16 Oct. 1825–2 Dec. 1900), educator and editor, was born in New York City, the son of John Day, a sailmaker, and Eliza Dixon, a seamstress. J. P. Williston, an inkmaker from Northampton, Massachusetts, first met Day during a visit to a school for black children in New York City. Williston was so impressed with the young student that he persuaded Day’s mother to allow him, a white man, to adopt her son. Day spent five years in Northampton, where he attended school and was apprenticed as a printer at the Hampshire Herald. Refused admission to Williams College because of his race, Day enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio (1843–1847). Soon after graduating, he was hired by the Cleveland True Democrat as a reporter, compositor, and local editor. He later published and edited the Aliened American (1853–1854), which aimed to promote education and defend the rights of African Americans. It was also the mouthpiece of the state’s Negro Convention Movement, in which Day was a leading figure. Day married fellow student Lucy Stanton in 1852; one child was born to the marriage.

Five years out of college, Day organized a meeting in Cleveland to honor surviving black veterans of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. It was in part a memorial to his father, a sailor in the War of 1812 who had died tragically in 1829, and also partly an expression of Day’s conviction that such valor in the defense of the nation was grounds enough to be recognized as citizens. “We ask for liberty; liberty here—liberty on Chalmette Plains—liberty wherever floats the American flag,” Day wrote. “We demand for the sons of the men who fought for you, equal privileges” (Cleveland True Democrat, 9 Sept. 1852). The struggle for equal rights dominated Day’s life.

The failure of his newspaper and increasing discrimination prompted Day and his family to join the growing number of African Americans emigrating to Canada. There he became involved in John Brown’s preparations for the 1859 attack on Harpers Ferry, printing Brown’s constitution in an isolated shack outside St. Catharines. Day was in Britain raising money for the fugitive slave settlement at Buxton, Ontario, when the attack occurred. He spent the next four years in Britain lecturing against slavery and working with the African Aid Society, an organization formed to support the efforts of MARTIN R. DELANY, HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET, Robert Campbell, and other advocates of African American emigration to the west coast of Africa. By the time of his return to the United States in 1863, Day’s marriage had fallen apart because of what he considered to be irreconcilable differences. It is difficult to determine what these differences were, but it is clear that Day’s long absences from home must have been a contributing factor. William and Lucy Day were finally divorced in 1872, after years of wrangling. A few months later Day married Geòrgie Bell of Washington, D.C.; he had no children with his second wife.

After returning to the United States, Day settled in New York City, devoting most of his time to working with the American Freedmen’s Friend Society, a black-led freedmen’s aid organization, and as lay editor of the Zion Herald, the organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In 1867 he was named by the Freedmen’s Bureau as superintendent of schools for the freedmen of Maryland and Delaware. Day used this office to promote education, to support the construction of schools, and to work with local associations to increase educational opportunities for the freedmen. In spite of local and state opposition, Day reported significant growth in schools built and in attendance. Day lost his job in 1869 when the Freedmen’s Bureau reorganized its local offices.

In 1872 Day moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, after purchasing a local newspaper, Progress of Liberty, and changing its name to Our National Progress. Published simultaneously in Harrisburg and Philadelphia; Wilmington, Delaware; Camden, New Jersey; and New York City, Day saw the paper as both a regional and a national mouthpiece of African Americans. Despite its wide circulation, the paper ceased publication in 1875 largely on account of difficulties brought on by the economic depression of 1873. Day ran unsuccessfully for the Harrisburg School Board in 1873; five years later he became the first African American to be elected to the board. He remained a member for the rest of the century with the exception of brief periods in the 1880s when he refused renomination. In 1891 the board unanimously elected Day its president, a position he held until 1895. He finally retired from the board in 1899, ending an involvement in education lasting more than fifty years.

Day was a prominent force in central Pennsylvania Republican circles. His active involvement in the 1872 campaign led to his appointment to a clerkship in the state auditor general’s office. But frustration with token appointments and the continued corruption of the state Republican machine under Simon Cameron led Day to break with the party in 1878. He temporarily threw his support to the Democrats but was back in the Republican fold in 1881. Although he remained an active supporter of the party, Day never again regained his place of prominence, nor was he, or any other black Pennsylvanian during Day’s lifetime, ever nominated to significant office.

After his return from Britain in 1863, Day had become actively involved in the AME Zion Church. His parents’ home had served as a meeting place for the fledgling denomination in the 1820s, and Day had been baptized by JAMES VARICK, the first bishop of the church. By 1870 Day was unquestionably the most prominent member of the denomination in Pennsylvania. He was named secretary-general of the national body in 1876 and presiding elder of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Conference in 1885. As elder he supervised a district that included Washington, D.C., and parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. He was later appointed secretary of the board of bishops.

Day, a contemporary observed, was “one of the grandest and most refined men of this country regardless of race” (Harrisburg Telegraph, 14 Apr. 1898). It was a fitting tribute to a man who had spent all of his adult life promoting the cause of freedom and equality in the United States. Day died in Harrisburg as a result of a series of strokes.

DEE, RUBY

(27 Oct. 1924–), actress and writer, was born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, the third of four children of teenage parents, Gladys Hightower and Edward Nathaniel Wallace, a Pullman car porter. After Gladys ran off to follow a preacher, the couple divorced in 1924, and Edward married Emma Amelia Benson, a former schoolteacher, who lived in New York City. Emma, whom Ruby called “Mother,” reared the Wallace children in Harlem, New York, where family lessons included picketing white-owned Harlem businesses that refused to hire African Americans.

Ruby graduated from Hunter College High School in 1939 and entered Hunter College, in New York City. Her professional theater career began in 1940 during her sophomore year, when the writer and director Abram Hill cast her in his social satire, On Strivers Row (1940) at the American Negro Theater (ANT), which he had cofounded with FREDERICK DOUGLASS O’NEAL and Austin Briggs-Hall earlier that year. Over the next few years Ruby appeared in five other ANT plays, including Hill’s powerful indictment of white racism and exploitation, Walk Hard (1944). In 1941 she married Frankie Dee Brown, a midget and well-off liquor salesman, whom she divorced in 1945 because of his obsessive jealousy. Dee’s busy personal and professional life took its toll on her academic work. After flunking out of school, she was reinstated and graduated from Hunter in 1944.

OSSIE DAVIS and Ruby Dee starred together in Robert Ardrey’s play Jeb, about a returning veteran who confronts the Ku Klux Klan, 1946. Library of Congress

Dee made her Broadway debut in the original production of South Pacific in 1943 and replaced ALICE CHILDRESS in the Broadway production of Anna Lucasta the next year. In 1945 Dee played the female lead in Robert Ardrey’s play Jeb, the story of a returning African American veteran who faces down the Ku Klux Klan to marry his girlfriend; the part of Jeb was played by OSSIE DAVIS. Davis and Dee appeared together again later that year in the national tour of Anna Lucasta and in 1948 at the Lyceum Theater in The Smile of the World. The couple married in 1948 and had three children: Nora, Guy, and Hasna.

In 1959 Dee opened in the original cast of LORRAINE HANSBERRY’S Broadway play A Raisin in the Sun, first opposite SIDNEY POITIER and later opposite her husband. Despite her reservations about the role—“It seemed that I’d been playing that same character, more or less, in almost everything I’d done” (Davis and Dee, 281)—Dee received great notices. In the mid-1960s, when she starred as Kate in Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia in King Lear, Dee became the first African American woman to play lead roles at the American Shakespeare Festival. During her illustrious theater career, Dee won an Obie Award for playing Lena opposite JAMES EARL JONES in Athol Fugard’s off-Broadway play Boesman and Lena (1970) and a Drama Desk Award for Wedding Band (1973), a play by Alice Childress. Other theatrical highlights include her starring role in the 1988 Broadway comedy Checkmates opposite Paul Winfield and the role of Laura in The Glass Menagerie at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 1989.

Like her husband, Dee was committed to increasing the black presence among television and film crews. She had found it particularly ironic that 1950’s No Way Out, the story of a wounded racist robber who does not want to be treated by a black intern, “deliberately barred [blacks] from participation in this image-making business” (Davis and Dee, 199). In addition to her stage work, Dee began appearing in film in the late 1940s, including The Fight Never Ends (1949), with JOE LOUIS playing himself; The JACKIE ROBINSON Story (1950), in which she played Rachel Robinson opposite Jackie Robinson playing himself; Edge of the City (1957); St. Louis Blues (1958), with NAT KING COLE, EARTHA KITT, CAB CALLOWAY, and ELLA FITZGERALD; A Raisin in the Sun (1961), reprising her role as Ruth; The Balcony (1963); The Incident (1967); Up Tight (1968), set in a Cleveland slum after the death of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.; Buck and the Preacher (1972), directed by Poitier and costarring HARRY BELAFONTE; Go Tell It on the Mountain (1985), based on the book by JAMES B ALDWIN; and two SPIKE LEE films, Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991).

For her work on television, Dee has been nominated for an Emmy Award seven times. She won an Emmy for Decoration Day (1990) and a Cable ACE Award for her performance in Long Day’s Journey into Night. She played recurring characters on both Guiding Light (1967) and Peyton Place (1968–1969) on television and has appeared in such television dramas as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979), adapted from MAYA ANGELOU’S memoir; To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1981); The James Mink Story (1996); The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990); Zora Is My Name, about ZORA NEALE HURSTON, which she cowrote; and Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First Hundred Years (1999), in which she appeared as BESSIE DELANY. Dee has written several books, including Glowchild and Other Poems (1972); My One Good Nerve (1999), which she turned into a one-woman show; and two children’s books, Two Ways to Count to Ten (1988), winner of a Literary Guild Award; and Tower to Heaven (1991).

Davis and Dee have been working together—on stage, film, and television as performers, writers, and producers—for almost sixty years. In 1980 they founded their own production company, Emmalyn II Productions Company, and over the years produced both a television and a radio series, as well as numerous documentary and non-fiction projects. The couple has also worked together in civil rights and humanitarian causes, on the small and large scales. In the 1950s they risked their careers by stridently resisting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s blacklisting activities. Their roles came to national attention when they served as masters of ceremonies for the 1963 March on Washington. The following year they helped establish Artists for Freedom, which donated money to civil rights organizations in the name of the four little girls killed in Birmingham, Alabama. Dee helped organize a summit of “prominent black leaders in the Struggle . . . [so that they] could meet in an informal atmosphere, talk, map strategy without press participation, without cameras” (Davis and Dee, 307). Dee often worked behind the scenes, helping establish Concerned Mothers, which raised money for Betty Shabazz and her children after the death of Shabazz’s husband, MALCOLM X. She and Davis have been active in supporting the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and sickle-cell-disease research. They also campaigned for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row since 1982 for killing a Philadelphia policeman, and protested civil rights abuses, including the killing of Amadou Diallo by New York police.

DEFRANTZ, ANITA L.

(4 Oct. 1952–), Olympic rower and administrator, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Robert David DeFrantz, a social worker, YMCA administrator, and local school board member, and Anita Page, a speech pathologist and university professor. When DeFrantz was eighteen months old, her family moved to Indiana, living first in Bloomington and then Indianapolis.

DeFrantz was greatly influenced by her family’s history of social and political activism. Her grandfather, Faburn Edward DeFrantz, was executive director of the Senate Avenue YMCA in Indianapolis from 1916 until 1952. Under his leadership, the Senate Avenue Y’s “Monster Meetings” became an important forum over a span of several decades for the examination of issues affecting African Americans. They were public educational gatherings that brought to town such African American luminaries as W. E. B. DU BOIS, LANGSTON HUGHES, PAUL ROBESON, A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, JACKIE ROBINSON, ROY WILKINS, and THURGOOD MARSHALL. DeFrantz’s parents met in the late 1940s as students at Indiana University. Her father was president of the campus NAACP chapter. Her mother was among the first group of African Americans to integrate student housing at the university.

DeFrantz’s early athletic accomplishments were modest. As an elementary school student, she swam at Indianapolis’s Frederick Douglass Public Park Pool and participated in local competitions. She attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. Although active in several extracurricular activities such as madrigal, band, orchestra, Quill and Scroll, and thespians, she did not play a sport.

A high school friend who graduated a year before DeFrantz and went to Connecticut College encouraged DeFrantz to apply to the college. She did so and was accepted. DeFrantz played basketball during her freshman year. In the fall of her sophomore year, she discovered rowing. One day on campus, she spotted a strange-looking boat in front of the student union. When DeFrantz, who was nearly six feet tall, asked what it was, the college rowing coach told her it was for rowing, adding, “You’d be perfect for it” (Thomas, 1).

After graduating from college with honors in 1974, DeFrantz enrolled in law school at the University of Pennsylvania. She chose to attend the university primarily because the Vesper Boat Club, a training center for elite rowers, was located in Philadelphia. While in law school, DeFrantz trained for rowing three times a day and held a part-time job working from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. at Philadelphia police headquarters interviewing defendants before their bail hearings.

Training under the tutelage of coaches at Vesper, she made her first national rowing team in 1975. That year she competed in the world championships, in the four-oared shell, at Nottingham, England, finishing fifth. The following year, 1976, was the first year that women competed in Olympic rowing. DeFrantz made the United States team as a member of the women’s eight-oared shell. The team won a bronze medal at the Montreal Olympic Games.

After the Olympic Games, DeFrantz spent the fall of 1976 working at the Center for Law and Social Policy, in Washington, D.C. She completed law school in 1977 and was admitted to the Pennsylvania State Bar later that year.

She continued rowing with the goal of winning a gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. DeFrantz was a member of every United States national team between 1975 and 1980. She won a silver medal at the 1978 world championships, competed in world championship finals four times, and won six national titles. She supported herself financially by working as a staff attorney for the Juvenile Law Center of Philadelphia from 1977 to 1979, and then from 1979 to 1981 as a pre-law adviser and director of the Third World Center at Princeton University.

The 1970s also marked the beginning of DeFrantz’s involvement in sports governance. Fellow athletes elected her to the United States Olympic Committee Athletes Advisory Council in 1976, a position she held until 1984. She become a member of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) board of directors in 1976 and joined the committee’s executive board in 1977.

President Jimmy Carter’s call for an American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games in response to the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan proved to be a pivotal event in DeFrantz’s life. In April 1980 the USOC, under strong pressure from the Carter administration, voted against sending a team to Moscow. The decision outraged DeFrantz, who was considered a leading contender for the 1980 Olympic team. She argued that the federal government had never provided any financial support for athletes’ training and that individual athletes should have the right to decide for themselves whether to compete in Moscow. She led a group of eighteen other athletes, one coach, and one administrator who filed a suit in United States District Court in April 1980 seeking to overturn the USOC decision. The suit failed, but it caught the attention of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which in July 1980 awarded DeFrantz the Bronze Medal of the Olympic Order for her stand.

DeFrantz’s defense of athletes’ rights also attracted the attention of Peter Ueberroth, the president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. Ueberroth offered her a job developing the plan for the three Olympic villages used at the 1984 Games. She began at the committee in 1981, became the committee’s vice president for Olympic Villages, and ran the day-to-day operations of the Olympic Village at the University of Southern California during the Games.

The 1984 Games generated a surplus of $223 million. Approximately $93 million of the surplus was used to establish the Amateur Athletic Foundation (AAF) of Los Angeles, a nonprofit corporation devoted to developing youth sports in Southern California. DeFrantz joined the foundation staff in 1985. In 1987 the board of directors elected her president. Under DeFrantz’s leadership, the AAF invested more than $100 million in youth sports through grant making and self-initiated programs designed primarily to meet the needs of young people historically underserved by private and public sports programming.

While still a staff member of the AAF in 1986, DeFrantz was elected to the IOC. She became the first African American and only the fifth woman elected to the organization. In 1992 the IOC elected DeFrantz to its executive board. Two years later she became the first woman elected vice-president in the committee’s 103-year history. DeFrantz, however, was unsuccessful in her attempt in 2001 to win the IOC presidency.

Throughout her tenure on the IOC, DeFrantz has been a leading advocate of expanding the Olympic program to include more female athletes and more events for women. She became chair of the newly formed IOC Working Group on Women and Sport in 1995. The influence of DeFrantz and other advocates of gender equity in international sports was reflected in the changing composition of the Olympic Games. At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, two years before DeFrantz’s election, women competed in sixty-two events and comprised 23 percent of all athletes. At the 2000 Sydney Games, there were 132 events for women, who made up 38.2 percent of all athletes.

Membership in the IOC provided DeFrantz entry to a variety of other international sports posts from the 1990s forward. She was vice president of the International Rowing Federation, a member of the executive committee of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, a member of the Board of Trustees for the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee, and an arbitrator for the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

DeFrantz occupies an unusual, if not unique, position as an administrator of two distinctly different types of sports organizations. She is a member of several elite national and international sports governing bodies. At the same time, DeFrantz runs a foundation committed to youth sports. She is best known as an Olympic leader, a role she fulfills on a volunteer basis. Her actual vocation, however, is the development of community-based sports programs for children and teenagers. This dual identity, combined with her reputation as an advocate of women’s sports and her visibility as an African American woman in sports administration, an arena dominated by white men, has earned DeFrantz a variety of awards and recognitions. These include the Ladies Home Journal 100 Most Important Women in America, 1988; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s Black Woman of Achievement Award, 1988; Women’s Sports Foundation’s Billie Jean King Contribution Award, 1996; The Australian Magazine 100 Most Powerful Women in the World, 1997; and The Sporting News 100 Most Powerful People in Sports, 1991–1999.

DELANEY, BEAUFORD

(30 Dec. 1901–26 Mar. 1979), painter, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the eighth of ten children, to Delia Johnson, a domestic worker, and John Samuel Delaney, a Methodist minister. Beauford attended the segregated Knoxville Colored High School, from which he graduated with honors. As a teenager, he met a local artist, Lloyd Branson, who painted impressionist-style landscapes and portraits. For several years Beauford worked for Branson as a porter in exchange for art lessons and began creating representational landscapes and portraits of local Knoxville blacks. Recognizing the young artist’s talent, Branson pushed him to pursue formal art studies in Boston and helped finance his education.

In September 1923 Delaney left Knoxville for Boston, where he attended the Massachusetts Normal Art School (now Massachusetts College of Art), studying portraiture and academic traditions. He took classes at the Copley Society, the South Boston School of Art, and the Lowell Institute, and he copied original works of art at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, refining his skills as a draftsman. Gradually, Delaney became fascinated by more modern work, especially that of the impressionist painter Claude Monet, which he saw in a retrospective mounted just after the artist’s death in 1926. Monet’s late water lily paintings provided an important example of abstract brushwork, light, and color that would prove critical to Delaney’s later expressionistic painting.

Delaney arrived in New York City in November 1929 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance and settled in Greenwich Village, where he lived in several different apartments during his twenty-three-year stay. During the early 1930s Delaney supported himself doing traditional pastel and charcoal portraits of dancers and society. He also began producing more experimental works, sketching and painting people in the streets of Greenwich Village and Harlem, using erratic line and bright color. Delaney credited this stylistic shift to his New York environment. “I never drew a decent thing until I felt the rhythm of New York,” he explained. “New York has a rhythm as distinct as the beating of a human heart. And I’m trying to put it on canvas . . . . I paint people. People—and in their faces I hope to discover that odd, mysterious rhythm” (New York Telegraph, 27 Mar. 1930).

Newspaper critics increasingly recognized Delaney’s work, and in February 1930 the Whitney Studio Gallery included three of his oil portraits and nine pastel drawings in a group exhibition. The Whitney offered him work as a caretaker, gallery guard, and doorman, and in return he received a studio in the basement for two years. Delaney continued his studies with the Ashcan school artist John Sloan and the American regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students’ League in New York. In late 1930 he began a series of pastel and charcoal drawings of famous African American jazz musicians, including DUKE ELLINGTON, ETHEL WATERS, and LOUIS ARMSTRONG.

During the Works Progress Administration era, Delaney worked as an assistant to Charles Alston on his Harlem Hospital mural project but found himself drawn to European modernists, such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the fauves. He also loved the American modernists, including John Marin, Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Stuart Davis, and saw their work often at Stieglitz’s gallery, An American Place. As art sales were slow during the Depression, Delaney earned money teaching art classes at various Greenwich Village schools and at an adult education project in Brooklyn.

In addition to experiencing the racial injustices of the time, Delaney also struggled with his homosexuality. Moreover, he began to suffer long bouts of depression and paranoia aggravated by alcoholism, and these illnesses plagued him throughout the remainder of his life.

In 1934 Delaney began exhibiting in the Washington Square Outdoor Exhibit, and his work became increasingly expressionistic, using distortion, heightened color, and manipulated perspective to create psychologically and spiritually charged paintings. During 1938 Delaney had two solo exhibitions of portraits, at the Eighth Street Playhouse in New York and Gallery C in Washington, D.C., and in October 1938 Life magazine featured him as “one of the most talented Negro painters.” Delaney became a close friend of the writer JAMES BALDWIN in the early 1940s, and this pivotal friendship lasted throughout Delaney’s life, providing companionship and intellectual camaraderie. Over the years Delaney painted roughly twelve portraits of Baldwin, including Dark Rapture (1941) and James Baldwin (1965).

During the 1940s Delaney’s psychological problems and economic circumstances worsened, and, according to many of his notes, his paintings became a kind of salvation, a means of escaping the difficult realities of his daily life. Delaney’s commitment to modernism and abstraction intensified, and the influence of European artists, particularly the postimpressionists and the fauves, can be seen in many works of this period, including Can Fire in the Park (1946), Green Street (1946), and Washington Square (1949). By the late 1940s Delaney had become an established expressionist painter in the New York art scene. He received positive reviews when he showed in two group exhibitions at Roko Gallery in 1949, and the following year he was given a solo exhibition there.

In 1950 Delaney won a two-month fall fellowship at the Yaddo writers and artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. While there, he read extensively and began thinking seriously about traveling to Paris, where many African American artists were working and living in exile. He returned to Yaddo in November 1951 and, after dispersing his paintings, sailed for Paris on 28 August 1953. Delaney settled in the Montparnasse section of Paris, going to many galleries, and frequenting the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Orangérie, and the city’s many galleries. In Paris he found a circle of expatriate artists that included his dear friend James Baldwin, painters Larry Calcagno, Larry Potter, and Bob Thompson, and photographer Ed Clark.

While some of his paintings during this time were purely abstract, such as Abstraction (1954), others reflect Delaney’s travels in Europe. In 1954 he exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Ninth Salon at the Musée des Beaux Arts. By the fall of 1955 he had left Montparnasse for the suburb of Clamart. Still supporting himself through sporadic painting sales and generous contributions from friends, Delaney could not afford psychiatric treatment and suffered ongoing bouts of depression and paranoia that affected his ability to work. When he could concentrate, he vacillated between large-scale abstraction and figuration. In Composition 16 (1954), Delaney’s canvas glows with thick, swirling, intensely colored green, red, and yellow impasto surrounding a central glowing yellow light. Self-Portrait (1961) demonstrates the same fascination with light and gestural brushwork, integrated with an expressive likeness of the artist. The most important works to come out of his Paris years, however, were the allover abstractions, both the oil-on-canvas paintings and a series of gouache works on paper, which he showed in three important solo exhibitions at Galerie Paul Facchetti in 1960, the Galerie Lambert in 1964, and the Galerie Darthea Speyer in 1973.

In the summer of 1961 Delaney traveled to Greece. During the trip he was plagued by taunting, threatening voices that eventually led to his hospitalization, a subsequent suicide attempt, and then temporary institutionalization. His patron, Darthea Speyer, the cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Paris, arranged for his return to Paris. Eventually, Delaney’s friends began to urge him to get professional psychological help, and he briefly rested at La Maison du Santé de Nogent sur Marne outside Paris. Afterward he stayed with Madame du Closel, a French art collector, and her husband. Delaney soon came under the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Ferdiere, who specialized in depression and who diagnosed Delaney with acute paranoia. During this period Delaney created a series of quickly executed gouache works on paper that he called Rorschach tests, some done at his doctor’s request. Delaney’s final years in Paris were spent in a studio at rue Vercingetorix, where he was supported mainly by the du Closels. Despite his doctor’s warnings, he drank sporadically, nullifying the effects of his antipsychotic medication. Delaney spent his final years institutionalized in St. Anne’s Hospital for the Insane in Montparnasse, where he died in 1979.

DELANY, BESSIE

(3 Sept. 1891–25 Sept. 1995), and SADIE DELANY (19 Sept. 1889–25 Jan. 1999) were born Annie Elizabeth Delany and Sarah Louise Delany in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughters of Henry Beard Delany, an educator and Episcopal bishop, and Nanny James Logan. Bessie was to become a dentist, and Sadie a schoolteacher; late in life, they gained fame for their published reminiscences. Descended from a mix of black, American Indian, and white lineages, the sisters grew up in a family of ten children in Raleigh on the campus of St. Augustine’s, the African American school where their father, a former slave, served as priest and vice principal. The sisters graduated from St. Augustine’s (Sadie in 1910 and Bessie in 1911) at a time when few Americans, black or white, were educated beyond grammar school. “We had everything you could want except money,” recalled Bessie. “We had a good home, wonderful parents, plenty of love, faith in the Lord, educational opportunities—oh, we had a privileged childhood for colored children of the time” (Smithsonian, Oct. 1993, 150).

After completing their studies at St. Augustine’s, both Sadie and Bessie went on to teaching jobs in North Carolina. Their father had strongly urged his daughters to teach, since he was unable to finance further education at a four-year college. He also advised them to make their own way, warning them against accepting scholarships that would obligate them to benefactors. Bessie took a job in the mill town of Boardman, while Sadie became the domestic science supervisor for all of the black schools in Wake County. Although she received no extra salary, Sadie also assumed the duties of supervisor of black schools in the county. Both sisters were shocked by the conditions their students lived in. Bessie later said in the sisters’ joint memoir, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years (1993), that she found the families in Boardman “poor and ignorant” (89). Sadie remarked that her students’ families in Wake County were “in bad shape” and that they “needed help with the basics” and “didn’t know how to cook, clean, eat properly, or anything” (81). She therefore concentrated her efforts on teaching sanitation, hygiene, and food preparation. She also convinced many of her charges to continue their education.

In 1916 Sadie moved to Harlem in New York City and enrolled at Pratt Institute, then a two-year college. After graduating in 1918 she enrolled at Columbia University, where she earned a BS in 1920. She returned to North Carolina briefly with the intention of helping her people but, discouraged by the pervasive Jim Crow system, soon returned to Harlem. She encountered racism in New York but concluded that the North “was an improvement over the South” (107). She began teaching in an elementary school in Harlem in 1920, and for several years she also ran a candy business. In 1925 she received her master’s degree in education from Columbia. Beginning in 1930, she taught at Theodore Roosevelt High School, a white school in the Bronx. Having skipped the interview because she feared her color would cost her the job, Sadie stunned school officials on the first day of school; but as she later observed, “Once I was in, they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of me” (120). With her appointment, Sadie became the first African American in New York City to teach domestic science at the high school level.

In 1918, after teaching for a short time in Brunswick, Georgia, and taking science courses at Shaw University in Raleigh, Bessie joined her sister in New York, where she enrolled the following year in the dentistry program at Columbia University. She completed her DDS in 1923 and became only the second black female dentist licensed in the state of New York, with a practice in Harlem. She was well known there as “Dr. Bessie” and her office was a meeting place for black leaders, including JAMES WELDON JOHNSON and E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER. During the Depression of the 1930s she found herself twice evicted from her office, but she persisted in her work.

During their childhood the Delany sisters had encountered the segregation and the discrimination of the Jim Crow South and the threat of violence that underlay the system. Bessie remembered the first time she faced segregation when, as a child in the mid-1890s, she found she could no longer go to the park that she had previously played in, and she also recalled experimenting with drinking the water from a “whites only” fountain and discerning no difference in its taste. Yet, like her sister, she found that in the North, too, restrictions and dangers hemmed her in. Bessie’s closest brush with the Ku Klux Klan came not in the South, however, but on Long Island.

Neither Bessie nor Sadie ever married. Nanny Delany had urged her daughters to decide whether they were going to marry and raise families or have careers. As Bessie said years later, it never occurred to anyone that a woman could have both a family and a profession, and the sisters decided on careers. Bessie and Sadie lived together for nearly eight decades in New York City and then in nearby Mount Vernon, and they were surrounded by family members. All but one of their siblings settled in Harlem, and after their father’s death in 1928 their mother lived with them. The sisters were devoted to their mother, and it was largely to please her that after World War II they left Harlem and moved to a cottage in the north Bronx. In 1950 Bessie gave up her dental practice to care for their mother full time. After their mother’s death in 1956, the sisters moved to Mount Vernon, where they purchased a house in an all-white neighborhood. Sadie retired in 1960. Sadie was amiable by nature, having broken the color barrier in the New York City public schools through craft instead of confrontation. By contrast, Bessie was feisty and contentious, accustomed to speaking her mind. “We loved our country,” she observed, “even though it didn’t love us back” (60). Asked her impression of the Statue of Liberty when she first entered New York harbor, she replied that it was important as a symbol to white immigrants but meant nothing to her. Regarding her experience at Columbia University, she noted: “I suppose I should be grateful to Columbia, that at that time they let in colored people. Well, I’m not. They let me in but they beat me down for being there! I don’t know how I got through that place, except when I was young nothing could hold me back” (115).

The Delany sisters might have escaped notice by the wider world had they not in 1993 coauthored a best-selling memoir with the assistance of Amy Hill Hearth. Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years had its origins in an essay that Hearth had written for the New York Times on the occasion of Bessie’s one-hundredth birthday. So enthusiastic were readers’ responses to the article that Hearth continued her interviews and produced the book. Published when Bessie was 102 and Sadie was 104, Having Our Say offered a perceptive, witty review of the sisters’ lives through the previous century. As Hearth observed in her introduction to the book, it was meant less as a study of black history or of women’s history than of American history, but the sisters’ age, race, and gender combined to provide a tart perspective on the past. These two black women spoke of their strong family, the racism and sexism that could have thwarted them, and their triumphs. They spoke of their experiences as teachers in the segregated South, their participation in the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North, and—although more briefly—their recollections of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Having Our Say remained on the New York Times bestseller list—first in hardback and then as a paperback—for seventy-seven weeks.

By the time Bessie Delany died aged 104 at her Mount Vernon home in 1995, Having Our Say had sold nearly a million copies in hardback or paper and had been translated into four foreign languages. Reviewers were generally enthusiastic about the book, but an unsigned commentary in the Women’s Review of Books in January 1994 questioned the role of Amy Hill Hearth as a white woman selectively pulling together the recollections of two elderly black women. Such criticisms did not, however, diminish the popular appeal of the sisters’ story, which was adapted as a Broadway play in 1995 and as a television movie in 1999, starring Diahann Carroll as Sadie and RUBY DEE as Bessie. That same year Sadie Delany died in Mount Vernon, aged 109.

DELANY, MARTIN ROBISON

(6 May 1812–24 Jan. 1885), political activist, doctor, newspaper editor, and author, was born in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), son of Samuel Delany, a slave, and Pati Peace, the free daughter of free and African-born Graci Pearce. In 1822 Pati fled with her children to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania; Samuel joined her in 1823 after purchasing his freedom.

In 1831 in Pittsburgh, Delany studied history, geography, literature, and political economy, informally, with Lewis Woodson and Molliston M. Clark. Here Delany began his restless, wide-ranging advocacy of African American political rights, cultural self-reliance, and independent enterprise. Opposed to physical and “servile” work, Delany apprenticed himself to a white doctor in 1833. During his time in Pittsburgh he joined or helped found several African American antislavery, temperance, historical, literary, and moral reform societies. When Pennsylvania rescinded black suffrage in 1839, Delany explored the Mexican part of Texas, where slavery was illegal and blacks could become citizens. However, usurping American slaveholders were moving in, and Delany returned to Pittsburgh, ending his first attempt to find or found a nation for himself and his people.

In 1843, by now an established “cupper and leecher” (a person who drew blood for medicinal purposes), Delany married Catherine A. Richards, daughter of a once-wealthy mixed-race businessman. Unusually, they named their six surviving sons after prominent black heroes; their daughter, symbolically, Halle Amelia Ethiopia.

In August 1843, Delany launched the Mystery, a weekly newspaper that argued against slavery and for equality between the races. In 1847, now a recognized leader and an officer in his Freemason’s Lodge, Delany impressed the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Garrison wrote to his wife (16 Aug. 1847) that Delany was “Black as jet, . . . a fine fellow of great energy and spirit.” Promised a wider editorial field, Delany joined the staff at Douglass’s forthcoming North Star. For a year and a half he promoted the newspaper, lectured, attended meetings, described and criticized the conditions and attitudes of black people from Detroit to Delaware, and wrote editorials on black political possibilities from Canada to Cuba. But by July 1849, his domestic reports turned pessimistic and he resigned a poor man from the financially strapped North Star and returned again to Pittsburgh.

Published in 1865, this hand-colored lithograph of physician and editor Martin Robison Delany marks his promotion to major, making him the highest ranking African American in the American military. Hulton/Archive by Getty Images

Concluding that the Fugitive Slave Law section of the Compromise of 1850, which commanded Americans to return slaves fleeing to the North, also threatened to reenslave free blacks, Delany was moved to bolder assertions of his rights. Delany took recommendations from seventeen doctors to Harvard Medical School, where he was allowed to study for one term before a majority of white students petitioned that he be expelled. Delany made his way home by lecturing to black audiences on the physiological superiority of blacks to whites. Back in Pittsburgh, Delany moved his family to a section called Hayti, practiced medicine, and also served as principal of the Colored School.

Delany began to travel further afield. The 1851 North American Convention of Colored Freemen in Toronto, which resolved to encourage American slaves to come to Canada instead of going to Africa, took him to Canada. Then in April 1852 a settlement of free blacks in Nicaragua elected Delany “Mayor of Greytown . . ., civil governor of the Mosquito Reservation and commander in chief of the military forces of the province” (Ullman 139). A lack of funds stranded him in New York City, but there he hurriedly cobbled together the first book-length, antisentimental, sociopolitical report on “free” African Americans: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852). Sketches of contributions to the nation from 104 blacks were surrounded by reminders of white repression, condescension, and black dependence, leading to bold anticolonizationist, black-nationalist, pro-black-led emigrationist arguments and conclusions. Appearing, however, only a month after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Delany’s book received little attention.

Almost a year later, Delany criticized Douglass for commending Stowe’s efforts while neglecting Delany’s attempts to reshape black political discourse. By 1853 Delany was well along in composing his long fiction, Blake, but before its appearance, he published his “Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry,” a pamphlet claiming that Africans were the founders of the order and demanding white acceptance or rejection. He organized an opposition National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, following Douglass’s often-praised “We will fight it out here” Colored National Convention in Rochester, New York, in 1853. Delany’s keynote address at the Cleveland convention sharpened the emigrationist arguments he had introduced in Condition.

Despite being honored in Pittsburgh for his efforts in an 1854 cholera epidemic, Delany moved his family to largely black Chatham, Canada, in 1856. Two years later, he arranged a meeting between African Americans and the militant white abolitionist John Brown, while also attempting to raise money to explore Africa. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 DRED SCOTT decision denied African Americans full citizenship rights and stated that, even in the North or in the new free territories, blacks were “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The ruling led several prominent black leaders to contemplate leaving the United States, as Delany had done, and encouraged some African Americans to plan emigration to Canada, Haiti, Central America, and Africa.

Delany’s fiction found a publisher in January 1859, when the new monthly Anglo-African Magazine began printing twenty-six chapters of Blake, or the Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba. The work deliberately challenged earlier representations of slaves and free blacks. Not a novel, its freer form sampled several genres and offered a wide-ranging, conversational, song-and-verse-infused mix of imagined and real-world situations, characters, and observations. Its daring but careful hero prepared blacks to revolt against their oppressors from Texas to Dahomey in Africa. In July, the tale’s printing was suspended because its author was in Africa. Delany explored Liberia before going on to present-day Nigeria, where he and his fellow explorer, Robert Campbell, negotiated an agreement with several chiefs allowing African American emigrants the right to settle on arable land.

Delany subsequently spent seven months in England, where he raised interest in and money for his African emigration project. He returned to Canada on the eve of the American Civil War and published American and English versions of his Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861). Although he continued to encourage American blacks to consider emigration, he discovered in 1862 that white British missionaries and colonialists had undermined his African plans. Stymied again, Delany returned to writing. He simplified Blake’s dialect transcriptions and a complete version appeared in the Weekly Anglo-African newspaper between November 1861 and June 1862. Unfortunately, the May 1862 issues have been lost, and only seventy-four of the promised eighty chapters survive. The last available words portentously warn: “‘Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!’” (WAA, 26 Apr. 1862).

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 opened up the prospect of full citizenship for African Americans, and immediately Delany began recruiting for black regiments across the North. Around that time he moved his family to a new home near Wilberforce College in Ohio. In February 1865 he became the first black major to be assigned a field command when he was commissioned as a major in the 104th United States Colored Troops. Although the war was soon over, Delany continued to serve the unionist and abolitionist cause by taking a position with the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For three years, Delany lectured and encouraged blacks in South Carolina, where African Americans were in the majority, to gain education, land, and a level of self-respect and political power that had been impossible under slavery—or even in the antebellum North. He brokered formal and informal contracts between blacks and whites, poor landholders, even-poorer workers, and racially prejudiced Northerners and Southerners. In 1868 he was a delegate to the democratically innovative South Carolina State Constitutional Convention.

Delany also continued to write. From war’s end through 1871, he wrote essays on the failures of southern political leadership during the war, the economic hopes for freedmen, and the racist neglect of a once glorious African culture in Egypt. His writings also examined the rights and duties of citizenship, and ways in which Northern capital, Southern land, and black workers might make a better United States.

During these busy years, Delany worked with Frances Rollin on Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868, reprinted in 1883), one of few nineteenth-century biographies of an African American. However, the book’s optimistic prediction of improved circumstances for Delany and other blacks did not materialize. Stubbornly, he persistently sought to establish for himself a respectable position, but was unsuccessful in his campaign to serve as U.S. Consul to Liberia. In 1870 he worked for the South Carolina Bureau of Agricultural Statistics, and the following year he opened a real estate agency. From 1870 to 1872 Delany worked tirelessly, yet unprofitably, for the Republican Party as an honorary state militia member, before resigning because he had discovered rising corruption within that organization.

In 1873 and 1874, Delany, then a poorly paid federal customs clerk, courted southern whites while seeking a law requiring fair political representation of both races. He ran for lieutenant-governor of South Carolina as an independent Republican, but lost a close election. Behind local pressure, the state’s last Republican governor appointed Delany as a trial justice (justice of the peace) in 1875. A year later, Delany supported a white Democrat, Wade Hampton, for governor and was reappointed as a trial justice through 1878. By then, Reconstruction, and the possibility of full black citizenship, had nearly ended. Late in 1877 Delany became involved with the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steam Ship Company, whose emigration ventures soon failed. Defeated there and in South Carolina, he headed north.

In 1879, Philadelphia’s Harper & Brothers published Delany’s Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, a Biblically-inspired swan song asserting the eternal and essential differences between blacks and whites. From 1880 through 1883 Delany worked at various civil service jobs around Washington, D.C., and in 1884 he joined a Boston firm with offices in Central America. Falling ill, he returned to Ohio and died in the home of his self-reliant, much-respected wife.

DEMBY, EDWARD T.

(13 Feb. 1869–14 Oct. 1957), the first African American Episcopal bishop elected to serve in the United States, was born Edward Thomas Demby V and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, the eldest child of freeborn parents, Edward T. Demby IV and Mary Anderson Tippett. Young Edward was tutored by his uncle, “Professor” Eddy Anderson, for the majority of his primary and secondary school years. Anderson was the headmaster of a private high school located behind Ezion (Northern) Methodist Episcopal Church, a hub of Wilmington’s black community.

After leaving Wilmington, Demby embarked on an educational odyssey that encompassed Philadelphia’s prestigious Institute for Colored Youth, followed by Centenary Bible Institute (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore, Howard University in Washington, D.C., Wilberforce University in Ohio, and National University in Chicago. He usually taught in some capacity to support himself through college and operated more than one private academy in the course of his studies. By 1894 he was an ordained African Methodist Episcopal clergyman teaching theology at Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas.

In 1895, while serving as dean of Paul Quinn, Demby converted to the predominately white Episcopal Church and immediately began a process leading to the priesthood. He was first a catechist, or lay reader, responsible for churches in Denver and rural West Tennessee, then a deacon in West Tennessee, and finally a priest in West Tennessee. When he was examined for the priesthood, he caused a sensation. The examiners were flabbergasted at Demby’s command of sacred languages and overall intellectual prowess. Afterwards, they felt compelled to admit that “no one” could have done better on certain parts of the examination. As for Demby, he was already mindful of the possibility of one day becoming a bishop, and he did not want it said that he was given any shortcuts by reason of his color. Demby credited himself for being the first African American to operate a school that offered correspondence courses in sacred languages.

After the death of his first wife, Polly Alston Sherrill, Demby transferred to St. Augustine’s, Kansas City, where in 1902 he married Antoinette Martina Ricks, a graduate of the first nursing class of Freedmen’s Hospital, Howard University, and the head nurse at Freedman’s Hospital in Kansas City.

Over the next five years, Demby served as a priest to churches in Cairo, Illinois, and Key West, Florida. In both cases he strove to reach large migrant populations via the parochial school adjacent to each church. At St. Michael’s in Cairo, he discovered that Polly’s Tuskegee background was especially effective in drawing attention to the school. However, while he served at St. Peter’s in Key West, Demby no longer identified with Tuskegee. In 1907, at the zenith of the debate between W. E. B. DU BOIS and BOOKER T. WASHINGTON over the direction of African American education, Demby publicly condemned Washington’s philosophy of industrial education. He said it was not in the best interests of African Americans and personally attacked Washington for being overly manipulative toward blacks and overly servile toward whites.

Simultaneously, Demby published letters regarding the election of black bishops to serve in the United States, a volatile issue confronting the 1907 General Convention of the Episcopal Church. It was a choice between two plans. The first, called the missionary district plan, called for the organization of black churches into missionary districts that would, in turn, elect black representatives to general conventions and be represented by black bishops in the national House of Bishops. Black missionary bishops and their delegates would enjoy political equality in exchange for wholesale segregation of the church, especially in the South. The second plan, called the suffragan bishop plan, would not have written segregation into church law, but would have allowed each diocese to elect suffragan (assistant) bishops to supervise black ministries in the same diocese. Suffragans would be under the authority of white bishops. They would have rights to the floor, but no vote in the House of Bishops. Like the Conference of Church Workers among the Colored People, the primary black advocacy group in the Episcopal Church, Demby preferred the missionary district plan for its autonomy and the vestige of equality it guaranteed. Ultimately, the general convention passed the suffragan plan into law.

Also in 1907, Demby moved back to Tennessee. His chief calling was Emmanuel Church in Memphis, but he served in many locations. He organized and supervised black missions in the Memphis area, served as dean and archdeacon of Tennessee’s black Episcopalians, and supervised the establishment of Hoffman-St. Mary’s Industrial Institute, the flagship of black education in Episcopal Tennessee. He was a leader in several religious, civic, and charitable groups in Memphis and considered himself an emissary to the white community.

In 1917 the dioceses in Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas elected Demby the nation’s first black bishop. Although he was appointed to the Diocese of Arkansas, the bishops of the Province of the Southwest intended that Demby supervise black ministries throughout the region. However, by the time he was consecrated in 1918, dissenting black churches and their bishops had effectively reduced his jurisdiction to a mere handful of small churches in Arkansas. In addition, he had no official residence and no salary. Thus began a ministry Demby described as “making bricks without straw.”

From 1918 to 1931 Demby confined his administrative duties primarily to Arkansas as he struggled for funds and credibility. As of 1922 the national church began appropriating additional funds for his operating expenses, and it finally began paying him a meagre salary. However, these appropriations enabled Demby to establish Christ Church Parochial and Industrial School in Forrest City, Arkansas, and recruit teachers to staff it. Likewise, he was able to recruit priests to fill pulpits in Arkansas and Oklahoma. The self-sufficient black church became his creed, and in 1930 he announced a ten-year plan to transform Arkansas’s five black churches into independent parishes. Meanwhile, the 1925 general convention, realizing that Demby’s jurisdiction had been heavily compromised at the outset, contemplated relocating him or reducing his appropriations. Inspired, or perhaps shamed, by these developments, the bishops of the Southwest made greater use of his ministry. Likewise, the church’s black clergy, who had never been reconciled to Demby’s second-class bishop status, began, nonetheless, to rally to his defense and grant him greater recognition. As for Demby, he toured the Southwest, as well as the rest of the country, preaching, marrying, and burying, and otherwise promoting black Episcopal missions. He found soliciting especially difficult, as he was by nature not a fund-raiser; rather, he believed that viable ministries engendered their own support. Nevertheless, he pressed on with nationwide canvasses in 1921 and 1927, and the situation was much improved in Arkansas by the end of the decade.

Demby’s ministry in Arkansas and the Southwest was never the evangelical success he expected, and after 1932 it was even less so. The cause, aside from the general economic decline of the Great Depression, was the Newport incident of May 1932, when the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas elected a bishop at Newport, Arkansas. In August, Demby and his white allies protested the racist conduct of that convention, and especially the election. As a result, the House of Bishops overturned the Arkansas election. The protest, however, inspired retaliatory acts by the offended parties, acts that had negative repercussions for Demby’s ministry. By 1934 his situation was very ambiguous.

As Demby became more of a bishop in name only, he turned his energies upon the national church and the greater issue of black ministries in general. He was appointed a member of the church’s Joint Commission on Negro Work, and, as such, influenced the general convention of 1940, which made several landmark decisions with regard to the status of African Americans in the Episcopal Church. Most importantly, Demby made the keynote speech, defeating yet another attempt to enact the missionary district plan. This event signaled the end of the plan and the demise of segregation as acceptable church policy. Diocese by diocese, institution by institution, the Episcopal Church desegregated itself over the next fifteen years.

Demby retired from his post in 1938 and spent the remainder of his life serving individual churches in Kansas, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. He also traveled the country and spoke at events with a biracial theme. He died in Cleveland in 1957 and was eulogized as someone who could eradicate racism by sheer good example, if that were possible.

DEPRIEST, OSCAR STANTON

(9 Mar. 1871–12 May 1951), politician, was born in Florence, Alabama, the son of Martha Karsner, a part-time laundress, and Neander R. DePriest, a teamster and farmer. His father, a former slave, joined the Republican Party. After a neighbor’s lynching, the family moved to Salina, Kansas, in 1878. Young Oscar had sandy hair, blue eyes, and a light complexion and often fought over racial slurs made in his presence. After two years at Salina Normal School, he left home at seventeen, settling in Chicago. He apprenticed as a house painter and by 1905 had a successful contracting and real estate business. In 1898 he married Jessie L. Williams; they had one child.

DePriest was elected Cook County commissioner in 1904 and 1906 because he delivered a bloc of African American voters from the city’s Second and Third wards for the Republican Party. He educated his constituency about city and county relief resources but lost the 1908 nomination over a dispute with First District congressman Martin B. Madden. For the next few years he maneuvered among various factions, sometimes supporting Democrats over Republicans. He reconciled with Madden and backed white Republican candidates for alderman against African Americans running as independents in 1912 and 1914.

In 1915 the growing African American community united to elect DePriest to the city council. Significant support came from women, who had won the municipal ballot in 1913. As alderman, he introduced a civil rights ordinance and fought against job discrimination. Indicted in 1917 on charges of taking a bribe from a gambling establishment, DePriest claimed the money as a campaign contribution. He was successfully defended by Clarence Darrow but was persuaded not to run again. He campaigned as an independent in 1918 and 1919 but lost to black Republican nominees. In the 1919 race riots, his reputation was revived when, armed with pistols, he drove twice a day to the stockyards to supply his community with meat.

The riots helped DePriest renew ties to the Republican mayor, William Hale Thompson, and he was a delegate to the 1920 Republican National Convention. In 1924 he was elected Third Ward committeeman. His help in Thompson’s 1927 election won DePriest an appointment as assistant Illinois commerce commissioner. In the 1928 election he again ran successfully for Republican delegate and Third Ward committeeman. That same year he supported the renomination of Congressman Madden, who died shortly after the primary, and used his influence with the Thompson faction of the Republican party to win the nomination for Madden’s seat. After he was nominated, he was indicted for alleged gambling connections and vote fraud, charges that his supporters maintained were politically motivated. DePriest refused to withdraw and won the election to represent the predominantly black First District. The case against him was subsequently dismissed for insufficient evidence.

DePriest became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress in twenty-eight years and the first from a northern state. He considered himself “congressman-at-large” for the nation’s twelve million black Americans and promised to place a black cadet in West Point, fight for enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and secure work relief for the unemployed. But he vowed to “represent all people, both black and white.”

While denying that he sought “social equality,” DePriest used his position to secure the rights of citizenship for African Americans. When his wife’s attendance at First Lady Lou Hoover’s traditional tea for congressional wives in 1929 created controversy, DePriest used the publicity to promote a fundraiser for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was much in demand as a speaker, urging audiences to organize and to vote, even in the South, where threats were made against his life. Although the Great Depression, which began shortly after his arrival in Congress, lured his constituents toward the Democrats, he won reelection in 1930 and 1932. He opposed federal relief, preferring state and local measures.

DePriest sponsored a number of bills to benefit his constituents, including pensions for surviving former slaves and appropriations for African American schools in the District of Columbia. His most important legislative victory was an amendment to the 1933 bill creating the Civilian Conservation Corps barring discrimination based on race, color, or creed. After the infamous 1931 SCOTTSBORO BOYS case in which nine young African American men were sentenced to death after being convicted on questionable evidence by an all-white jury of raping two white women, DePriest called for a law to enable a trial to be transferred to another jurisdiction if the defendant was deemed not likely to get a fair trial. Warning that the country would suffer if one-tenth of its population were denied justice, he said, “If we had a right to exercise our franchise . . . as the constitution provides, I would not be the only Negro on this floor.” The bill died in the Judiciary Committee, as did his proposal for an antilynching bill. He also fought unsuccessfully to integrate the House of Representatives restaurant, where he was served, but his staff was not.

By 1934 DePriest faced charges that his party was doing little to help African Americans hard hit by the depression, and he lost to Arthur W. Mitchell, the first African American Democrat elected to Congress. DePriest was vice chairman of the Cook County Republican Central Committee from 1932 to 1934, a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1936, and alderman from the Third Ward in 1943–1947. He lost the 1947 election for alderman, partly because of charges of cooperating with the Democratic mayor. He continued in the real estate business with his son Oscar DePriest Jr. and died at his home in Chicago.

Skillful at organizing a coalition of black voters and using this bloc to pressure the dominant white political machine, DePriest was the forerunner of many local African American politicians in the latter part of the twentieth century. His six years in Congress enabled him to raise black political consciousness. Kenneth Eugene Mann, writing in the Negro History Bulletin in October 1972, noted that DePriest “took advantage of his opportunities and frequently created them.”

DIDDLEY, BO

(20 Dec. 1928–), guitarist, songwriter, and musical innovator, was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Mississippi, the only child of Ethel Wilson, a sharecropper in her teens, and Eugene Bates. He was raised with a number of other children by Ethel’s first cousin, Gussie McDaniel. When McDaniel’s husband died in 1934, the family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and the young boy’s surname was changed to McDaniel to allow him to enter the public school system. There, he received the name Bo Diddley, an appellation whose origin has been variously explained by an array of stories. (Diddley himself claims not to know the origin, and downplays a possible connection to the diddley bow—a single string attached to a wall or house frame and played with a bottleneck slide or nail—stating that he never played one.) Diddley showed an aptitude for music early on; he studied the violin from the age of eight until he was fifteen under a classical instructor, O. W. Frederick, at the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. He also took up drums, and he received his first guitar on his twelfth birthday. Owing to his large hands, he was not able to treat the fretboard delicately and came to approach the instrument something like a drum set, driving material forward by virtue of rhythm rather than melody. He began his first band, a trio named the Hipsters and later the Langley Alley Cats, after he dropped out of high school, and he supported his musical endeavors by working in a grocery store and a picture frame factory, in addition to being an elevator operator.

Songwriting came early and easily to Diddley, who wrote his first piece, “I Don’t Want No Lyin’ Woman,” at age sixteen. In an effort to counteract the noise in the venues where he performed, Diddley built an amplifier by hand. He intuitively understood from the start that his style would conjoin volume and rhythm, and therefore, early on, he enlisted the assistance of a neighbor, Jerome Green, on maracas to underscore the beat. Together with Green, harmonica player “Billy Boy” Arnold, and others, Diddley established a reputation in the local clubs of Chicago.

Bo Diddley with his trademark hat and square guitar. Corbis

The sound they produced proved to be unique, for Diddley amalgamated a body of musical practices that originated in the rhythms of the church, the percussive speech patterns of the street, and the “shout mode” that harked back to drum-playing traditions in Africa. He combined that rhythmic approach along with a declamatory style in his vocals that prefigured rap. Acutely aware of his innovations, Diddley routinely objected to efforts to label this sound or to single out its influences: “Guys kind of piss me off trying to name what I’m doing, and you know, they don’t want to accept what I tell them, so they want to use their own thing so they can title it. But I do know what it is, and a lot of times I tell people I don’t, I just play it. But I know” (Chess, CH3-19502, 1990, 7). No matter what the source or the name of his musical style, Diddley etched a singular path by making his band stress rhythm over melody, and he frequently employed repetitious, often childlike words, drawn from street games or from the verbal one-upmanship associated with signifying, words used more for their sound than their sense. Diddley developed a “shave-and-a-haircut—two bits” sequence of rhythmic accents that audiences indelibly associate with his music. In 1946, he married Ethel Mac Smith and they had two children before the marriage ended in divorce.

In order to break into the record business in 1955, Diddley, still performing under the name Ellas McDaniel, made a demonstration record of two songs: “Uncle John” and “I’m a Man.” He took them to several local companies, including the black-owned Vee Jay Records, that turned him down. He then turned to Chess Records, owned by Leonard and Phil Chess. Established in 1947, the label initially made its mark with blues, recording such titans of the genre as MUDDY WATERS, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter. The Chess brothers were on the lookout for artists who could sell to a broad, not necessarily racially segregated audience. They were about to succeed with CHUCK BERRY, and they heard in McDaniel something that could be as marketable.

Inadvertently, while performing “Uncle John,” the group proclaimed, “Bo Diddley.” At first, Leonard Chess worried that this name might defame blacks. When he was assured it would not, the title of the track became “Bo Diddley,” and a career was launched. Both sides of the single took off, and within weeks they occupied the number one and two spots on the Billboard jukebox charts as well as rising on the Billboard list of what disk jockeys were playing. These songs clearly appealed to both black and white listeners, and therefore, in the parlance of the music business, they “crossed over.”

A string of successful singles followed, including “You Don’t Love Me” (1955), “Mona” (1957), and “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover” (1962). Diddley consolidated his success with a riveting stage presence. His homemade square-shaped guitar and boosted amplification captivated audiences, as did the manner in which his behavior mirrored the sexual braggadocio of his lyrics. He strutted across the stage like the legendary bluesman CHARLEY PATTON, playing his guitar with his teeth, behind his back, over his head, and between his legs. He further upped the ante by adding, on more than one occasion, a female second guitarist, giving her such names as Lady Bo and the Duchess.

However, despite the galvanizing nature of his material and performance, Diddley’s rise to the top of the charts was brief. With the appearance of the Beatles in the United States in 1964, many black artists associated with early rock and roll fell out of favor or were treated condescendingly as objects of nostalgia. Diddley continued to record for the Chess label until 1974, yet few of his albums or singles achieved commercial success.

Lamentably, Diddley found himself not only toppled from the charts but also convinced that he never received his due financial reward, either from Chess Records or from the companies that subsequently owned their recordings. He was relegated to Oldies venues for much of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, even though countless musicians and writers applauded his material and credited its influence upon rock and roll. Some of his songs became part of the permanent repertoire of American popular music, but the concrete rewards for that achievement were few.

Slowly, the tide turned. Tributes on the part of younger musicians led to renewed media exposure. Diddley appeared in the Eddie Murphy film comedy Trading Places (1983) and in a 1989 Nike commercial with the sports figure Bo Jackson. Honorific organizations across the musical spectrum honored him. Diddley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and received the Guitar Player magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990 and the Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in 1996. He accepted a lifetime achievement award at the 1998 Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

But awards do not pay the bills, and Diddley continued to perform into his seventies to keep his legacy alive. The influence and magnitude of that achievement cannot be underestimated. He codified a rhythm that has become an indelible feature of American vernacular music. His guitar style can be heard in genres as broad as rock and roll and heavy metal, and his use of technology to augment the impact of his material set in motion popular music’s long-standing attachment to volume. Diddley’s musical influence is clearly seen in the careers of such performers as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and the Rolling Stones. Furthermore, his playful and yet sophisticated use of language and his declamatory delivery have made him one of the forefathers of rap.

DINKINS, DAVID N.

(10 July 1927–), mayor of New York City, was born David Norman Dinkins in Trenton, New Jersey, the first of two children of William H. Dinkins, a barbershop owner and real estate agent, and Sally (maiden name unknown), a domestic worker and manicurist. David’s parents divorced when he was six years old, and he lived briefly with his mother after she moved to Harlem, New York City, although he soon returned to Trenton to live with his father and stepmother, Lottie Hartgell, a high school English teacher.

After graduating from high school in Trenton, Dinkins became one of the first African Americans to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps, and he graduated magna cum laude in 1950 from Howard University, where he majored in mathematics. He graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1956 and practiced law in New York City until 1975. Dinkins and his wife, the former Joyce Burroughs, whom he married in 1953, have two children.

Dinkins became involved in politics through his wife, the daughter of a Democratic ward leader in Harlem. He served one term in the New York state assembly, two years as president of the New York City Board of Elections, and ten years as the city clerk. When his close friend Percy Sutton resigned as Manhattan borough president in 1977, he encouraged Dinkins to try for the position. After three unsuccessful attempts, Dinkins was elected borough president in 1985. A quiet, unassuming politician throughout his long and generally undistinguished public career, he managed, even as Manhattan borough president, to remain largely invisible to New York City voters.

Known as a stolid and courtly gentleman, but certainly not a dynamic or forceful leader, the sixty-two-year-old Dinkins surprised the political experts with his decision to challenge the incumbent mayor Edward Koch in 1989. The deterioration of race relations in New York City during the Koch years had accelerated during Koch’s third term, and the local black press called for the election of the city’s first black mayor. The racial unease plaguing the city intensified in the months preceding the August 1989 primary election, and Koch’s responses to racially charged incidents seemed increasingly inadequate to many African Americans. Dinkins spoke about the need for racial rapprochement and promised to be a healer; he won the primary election with 50.8 percent of the vote to Koch’s 42 percent.

In the general election that followed, the Republicans fielded a strong candidate in Rudolph Giuliani, a well-known federal prosecutor who had indicted a long list of Mafia dons, crooked politicians, and corporate embezzlers. Giuliani conducted an aggressive campaign, promising New Yorkers a tough law-and-order administration, while Dinkins continued to emphasize his ability to bring the city together, to calm the roiling racial seas that seemed to be pounding the city from all sides. On 7 November 1989 a slender majority of the New York City electorate provided Dinkins with a 47,000-vote victory margin out of 1.9 million votes cast.

New York City’s finances had been balanced over a precipice for decades, and Koch left his successor no shortage of worrisome dilemmas. The city’s first black mayor inherited a billion-dollar deficit, with even greater fiscal problems on the horizon, as contracts would soon expire for 360,000 municipal employees. City officials counted 75,000 homeless in New York City, only 35,000 of whom found shelter nightly, and the city needed 250,000 more housing units. Schools, social agencies, and the health-care system lacked adequate resources. The closing of bridges, highways, and streets, as well as the frequent explosion of water mains, gave the impression that New York City’s aged infrastructure was collapsing. Throughout his administration, Dinkins had to grapple with the intractable problem of how to balance the city’s budget, satisfy the business community’s demand for fiscal responsibility, and still find the resources to offer the costly social programs that much of his constituency and his own liberal beliefs demanded—all at a time when the federal government had reduced its largess to cities and the nation’s economy remained mired in recession.

While struggling from year to year to manage the city’s nettlesome financial problems, Dinkins also had to respond to a series of violent incidents that threatened to undermine the racial comity he had promised to nurture. On 18 January 1990, just seventeen days after Dinkins assumed office, an altercation between a Haitian American resident of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the Korean American owners of a neighborhood grocery store heightened racial tensions in the city. African Americans, led by AL SHARPTON, initiated a boycott of the store that lasted nearly a year and, as violence between blacks and Asians increased in Flatbush, critics accused Dinkins of being insensitive to the Asian immigrants.

The following year, three days of rioting erupted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn after a car driven by a Hasidic Jew accidentally struck and killed a black girl and seriously injured her brother. In retribution, an angry gang of black youths murdered a rabbinical student. The mayor tried unsuccessfully to mediate between African Americans and Hasidim in Crown Heights. Jewish leaders excoriated Dinkins for what they saw as his lack of impartiality, while African Americans praised him for what they considered his restraint.

More criticism came over the mayor’s handling of yet another racial disturbance, a clash between police and Dominican immigrants in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Despite Dinkins’s frequent attempts to cool angry passions, five days of rioting followed in Washington Heights. In the aftermath of the disturbance, the Policemen’s Benevolent Association charged that the mayor had proved too tolerant of rioters and had expressed excessive criticisms of the police.

In 1993 Rudolph Giuliani easily secured the Republican nomination for mayor and launched an aggressive campaign that hammered constantly at a single theme—in four years, Dinkins had repeatedly demonstrated his inability to manage the myriad affairs of the complex city. Giuliani characterized the Dinkins administration as ineffective and wasteful, and the mayor himself as inept and unresponsive to whites, Latinos, and Asians. The result of such mismanagement, charged the former prosecutor, was evident in the deterioration of the quality of life in New York City, and no more so than in the escalating crime rate that had become a major focus of editorial comment in the press.

Dinkins ardently defended his record in city hall, attributing persistent economic problems to forces outside mayoral control. If racial tensions had risen nearly to the boiling point, Dinkins asserted, his administration had kept the lid on. New York City, he argued, had experienced no massive outbreak comparable to the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, following the announcement that Los Angeles police officers had been exonerated in the beating of Rodney King. Dinkins lost the vote for reelection by a narrow margin, receiving 48.3 percent of the vote to Giuliani’s 50.7 percent, and thus became the first black mayor of a major U.S. city to relinquish the office after just one term.

Dinkins’s mayoralty produced an ambiguous legacy. Because of New York City’s preeminence among the nation’s urban places, his election constituted a landmark in U.S. politics. Unlike successful black candidates in other large cities with black electoral majorities, Dinkins triumphed in 1989 in a city where blacks composed just 25 percent of the population. The New York Times recognized Dinkins’s achievement, calling his election “a political coming of age” for African Americans (2 Jan. 1990). The lack of success of his reelection campaign in 1993 resulted from a perception that a courtly and cautious man had failed to effectively manage the city’s affairs. His failure to solve New York’s fiscal woes bespoke the difficulties facing a host of black mayors who arrived in city halls at a precarious time of urban retrenchment, suburban expansion, and dwindling resources. Yet by 1992 Dinkins had brought the city from massive deficits to a budget surplus and his community-policing programs resulted in a steady decrease in crime. However, his failure to convince voters of his ability to deal fairly and evenhandedly with all ethnic groups and races in New York City proved to be a serious shortcoming, in part because of the intense scrutiny inevitably applied to black mayors when issues of race relations arise.

DIXON, “BIG” WILLIE JAMES

(1 July 1915–29 Jan. 1992), blues musician, composer, and arranger, was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Daisy McKenzie and, putatively, her husband Charlie Dixon. Willie was one of seven surviving children (out of fourteen). It is likely that Anderson “A. D.” Bell, whom Willie Dixon called his stepfather, was actually his biological father, as records show that Daisy and Charlie Dixon finalized divorce proceedings in 1913. As a youth Dixon worked in his mother’s restaurant as well as spending time in Vicksburg’s barrel houses and juke joints. Along with his mother’s interest in reading and writing poetry, contact with blues legends such as CHARLEY PATTON and Eurreal Wilford “Little Brother” Montgomery led Dixon to begin writing songs of his own.

The search for work and his own wanderlust put Dixon on the road at a young age. Arrested while traveling as a hobo through Clarksdale, Mississippi, and sentenced to thirty days on the Charles Allen Prison Farm, Dixon escaped to Memphis, Tennessee, on the back of a mule. Freight trains carried him north until he reached his sister in Chicago in 1929. Between 1926 and 1936 Dixon found his way to New York City, Ohio, Florida, and numerous hobo jungles throughout the South. He even shipped out to Hawaii, mistakenly boarding a vessel bound for the islands while he was cleaning ships.

Despite these adventures, it was back in Vicksburg that Dixon’s career as a musician and songwriter began to take shape. When in Mississippi, he sold song lyrics to country and western musicians and sang bass with the Union Jubilee Singers, a gospel quartet. This group’s popularity brought singing engagements around Mississippi and led to regular appearances on WQBC radio, doing weekly live broadcasts from the station’s Vicksburg studios.

Always large for his age, as Dixon matured he approached three hundred pounds and began training seriously as a boxer. Fighting under the name James Dixon, he won the 1936 Illinois Golden Gloves in the heavyweight division. However, Dixon’s professional boxing career was put on hold when he drew a suspension for brawling outside the ring. Soon afterward, the musician Leonard “Baby Doo” Caston persuaded Dixon to focus his energies on music full-time.

With Caston’s help, Dixon left boxing behind. Not only did Caston make Dixon’s first bass from an oil can and a strand of wire, he also introduced Dixon to people in the music business. When the musicians’ union recording ban of 1936–1937 was lifted, Dixon played bass at his first recording session with Caston and a vocal group called the Bumping Boys. In 1939 Caston and Dixon returned to the studio as members of the Five Breezes, cutting eight tracks that were released on Bluebird, RCA’s “race record” label. (Race records were those produced or marketed with African American consumers in mind.)

The association with Caston and the other members of the Five Breezes established Dixon on the Chicago music scene. He moved about town, selling song sheets or printed copies of his version of the folk rhyme “The Signifying Monkey.” He became a fixture at the many music clubs on Maxwell Street and also played at Martin’s Corner on the city’s West Side. However, Dixon’s run of good fortune came to an abrupt end when the United States entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. In 1942, he was literally pulled off the stage and arrested as a draft resister. Refusing military service, he was, like BAYARD RUSTIN and other conscientious objectors, imprisoned and became entangled in a lengthy court battle. In his memoir, I Am the Blues, Dixon stated, “I wasn’t going to fight nobody . . . . I told them I didn’t feel I had to go because of the conditions that existed among my people” (54). He served ten months for resisting the draft, and was released in 1944.

After the war Dixon and Caston reunited, forming a vocal trio along with Ollie Crawford. Calling themselves the Big Three (after Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin), the group had a run of hit records in the mid-1940s, including “The Signifying Monkey.” White audiences embraced the Big Three’s swing-oriented pop sound, and the group toured extensively throughout the Midwest. Even as the trio enjoyed their success, Dixon tired of the traveling and the musical direction the group was taking. In order to spend more time with his wife, Marie, and their eleven children, he began hiring himself out to Chicago studios when his touring schedule allowed.

During the late 1940s Chicago experienced a blues renaissance, as raw, down-home sounds were electrified in small clubs and bars on the South Side. As this music found the ears of black audiences in Chicago and around the country, a number of independent record producers sought to cash in, including Leonard and Phil Chess. Late in 1948, after watching Dixon perform in late-night jam sessions on Forty-seventh Street, Leonard Chess offered the bass player studio work for an upcoming session with the bluesman Robert Nighthawk. This began a relationship between Dixon and Chess that was, if nothing else, extremely productive for the former and very profitable for the later. Using Dixon’s feel for the music as their guide, the Chess brothers, who were minor players in the race record market in the late 1940s, became hit makers in short order.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Dixon wrote, arranged, and played the music that made Chess Studios an assembly line of hits that topped both the blues chart and the R&B (rhythm and blues) charts. Artists such as MUDDY WATERS, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter drew from Dixon’s extensive songbook, recording tunes such as “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Little Red Rooster,” “Back Door Man Spoonful,” “You Shook Me,” and “Wang Dang Doodle.” While at Chess, Dixon became a contributor to the foundation of rock and roll, playing bass and doing studio work in sessions with CHUCK BERRY and Bo DIDDLEY. Dixon also served as an A&R (artist and repertoire) man, finding new talent for the Chess brothers. He was instrumental in ushering into the Chess empire the next wave of hit makers, including Otis Rush and Buddy Guy. Working through his own Yambo label, Dixon also promoted the recording careers of Koko Taylor, Lucky Peterson, and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi.

Dixon toured overseas during the late 1950s and early 1960s, helping to awaken interest in the blues on an international scale. By playing in Europe and Great Britain, as well as at American folk festivals, he contributed to the so-called blues revival and witnessed his songs pass to a new generation of musicians. British acts including the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton, as well as American rockers such as the Grateful Dead and The Doors, had hits with his songs. However, these musical transfers were not without complications. After Leonard Chess’s death in 1969, Dixon took legal action to regain the rights to his songs from Arc Music, the Chesses’ publishing company. In 1977 he reached an out-of-court settlement, after which the rights were transferred to his Ghana Publishing Company. Soon afterward Dixon filed a successful suit for copyright violation against Led Zeppelin for their recording of “Whole Lotta Love.”

As a statesman and steward of the blues, Dixon continued to perform and record in his later years. He was honored with numerous awards and citations, including the Blues Ink Lifetime Achievement Award and the W. C. HANDY Award. Despite health complications due to diabetes, Dixon worked to establish the Chicago public schools “Blues in the Schools” program and the Blues Heaven Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting older blues performers and providing scholarships to young musicians. He died in Burbank, California.

DORSEY, THOMAS ANDREW

(1 July 1899–23 Jan. 1993), blues performer, gospel singer, and composer, was born in Villa Rica, Georgia, the son of Thomas Madison Dorsey, a preacher, and Etta Plant Spencer. Dorsey’s mother, whose first husband had died, owned approximately fifty acres of farmland. Dorsey lived in somewhat trying circumstances as his parents moved first to Atlanta and Forsyth, Georgia, and then back to Villa Rica during the first four years of his life. In Villa Rica the Dorsey family settled into a rural lifestyle supported by marginal farming that was slightly mitigated by his father’s pastoral duties.

Though economically pressed, Dorsey’s parents found enough money to purchase an organ, and it was on this instrument that their young son began to play music at around six years of age. Dorsey was exposed not only to the religious music that pervaded his home but also to the secular music—especially the emerging blues tradition—that encompassed the music universe of a young black American growing up in rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. His experience with secular music came through his friends as well as his uncle Phil Plant, who picked the guitar and wandered across southern Georgia as a bard. His mother’s brother-in-law Corrie M. Hindsman, a more respectable member of the local black establishment, gave Thomas a rudimentary formal music education, including singing out of the shape-note hymnals and learning some of the antebellum spirituals.

In 1908 the family moved to Atlanta after Dorsey’s parents finally tired of the lack of opportunities available to black Americans living in rural Georgia. Both worked at a variety of menial jobs while the elder Dorsey occasionally also worked as a guest preacher. Atlanta’s higher cost of living meant a decline in social and economic status, however, and young Thomas dropped out of school after the fourth grade. He slowly became part of the commercial music scene that revolved around Decatur Street and the Eighty-one Theater in particular. By his mid-teens Dorsey was regularly working as a pianist at the clubs and at local Saturday night stomps, house parties, and dances sponsored by organizations such as the Odd Fellows.

For three years, between the summers of 1916 and 1919, Dorsey shuttled between Atlanta and Chicago in search of more lucrative and steady musical employment. He was principally a blues pianist who occasionally performed with small combos that played jazz, and well into the early 1920s Dorsey was still struggling to survive on his meager earnings from music. Although he attended the 1921 National Baptist Convention in Chicago (his Uncle Joshua invited his nephew to accompany him) and after the convention became music director of Chicago’s New Hope Baptist Church, Dorsey remained committed to the secular world. He was in a good position to cash in on this music when the blues records of BESSIE SMITH, Alberta Hunter, and MA RAINEY gained popularity in the mid-1920s. For several years he served as Rainey’s pianist and arranger, touring the country playing tent shows and vaudeville stages. In 1928 he teamed with Tampa Red, and they soon had a hit with “It’s Tight Like That”; until 1932 the duo earned a steady living playing on stage and recording for the Vocalion label. Dorsey also worked as a music demonstrator in Chicago music stores from 1928 on and as an arranger and session organizer for Brunswick and Vocalion records.

Dorsey’s personal life had changed in August 1925 when he married Nettie Harper, who had recently arrived in Chicago from Philadelphia. He was given to occasional bouts with depression, and his marriage helped to stabilize him. When these periods descended upon him he turned not only to Nettie but also to his own religious upbringing. As early as 1922 Dorsey began publishing sacred songs in addition to blues. His 1926 composition “If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me,” came during one of his depressive periods and is perhaps the first “gospel blues” piece ever published. Dorsey pioneered this genre by combining sacred lyrics with the harmonic structure and form of the popular blues songs. In 1928 Dorsey met and mentored seventeen-year-old MAHALIA JACKSON, one of the first singers he knew who was able to combine the emotional feeling of blues with the sentiments of his new gospel songs.

Almost exactly seven years after their marriage, Nettie died in childbirth, followed within a day by their infant son, their only child. Dorsey fell into deep melancholy that lasted for months. He finally started to climb out of his depression by writing “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” and from that point until his own death Dorsey devoted his life to gospel performing, composing, and organizations. During the decade after his wife’s death, Dorsey worked tirelessly to promote gospel music, first in Chicago and then across the United States.

As early as a year before Nettie’s passing Dorsey had been turning more and more of his attention to the sacred music realm. He founded and helped to direct the first gospel choir at Chicago’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in late 1931. One year later Dorsey, along with gospel singer Sallie Martin, was instrumental in establishing the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, formed in response to the steadily growing number of gospel choruses. These proved to be popular, though controversial, innovations within the black-American church. The old-line, more conservative mainstream church members proved resistant to change; they protested the showmanship that accompanied these groups’ programs and were appalled by the clapping, highly syncopated rhythms, choreographed movement, and overt emotionalism that Dorsey instilled in the gospel choruses with which he worked. While sometimes troubled by criticism, Dorsey was undeterred. His final major contribution during this early period was to open the Thomas A. Dorsey Gospel Songs Music Publishing Company. This fledgling company sold thousands of copies of early gospel songs for ten cents apiece, disseminating them mainly at local churches and the early annual meetings of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses.

Dorsey worked tirelessly over the next two decades in service to the growth of gospel blues and the organizations that he helped found. He traveled across the country teaching workshops, leading choruses, and occasionally singing, all the while retaining his Chicago base. He published scores of sacred songs during this period, including “There’ll Be Peace in the Valley” (1938), “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” (1939), “Ev’ry Day Will Be Sunday By and By” (1946), and “I’m Climbing Up the Rough Side of the Mountain” (1951). In 1940 he married Kathryn Mosley, with whom he had two children, and in the 1960s and 1970s he served as an assistant pastor at the Pilgrim Church.

Slowed by age and the desire to stay closer to his Chicago home, Dorsey became less prolific over the last four decades of his life, composing fewer than twenty songs. Throughout his life Dorsey remained proud of his work in blues and of his guidance of Mahalia Jackson early in a career that eventually touched millions of Americans, black and white. By the late 1950s pop singers Pat Boone and Elvis Presley had underscored Dorsey’s impact on modern gospel music through their influential recordings of “Peace in the Valley” and other Dorsey-inspired compositions. The 1982 documentary film Say Amen, Somebody pays warm tribute to Dorsey and other gospel pioneers. During the final years of his life Dorsey became recognized as the patriarch of the gospel blues movement, which he lived to see from its inception to its widespread acceptance. After several years of severely diminished health, he died in Chicago.

DOUGLAS, AARON

(26 May 1899–2 Feb. 1979), artist and educator, was born in Topeka, Kansas, the son of Aaron Douglas Sr., a baker from Tennessee, and Elizabeth (maiden name unknown), an amateur artist from Alabama. Aaron had several brothers and sisters, but he was unique in his family in his singular drive to pursue higher education. He attended segregated elementary schools and then an integrated high school. Topeka had a strong and progressive black community, and Aaron was fortunate to grow up in a city where education and social uplift were stressed through organizations such as the Black Topeka Foundation. He was an avid reader and immersed himself in the great writers, including Dumas, Shakespeare, and Emerson. His parents were able to feed and clothe him but could offer him no other help with higher education. When he needed money to pursue a college degree, he traveled via rail to Detroit, where he worked as a laborer in several jobs, including building automobiles. It was hard work, but it increased his desire to attend college.

Upon his return to Topeka, Douglas decided to attend the University of Nebraska and arrived ten days into the term with no transcripts in hand. This was the first in a series of steps he made to educate himself and improve his artistic skills. The chairman of Nebraska’s art department realized Douglas’s potential and agreed to accept him on the condition that his transcripts would follow. At Nebraska, Douglas discovered the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and found inspiration in them. By 1921 he was a constant reader of Crisis magazine, and later, Opportunity, and he began to seriously consider the nation’s racial situation. Douglas graduated from Nebraska with a BFA in 1922 and accepted a teaching position at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was one of only two black faculty members. In 1925, after seeing a special issue of Survey Graphic magazine, which focused on Harlem and featured a portrait of black actor Roland Hayes on its cover, Douglas decided to quit his job and pursue his dream of working as a full-time artist. Hoping for wider artistic opportunities and contact with a larger black community, Douglas moved to Harlem in 1925. While he was full of dreams, Douglas had very few connections in New York.

Painter and graphic artist Aaron Douglas executed several murals depicting African American life and history, including The Song of the Towers, the fourth panel in a mural series dated 1934 and titled Aspects of Negro Life. Schomburg Center

Only days after his arrival, Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois hired him to work in the magazine’s mail room and to help illustrate the magazine. Du Bois, who had been editing Crisis for fourteen years, was struggling against the competition, Opportunity magazine, published by the National Urban League. Needing a stronger visual message, Du Bois turned to Douglas, commissioning bold covers, prints, and drawings to accompany essays, stories, and editorials expressing Du Bois’s vision of what African Americans should know about the world around them, and what causes they should support. In 1927 Douglas was made art director at Crisis. When Douglas had started work at Crisis, he had also been hired by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON to illustrate for Opportunity magazine. Douglas soon found himself in the unique, and pleasant, position of having two major publications vying for his talents. Through his Crisis connections, Douglas met Bavarian artist Winold Reiss, who offered him a scholarship to study with him in his New York atelier, where Douglas immersed himself in the study of black life. Douglas was soon noticed by other patrons, and he quickly became one of the most sought-after illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance, receiving commissions to illustrate magazines and book covers as well as to execute a number of private commissions and public murals.

From his earliest Harlem paintings and prints, Douglas developed a strong commitment to establishing an African American identity tied to an African past, a history and identification encouraged by both Du Bois and ALAIN LOCKE. Douglas was drawn to African art even while he knew very little about it. As one of the key visual spokesmen for what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, Douglas used the art of the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Egypt to establish a firm connection between African Americans and African culture. As he wrote to his future wife, Alta Sawyer, in 1925:

We are possessed, you know, with the idea that it is necessary to be white, to be beautiful. Nine times out of ten it is just the reverse. It takes lots of training or a tremendous effort to down the idea that thin lips and a straight nose is the apogee of beauty. But once free you can look back with a sigh of relief and wonder how anyone could be so deluded.

(Kirschke, 61)

Douglas married Alta in 1926. Over the years the couple’s Harlem home became a central meeting place for the artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Meanwhile, Douglas’s illustrations, full of race pride and African heritage, had wide distribution and were seen across the country, in libraries, schools, social clubs, beauty parlors, and homes. He also provided artwork for other magazines, including Theatre Arts Monthly, as well as for numerous books. Douglas produced covers and interior illustrations for some of the Harlem Renaissance’s most significant literary achievements, including Alain Locke’s New Negro, WALLACE THURMAN’s The Blacker the Berry, Paul Morand’s Black Magic, James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones, COUNTÉE CULLEN’s Caroling Dusk, and CLAUDE MCKAY’s Banjo, and several works by LANGSTON HUGHES. Douglas was moved by the artistic milieu in which he worked, especially the literature of the time, written by his friends, which, along with his own work, described black life. Douglas’s work articulated the black experience in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, including the tremendous output of visual arts and music, and the effects of discrimination and the Depression. Douglas offered a unique visual style, which combined elements of American and European modernism, including cubism, orphism, precisionism, and art deco patterning, with a strong Pan-Africanist vision. His linoleum cuts, pen and ink drawings, oils, gouaches, and frescos forged a distinct combination of modernist elements.

In 1928 Douglas and Gwendolyn Bennett became the first African American artists to receive a fellowship to study at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Douglas’s one-year fellowship was followed, in 1931, by a year of study in Paris at the Academie Scandinave, where he met African American painters HENRY OSSAWA TANNER and Palmer Hayden.

In addition to his work as an illustrator, Douglas was a painter, particularly of portraits. He was interested in murals and received several mural commissions, including a mural at the Harlem branch of the YMCA, the College Inn in Chicago, and Bennett College in South Carolina. His most innovative project—created for Cravath Hall Library at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1930—was a massive cycle of murals celebrating philosophy, drama, music, poetry, and science, as well as African and African American culture. Restoration of these murals in 2003 revealed orphist-like geometric circles and abstract papyrus-topped columns, as well as four murals that had been covered for decades. One mural depicts Africans left behind as their family members and friends are taken away, never to be seen again. The mural cycle chronicles the history of blacks from Africa and slavery, to their triumphant release from servitude through education. Ambitious in its Pan-Africanist vision the mural includes elements drawn from Egypt, West Africa, and the Congo. In the 1960s Douglas entirely repainted the Fisk murals with a much brighter, bolder palette. In 1934 Douglas completed Aspects of Negro Life, four large mural panels sponsored by the WPA for the Countée Cullen Library at 135th Street (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Like the Fisk murals, these panels illustrate life in Africa before enslavement, through the years of slavery, emancipation, and into the African American present. Douglas offered hope even in the Depression, through creativity, music, and culture.

The Fisk mural commission led to Douglas’s return to the university in 1937, where he established the university’s first art department, remaining as chair of the department for over thirty years, until his retirement in 1966. In 1944, after years of part-time graduate work, he earned his MA from Columbia University Teacher’s College. He taught and worked as an artist well into his seventies and considered his work as an educator at Fisk to be his greatest accomplishment. Douglas, whose work influenced countless artists with its unique vision of African American identity linked to a Pan-Africanist vision, died in Nashville in 1979.

DOUGLASS, FREDERICK

(Feb. 1818–20 Feb. 1895), abolitionist, civil rights activist, and reform journalist, was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey near Easton, Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey, a slave, and an unidentified white man. Although a slave, he spent the first six years of his life in the cabin of his maternal grandparents, with only a few stolen nighttime visits by his mother. His real introduction to bondage came in 1824, when he was brought to the nearby wheat plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. Two years later he was sent to Baltimore to labor in the household of Hugh and Sophia Auld, where he remained for the next seven years. In spite of laws against slave literacy, Frederick secretly taught himself to read and write. He began studying discarded newspapers and learned of the growing national debate over slavery. And he attended local free black churches and found the sight of black men reading and speaking in public a moving experience. At about age thirteen he bought a popular rhetoric text and carefully worked through the exercises, mastering the preferred public speaking style of the time.

This early photograph of Frederick Douglass shows the strength of character and determination that made him the most influential African American of the nineteenth century and the most powerful voice for the abolition of slavery and for equal rights. Corbis

Literacy and a growing social consciousness made Frederick into an unruly bondsman. In 1833, after being taken by master Thomas Auld to a plantation near St. Michael’s, Maryland, he organized a secret school for slaves, but it was discovered and broken up by a mob of local whites. To discipline Frederick, Auld hired him out to a local farmer who had a reputation as a “slave breaker.” Instead he became increasingly defiant and refused to allow himself to be whipped. Hired out to another local farmer, he again organized a secret school for slaves. Before long, he and his pupils had plotted to escape to the free state of Pennsylvania, but this too was discovered. Expecting further trouble from Frederick, Auld returned him to Baltimore in 1836 and hired him out to a local shipyard to learn the caulking trade. Taking advantage of the relative liberty afforded by the city, Frederick joined a self-improvement society of free black caulkers that regularly debated the major social and intellectual questions of the day.

After an unsuccessful attempt to buy his freedom, Frederick escaped from slavery in September 1838. Dressed as a sailor and carrying the free papers of a black seaman he had met on the streets of Baltimore, he traveled by train and steamboat to New York. There he married Anna Murray, a free black domestic servant from Baltimore who had encouraged his escape. They soon settled in the seaport of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Frederick found employment as a caulker and outfitter for whaling ships, and began a family; two daughters and three sons were born to the union in a little more than a decade. At the urging of a local black abolitionist, he adopted the surname Douglass to disguise his background and confuse slave catchers. He also joined the local African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and became an active lay leader and exhorter.

Soon after arriving in New Bedford, Frederick Douglass was drawn to the emerging antislavery movement. He began to read the Liberator, a leading abolitionist journal edited by William Lloyd Garrison, and to attend antislavery meetings in local black churches, occasionally speaking out about his slave experiences. His remarks at an August 1841 convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on Nantucket Island brought him to the attention of Garrison and other leading white abolitionists. Society officials, impressed by Douglass’s eloquence and imposing presence, hired him as a lecturing agent. Over the next two years, during which time he moved his family to Lynn, Massachusetts, he made hundreds of speeches for the society before antislavery audiences throughout New England and New York State. In 1843 he joined other leading abolitionist speakers on the One Hundred Conventions tour, which sought to strengthen abolitionist sentiment in upstate New York, Ohio, Indiana, and western Pennsylvania. His oratorical skills brought him increasing recognition and respect within the movement. But antislavery lecturing was a hazardous business. Douglass and his colleagues were often subjected to verbal assaults, barrages of rotten eggs and vegetables, and mob violence. And, as a fugitive slave, his growing visibility placed him in constant danger of recapture. He had to conceal or gloss over certain details in his life story, including names, dates, and locations, to avoid jeopardizing his newfound freedom.

Douglass’s growing sophistication as a speaker brought other difficulties in the mid-1840s. At first, his speeches were simple accounts of his life in bondage. But as he matured as an antislavery lecturer, he increasingly sought to provide a critical analysis of both slavery and northern racial prejudice. His eloquence and keen mind even led some to question whether he had ever been a slave. As Douglass’s skills—combined with his circumspection—prompted critics to question his credibility, some white abolitionists feared that his effectiveness on the platform might be lost. They advised him to speak more haltingly and to hew to his earlier simple tale. One white colleague thought it “better to have a little of the plantation” in his speech (McFeely, 95).

Douglass bristled under such paternalistic tutelage. An answer was to publish an autobiography providing full details of his life that he had withheld. Although some friends argued against that course, fearing for his safety, Douglass sat down in the winter of 1844–1845 and wrote the story of his life. The result was the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1845). The brief autobiography, which ran only to 144 pages, put his platform tale into print and reached a broad American and European audience. It sold more than thirty thousand copies in the United States and Britain within five years and was translated into French, German, and Dutch. Along with his public lectures, “the Narrative made Frederick Douglass the most famous black person in the world” (David W. Blight, ed., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [1993], 16).

Although the Narrative enhanced Douglass’s popularity and credibility, it increased the threat to his liberty. He was still a fugitive slave—but now one with a best-selling autobiography. Antislavery colleagues advised Douglass to travel to Britain to elude slave catchers, also hoping that his celebrity would mobilize British abolitionists to bring international pressure against American slavery. He sailed in August 1845 and remained abroad twenty months, lecturing to wildly enthusiastic audiences in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Douglass broadened his reform perspective, grew in confidence, and became increasingly self-reliant during this time. English antislavery friends eventually raised the funds necessary to purchase his freedom from the Aulds and permit his return home. They also collected monies to allow him to begin his own antislavery newspaper in the United States. In December 1847 Douglass moved his family to Rochester in the “burned-over district,” a center of reform activity in upstate New York. There he launched the weekly reform journal North Star, which promoted abolitionism, African American rights, temperance, women’s rights, and a host of related reforms. Like his later journalistic ventures, it was well written and carefully edited and carried Douglass’s message to an international audience. While it served as a personal declaration of independence, it initiated an ever-widening rift between Douglass and his Garrisonian colleagues, who sensed that they were losing control of his immense talent.

Douglass’s movement away from Garrisonian doctrine on antislavery strategy also signaled his growing independence. Unlike Garrison, who viewed moral suasionist appeals to individual conscience as the only appropriate tactic, Douglass was increasingly persuaded of the efficacy of politics and violence for ending bondage. He attended the Free Soil Convention in Buffalo in 1848 and endorsed its platform calling for a prohibition on the extension of slavery. In 1851 he merged the North Star with the Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which openly endorsed political abolitionism. This brought a final breach with the Garrisonians, who subjected him to a torrent of public attacks, including scandalous charges about his personal behavior. Nevertheless, Douglass endorsed the nascent Republican Party and its moderate antislavery platform in the elections of 1856 and 1860. At the same time, he increasingly explored the possibilities of abolitionist violence. As early as 1849 Douglass endorsed slave violence, telling a Boston audience that he would welcome news that the slaves had revolted and “were engaged in spreading death and devastation” throughout the South (Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom [1974], 67). After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which put the federal government in the business of capturing and returning runaway slaves, he publicly urged resistance to the law, with violence if necessary. And he became active in the Underground Railroad, hiding numerous fugitives in his Rochester home and helping them on the way to Canada West (now Ontario). Douglass’s growing attraction to violence is evident in his 1852 novella, The Heroic Slave, generally considered to be the first piece of African American fiction, which glorified the leader of a bloody slave revolt. Later in the decade Douglass became involved in the planning for John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and secretly helped raise funds for the venture, although he thought it ill conceived. When the raid failed, he fled to Canada East (now Quebec), then on to England, fearing arrest on the charge of being Brown’s accomplice. He returned home in 1860, disillusioned about African American prospects in the United States and planning to visit Haiti in order to explore the feasibility of black settlement there.

The coming of the Civil War revived Douglass’s hopes. From the beginning of the conflict, he pressed President Abraham Lincoln to make emancipation a war goal and to allow black enlistment in the Union army. After Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, Douglass spoke widely in support of the measure. Believing that military service might allow black men to demonstrate their patriotism and manhood, winning greater equality as well as helping to end slavery, he recruited for the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Colored Infantry, the first African American regiment organized in the North. His stirring editorial “Men of Color, to Arms” was often reprinted in northern newspapers and became a recruiting poster. Nevertheless, Douglass was disgusted by the government’s failure to keep its recruiting promises and met with Lincoln to protest discrimination against black troops. Before long, the War Department offered him a commission to enlist and organize African American regiments among the slaves fleeing to Union lines in the lower Mississippi Valley. He stopped publication of Douglass’ Monthly, which he had begun in 1859, and waited. But the commission never came, and Douglass, refusing to go South without it, continued to lecture and recruit in the North. As the war wound toward a conclusion in 1864–1865, he worked to shape public memory of the war and the character of the peace. He reminded audiences that the conflict had been fought to abolish slavery; it would only be successful, he argued, if the former slaves were granted equal citizenship rights with other Americans.

The end of the war and the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery posed a crisis for Douglass. After a quarter of a century as the preeminent black abolitionist, he wondered if his career was at an end. But he soon recognized that important work remained to be done. In an 1865 speech to the American Anti-Slavery Society, many of whose white members were calling to disband the society, he forcefully argued that “the work of Abolitionists is not done” and would not be until blacks had equal citizenship rights with other Americans. Although he vigorously supported the Fourteenth Amendment and other civil rights statutes, he believed that a meaningful Reconstruction required two essential elements: keeping the old leadership elite from returning to power in the South, and giving the freed-men the vote. Putting the ballot in the hands of black men, he argued, would prove the key to uplifting and protecting African American rights. When President Andrew Johnson refused to endorse these principles in an 1866 meeting with Douglass, the race leader became one of his most vocal critics. He lobbied hard for passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, even at the cost of a breach with many friends who opposed the measure unless it also granted women the vote.

The 1870s were a “time of troubles” in Douglass’s life. An 1872 fire destroyed his Rochester home and the files of his lengthy journalistic endeavors. He moved his family to Washington, D.C., where two years earlier he had purchased the New National Era. Through careful editorial guidance, he attempted to shape the weekly into a mouthpiece for the race. But persistent financial troubles forced him to stop publication of the paper in 1874. That same year Douglass was named president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, a federally chartered savings and lending institution created to assist the economic development of former slaves. He soon found that the bank was in severe financial distress; it was forced to declare bankruptcy in a matter of months. These two failed ventures cost Douglass thousands of dollars and some public respect. Other black leaders increasingly criticized his alleged moderation on key race questions, his devotion to American individualism (most clearly seen in his oft-repeated lecture, “Self-Made Men”), and his unswerving loyalty to the Republican Party. They openly attacked his failure to criticize the party’s abandonment of the Reconstruction experiment in 1877.

The end of Reconstruction dashed Douglass’s hopes for a meaningful emancipation. Even so, he never abandoned the fight for African American rights. And he still regarded the Republican Party as the likeliest vehicle for black advancement. A skilled practitioner at “waving the bloody shirt”—linking Democrats with slavery and the Confederacy—he campaigned widely for Republican candidates during the 1870s and 1880s. Partisanship brought rewards. President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Douglass as the U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia (1877–1881), and President James A. Garfield named him the district’s recorder of deeds (1881–1886). These offices made him financially secure. But changing family circumstances unsettled his personal life. His wife, Anna, died in 1882. Two years later he married Helen Pitts, his white former secretary. This racially mixed marriage stirred controversy among blacks and whites alike; nevertheless, it failed to limit Douglass’s influence.

Douglass was not lulled into complacency by partisan politics. He pressed Republicans as forcefully as ever on issues of concern to the African American community, while continuing to campaign for party candidates. President Benjamin Harrison rewarded him with an appointment as U.S. minister to Haiti (1889–1891). In this capacity he became an unwitting agent of American expansionism in the Caribbean, unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate special shipping concessions for American business interests and the lease of land for a naval base at Môle St. Nicholas. He eventually resigned his post and returned home in disgust.

Douglass continued to claim the mantle of race leader in the 1890s. He denounced the wave of disfranchisement and segregation measures spreading across the South. He threw much of his energy into the emerging campaign against racial violence. Between 1892 and 1894 he delivered “Lessons of the Hour”—a speech attacking the dramatic increase in black lynchings—to dozens of audiences across the nation. He personally appealed to Harrison for an antilynching law and used his position as the only African American official at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to bring the issue before an international audience. He had just returned from another lecture tour when he died at his Washington home.

The most influential African American of the nineteenth century, Douglass made a career of agitating the American conscience. He spoke and wrote on behalf of a variety of reform causes: women’s rights, temperance, peace, land reform, free public education, and the abolition of capital punishment. But he devoted the bulk of his time, immense talent, and boundless energy to ending slavery and gaining equal rights for African Americans. These were the central concerns of his long reform career. Douglass understood that the struggle for emancipation and equality demanded forceful, persistent, and unyielding agitation. And he recognized that African Americans must play a conspicuous role in that struggle. Less than a month before his death, when a young black man solicited his advice to an African American just starting out in the world, Douglass replied without hesitation: “Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!” (Joseph W. Holley, You Can’t Build a Chimney from the Top [1948], 23).

DADDY GRACE.

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