African American Lives

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EARLEY, CHARITY ADAMS

(5 Dec. 1917–13 Jan. 2002), commander of the only African American unit of the Women’s Army Corps stationed in Europe during World War II, was born Charity Edna Adams, the eldest of four children. She was raised in Columbia, South Carolina, where her father was a minister in the African Episcopal Methodist Church. Her mother was a former teacher.

Adams graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Columbia as valedictorian of her senior class and then from Wilberforce University in Ohio, one of the top three black colleges in the nation in the 1930s. She majored in Math and Physics and graduated in 1938. After returning to Columbia, where she taught junior high school mathematics for four years, Adams enrolled in the MA program for vocational psychology at Ohio State University, pursuing her degree during the summers.

As a member of the military’s Advisory Council to the Women’s Interests Section (ACWIS), MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, president of the National Council of Negro Women, had fought for the inclusion of black women in the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in 1942. The dean of women at Wilberforce identified Adams as a potential candidate with both the education and the character to become a fine female officer. Intrigued by the possibilities of military service, Adams applied in June 1942 and in July 1942 she became the first of four thousand African American women to join what became the Women’s Army Corp (WAC). She was one of thirty-nine black women enrolled in the first officer candidate class at the First WAAC Training Center at Fort Des Moines in Iowa, where she was stationed for two and a half years, achieving the rank of major.

The armed forces were segregated in World War II, and Adams suffered indignities from those racist policies, but she handled them with great fortitude and tenacity. One of these incidents happened at Fort Des Moines when a white colonel upbraided her for visiting the all-white officers’ club with a major who had invited her there. She was forced to stand at attention for forty-five minutes while the colonel scolded her for “race mixing” and told her that black people needed to respect separation of the races even if they were officers. Indignant, Adams never entered the officers’ club again. Adams also encountered American segregation policies in England, where she commanded the only African American WAC unit to serve overseas, a postal unit stationed in Birmingham and then in France. The American Red Cross, working with the U.S. Army, pressured Adams to move her unit from integrated accommodations to a designated London hotel and sent her equipment to be used at a segregated recreational area. Adams refused the move and the equipment, insisting that her unit continue using its integrated facility, and she persuaded her troops not to change their lodgings.

Major Charity E. Adams (later Charity Adams Earley) inspects the first African American contingent of the Women’s Army Corps assigned overseas, 1945. National Archives and Records Administration

Adams also battled occupational segregation within the army. African Americans were routinely assigned menial service jobs and denied access to office work or skilled jobs. Army labor requisitions for WAC personnel often were for administrative jobs, but these were regularly reserved for white women. In an effort to break down these barriers, Adams was sent to the Pentagon in 1943 along with the African American Major Harriet West, assistant to the WAC leader Oveta Culp Hobby, to increase quotas of black women in motor transport and other jobs. They received nominal support from the Pentagon, but racial discrimination in job assignments remained a problem throughout the war for both male and female African American soldiers.

As a black woman in uniform during the 1940s, Adams was subjected to the tensions confronting all black soldiers on the home front as well. On her first visit home to Columbia in December 1942, she accompanied her father to a meeting of the Columbia chapter of the NAACP, which he headed, to discuss the mistreatment of black soldiers by white military police at nearby Fort Jackson. Upon returning home, they discovered that the Ku Klux Klan had parked a line of cars in front of their house. Adams’s father gave the family his shotgun to protect themselves while he went to the home of the NAACP state head, only to find that home similarly surrounded and the family was out of town. In her autobiography Adams recounts the tense night that followed, as she kept watch over the hooded Klan members until dawn, when they left.

Adams also describes an incident in 1944 at an Atlanta train station, when she was asked by two white military police to produce identification. Several whites in the segregated waiting room had cast doubt on her status as an army officer. Even though she was with her parents, this was a dangerous encounter for Adams. The previous year a black army nurse in Alabama had been beaten by police and jailed for boarding a bus ahead of white passengers, and three African American WACs stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, had been similarly beaten for failing to move from the white area of a Greyhound bus station. Despite the risk, Adams took charge by interrogating the MPs herself and demanding the name of their commanding officer so that she could file a report on them if they did not respect her rank. The MPs saluted and disappeared.

After the war Adams returned to Ohio State and completed her MA in 1946, after which she served as a registration officer for the Veteran’s Administration in Cleveland, as manager of a music school at the Miller Academy of Fine Arts, and as dean of student personnel services at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College and then at Georgia State College. On 24 August 1949, she married a physician, Stanley Earley Jr. Accompanying him to the University of Zurich, where he was a medical student, she learned German and took courses at the university and at the Jungian Institute of Analytical Psychology. Earley returned to the United States with her husband after he completed his training, and they had two children, a son and a daughter. The family settled in Dayton, Ohio, where she was actively involved in community affairs, serving on boards for social services, education, civic affairs, and corporations.

In 1989 Earley published a memoir of her wartime service, One Woman’s Army. The courage and leadership Earley displayed in her pioneering role in the U.S. Army earned her an award for distinguished service in 1946 from the National Council of Negro Women and, decades later, a place on the Smithsonian Institution’s listing of the most historically important African American women. In 1996 the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum also honored Adams’s wartime service. She died in Dayton at the age of eighty-three, having established a permanent place in history for her trail-blazing accomplishments in World War II.

EDELMAN, MARIAN WRIGHT

(6 June 1939–), civil rights attorney and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, was born Marian Wright in Bennettsville, South Carolina, to Arthur Jerome Wright, a Baptist minister, and Maggie Leola Bowen, an active churchwoman. Both parents were community activists who took in relatives and others who could no longer care for themselves, eventually founding a home for the aged that continues to be run by family members. The Wrights also built a playground for black children denied access to white recreational facilities, and nurtured in their own children a sense of responsibility and community service. As soon as Marian and her siblings were old enough to drive, they continued the family tradition of delivering food and coal to the poor, elderly, and sick. Arthur Wright also encouraged his children to read about and to revere influential African Americans like MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE and MARIAN ANDERSON (for whom Marian Wright was named).

Marian Wright experienced racial injustice from an early age, despite the efforts of her parents and other elders to protect their children from the harshest excesses of segregation. Maggie Wright was choir director, organist, and coordinator of church and community youth activities and could not always be with her children; thus neighbors and parishioners often looked after the Wright children. Such communal parenting provided Edelman with a series of strong black female role models. These women, she later wrote, became “lanterns” for her childhood and adult life.

Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, whose mission since 1973 has been to “Leave No Child Behind.” Corbis

In 1956, two years after her father’s death, Wright entered Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. There she met several people who became influential mentors, including the historian Howard Zinn, the educator and civil rights advocate BENJAMIN MAYS, and MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. At Spelman, she continued the deep religious commitment of her childhood. Her diaries from that time record her prayers, asking God to “help me do the right thing and to be sincere and honest,” to “teach us to seek after truth relentlessly, and to yearn for the betterment of mankind by endless sacrifice” (Edelman, 61, 64). This centrality of faith to her daily life persisted throughout Wright’s career. She later identified her life’s work as a desire to emulate her mentors in “seeking to serve God and a cause bigger than ourselves” (Edelman, 53).

During her junior year she received a Charles Merrill scholarship that provided a year of European study and travel to Paris, Geneva, and several Eastern Bloc nations. That experience, she wrote in her diary, changed her life. “I could never return home to the segregated South and constraining Spelman College in the same way” (Edelman, 43). Marian Wright was not alone. Inspired by the February 1960 sit-in protests at segregated North Carolina lunch counters, thousands of young black southerners began to actively resist Jim Crow. That spring Wright was arrested with other Atlanta students during a sit-in, and she helped develop a student document, “An Appeal for Human Rights,” that was published in both the white-owned Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Daily World, a publication produced by, and primarily read by, African Americans. At Easter, she joined several hundred students, primarily from the South, at a gathering in Raleigh, North Carolina, initiated by ELLA BAKER of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. That meeting resulted in Wright’s participation in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In May 1960 Wright graduated from Spelman as class valedictorian and entered Yale University Law School that fall. Having abandoned her earlier plans of studying Russian literature or preparing for the foreign service, she now determined that mastering the law would best prepare her for assisting the black freedom struggle. While at Yale, Wright continued her civil rights commitment through the Northern Students’ Movement, a support group for SNCC, and by visiting civil rights workers in Mississippi. During the summer of 1962, she traveled to the Ivory Coast under the Crossroads Africa student cultural exchange program founded by JAMES H. ROBINSON. After graduating from Yale in 1963, Wright spent one year preparing to become a civil rights attorney by working for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York.

In 1964 Wright moved south to direct the LDF’s activities in Jackson, Mississippi. She arrived during “freedom summer,” a major voter-registration campaign that helped her forge relationships with ROBERT P. MOSES, FANNIE LOU HAMER, Mae Bertha Carter, UNITA BLACKWELL, and other civil rights leaders. Wright remained in Jackson for four years and became the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. She also successfully supported continued federal funding for the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), one of the nation’s largest Head Start programs. CDGM, founded as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, was strongly opposed by conservatives in Mississippi and the state’s all-white Congressional delegation, who viewed the organization as too radical. To the extent that CDGM wanted to end poverty and inequality for all Mississippians, it was radical, indeed, revolutionary. Wright also filed and won a school integration lawsuit that began the process of fully desegregating Mississippi schools.

As a result of her civil rights practice and work for the poor in Mississippi, Wright testified before the U.S. Senate in 1967 about hunger and poverty in the state. Prompted by Wright’s compelling testimony, Senator Robert Kennedy visited Mississippi to examine her assertions of extreme economic deprivation. Wright guided Kennedy on this fact-finding trip, which resulted in immediate federal commodity and, later on, in expansions of the federal food stamp program. Wright also encouraged Martin Luther King Jr. to launch the Poor People’s Campaign, to dramatize the problems of poverty in America, and later served as an attorney for that effort following King’s assassination in April 1968. That July, Wright married Peter Edelman, a prominent aide to Senator Kennedy. The couple had three sons, Joshua, Jonah, and Ezra.

Edelman moved to Washington in 1968 and continued her civil rights and antipoverty work through a Field Foundation grant that enabled her to found the Washington Research Project (WRP), a public-interest law firm that lobbied for child and family well-being, and for expanding Head Start and other anti-poverty programs. Three years later she moved with her husband to Boston, where she directed the Harvard Center for Law and Education from 1971 to 1973. In 1973 the WRP became the parent organization for the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), whose mission has been to “Leave No Child Behind.” Under Edelman’s presidency, the CDF has promoted a “healthy start,” a “head start,” a “fair start,” a “safe start,” and a “moral start” for all children. By tackling children’s welfare, health care, and employment issues, as well as teenage pregnancy and adoption, the CDF became the nation’s largest and most successful child advocacy organization. It has several local and state affiliates in many states. At its retreat center on a farm once owned by the Roots author ALEX HALEY in Clinton, Tennessee, the CDF focuses on Edelman’s vision of transforming America by building a movement for children. CDF programs draw on the methods and lessons of the civil rights movement, for example, in the freedom school trainers program, which exposes young people to civil rights veterans and history. Those selected by the CDF to teach young adults are called Ella Baker Trainers, in honor of her role as a mentor for thousands of young activists like Marian Wright, Bob Moses, and STOKELY CARMICHAEL. The CDF’s annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute also reflects Edelman’s roots in the black church through its workshops, worship, singing, and inspirational preaching and teaching.

Edelman’s tenacious defense of children’s rights has earned her respect, opportunity, and honors. From 1976 to 1987 she chaired the Spelman College trustee board, becoming the first woman to hold that post. From 1971 to 1977 she served as a member of the Yale University Corporation, the first woman elected by alumni to this position. She has received numerous awards and honors, including the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2000, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1985, the AFL-CIO Humanitarian Award in 1989, and honorary degrees from more than thirty colleges and universities. She has also been praised for several books on child advocacy and child rearing, including Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (1987), Stand for Children (1998), and Hold My Hand: Prayers for Building a Movement to Leave No Child Behind (2001).

Edelman actively continues her CDF work, which remains as necessary today as when she founded the organization three decades ago. Her close friendship with her fellow Yale Law School graduate and CDF activist, Hillary Rodham Clinton, led to speculation that the CDF might wield considerable influence in the White House, when Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, was elected president in 1992. However, in 1996 Edelman opposed President Clinton for supporting welfare reform legislation that she believed would worsen child poverty. Edelman has also criticized Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, who appropriated the CDF’s “leave no child behind” motto as a campaign slogan but has shown little interest in backing up such rhetoric with meaningful legislation. Responding to President Bush’s State of the Union address in 2002, Edelman stated:

The President’s economic plan so far has favored the wealthiest one percent of Americans. This nation should not give another tax break to the wealthy or corporate America or make permanent existing tax breaks for the wealthiest individuals and companies until there are no more hungry, homeless, poor children. For the annual cost of what the President has already approved in tax cuts to the top one percent of taxpayers, we could pay for child care, Head Start, and health care for all of the children who still need it—as proposed in the comprehensive Act to Leave No Child Behind.

(“Statement by the Children’s Defense Fund,” 30 Jan. 2002, http://www.childrens-defense.org/statement-stateofunion.php.)

EDWARDS, HARRY THOMAS

(3 Nov. 1940–), federal judge, was born in New York City. Raised by his mother, Arline Ross, a psychiatric social worker, and his father, George F. Edwards, an accountant and state legislator, Edwards enjoyed a very close relationship with his maternal grandfather, a tax attorney, and two uncles who also were lawyers. His decision to attend law school after graduating with a BS degree from Cornell University in 1964 was due to his admiration of his grandfather and encouragement from his two uncles.

In 1962 Edwards entered the University of Michigan Law School, where he achieved a stellar academic record. He served as an editor of the Michigan Law Review, was selected for membership in the Order of the Coif, a legal honor society reserved for the top 5 percent of students, and received American Jurisprudence Awards for outstanding performance in labor law and administrative law. As a result of this record, Edwards earned a JD degree with distinction in 1965.

Edwards began his professional career as an associate attorney with the Chicago firm of Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather, and Geraldson, where he practiced law in the labor department from 1965 to 1970. Leaving the firm in 1970 to begin a teaching career at the University of Michigan Law School, he served as an associate professor of law from 1970 to 1973, and later as professor of law from 1973 to 1975. From January to June 1974 he was a visiting professor at the Free University of Brussels, participating in the Program for International Legal Cooperation. In 1975 Edwards began teaching at Harvard, where in 1976 he became only the third African American awarded tenure at Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, Edwards taught labor law, collective bargaining and labor arbitration, and negotiation and labor-relations law in the public sector. In 1977 Edwards rejoined the law faculty at the University of Michigan Law School. During his time at the university, Edwards also served as a member and then chair of the board of directors of AMTRAK, the largest passenger railroad company in the United States.

Harry T. Edwards, chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit. © Reuters NewMedia Inc./CORBIS

In 1980 President Jimmy Carter appointed Edwards to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the most influential federal appeals court in the nation. Since joining the bench, Edwards has written hundreds of notable opinions, including decisions involving issues such as labor and employment, antitrust, administrative, tax, constitutional, civil rights, and criminal law. In his twenty-two years on the bench, Edwards developed a reputation for meticulous and thorough preparation for oral argument, as well as superbly crafted, tightly organized, and carefully annotated opinions.

In December 1982 Edwards was recognized by the American Lawyer as an Outstanding Performer in the legal profession for his judicial opinions in the area of labor law, and he continued to write important opinions in labor law in the 1990s. One such opinion was Association of Flight Attendants, AFL CIO v. USAir, Inc. (1994) where the court was faced with the question of whether flight attendants employed by an airline that had been purchased by USAir were subject to the airline’s collective-bargaining agreement with its own flight attendants. In his opinion, Edwards held that USAir’s collective bargaining agreement did not apply to the new flight attendants because a “mere change in union representative had no effect on the status quo applicable to shuttle flight attendants.” Thus the newly acquired flight attendants were able to adhere to the terms of their premerger collective bargaining agreement.

Edwards has been recognized for a series of articles regarding legal teaching and scholarship. In “The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession,” in Michigan Law Review Vol. 91 (1) (1992), he argues that law schools are failing to educate students adequately by overemphasizing abstract theory at the expense of practical scholarship and pedagogy and that law firms are failing to ensure that lawyers practice law in an ethical manner. The article sparked a national debate among legal scholars and practitioners on the proper method of legal teaching and reform in law schools and law firms. Another of his articles, “The Effects of Collegiality on Judicial Decision Making,” in Pennsylvania Law Review Vol. 151 (2003), explains how appellate judges decide cases. Edwards specifically refutes the common claim that the personal ideologies and political leanings of the judges on the District of Columbia Circuit are deciding factors in the ultimate holdings of the court. Despite his judicial duties, Edwards has also continued to influence students by teaching on a part-time basis at a number of law schools, including Harvard, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgetown, Duke, and New York University. Over the course of his teaching and judicial career, Edwards has found time to coauthor four critically acclaimed books: Labor Relations Law in the Public Sector (3rd edition 1985), The Lawyer as a Negotiator (1977), Collective Bargaining and Labor Arbitration (1979), and Higher Education and the Law (1979, annual supplements 1980–1983). He has also published numerous articles and pamphlets concerning issues in labor law, equal-employment opportunity, labor arbitration, higher education, alternative-dispute resolution, federalism, judicial process and administration, and comparative law.

Edwards became chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit in 1994. During his seven-year stint as chief judge, he directed numerous automation initiatives at the court of appeals, oversaw a complete reorganization of the clerk’s office and legal division, implemented case management programs that helped to reduce the court’s case backlog and disposition times, and successfully pursued congressional support for the construction of an annex to the courthouse building. He also established programs to enhance communications with the lawyers who practice before the court, and received high praise from members of the bench, bar, and press for fostering collegial relations among the members of the ideologically divided court. In 2000–2001 Edwards presided over the court’s hearings in United States v. Microsoft, the largest antitrust case in U.S. history. In this case, the court reviewed the legal conclusions regarding three alleged antitrust violations and the resulting remedial order imposed on Microsoft by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Edwards participated in the court’s per curiam opinion that affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court’s judgment that Microsoft violated section 2 of the Sherman Act.

In July 1996 the American Lawyer and the Washington Legal Times published personal profiles of Edwards, applauding his efforts in managing the District of Columbia Circuit as chief judge and in helping to bring collegiality to the court. Edwards stepped down from his position as chief judge in July 2001.

Edwards has served on numerous boards, including the board of directors of the National Institute for Dispute Resolution, the executive committee of the Order of the Coif, the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools, and the National Academy of Arbitrators (as vice president). His numerous awards include the Society of American Law Teachers Award, recognizing distinguished contributions to teaching and public service; the Whitney North Seymour Medal, presented by the American Arbitration Association for outstanding contributions; the 2001 Judicial Honoree Award presented by the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, recognizing significant contributions in the field of law; and eleven honorary JD degrees. He is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Judicature Society, and the American Bar Foundation. Edwards serves as a teacher/mentor at the Unique Learning Center in Washington, D.C., a volunteer program established to assist disadvantaged innercity youth.

Married to Pamela Carrington-Edwards in 2000, Edwards has two children from a previous marriage to Ila Hayes Edwards.

Edwards begins his seminal article in the Michigan Law Review on legal education with a quotation from Felix Frankfurter, the former associate judge on the U.S. Supreme Court: “In the last analysis, the law is what the lawyers are,” but this could also aptly apply to Edwards’s professional career, for in the last analysis, the laws made by Edwards are what he is and what his life represents—a shining example of professionalism.

EIKERENKOETTER, FREDERICK J.

See Reverend Ike.

ELAW, ZILPHA

(c. 1790-?), evangelist and writer, was born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to parents whose names remain unknown. In 1802, when Zilpha was twelve, her mother died during the birth of her twenty-second child, leaving Zilpha’s father to raise the three children who had survived infancy. Unable to support the family, her father sent her older brother to their grandparents’ farm far from Philadelphia and consigned Zilpha to a local Quaker couple, Pierson and Rebecca Mitchel. Within eighteen months Zilpha’s father died. Zilpha felt fortunate to stay with the Mitchels for the next six years, until she reached the age of eighteen.

Zilpha had enjoyed a close relationship with her father and was deeply grieved by his passing. The emotional turmoil associated with his death led her to a deeper contemplation of the state of her soul, though she felt that she had no religious instruction or direction to guide her through this period. Zilpha felt spiritually adrift between the public religious expressions she had witnessed as a young girl and the Quaker tradition where religious devotion was “performed in the secret silence of the mind” (Elaw, 54). Concerned about what she felt to be her increasingly impious behavior among the Mitchel children, Zilpha began to experience dreams and visions in which God or the archangel Gabriel warned her of her sinful ways and pressed her to repent before a promised cataclysmic end, when repentance would no longer be possible. When she was still a teenager, these dreams of damnation and her concerns about her feelings of guilt and sin led her to seek affiliation with the Methodists.

Conversion among the Methodists was a gradual process that Zilpha later compared to the dawning of the morning. That she marks her process in this way distinguishes her autobiography, Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels, and Labours of Mrs. Elaw, An American Female of Colour (1846), from many others in the spiritual autobiography genre, such as SOJOURNER TRUTH and JARENA LEE, in which the authors emphasize a single event or a miraculous series of distinctive incidents that worked an immediate and permanent change in the writer. Elaw, conversely, provides a model of slow but sure development over her adolescence and early adulthood.

In another vision Jesus appeared to Elaw as she wrote in her dairy and assured her that her sins had been forgiven. In 1808, at eighteen years of age, she “united [herself] in the fellowship of the saints with the militant church of Jesus on earth” (Elaw, 57), joining a local Methodist society. Conversion, study, church membership, baptism, and the new right to participate in Holy Communion transformed Zilpha’s life. She gained a new self-confidence that she had not possessed before her revelation. The society became her family, God became her father, and Jesus became her brother and friend.

The spiritual reverie she enjoyed changed when she married Joseph Elaw in 1810. Joseph was not a born-again Christian. Zilpha’s experience in this incompatible union served as the subject for one of the more powerful expositions in her narrative. She warns Christian women against marrying unbelieving men, suggesting that they would be more content to be drowned by a millstone hung about their necks for disobeying God’s law. Pride, arrogance, and the independence of young women drove them to make marital choices without parental regulation, guardianship, and government, she argued. In her view, women ought to be subordinate to fathers and, upon marriage, to husbands. The “carnal courtship” was not marriage but fornication, and it promised to deceive and destroy the woman’s spirit.

Elaw supported her opinion with scripture but, more convincingly, underpinned her discussion by describing the discord she suffered within her marriage. Joseph objected to Zilpha’s zealous and public religious practice and pressed her to take in amusements that he enjoyed, like music and dancing in nearby Philadelphia. Although the temptation to lose herself in these amusements was great, she held fast to her convictions.

In 1811 the Elaws relocated to Burlington, New Jersey, where their daughter was born and where Joseph could ply his trade as a fuller until embargos during the War of 1812 prevented shipping exports. Elaw also attended her first camp meeting in New Jersey. Camp meetings, referred to in the subtitle of her narrative, were open-air religious revivals, often attended by hundreds of worshipers who traveled great distances to participate. These events were popular among the Methodists and provided extraordinary opportunities for women and African Americans to engage in preaching and religious leadership outside the monitored and regulated site of the church.

As Elaw described the meetings, the campgrounds often had segregated living spaces but integrated worship spaces. Consequently, after experiencing another sanctifying vision, Elaw involuntarily began to pray and preach publicly and gained a reputation for her evangelical power. At one camp meeting, she developed the desire to engage in a household ministry among families in her community, and she was endorsed in this enterprise by local Burlington clergy. Elaw maintained this “special calling” despite a chilly reception by some local black Methodist parishioners and the vigorous protests of her husband, who feared that she would be ridiculed.

Throughout her period of household ministry, Elaw struggled with a call to preach to a broader audience, with her divine mission at odds with her sense of feminine propriety. She continued to have dreams about a greater call, but she found little support for this vision as well. All thought of preaching ended for a time when her husband died on 27 January 1823. To support herself and her daughter, Elaw established a school, but closed it two years later, yielding to the call to preach. She placed her daughter with relatives and began to preach, for a while joining with Jarena Lee. Elaw’s itinerant ministry took her through the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States and even below the Mason-Dixon line in 1828 to Maryland and Virginia, preaching to blacks and whites, men and women, believers and nonbelievers. She remarked that she became a “prodigy” to those who heard and saw her. The confluence of her race, gender, and spiritual enthusiasm presented a singular spectacle to many whose fascination with her rendered them susceptible to her persuasive style and rhetoric.

In 1840 Elaw sailed to London, England, to preach and evangelize. She met with success there, but she continued to battle those who were not receptive to women preachers. Her narrative suggests that she intended to return to America in 1845, but no record of her return or activity in the United States exists after the publication of her narrative in 1846.

A notable feature of Elaw’s narrative is the regularity with which she attributes her success to the combination of her race, gender, and salvation. Her narrative is modeled after Saint Paul’s struggles and salvation, as detailed in his letters to the Christian churches in the New Testament. Taken as a whole, Elaw’s narrative characterizes her race and gender as socially constructed “thorns” or burdens that, like Paul, she must endure. These “burdens” were the elements that rendered her a prodigy, or phenomenon to those who heard her preach. The confluence of her race, gender, and spiritual power were, in her understanding, elements of grace with which she had been blessed to do God’s work.

Like many women active in preaching activities in the nineteenth century, Elaw traveled, spoke in an impassioned and inspired manner on the Bible, and wrote a narrative of her religious development as a guide to others, especially women, who might follow her path. She did not carry any official designation as a minister or preacher, but was recognized for her powerful and effective evangelism as an itinerant religious leader. As one of the earliest black women to claim the right to preach publicly, Elaw was a key figure in establishing the tradition of African American women religious leaders. This tradition continued throughout the nineteenth century in the work of such notable evangelists as JULIA FOOTE and AMANDA SMITH, and it laid the groundwork for the acceptance of such women as PAULI MURRAY and Bishop BARBARA HARRIS in ministerial roles in the late twentieth century.

ELDERS, M. JOYCELYN

(13 Aug. 1933–), physician, scientist, professor, public health official, and first African American surgeon general of the United States, was born Minnie Lee Jones in the small town of Schaal, Arkansas, the oldest of eight children of Curtis Jones, a sharecropper, and Haller Reed Jones. As a child, Jones performed the hard labor demanded of Arkansas farmers and their families, and she often led her younger siblings in their work on the small cotton farm. The family home was an unpainted three-room shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity, and there was no hospital or physician for miles around. Jones watched her mother give birth seven times without medical assistance; the only memory she has of a visit to a physician was when her father took a gravely ill younger brother twelve miles by mule to the nearest doctor.

Haller Jones was determined that her children would have more prosperous futures and instilled the importance of education in all of her children, sending them to school during the winter and constantly drilling them on reading skills during the summer months. Minnie Jones excelled at the small segregated Howard County Training School in Schaal, graduating as valedictorian at the age of fifteen. At the graduation ceremony a representative from the Philander Smith Methodist College in Little Rock awarded her a full scholarship. She almost was unable to accept, as transportation to Little Rock was too expensive and she was too valuable as a work leader in the fields. But the family managed with help from extended family and neighbors, and Jones began her college career in the fall of 1948.

At Philander Smith, Jones decided to pursue a career in science, hoping to work in a laboratory after college. Then, at an event arranged by her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, she met Dr. Edith Irby Jones, the first African American medical student at the University of Arkansas. After hearing Edith Jones speak about her experiences there, she felt focused and inspired; Minnie Jones determined that she, too, would go to medical school and become a doctor. At about the same time, perhaps to demonstrate her newfound independence, she began to go by the name of Joycelyn, the middle name she had adopted during childhood.

Joycelyn Jones married a fellow student, Cornelius Reynolds, after graduation, and the couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Reynolds had secured employment. In Milwaukee, she worked as a nurse’s aide at the veterans’ hospital, where she learned of the Women’s Medical Specialist Corps. The WMSC was a program in which the army trained college graduates as physical therapists and made them commissioned officers eligible for the GI Bill. Jones and Reynolds parted amicably in May of 1953, and Jones remained in the army for three years. She left when she had served enough time to pay for medical school at what is now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where she was the second black woman student to attend, after Edith Irby Jones.

In 1960, the same year she graduated from medical school, Jones met and married Oliver Elders, a high school basketball coach. She then completed an internship in pediatrics at the University of Minnesota and returned to the University of Arkansas for a residency in pediatrics with an emphasis on pediatric surgery. Elders came through at the top of her class and was named chief resident in her third year. Along the way, she had two children: Eric in 1963 and Kevin in 1965. After her year as chief resident, Elders decided on a career in academic medicine, serving simultaneously as a junior faculty member and completing a master’s degree in Biochemistry. Elders ascended the professional ladder, achieving a full professorship and board certification in pediatric endocrinology in 1976. In all, Elders worked as a professor and practitioner of pediatric endocrinology for nearly twenty-five years and became especially renowned for authoring more than one hundred published papers and for her expert and compassionate treatment of young patients with diabetes, growth problems, and sexual disorders.

In 1987 Elders was appointed by then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to the position of director of the Arkansas Department of Health. She initially accepted with some misgivings about leaving her academic post, but she quickly became passionate about her new position. While in office, Elders and her team helped effect an impressive increase in the state health budget. They introduced a program to provide breast cancer screenings and provisions for funding around-the-clock in-home care for elderly and terminally ill patients, and they instituted programs to expand access to HIV testing and counseling services. Her policy initiatives for children resulted in a nearly 25 percent rise in immunizations and a tenfold increase in the number of early childhood screenings in the state. As director, Elders served on several presidential commissions on public health under President George H. W. Bush, and she was elected president of the Association of State and Territorial Health officers.

Elders was especially committed to lowering the teen pregnancy rate in Arkansas, at the time the second highest in the nation. In order to reduce the catastrophic public health consequences of such a high teen pregnancy rate, Elders and her team worked toward implementing a comprehensive health curriculum in the public schools, in which sex education would be a central topic. This would prove to be one of the most controversial acts of her administration, but Elders never backed down under pressure from her critics; she often commented that she felt she was in a unique position to help those in poor rural communities, having been raised in one, and that she would therefore not abandon the course she believed was right.

As director of the health department, Elders also worked toward establishing comprehensive health clinics in public schools. Because so many poor and rural communities in Arkansas lacked adequate health-care facilities, Elders and her staff reasoned that this would be the best way to expand access to preventive care measures, such as dental screenings and vaccinations. At the discretion of the local school board, these clinics could also be authorized to provide reproductive health counseling services and distribute condoms. Although the service was explicitly available only to students who had obtained their parents’ permission, it touched off a heated national debate over the relative merits and dangers of distributing condoms in public schools, and Elders’s policies became a regular target of critics nationwide.

In July 1993 Bill Clinton, by then president of the United States, appointed Elders to the position of surgeon general of the Public Health Services, and the U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment in September of the same year. Elders was the first African American and second woman appointed to this post, and, during her tenure, she served on a number of influential health policy committees and spoke widely on matters of public health. After only fifteen months as surgeon general, however, Elders was forced to resign over a public remark she had made at a United Nations World AIDS Day event. Following her presentation on school health clinics, a reporter asked her if she believed there should be any discussion of masturbation in high school health curricula. Elders responded, “I think it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.”

Two weeks later, amidst a barrage of press coverage, Elders tendered her resignation and moved back to Little Rock. She returned to her academic post at the University of Arkansas Children’s Hospital and a full schedule of public-speaking engagements, writing, and community and church involvement. Elders retired from her academic position in 1998, accepting an emeritus appointment. Since then she has lectured and published on those issues to which she has always been passionately dedicated: adequate health care for the poor, the importance of preventative health care, and the need for sex education in public schools.

ELLINGTON, DUKE

(29 Apr. 1899–24 May 1974), jazz musician and composer, was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., the son of James Edward Ellington, a butler, waiter, and later printmaker, and Daisy Kennedy. The Ellingtons were middle-class people who struggled at times to make ends meet. Ellington’s mother was particularly attached to him; in her eyes he could do no wrong. They belonged to Washington’s black elite, who put much stock in racial pride. Ellington developed a strong sense of his own worth and a belief in his destiny, which at times shaded over into egocentricity. Because of this attitude, and his almost royal bearing, his schoolmates early named him “Duke.”

Ellington’s interest in music was slow to develop. He was given piano lessons as a boy but soon dropped them. He was finally awakened to music at about fourteen when he heard a pianist named Harvey Brooks, who was not much older than he. Brooks, he later said, “was swinging, and he had a tremendous left hand, and when I got home I had a real yearning to play.”

Duke Ellington photographed by GORDON PARKS SR. at the Hurricane Club in New York, 1943. Library of Congress

He did not take formal piano lessons, however, but picked the brains of local pianists, some of whom were excellent. He was always looking for shortcuts, ways of getting effects without much arduous practicing. As a consequence, it was a long time before he became proficient at the stride style basic to popular piano playing of the time.

As he improved, Ellington discovered that playing for his friends at parties was a route to popularity. He began to rehearse with some other youngsters, among them saxophonist Otto “Toby” Hardwick and trumpeter Arthur Whetsol. Eventually a New Jersey drummer, Sonny Greer, joined the group. By age sixteen or seventeen Ellington was playing occasional professional jobs with these and other young musicians. The music they played was not jazz, which still was not widely known, but rags and ordinary popular songs.

He was not yet committed to music. He was also studying commercial art, for which he showed an aptitude. However, he never graduated from high school, and in 1918 he married Edna Thompson; the following spring their son, Mercer, was born. Although later Ellington lived with several different women, he never divorced his wife.

He now had a family to support and was perforce drawn into the music business, one of the few areas in which blacks could earn good incomes and achieve a species of fame. Increasingly he was working with a group composed of Whetsol, Greer, and Hardwick under the nominal leadership of Baltimore banjoist Elmer Snowden. This was the nucleus of later Ellington bands. In 1923 the group ventured to New York and landed a job at a well-known Harlem cabaret, Barron’s Exclusive Club. The club had a clientele of intellectuals and the social elite, some of them white, and the band was not playing jazz, but “under conversation music.” Ellington was handsome and already a commanding figure, and the others were polite, middle-class youths. They were well liked, and in 1923 they were asked to open at the Hollywood, a new club in the Broadway theater district, soon renamed the Kentucky Club.

As blacks, they were expected to play the new hot music, now growing in popularity. Like many other young musicians, they were struggling to catch its elusive rhythms, and they reached out for a jazz specialist, trumpeter James “Bubber” Miley, who had developed a style based on the plunger mute work of a New Orleanian, “KING” OLIVER. Miley not only used the plunger for wahwah effects but also employed throat tones to produce a growl. He was a hot, driving player and set the style for the band. Somewhat later, SIDNEY BECHET, perhaps the finest improviser in jazz at the time, had a brief but influential stay with the band.

Through the next several years the band worked off and on at the Kentucky Club, recording with increasing frequency. Then, early in 1924, the group fired Snowden for withholding money, and Ellington was chosen to take over. Very quickly he began to mold the band to his tastes. He was aided by an association with Irving Mills, a song publisher and show business entrepreneur with gangland connections. Mills needed an orchestra to record his company’s songs; Ellington needed both connections and guidance through the show business maze. His contract with Mills gave Ellington control of the orchestra.

As a composer, Ellington showed a penchant for breaking rules: if he were told that a major seventh must rise to the tonic, he would devise a piece in which it descended. His still-developing method of composition was to bring to rehearsal—or even to the recording studio—scraps and pieces of musical ideas, which he would try in various ways until he got an effect he liked. Members of the band would offer suggestions, add counterlines, and work out harmonies among themselves. It was very much a cooperative effort, and frequently the music was never written down. Although in time Ellington worked more with pencil and paper, this improvisational system remained basic to his composing.

Beginning with a group of records made in November 1926, the group found its voice: the music from this session has the distinctive Ellington sound. The first important record was “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” (1926), a smoky piece featuring Bubber Miley growling over a minor theme. Most important of all was “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927), another slow piece featuring Miley in a minor key. It ends with a quotation from Chopin’s “Funeral March.” In part because of this touch, “Black and Tan Fantasy” was admired by influential critics such as R. D. Darrell, who saw it as a harbinger of a more sophisticated, composed jazz. Increasingly thereafter, Ellington was seen by critics writing in intellectual and music journals as a major American composer.

Then, in December 1927 the group was hired as the house band at the Cotton Club, rapidly becoming the country’s best-known cabaret. It was decided, for commercial purposes, to feature a “jungle sound,” built around the growling of Miley and trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton. About this time Ellington added musicians who would fundamentally shape the band’s sound: clarinetist Barney Bigard, a well-trained New Orleanian with a liquid tone; saxophonist Johnny Hodges, who possessed a flowing, honeyed sound and quickly became the premier altoist in jazz; and Cootie Williams, who replaced the wayward Miley and soon became a master of the plunger mute. These and other instrumentalists each had a distinctive sound and gave Ellington a rich “tonal palette,” which he worked with increasing mastery.

Through the 1920s and 1930s Ellington created a group of masterpieces characterized by short, sparkling melodies, relentless contrasts of color and mood, and much more dissonant harmony than was usual in popular music. Among the best known of these are “Mood Indigo” (1930) and “Creole Love Call” (1927), two simple but very effective mood pieces; “Rockin’ in Rhythm” (1930), a driving up-tempo piece made up of sharply contrasting melodies; and “Daybreak Express” (1933), an uncanny imitation of train sounds. These pieces alone won Ellington a major position in jazz history, but they are only examples of scores of brilliant works.

By now he had come into his own as a songwriter. During the 1930s he created many standards, like “Prelude to a Kiss” (1938), “Sophisticated Lady” (1932), and “Solitude” (1934). This songwriting was critically important, for, leaving aside musical considerations, Ellington’s ASCAP royalties were in later years crucial in his keeping the band going.

It must be admitted, however, that Ellington borrowed extensively in producing these tunes. “Creole Love Call” and “Mood Indigo,” although credited to Ellington, were written by others. Various of his musicians contributed to “Sophisticated Lady,” “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and many more. Though it is not always easy to know how much others contributed to a given work, it was Ellington’s arranging and orchestrating of the melodies that lifted pieces like “Creole Love Call” above the mundane.

By 1931, through broadcasts from the Cotton Club and his recordings, Ellington had become a major figure in popular music. In that year the band left the club and for the remainder of its existence played the usual mix of one-nighters, theater dates, and longer stays in nightclubs and hotel ballrooms. Singer Ivie Anderson, who would work with the organization for more than a decade and remains the vocalist most closely associated with Ellington, joined him at this time.

In 1933 the band made a brief visit to London and the Continent. British critics convinced Ellington that he was more than just a dance-band leader. He had already written one longer, more “symphonic” piece, “Creole Rhapsody” (1931). He now set about writing more. The most important of these was “Black, Brown, and Beige,” which was given its premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1943. The opening was a significant event in American music: a black composer writing “serious” music using themes taken from black culture.

Classical critics did not much like the piece. The problem, as always with Ellington’s extended work, was that, lacking training, he was unable to unify the smaller themes and musical ideas he produced. Ellington, although temporarily discouraged, continued to write extended pieces, which combined jazz elements with devices meant to reflect classical music.

Additionally, beginning in 1936, Ellington recorded with small groups drawn from the band. These recordings, such as Johnny Hodges’s “Jeep’s Blues” (1938) and Rex Stewart’s “Subtle Slough,” contain a great deal of his finest work. Yet most critics would say that his finest work of the time was a series of concertos featuring various instrumentalists, including “Echoes of Harlem” (1935) for Cootie Williams and “Clarinet Lament” (1936) for Barney Bigard.

In 1939 the character of the band began to change when bassist Jimmy Blanton, who was enormously influential during a career cut short by death, and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster were added. Ellington had never had a major tenor soloist at his disposal, and Webster’s rich, guttural utterances were a new voice for him to work with. Also arriving in 1939 was Billy Strayhorn, a young composer who had more formal training than Ellington. Until Strayhorn’s death in 1967, a substantial part of the Ellington oeuvre was actually written in collaboration with Strayhorn, although it is difficult to tease apart their individual contributions. In 1940 Ellington switched from Columbia to Victor. The so-called Victor band of 1940 to 1942, when a union dispute temporarily ended recording in the United States, is considered by many jazz critics to be one of the great moments in jazz. “Take the ‘A’ Train,” written by Strayhorn, is a simple, indeed basic, piece, which gets its effect from contrapuntal lines and the interplay of the band’s voices. “Cotton Tail” (1940) is a reworking of “I’ve Got Rhythm” that outshines the original melody and is famous for a powerful Webster solo and a sinuous, winding chorus for the saxophones. “Harlem Air Shaft” (1940) is a classic Ellington program piece meant to suggest the life in a Harlem apartment building and is filled with shifts and contrasts that produce a sense of rich disorder. “Main Stem” (1942) is another hard-driving piece, offering incredible musical variety within a tiny space. Perhaps the most highly regarded recording from this period is “Ko-Ko” (1940). Originally written as part of an extended work, it is based on a blues in E-flat minor and is built up of the layering of increasingly dissonant and contrasting lines.

By the late 1940s, it was felt by many jazz writers that the band had deteriorated. The swing band movement, which had swept up the Ellington group in the mid-1930s, had collapsed, and musical tastes were changing. A number of the old hands left, taking with them much of Ellington’s tonal palette, and while excellent newcomers replaced them, few equaled the originals. Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s there were constant changes of personnel, shifts from one record company to the next, and a dwindling demand for the orchestra. Henceforth Ellington would need his song royalties to support what was now a very expensive organization. In 1956 Ellington was asked to play the closing Saturday night concert at the recently established Newport Jazz Festival. At one point in the evening he brought tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves forward to play twenty-seven choruses of the blues over a rhythm section. The crowd was wildly enthusiastic; the event got much media attention, and Ellington’s star began to rise again.

Through the late 1950s and 1960s Ellington continued to create memorable pieces, many of them contributed by Strayhorn, particularly the haunting “Blood Count” (1967). Also of value were a series of collaborations with Ellington by major jazz soloists from outside the band, including LOUIS ARMSTRONG, Coleman Hawkins, and JOHN COLTRANE. Other fine works were Strayhorn’s “UMMG,” featuring DIZZY GILLESPIE; “Paris Blues” (1960), a variation on the blues done for a movie by that name; and an album tribute to Strayhorn issued as “. . . And His Mother Called Him Bill” (1967).

But by this time Ellington’s main concerns were his extended works, which eventually totaled some three dozen. Many of these were dashed off to meet deadlines, or even pulled together in rehearsal, and are of slight value. Almost all suffer from the besetting flaw in Ellington’s longer works, his inability to make unified wholes of what are often brilliant smaller pieces.

Although some critics today insist that much of this work is of value, it was not well reviewed outside the jazz press when it appeared. Among the most successful are “The Deep South Suite” (1946), “Harlem (A Tone Parallel to Harlem),” first recorded in 1951, and “The Far East Suite” in collaboration with Strayhorn and recorded in 1966.

To Ellington, the most important of these works were the three “Sacred Concerts,” created in the last years of his life. They consist of collections of vocal and instrumental pieces of various sorts, usually tied loosely together by a religious theme. Although these works contain fine moments and have their admirers, they do not, on the whole, succeed. Duke Ellington’s legacy is the short jazz works, most of them written between 1926 and 1942: the jungle pieces, like “Black and Tan Fantasy”; the concertos, like “Echoes of Harlem”; the mood pieces, such as “Mood Indigo”; the harmonically complex works, like “Ko-Ko”; and the hard swingers, such as “Cotton Tail.” This work has a rich tonal palette. It uses carefully chosen sounds by his soloists; endless contrast not only of sound but of mood, mode, key; the use of forms unusual in popular music, like the four-plus-ten bar segment in “Echoes of Harlem”; and deftly handled dissonance, often built around very close internal harmonies. Although Ellington was not a jazz improviser in a class with Armstrong or CHARLIE PARKER, his body of work is far larger than theirs, more varied and richer, and is second to none in jazz. Ellington died in New York City.

Discography:

Aasland, Benny. The “Wax Works” of Duke Ellington (1979–).

Bakker, Dick M. Duke Ellington on Microgroove (1972–).

Massagli, Luciano, Liborio Pusateri, and Giovanni M. Volonté, Duke Ellington’s Story on Records (1967–).

—JAMES LINCOLN COLLIER

ELLIOTT, ROBERT BROWN

(11 Aug. 1842–9 Aug. 1884), Reconstruction politician and U.S. Congressman, was born probably in Liverpool, England, of West Indian parents whose names are unknown. Elliott’s early life is shrouded in mystery, largely because of his own false claims, but apparently he did attend a private school in England (but not Eton as he claimed) and was trained as a typesetter. It is likely also that in 1866 or 1867, while on duty with the Royal Navy, he decided to seek his fortune in America and jumped ship in Boston Harbor, without, however, taking out citizenship papers. All that is known for certain is that by March 1867 Elliott was associate editor of the South Carolina Leader, a black-owned Republican newspaper in Charleston. Shortly thereafter he married Grace Lee Rollin, a member of a prominent South Carolina free Negro family. The couple had no children.

During Reconstruction South Carolina’s population was 60 percent black, and the state had many highly capable black leaders. Between 1867 and 1877, when state rule was formally restored, Elliott, a politically adept orator, developed into the major black spokesman and politician in South Carolina. He was one of the at least seventy-one black delegates to the 1868 Constitutional Convention, which drafted the most democratic constitution in South Carolina history. At the 1868 state Republican convention he was nominated for lieutenant governor but dropped out of contention after finishing third on the first ballot. That same year, while serving as the only black member of the five-man board of commissioners in Barnwell County, Elliott was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he became a very powerful player in state government. Almost elected as Speaker (placing second in the balloting), he was made chair of the committee on railroads and was appointed to the committee on privileges and elections, both very influential assignments. As assistant adjutant general of South Carolina, he even was placed in charge of organizing a militia. In 1870 Elliott was elected to the United States House of Representatives, defeating a white opponent in a district with only a slight black majority, and he was reelected by a wide margin two years later. Near the end of his second term he resigned in order to run again for the state house, winning easily. This time he did serve as Speaker from 1874 to 1876, when he was elected state attorney general. The next year, however, he was one of five Republicans removed from office following the Democratic takeover of Congress.

Elliott was even more influential within Republican Party ranks. A delegate to three national conventions (twice leading the delegation), he served as party chair in South Carolina for much of the 1870s and was permanent chair of most state nominating conventions.

In all of his political positions Elliott aligned himself with the Radical Republicans. At the state constitutional convention he led the successful opposition to both a literacy test for voters and a poll tax, as he well understood that they could later be used to keep blacks from voting. Also at the convention, he fought successfully to have invalidated all debts related to the sale of slaves. As a state representative, Elliott lobbied successfully for a bill to ban discrimination in public facilities and on public transportation. As a U.S. congressman, he gained some notoriety for a speech favoring federal suppression of the Ku Klux Klan and for his debate with former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens over proposed legislation that subsequently became the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Also while in Congress he voted against the bill granting political amnesty to former Confederates. Elliott was nationally known by 1874, when black Bostonians asked him to give the oration at a memorial service for Radical senator Charles Sumner.

Despite Elliott’s well-deserved reputation as a racial militant, his record is not that simple. For example, as a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention he supported the creation of a public school system and compulsory school attendance but opposed integration. Elliott never seriously interested himself in the plight of rural or urban black workers, and as president of a state labor convention in 1869 he favored a permanent halt to the confiscation of planter land. Even a few of his Democratic critics acknowledged that Elliott’s view of the role of the militia was more moderate than that of white governor Robert Scott, who saw it as an offensive and not a defensive force. In his speeches to black audiences, Elliott often expressed a belief in self-help as the means to political and economic empowerment.

Despite his moderate tendencies, Democrats insisted on seeing Elliott as an irresponsible hater of whites and as a troublemaker. White Carolinians, including some Republican enemies, categorized him as one of the state’s major “corruptionists,” a common and often unsubstantiated charge leveled against both black and white Radicals during Reconstruction. Although Elliott seems to have resisted small bribes and other minor enticements that some black and white politicians routinely accepted, his political career was not devoid of scandal. At least one financially lucrative deal made while he was on the state’s powerful railroad committee was suspect; as assistant adjutant general he charged excessive fees; in addition to Republican Party funds he took state monies for his various lobbying efforts; and he distributed large sums of public as well as private money during election campaigns. Thus, even though a succession of law partnerships failed, Elliott maintained a high lifestyle and owned numerous city lots as well as an elegant three-story house in Columbia. Comparatively, however, the corruption of white governors Franklin Moses Jr., Daniel Chamberlain, and Robert Scott and U.S. Senator John Patterson was far more blatant, and Elliott, unlike several of his black and white contemporaries, was never indicted for any crime.

Elliott’s reputation as a racial militant derived primarily from his successful efforts to increase black political participation, especially in terms of nominations to higher offices. In 1870, for example, as chair of the Republican nominating convention, Elliott made sure that black candidates were selected for three of the four congressional seats, that the candidate for lieutenant governor was black, and that overall blacks had greater influence in the party. These tactics angered white Republicans and Democrats alike, as did Elliott’s shifting of allegiances so that his political support became the determining factor in important elections—especially gubernatorial elections. Elliott was not politically invincible, however, nor was he always successful in achieving his own political goals. Perhaps his most devastating defeat occurred in the bitter, three-way fight for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1872.

As state chair, Elliott was in charge of the 1876 campaign and, despite the Democrats’ widespread use of violence and intimidation, courageously spoke throughout the state. He hoped that his election as attorney general would prove to be a stepping-stone to the governorship, but the ouster of all Republican executive branch officeholders by the re-emergent Democrats in 1877 eliminated that possibility. Believing that the lack of Republican opposition would lead to dissension among Democrats, just as the absence of Democratic challengers had earlier produced divisions among Republicans, in both 1878 and 1880 Elliott, as chair, convinced party leaders not to run a statewide campaign. By 1880, however, Elliott had become greatly discouraged, and in 1881 he led a delegation of black protesters who met with President-elect James Garfield. Asserting that black southerners were “citizens in name and not in fact” and that their rights were being “illegally and wantonly subverted,” he appealed for federal help, which was not forthcoming.

Personal problems exacerbated Elliott’s dire political outlook. Financial losses forced him to close his law office in 1879. His monthly salary as special inspector of customs in Charleston (a patronage position) was not enough to keep him from having to sell his house in order to pay off his debts. Continuing bouts with malaria and his wife’s medical problems made his life even more difficult. A delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1880, Elliott was frustrated further by the defeat of his presidential choice, Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman. After eleven months in New Orleans as special agent of the Treasury, Elliott was fired for criticizing his boss and for supporting a losing political faction. A final law firm failed, and his health worsened. He died penniless in New Orleans of malarial fever.

Elliott was a charismatic and effective political leader who provoked outrage among whites and enthusiasm among blacks. What most outraged his opponents was Elliott’s racial pride and his insistence on demanding, not asking, for his rights and the rights of black Americans. Persistently calling for the unprecedented expansion of national power in order to guarantee the fruits of Reconstruction while also urging blacks to be more worthy of the freedom they had won, Elliott was a precursor of many twentieth-century black leaders. Yet despite his reputation for political militancy, Elliott was always an ardent party man who believed that a strong Republican Party and Union constituted the best hope for racial equality.

ELLISON, RALPH WALDO

(1 Mar. 1913?–16 Apr. 1994), novelist and essayist, was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the oldest of two sons of Lewis Ellison, a former soldier who sold coal and ice to homes and businesses, and Ida Milsaps Ellison. (Starting around 1940 Ellison gave his year of birth as 1914; however, the evidence is strong that he was born in 1913.) His life changed for the worse with his father’s untimely death in 1916, an event that left the family poor. In fact, young Ralph would live in two worlds. He experienced poverty at home with his brother, Herbert (who had been just six weeks old when Lewis died), and his mother, who worked mainly as a maid. At the same time, he had an intimate association with the powerful, wealthy black family in one of whose houses he had been born.

At the Frederick Douglass School in Oklahoma City he was a fair student, but he shone as a musician after he learned to play the trumpet. Graduating from Frederick Douglass High School in 1932, he worked as a janitor before entering Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1933. There his core academic interest was music, and his major ambition was to be a classical composer—although he was also fond of jazz and the blues. In Oklahoma City, which was second only to Kansas City as a hotbed of jazz west of Chicago, he had heard several fine musicians, including Lester Young, Oran “Hot Lips” Page, COUNT BASIE, and Louis ARMSTRONG. The revolutionary jazz guitarist Charlie Christian and the famed blues singer Jimmy Rushing both grew up in Ellison’s Oklahoma City. However, classical music was emphasized at school. At Tuskegee, studying under William Levi Dawson and other skilled musicians, Ellison became student leader of the school orchestra. Nevertheless, he found himself attracted increasingly to literature, especially after reading modern British novels and, even more influentially, T. S. Eliot’s landmark modernist poem, The Waste Land.

Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952 and won the prestigious National Book Award the next year. Archival Research International/Double Delta Industries Inc.

In 1936, after his junior year, Ellison traveled to New York City hoping to earn enough money as a waiter to pay for his senior year. Ellison never returned to Tuskegee as a student. Settling in Manhattan, he dropped his plan to become a composer and briefly studied sculpture. Working as an office receptionist and then in a paint factory, he also found himself inspired, in the midst of the Great Depression, by radical socialist politics and communism itself. He became a friend of LANGSTON HUGHES, who later introduced him to RICHARD WRIGHT, then relatively unknown. Encouraged by Wright, whose modernist poetry he admired, Ellison continued to read intensively in modern literature, literary and cultural theory, philosophy, and art. His favorite writers were Herman Melville and Fyodor Dostoyevsky from the nineteenth century and, in his own time, Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and André Malraux (the French radical author of the novels Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope). These men, joined by the philosopher and writer Kenneth Burke as well as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, became Ellison’s literary pantheon. (Ellison never expressed deep admiration for any black writer except—for a while—Wright. He liked and was indebted to Langston Hughes personally but soon dismissed his work as shallow.)

In 1937, as editor of the radical magazine New Challenge, Wright surprised Ellison with a request for a book review. The result was Ellison’s first published essay. Next, Wright asked Ellison to try his hand at a short story. The story, “Hymie’s Bull,” was not published in Ellison’s lifetime, but he was on his way as an author. A trying fall and winter (1937–1938) in Dayton, Ohio, following the death of his mother in nearby Cincinnati, only toughened Ellison’s determination to write. In 1938 he secured a coveted place (through Wright) on the Federal Writers’ Project in New York, where he conducted research into and wrote about black New York history over the next four years. That year he married the black actress and singer (and communist) Rose Poindexter.

Slowly Ellison became known in radical literary circles with reviews and essays in magazines such as New Masses, the main leftist literary outlet. When he became managing editor (1942–1943) of a new radical magazine, Negro Quarterly, the lofty intellectual and yet radical tone he helped to set brought him more favorable attention. About this time Ellison came to a fateful decision. He later identified 1942 as the year he turned away from an aesthetic based on radical socialism and the need for political propaganda to one committed to individualism, the tradition of Western literature, and the absolute freedom of the artist to interpret and represent reality.

Facing induction during World War II into the segregated armed forces, Ellison enlisted instead in the Merchant Marine. This led to wartime visits to Swansea in Wales, to London, and to Rouen, France. During the war he also published several short stories. His most ambitious, “Flying Home” (1944), skillfully combines realism, surrealism, folklore, and implicit political protest. Clearly Ellison was now ready to create fiction on a larger scale. By this time his marriage had fallen apart. He and Rose Poindexter were divorced in 1945. The next year he married Fanny McConnell, a black graduate in drama of the University of Iowa who was then an employee of the National Urban League in Manhattan.

With a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship (1945–1946) Ellison began work on the novel that would become Invisible Man. (One day, on vacation in Vermont, he found himself thinking: “I am an invisible man.” Ellison thus had the first line, and the core conceit, of his novel.) In 1947 he published the first chapter—to great praise—in the British magazine Horizon. In the following five years Ellison published little more. Instead, he labored to perfect his novel, whose anonymous hero, living bizarrely in an abandoned basement on the edge of Harlem, relates the amazing adventure of his life from his youthful innocence in the South to disillusionment in the North (although his epilogue suggests a growing optimism).

In April 1952 Random House published Invisible Man. Many critics hailed it as a remarkable literary debut. However, black communist reviewers excoriated Ellison, mainly because Ellison had obviously modeled the ruthless, totalitarian, and ultimately racist “Brotherhood” of his novel on the Communist Party of the United States. Less angrily, some black reviewers also stressed the caustic depiction of black culture in several places in Invisible Man. Selling well for a first novel, the book made the lower rungs of the best-seller list for a few weeks. Then, in January 1953, Invisible Man won for Ellison the prestigious National Book Award in fiction. This award transformed Ellison’s life and career. Suddenly black colleges and universities, and even a few liberal white institutions, began to invite him to speak and teach. That year he lectured at Harvard and, the following year, taught for a month in Austria at the elite Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.

In 1955 he won the Prix de Rome fellowship to the American Academy in Rome. There he and his wife lived for two years (1955–1957) in a community of classicists, archeologists, architects, painters, musicians, sculptors, and other writers. While in Rome, Ellison worked hard on an ambitious new novel about a light-skinned black boy who eventually passes for white and becomes a notoriously racist U.S. senator, and the black minister who had reared the boy as his beloved son. He worked on this novel for the rest of his life.

Returning home, Ellison taught (1958–1961) as a part-time instructor at Bard College near New York City. This was followed by a term at the University of Chicago in 1961; two years (1962–1964) as a visiting professor of writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a year (1964–1965) as a visiting fellow in American Studies at Yale. During this time he published several important essays even as he toiled on his novel. In 1960 he published a short excerpt from his novel in the Noble Savage, a magazine that had been cofounded by Saul Bellow, a future Nobel Prize winner and close friend of Ellison’s for some time.

Over the years Ellison was involved intellectually and personally with a wide range of major American scholars, critics, and creative writers. These included the philosopher Kenneth Burke, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, Bellow himself, the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, and the poet Richard Wilbur. Among blacks, his most important friendship for many years was with ALBERT L. MURRAY, a fellow student at Tuskegee in Ellison’s junior year and later a professor of English there. Murray settled with his family in Harlem and published books about African Americans and the national culture. Starting in the 1960s Ellison was devoted to two institutions that honored achievement in the arts. The first was the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. (Initially a member of the institute, he was elected later to the inner circle of excellence, the academy.) The other organization was the Century Association in mid-Manhattan, probably the most prestigious private club in the United States dedicated to the arts and literature.

As the years passed and his second novel failed to appear, Ellison’s essays and interviews played a crucial role in furthering his reputation as an American intellectual of uncommon brilliance. His collection Shadow and Act (1964) reinforced this reputation. In it, Ellison insisted on the complexity of the American experience and the related complexity of black life. The black writer and artist, he insisted, should not be bound by morbid or negative definitions of the black experience but by a highly positive sense that cultural achievements such as the blues, jazz, and black folklore represent the triumph of African Americans over the harsh circumstances of American history—and a triumph of the human spirit in general. The Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were sacred documents authenticating the special promise of American and African American culture.

In 1965 a national poll of critics organized by a respected weekly magazine declared Invisible Man to be the most distinguished work of America fiction published since 1945. Other formal honors followed. However, the rise of Black Power and the Black Arts Movement about this time led to a backlash among younger, militant blacks against Ellison’s ideas. Shunned at times on certain campuses, he was occasionally heckled or even denounced as an “Uncle Tom.” Ellison was hurt by these assaults but remained confident about his values and insights. Moreover, the hostility of some younger blacks was offset by a host of honors. In 1966 he was appointed Honorary Consultant in American Letters at the Library of Congress, and the next year he joined the board of directors of the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. At a crucial time in the rise of public television, he became a director of the Educational Broadcasting Corporation. In 1969 France made Ellison a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres. He also became a trustee of the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York and of Bennington College, in Vermont. Also in 1969 he received the highest civilian honor bestowed on a U.S. citizen, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

From 1970 until 1979, when he reached the age of compulsory retirement, Ellison was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University. Always interested in art—he and his wife collected African art as well as Western paintings and sculpture—he became a director of the Museum of the City of New York. In addition, he was a trustee of the Rockefeller-inspired Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Virginia and a member of the Board of Visitors of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He took these two last appointments as proof of important social change in the South, about which Ellison was sentimental because of the South Carolina and Georgia origins of his father and mother, respectively. In 1975 Oklahoma City honored him when he helped open the Ralph Ellison Branch of the city library system. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 1985.

The following year Ellison published his third book, Going to the Territory. Like Shadow and Act, this volume collected shorter pieces that reflected his unabated interest in the complex nature of black American and American culture. Vigorous to the end, Ellison died at his home in Manhattan. By this time he had seen his critics of the late 1960s and early 1970s decline in influence even as Invisible Man had become established as an American classic in fiction. After his death a succession of volumes have helped keep his reputation alive. These include his Collected Essays (1995), Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), and the novel Juneteenth (1999), all edited by John F. Callahan, who had been a trusted friend of Ellison’s as well as a professor of American literature. Ellison’s reputation rests on two remarkable books. As a novel of African American life, Invisible Man has no clear superior and very few equals to rival its breadth and artistry. With the exception of The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, Shadow and Act is probably the most intelligent book-length commentary on the nuances of black American culture ever published.

EQUIANO, OLAUDAH

(1745?–31 Mar. 1797), slave, writer, and abolitionist, was, according to his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, born in the village of Essaka in Eboe, an unknown location in the Ibo-speaking region of modern Nigeria. Equiano recorded that he was the son of a chief and was also destined for that position. However, at about the age of ten, he was abducted and sold to European slave traders. In his narrative, Equiano recalls the Middle Passage in which “the shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable” (58). Despite falling ill, Equiano survived the voyage and was taken first to Barbados and then to Virginia, where in 1754 he was bought by Michael Pascal, a captain in the Royal Navy. Pascal’s first act was to rename the young slave Gustavus Vassa, an ironic reference to the Swedish freedom fighter and later king, Gustavus I Vasa (1496–1560). Documents make it clear that he went by the name of Vassa until the late 1780s.

However, two documents—his baptismal record of 1759 and a muster roll from 1773—call portions of Equiano’s autobiographical account into question. Both documents record Equiano’s place of birth as South Carolina. Given that Equiano’s story after he left Virginia is verifiable historically, but that his preceding narrative is not, some scholars have argued that it is reasonable to conclude that he was indeed born in South Carolina, not Africa, and that the early parts of his Narrative were written as rhetorical maneuvers designed to bring attention to the horrors of the slave trade, maneuvers largely “based on oral history and reading, rather than on personal experience” (Carretta, 103). However, it is equally possible that at his baptism and on later occasions Equiano suppressed his African identity and claimed to have been born in South Carolina, only daring, or caring, to tell his real history later in life. Unless further evidence emerges, the truth may never be known.

Olaudah Equiano published his autobiography, the first major slave narrative, in 1789, and became the first prominent black abolitionist. Schomburg Center

Apart from minor disagreements about dates, which suggest Equiano inflated his age to make the story of his childhood seem more credible, the surviving historical evidence generally supports his autobiographical account from 1755 onwards. As a ten-year-old boy Equiano was taken to England and and then put aboard Pascal’s warship, where he saw action in the French and Indian Wars. Equiano spent much time in London and suffered and recovered from smallpox and gangrene. Shipboard life gave him the opportunity to learn to read, write, and calculate, skills that later enabled him to work toward his own emancipation.

In December 1762 Equiano believed that he had earned his freedom, but in this he was deceived. Pascal swindled Equiano out of both his wages and his prize money, raised from selling captured goods, and sold him to a slave trader bound for Montserrat in the West Indies. There he was bought by Robert King, a Quaker merchant, who employed Equiano as a gauger, a shipboard weights-and-measures officer. In this trusted position Equiano traveled in King’s ships throughout the Caribbean and North America. He admired Philadelphia, but was badly beaten by a slave owner in Georgia. After witnessing many scenes of cruelty, Equiano “determined to make every exertion to obtain my freedom, and to return to Old England” (Equiano, 122). He obtained a promise from King that he would be manumitted if he could raise forty pounds (the equivalent of approximately four thousand dollars in 2003), the price King had paid for him. Starting with three pence (approximately two dollars in 2003), he began petty trading and gradually raised the money. After some negotiation, on 11 July 1766 in Monserrat Equiano’s manumission papers were drawn up. “I who had been a slave in the morning, trembling at the will of another, now became my own master, and compleatly free. I thought this was the happiest day I had ever experienced” (137). Equiano had achieved his freedom legally, although it has been argued that by buying his way out of slavery he implicitly acknowledged its legitimacy.

Equiano’s first paid employment was as an able-bodied seaman aboard King’s ships. On one voyage he safely brought the ship home after the death of the captain. On another occasion he was instrumental in saving the crew after a shipwreck. In July 1767, frustrated at the “impositions on free negroes,” especially in Georgia, where an attempt was made to kidnap him, he paid seven guineas (the equivalent of about $750 in 2003) for passage to London. On arrival, he was immediately paid the wages (also seven guineas) from his service in the Royal Navy. Meeting with Pascal he demanded, but was refused, his prize money. Over the winter he learned to play the French horn and, more usefully, how to dress hair.

A year of evening classes depleted his savings, and Equiano returned to sea as a steward. In Turkey he was impressed by Islam, but found Turkish rule in Greece oppressive; in Naples he witnessed an eruption of Vesuvius; in Portugal he observed the workings of the Inquisition; and in Jamaica he was reminded of the horrors of slavery. In May 1773, “roused by the sound of fame,” he joined John Phipp’s expedition to find a northwest passage to India. The expedition reached only as far as Spitzbergen (Svalbard) in Norway.

On his return to London, Equiano underwent a period of spiritual self-examination. In May 1774 he decided to move to Turkey and embrace Islam. He shipped as a steward aboard a merchantman bound for Smyrna (Izmir), but before sailing, the ship’s cook, a former slave called John Annis, was kidnapped and forcibly sent to the Caribbean, a practice that had been declared illegal in 1772 after a campaign by the abolitionist Granville Sharp. After the incident, Equiano approached Sharp for help, and while their attempt to save Annis failed, the event put Equiano in touch with the emerging abolitionist movement in London. A second attempt to reach Turkey was aborted, and Equiano began to see his failure to reach the Islamic country as the work of providence. After much meditation and doubt, on 6 October 1774 he recorded his conversion to Christianity with the words “the Lord was pleased to break in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light” (190).

In 1775 Equiano joined a project to settle a colony on the Mosquito Coast (now Nicaragua). Some have argued that Equiano’s official role—buying slaves for the colony—and his self-appointed role as missionary to the Mosquito Indians demonstrate his complicity in both the slave trade and European colonization. By June 1776 however, the colonists’ “mode of procedure [became] very irksome” and he left the colony. On the return voyage he was imprisoned by a ship’s captain who intended to sell him into slavery at Cartagena, but he made a daring escape and worked his passage back to London. Having “suffered so many impositions,” he became “heartily disgusted with the seafaring life” and instead worked as a servant. In 1779 he applied to the Bishop of London to be ordained as a missionary to Africa, but was turned down. In 1784 Equiano returned briefly to sea and visited the newly formed United States where, in Philadelphia, he came into contact with a group of Quakers, led by Anthony Benezet, who had begun to speak out against slavery.

Returning to London in 1786, Equiano was appointed as commissary of stores and provisions to a project to resettle poor black Londoners to a new colony in Sierra Leone, making him the first black civil servant in British history. After complaining about “flagrant abuses,” however, he was fired and, as he predicted, the project failed. Equiano then immersed himself in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, writing letters to the newspapers and, in March 1788, petitioning Queen Charlotte.

In May 1789 Equiano published his polemical autobiography, which quickly became a best-seller, going through nine British editions in his lifetime. An unauthorized edition was published in New York in 1791. Equiano publicized the book himself, undertaking an extensive lecture tour throughout the British Isles. Financially secure, on 7 April 1792 he married Susanna Cullen of Soham in Cambridgeshire, where they lived and had two daughters, one of whom survived to inherit an estate of £950 (approximately one-hundred thousand dollars in 2003). Equiano died in London in 1797; his place of burial is unknown.

By his own account, Equiano spent fewer than two years visiting regions now in the United States and, while he strongly asserted his African identity, he clearly came to regard England as his home. Yet his position in African American history and culture is important. As the author of the only substantial description of the Middle Passage written from a slave’s point of view, Equiano provides an important point of connection between Africa and America. As the author of the first major slave narrative, his rhetorical style was widely emulated by many African American writers recounting their journey up from slavery. And as the first prominent black abolitionist, he offered a model for political activism that has remained relevant into the twenty-first century.

ESTEBAN

(?–May 1539), explorer, enslaved North African, and the first representative of the so-called Old World to encounter peoples of today’s American Southwest, was born in Azamor, Morocco. His career as an explorer began in 1528 with the journey to Florida of Pánfilo de Narváez.

This initial Spanish exploration of Florida ended in disaster. The Narváez expedition included four hundred men sailing on five ships. They departed Havana, Cuba, in April 1528 and reached present-day Tampa Bay on 1 May. There Narváez split his forces, ordering the ships to sail along the coast while he marched inward with three hundred men, searching for a fabled city of gold and its attendant riches. A series of attacks by natives reduced the Spanish forces, but they continued their explorations, reaching Apalachen, principal settlement of the Apalachee people (located near present-day Tallahassee) by July 1528. Overwhelmed by native forces defended by highly skilled bowmen, the Spaniards fled south to the Gulf of Mexico in a vain search for their ships, which had returned to New Spain after a year of unsuccessful attempts to rejoin with Narváez. The Spanish explorers quickly constructed five barges out of palmetto fibers and horsehair and sailed west, mistakenly believing themselves closer to Mexico than to Cuba. For a month and a half, they sailed along the Gulf coast. Fierce storms off the Texas coast sank three of the five barges, but the barge carrying Esteban weathered the storm. In November 1528 the remnants of the Narváez expedition landed on a sandbar near present-day Galveston, Texas, which they named the Island of 111 Fate.

Chakwaina, Esteban’s mythical counterpart. University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology

Esteban, Captain Andrés Dorantes (his master), Alvar Núftez Cabeza de Vaca, and thirteen other men managed to survive the winter. When spring approached, the men moved to the mainland. Soon thereafter, an encounter with Karankawa Indians resulted in their enslavement for five years until 1534. Twelve of the Spanish explorers did not survive their captivity. In 1534 the four remaining explorers, Esteban, Andrés Dorantes, Cabeza de Vaca, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, escaped from their captors. They traveled inland, where they encountered friendlier Indians, who believed them to be medicine men.

The four survivors quickly transformed themselves into “cultural brokers,” learning various native languages and folkways to survive. Apparently, Esteban was particularly adept at learning languages, functioning as the group’s interpreter and go-between. The four wandered from tribe to tribe throughout modern-day Texas and northern Mexico, presenting themselves as healers and religious figures, the “Sons of the Sun.” According to one historian, their healing powers consisted mostly of prayers and theatrics, but included at least one surgery. The journey provided the four survivors with an unparalleled knowledge of native cultures, languages, wealth (or lack thereof), and of the region’s topography.

This knowledge was highly prized when the quartet returned to Mexico City in July 1536, after wandering some fifteen thousand miles over the course of eight years. A chance encounter with Spaniards on a slaving expedition in northwestern Mexico ended the group’s years of wandering. Dressed Indian-style and traveling with some six hundred native escorts, the four were barely recognizable as nonnatives.

Despite their truthful reports of very little wealth to be found among the northern indigenous tribes, the return of Esteban, Andres de Dorantes, Cabeza de Vaca, and Castillo Maldonado precipitated a flurry of excitement about the “northern mystery,” as the Spanish termed the unknown lands to the north of Mexico. Plans for expeditions abounded, but such ventures could only proceed with the permission of the viceroy. And when it came to the possibility of an otro Mexico, another discovery with the same potential for wealth as the Aztec Empire, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza had plans of his own. When the three European survivors refused to head an exploration venture, Mendoza purchased the slave Esteban, planning to send him in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, the fabled vast riches enjoyed by northern natives. For the sake of propriety, however, such an expedition could not be headed by a slave. Mendoza recruited a Franciscan friar, Marcos de Niza, to lead the expedition.

Esteban and Fray Marcos set out on their expedition to the north in 1539. By previous arrangement, Esteban ranged several days’ journey ahead of the Franciscan. Also by previous agreement, Esteban left crosses of various sizes, which would indicate to Fray Marcos the magnitude of his findings.

Esteban maintained his “Son of the Sun” persona, using his skills as a linguist and a healer to ensure his safe passage through native lands. Indians later reported to members of the 1540 Coronado expedition that Esteban covered his sizeable frame with animal pelts and adorned his ankles and arms with bells, feathers, and pieces of turquoise. He soon gathered some three hundred native followers, both men and women, who trusted in his powers as a medicine man and showered him with gifts. He experienced no trouble until he reached the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh, where, in response to his message that “he was coming to establish peace and heal them,” elders warned him not to enter the village. A red and white feathered gourd rattle accompanying Esteban’s message apparently angered the chief, who threw it to the ground, saying, “I know these people, for these jingle bells are not the shape of ours. Tell them to turn back at once, or not one of their men will be spared” (Gutiérrez, 39). Disregarding this warning, Esteban proceeded into the pueblo, where he was taken prisoner, and the village authorities tried to discern the reasons behind his arrival. According to one account, Esteban explained that other “children of the sun” would follow him, and then demanded wealth and women. These responses convinced the village elders that Esteban was a witch and a foreign spy, and as such, could not be allowed to live (Gutiérrez, 39–40). Other scholars have speculated that perhaps Esteban interrupted an important religious ceremony, or that the Zuni recognized Esteban as the advance flank of an invading force. If he were eliminated, an invasion or conquest might be avoided. According to Zuni oral tradition, Esteban behaved rudely toward the female members of the pueblo, incurring the wrath of the pueblo’s men, who then killed him. Whatever the case, Esteban met his demise at Hawikuh in May 1539.

Noting the increasingly large crosses left for him, Fray Marcos viewed Hawikuh from afar, but with great anticipation. Word of Esteban’s fate had reached him, and he was reluctant to journey any closer to the Zuni. So he took a long look at Hawikuh, as the bright sun beat down on its adobe apartments, making them gleam as if golden. Fray Marcos returned to Mexico City and to his benefactor, Viceroy Mendoza, reporting that Esteban’s death had not been in vain, for he had found the fabled golden city of Cibola. Eager to exploit such riches, the viceroy quickly organized another expedition to the north, to be led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado accompanied by Fray Marcos. When Coronado reached Hawikuh, he found not a city of gold, but a village of mud huts and a people whose only recognizable wealth lay in a few stones of turquoise.

Esteban’s appearance in Hawikuh must have made a lasting impression on the Zunis. Legends make Esteban the impetus for Chakwaina, a black ogre kachina, or spirit, who reflects the Pueblo oral tradition regarding the appearance of a black Mexican in their midst who represents both the Pueblo people’s fears and the role Esteban played as the harbinger of European conquest.

EUROPE, JAMES REESE

(22 Feb. 1880–9 May 1919), music administrator, conductor, and composer, was born in Mobile, Alabama, the son of Henry J. Europe, an Internal Revenue Service employee and Baptist minister, and Lorraine Saxon. Following the loss of his position with the Port of Mobile at the end of the Reconstruction, Europe’s father moved his family to Washington, D.C., in 1890 to accept a position with the U.S. Postal Service. Both of Europe’s parents were musical, as were some of his siblings. Europe attended the elite M Street High School for blacks and studied violin, piano, and composition with Enrico Hurlei of the U.S. Marine Corps band and with Joseph Douglass, the grandson of FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

Following the death of his father in 1900, Europe moved to New York City. There he became associated with many of the leading figures in black musical theater, which was then emerging from the tradition of nineteenth-century minstrelsy. Over the next six years, Europe established himself as a composer of popular songs and instrumental pieces and as the musical director for a number of major productions, including Ernest Hogan’s “Memphis Students” (1905), John Larkins’s A Trip to Africa (1904), Bob Cole and JOHN ROSAMOND JOHNSON’S Shoo-Fly Regiment (1906–1907) and Red Moon (1908–1909), S. H. Dudley’s Black Politician (1907–1908), and BERT WILLIAMS’S Mr. Load of Koal (1909). During Red Moon’s run, he was involved with, but did not marry, a dancer in the company, Bessie Simms, with whom he had a child.

In April 1910 Europe became the principal organizer and first president of the Clef Club of New York, the first truly effective black musicians’ union and booking agency in the city. So effectual was the club during the years before World War I that, as JAMES WELDON JOHNSON recalls in his memoir Black Manhattan (1930), club members held a “monopoly of the business of entertaining private parties and furnishing music for the dance craze which was then beginning to sweep the country.” Europe was also appointed conductor of the Clef Club’s large orchestra, which he envisioned as a vehicle for presenting the full range of African American musical expression, from spirituals to popular music to concert works. On 27 May 1910 he directed the one-hundred-member orchestra in its first concert at the Manhattan Casino in Harlem. Two years later, on 2 May 1912, Europe brought 125 singers and instrumentalists to Carnegie Hall for an historic “Symphony of Negro Music,” featuring compositions by WILL MARION COOK, HARRY BURLEIGH, J. Rosamond Johnson, William Tyers, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and himself. It was the first performance ever given by a black orchestra at the famous “bastion of white musical establishment,” and Europe returned to direct concerts there in 1913 and 1914.

In 1913 Europe married Willie Angrom Starke, a widow of some social standing within New York’s black community; they had no children. Later that year, he and fellow Clef Club member Ford Dabney became the musical directors for the legendary dance team of Vernon Castle and Irene Castle until the end of 1915 when Vernon Castle left to serve in World War I. Irene Castle recalls in her memoir Castles in the Air (1958) that they wanted Europe because his was the “most famous of the colored bands” and because he was a “skilled musician and one of the first to take jazz out of the saloons and make it respectable.” With the accompaniment of Europe’s Society Orchestra, the Castles toured the country, operated a fashionable dance studio and supper club in New York City, and revolutionized American social dancing by promoting and popularizing the formerly objectionable “ragtime” dances, such as the turkey trot and the one-step. The most famous of the Castle dances, the fox-trot, was conceived by Europe and Vernon Castle after an initial suggestion by composer W. C. HANDY. As a result of his collaboration with the Castles, in the fall of 1913 Europe and his orchestra were offered a recording contract by Victor Records, the first ever offered to a black orchestra. Between December 1913 and October 1914 Europe and his Society Orchestra cut ten sides of dance music for Victor, eight of which were released.

James Reese Europe, regimental bandleader with the Fifteenth “Hellfighters” Infantry Regiment, brought live ragtime, blues, and jazz to Europe during World War I. National Archives

In 1916 Europe enlisted in the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, the first black regiment organized in the state and one of the first mobilized into federal service when the United States entered World War I in 1917. After encountering severe racial hostility while training in South Carolina, the infantry was sent directly to France and assigned to the French army. Europe, who held two assignments, bandmaster of the regiment’s outstanding brass band and commander of a machine gun company, served at the front for four months and was the first black American officer to lead troops in combat in the Great War. The entire Fifteenth Regiment, which was given the nickname “Hellfighters,” emerged after the Allied victory in November of 1918 as one of the most highly decorated American units of the war. Europe’s band, which performed throughout France during the war, was the most celebrated in the American Expeditionary Force and is credited with introducing European audiences to the live sound of orchestrated American ragtime, blues, and a new genre called “jazz.”

On 17 February 1919 the regiment and its band were given a triumphant welcome-home parade up Fifth Avenue, and Lieutenant Europe, hailed as America’s “jazz king,” was signed to a second recording contract; he and the band subsequently embarked upon an extensive national tour. Europe’s career ended abruptly and tragically a few months later, however, when during the intermission of one of the band’s concerts in Boston, he was fatally stabbed by an emotionally disturbed band member. Following a public funeral in New York City, the first ever for a black American, Europe was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

Europe composed no major concert works, but many of his more than one hundred songs, rags, waltzes, and marches exhibit unusual lyricism and rhythmic sophistication. His major contributions, however, derive from his achievements as an organizer of professional musicians, a skilled and imaginative conductor and arranger, and an early and articulate champion of African American music. Through his influence on NOBLE SISSLE, EUBIE BLAKE, and George Gershwin, among others, Europe helped to shape the future of American musical theater. As a pioneer in the creation and diffusion of orchestral jazz, he initiated the line of musical development that led from Fletcher Henderson and Paul Whiteman to DUKE ELLINGTON. Without the expanded opportunities for black musicians and for African American music that Europe helped to inaugurate, much of the development of American music in the 1920s, and indeed since then, would be inconceivable.

EVERS, MEDGAR

(2 July 1925–12 June 1963), civil rights activist, was born Medgar Wiley Evers in Decatur, Mississippi, the son of James Evers, a sawmill worker, and Jessie Wright, a domestic worker. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and served in the invasion of Normandy and the French campaign. After the war ended Evers returned to Mississippi, where he attended Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, a segregated land-grant institution, from which he graduated in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. While at Alcorn he met a nursing student, Myrlie Beasley (MYRLIE EVERS-WILLIAMS), whom he married in 1951; the couple had three children.

After graduating from Alcorn, Evers spent several years working as a traveling salesman for the Magnolia Mutual Insurance Company, a business founded by, run by, and serving African Americans. His extensive travels through impoverished areas of Mississippi made him aware of the terrible poverty and oppression suffered by many black southerners and led him to become an active volunteer in the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP. His skill and enthusiasm did not pass unnoticed by the organization’s leadership, and in 1954, after Evers’s application to the University of Mississippi Law School was rejected on racial grounds, he was appointed to the newly created and salaried position of state field secretary for the NAACP, in Jackson.

Evers’s duties as field secretary were originally bureaucratic—collecting, organizing, and publicizing information about civil rights abuses in Mississippi. However, his anger, aroused by the refusal of southern authorities to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision against segregation of public institutions, led him to more direct forms of action, sometimes to the dismay of the generally more conservative NAACP leadership. Evers did not shy away from high-profile activities; he helped to investigate the death of EMMETT TILL, a teenager murdered allegedly for having whistled at a white woman, and he served as an adviser to JAMES MEREDITH in his eventually successful quest to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

Medgar Evers, whose murder became an important symbol of the civil rights movement, is shown on the program at his funeral. Corbis

Evers’s more aggressive style of leadership became evident in the early 1960s, when he helped to organize the Jackson Movement, an all-out attempt to end segregation in Mississippi’s largest and most densely black-populated city. Throughout 1962 and 1963 Jackson’s African American residents, under Evers’s leadership, struggled for racial justice, focusing on the issues of integration of public schools, parks, and libraries and the hiring of African Americans for municipal offices and on the police force. Evers’s tactics, which included mass meetings, peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, and economic boycotts of segregated businesses and of the state fair, helped to unify Jackson’s black community. His energy and diplomacy helped to resolve conflicts and create unity between radical youth groups and the more conservative organizations of middle-class adults and also attracted the participation of some moderate white Jackson residents. However, Evers’s actions were perceived as antagonistic by many other white Jacksonians.

Shortly after midnight on 12 June 1963 Evers returned to his home after a Movement meeting and was ambushed in his driveway and shot to death. News of the murder spread rapidly through Jackson’s black community, and a riot was narrowly averted. Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, and the NAACP honored him posthumously with its 1963 Spingarn Medal.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of Evers’s murder led to the arrest of Byron de la Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman, avowed anti-integrationist, and member of a long-established Mississippi family. Beckwith was tried for the crime, but, despite the testimony of several witnesses who claimed that they had heard the accused boast of having shot Evers, he was found not guilty by an all-white jury. A retrial ended in the same verdict. In February 1994, however, a third trial, this time by a racially mixed jury, ended in Beckwith’s conviction for Evers’s murder and a sentence of life imprisonment.

Although his career as a political activist and organizer was cut short by his death, Medgar Evers became and has remained an important symbol of the civil rights movement. The brutal murder of a nonviolent activist shocked both black and white Americans, helping them to understand the extent to which areas of the Deep South tolerated racial violence. Evers’s death was a crucial factor that motivated President John F. Kennedy to ask the U.S. Congress to enact a new and comprehensive civil rights law, an action that committed the federal government to enforcement of policies to promote racial equality throughout the United States. Evers’s name has remained alive through the efforts of the NAACP’s Medgar Evers Fund, which provides financial assistance for efforts to improve housing, health care, education, and economic opportunity for African Americans. A branch of the City University of New York was named Medgar Evers College in 1969. His widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, served as interim president of the national NAACP in 1995.

EVERS-WILLIAMS, MYRLIE

(17 Mar. 1933–), civil rights activist, was born Myrlie Beasley in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and was raised, following her parents divorce, by her grandmother, Annie McCain Beasley, and her aunt, Myrlie Beasley Polk. Both women were schoolteachers who encouraged young Myrlie in her educational pursuits through activities such as singing, public speaking, and piano lessons. Myrlie hoped to major in music in college, but neither of Mississippi’s state schools for blacks, Alcorn A&M College or Jackson State, had such a major. In 1950 Myrlie enrolled at Alcorn, intending to study education and music. Only two hours after arriving on campus, however, she met MEDGAR EVERS, an upperclassman and army veteran seven years her senior. He soon proposed, and they were married on 24 December 1951. Following Medgar’s graduation and Myrlie’s sophomore year, the couple moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where Medgar took a position as an insurance salesman with Magnolia Mutual Insurance, a black-owned company.

Myrlie Evers entered the civil rights movement through Medgar’s work as the NAACP state field secretary for Mississippi. This was the beginning of a lifetime of work against segregation and racial violence against blacks. Medgar’s appointment came in 1954, the same year as their daughter Reena Denise’s birth and a year after the birth of their first child, Darrell Kenyatta. Son James Van Dyke was born in 1960. Myrlie Evers worked full time as a secretary in the NAACP Jackson office and the Everses worked tirelessly on the NAACP’s agenda of securing voting rights, coordinating civil rights demonstrations, and desegregating public facilities. The Everses were also deeply involved in the quest to bring the murderers of EMMETT TILL to justice and in the efforts of JAMES MEREDITH in desegregating the University of Mississippi.

Due to their civil rights work and their direct confrontation with the white supremacist power elite, the Evers family lived under the constant threat of violence. The children were trained to take cover should gunfire erupt and Myrlie practiced the steps she would take if her husband were shot. In one incident, their home was firebombed while Medgar was away at a meeting, leaving Myrlie to put out the fire while in fear that the arsonists were still nearby. The violence reached its climax for the Evers family on 12 June 1963, when Medgar was killed by a sniper’s bullet in front of their home. The Evers children dove for the floor as trained, as Myrlie ran outside and found her husband bleeding from a gunshot wound to the back. Although he was rushed to the hospital and admitted to the emergency room—after hospital officials vacillated on their segregation policy—Medgar Evers died an hour after the shooting.

At the scene of the murder the police retrieved a rifle with the fingerprints of Byron De La Beckwith, an outspoken racist and anti-integrationist. Beckwith was indicted twice but freed by deadlocked, all-white juries. Medgar’s murder and the failure of the jury to convict Beckwith were catalysts in Myrlie Evers’s quest for justice in the face of racial discrimination. Evers also credits her late husband with raising her racial awareness and pride in her race.

Though he believed Mississippi would be the best place to live were Jim Crow segregation ever abolished, Medgar always thought California would be a good place to raise their children. A year after Medgar’s murder and the subsequent trials, Evers and her three children moved to Claremont, California. She cowrote a book about her husband, For Us, the Living (1967), and gave speeches for the NAACP. In the book Evers details the tensions and emotions she felt as she grew from a sheltered Mississippi childhood into civil rights activism alongside Medgar in the virulently racist South.

Evers experienced several life changes upon moving to California. She enrolled in Pomona College, graduating with a BA in Sociology in 1968. She then served as assistant director of planning and development for the Claremont College system. She also ran for Congress in 1969. Though she lost the race, it was the first time she explicitly stepped out of her murdered husband’s shadow, changing her political ticket from “Mrs. Medgar Evers” to “Myrlie Evers.” In 1975 Evers married Walter Williams, a longshoreman and union Organizer who died of prostate cancer in 1995.

In step with her lifetime of activism and achievements, Evers-Williams accomplished two firsts. Los Angeles Mayor TOM BRADLEY appointed her to the city’s Board of Public Works, making her the first black woman to serve in that capacity. Evers-Williams served on the board from 1988 to 1990, comanaging a million-dollar annual budget. In 1995 Evers-Williams became the first woman to serve as chair of the board of the NAACP. Before leaving the position in 1998, Evers-Williams helped recuperate the organization’s image, which was damaged by her predecessors, who left the organization four million dollars in debt.

Evers-Williams remained determined to see Beckwith brought to justice. In addition to trips back to Mississippi to track Beckwith’s whereabouts, Evers-Williams continued to search for evidence that would spur a new trial. After Jackson reporter Jerry Mitchell unearthed documents proving the long-suspected collusion between government officials and white supremacists, Evers pressured Mississippi prosecutors to move for a new trial. In 1994, more than thirty years after the assassination, Beckwith was finally convicted of Medgar Evers’s murder and sentenced to life in prison, opening the door to the prosecution of other old civil rights cases. In 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi, a film directed by Rob Reiner, dramatized the events surrounding the final Beckwith trial. WHOOPI GOLDBERG played Evers-Williams in the film, which centered on prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter’s quest to bring Beckwith to trial in 1994.

In 1999 Evers-Williams published an autobiography, Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on My Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be. She has received seven honorary doctorates and awards from the NAACP, the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, and the League of Women Voters. In 1988 she established the Medgar Evers Institute, which works to encourage a better understanding of human rights. The Institute’s Archive and Justice Center are based in Jackson, Mississippi, while the Oregon State University Medgar Evers Institute Fellowship Center is based in Bend, Oregon, where Evers-Williams lives.

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EDWARDS, HARRY THOMAS

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ELLIOTT, ROBERT BROWN

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ELLISON, RALPH WALDO

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EQUIANO, OLAUDAH

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ESTEBAN

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EUROPE, JAMES REESE

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EVERS, MEDGAR

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EVERS-WILLIAMS, MYRLIE

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