African American Lives

H–I

HALEY, ALEX

(11 Aug. 1921–10 Feb. 1992), writer, was born Alexander Palmer Haley in Ithaca, New York, the son of Simon Alexander Haley, a graduate student in agriculture at Cornell University, and Bertha George Palmer, a music student at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music. Young Alex Haley grew up in the family home in Henning, Tennessee, where his grandfather Will Palmer owned a lumber business. When the business was sold in 1929, Simon Haley moved his family to southern black college communities, including Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College in Normal (near Huntsville), Alabama, where he had his longest tenure teaching agriculture. The three sons of Bertha and Simon Haley, Alex, George, and Julius, spent their summers in Henning, where, in the mid-1930s, grandmother Cynthia Murray Palmer recounted for her grandsons the stories of their family’s history.

After graduating from high school in Normal, Alex Haley studied to become a teacher at Elizabeth City State Teachers College in North Carolina from 1937 to 1939. In 1939 he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. Two years later Haley married Nannie Branch. They had two children. Haley spent twenty years in the coast guard, advancing from mess boy to ship’s cook on a munitions ship, the USS Murzin, in the South Pacific during World War II. To relieve his boredom, he began writing, love letters for fellow shipmates at first, then romance fiction, which brought many rejection letters from periodicals such as True Confessions and Modern Romances. Finally, Haley sold three stories on the history of the coast guard to Coronet. In 1949 the coast guard created the position of chief journalist for him. Haley did public relations, wrote speeches, and worked with the press on rescue stories for the coast guard until he retired in 1959.

Failing to find other work and sustained by his military pension, Haley moved to Greenwich Village to work as a freelance writer in 1959. Casting about for his subject and voice, his early articles included a feature on Phyllis Diller for the Saturday Evening Post. Two articles for Reader’s Digest were better indicators of Haley’s future work. One was a feature on Nation of Islam leader ELIJAH MUHAMMAD; the other was an article about his brother George, who was the first African American student at the University of Arkansas law school in 1949 and would be elected to the Kansas state legislature in the 1960s. In 1962 Playboy hired Haley to produce a series of interviews with prominent African Americans: MILES DAVIS, Cassius Clay (MUHAMMAD ALI), JIM BROWN, SAMMY DAVIS JR., QUINCY JONES, LEONTYNE PRICE, and MALCOLM X. The last interview was the genesis of Haley’s first important book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Based on extensive interviews with the religious leader, the book was Haley’s artistic creation and has won an important place in American biography. (Haley’s manuscript of The Autobiography of Malcolm X is in private hands, but the publisher’s copy is in the Grove Press Archive at Syracuse University.) His marriage to his first wife ended in 1964; that same year Haley married Juliette Collins. They had one child before their divorce in 1972.

Haley’s second important book was even more his own story than The Autobiography. Recalling stories recounted to him by his grandmother twenty-five years earlier, Haley had begun research on his family’s history as early as 1961. Backed by a contract from Doubleday, Haley began serious work on a book that was initially to be called Before This Anger. His research trips across the South took him to Gambia, West Africa, where a griot identified an ancestor as Kunte Kinte. In 1972 Haley founded and became the president of the Kinte Foundation of Washington, D.C., which sought to encourage research in African American history and genealogy. Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) finally appeared in the bicentennial year to great fanfare. A historical novel that invited acceptance as a work of history, it told the story of the family’s origins in West Africa, its experience in slavery, and its subsequent history. A best-selling book that won a Pulitzer Prize, Roots had even greater impact when it was made into a gripping television miniseries. Broadcast by ABC in January and February 1977, it was seen, in whole or in part, by 130 million people. It stimulated interest and pride in the African American experience and had a much greater immediate impact than did The Autobiography.

In 1977, however, Margaret Walker brought suit against Haley for plagiarism from her novel Jubilee. Her case was dismissed. Subsequently, however, Haley reached an out-of-court settlement for $650,000 with novelist Harold Courlander, who alleged that passages in Roots were taken from his The Slave. Haley acknowledged that Roots was a combination of fact and fiction. By 1981 professional historians were challenging the genealogical and historical reliability of the book. A third lawsuit for plagiarism was filed in 1989 by Emma Lee Davis Paul. The symbolic significance of the linkage in Roots of the African American experience to its African origins for a mass audience continues to be important. Yet, by the time of Haley’s death, renewed interest in Malcolm X and questions about the originality and reliability of Roots seemed to have reversed early judgments about the relative importance of the two books.

In 1988 Haley published A Different Kind of Christmas, a historical novella about the Underground Railroad. When he died in Seattle, Washington, Haley was separated from his third wife, Myra Lewis, and there were legal claims of more than $1.5 million against his estate. The primary claimants were First Tennessee Bank, his first and third wives, and many creditors, including a longtime researcher, George Sims. The bank held a mortgage of almost one million dollars on Haley’s 127-acre farm near Norris, Tennessee. His first wife claimed that their 1964 divorce was not valid, and his third wife claimed entitlement to one-third of the estate. The executor of Haley’s estate was his brother George, who had been chief counsel to the U.S. Information Agency and chaired the U.S. Postal Rate Commission. George Haley concluded that the estate must be sold. In a dramatic sale on 1–3 October 1992, Alex Haley’s estate, including his manuscripts, was auctioned to the highest bidder.

His novel Queen: The Story of an American Family, based on the life of his paternal grandmother, was published posthumously in 1993 and was the basis of a television miniseries that aired in February 1994. A second novel, Henning, which was named for the small community in West Tennessee where Haley lived as a child and is buried, remains unpublished.

HALL, PRINCE

(1735–4 Dec. 1807), Masonic organizer and abolitionist, was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, the son of a “white English leather worker” and a “free woman of African and French descent”; his birth date is variously given as 12 Sept. 1748 (Horton). He was the slave of William Hall, a leather dresser. At age seventeen, Hall found passage to Boston, Massachusetts, by working on a ship and became employed there as a leather worker. In 1762 he joined the Congregational Church on School Street. He received his manumission in 1770. Official records indicate that Hall was married three times. In 1763 he married Sarah Ritchie, a slave. In 1770, after her death, he married Flora Gibbs of Gloucester, Massachusetts; they had one son, Prince Africanus. In 1798 Hall married Sylvia Ward. The reason for the dissolution of the second marriage is unclear.

In March 1775 Hall was one of fifteen African Americans initiated into a British army lodge of Freemasons stationed in Boston. After the evacuation of the British, the black Masons were allowed to meet as a lodge and to participate fully in Masonic ceremonies, but full recognition was withheld. After a series of appeals, African Lodge No. 459 was granted full recognition in 1784 by the London Grand Lodge. Hall became the lodge’s “worshipful master,” charged with ensuring that it followed all the rules of the “Book of Constitution.” He served in that position until his death.

During the revolutionary war, Hall worked as a skilled craftsman and sold leather drumheads to the Continental army. Military records indicate that he most likely fought in the war. During the war, Hall also agitated on behalf of abolition. In 1777 he and seven other African Americans, including three black Masons, petitioned the General Court to abolish slavery in Massachusetts so that “the Inhabitanc of these Stats” could no longer be “chargeable with the inconsistency of acting themselves the part which they condem and oppose in others.” The petition was referred to the Congress of Confederation, but slavery was not abolished in Massachusetts until 1783.

Throughout the 1780s, Hall served as the grandmaster of the Masonic Lodge and owned and operated a leather workshop called the Golden Fleece. During that period he also emerged as a leading spokesman for black Bostonians. When Shays’s Rebellion broke out in western Massachusetts in 1786, Hall and the African lodge offered to raise a militia of seven hundred black soldiers to assist the government in putting down the rebellion. “We, by the Providence of God, are members of a fraternity that not only enjoins upon us to be peaceable subjects to the civil powers where we reside,” Hall wrote, “but it also forbids our having concern in any plot of conspiracies against the state where we dwell.” The offer was turned down by the governor.

In 1787 Hall and seventy-two other African Americans, perhaps resentful of the state government’s dismissive attitude toward them, signed a petition asking the state legislature to finance black emigration to Africa. “We, or our ancestors have been taken from all our dear connections, and brought from Africa and put into a state of slavery in this country,” the petition stated, in marked contrast to the patriotic language of the petition on Shays’s Rebellion. “We find ourselves, in many respects, in very disagreeable and disadvantageous circumstances; most of which must attend us, so long as we and our children live in America.” This was the first public statement in favor of African colonization made in the United States. The legislature accepted the petition but never acted on it.

Shortly after the emigration petition, Hall drafted another petition to the Massachusetts legislature, this one protesting the denial of free schools for African Americans who paid taxes and therefore had “the right to enjoy the privileges of free men.” In 1788 Hall drafted a petition, signed by twenty-two members of his lodge, expressing outrage at the abduction by slave traders of three free blacks in Boston. After a group of Quakers and other Boston clergy joined the call, in March 1788 the General Court passed an act that banned the slave trade and granted “relief of the families of such unhappy persons as may be kidnapped or decoyed away from this Commonwealth.” Diplomatic actions obtained the release of the three captured freemen from the French island of St. Bartholomew. Hall and the African lodge organized a celebration for their return to Boston.

In 1792 Hall delivered a lecture on the injustice of black taxpayers’ being denied free schools for their children. The lecture was published as A Charge Delivered to the Brethren of the African Lodge on the 25th of June, 1792 (1792). After failing to convince the state government to provide education for black children, Hall in 1796 established a school for black children in his own house. He recruited two students from Harvard College to serve as teachers. In 1806 the school’s increased enrollment prompted Hall to move it to a larger space at the African Society House on Belknap Street.

Hall died in Boston. The Prince Hall Masons, still the largest and most prestigious fraternal order of African Americans, was established one year after his death.

Hall was one of the most prominent and influential African Americans in the era of the American Revolution. As a leading spokesperson, organizer, and educator, Hall served as a principal agitator for abolition and for civil rights for black Americans in the period. He was also a pioneer in the establishment of fraternal organizations of African Americans at a time when such activities were deemed solely the province of whites.

HAMER, FANNIE LOU TOWNSEND

(6 Oct. 1917–14 Mar. 1977), civil rights activist, was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the twentieth child of Lou Ella (maiden name unknown) and Jim Townsend, sharecroppers. When Fannie Lou was two, the family moved to Sunflower County, where they lived in abject poverty. Even when they were able to rent land and buy stock, a jealous white neighbor poisoned the animals, forcing the family back into share-cropping. Fannie Lou began picking cotton when she was six; she eventually was able to pick three to four hundred pounds a day, earning a penny a pound. Because of poverty she was forced to leave school at age twelve, barely able to read and write. She married Perry (“Pap”) Hamer in 1944. The couple adopted two daughters. For the next eighteen years Fannie Lou Hamer worked first as a sharecropper and then as a timekeeper on the plantation of B. D. Marlowe.

Hamer appeared destined for a routine life of poverty, but two events in the early 1960s led her to become a political activist. When she was hospitalized for the removal of a uterine tumor in 1961, the surgeons performed a hysterectomy without her consent. In August 1962, still angry and bitter over the surgery, she went to a meeting in her hometown of Ruleville to hear JAMES FORMAN of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After hearing their speeches on the importance of voting, she and seventeen others went to the courthouse in Indianola to try to register. They were told they could only enter the courthouse two at a time to be given the literacy test, which they all failed. On the trip back to Ruleville the group was stopped by the police and fined one hundred dollars for driving a bus that was the wrong color. Hamer subsequently became the group’s leader. B. D. Marlowe called on her that evening and told her she had to withdraw her application to register. Hamer refused and was ordered to leave the plantation. (Because Marlowe threatened to confiscate their belongings, Pap was compelled to work on the plantation until the harvest season was finished.) For a time, Hamer stayed with various friends and relatives, and segregationist night riders shot into some of the homes where she was staying. Nevertheless, she remained active in the civil rights movement, serving as a field secretary for SNCC, working for voter registration, advocating welfare programs, and teaching citizenship classes.

Fannie Lou Hamer speaking at a rally during the March Against Fear, 1966. © Flip Schulke/CORBIS

Hamer gained national attention when she appeared before the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an organization attempting to unseat the state’s regular, all-white delegation. Speaking as a delegate and co-chair of the MFDP, she described atrocities inflicted on blacks seeking the right to vote and other civil rights, including the abuse she had suffered at the Montgomery County Jail, where white Mississippi law enforcement officers forced black inmates to beat her so badly that she had no feeling in her arms. (Hamer and several others had been arrested for attempting to integrate the “white only” section of the bus station in Winona, Mississippi, during the return trip from a voter registration training session in South Carolina.) After giving her dramatic testimony, she wept before the committee. Although her emotional appeal generated sympathy for the plight of blacks in Mississippi among the millions watching on television, the committee rejected the MFDP’s challenge.

That same year Hamer traveled to Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, and several other African nations at the request and expense of those governments. Still, her primary interest was in helping the people of the Mississippi Delta. She lectured across the country, raising money and organizing. In 1965 she ran as an MFDP candidate for Congress, saying she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” While many civil rights leaders abandoned grassroots efforts, she remained committed to organizing what she called “everyday” people in her community, frequently saying she preferred to face problems at home rather than run from them. In 1969 she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative to provide homes and food for deprived families, white as well as black, in Sunflower County. The cooperative eventually acquired 680 acres. She remained active, however, at the national level. In 1971 she was elected to the steering committee of the National Women’s political caucus, and the following year she supported the nomination of Sissy Farenthold as vice president in an address to the Democratic National Convention.

After a long battle with breast cancer, Hamer died at the all-black Mound Bayou Hospital, thirty miles from Ruleville. Civil rights leaders ANDREW YOUNG, JULIAN BOND, and ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON attended her funeral.

HAMMON, BRITON

(fl. 1747–1760), slave narrative author, wrote the earliest slave account published in North America. Practically nothing is known about him other than what he stated in the account of his life’s events between 1747 and 1760. While living as a slave in New England in 1747, Hammon undertook a sea voyage that turned out to be a thirteen-year odyssey featuring numerous perils and repeated captures by American Indians and Spaniards. A Narrative, of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man,—Servant to General Winslow, of Marshfield, in New-England, Who Returned to Boston, after Having Been Absent Almost Thirteen Years, published as a fourteen-page pamphlet, was printed and sold in 1760 by Green and Russell, a Boston publishing firm that was bringing out popular Indian captivity narratives.

This remarkable story of sea adventures, treachery, and multiple captivities is believed to be the first autobiographical slave narrative on record. It is not clear whether Hammon’s work was actually written by him. More than likely, it was dictated to a writer who faithfully transcribed the slave’s spoken tale. The ungrammatical and plain style of the text and the lack of much editorializing in the main body of the account seem to indicate that Briton Hammon’s words were written down almost exactly as he delivered them. However, the beginning and ending sections of the narrative do point to the probability that a white recorder stylistically embellished Hammon’s work with traditional eighteenth-century religious statements and personal expressions of humility.

Hammon’s journey commenced on the “25th Day of December, 1747,” when, with his master’s permission, the adventurous slave left Marshfield, Massachusetts, on a sea voyage. The next day he set sail from Plymouth on a ship bound for Jamaica and the “Bay” of Florida. After a month’s journey, the ship arrived in Jamaica for a short stay and then sailed up the coast of Florida for the purpose of picking up “log wood.” The vessel left Florida at the end of May, and in the middle of June it ran aground a short distance from shore, off “Cape-Florida.” There, the captain’s refusal to unload some of the cargo of wood so as to free the ship proved fatal. In two days’ time a large group of Indians in canoes, flying the English colors as a ruse to trick the captain and his crew, attacked and murdered everyone on the ship except Hammon, who saved himself by jumping overboard. But the Indians soon took him out of the water, beat him, and told him they were going to roast him alive. However, much to Hammon’s surprise, they treated him fairly well as their prisoner.

Hammon remained with the Indians for five weeks, until he managed to get to Cuba aboard a Spanish vessel whose captain he had previously met in Jamaica. The Indians pursued their escaped captive to Havana and demanded that he be returned to them. The governor of the island refused, but paid the Indians ten dollars to purchase Hammon. After working in the governor’s castle for about a year, Hammon met up with a press gang that demanded he serve aboard a ship sailing to Spain. Upon his refusal, Hammon was put into a dungeon and held there for four years and seven months, during which time he tried without success to make the governor aware of his imprisonment.

Finally, through the efforts of friends, Hammon’s situation came to the attention of the governor, who ordered him released and returned to his service. For the next several years Hammon worked for the governor in his castle and later for the bishop of Havana. During this time the long-suffering prisoner made three attempts to escape, and on the last one he succeeded. After a bit of difficulty he managed to be taken aboard an English ship that was about to sail for Jamaica and then on to London.

Upon his arrival in England, Hammon signed up for service on a succession of British naval vessels, one of which engaged in a battle with a French warship. During this encounter he “was Wounded in the Head by a small Shot.” After serving several months at sea, Hammon was discharged on 12 May 1759 to the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, England, after “being disabled in the Arm.” Hammon soon recovered, and over the next few months he worked as a cook on several ships. After suffering a bout of fever in London, Hammon signed aboard a vessel sailing for Boston. On the passage over the Atlantic Ocean he became delighted to learn that his “good Master” General Winslow, who had allowed Hammon to leave New England thirteen years before, was one of the passengers aboard ship. After the happy reunion, Winslow remarked that Hammon “was like one arose from the Dead, for he thought I had been Dead a great many Years, having heard nothing of me for almost Thirteen Years” (Hammon, 13).

At the ending of Hammon’s narrative, he thanks the “Divine Goodness” for being “miraculously preserved and delivered out of many Dangers,” and attests the fact that he has “not deviated from Truth” (Hammon, 14). The ending corresponds to the spiritual declaration at the beginning of his narrative, and both sections seem to be tacked on by someone else to give the story a religious framework. These, in addition to the many religious references Hammon himself inserts in his story, impart a spiritual autobiographical character to the work. The title of Hammon’s book was similar to those of other published Indian captivity accounts, and at times his text seems to echo the phraseology and religious references of those accounts.

Hammon’s work is believed to be the first of thousands of slave narratives written in America. His story follows the pattern of spiritual striving and of escape from physical captivity (in Hammon’s case, Indian and Spanish bondage but not American slavery) that is an essential element of the many slave narratives that were published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the immediate decades after Hammon’s publication, there appeared several notable slave narratives including those by JAMES ALBERT UKAWSAW GRONNIOSAW (1772), OLAUDAH EQUIANO (1789), and Venture Smith (1798). All that is known about Hammon’s life after his return to New England in 1760 is that his short tale of captivity and escape became a well-known personal account in eighteenth-century America.

HAMMON, JUPITER

(11 Oct. 1711–?), poet and preacher, was born on the estate of Henry Lloyd on Long Island, New York, most probably the son of Lloyd’s slaves Rose and Opium, the latter renowned for his frequent escape attempts. Few records remain from Hammon’s early life, though correspondence of the Lloyd family indicates that in 1730 he suffered from a near-fatal case of gout. He was educated by Nehemiah Bull, a Harvard graduate, and Daniel Denton, a British missionary, on the Lloyd manor. Except for a brief period during the revolutionary war, when Joseph Lloyd removed the family to Hartford, Connecticut, Hammon lived his entire life on Long Island, in the Huntington area, serving the Lloyds as clerk and bookkeeper. There is no surviving indication that Hammon either married or had children. The precise date of his death and the location of his grave remain unknown, although it is known that he was alive in 1790 and had died by 1806.

Hammon is best known for his skill as a poet and preacher. Early in the spiritual Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s he was converted to a Wesleyan Christianity, and his poems and sermons reflect a Calvinist theology. Within the framework of these religious doctrines Hammon crafted a body of writing that critically investigates slavery. His first published poem, “An Evening Thought,” appeared as a broadside on Christmas Day 1760. Imbedded within the religious exhortation is a subtle apocalyptic critique of slavery in which the narrator prays that Christ will free all men from imprisonment:

Now is the Day, excepted Time;

The Day of Salvation;

Increase your Faith, do not repine:

Awake ye every Nation.

The poem ends by calling on Jesus to “Salvation give” and to bring equality to all: “Let us with Angels share.” Hammon couples a protest against earthly injustice with his religious conviction that all men are enslaved by sin.

Hammon’s next publication, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley,” appeared in Hartford on 4 August 1778. The language of the poem offers PHILLIS WHEATLEY, then the most prominent African in America, spiritual—and thereby literary—advice. From the position of elder statesman Hammon attempts to correct what he sees as the pagan influences in Wheatley’s verse:

Thou hast left the heathen shore;

Thro’ mercy of the Lord,

Among the heathen live no more,

Come magnify thy God.

Psalm 34:1–3.

Typical of eighteenth-century American poetry, and primarily influenced by Michael Wigglesworth, Hammon’s verse portrays America as a site for spiritual salvation since it is free of the corruption of the Old World. The poem seizes on biblical passages in order to fashion an argument that he hopes will convince Wheatley to write more religious verse. Hammon’s next piece, An Essay on the Ten Virgins, advertised for sale in Hartford in 1779, is now lost.

Hammon exhorts his “brethren” to confess their sins and thus receive eternal salvation in his 1782 sermon Winter Piece. Its call to repentance and the proclamation of man’s inherent sinfulness is consistent with other sermons of this era. Another prose essay, An Evening’s Improvement, was printed in Hartford in 1783, and in it Hammon continues his protest against the institution of slavery. Published along with the sermon is Hammon’s greatest poem, “A Dialogue, Entitled, the Kind Master and the Dutiful Servant,” wherein he directly questions the unequal relationship between slave and master by emphasizing that before God, only sin divides Man:

Master

My Servant we must all appear,

And follow then our King;

For sure he’ll stand where sinners are,

To take true converts in.

Servant

Dear master, now if Jesus calls,

And sends his summons in;

We’ll follow saints and angels all,

And come unto our King.

The end of the poem disrupts the dialogue structure as the voice of the servant blends into that of the poet’s. In the last seven stanzas Hammon instructs all in how to attain peace and harmony:

Believe me now my Christian friends,

Believe your friend call’d Hammon:

You cannot to your God attend,

And serve the God of Mammon.

Here Hammon argues that materialism (Mammon), a code for economic slavery, prohibits salvation because it leads an individual away from religious contemplation.

Hammon’s final and most widely read piece, An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York, was first printed in 1787 and then republished by the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting Abolition in 1806. In it Hammon speaks most directly against slavery. Within the body of his address Hammon argues that young African Americans should pursue their freedom even though he, at age seventy-six, does not want to be set free. Hammon calls for gradual emancipation: “Now I acknowledge that liberty is a great thing, and worth seeking for, if we can get it honestly; and by our good conduct prevail on our masters to set us free.”

Hammon argues that earthly freedom is subordinate to spiritual salvation and that the need to be born again in the spirit of Christ overpowers all else, for in death “there are but two places where all go . . . white and black, rich and poor; those places are Heaven and Hell.” Eternal judgment is what ultimately matters; thus Hammon urges his fellow African Americans, in their pursuit of freedom, to seek forgiveness through repentance and to place spiritual salvation above mortal concerns.

Hammon remained unknown from the early nineteenth century until 1915, when literary critic Oscar Wegelin, who rediscovered Hammon in 1904, published the first biographical information on him as well as some of his poetry. Although Hammon apparently was not the first African American writer (evidence suggests he was predated by one Lucy Terry poem), his canon makes him one of America’s first significant African American writers.

HANDY, W. C.

(16 Nov. 1873–28 Mar. 1958), blues musician and composer, was born William Christopher Handy in Florence, Alabama, the son of Charles Bernard Handy, a minister, and Elizabeth Brewer. Handy was raised in an intellectual, middle-class atmosphere, as befitted a minister’s son. He studied music in public school, then attended the all-black Teachers’ Agricultural and Mechanical College in Huntsville. After graduation he worked as a teacher and, briefly, in an iron mill. A love of the cornet led to semiprofessional work as a musician, and by the early 1890s he was performing with a traveling minstrel troupe known as Mahara’s Minstrels; by middecade, he was promoted to bandleader of the group. Handy married Elizabeth Virginia Price in 1898. They had five children.

It was on one of the group’s tours, according to Handy, in the backwater Mississippi town of Clarksdale, that he first heard a traditional blues musician. His own training was limited to the light classics, marches, and early ragtime music of the day, but something about this performance, by guitarist CHARLEY PATTON, intrigued him. After a brief retirement from touring in 1900–1902 to return to teaching at his alma mater, Handy formed his first of many bands and went on the road once more. A second incident during an early band tour cemented Handy’s interest in blues-based music. In 1905, while playing at a local club, the Handy band was asked if they would be willing to take a break to allow a local string band to perform. This ragged group’s attempts at music making amused the more professional musicians in Handy’s band until they saw the stage flooded with change thrown spontaneously by audience members and realized that the amateurs would take home more money that night than they would. Handy began collecting folk blues and writing his own orchestrations of them.

By 1905 Handy had settled in Memphis, Tennessee. He was asked in 1907 by mayoral candidate E. H. “Boss” Crump to write a campaign song to mobilize the black electorate. The song, “Mr. Crump,” became a local hit and was published five years later under a new name, “The Memphis Blues.” It was followed two years later by his biggest hit, “The St. Louis Blues.” Both songs were actually ragtime-influenced vocal numbers with a number of sections and related to the traditional folk blues only in their use of “blue” notes (flatted thirds and sevenths) and the themes of their lyrics. Many of his verses were borrowed directly from the traditional “floating” verses long associated with folk blues, such as the opening words of “St. Louis Blues”: “I hate to see that evening sun go down.” In the mid-1920s early jazz vocalist BESSIE SMITH recorded “St. Louis Blues,” making it a national hit.

In 1917 Handy moved to New York, where he formed a new band, his own music-publishing operation, and a shortlived record label. He was an important popularizer of traditional blues songs, publishing the influential Blues: An Anthology in 1926 (which was reprinted and revised in 1949 and again after Handy’s death in 1972) and Collection of Negro Spirituals in 1939. Besides his work promoting the blues, he also was a champion of “Negro” composers and musicians, writing several books arguing that their musical skills equaled that of their white counterparts. In 1941 he published his autobiography, Father of the Blues, a not altogether reliable story of his early years as a musician.

By the late 1940s Handy’s eyesight and health were failing. In the 1950s he made one recording performing his blues songs, showing himself to be a rather limited vocalist by this time of his life, and one narrative recording with his daughter performing his songs. His first wife had died in 1937; he was married again in 1954, to Irma Louise Logan. He died in New York City. His autobiography was reissued after his death. In 1979 the W. C. Handy Blues Awards were established, to recognize excellence in blues recordings.

Handy may not have “fathered” the blues, as he claimed, nor did he write true “blues” songs of the type that were performed by country blues musicians. But he did write one of the most popular songs of the twentieth century, which introduced blues tonalities and themes to popular music. His influence on stage music and jazz was profound; “St. Louis Blues” remains one of the most frequently recorded of all jazz pieces.

HANSBERRY, LORRAINE VIVIAN

(19 May 1930–12 Jan. 1965), playwright, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real estate agent, and Nannie Perry, a schoolteacher. Throughout her childhood, Lorraine Hansberry’s home was visited by many distinguished blacks, including PAUL ROBESON, DUKE ELLINGTON, and her uncle, the Africanist William Leo Hansberry, who helped inspire her enthusiasm for African history. In 1938, to challenge real-estate covenants against blacks, Hansberry’s father moved the family into a white neighborhood where a mob gathered and threw bricks, one of which nearly hit Lorraine. Two years later, after he won his case on the matter of covenants before the Supreme Court, they continued in practice. Embittered by U.S. racism, Carl Hansberry planned to relocate his family in Mexico in 1946 but died before the move.

After studying drama and stage design at the University of Wisconsin from 1948 to 1950, Hansberry went to New York and began writing for Robeson’s newspaper Freedom. She also marched on picket lines, made speeches on street corners, and helped move furniture back into evicted tenants’ apartments. In 1953 she married Robert Nemiroff, an aspiring writer and graduate student in English and history whom she had met on a picket line at New York University. Soon afterward, she quit full-time work at Freedom to concentrate on her writing, though she had to do part-time work at various jobs until the success of Nemiroff and Burt D’Lugoff’s song “Cindy, Oh Cindy” in 1956 freed her financially to write full-time. She also studied African history under W. E. B. DU BOIS at the Jefferson School for Social Science.

In 1957 Hansberry read a draft of A Raisin in the Sun to Philip Rose, a music publisher friend, who decided to produce it. Opening on Broadway in 1959, it earned the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award for Best Play, making Hansberry the youngest American, first woman, and first black to win the award. This play about the Youngers, a black family with differing personalities and dreams who are united in racial pride and their fight against mutual poverty, has become a classic.

Although Hansberry enjoyed her new celebrity status, she used her many interviews to speak out about the oppression of African Americans and the social changes that she deemed essential. Her private life, however, remained painful and complex. Shortly after her marriage, her lesbianism emerged, leading to conflicts with her husband and within herself, difficulties exacerbated by the widespread homophobia that infected even the otherwise progressive social movements she supported. At some point amid her public triumph, she and Nemiroff separated, though their mutual interests and mutual respect later reunited them.

Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the Sun has become a classic of American drama. Library of Congress

In 1960 she wrote two screenplays of A Raisin in the Sun that would have creatively used the cinematic medium, but Columbia Pictures preferred a less controversial version that was closer to the original. Accepting a commission from NBC for a slavery drama to commemorate the Civil War centennial, Hansberry wrote The Drinking Gourd, but this too was rejected as controversial. During this busy year she began research for an opera titled Toussaint and a play about Mary Wollstonecraft; started writing her African play, Les Blancs; and began the play that evolved into The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. In 1961 the film A Raisin in the Sun won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1962 Hansberry wrote her postatomicwar play, What Use Are Flowers?, while publicly denouncing the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Cuban “missile crisis” and mobilizing support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The following year, she began suffering from cancer but continued her support for SNCC and, at JAMES BALDWIN’S invitation, participated in a discussion about the country’s racial crisis with Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

During 1964 she and Nemiroff divorced, but because of her illness they only told their closest friends and saw each other daily, continuing their creative collaboration until her death. She named Nemiroff her literary executor in her will. From April to October 1964 she was in and out of the hospital for therapy but managed to deliver her “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” speech to winners of the United Negro College Fund writing contest and to participate in the Town Hall debate on “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash.” In October she moved to a hotel near the site of rehearsals of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and attended its opening night. Despite its mixed reviews, actors and supporters from various backgrounds united to keep the play running until Hansberry’s death in New York City.

HARPER, FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS

(24 Sept. 1825–20 Feb. 1911) poet, novelist, activist, and orator, was born Frances Ellen Watkins to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland. Her parents’ names remain unknown. Orphaned by the age of three, Watkins is believed to have been raised by her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins, a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a contributor to such abolitionist newspapers as Freedom’s Journal and the Liberator. Most important for Watkins, her uncle was also the founder of the William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, where she studied. A well-known and highly regarded school, the academy’s curriculum included elocution, composition, Bible study, mathematics, and history. The school also emphasized social responsibility and political leadership. Although Watkins withdrew from formal schooling at the age of thirteen to begin work as a domestic servant, her studies at the academy no doubt shaped her political activism, oratorical skills, and creative writing.

After leaving school, Watkins worked as a seamstress and as a child caretaker for a family who owned a bookstore. While in their employ, she continued her studies independently, reading liberally from her employers’ book stock. Watkins’s first poetry appeared in local newspapers while she was still a teenager. In 1846, at the age of twenty-one, she published her first book, a collection of prose and poetry entitled Forest Leaves. No known copy of Forest Leaves has survived, though the scholar Frances Smith Foster has speculated that the volume probably contained poems and prose on subjects as varied as “religious values, women’s rights, social reform, biblical history and current events” (Foster, 8).

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, poet and novelist, campaigned for equal rights throughout much of the nineteenth century. Schomburg Center

Although Watkins had the advantage of a better education than that of many of her peers, she was not immune to the racial hostilities of the antebellum years. The Compromise of 1850 complicated the lives of Watkins and her family. Among the many components of this federal legislation was the Fugitive Slave Act, which required that all citizens participate in the recovery of slaves and imposed severe penalties on those who refused. The family lived in the precarious position of being free blacks in Maryland, a slave state, at a time when federal legislation increasingly challenged black freedom. This undoubtedly shaped Watkins’s feelings that all blacks—slave and free, wealthy or poor—had a duty to the welfare of their fellow African Americans, a theme that emerges frequently in her literature.

In 1850 Watkins’s family was forced by local officials to disband their elite school for blacks and sell their home. Watkins moved to Ohio and began working as a teacher at the Union Seminary near Columbus. Why she chose to go to Ohio while some of her family members remained in Baltimore and others relocated to Canada is unknown. But in 1853 the state of Maryland forbade free blacks to enter the state. The penalty was enslavement. During this period in which Watkins was unable to return to her home state, a free black man was arrested and enslaved for entering Maryland. The man died soon after the ordeal. In a letter to WILLIAM STILL, Watkins cast this man’s death as the beginning of her own commitment to abolitionism: “Upon that grave I pledged myself to the Anti-Slavery cause” (Still, 786).

Soon after this incident in Maryland, Watkins moved to Philadelphia, where she lived in a home that functioned as an Underground Railroad station, one of a series of homes used to assist fugitive slaves in their escape. While there, she published several poems in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Eliza Harris,” “To Harriet Beecher Stowe,” and “Eva’s Farewell.” The poems appear to have been widely circulated. “Eliza Harris” appeared in at least three national papers. Building on the pathos of Stowe’s representation of the escape of the nearly white slave Eliza, Watkins makes the national implications of Eliza’s condition explicit:

Oh shall I speak of my proud

country’s shame?

Of the stains on her glory, how give them their name?

How say that her banner in mockery waves—

Her “star spangled banner”—o’er millions

of slaves?

(Foster, 61)

In 1854 Watkins initiated her career as a public speaker in New Bedford, Massachusetts, delivering a lecture entitled “The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race.” Soon after, she was enlisted as a traveling lecturer for the Maine Antislavery Society and became an admired and much sought after lecturer. In a letter that same year, Watkins reports lecturing every night of the week, sometimes more than once in a day, to audiences as large as six hundred people. In a period of six weeks in the fall of 1854 she gave thirty-three lectures in twenty-one cities and towns. Contemporary newspaper accounts describe her as an eloquent and moving speaker. The Portland Advertiser, for example, characterized her lectures by saying that “the deep fervor of feeling and pathos that she manifests, together with the choice selection of language which she uses arm her elocution with almost superhuman force and power over her spellbound audience” (Boyd, 43). Also in 1854 Watkins published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, which included poems on antislavery and equal rights. It appears that the publisher was confident that the book would be well received. Y. B. Yerrington and Sons of Boston published the book in Philadelphia and Boston. Both editions were reprinted in 1855, and by 1857 the publisher claimed that they had sold ten thousand copies of the book.

In 1860 Watkins married Fenton Harper, and together they purchased a farm outside Columbus, Ohio. The couple had a daughter, Mary. Although little is known about the marriage, Foster has described this period as a “semiretirement” from Watkins’s public life (18). Soon after her husband’s death in 1864, Harper returned to New England and resumed her lectures. After the Civil War, she began lecturing in the South. She was particularly concerned with the future of the newly freed people. This trip would greatly influence Harper’s literature. Three of her books, in particular, are concerned with Reconstruction efforts: a serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869); a book of poetry, Sketches of Southern Life (1871); and her most famous novel, Iola Leroy (1896).

Significantly, the vision of a new nation that emerges in Harper’s literature is not only one of racial equality but also one in which gender equality is represented as crucial to the fulfillment of the American creed of liberty. Harper participated in many women’s organizations, including the American Women’s Suffrage Association, the National Council of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the First Congress of Colored Women in the United States. Her status as both a woman and an African American, however, placed her in a complicated position, particularly as early white feminists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, used racist propaganda to assert the importance of women’s suffrage over black male suffrage.

Harper, along with FREDERICK DOUGLASS, participated in the 1869 American Equal Rights Association meeting to debate the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, which would grant suffrage to black men. Harper supported the vote for black men: “When I was at Boston there were sixty women who left work because one colored woman went to gain a livelihood in their midst. If the nation could handle one question I would not have the black woman put a single straw in the way if only the men of the race could obtain what they wanted.” (Boyd, 128). Harper continued her activism on behalf of African American and women’s rights well into the 1890s, becoming the vice president of the National Council of Negro Women, which she had helped found in 1896.

Little is known about Harper between 1901 and her death in Philadelphia in 1911. Indeed, though she was a well-known public figure throughout much of the nineteenth century, many of the details of her life and work remain unknown. The rediscovery in the early 1990s of three of her novels—Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876–1877), and Trial and Triumph (1888–1889)—all published in the African Methodist Episcopal Church periodical the Christian Recorder, suggests that there is probably much more to know about the life and career of one of the most prolific and popular black writer of the nineteenth century.

HARRINGTON, OLIVER W.

(14 Feb. 1912–2 Nov. 1995), cartoonist, was born Oliver Wendell Harrington in New York City, the son of Herbert Harrington, a porter, and Euzenie Turat. His father came to New York from North Carolina in the early 1900s when many African Americans were seeking greater opportunities in the North. His mother had immigrated to America, arriving from Austria-Hungary in 1907, to join her half sister. Ollie Harrington grew up in a multiethnic neighborhood in the south Bronx and attended public schools. He recalled a home life burdened by the stresses of his parents’ interracial marriage and the financial struggles of raising five children. From an early age, he drew cartoons to ease those tensions.

In 1927 Harrington enrolled at Textile High School in Manhattan. He was voted best artist in his class and started a club whose members studied popular newspaper cartoonists. Exposure to the work of Art Young, Denys Wortman, and Daniel Fitzpatrick later influenced his style and technique. About that time, toward the end of the Harlem Renaissance, he began to spend considerable time in Harlem and became active in social groups there. Following his graduation from Textile in 1931, he attended the National Academy of Design school. There he met such renowned artists and teachers as Charles L. Hinton, Leon Kroll, and Gifford Beal. During his years at the Academy, Harrington supported himself by drawing cartoons and working as a set designer, actor, and puppeteer.

In 1932 he published political cartoons and Razzberry Salad, a comic panel satirizing Harlem society. They appeared in the National News, a newspaper established by the Democratic party organization in Harlem, which folded after only four months. He then joined the Harlem Newspaper Club and was introduced to reporters such as Ted Poston, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley of the Amsterdam News, as well as Bessye Bearden of the Chicago Defender and her son ROMARE BEARDEN. In 1933, Harrington submitted cartoons to the Amsterdam News on a freelance basis. During the next two years, he also attended art classes at New York University with his friend Romare Bearden. In May 1935, he joined the staff of the News and created Dark Laughter, soon renamed Bootsie after its main character, a comic panel that he would draw for more than thirty-five years. Harrington remarked that “I simply recorded the almost unbelievable but hilarious chaos around me and came up with a character” (Freedomways 3, 519).

Cartoonist, journalist, and expatriate Oliver W. Harrington was best known for Bootsie, a cartoon character in an urban black community, and an African American aviator named Jive Gray. The Walter O. Evans collection

When the Newspaper Guild struck the News in October 1935, Harrington, while not a guild member, supported the strike and would not publish his cartoons until it was settled. During the strike, he became friends with journalists BENJAMIN JEFFERSON DAVIS JR. (later a New York City councilman) and Marvel Cooke, who were members of the Communist Party. While probably not a party member, he maintained active ties to the left from that time. Harrington soon returned to freelance work and taught art in a WPA program. Edward Morrow, a Harlem reporter and graduate of Yale University, and Bessye Bearden encouraged him to apply to the School of the Fine Arts at Yale, which accepted him in 1936. Supporting himself with his Bootsie cartoons (which he transferred to the larger circulation Pittsburgh Courier in 1938), scholarship assistance, and waiting on tables at fraternities, Harrington received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1940. He won several prizes for his paintings, although not a prestigious traveling fellowship at graduation, which he believed was denied him because of his race.

In 1942, after working for the National Youth Administration for a year, Harrington became art editor for a new Harlem newspaper, the People’s Voice, edited by ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. He also created a new comic strip, Live Gray. In 1943 and 1944 he took a leave from the Voice to serve as a war correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier. While covering African American troops, including the Tuskegee Airmen, in Italy and France, he witnessed racism in the military to a degree he had not experienced before. In Italy he met WALTER WHITE, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In 1946 White, who was attempting to strengthen the NAACP’s public relations department following racial violence against returning veterans, hired Harrington as director of public relations. But by late 1947 the two had become estranged and Harrington resigned to become more active politically. With the Bootsie cartoons and book illustration work again his principal source of income, and after ending a brief wartime marriage, he joined a number of political committees in support of the American Labor Party and Communists arrested in violation of the Smith Act. In 1950 he became art editor of Freedom, a monthly newspaper founded by Louis Burnham and PAUL ROBESON. He also taught art at the Jefferson School for Social Sciences, a school that appeared on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Informed of his ties to the school, the FBI opened a file on Harrington.

By early 1952, with some of his friends under indictment and others facing revocation of their passports, Harrington left the United States for France. Whether he had knowledge of the FBI investigation is unclear, but by the time he reached Paris, the Passport Office there had been instructed to seize his passport if the opportunity arose. Meanwhile, Harrington settled into a life centered around the Café Tournon with a group of expatriate artists and writers that included RICHARD WRIGHT and CHESTER HIMES. Himes called Harrington the “best raconteur I’d ever known.” His Bootsie cartoons and illustration work continued to provide income and he traveled throughout Europe. For a short time, following a brief second marriage in 1955, he settled in England, but he returned to Paris in 1956 as the Algerian War was worsening. The war divided the African American community, and Harrington became embroiled in a series of disputes with other expatriates. His visit to the Soviet Union in 1959 as a guest of the humor magazine Krokodil again attracted intelligence officials.

Saddened by the death of his close friend Richard Wright, and his income dwindling due to financial difficulties at the Courier, in 1961 Harrington traveled to East Berlin for a book illustration project and soon settled there for the remainder of his life. He submitted cartoons to Das Magasin and Eulenspiegl and in 1968 became an editorial cartoonist for the Daily Worker, later People’s Weekly World. His press credentials enabled him to travel to the West, and many of his old friends, including Paul Robeson and LANGSTON HUGHES, visited him in East Germany. In 1972 Harrington returned for a brief visit to the United States; in the 1990s he visited more regularly. In 1994, after the publication of two books of his cartoons and articles raised interest in his work, he was appointed journalist-in-residence for a semester at Michigan State University. He died in East Berlin. He was survived by his third wife, Helma Richter, and four children: a daughter from his second marriage, a son from his third, and two daughters from relationships with women to whom he was not married. Harrington’s complex personal life, as well as his politics, was sometimes a motive for his travels.

Harrington was often referred to as a “self-exile,” but he never described himself that way. “I’m fairly well convinced that one is an exile only when one is not allowed to live in reasonable peace and dignity as a human being among other human beings” (Why I Left America, 66). Remembered as the premier cartoonist of the African American press for three decades and a central figure in the expatriate community in Paris in the 1950s, he battled racism through his art, his writings, and an alter ego named Bootsie.

HARRIS, BARBARA

(12 June 1930–), Episcopal bishop, was born Barbara Clementine Harris in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the middle child of Walter Harris, a steelworker, and Beatrice Price, who worked as a program officer for the Boys and Girls Club of Philadelphia and later for the Bureau of Vital Statistics for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Barbara was born the day after St. Barnabas Day, and her family attended St. Barnabas Church; hence they named her Barbara.

Barbara graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1948 and then attended the Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Journalism. Upon completion of the program, she began a twenty-year career as a public relations consultant for Joseph V. Baker Associates, a black-owned national public relations firm headquartered in Philadelphia, eventually becoming president of the company. While in this office, she entered into a brief marriage, which ended in divorce. In 1968 Sun Oil recruited her as a community relations consultant. She stayed with Sun Oil for twelve years, rising to the position of manager of their public relations department. Her career was groundbreaking, and she worked hard to dismantle barriers for both women and African Americans in a predominately white male profession.

Harris, however, found her life’s work not in the corporate world, but in the church. Always active in her church, she taught Sunday school and sang in the choir. She brought her friends to church with her no matter how late they had stayed out on Saturday night. She encouraged the parish of St. Barnabas to start a youth group and later initiated and took charge of a group for young adults. For fifteen years she volunteered with the St. Dismas Society, visiting prisons to conduct services on weekends and to counsel and befriend prisoners. During the summer of 1964 she helped register black voters in Mississippi, and the following year she took part in the march led by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Even in the church Harris witnessed and experienced discrimination, and she came to recognize the need for change. In 1968 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church called a special convention in South Bend, Indiana, to address the concerns of African Americans in the church. As a direct result of the efforts of that convention, which Harris attended, the church began a long—and still unfinished—journey toward eliminating discrimination in the church.

In 1968 Harris transferred her membership to the more activist Episcopal Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia. The rector, the Reverend Paul Washington, was a staunch fighter for justice who believed that the church should be the vehicle for transformation in the community. In the 1960s he hosted several controversial meetings, including an August 1968 Black Power convention that included such leading activists as STOKELY CARMICHAEL and H. RAP BROWN and that drew both thousands of people and the attention of the FBI.

On 29 July 1974 Harris led the procession into the Church of the Advocate for the controversial ordination into the priesthood of eleven women, “the Philadelphia Eleven.” Two years later, after intense debate, the ordination of women as priests was sanctioned by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. Harris soon began to hear the call to ordination herself. Because she could not just leave her career to attend seminary on a full-time basis, the Diocese of Pennsylvania made arrangements for her to attend classes at Villanova University from 1977 to 1979, and to study with clergy in the area. After several years she took the General Ordination Examinations required of all seminary graduates and passed with flying colors. She was ordained a deacon in 1979 and a priest in 1980.

After her ordination Harris served at the Church of the Advocate and then spent four years as priest in charge at the Church of St. Augustine of Hippo, in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, breathing new life into a congregation that had been moribund and on the verge of closing. During this period she also served as a chaplain to the Philadelphia County Prison, continuing her ministry to prisoners, giving particular attention to the “lifers,” the long-term prisoners who seldom had visitors and were largely forgotten. In 1984 Harris became the executive director of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company. The primary publication of the company was The Witness, a liberal magazine with a history of speaking out on current issues. Harris proved to be a catalyst for the magazine’s emphasis on issues of racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, both in the church and in society. Harris regularly contributed a hard-hitting, outspoken column entitled “A Luta Continua” (“The Struggle Continues”), which brought her to the attention of a national and international audience.

In the spring of 1987 the Diocese of Massachusetts held a conference on women in the episcopate, with many ordained women in attendance. Harris was one of the speakers and made a great impact on all those who were present. The following spring the diocese began the process of identifying those clergy who would stand for election later that year as suffragan bishop, an assistant to the diocesan bishop, and there was talk of adding women to the list of candidates. The Episcopal Church met in convention and tried to pass a resolution to appease those opposed to the election of a woman bishop, but when the Diocese of Massachusetts released the names of the candidates, Barbara Harris was one of two women on the list. That summer the Archbishop of Canterbury hosted the Lambeth Conference, a gathering of Anglican bishops held every ten years. There was much concern and debate over the Massachusetts election, for fear that electing a woman might cause a division in the Anglican Communion and endanger ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church.

Harris went to the Lambeth Conference as a member of the press corps in her role with the Episcopal Church Publishing Company and was continually bombarded by participants and the other press members. To some she became a symbol of all that was wrong with the Episcopal Church, or at least with its “liberal” element. Objections to Harris’s election were raised on a number of fronts—her nontraditional education and theological training, her status as divorced (an objection not raised in regard to males also being considered), her liberal social activism—but certainly the greatest impediment in the minds of many was simply the fact that she was a woman. The conference, however, ultimately allowed for the consecration of women by ruling that national churches had the right to choose their own bishops.

The Massachusetts election took place on Saturday, 25 September 1988, and Harris was stunned and surprised to be elected on the fifth ballot. Her strength and her faith were now going to be tested. The next step was for a majority of Episcopal dioceses to consent to the election. Although this was nominally a vote on whether the election was in accord with the church constitution, it was in reality based on the person and not the process. Harris’s credentials, her qualifications, and her writings were again questioned. However, consent was obtained, and she subsequently got the necessary number of votes in the House of Bishops.

Harris was consecrated bishop on 11 February 1989. The day was glorious; Boston’s Hynes Auditorium was packed with over eight thousand clergy and laypeople, representing the diversity and breadth of the Episcopal Church. As was expected, there were formal protests during the service. After the protests, Harris’s mother walked over to her and said, “Don’t worry, baby, everything will be all right. God and I are on your side.” The Right Reverend Barbara Clementine Harris served as suffragan bishop in Massachusetts for over thirteen years, consistently carrying out her ministry of compassion, healing, and reconciliation and always speaking out for justice on behalf of the marginalized in our society. Harris has received sixteen honorary doctorate degrees from a broad range of colleges, universities, and seminaries and has traveled around the world sharing the good news. After retiring in November 2002, she agreed to serve part-time in the Diocese of Washington as an assisting bishop.

The debate over the role of women in the church grows quiet at times, but it has not gone away. The role of women was again called into question at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which also saw heated discussions on homosexuality. The specter of schism in the Episcopal Church in the United States was again raised at the General Convention in 2003 in the debate over the confirmation of the openly gay canon Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. At the convention, Harris reminded those present of the similar fears felt in 1989 and pointed out that the Anglican Communion remains intact. Delivering a sermon in her home parish the day after her own election as bishop in 1988, Harris expressed in metaphor the significance of that event, a metaphor that, applied more broadly, captures the difficulty of bringing about change in the face of long-standing beliefs and attitudes: “A fresh wind is indeed blowing. We have seen in this year alone some things thought to be impossible just a short time ago. To some, the changes are refreshing breezes. For others, they are as fearsome as a hurricane.”

HARRISON, HUBERT HENRY

(27 Apr. 1883–17 Dec. 1927), radical political activist and journalist, was born in Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands), the son of William Adolphus Harrison and Cecilia Elizabeth Haines. Little is known of his father. His mother had at least three other children and, in 1889, married a laborer. Harrison received a primary education in St. Croix. In September 1900, after his mother died, he immigrated to New York City, where he worked low-paying jobs, attended evening high school, did some writing, editing, and lecturing, and read voraciously. In 1907 he obtained postal employment and moved to Harlem. The following year he taught at the White Rose Home, where he was deeply influenced by social worker Frances Reynolds Keyser, a future founder of the NAACP. In 1909 he married Irene Louise Horton, with whom he had five children.

Between 1901 and 1908 Harrison broke “from orthodox and institutional Christianity” and became an “Agnostic.” His new worldview placed humanity at the center and emphasized rationalism and modern science. He also participated in black intellectual circles, particularly church lyceums, where forthright criticism and debate were the norm and where his racial awareness was stimulated by scholars such as bibliophile ARTHUR SCHOMBURG and journalist John E. Bruce. History, free thought, and social and literary criticism appealed to him, as did the protest philosophy of W. E. B. DU BOIS over the more “subservient” one of BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. Readings in economics and single taxism and a favorable view of the Socialist Party’s position on women drew him toward socialism. Then in 1911, after writing letters critical of Washington in the New York Sun, he lost his postal job through the efforts of Washington’s associates and turned to Socialist Party work.

From 1911 to 1914 Harrison was the leading black in the Socialist Party of New York, where he insisted on the centrality of the race question to U.S. socialism; served as a prominent party lecturer, writer, campaigner, organizer, instructor, and theoretician; briefly edited the socialist monthly the Masses; and was elected as a delegate to one state and two city conventions. His series on “The Negro and Socialism” (New York Call, 1911) and on “Socialism and the Negro” (International Socialist Review, 1912) advocated that socialists champion the cause of the Negro as a revolutionary doctrine, develop a special appeal to Negroes, and affirm their duty to oppose race prejudice. He also initiated the Colored Socialist Club (CSC), a pioneering effort by U.S. socialists at organizing blacks. After the party withdrew support for the CSC, and after racist pronouncements by some Socialist Party leaders during debate on Asian immigration, he concluded that socialist leaders put the white “Race First and class after.”

Harrison believed “the crucial test of Socialism’s sincerity” was “the Negro,” and he was attracted to the egalitarian practices and direct action principles of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He defended the IWW and spoke at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and “Big Bill” Haywood. Although he was a renowned socialist orator, and was described by author Henry Miller as without peer on a soapbox, Socialist Party leaders moved to restrict his speaking.

Hubert Henry Harrison, “The Father of Harlem Radicalism.” Schomburg Center

Undaunted, Harrison left the Socialist Party in 1914 and over the next few years established the tradition of street corner oratory in Harlem. He first developed his own “Radical Lecture Forum,” which included citywide indoor and outdoor talks on free thought, evolution, literature, religion, birth control, and the racial aspects of World War I. Then, after teaching at the Modern School, writing theater reviews, and selling books, he started the “Harlem People’s Forum,” at which he urged blacks to emphasize “Race First.”

In 1917, as war raged abroad, along with race riots, lynchings, and discrimination at home, Harrison founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and newspaper of the militant “New Negro” movement. He explained that the league was called into being by “the need for a more radical policy than that of the NAACP” (Voice, 7 Nov. 1917) and that the “New Negro” movement represented “a breaking away of the Negro masses from the grip of the old-time leaders” (Voice, 4 July 1917). Harrison stressed that the new black leadership would emerge from the masses and would not be chosen by whites (as in the era of Washington’s leadership), nor be based in the “Talented Tenth of the Negro race” (as advocated by Du Bois). The league’s program was directed to the “common people” and emphasized internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness. The Voice called for a “race first” approach, full equality, federal antilynching legislation, labor organizing, support of socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense in the face of racist attacks.

Harrison was a major influence on a generation of class and race radicals, from socialist A. PHILIP RANDOLPH to MARCUS GARVEY. The Liberty League developed the core progressive ideas, basic program, and leaders utilized by Garvey, and Harrison claimed that, from the league, “Garvey appropriated every feature that was worthwhile in his movement.” Over the next few years Garvey would build what Harrison described as the largest mass movement of blacks “since slavery was abolished”—a movement that grew, according to Harrison, as it emphasized “racialism, race consciousness, racial solidarity—the ideas first taught by the Liberty League and The Voice.”

The Voice stopped publishing in November 1917, and Harrison next organized hotel and restaurant workers for the American Federation of Labor. He also rejoined, and then left, the Socialist Party and chaired the Colored National Liberty Congress that petitioned the U.S. Congress for federal antilynching legislation and articulated militant wartime demands for equality. In July 1918 he resurrected The Voice with influential editorials critical of Du Bois, who had urged blacks to “Close Ranks” behind the wartime program of President Woodrow Wilson. Harrison’s attempts to make The Voice a national paper and bring it into the South failed in 1919. Later that year he edited the New Negro, “an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races.”

In January 1920 Harrison became principal editor of the Negro World, the newspaper of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He reshaped the entire paper and developed it into the preeminent radical, race-conscious, political, and literary publication of the era. As editor, writer, and occasional speaker, Harrison served as a major radical influence on the Garvey movement. By the August 1920 UNIA convention Harrison grew critical of Garvey, who he felt had shifted focus “from Negro Self-Help to Invasion of Africa,” evaded the lynching question, put out “false and misleading advertisements,” and “lie[d] to the people magniloquently.” Though he continued to write columns and book reviews for the Negro World into 1922, he was no longer principal editor, and he publicly criticized and worked against Garvey while attempting to build a Liberty party, to revive the Liberty League, and to challenge the growing Ku Klux Klan.

Harrison obtained U.S. citizenship in 1922 and over the next four years became a featured lecturer for the New York City Board of Education, where Yale-educated NAACP leader WILLIAM PICKENS described him as “a plain black man who can speak more easily, effectively, and interestingly on a greater variety of subjects than any other man I have ever met in the great universities.” In 1924 he founded the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which stressed that “as long as the outer situation remains what it is,” blacks in “sheer self-defense” would have to develop “race-consciousness” so as to “furnish a background for our aspiration” and “proof of our equal human possibilities.” The ICUL called for a broad-based unity—a unity of action, not thought, and a separate state in the South for blacks. He also helped develop the Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints of the New York Public Library, organized for the American Negro Labor Congress, did publicity work for the Urban League, taught on “Problems of Race” at the Workers School, was involved in the Lafayette Theatre strike, and lectured and wrote widely. His 1927 effort to develop the Voice of the Negro as the newspaper of the ICUL lasted several months. Harrison died in New York City after an appendicitis attack. His wife and five young children were left virtually penniless.

Harrison, “The Father of Harlem Radicalism,” was a leading black socialist, the founder and leading force of the militant “New Negro” movement, and the man who laid the basis for, and radically influenced, the Garvey movement. During a heyday of black radicalism he was the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals. He critically and candidly challenged the ruling classes, racists, organized religion, politicians, civil rights and race leaders, socialists, and communists. During his life, though well respected by many, Harrison was often slighted. In death, his memory was much neglected, not least by “leaders” who had felt the sting of his criticism. He was, however, a political and cultural figure of great influence who contributed seminal work on the interrelation of race and class consciousness and whose book and theater reviews drew praise from leading intellectuals of the day. Historian J. A. Rogers stressed that “No one worked more seriously and indefatigably to enlighten his fellowmen; none of the Aframerican leaders of his time had a saner and more effective program—but others, unquestionably his inferiors, received the recognition that was his due.”

HASTIE, WILLIAM HENRY

(17 Nov. 1904–14 Apr. 1976), civil rights attorney, law school professor, and federal judge, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Roberta Childs, a teacher, and William Henry Hastie, a clerk in the U.S. Pension Office (now the Veterans Administration). He was a superb student and athlete. His father’s transfer to Washington, D.C., in 1916 permitted Hastie to attend the nation’s best black secondary school, the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1921. He attended Amherst College, where he majored in mathematics and graduated in 1925, valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, and magna cum laude. After teaching for two years in Bordentown, New Jersey, he studied law at Harvard University, where one instructor adopted the custom of saying after asking a question of the class, “Mr. Hastie, give them the answer” (Ware, 30). He worked on the Law Review and earned an LLB in 1930.

Hastie returned to Washington, D.C., in 1930, passed the bar exam, and began his legal career as a practitioner and an educator. He joined the firm of CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON and Houston’s father, William L. Houston, which then became Houston, Houston, and Hastie. He also joined the law faculty at Howard University, where his first students included THURGOOD MARSHALL and Oliver Hill. He took a year away to study again at Harvard, where he shared an apartment with his friend ROBERT WEAVER and earned his SJD in 1933. He returned to Howard, where, when he was working in Washington, he taught until 1946. At the same time he became active in civil rights. His students researched current civil rights cases, participated in rehearsals of arguments on those cases, and attended the Supreme Court to watch Hastie and other civil rights giants argue cases. In 1935 he married Alma Syphax; they had no children before they divorced. In 1943 he married Beryl Lockwood; they had two children.

Hastie believed that, in the pursuit of justice, people should “struggle as best they know how to change things that seem immutable” (Ware, 147). In 1933 he was a founding member in Washington, D.C., of the New Negro Alliance, part of the “don’t buy where you can’t work” movement of the 1930s. He took a case in which a local court issued injunctions against African Americans picketing at chainstore outlets that, though operating in black areas, hired only white clerks. He argued the case in trial court and in federal appeals court but lost both attempts. He was unavailable to argue the case before the Supreme Court, which, convinced by the arguments Hastie and other attorneys had mounted, ruled in New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co. (1938) that the Norris-LaGuardia Act barred injunctions against peaceful labor-related picketing.

A champion of equal opportunity and racial integration, Hastie worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on major civil rights cases elsewhere, among them the 1933 Hocutt case in North Carolina, in which a black applicant unsuccessfully challenged the white-only admissions policy of the University of North Carolina. He also participated in cases that sought equalization of teachers’ salaries, including the 1939 Mills case in Maryland and the 1940 Alston case in Virginia, both of which the NAACP won. With Marshall he argued cases before the Supreme Court that secured victories against the white Democratic primary in Smith v. Allwright (1944) and against segregated interstate transportation in Morgan v. Virginia (1946). In 1945 he presided at a conference in Chicago on segregated housing that the NAACP called to plan litigation against the constitutionality of restrictive covenants.

A series of appointments with the federal government began in November 1933, when Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes recruited Hastie as assistant solicitor. In that capacity Hastie helped draft the Organic Act of 1936 for the Virgin Islands, which established a fully elective legislature and broadened the electorate to include residents regardless of their property, income, or gender. Hastie, like Weaver, was an early member of what became known as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “black cabinet.” His performance at the Interior Department led to his appointment in March 1937 to a four-year term as district judge in the Virgin Islands, the first black federal judge in U.S. history. He resigned from his judgeship in early 1939 to become dean of the Howard Law School. He took leave of the deanship in June 1940 to become civilian aide to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, in charge of handling matters of race in the military. In 1942 President Roosevelt also named Hastie a member of the Caribbean Advisory Committee, to advise the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, established to foster the wartime social and economic cooperation of British and U.S. possessions in the Caribbean. Though Hastie’s work in the War Department earned him the title “father of the black air force” (Ware, 133), he resigned his position there in early 1943 in frustration over his limited effectiveness in curtailing racial segregation and discrimination in the military. For his efforts and his resignation over what he called the Army Air Force’s “reactionary policies and discriminatory practices,” he won the NAACP’s Spingarn Award in 1943.

Hastie resumed his work at Howard University, and he presided at a rally in 1944 for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. In 1946 President Harry S. Truman nominated him for the governorship of the Virgin Islands. The only African American who had previously served as governor of any U.S. jurisdiction was P. B. S. PLNCHBACK, who served for a month as acting governor of Louisiana after being elected to the state senate during Reconstruction. Hastie had a rough time dealing effectively with public affairs in the islands, but he tried to enhance Virgin Islanders’ self-government. He fostered a civil rights law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or color.

In 1948 Hastie briefly returned to the mainland, where he campaigned effectively in black communities in support of President Truman’s reelection bid. In 1949 Truman appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Hastie took his seat as a recess appointment in December 1949, the first black federal judge with life tenure. Confirmed in 1950, he served as appeals judge until 1968, then as chief judge until he retired in 1971, and as senior judge thereafter. He wrote the decisions in more than four hundred cases. He was considered for a Supreme Court appointment as early as 1954 and as late as 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson nominated Hastie’s former student Marshall instead.

A member of the Board of Directors of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1941 to 1968, Hastie continued to give public lectures on civil rights. He also served on the Boards of Trustees of Amherst College and Temple University. Cool and suave, committed yet dignified, Hastie died in Norristown, Pennsylvania. He excelled as a law school professor and dean, as a civil rights attorney and leader, and as a pioneer black officeholder in the federal government.

HAYDEN, ROBERT EARL

(4 Aug. 1913–25 Feb. 1980), poet and teacher, was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Asa Sheffey, a steel-mill worker, and Gladys Ruth Finn. Early in his childhood, his parents separated and he was given to neighbors William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who also were black, and who reared and renamed him. Hayden grew up in a poor, racially mixed neighborhood. Extremely nearsighted, unathletic, and introverted, he spent much of his youth indoors reading and writing. When he was eighteen, he published his first poem. Hayden attended Detroit City College from 1932 to 1936; worked for the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1938; published his first volume of poetry, Heart-Shape in the Dust, in 1940; and, studying with W. H. Auden, completed an MA in English at the University of Michigan in 1944. In 1946 he began teaching English at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

During his twenty-three years at Fisk, he published four volumes of poetry: The Lion and the Archer (with Myron O’Higgins, 1948), Figure of Time (1955), A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), and Selected Poems (1966). These were years of demanding college teaching and creative isolation, but they were brightened by a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1947; a Ford Foundation grant to write in Mexico in 1954–1955; and the Grand Prize for Poetry in English at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. At a writers’ conference at Fisk, also in 1966, Hayden was attacked by younger blacks for a lack of racial militance in his poetry. Hayden’s position, however, first articulated in 1948, was that he did not wish to be confined to racial themes or judged by ethnocentric standards. His philosophy of poetry was that it must not be limited by the individual or ethnic identity of the poet. Although inescapably rooted in these elements, poetry must rise to an order of creation that is broadly human and universally effective. He said, “I always wanted to be a Negro, or a black, poet. . . the same way Yeats is an Irish poet.” He was trying, like Yeats, to join the myths, folk culture, and common humanity of his race with his special, transcendent powers of imagination. Hayden’s Baha’i faith, which he adopted in the 1940s, and which emphasized the oneness of all peoples and the spiritual value of art, also helped sustain him as a poet. In the late 1970s he said, “today when so often one gets the feeling that everything is going downhill, that we’re really on the brink of the abyss and what good is anything, I find myself sustained in my attempts to be a poet. . . because I have the assurance of my faith that this is of spiritual value and it is a way of performing some kind of service.”

In 1969 Hayden joined the Department of English of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he taught until his death. During these years, he published Words in the Mourning Time (1970), The Night-Blooming Cereus (1973), Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975), and American Journal (1978, rev. ed., 1982). He was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975 and appointed consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976–1978, the first African American to be selected.

Shifting from a romantic and proletarian approach in Heart-Shape in the Dust to an interest in rich language and baroque effects in The Lion and the Archer, Hayden’s mature work did not appear until A Ballad of Remembrance. Ballad presents the first well-rounded picture of Hayden’s protean subjects and styles as well as his devotion to craft. Selected Poems extends this impression and is followed by Words in the Mourning Time, which responds to the national experience of war, assassination, and racial militance in the late 1960s. Hayden’s next volumes—The Night-Blooming Cereus, the eight new poems in Angle of Ascent, and American Journal—reveal an aging poet yielding to his aesthetic nature and his love of art and beauty for their own sake.

An obsessive wordsmith and experimenter in forms, Hayden searched for words and formal patterns that were cleansed of the egocentric and that gave his subjects their most objective aspect. Believing that expert craft was central, he rejected spontaneous expression in favor of precise realism, scrupulous attention to tone, and carefully wrought verbal mosaics. In Hayden’s poetry, realism and romanticism interact, the former deriving significantly from his interest in black history and folk experience, the latter from his desire to explore subjective reality and to make poetry yield aesthetic pleasure. As Wilburn Williams Jr. has observed, “spiritual enlightenment in his poetry is never the reward of evasion of material fact. The realities of the imagination and the actualities of history are bound together in an intimate symbiotic alliance that makes neither thinkable without the other.” Some of the major themes of Hayden’s poetry are the tension between the tragic nature of life and the richness of the imagination, the past in the present, art as a form of spiritual redemption, and the nurturing power of early life and folk memories. His favorite subjects include the spirit of places, folk characters, his childhood neighborhood, and African American history.

In the debate about the purpose of art, Hayden’s stance, closer to the aesthete than the propagandist, has exposed him to criticism. Yet the coalescence in Hayden’s poetry of African American material with a sophisticated modernism represents a singular achievement in the history of American poetry. His poetry about black culture and history, moreover, reveals the deepest of commitments to his own racial group as well as to humanity as a whole.

Hayden was married in 1940 to Erma Morris, with whom he had one child. He died in Ann Arbor.

HAYNES, LEMUEL

(18 July 1753–28 Sept. 1833), Congregational minister, was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, the son of a black father and a white mother, both unknown, and both of whom abandoned him at birth. He was indentured at five months of age to a white family named Rose, through whom he absorbed strong Calvinist theology and evangelical piety. He was educated in the local schools, but, a serious and diligent child, he also taught himself by the light of the fireside at night; he later said, “I made it my rule to know more every night than I knew in the morning.” In 1783 he married Elizabeth Babbit, a white schoolteacher who had proposed to him; they became the parents of ten children.

Lemuel B. Haynes, Revolutionary War veteran, poet, and Calvinist preacher. Schomburg Center

Haynes fulfilled his indenture and came of age just as the American Revolution was beginning. He signed up as a Minuteman in 1774 and joined militia troops at Roxbury following the Lexington alarm. He joined the Continental army in 1776, marched to Ticonderoga, and was mustered out because he contracted typhus. Haynes remained a lifelong patriot, an admirer of George Washington, an ardent Federalist, and an outspoken critic of Jeffersonianism. He may even have been a member of the secretive Washington Benevolent Society.

Haynes who had poetic aspirations, is thought to be the author of a broadside poem (1774?) lamenting the death of Asa Burt, who was killed when a tree fell on him. He was the author of a patriotic ballad, “The Battle of Lexington” (1775?), which remained unpublished until 1985, after it was discovered by Ruth Bogin in the Houghton Library at Harvard. Although it demonstrates more sincerity than talent, the poem is not entirely without merit: “Freedom & Life, O precious Sounds / yet Freedome does excell / and we will bleed upon the ground / or keep our Freedom still.”

Deciding on the ministry as a career, Haynes turned down an opportunity to attend Dartmouth College and instead studied privately with local ministers. He was licensed to preach in 1780, served the Granville, Connecticut, church for five years, and was ordained to the Congregational ministry on 9 November 1785 by the Association of Ministers in Litchfield County. Haynes was apparently the first African American ordained by a mainstream denomination in the United States. He moved to Torrington, Connecticut, where the congregation included the parents of John Brown. In the tradition of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, Haynes was a New Light Congregationalist who favored revivalism but recognized and was critical of its excesses.

In 1788 Haynes became minister of the west parish in Rutland, Vermont, a conservative congregation he served for thirty years. An effective preacher, he was often invited to speak at ordinations, funerals, and public events. He later recalled that he preached 5,500 sermons in Rutland, four hundred of them at funerals. He and the congregation remained a center of Calvinism in the midst of the Vermont frontier’s rationalism of Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen.

In 1805 Haynes preached a sermon that made an impact far beyond his local circle. In the brief but witty response to visiting Universalist Hosea Ballou, Haynes satirically linked Ballou to the Garden of Eden’s serpent, which, as the title of his homily claimed, also promised “Universal Salvation.” The sermon was printed, and then reprinted, as late as 1865, until more than seventy editions had been issued throughout the Northeast.

Haynes’s humor extended beyond religious satire. When the house of Reverend Ashbel Parmelee burned down, Haynes asked Parmelee if he had lost his sermon manuscripts in the fire. When Parmelee told him that he had, Haynes asked, “Well, don’t you think that they gave more light than they ever had before?” Haynes once inadvertently walked into a hotel dining room where a private party was celebrating Andrew Jackson’s election to the presidency. Handed a glass of wine and invited to offer a toast, Haynes lifted his glass to the new president and said “Andrew Jackson: Psalm 109, verse 8,” then put down the glass and went on his way. When someone later looked up the Bible verse he discovered that it read “Let his days be few and let another take his office.”

Eased out of the Rutland church when he was sixty-five, Haynes moved to Manchester, Vermont, where he became involved in a sensational murder case. Two brothers, Stephen and Jesse Boorn, were in prison, having been convicted of the murder of their mentally unstable brother-in-law, Russell Colvin. Colvin’s body had not been found, but he had disappeared, and several clues (a found button, a bone unearthed by a dog) pointed to the brothers’ guilt. Haynes befriended the Boorns and became convinced of their innocence. Colvin surfaced in New Jersey just before the brothers were to be executed and was brought back to Manchester in a moment of great local drama. Haynes wrote an account of the case, Mystery Developed (1820), which had all the shape of a short story, and he preached a sermon, The Prisoner Released (1820), which warned against convicting a person on the basis of circumstantial evidence. The British novelist Willkie Collins later read about the case and used the dead/alive theme in his story John Jago’s Ghost. Haynes moved once again in 1822, serving the Granville, New York, church, just across the border from Vermont, until his death there.

Haynes has been remembered chiefly as a revolutionary war veteran and has even been omitted from some accounts of African American history, perhaps because he never lived among black people. Because his religious interests have long since been out of fashion, Haynes the theologian and preacher has been ignored, despite the remarkable publishing history of Universal Salvation. Haynes has often been criticized for his failure to speak out against slavery, but recent discoveries of Haynes material may alter that situation. In addition to Haynes’s poem on Lexington, Bogin also found an unpublished manuscript, dating from about 1776, entitled “Liberty Further Extended.” Composed by the young Haynes, probably while he was in the Continental army, it argues, on the basis of natural rights, for an expansion of the Revolution to encompass the liberation of the nation’s African slaves. “Men were made for more noble Ends than to be Drove to market, like Sheep and oxen,” Haynes wrote. “Even an affrican, has Equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen.” The incomplete manuscript was not published until 1983. A more recent discovery, by David Proper, reveals that Haynes preached the funeral sermon in 1821 for LUCY TERRY, the earliest known African American poet. A contemporary newspaper account states that Haynes read a poem that seems to be his own composition and that includes the lines “How long must Ethaopia’s murder’d race / Be doom’d by men to bondage and disgrace?”

Haynes clearly was more race conscious than has been realized; he even identified himself, the author of “The Battle of Lexington,” as “a young Mollato.” In a Fourth of July speech in 1801 marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of American independence, Haynes contrasted European monarchy with American Republicanism and spoke of the plight of “the poor Africans among us.” “What has reduced them to their present pitiful, abject state?” he asked. “Is it any distinction that the God of nature hath made in their formation? Nay, but being subjected to slavery, by the cruel hands of oppressors, they have been taught to view themselves as a rank of being far below others.”

HEALY, ELIZA

(23 Dec. 1846–13 Sept. 1919), Roman Catholic nun, was born a slave in Jones County, Georgia, the daughter of Michael Morris Healy, a well-to-do plantation owner, and Eliza Clark, one of his slaves. Michael Morris Healy was a native of Ireland who had immigrated to Jones County near Macon, Georgia, where, after acquiring land and slaves, he became a prosperous planter. Eliza Clark had nine surviving children by Michael Healy, who acknowledged his children and carefully made provisions for their eventual removal outside of Georgia, where at that time, the manumission of slaves was virtually impossible.

Eliza Healy’s mother died in the spring of 1850 and her father in the summer of the same year. By that time, her five older brothers and one older sister had already been sent north to be educated. The youngest three children, including Eliza, were successfully brought out of Georgia and sent to New York.

Although he was a Catholic, Michael Healy did not have his children baptized. In the North, however, several of the Healy children pursued vocations in their father’s faith. The three youngest siblings, including Eliza, were baptized in New York in 1851. Their eldest brother, JAMES HEALY, was at that time a seminarian in Montreal. In 1854 in Paris he was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Boston and in 1875 became the second bishop of Portland, Maine, and the first African American bishop in the United States. Two other brothers also became Roman Catholic priests. PATRICK HEALY was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1865 and became president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1874. A third brother, (Alexander) Sherwood Healy, served as a priest for the Diocese of Boston beginning in 1858. A fourth brother, MICHAEL HEALY, chose a secular path; he became a sea captain in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service.

Both Eliza and her younger sister, (Amanda) Josephine, studied in schools operated by the sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal. At the same time, their older sister, Martha, was professed a nun in the same community in 1855. (Martha left the community with a dispensation from her vows in 1863.) After finishing her secondary education in 1861, Eliza, with Josephine, rejoined other members of the Healy family in the Boston area. About a dozen years later both sisters chose to lead the religious life.

Eliza was twenty-seven when she entered the novitiate of the congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal in 1874, and she made her first profession in 1876. Following the custom of the sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame, she received the religious name of Sister Saint Mary Magdalen. In the beginning of her religious life, she taught in various schools operated by the Congregation of Notre Dame in Canada. She was superior of a convent for the first time in Huntington, Quebec, from 1895 to 1897, during which time her administrative gifts first became apparent. She returned to the mother house of the Sisters of Notre Dame in Montreal, where she was put in charge of English Studies and then served as a teacher in the Normal School from 1900 to 1903.

Sister Saint Mary Magdalen served longest at Villa Barlow in St. Albans, Vermont. From 1903 to 1918 she was superior and headmistress of the school, and during that time she completely restored and reorganized the school and community. The annals of the congregation recount the precarious financial situation at Villa Barlow when she took over; the community was almost ready to abandon the site: “She had to struggle against the parish and even the diocesan authorities. Her wisdom enabled her to unravel the complicated problems, to assure the resources, to pay the debts, and to make this . . . mission one of our most prosperous houses in the United States.” Sister Saint Mary Magdalen also paid close attention to issues of health and hygiene for both the pupils and the sisters in her charge.

In 1918 she was sent to be superior of the Academy of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament on Staten Island, New York. In a few months she was able to improve the financial situation of the college, but her stay was brief. Her health declined rapidly, and she returned to the mother house in Montreal, where she died of heart disease the following summer.

Notices on Sister Saint Mary Magdalen by members of her community describe her as an indefatigable and somewhat demanding superior with a gift for business and organization. Her leadership qualities and her spirituality, such as her devotion to prayer, were especially remarked on by the sisters who had lived with her. Her relationship with the other sisters was described in the annals: “The sisters loved this superior, so just, so attractive, so upright! . . . she reserved the heaviest tasks for herself. . . in the kitchen, in the garden, in the housework. . . . She listened to everyone, . . . was equal to everything. . . spared herself nothing . . . so that nothing was lacking to make the family life [of the community] perfect.”

While none of the Healy siblings ever spoke publicly about the issue of race, it remains at the heart of the family’s story. Both Bishop Healy and his brother Alexander were visibly black, but Patrick Healy’s racial identity was not well known outside of the Jesuit order. None of the priest brothers involved themselves with the black Catholic community. In the same way, it seems that their gifted and dedicated sister lived out her life of leadership and service far removed from the world of her mother and the harsh circumstances faced by those of her mother’s African heritage.

HEALY, JAMES AUGUSTINE

(6 Apr. 1830–5 Aug. 1900), Roman Catholic bishop, was born in Jones County, Georgia, the son of Michael Morris Healy, a planter, and his slave Eliza Clark. James’s early years were spent in the insular world of Healy’s 1,600-acre plantation. When he reached school age, James and his brothers Hugh and PATRICK HEALY were placed by their father in a Quaker school in Flushing, New York. Eventually all nine of the Healy siblings, including MICHAEL HEALY and ELIZA HEALY, left Georgia for the North.

In 1844 Healy and his brothers transferred to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a new Jesuit school established by Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick of Boston. Healy thrived in his new environment, excelling academically and experiencing a spiritual awakening that led to his decision to enter the priesthood in 1848. The Jesuit novitiate was in Maryland, a slave state, so with the help of Fitzpatrick, Healy in 1849 entered the Sulpician Seminary in Montreal, Canada. After receiving his MA two years later, Healy entered the seminary of St. Sulpice in Issy, France, where he worked toward becoming a professor of theology and philosophy. However, following the deaths of his parents in 1850 and of his brother Hugh in a freak accident in 1853, Healy felt called to return to the United States.

In Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on 10 June 1854, Healy became the first African American to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest. He then returned to Boston, where he became an assistant pastor of the Moon Street Church and an administrator of the House of the Guardian Angel, a home for orphaned boys. Fitzpatrick soon brought Healy onto his staff and gave him the responsibility of organizing the chancery office. In June 1855 Healy officially became the first chancellor of the diocese of Boston, loyally serving Fitzpatrick and learning from him the subtleties of Catholic leadership in New England’s anti-Catholic environment.

In 1857, after Fitzpatrick became ill, Healy took over many of the bishop’s duties. Plans to build a new cathedral were delayed because of the Civil War, and in 1862 Healy became the rector of a makeshift cathedral that had been a Unitarian church. As the war climaxed, he helped found the Home for Destitute Catholic Children, bringing in the Sisters of Charity to run it in 1865.

After Fitzpatrick’s death in 1866, the new bishop, John Joseph Williams, appointed Healy as the pastor of St. James Church, the largest Catholic congregation in Boston. If Healy was concerned that as a southerner of African descent he would be unacceptable to the predominantly Irish parishioners, he kept this concern to himself, and he soon won over the congregation through firm spiritual leadership and a tender affection for those in need. As one parishioner said, if Healy “had any such thing as an inferiority complex concealed about his person, his Irish congregation never discovered it, for he ruled them—and they were not easy to rule” (Foley, 109).

A highlight of Healy’s years as the pastor of St. James was the establishment in 1867 of the House of the Good Shepherd, a refuge for homeless girls. However, his success as an apologist for the Catholic church before the Massachusetts legislature in March 1874 was perhaps his most impressive achievement. The legislature was considering the taxation of churches and other religious institutions, and Healy defended Catholic institutions—including schools, hospitals, and orphanages—as vital organizations that helped the state both socially and financially. He also eloquently condemned the laws that were already in place, which were generally enforced only on Catholic institutions.

James Augustine Healy was the first African American to become a Roman Catholic priest in 1854 and bishop in 1875. Holy Cross Special Collections

Healy’s success in the public sphere and his exemplary service as pastor of St. James led to his election by Pope Pius IX as the second bishop of Portland, Maine, in February 1875. Again he was concerned that the color of his skin would undermine his authority, particularly in regard to the fifty-two priests of the diocese. His fears, however, were never realized. Although Healy’s personal history was the source of some intrigue and prejudice among his flock, his ability and pastoral excellence reduced the matter to a nonissue. He took firm control of the diocese, which covered all of Maine and New Hampshire and was growing rapidly as a result of Irish and French Canadian immigration. Relying on the savvy of John M. Mitchell, a prominent local lawyer well schooled in Maine’s political and social intricacies, Healy helped unify his parishes in an era when Catholics were often divided by ethnic differences.

Healy oversaw the founding of sixty parishes, eighteen schools (including American Indian schools), and sixty-eight charitable institutions within the diocese. In 1884, at Healy’s suggestion, the diocese was divided by state lines, and a separate diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, was established. Healy helped set up his former chancellor, Denis Bradley, as its first bishop. He also oversaw the establishment of the state’s first Catholic college in 1886, as St. Mary’s College in Van Buren opened its doors. Under Healy, dozens of religious congregations were established, many of French Canadian origin. By 1900 the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame, the Dominicans, the Marist Brothers, and the Christian Brothers were all established in various educational and institutional positions throughout the state.

While the quality of Healy’s career proves that a person’s race is not the essential characteristic by which he or she can be judged, his desire to avoid the issue led to several lost opportunities to condemn the sin of racism on a national stage. Even after the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, which placed Healy on the newly formed Commission on Negro and Indian Missions, he refused to participate in organizations that were specifically African American. Three times, in 1889, 1890, and 1892, Healy declined to speak at the Congress of Colored Catholics. His legacy as the first African American Catholic bishop is at least partially diminished by this reticence.

Although Healy was haunted by racism throughout his life, he never allowed it to affect his duties. His graceful attitude toward the problem is exemplified by an encounter he had with a young parishioner during the sacrament of penance. The teenage girl, unaware that her confessor was Healy himself, admitted that she had “said the bishop was as black as the devil.” Healy responded, “Don’t say the bishop is as black as the devil. You can say the bishop is as black as coal, or as black as the ace of spades. But don’t say the bishop is as black as the devil!” (Foley, 145).

Healy was a religious leader whose intelligence, spiritual conviction, and dedicated service inevitably defined him and created a devoted, if not wholly color-blind, following. He died in Portland, Maine.

HEALY, MICHAEL

(22 Sept. 1839–30 Aug. 1904), Coast Guard officer and Alaska pioneer, was born Michael Augustine Healy in Jones County, Georgia, to Michael Morris Healy, an immigrant from Ireland, and Eliza Clark, a mixed-race slave owned by Michael Morris Healy. Michael was the sixth of nine surviving children born to his parents, who, though never legally married, maintained a common-law relationship for more than twenty years, neither one of them ever marrying anyone else. Michael Morris Healy was barred by Georgia law from emancipating either his wife or his children, but he treated them as family members rather than as slaves, even as he owned fifty other slaves. He was a successful cotton planter and amassed the resources to send his children north before the Civil War, which he did as each approached school age, beginning in 1844. The children exhibited a wide range of complexion, but most of them, including young Michael, were light-skinned enough so that anyone who did not know the family’s story remained unaware of their racial heritage, presuming them to be white.

Captain Healy, pictured here on USRC Bear, was such a stern officer he was nicknamed “Hell-Roaring Mike.” Corbis

Michael followed his older brothers to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850. They had flourished there, and three of them made the decision to become Catholic priests. JAMES HEALY, the first African American ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, eventually became the bishop of Portland, Maine; another, PATRICK HEALY, the first African American to earn a PhD and to be ordained a Jesuit priest, served as president of Georgetown University; (Alexander) Sherwood Healy, was the rector of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston. Two sisters, (Amanda) Josephine and ELIZA HEALY, became Catholic nuns, serving in convents and schools in the United States and Canada. Michael, however, had no interest in a religious career. Instead, he ran away from Holy Cross and by 1855 had found work in the maritime trades, serving on a succession of merchant vessels as a deckhand, mate, and, finally, second or first officer.

In September 1863 Healy enlisted in the United States Revenue Cutter Service (USRCS), the precursor of the modern-day Coast Guard. A year later he applied for an officer’s commission, and, with the help of his brother James, who had connections among several important Republican politicians in Boston, he was appointed a second lieutenant. No mention of his racial background was made during the appointment process; had he been identified as having African American ancestry, he would almost certainly have been prevented from securing an officer’s rank. Instead, officials of the USRCS were allowed to think that he was white. Shortly afterward, in January 1865, he married Mary Jane Roach, the daughter of Irish immigrants to Boston; they would eventually have one son.

For the next several years, Healy had a series of routine assignments on USRCS cutters based in Newport, Rhode Island; New Bedford, Massachusetts; and New York City, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. In the summer of 1874 he was assigned to the USRCS fleet based in San Francisco, charged with patrolling the waters off Alaska, which the United States had purchased from Russia a few years earlier. The USRCS was the only government agency enforcing law and order in the northern Pacific, the Bering Sea, and the Arctic Ocean. Cutters made annual summer cruises in those waters, conducting basic exploration and scientific work, assisting commercial vessels, policing the whaling fleet, apprehending smugglers, and helping both setders and natives. In March 1883 Healy was promoted to the rank of captain, becoming the first African American captain in the USRCS, a distinction he would not have claimed, and did not claim, for himself.

In 1886 Healy was given command of the ship Bear; the fame of the vessel and her captain grew steadily over the next decade as they went about their regular tasks. Exploration was high on the list. Twice, with the Bear anchored offshore, Healy sent exploring parties in launches upriver in search of overland routes to Alaska’s northern slope. Although no practical routes were identified, the explorers catalogued much of the flora and fauna of inland Alaska for the first time, which Healy later published in two widely respected reports. Healy supervised efforts to protect wildlife, focusing particularly on attempts (not wholly successful) to prevent the overhunting of seals on the open seas. He provided regular assistance to the diminishing American whaling fleet concentrated above the Arctic Circle, which frequently entailed freeing whaling ships trapped in the ice and rescuing seamen stranded by shipwreck. Healy’s contact with Inuit and Aleut natives culminated in his unusual plan to introduce domesticated reindeer into Alaska in the hope of improving native self-sufficiency. Beginning in 1891 he sailed repeatedly back and forth, buying reindeer from natives in Siberia who had been herding them for centuries, transporting the animals on the cutter, and establishing herds for the Alaska natives, among whom such herding had been unknown. By disrupting the illegal traffic in liquor and guns, Healy also attempted to curb the abuse of natives by white settlers from the United States.

Healy’s endeavors earned him a wide reputation. Ask anyone in the Arctic “Who is the greatest man in America?,” the New York Sun claimed in 1894, and the swift answer would be “Why, Mike Healy.” His picturesque career was the stuff of novels, and, in fact, he appeared in a fictionalized but reasonably accurate portrayal in James Michener’s best-selling 1989 book, Alaska. Eventually, however, Healy’s stern, no-nonsense approach to law enforcement and his aggressive personality—for which he had been nicknamed “Hell-Roaring Mike”—proved his undoing. After several minor complaints were lodged against him, Healy was tried before a court-martial in San Francisco in 1890, charged with the cruel treatment of prisoners in his custody.

The trial became a rallying cry for temperance forces, who accused Healy of having been drunk at the time. While he was acquitted of all charges on that occasion, he was less fortunate six years later, when he was tried again, this time for abusive treatment of his own men and public drunkenness. At his 1896 trial Healy was found guilty. Although he could have been dismissed from the USRCS, his punishment was less severe. Instead, he was placed in the indeterminate status of “waiting orders,” and he was made to suffer the embarrassment of being dropped to the bottom of the list of captains in the service, which was normally arranged by seniority. Neither in his trials nor in the newspaper accounts of them was his racial background raised as an issue; it apparently remained unknown, even to his opponents, who probably would have used it against him had they been aware of it.

Shortly after the turn of the century, Healy briefly achieved a kind of redemption when he was once again given command of USRCS ships. Healy retired from the service in the fall of 1903 and died the following summer. Today, his trailblazing position as the first black captain of the USRCS is celebrated, and in 1997 the Coast Guard commissioned an icebreaker named for him, recognizing that distinction. In his own lifetime, however, Healy exemplified the desire of some African Americans to pass in order to have successful careers in the white community.

HEALY, PATRICK FRANCIS

(2 Feb. 1834–10 Jan. 1910), Jesuit priest and university president, was born in Jones County, Georgia, the son of Michael Morris Healy, an Irish American planter, and Eliza Clark, an African American woman he had purchased. The senior Healy deserted from the British army in Canada during the War of 1812 and by 1818 had made his way to rural Georgia where he settled, speculated in land, and acquired a sizable plantation and numerous slaves. Healy acknowledged Eliza as “my trusty woman” in his will, which provided that she be paid an annuity, transported to a free state, and “not bartered or sold or disposed of in any way” should he predecease her. Healy also acknowledged his nine children by Eliza, although by state law they were slaves he owned, and he arranged for them to leave Georgia and move to the North, where they would become free.

After first sending his older sons to a Quaker school in Flushing, New York, Michael Healy by chance met John Fitzpatrick, then the Roman Catholic bishop coadjutor of Boston, who told him about the new Jesuit College of the Holy Cross opening in Worcester, Massachusetts. Patrick, along with three of his brothers, was enrolled in Holy Cross in 1844. A sister, Martha, was sent to the Notre Dame sisters’ school in Boston. Patrick graduated in 1850, the year after his older brother JAMES HEALY was literally the first person to receive a diploma from the fledgling college. At Holy Cross the Healy brothers’ race was fully known and generally accepted without incident. In one poignant letter, however, Patrick Healy wrote, “Remarks are sometime made which wound my very heart. You know to what I refer. . . I have with me a younger brother Michael. He is obliged to go through the same ordeal.”

Although none of the Healy children were baptized until coming North, brothers James, Hugh, Patrick, and Sherwood were baptized at Holy Cross in 1844, and by 1851, all of the Healy children had been baptized. So it is not surprising that Patrick Healy decided to emulate his friends and protectors and enter the Society of Jesus. He matriculated at the order’s novitiate in Frederick, Maryland, where his light skin apparently kept him from being identified as African American and thus in school contrary to the law.

In 1874 Patrick Francis Healy, the first African American Jesuit, became president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Library of Congress

After making his Jesuit vows in 1852, Healy taught at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia and was then assigned back to Holy Cross, where he taught a variety of courses. In 1858 he was sent to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to continue his own studies in philosophy and theology, but soon he was abruptly reassigned to Rome, probably because his race had become an issue. His brother James, who had decided to enter the secular priesthood, attended the Sulpician seminaries in Montreal and Paris because it was not possible for a black person to be enrolled in an American school.

Patrick Healy’s delicate health did not long tolerate the weather in Rome, so he was sent to the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. He was ordained to the priesthood on 3 September 1864 by Bishop Lamont in Liegé and then stayed on at Louvain to complete a doctorate in philosophy. He received his degree on 26 July 1865, apparently the first African American to earn a PhD. He returned to the United States the next year, after further spiritual training in France, and was assigned to teach philosophy at Georgetown.

Healy took his final vows as a Jesuit on 2 February 1867, the first African American to do so. If the illegitimacy of his birth made his ordination problematic, church officials overlooked this fact, as they did in the case of his brother James, who had become in 1854 the first African American ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood. Patrick Healy moved quickly through the administrative ranks at Georgetown, becoming prefect of studies, or dean, and then vice president. When the president, the Reverend John Early, died unexpectedly in 1873, Healy was named acting president. Following confirmation by authorities in Rome, he was inaugurated the twenty-ninth president of Georgetown on 31 July 1874.

Patrick Healy’s influence on Georgetown was so far-reaching that he is often referred to as the school’s “second founder,” following Archbishop John Carroll. Healy did, in fact, transform a small nineteenth-century college into a major twentieth-century university. He modernized the curriculum by requiring courses in the sciences, particularly chemistry and physics. He expanded and upgraded the schools of law and medicine. He centralized libraries, arranged for scholastic awards to students, and created an alumni organization. The most visible result of Healy’s presidency was the construction of a large building begun in 1877 and first used in 1881. The imposing Healy Hall, with its 200-foot tower, contained classrooms, offices, and dormitories; its Belgian Gothic style was clearly reminiscent of Louvain. Paying for the building became somewhat problematic, however, when stories of Healy’s race, never a secret, circulated through Washington.

Healy’s influence extended beyond Georgetown as he mixed in the nation’s capital with presidents of the United States and other government officials as well as the parents of Georgetown students. He served as head of the Catholic Commission on Indian Affairs. He preached often in Catholic churches in the Washington area, including St. Augustine’s, an African American parish. He was present at the cornerstone laying of this church in 1874 and at the dedication of its new building in 1876. He spoke at congressional hearings in opposition to taxes on religious and educational institutions.

Healy’s health was never robust, and he apparently suffered from epilepsy, which grew more serious with age. Upon the advice of his physician, he retired from the Georgetown presidency on 16 February 1882. Several assignments followed, but they existed largely in name only: St. Joseph’s Church, Providence, Rhode Island; St. Lawrence Church, New York City; and St. Joseph’s College, Philadelphia. In fact, in retirement he traveled extensively through Europe and the United States, often in the company of his brother James. He spent his last two years in the Georgetown infirmary, where he died, survived only by his sister ELIZA HEALY.

Patrick Healy’s brothers and sisters led equally significant lives. James became bishop of Portland, Maine. (Alexander) Sherwood became a professor of moral theology and accompanied Boston archbishop John J. Williams to Vatican I as his personal theologian. Eliza became Sister Mary Magdalen, a superior in the Notre Dame sisters. MICHAEL HEALY, the only sibling not to follow a religious vocation, became “Hell Roaring Mike,” captain of a U.S. revenue cutter in the Arctic and North Pacific.

HEDGEMAN, ANNA ARNOLD

(5 July 1899–17 Jan. 1990), civil rights and women’s rights activist, and government administrator was born Anna Arnold in Marshalltown, Iowa, to Marie Ellen Parker and William James Arnold II. The granddaughter of slaves, Anna grew up in Anoka, Minnesota. Her parents, particularly her father, stressed the importance of education, religion, and discipline. Anna attended Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1918 to 1922. She majored in English and pursued her studies with a passion that marked the way she lived her life. In 1919 she attended a lecture given by W. E. B. DU BOIS, who had just returned from the Pan-African Conference held in Paris. This was her initial exposure to the African freedom struggles.

In the spring of 1922 Arnold became Hamline University’s first black graduate. Shortly afterward she boarded a train for Holly Springs, Mississippi, and began her teaching career at Rust College. On her trip to the South, she confronted the realities of the Jim Crow transportation system when she was forced to change trains halfway through the ride.

Rust College was a vibrant place, but its resources were stretched to the limit. During her two years in Holly Springs, Arnold began to grasp the devastating impact of racism. At the same time she learned about black history from Dr. J. Leonard Farmer, the dean of Rust College and the father of future civil rights leader JAMES FARMER. Frustrated by her inability to effect change, Arnold returned to the North in 1924, eager to work in a world she believed was more tolerant about race relations. But she quickly became disillusioned. Unable to secure a teaching position in a predominantly white school, Arnold realized that racism in the North was often more subtle, but just as devastating as it was in the South.

On the advice of a friend, Arnold sought a job with the YWCA and soon began work with the Negro branch in Springfield, Ohio. But she became increasingly angry about the way racism divided resources along the color line. Searching for a community and a place to belong, she made her way to the Northeast, first working at the Negro branch of the Jersey City YWCA and then settling in Harlem. She served as the Harlem YWCA’s membership secretary and participated in the branch’s stimulating cultural and educational programs. In 1933 she married Merritt Hedgeman, an interpreter and singer of black folk music and opera, and the couple made their home in New York City.

Ironically, the Depression enabled the relative newcomer to get a city administration job. Starting in 1934 she worked with the Emergency Relief Bureau (later the Department of Welfare), first as a supervisor and then as a consultant on racial problems. By the late 1930s Hedgeman had resigned from the Department of Welfare to assume the directorship of the Negro branch of the Brooklyn YWCA. Yet, even while she held that position, she organized the Citizens’ Coordinating Committee to advocate for city jobs for black workers. Through her efforts and leadership, black New Yorkers secured the first 150 provisional appointments the city had ever given the black community.

In 1941 Hedgeman helped A. PHILIP RANDOLPH with his first March on Washington effort. As World War II drew to a close, Randolph asked Hedgeman to be executive director of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). She spoke at rallies with other civil rights advocates and led strategy meetings on how to move legislation through Congress. Despite the pressure to maintain the FEPC, Congress eliminated the program.

Hedgeman’s work with the FEPC however, had attracted national attention. Congressman William Dawson of Chicago brought her on board the National Citizens for the Re-Election of President Truman campaign. For her commitment to the Democratic Party, she received a high-level federal appointment as assistant director of the Federal Security Agency, which later became the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

In 1953 Hedgeman traveled to India at the request of Ambassador Chester Bowles. She spent three months there as part of a social work delegation, and she lectured, met with students, and studied. Shortly after her return from India, President Eisenhower took office, and Hedgeman, a Democratic appointee, left Washington. Settling back in New York City, she immediately became involved in Harlem politics. Hedgeman became the first African American in Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.’s cabinet in 1954. Her responsibilities included serving as the mayor’s adviser and as a representative to the United Nations. In 1958 Hedgeman resigned from Wagner’s administration and turned her energies to the private sector. She did not stay out of politics for long.

Local insurgents in the Bronx approached Hedgeman to run for the U.S. Congress in 1960. Although she was defeated in the primaries, she continued her activism locally and overseas. In July 1960 she flew to Ghana to deliver the keynote address for the First Conference of African Women and Women of African Descent. While there she met with African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba.

Hedgeman aggressively pursued civil rights, again working closely with A. Philip Randolph as a major architect of the 1963 March on Washington. The only woman on a nine-member organizing committee, she challenged the male leaders, insisting that women be recognized for their tremendous contributions to the movement and that at least one woman be put on the official program.

As the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 made its way through Congress, Hedgeman, then the assistant director of the Committee on Race Relations for the National Council of Churches, helped coordinate the lobbying effort to get the stalled bill out of the Senate. Years of experience had taught her that the only hope of moving the president or Congress on race issues was through sustained public pressure.

In 1965 Hedgeman was asked to run for New York City council president. She suffered a defeat but maintained her commitment to electoral politics. In 1968 she ran for office one last time, for the New York State Assembly. Her opponent, incumbent CHARLES RANGEL, beat her in the primaries. Even as she fought for civil rights and pursued elected office, Hedgeman worked for women’s equality. She was among the National Organization for Women’s earliest members and served on its board of directors.

Hedgeman, who published autobiographies in 1964 and 1977, received an honorary doctorate from Hamline University and numerous awards for her work on race relations. She died in Harlem Hospital in January 1990.

HEIGHT, DOROTHY

(24 Mar. 1912–) was born Dorothy Irene Height in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of James Height, a building and painting contractor who became active in Republican politics, and Fannie Burroughs, a nurse and household worker, both twice widowed with children from earlier marriages. As a child, Dorothy loved to read, liked challenges, and always kept busy. When she was four, she and her family moved to Rankin, Pennsylvania, a small borough of Pittsburgh, during the Great Migration. Fannie participated in the black women’s club movement through the Pennsylvania Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, and Dorothy recalled going with her mother to every state and national meeting and hearing the imperative of “uplifting the race.”

Rankin was an ethnically diverse community, and Dorothy attended school with Germans, Croatians, Jews, Italians, Poles, and children of other ethnicities. Growing up, she generally experienced very little prejudice. Her first brush with racism, however, occurred when she was eight years old, when Sarah Hay, one of her Irish Catholic friends, refused to play with her one day because she was a “nigger.” As she grew older, Dorothy would have other, more intense racist encounters. As a student, she proved to be exceptional. In addition to excelling at academics, she won several speech contests and had a passion for music, even cowriting the alma mater for her high school. She graduated from Rankin High School in June of 1929, after which she studied social work and psychology at New York University (NYU). While in college, Height worked as a proofreader for the Negro World, MARCUS GARVEY’s widely circulated newspaper. In 1932, after just three years, she finished her BA and one year later earned an MA in Educational Psychology, also from NYU. Her college years paralleled the Harlem Renaissance and had allowed her to meet and hear presentations by W. E. B. DU BOIS, PAUL ROBESON, COUNTÉE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, and others.

After finishing college, Height began a long career as a social worker. Her first job, for which she was paid twenty dollars a month, was with the Brownsville Community Center in Brooklyn, where she addressed the community’s high delinquency and unemployment rates. Soon after, she became an investigator for the Home Relief Bureau of the New York City Welfare Administration, earning twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents a week. She also worked with other community leaders to quell the Harlem riots of 1935. This riot began after a young African American stole a knife from a Harlem store. Rumors spread that he had been beaten to death, so crowds formed, accusing the white merchants of discrimination in employment and the police of brutality. The ensuing violence resulted in the death of three African Americans and the destruction of over two million dollars in property.

During this time Height worked with the United Christian Youth Movement of North America (UCYMNA), became president of the New York State Christian Youth Council, chaired the Harlem Youth Council, and attended the UCYMNA-sponsored World Conference on Life and Work of the Churches in Oxford, England, where she worked with BENJAMIN MAYS and his wife, Sadie. Over time Height’s sphere extended to Africa, where she worked with Africans in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, and Guinea. Eventually the U.S. State Department noticed her work and appointed her to its advisory panel on Africa.

Inspired by the Oxford conference, Dorothy helped organize the World Conference of Christian Youth, a global conference of young Christians held in Amsterdam in August 1939. Several months later Height resigned from the Home Relief Bureau and took a job as assistant executive director of the New York YWCA. The New York World’s Fair brought thousands of young African American women to the city in 1939 in search of employment. In helping these young women, Height learned of the “Bronx slave market,” where women waited on street corners for jobs as domestics, only to be exploited, physically and financially, by employers. Height fought, unsuccessfully, to have this practice abolished. She also fought to secure antilynching legislation, eliminate segregation in the armed forces, and reform of the criminal justice system.

At the third annual meeting of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), held in November 1937, Height met the NCNW’s founder, MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, and the keynote speaker, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Shortly thereafter, Bethune appointed Height to the NCNW’s resolutions committee, and in 1938 she worked with Roosevelt on the World Conference of Youth, held at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Years later, in 1961, Height worked with Roosevelt again after President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. As Height later recalled, “It was a privilege to know Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Bethune, two extraordinary women” (93).

Height continued her work with the YWCA, taking a position as executive director of the PHILLIS WHEATLEY YWCA in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1939. Five years later she returned to New York, becoming secretary for interracial education on the YWCA’s national board, a position she felt would better allow her to “make a contribution to the national effort to end racism and segregation” (107). Height helped the YWCA adopt its first Interracial Charter in 1946, a very difficult task in light of the resistance on the part of many white southern YWCA branches. In 1965 she became the director of the YWCA’s office of racial justice, a position she held until her retirement from the organization in 1977. In 2000 President Bill Clinton became the first recipient of the YWCA Dorothy I. Height Racial Justice Award.

Dorothy Height had joined the Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1939. Two years later she became chair of its social action program, and from 1947 to 1956, she served as president of the sorority. Over the years she moved the Delta’s annual convention from a church basement to the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, Missouri. Height developed the organization’s Job Opportunity Project and began the Delta bookmobile project in Georgia, an effort that led the state to start providing rural and poor children with library services.

In 1957, two years after the death of Mary McLeod Bethune, Height became the NCNW’s fourth president, a position she still holds at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Over the next four decades, under Height’s leadership, the NCNW created the Bethune Museum and Archives, the first national archive on black women and published the organization’s first book. She also established the annual Black Family Reunion Celebration and an anonymous debtors’ program to help young black women with their finances; both programs were designed to strengthen the black family. The NCNW, which became tax exempt in 1966, confronted unemployment, hunger and malnutrition, the problems of poor housing and public health and participated in the March on Washington, voter education drives in the North, and numerous civil rights projects in Mississippi during the 1960s. Height herself participated in almost every major civil and human rights event, working closely with MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., ROY WILKINS, WHITNEY YOUNG, and A. PHILIP RANDOLPH among others.

In 1995 Height spearheaded the purchase of the NCNW’s national headquarters, the historic Sears House on 633 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C. The NCNW, which includes more than four million women, shares its headquarters with the Dorothy I. Height Leadership Institute and the National Centers for African American Women. According to Height, the NCNW’s “great strength has been that it builds leadership skills in women by emphasizing self-reliance, unity, and the commitment to working collaboratively” (271).

Height received the Citizens Medal Award from President Ronald Reagan in 1989 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from President Bill Clinton in 1994. In her 2003 memoir, she reminded readers that while American leaders travel the world selling democracy and expressing concern for human rights, “many here at home still cannot enjoy the simplest benefits guaranteed by the Constitution because of endemic, institutionalized racism. Institutionalized racism is more than debilitating—it is disastrous for the nation. It is long past time to end it, completely, everywhere” (268–269).

HEMINGS, SALLY

(1773–1835), slave and Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, whose given name probably was Sarah, was born in Virginia, the daughter of the slave Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings and, allegedly, John Wayles, a merchant and planter. (Family members spell the surname both Hemings and Hemmings.) After Wayles’s death in 1773, Betty Hemings and her children became the property of Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. From an early age Sally Hemings was a personal servant of Jefferson’s daughter Mary (later Maria), whom she accompanied to France in 1787, when Sally was fourteen and Mary nine.

It is not known whether Sally, while in Paris, lived at Mary’s convent school or at Jefferson’s residence on the Champs-Elysées, where her brother James Hemings was chef de cuisine. Jefferson’s expenditures during her two-year residence in Paris indicate that Sally received further training in the skills of a lady’s maid, and she acted in that capacity for Jefferson’s older daughter, Martha, when the latter began going out in Parisian society in 1789. She intermittently received a small monthly wage during this period.

Jefferson, his two daughters, and his two slaves returned to Virginia at the end of 1789. Despite her long association with Jefferson’s younger daughter, Sally Hemings remained at Monticello after Maria Jefferson’s marriage and departure in 1797. Her son Madison Hemings remembered that she took care of Jefferson’s chamber and wardrobe and did “such light work as sewing, &c.” Jefferson’s records reveal only that she was one of the “house-maids,” that she bore six children, two of whom died as infants, and that, at Jefferson’s death in 1826, she was still a slave, valued in the appraisal of his property at fifty dollars.

There is no certain information on Sally Hemings’s status after Jefferson’s death. It seems likely that she was unofficially freed by Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph, whose 1834 will asked that “Sally” be given her “time.” This may have been intended to legitimize an existing situation. She appears in an 1833 “List of Free Negroes & Mulattoes” with her son Madison, who recalled that his mother lived with him in Charlottesville until her death.

Madison Hemings, freed in Jefferson’s will, related his life story to an Ohio journalist in 1873. It is this account, selectively accepted by historians, that contains most of what is known about the Hemings family. Hemings is the main source for the allegation that John Wayles was the father of Sally Hemings and five of her siblings. He also stated that he and his own brothers and sisters were Thomas Jefferson’s children, the result of a relationship that began in Paris. When his account was published in 1873, the story of a possible sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings had long been part of the public discourse. It had been transformed from local gossip to national news in the fall of 1802, when an article in the Richmond Recorder began, “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is sally.” The author was James Thomson Callender, a disgruntled convert to the Federalist cause after his former heroes on the Republican side failed to “reward” him with a postmastership. Other Federalist writers quickly incorporated the tale in their attacks on President Jefferson and his administration. Jefferson himself was silent on the issue. In accordance with his practice in regard to personal attacks, he never publicly denied a connection. One private letter, which might be interpreted as a denial, remains ambiguous. His own family members were consistent in their disbelief but made their denials privately.

For the rest of the century the allegation that the author of the Declaration of Independence kept his own children in slavery was taken up by critics of Jefferson’s party, his region, and his country. Skeptical British travelers, highlighting the hypocrisy of the American experiment, repeated and embellished the story, and antislavery activists of the antebellum period used the relationship to emphasize the exploitation of the slavery system.

In the meantime, more quietly, a belief in their Jefferson ancestry passed from generation to generation of Sally Hemings’s descendants. Their side of the story was first given wider circulation in 1974 in Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History by Fawn M. Brodie, one of the very few Jefferson biographers to accept the Hemings-Jefferson connection. At the center of Brodie’s psychological portrait is an enduring relationship between master and slave, romantic rather than exploitative. It is her version that captured and has held the public imagination since that time.

In the absence of solid evidence to prove or refute its existence, the possible relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was the subject of vigorous and shifting debate for almost two centuries. The story became a convenient symbol for some of the anomalies of American history and complexities of American society, and African Americans in the twentieth century viewed its denial by historians as symbolic of the negation of oral traditions—often the only possible link to their ancestors in slavery. The results of DNA testing of Hemings and Jefferson descendants, published in the fall of 1998, strongly indicate, however, that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s youngest son, Eston, and perhaps all her known children. While the debate has turned to issues of family and master-slave relations, the findings have in effect deepened the enigma of Jefferson’s character. Even more elusive, however, is the figure at the heart of the controversy, Sally Hemings herself.

HENDRIX, JIMI

(27 Nov. 1942–18 Sept. 1970), rock guitarist, singer, and songwriter, was born into a working-class black family in Seattle, Washington, the son of James Allen Ross Hendrix, a gardener, and Lucille Jetter. Named Johnny Allen Hendrix at birth by his mother while his father was in the service, his name was changed to James Marshall Hendrix by his father upon his return home. Self-taught as a left-handed guitarist from an early age, Hendrix played a right-handed guitar upside down, a practice he maintained throughout his life since it allowed for unusual fingering patterns and quicker access to tone and volume controls. His early influences ranged from jazz guitarist Charlie Christian to blues guitarists and honking rhythm and blues saxophone soloists. He attended elementary school in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle and went to Garfield High School in Seattle. In his senior year, he left high school to become a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army.

At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Hendrix formed a rhythm and blues band, the Casuals, with bassist Billy Cox, who would rejoin him years later at the height of his fame. Following his discharge from the army in 1962, he moved to Nashville, where he played with some locally successful rhythm and blues groups and recorded a demonstration tape with the soul guitarist Steve Cropper, one of many guitarists to have an influence on Hendrix’s maturing style. After a brief tour in 1963 with LITTLE RICHARD, Hendrix was in great demand as a sideman, performing with a number of established figures and groups such as Solomon Burke, Ike and Tina Turner, Jackie Wilson, B. B. KING, and, later, the Isley Brothers and Curtis Knight. In 1963–1964 Hendrix’s guitar playing was increasingly influenced by traditional bluesmen such as ROBERT JOHNSON, T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, MUDDY WATERS, and especially Albert King, although the relatively few available recordings from this period reveal only that he was a fluent and idiomatic rhythm and blues guitarist and capable sideman.

Leading his own group, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, in a Greenwich Village club in late 1965, Hendrix began to exhibit increasing signs of an original, even eccentric approach that incorporated feedback and other electronic sounds as an integral part of his style as well as overt sexual posturing and a further development of the showmanship techniques (such as playing his guitar behind his back and with his teeth) that he had displayed while touring with the Isley Brothers. Among the influences that took root in this period were Bob Dylan, whose mannered vocal style and sometimes mystical and visionary lyrics Hendrix admired, and the guitar playing of Mike Bloomfield, the inventive lead guitarist for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Bob Dylan.

Impressed by Hendrix’s formidable technique, distinctive playing style, and charismatic stage presence, Chas Chandler, former bass guitarist of the British rock group the Animals, convinced Hendrix to return with him to England to launch a new career. Under Chandler’s guidance, the new Jimi Hendrix Experience, also featuring bassist Noel Redding and virtuoso drummer Mitch Mitchell, quickly became a favorite on the British and European pop scenes, releasing its first single, “Hey Joe,” in December 1966 and its first album, Are You Experienced? (Reprise 6267), in September 1967. Consisting mostly of original songs, the album was characterized by extensive multitracking and electronic manipulation of sound (for example, phase shifting, tape reversed effects, and a variety of feedback sounds), the result of a collaboration between Hendrix and recording engineer Eddie Kramer. The album demonstrated that Hendrix’s virtuoso guitar style had by this point successfully assimilated and adapted techniques from an unusually wide variety of sources ranging from soul guitarists to traditional and contemporary urban bluesmen and even jazz players such as Wes Montgomery. His vocal style had developed into a highly individualistic blend of mannerisms derived from blues, soul, and Dylan’s half-spoken narrative style.

The Are You Experienced? album and associated singles did much to propel Hendrix to the forefront of the emerging British psychedelic rock movement, one of few black performers associated with that style. His popularity in the United States was guaranteed by his electrifying performance at the prestigious First International Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, in which he burned his guitar and destroyed his equipment onstage.

Hendrix released his second album with the Experience, Axis: Bold as Love (Reprise 6281), in January 1968. This album exhibited an even more elaborate use of multitracking and electronic manipulation than the first, with some songs demonstrating more complex structures and more ambitious and visionary lyrics, some of which appear to have been inspired by drug experiences. In 1968 he was named artist of the year by both Billboard and Rolling Stone magazines.

Following this album, Hendrix began various attempts to expand the basic “power trio” format of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The double album issued in September, Electric Ladyland (Reprise 6307), employed various other artists along with Redding and Mitchell and was the most intricately textured to date. Some songs, however, such as the hit single version of Dylan’s “All along the Watchtower,” showed an unusually straightforward, almost austere style, and others, such as “Voodoo Chile,” suggested a return to the earlier urban blues style of Muddy Waters.

After the release of this album, Hendrix continually expressed the desire to shed his “psychedelic wizard” reputation and further develop his musical style, speaking on a number of occasions of his interest in jazz and his eagerness to perform with major jazz figures such as MILES DAVIS, who had shown some interest in Hendrix’s music. Hendrix disbanded the Experience in 1969, envisioning a fluid “Electric Sky Church” made up of various musicians performing in different styles. His performance at the August 1969 Woodstock Festival, in which Billy Cox, a friend from his army days, replaced Noel Redding on bass, included a particularly dynamic and violent performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” that became famous as a demonstration of his unique guitar style. Under some pressure from black militants to make outspoken political statements, Hendrix shied away from active involvement in politics but did launch an all-black trio, the Band of Gypsys, featuring bass player Billy Cox and drummer/vocalist Buddy Miles, which in 1970 released an album of tracks (The Band of Gypsys, Capitol 0472) from a concert at the Fillmore East in New York City. But Hendrix remained dissatisfied, and the group quickly disbanded, with Hendrix walking offstage during a performance in early 1970. Hendrix was briefly rejoined by the original members of the Experience, but Noel Redding was soon replaced by Cox once again. In this period, Hendrix devoted considerable time to planning for and working in his new studio, Electric Lady Studios. His final live performances were erratic, with Hendrix sometimes appearing to be out of control or distant. He died in London in his sleep, asphyxiated following a presumably accidental overdose of sleeping pills. By then he had become a figure of gigantic proportions in the pop music world, not only as the first major black artist in the psychedelic style, but as a guitarist and composer whose work was considered strikingly original and distinctive.

Despite his great fame, his influence on later rock musicians was expressed more in terms of inspiration than direct imitation. Few if any of his followers appeared able to duplicate many of Hendrix’s guitar-derived or studio-generated electronic effects with the finesse that he had demonstrated. His compositional approach was sufficiently unique that his songs were largely inimitable as well. But the Hendrix legacy remains strong, if for no other reason than because he is seen as a musical free spirit who expanded the potential of the electric guitar and the boundaries of rock music in general in the late 1960s to a degree matched by few others.

HENSON, JOSIAH

(15 June 1789–5 May 1883), escaped slave and preacher, was born in Charles County, Maryland, on a farm owned by Francis Newman. As a child, Henson frequently saw his parents abused and severely beaten. On one occasion, as a punishment for defending his wife, Henson’s father was sentenced to a physical mutilation that left him permanently scarred. Although he was raised without religion, Henson was immediately converted to Christianity after his first exposure to it at a revivalist camp meeting. As a young boy, he was sold to Isaac Riley.

Because of his unusual strength and intelligence, Henson was made superintendent of the farm at a young age. He managed the plantation well, doubling the annual crop production. One day, during an argument at a neighboring farm, Henson defended his master in an argument with the other plantation’s overseer. In revenge, the overseer and three of his slaves waylaid Henson one evening soon afterward, beating him and shattering his shoulder blade. For the rest of his life, he could not raise his arms above shoulder level. At age twenty-two Henson married another slave (name unknown); they had twelve children.

Isaac Riley, the master of Henson’s plantation, went bankrupt in 1825 and was forced to sell his farm and to transfer his twenty slaves to his brother’s farm in Kentucky. After making Henson swear to their safe passage, Riley entrusted him with the care of the slaves. The route to Kentucky took the party through Ohio, a free state, where many implored Henson to allow them their freedom, but Henson kept his word and brought them intact to their new owner. In 1828 Henson became a preacher for the Methodist Episcopal Church. He then attempted to buy his freedom from his owner. A price of four hundred dollars was settled on, but at the last minute the owner reneged on his agreement, deciding instead to sell Henson to a new owner in New Orleans. Journeying south with his master’s son, who had instructions to transact some business and then to sell Henson before the return voyage, Henson’s trepidation grew as he saw the terrible conditions in which slaves in the deep South lived. Midway through the journey, the master’s son developed a serious fever, rendering him weak and helpless, and he begged Henson to bring him home safely. Though he could easily have deserted his young master and made a bid for freedom, Henson remained to escort the son back to his father. His loyalty met with neither reward nor gratitude. Henson’s growing desire for freedom, augmented by outrage at this ingratitude, propelled him to escape with his wife and four young children in the summer of 1830. In two weeks he had reached Cincinnati, from there he sailed to Buffalo, New York, and, in October, he crossed the U.S. border into Canada.

Henson settled in Dresden, Ontario, near Lake St. Clair and south of the Sydenham River, and he became a preacher. His oldest son, then in school, taught him to read. Quickly establishing himself as a leader in the Afro-Canadian community, Henson made several trips back to the United States and across the Mason-Dixon line to help other slaves escape. During the Canadian Rebellions of 1837–1838 Henson served the British as a captain in a troop of Afro-Canadian volunteers. With the support of sponsors from England and America, Henson began laying the foundations for an Afro-Canadian community and industrial school. The British American Institute, begun in 1842, encompassing two hundred acres of wooded land, was intended as a refuge for escaped slaves. However, the community never grew large or self-sufficient enough to survive, and by the end of the Civil War almost all of the colony’s remaining members had returned to the United States. In 1849 Henson published his autobiography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself. Reprinted in 1858, its name was changed to Truth Stranger than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life, and the next edition was titled “Truth Is Stranger than Fiction”: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (1879). Both later editions contain a foreword by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

On three journeys to England, in 1849, 1851, and 1876, Henson received much attention from members of high society there, including the archbishop of Canterbury. He was honored at a private party given in 1851 by Prime Minister Lord John Russell and invited by Lord Grey to travel to India to supervise cotton plantations. Soon after his return from England, Henson met Stowe. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, the public began to believe that Henson’s life story was the basis for the character of Uncle Tom in the novel. Following the death of his first wife, Henson married a Boston widow. His final trip to England, a preaching and lecturing tour in 1876, was highlighted by Queen Victoria’s personal gift of her photograph encased in a gold frame. Henson died in Dresden, Ontario.

Henson’s life story is that of a daring early leader of slaves and escaped slaves, a man of high moral principles who endured great suffering. Although the British American Institute was small and unsuccessful, Henson’s work as an ambassador to England for African Americans did much for their perception overseas. His greatest achievement was the example he offered of a man born into slavery, illiterate and handicapped by vicious physical abuse, who gained his freedom, learned to read, and became a preacher and a leader of a community of escaped slaves.

HENSON, MATTHEW ALEXANDER

(8 Aug. 1866–9 Mar. 1955), Arctic explorer, was born in Charles County, Maryland, to Lemuel Henson, a sharecropper, and his wife, Caroline Gaines. As best as can be determined from the conflicting accounts of his life, Matthew’s mother, Caroline, died when he was just two years old. His father then married Nellie, a neighbor with whom he already had a child. A few years later Lemuel died, leaving Matthew in the care of his abusive stepmother. Shortly after his eleventh birthday, Matthew left his five siblings and fled to Washington, D.C., where he worked for food and lodging at a restaurant owned by Janey Moore, whom he called “Aunt Janey.” He may have attended the N Street School in Washington before a seaman known as Baltimore Jack captured his imagination with tales of adventure upon the high seas.

At age twelve Henson signed on as cabin boy on the Katie Hines, a threemasted sail and steam vessel. Over the next six years, the ship took Henson around the globe several times. During these voyages Captain Childs instructed Henson in reading, writing, history, and the nautical skills required for him to advance from cabin boy to able-bodied seaman. After Childs’s death in 1883, Henson signed on to the White Seal, a Newfoundland fishing schooner, but he found the working conditions so vile and the attitude of the white crew so hostile that he sought alternative work on land. He lived in Boston, Providence, and New York City before becoming a clerk at Steinmetz and Son, a Washington, D.C., haberdashery. In the spring of 1887 Robert Peary, a young naval engineer, entered the store to buy a sun helmet. Peary was leading a party to map a canal route connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific through Nicaragua, and he asked if Henson would be interested in coming along as his “personal servant.” Henson, whose thirst for adventure was as great as Peary’s, accepted. This was the first of many voyages that Henson took with Peary over the next twenty-two years.

During seven months in the tropics of Nicaragua, a relationship of trust and respect developed between Henson and Peary. On their return from Nicaragua, Peary helped Henson get a job as a messenger at the League Island Navy Yard, which provided him not only with a steady income, but a pension as well, benefits that were difficult for Negroes to obtain. In April 1891 Henson married Eva Helen Flint, a member of Philadelphia’s black middle class. He had financial security and a family, both of which he put at risk when he agreed to accompany Peary on a quest for the North Pole.

Henson accompanied Peary on seven Arctic expeditions. The first took place in 1891–1892, with the goal of traversing Greenland. They returned to Greenland in 1893–1895 to map the region but failed to reach the ice cap. The next two voyages, in 1896 and 1897, were expeditions to take a thirty-ton meteorite to the United States. During their longest polar expedition, from 1898 to 1902, Henson, who had recently divorced, entered into a relationship with an Inuit woman, Akatingwah, and they had a son, Anaukaq. The party returned to the United States without the grail they sought. They claimed to have set a new distance record of 87°6′ N during a 1905–1906 attempt but were turned back by ice floes and water. Finally, a determined effort in 1908–1909 got Peary, at least, into the history books.

When they first set sail from Brooklyn in 1891, Henson had more experience at sea than any other member of the crew. Some of the white officers complained of Henson’s “freedom and insolence.” John Verhoeff, a southerner who expected subservience from Negroes, clashed with Henson so intensely that on one occasion Commander Peary’s wife, Josephine Peary, suggested the two men simply “fight it out.” Peary developed confidence in Henson’s loyalty, dedication, and ingenuity, though he himself initially subscribed to the common stereotype that Negroes are better suited for warm climates. After their final mission, however, one member of the team, Donald MacMillan, stated flady in National Geographic that Henson “went to the Pole with Peary because he was easily the most efficient of all Peary’s assistants.”

His intelligence, adaptability, and personal demeanor helped to make Henson indispensable to their mission. The Inuit called Henson Mahri-Pahluk, “the kind one.” Henson himself writes that “I have been to all intents an Esquimo, with Esquimos for companions, speaking their language, dressing in the same kind of clothes, living in the same kind of dens, eating the same food, enjoying their pleasures, and frequently sharing their grief’ (Henson, 4). Henson’s close relationship with the Inuit was invaluable because they provided the expedition not only with labor and supplies, but also with knowledge and skills necessary for its very survival. For example, Europeans often used tents, whereas igloos provided better shelter and did not need to be transported. Similarly, explorers often wore woolen clothing and used Alpine skis, though the animal skins and shoes of the Inuit were more effective.

Henson was responsible for building the sledges and training the crews in their operation, engaging the Inuit who accompanied them and who manufactured their clothing, and even selecting the dogs. He participated in gathering scientific data, such as temperature and water depth, and he was cook, carpenter, hunter, and translator, as well as photographer—though most of his pictures were confiscated by Peary, who required all the members of his expeditions to sign nondisclosure agreements.

During their first voyage in 1891, Peary broke his leg and was almost completely dependent on Henson through the winter, when temperatures dropped to fifty degrees below zero. In 1898, during their fifth expedition, Peary lost eight toes to frostbite; Henson used his own body to warm Peary and saved his life by transporting him to safety. These were dangerous missions on which six men died; four Inuit died of Western diseases against which they had no immunity, Verhoeff mysteriously disappeared, and Ross Marvin was murdered by a member of his sledge crew. Under such extreme circumstances, Henson might best be described as Peary’s Arctic engineer, manager, and partner. However, the bonds of necessity that held the two together on the ice gave way to conventional divisions of race and class whenever they returned to “civilization.”

After eighteen years of sacrifice and repeated disappointment, Peary, at age fifty-three and Henson, at forty-three, found themselves 175 miles from the top of the world with four Inuit—Ooatah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah. At intervals Peary had members of his crew return to base, leaving a cache of supplies for those who forged ahead. Henson suspected that Peary would ask him to trail behind on the last leg of the journey. Thus, on 6 April 1909, when Peary instructed him to stop just short of the North Pole, Henson claims that he inadvertently overshot his target and camped at the pole forty-five minutes before Peary arrived. Peary disputed this claim, and his relationship with Henson became much more distant after their return. Henson wrote that “for the crime of being present when the Pole was reached Commander Peary has ignored me ever since” (Henson, 151).

The recognition that Henson should have received for his role in the discovery was delayed in coming, first because of a spurious claim by Dr. Frederick Cook that he had beaten them to the pole, and then by lingering doubts that Peary miscalculated or fabricated his coordinates. But by all calculations the expedition reached an area that can be considered generally, if not precisely, the North Pole. Peary received numerous accolades and awards and was promoted to rear admiral, allowing him to retire with a pension of almost eight thousand dollars a year. In contrast, Henson found himself working as a handyman in a Brooklyn garage for sixteen dollars a week and moonlighting at the post office. His second wife, Lucy Jane Ross, had to work to supplement their income. Henson tried to make a living on the lecture circuit, and he published his autobiography, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912), but there was little public interest in either.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON and administrators at several black colleges held dinners or presented Henson with honorary degrees, and more than twenty years after his greatest accomplishment, he was made an honorary member of the Explorers Club and an honorary member of the Academy of Science and Art of Pittsburgh. In 1913, by order of President William Howard Taft, Henson was given a position as a messenger at the U.S. Customs House in New York, which he held until the mandatory retirement age of seventy. However, repeated efforts to present Henson with a national medal of honor were blocked until 1944, when Congress authorized a medal honoring all the men of the Peary expedition. At Henson’s funeral ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. asserted that the “achievements of Henson are as important as those performed by Marco Polo and Ferdinand Magellan.” In 1988 Henson and his wife were reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery near the site of Robert Peary’s grave.

HERNDON, ANGELO

(6 May 1913–9 December 1997), Communist organizer and political prisoner, was born in the tiny southern Ohio town of Wyoming, the son of Paul Herndon, a coal miner. His mother, Harriet, was of a mixed-race background and worked as a domestic. According to an early version of Herndon’s autobiography, his name was recorded in the family Bible as Eugene Angelo Braxton Herndon. During Angelo’s youth, the family experienced poverty, which grew worse after his father died. Fundamentalist Christianity helped family members endure such hard times, and at the age of nine Herndon underwent a deep religious experience and joined a local church. Shortly after he turned thirteen, Angelo and an older brother left home for Kentucky, where they worked in a coal mine for a while before heading farther south to Alabama.

Over the next several years Herndon found employment at various construction and mining sites in the Birmingham area, though he also encountered pervasive racism and witnessed the clear economic exploitation of African American workers. Upset by these degrading conditions, he became frustrated with the reluctance of black Alabamians to fight back against their mistreatment. As the teenager matured and developed a political consciousness, he came to view the emotional religion of his youth as an inadequate philosophy for the harsh realities of daily life. During the summer of 1930 Herndon attended an integrated rally held in Birmingham by the Unemployed Council, a national organization dominated by members of the Communist Party, and he was excited by the group’s willingness to challenge white supremacy and economic inequality. A subsequent arrest by the local police convinced him that he had discovered the right path for himself and other African Americans. Toward the end of the summer, at the age of seventeen, Herndon formally joined the Communist Party. The new secular religion of Communism had replaced the fundamentalist Christianity of his youth.

The young convert eagerly plunged into a variety of Communist projects in Alabama, working tirelessly to organize miners and sharecroppers into unions and to develop a mass campaign around the nine wrongfully imprisoned SCOTTSBORO BOYS. His enthusiasm for the Communist cause did not go unnoticed by the authorities, however, and he was subjected to several additional arrests and beatings. Believing that such harassment lessened Herndon’s effectiveness, the party reassigned him to Atlanta during the winter of 1931–1932, to revitalize the Unemployed Council there.

Soon after Herndon arrived in Atlanta, the city and county governments plunged into a deep financial crisis, endangering the area’s limited relief program but also presenting the Communists with an excellent opportunity to attract members. As economic conditions steadily worsened during 1932, the Unemployed Council expanded its work among the jobless. In response to an announcement of further cuts in relief payments, Herndon successfully organized, on 30 June, an unprecedented protest by more than a thousand white and black workers in front of the Fulton County Courthouse. Unnerved by the demonstration, county commissioners immediately restored some of the previously eliminated funds. Meanwhile, the police department stepped up its surveillance of local radicals and eventually arrested Herndon on 11 July. Eleven days later a grand jury indicted him under an 1866 anti-insurrection law, which had revised an 1833 statute prohibiting slave revolts. Prosecutors specifically charged the young Communist with “attempting to incite insurrection against the state of Georgia,” a capital offense. The severity of this charge clearly indicated that local officials viewed Herndon’s interracial efforts as a dangerous threat to the existing social order.

In January 1933 Herndon received his day in court. He turned over the handling of his case to the International Labor Defense (ILD), which retained two local African American attorneys, BENJAMIN JEFFERSON DAVIS JR. and John Geer, to defend him. This bold but risky decision reflected Herndon’s and the ILD’s determination to confront white supremacy directly and unequivocally. During the trial, prosecutors tried to create an atmosphere of hysteria, warning that Communism directly threatened Georgia’s political and economic stability. The prosecution specifically accused Herndon of circulating inflammatory literature and attempting to establish a radical movement whose ultimate aim was to overthrow the established government. Defense attorneys countered that there was no proof that the nineteen-year-old activist had taken any specific steps to organize an actual revolt and that the prosecution was based on fear of Communism and interracial cooperation. Herndon willingly took the stand to justify his actions. He told the jury that, in reality, he was being tried because he had dared to organize black and white workers together. The young defendant further argued that capitalism deliberately encouraged racism “in order to keep the Negro and white divided” (quoted in Martin [1976], 52). Finally, Herndon warned that although the state had the power to send him to prison, there would be more “Angelo Herndons to come in the future.” His courageous but inexpedient testimony failed to impress the all-white, twelve-man jury, which found Herndon guilty and sentenced him to eighteen to twenty years in prison.

While Davis and Geer prepared an appeal to the state supreme court, the ILD launched a national mass campaign on behalf of Herndon, arguing that he was a political prisoner who had been unjustly convicted because of his radical beliefs. The ILD’s persistence eventually built the case into a national cause célèbre. In May 1934 the state supreme court rejected the appeal. The ILD then recruited several specialists in constitutional law to argue the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Herndon remained behind bars in Atlanta until August 1934, when the ILD finally gained his release on bail.

Once he was free, Herndon embarked on several national speaking tours, increasing public awareness of his case. The ILD helped him compose a short autobiographical booklet describing his conversion to Communism and his trial, which the organization published under the title You Cannot Kill the Working Class. In May 1935 the Supreme Court turned down his appeal on technical grounds and sent the case back to the state courts. After Herndon surrendered to Georgia authorities, his lawyers initiated another round of legal maneuvers. In December a superior court judge unexpectedly ruled in Herndon’s favor, temporarily striking down the insurrection law, but the state supreme court restored the conviction in June 1936.

While his attorneys prepared for another full hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, Herndon remained free on a second bond and continued his public appearances in the North. With the assistance of a ghostwriter, he drafted a full-length autobiography, Let Me Live, which Random House released in early 1937. In April of that year Herndon finally received vindication. By a five-to-four vote, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the insurrection law, “as construed and applied,” to be unconstitutional and overturned his conviction. In concluding that the Georgia statute was “an unwarranted invasion of the right of freedom of speech,” the court moved closer toward acceptance of the so-called clear and present danger test for laws restricting First Amendment rights, an important constitutional shift.

His permanent freedom finally assured, Herndon returned to New York City, where he initially took a public role in many Communist activities and occasionally wrote articles for the Daily Worker. In 1938 he married Joyce M. Chellis, a native of Alabama. In the early 1940s he assisted RALPH ELLISON in founding and editing the short-lived Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and Culture. On two occasions he successfully thwarted efforts by New York City’s selective service director to revoke his draft deferment. Like many other Communists, Herndon gradually became dissatisfied with the party during the war, and by the mid-1940s he had quietly left its ranks. He subsequently moved to Chicago and took a job as a salesman, discussing his past with only his closest friends. In 1967 he tentatively agreed to speak with a historian researching his trial but then changed his mind. Two years later the New York Times and Arno Press published a reprint of Let Me Live, as part of a series on African American history and culture. Despite revived interest in his earlier political activism, Herndon refused to make any public appearances, declined requests for interviews, and continued to live a very private life.

HERRIMAN, GEORGE JOSEPH

(22 Aug. 1880–25 Apr. 1944), cartoonist, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of George Herriman Jr., a tailor, and Clara Morel. There is uncertainty about Herriman’s ethnic background. His birth certificate identified him as “Colored,” his parents were listed in the 1880 New Orleans federal census as “Mulatto,” but his death certificate noted that he was “Caucasian.” During his lifetime, friends often thought he was Greek or French because of his Adonis-like appearance, and he has been called a “Creole.” The family moved to Los Angeles when Herriman was a child, and his father opened a barbershop and then a bakery.

Herriman attended St. Vincent’s College, a Roman Catholic secondary school for boys. When he finished school in 1897 he followed his artistic bent and began to contribute illustrations to the Los Angeles Herald. After the turn of the century he moved to New York City and began to contribute cartoons to Judge, Life, and other humorous periodicals and comic strips to various newspaper syndicates, including several sequential series such as Musical Mose, Professor Otto and His Auto, Acrobatic Archie, and Two Jolly Jackies for the Pulitzer Syndicate and Major Ozone’s Fresh Air Crusade, Alexander the Cat, Bud Smith, and Rosy Posy for the World Color Printing Company. In 1902 he returned briefly to Los Angeles to marry Mabel Lillian Bridge, his childhood sweetheart; they had two children.

The great variety and skill of Herriman’s numerous efforts soon attracted the attention of William Randolph Hearst, who hired him for several of his papers, including the Los Angeles Examiner. Herriman lived in Los Angeles from 1905 until 1910, when Hearst brought him back to New York City to draw for the New York Evening Journal. Here, Herriman created his first widely successful feature, which would become known as The Family Upstairs, a domestic comic strip about the Dingbat family and their noisy neighbors in the apartment above. On 26 July 1910 this study in urban paranoia was interrupted by the appearance of the family cat, which is hit in the head by a rock thrown by a mouse. Therein lay the genesis for Herriman’s most successful strip, Krazy Kat, which began as an independent feature on 2 July 1911.

George Herriman, an African American cartoonist who concealed his racial heritage throughout his life, created the comic strip Krazy Katz. The strip ran from October 1913 until the cartoonist’s death in 1944. Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate

In the world of Krazy Kat, Ignatz the Mouse is the object of Krazy Kat’s affection, but instead of returning this love, Ignatz is disposed to hit the cat in the head with a brick. The cat naively believes that these clouts are meant as tokens of love. Meanwhile, the benevolent presence of Offissa Pup, himself in love with Krazy, operates to thwart Ignatz and keep the mouse behind jailhouse bars as much as possible. This situation of fully unrequited and androgynous love (Krazy’s sex changes from time to time) is acted out against a surrealistic shifting background in the Arizona desert, while the characters speak a poetic dialogue and richly mixed dialect unique in literature outside the fiction of James Joyce or the poetry of E. E. Cummings. Both Cummings and T. S. Eliot wrote in praise of Krazy Kat, which has remained the most admired comic strip in newspaper history. No other strip has matched its genius in humorous whimsy, abstract style, and metaphoric power.

Several series of animated cartoons have been based on Krazy Kat, two stage ballets have been inspired by it, Jay Cantor has used the characters in a novel under the same title, and any number of modern artists have created paintings and sculptures in homage to Herriman. While Herriman produced Krazy Kat on a daily basis, he also created other comic strips, most notably Baron Bean, Stumble Inn, Us Husbands, and Embarrassing Moments (or Bernie Burns). He illustrated the anthologies of Don Marquis’s columns about the poetic cockroach Archy and the feline vamp Mehitabel, giving an indelible visual stamp to the characters almost as endearing as Marquis’s comic verse.

In 1922 Herriman settled permanently in Hollywood. He has been described as a handsome, slender, short man with twinkling gray eyes and curly black hair, given to wearing a Stetson hat. He once wrote of his creation, “Be not harsh with ‘Krazy.’ He is but a shadow himself, caught in the web of this mortal skein.” A shy and private man, and more given to visual than verbal communication, he seldom commented on his art. He died in Los Angeles.

At the time of his death Herriman had penciled a week’s worth of Krazy Kat comic strips, which were to remain uninked on his drawing board. Given the limited circulation of the feature by then, Hearst permanently retired the strip rather than allow other artists to continue it. Legend has it that Krazy Kat was a personal favorite of Hearst’s, and no one could have imitated the Herriman style and whimsy, anyway. Like Pablo Picasso in painting, Herriman changed the visual style of his art form and influenced generations of cartoonists to come; like James Joyce in fiction, he stretched the traditional limitations of language; and like Samuel Beckett in drama, he captured the absurdities of efforts to communicate on the larger stage of life.

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