African American Lives

L

LACY, SAM

(23 Oct. 1903?–8 May 2003), sports columnist and editor, was born Samuel Harold Lacy, one of five children of Rose and Samuel Erskine Lacy. Many publications (including his own autobiography) state that Lacy was born in Mystic, Connecticut, but recent research suggests that he may have been born in 1905 in Washington, D.C. His mother, a Shinnecock Indian, was a hairdresser and the family disciplinarian; his father was a notary and legal researcher as well as an avid baseball fan. Lacy was raised in Washington, D.C., moving often within the city during his youth. Although the Lacys were not members of Washington’s professionally accomplished African American middle class, they strove to improve their social standing through hard work and education.

To that end, Lacy began working when he was about eight years old, shining shoes, selling newspapers, and setting pins at a bowling alley. Later, he shagged fly balls during batting practice for the Washington Nationals (later known as the Senators) baseball team. Popular with many of the ballplayers, Lacy often ran errands for them and eventually worked as a vendor at Griffith Stadium, where he saw major league stars like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth play, as well as such Negro league stars as Oscar Charleston and John Henry Lloyd. Like the rest of America, baseball was rigidly segregated. “I was in a position to make some comparisons,” Lacy reminisced in 1990, “and it seemed to me that those black players were good enough to play in the big leagues. There was, of course, no talk then of that ever happening. When I was growing up, there was no real opportunity for blacks in any sport” (Fimrite, 90).

At Armstrong Technical High School, the small, lithe Lacy played baseball, basketball, and football. After graduating in 1924, Lacy played semipro baseball, coached and promoted basketball, briefly attended Howard University, and worked as a part-time journalist and radio announcer. In October 1926 he joined the Washington Tribune full time, soon thereafter becoming its sports editor. In 1927 Lacy married Alberta Robinson—they had one son, Samuel Howe. They were divorced in 1952 and a year later he married Barbara Robinson, a government worker.

During the summer of 1929 Lacy left the Tribune to play baseball in Connecticut but returned to the newspaper in 1930, regaining his position as sports editor in July 1933. “By the mid-1930s, married for several years and with the dream of a baseball career no longer a realistic option, I finally was ready to make the move into full-time journalism with the Washington Tribune, where I worked from 1934 to 1938” (Lacy, 27).

It was in the mid-1930s that Lacy began agitating for social change, joining contemporaries like the labor leader A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, the law dean CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, and his fellow sportswriter Wendell Smith. Indeed, for the rest of his life, having found his voice as a “race man,” Lacy criticized a wide variety of racial injustices in the sports world. The list is long, but one of his first big stories came in October 1937, when he reported that Syracuse University’s star player, Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, was not in fact a “Hindu,” as was widely reported, but was an American-born black man. Lacy printed the truth, and Syracuse bowed to the University of Maryland’s refusal to compete if the player stayed in the lineup. It was a story that elicited criticism, even among African Americans. Lacy stood behind his story, arguing that racial progress demanded honesty. Years later Lacy wrote, “Call ’em as you see ’em and accept the comebacks. Take it in stride, the same as other distractions. That’s the way it was. Push forward or get pushed aside” (Lacy, 7).

Baseball, the national pastime and an important cultural institution, was at the forefront of Lacy’s agenda. The injustice of the game’s racial bigotry and exclusion motivated him. Perhaps encouraged by the response to the Sidat-Singh incident, Lacy met with the Senators owner, Clark Griffith, in December 1937 to discuss the hiring of black ballplayers. Lacy suggested that Griffith sign the Negro league greats JOSH GIBSON and Buck Leonard of the Homestead Grays. Griffith objected, saying that integration would devastate the Negro leagues “and put about 400 colored guys out of work.” Lacy reportedly responded: “When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he put 400,000 black people out of jobs” (Klingaman, 6A).

A traditionalist, Griffith was not persuaded, partly owing to the profitability of renting his stadium to Negro league teams. Nevertheless, the historian Brad Snyder observes that the meeting with Griffith “marked the beginning of Lacy’s campaign to integrate baseball in Washington,” and Lacy began to publish a column in the weekly Washington Tribune titled “Pro and Con on the Negro in Organized Baseball” (Snyder, 77). Lacy also argued, sometimes didactically, that black ballplayers and those who ran the Negro leagues needed to be more professional if they were to compete in the major leagues.

In 1940, after a series of disputes with the management of the Washington Afro-American, which had bought and absorbed the Tribune, Lacy left his wife and young son in Washington and moved to Chicago, where he soon became assistant national editor for the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s largest and most influential black papers. While he did not cover sports for the Defender, Lacy continued to fight for the integration of professional baseball by intensifying “an already aggressive and voluminous letter campaign directed at major league owners and particularly Commissioner [Kenesaw Mountain] Landis” (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 171, 1996, 176). Late in 1943 Landis relented and allowed Lacy to bring a small delegation to speak to the owners at their annual winter meeting. Unfortunately, Lacy was upstaged by the publisher of the Chicago Defender and by the famous actor-singer PAUL ROBESON and never got to make his case.

Shortly thereafter, a disappointed Lacy became columnist and sports editor for the weekly Baltimore Afro-American, a position he held for almost sixty years. Indefatigable, Lacy continued to crusade for the integration of professional baseball in his column and behind the scenes. In March 1945, after Landis died, Lacy wrote to every major league owner suggesting the creation of a committee to reconsider the integration of baseball. Lacy presented his proposal, and the executives agreed to his plan. The Major League Committee on Baseball Integration was established, including Lacy, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Larry MacPhail of the New York Yankees. The committee never met, however, largely because of MacPhail’s foot-dragging. Nonetheless, Rickey and JACKIE ROBINSON made history in August 1945, when the latter signed with the Dodgers.

After Robinson made the majors in 1947, Lacy was his close companion for three years. Lacy “chronicled Robinson’s first day in the majors, naming those who sat beside him on the Dodgers bench—and how close they sat. He cataloged the insults and debris hurled Robinson’s way. He counted brushback pitches. He timed applause. He reported every pulled muscle, broken nail and silver hair on Robinson’s prematurely gray head” (Klinga-man, 6A). Traveling all over the country with Robinson and other black sportswriters, Lacy suffered numerous racist indignities, yet kept them to himself.

In addition to crusading for the integration of baseball, Lacy wrote about auto and horse racing, boxing, college and professional basketball and football, golf, the Olympics, tennis, and track and field, amounting to roughly three thousand columns in all. A man with an acute sense of fairness, he wrote about racism in accommodations and employment practices, the exploitation of African American student athletes, and numerous other examples of discrimination and injustice.

More than a reporter, Lacy used his sports column to reflect on and to improve the world in which he lived and tried to do something about improving it. He was “a drum major for change—the broad, sweeping sort of social change that helps legitimize this nation’s claim to greatness long before the best-recognized civil-rights activists came on the scene. Given baseball’s popularity in the ’40s, the opening [Lacy helped forge] shattered the myth of white superiority and made it possible for other race-based barriers to crumble” (Wickham, 13A). Lacy won many awards and accolades, including the prestigious 1997 J. G. Taylor Spink Award for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, which earned him a place in the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1998. Lacy was only the second African American so honored. At a gathering in his honor in 2002, Lacy was lauded by Baltimore’s mayor, Martin O’Malley, “for challenging the American conscience and demanding that we live up to our promise as a people” (Kane 3B).

Though some said he became something of a curmudgeon in his later years, Lacy was a soft-spoken, humble man. “In the case of baseball integration, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time,” Lacy observed. “I think that anyone else situated as I was and possessing a bit of curiosity and concern about progress would have done the same thing” (Lacy, 209). Be that as it may, the sports columnist Michael Wilbon convincingly argues, “You can’t write the history of sports and race in America without devoting a chapter to Sam Lacy” (“Lacy’s Towering Legacy,” Washington Post, 11 May 2003).

LAMPKIN, DAISY

(1880s–Mar. 10 1965), civil rights and women’s suffrage advocate and NAACP leader, was born Daisy Elizabeth Adams, the only child of George S. Adams and Rosa Ann Proctor. Sources differ as to the exact date and place of her birth. Lampkin’s obituary in the New York Times states that she was 83 years of age at the time of her death in 1965, which places her birth in either 1881 or 1882. Other sources claim that Daisy was born on 9 August 1888. It is also uncertain whether she was born in Washington, D.C., or Reading, Pennsylvania, but she completed high school in the latter city before moving to Pittsburgh in 1909. In 1912 she helped organize a gathering for the woman’s suffrage movement and joined the Lucy Stone League, an organization connected with the suffrage movement. She became president of the league in 1925 and headed the organization for the next forty years.

In 1912 Daisy Adams married William Lampkin, originally from Rome, Georgia, who ran a restaurant in one of Pittsburgh’s wealthy suburbs. During the first years of her marriage, Lampkin worked with her husband in the restaurant business and expanded her activities as a community activist. She made street-corner speeches to mobilize African American women into political clubs, organized black housewives around consumer issues, and was a leading participant in a Liberty Bond drive during World War I, when, as the scholar Edna Chappell McKenzie notes, the black community of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, raised more than two million dollars. She also served on the staff of the Pittsburgh Urban League.

Impressed with Lampkin’s talents as a fund-raiser, Robert L. Vann, editor and publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, solicited Lampkin’s help when he was trying to raise money during the early days of the Courier. She continued to work for the newspaper in the 1920s and was made vice president in 1929, a position she held for thirty-six years, until her death in 1965.

During and after World War I, Lampkin’s activism among black women shaped the black freedom struggle at both local and national levels. She was chair of the Allegheny County Negro Women’s Republican League and vice-chair of the Negro Voters League. At the national level, she was elected president of the Negro Women’s Equal Franchise Federation, founded in 1911; she served as a national organizer and chair of the executive board of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and helped organize, with MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, the National Council of Negro Women.

By the early 1920s, Lampkin was a prominent figure in black politics and served as president of the National Colored Republican Conference. In 1924 she was the only woman selected by NAACP national secretary JAMES WELDON JOHNSON to attend a meeting of black leaders with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House; the meeting was to protest the injustice meted out to African American soldiers allegedly involved in the 1917 Houston riot. She was also elected an alternate delegate at large to the national Republican Party convention in 1926, a remarkable achievement for any black person or any woman at that time, as historian Edna McKenzie notes.

When Lampkin joined the staff of the NAACP in 1927, she linked her championing of black women with that of the NAACP’s agenda, focusing on breaking down barriers to full participation in American society. She served as regional field secretary in the early 1930s; became known as an unflappable, intrepid fund-raiser for the association; and was appointed national field secretary by the NAACP’s board of directors in 1935. Using her skills as an organizer and superb speaker, Lampkin worked with black workers during the economic hard times of the 1930s, increasing the NAACP’s membership in key cities, such as Chicago and Detroit. She not only revitalized the organization’s sagging enrollment but also used her national position and prestige to push the NAACP toward a new approach for attaining civil rights in America.

Lampkin increased NAACP membership at a moment when the association faced perhaps its most severe challenges from both within and without. Within the organization, dissent centered on the fact that the NAACP was not reaching the mass of African Americans. As the Depression deepened in the early 1930s, thousands of African Americans organized themselves through unemployed councils, participated in rent strikes, and joined the CIO’s rank-and-file industrial unions that were encouraged by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Some of their actions were encouraged and led by Communist Party organizers, others by groups such as A. PHILIP RANDOLPH’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Missing from efforts to mobilize the grass roots was the NAACP, which committed its resources to making appeals in courts on a case-by-case basis and agitated by compiling facts and deluging government officials with information.

Since its founding in 1909, the NAACP had pursued a gradual, legalistic approach to securing African Americans their full citizenship rights. The NAACP’s leadership expressed little interest in mass organization of black workers. In 1931, the American Communist Party (CPUSA) challenged the NAACP’s narrow agenda by taking on the legal defense of the SCOTTSBORO BOYS, nine working-class African American males who were charged in Scottsboro, Alabama, with the alleged rape of two white women. Because the NAACP had initially refused to take on the Scottsboro Boys case, the Communists convinced at least some African Americans that their Party was more in touch with the mood and interests of working-class blacks than the NAACP. Although the CPUSA did not win massive numbers of black converts, their militant approach forced black organizations, and the NAACP, in particular, to rethink their strategy in challenging racial inequality. The competition between the Communists and the NAACP, historian Mark Naison has argued, was not just for control over the Scottsboro case but also for the “hearts and minds of the black public” (Communists in Harlem during the Depression [1985], 62).

As funding from white philanthropists dried up, the NAACP needed to increase its membership within the black community. Daisy Lampkin understood well the threat that Scottsboro posed for the NAACP, and she also had a solution. “The NAACP is being openly criticized by its own members,” Lampkin wrote to WALTER WHITE, executive secretary of the NAACP, in 1933. “Some frankly say,” she continued, “that the NAACP is less militant” than it used to be. Moreover, Lampkin told White, friends of the NAACP asked her whether she thought the NAACP had outlived its usefulness and whether the time had come for it to give way to another organization with a more “militant program.” She advised both Walter White and his assistant, ROY WILKINS, to initiate a more aggressive program in order to meet the “onslaught of the Communists” (Letter from Roy Wilkins to Daisy E. Lampkin, 23 Mar. 1935, I-C-80, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress).

Lampkin demonstrated her independence as a leader within the NAACP on another occasion in 1933. A planned boycott of discriminatory practices by the Sears Roebuck shoe department by “prominent women” in the Chicago branch of the NAACP was aborted by from the national office. Walter White was concerned lest the proposed boycott sully the reputation of the NAACP in the eyes of William Rosenwald, chairman of the board of Sears, whose stock funded the Rosenwald Fund, a major contributor to projects benefiting black Americans. Such concerns did not faze the NACW. When the association met in Chicago in July 1933 for its annual convention, it condemned Sears for its discriminatory policies. Lampkin, running for vice president of the NACW at the time, strongly endorsed the resolution against Sears, which also urged “widespread publicity on the matter” (letter from A. C. MacNeal to Walter White, 29 July 29 1933, I-G-51, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress).

Perhaps to underscore her concern with the passive approach of the NAACP on this matter, Lampkin, regional field secretary at the time, did not visit the Chicago branch while attending the NACW convention, a slight that led the branch president to complain to White. As Lampkin reminded White in a letter of 22 October 1936, it was because of her influence in the “largest organization of colored women in America” that she was important to the staff of the NAACP. The public was well aware, she said, of her “many other interests,” which “account to a very large degree for the success I have in getting people to work with me in campaigns for the NAACP” (NAACP papers, Library of Congress, I-C-68).

By the end of the 1930s, the NAACP had expanded its program to reach the masses of the people, following advice that Lampkin had offered to Walter White and Roy Wilkins, in the early 1930s. Lampkin continued to work tirelessly for the NAACP until October 1964, when she collapsed from exhaustion after making yet another strenuous fund-raising appeal for the NAACP. She died a few months later, in March 1965, and was survived by her husband.

The life of Daisy Lampkin exemplifies the important role black women played in twentieth century campaigns for civil rights. Although Lampkin was best known nationally for her role as a prominent NAACP leader, her contribution to the larger freedom struggles for racial and gender equality extended far beyond that organization. Whatever the venue, the impulse that drove Lampkin’s life was to remove barriers that kept African Americans from the full enjoyment of their citizenship rights.

LANE, WILLIAM HENRY

(1825?–1852), dancer, also known as “Master Juba,” is believed to have been born a free man, although neither his place of birth nor the names of his parents are known. He grew up in lower Manhattan in New York City, where he learned to dance from “Uncle” Jim Lowe, an African American jig-and-reel dancer of exceptional skill.

By the age of fifteen, Lane was performing in notorious “dance houses” and dance establishments in the Five-Points district of lower Manhattan. Located at the intersection of Cross, Anthony, Little Water, Orange, and Mulberry streets, its thoroughfare was lined with brothels and saloons occupied largely by free blacks and indigent Irish immigrants. Lane lived and worked in the Five-Points district in the early 1840s. In such surroundings, the blending of African American vernacular dance with the Irish jig was inevitable. Marshall Stearns in Jazz Dance (1968) confirms that “Lane was a dancer of ‘jigs’ at a time when the word was adding to its original meaning, an Irish folk dance, and being used to describe the general style of Negro dancing.” Charles Dickens, in his American Notes (1842), describes a visit to the Five-Points district in which he witnessed a performance by a dancer who was probably Lane: “Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs.”

In 1844, after beating the reigning white minstrel dancer, John Diamond, in a series of challenge dances, Lane was hailed as the “King of All Dancers” and named “Master Juba,” after the African juba or gioube, a step-dance resembling a jig with elaborate variations. The name was often given to slaves who were dancers and musicians. Lane was thereafter adopted by an entire corps of white minstrel players who unreservedly acknowledged his talents. On a tour in New England with the Georgia Champion Minstrels, Lane was billed as “The Wonder of the World Juba, Acknowledged to be the Greatest Dancer in the World!” He was praised for his execution of steps, unsurpassed in grace and endurance, and popular for his skillful imitations of well-known minstrel dancers and their specialty steps. He also performed his own specialty steps, which no one could copy, and he was a first-rate singer and a tambourine virtuoso. In 1845 Lane had the unprecedented distinction of touring with the four-member, all-white Ethiopian Minstrels, with whom he received top billing. At the same time, he prospered as a solo variety performer and from 1846 to 1848 was a regular attraction at White’s Melodeon in New York.

Lane traveled to London with Pell’s Ethiopian Serenaders in 1848, enthralling the English, who were discerning judges of traditional jigs and clogs, with “the manner in which he beat time with his feet, and the extraordinary command he possessed over them.” London’s Theatrical Times wrote that Master Juba was “far above the common [performers] who give imitations of American and Negro character; there is an ideality in what he does that makes his efforts at once grotesque and poetical, without losing sight of the reality of representation.” Working day and night and living on a poor diet and no rest, Lane died of exhaustion in London.

In England, Lane popularized American minstrel dancing, influencing English clowns who added jumps, splits, and cabrioles to their entrées and began using blackface makeup. Between 1860 and 1865, the Juba character was taken to France by touring British circuses and later became a fixture in French and Belgian cirques et carrousels. The image of the blackface clown that persisted in European circuses and fairs continued to be represented in turn-of-the-century popular entertainments as well as on concert stages during the 1920s, in ballets such as Léonide Massine’s Crescendo, Bronislawa Nijinska’s Jazz, and George Balanchine’s “Snowball” in The Triumph of Neptune (1926).

In the United States, Lane is considered by scholars of dance and historians of the minstrel as the most influential single performer in nineteenth-century American dance. He kept the minstrel show in touch with its African American source material at a time when the stage was dominated by white performers offering theatrical derivatives and grotesque exaggerations of the African American performer. He established a performing style and developed a technique of tap dancing that would be widely imitated. For example, the white dancer Richard M. Carroll was noted for dancing in the style of Lane and earned a reputation for being a great all-around performer; other dancers, like Ralph Keeler, who starred in a riverboat company before the Civil War, learned to dance by practicing the complicated shuffle of Juba. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Lane’s legacy continued to be present in elements of the tap dance repertory. Lane’s grafting of African rhythms and loose body styling onto the exacting techniques of British jig and clog dancing created a new rhythmic blend of percussive dance that was the earliest form of American tap dance.

LANEY, LUCY CRAFT

(13 Apr. 1854–23 Oct. 1933), educator, was born in Macon, Georgia, the daughter of David Laney and Louisa (maiden name unknown). Both parents were slaves: they belonged to different masters, but following their marriage they were permitted to live together in a home of their own. David Laney was a carpenter and often hired out by his owner, Mr. Cobbs. Louisa, purchased from a group of nomadic Indians while a small child, was a maid in the Campbell household. One of Lucy Laney’s most cherished memories was “how her father would, after a week of hard slave work, walk for over twenty miles… to be at home with his wife and children on the Sabbath” (Crisis, June 1934). After the Civil War and emancipation, David Laney, who had served as a slave lay preacher, was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and became pastor of the Washington Avenue Church in Macon, Georgia. Louisa remained in the Campbell’s house as a wage earner. The Laneys’ newfound income provided the family some comforts that they shared with numerous cousins, orphaned children, and others in need of shelter.

When missionary teachers opened a school in Macon in 1865 Lucy Laney, together with her mother and her siblings, was among the first to enroll. She graduated from the Lewis High School in 1869 and entered Atlanta University where she received a certificate of graduation from the Higher Normal Department in 1873. In keeping with her strong conviction that “becoming educated [was] a perpetual motion affair” (Abbott’s Monthly, June 1931), over the course of her career she enrolled in summer programs at the University of Chicago, Hampton Institute, Columbia University, and Tuskegee Institute.

Laney was keenly aware of all the advantages life had afforded her, and she believed that of those to whom much is given much is expected. Emancipation had ushered in new opportunities and responsibilities, and early in life she dedicated herself to her race’s advancement. Based on her study of American history, she concluded that the four major components of a realistic program for the “uplift” of blacks were political power, Christian training, “cash,” and education. She viewed education as the key to achieving the first three objectives. Her decision to become a teacher was also dictated by the limited employment opportunities available to black women. Following graduation from Atlanta University she accepted a teaching position in Milledgeville, Georgia, and between 1873 and 1883 also taught at schools in Macon, Augusta, and Savannah.

While a student Laney had serious misgivings about the pedagogical practices at the various schools she attended. She had advised her teachers then that “some day I will have a school of my own.” Her experience as a teacher in the public school system intensified her desire to establish a school. She had little patience with “dull teachers . . . [who] failed to know their pupils—to find out their real needs—and hence had no cause to study methods of better and best development of the boys and girls under their care.” She deplored instructors who underestimated “the capabilities and possibilities” of black students and who did not know and/or teach African American history (“The Burden of the Educated Colored Woman,” 1899). Moreover, she was convinced that black children needed a thorough Christian education and was disturbed by the public school’s failure to address moral and religious concerns.

Laney was one of the first educators to recognize the special and urgent needs of black women in light of their central role in the education of their children. She was convinced that ignorance, immorality, and crime among blacks and perhaps some of the prejudice against them were their “inheritance from slavery.” In her opinion, “the basic rock of true culture” was the home, but during slavery “the home was… utterly disregarded… [the] father had neither responsibility, nor authority; mother, neither cares nor duties” (“Educated Colored Woman,” 1899). The disregard for homemaking and the home environment resulted in untidy and filthy homes that produced children of dubious character. Moreover, the absence of the sanctity of the marriage vow encouraged immorality and disrespect for black women.

While “no person [was] responsible for [their] ancestor’s… sins and shortcomings,” Laney argued that “every woman can see to it that she give to her progeny a good mother and an honorable ancestry.” Strengthening the black family and improving its home life was therefore “the place to take the proverbial stitch in time.” In addition to their role as wives and mothers, she believed that women were “by nature fitted for teaching the . . . young” and thus were best suited as teachers in the public school system. She was equally convinced that the teacher “who would mould character must herself possess it” and that those who would be mothers, teachers, and leaders needed to be capable in both “mind and character” (“Address before the Women’s Meeting,” 1897).

Laney’s conviction that educated women were a prerequisite for advancement of her race was the major impetus for the founding of the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute. She began her school with six students in the basement of Christ Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, on 6 January 1886. During the following three years the school, due to increasing enrollment, was moved to various rented buildings around the city. Haines Institute was chartered by the state of Georgia as a normal and industrial school on 5 May 1888. Although the school was sanctioned by the Presbyterian board, the general assembly provided only moral support, which Laney noted “was not much to go on.” In 1889, however, the board purchased a permanent site for the school and erected the institution’s first building. Despite numerous problems, by 1887 primary, grammar, and normal divisions had been established, and by 1889 she was able to develop a strong literary department as well as a scientifically based normal program and industrial course. By 1892 Haines Normal and Industrial Institute was recognized as one of the best schools of its type in the nation. John William Gibson and William H. Crogman said of Laney in their classic study, The Progress of a Race (1897), “There is probably no one of all the educators of the colored race who stands higher, or who has done more work in pushing forward the education of the Negro woman.”

Laney was the foremost female member of the generation born into slavery and educated during Reconstruction who rose to leadership and prominence in the 1880s and 1890s. In addition to being a national race leader, she was a pioneer in the struggles for Prohibition and women’s rights as well as in the black women’s club movement. She was instrumental in establishing the first public high school for blacks in Georgia, organizing the Augusta Colored Hospital and Nurses Training School, and founding the first kindergarten in the city of Augusta. She was also a leader in the battle to secure improved public schools, sanitation, and other municipal services in Augusta’s black community. She was a founding member of the Georgia State Teacher Association and a leader within the regional and national politics of the Young Women’s Christian Association. She chaired the Colored Section of the Interracial Commission of Augusta and served on the National Interracial Commission of the Presbyterian Church. An eloquent speaker, she was a distinguished member of the lecture circuit between 1879 and 1930. A number of articles by and about Laney and her school appeared in Presbyterian church publications such as the Home Mission Monthly, the Church Home and Abroad, Women and Mission, the Presbyterian Monthly Record, and the Presbyterian Magazine during the years 1886–1933.

Laney, who often stated that she wanted to “wear out, not rust out,” died in Augusta, Georgia, and was buried on the campus of the school that she built and to which she had devoted most of her life. The most enduring epithet for Laney, who never married or had children, was “mother of the children of the people,” and her most profound contributions were the men and women she educated. Writing in the April 1907 issue of the Home Mission Monthly she argued that “the measure of an institution is the men and women it sends into the world. The measure of a man is the service he renders his fellows.” Judging by this standard Lucy Craft Laney and the school she established were eminently successful.

LANGSTON, JOHN MERCER

(14 Dec. 1829–15 Nov. 1897), political leader and intellectual, was born free in Louisa County, Virginia, the son of Ralph Quarles, a wealthy white slaveholding planter, and Lucy Jane Langston, a part Native American, part black slave emancipated by Quarles in 1806. After the deaths of both of their parents in 1834, Langston and his two brothers, well provided for by Quarles’s will but unprotected by Virginia law, moved to Ohio. There Langston lived on a farm near Chillicothe with a cultured white southern family who had been friends of his father and who treated him as a son. He was in effect orphaned again in 1839, when a court hearing, concluding that his guardian’s impending move to slave-state Missouri would imperil the boy’s freedom and inheritance, forced him to leave the family. Subsequently, he boarded in four different homes, white and black, in Chillicothe and Cincinnati, worked as a farmhand and bootblack, intermittently attended privately funded black schools since blacks were barred from public schools for whites, and in August 1841 was caught up in the violent white rioting against blacks and white abolitionists in Cincinnati.

Learning from his brothers and other black community leaders a sense of commitment, Langston also developed a self-confidence that helped him cope with his personal losses and with pervasive, legally sanctioned racism. In 1844 he entered the preparatory department at Oberlin College, where his brothers had been the first black students in 1835. Oberlin’s egalitarianism encouraged him, and its rigorous rhetorical training enhanced his speaking skills. As early as 1848 and continuing into the 1860s, Langston joined in the black civil rights movement in Ohio and across the North, working as an orator and organizer to promote black advancement and enfranchisement and to combat slavery. At one Ohio state black convention, the nineteen-year-old Langston, quoting the Roman slave Terence, declared: “‘I am a man, and there is nothing of humanity, as I think, estranged to me.’… The spirit of our people must be aroused. They must feel and act as men.” After receiving his BA degree in 1849, Langston decided to study law. Discovering that law schools were unwilling to accept a black student, however, he returned to Oberlin and in 1853 became the first black graduate of its prestigious theological program. Despite evangelist and Oberlin president Charles Grandison Finney’s public urging, Langston, skeptical of organized religion, and especially its widespread failure to oppose slavery, refused to enter the ministry.

Finding white allies in radical anti-slavery politics, Langston engaged in local politics beginning in 1852, demonstrating that an articulate black campaigner might effectively counter opposition race-baiting; in mid-decade he helped form the Republican Party on the Western Reserve. Philemon E. Bliss of nearby Elyria, soon to be a Republican congressman, became Langston’s mentor for legal study, and in 1854 he was accepted to the Ohio bar, becoming the first black lawyer in the West. That year he married Caroline Matilda Wall, a senior at Oberlin; they had five children. In the spring of 1855 voters in Brownhelm, an otherwise all-white area near Oberlin where Langston had a farm, elected him township clerk on the Free Democratic (Free Soil) ticket, gaining him recognition as the first black elected official in the nation. Langston announced his conviction that political influence was “the bridle by which we can check and guide, to our advantage, the selfishness of American demagogues.”

In 1856 the Langstons began a fifteen-year residency in Oberlin. Elected repeatedly to posts on the town council and the board of education, he solidified his reputation as a competent public executive and adroit attorney. In his best-known case, Langston successfully defended EDMONIA LEWIS, a student accused of poisoning two of her Oberlin classmates (who recovered); Lewis would become the first noted African American sculptor. In promoting militant resistance to slavery, Langston helped stoke outrage over the federal prosecution under the Fugitive Slave Law of thirty-seven of his white and black townsmen and others involved in the 1858 Oberlin-Wellington rescue of fugitive slave John Price. Immediately, Langston organized the new black Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society, which he headed, to channel black indignation over the case. While his brother Charles Henry Langston, one of the two rescuers convicted, repudiated the law in a notable courtroom plea, Langston urged defiance of it in dozens of speeches throughout the state. Langston supported the plan by John Brown (1800–1859) to foment a slave uprising, although he did not participate in the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. Following the outbreak of the Civil War, once recruitment of northern black troops began in early 1863, he raised hundreds of black volunteers for the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth regiments and for Ohio’s first black regiment.

After the war, Langston’s pursuit of a Reconstruction based on “impartial justice” and a redistribution of political and economic power elevated him to national prominence. In contrast to FREDERICK DOUGLASS, the quintessential self-made man, to whom his leadership was most often compared, Langston represented the importance of education and professionalism, joined to activism, for a people emerging from slavery. In 1864 the black national convention in Syracuse, New York, elected him the first president of the National Equal Rights League, a position he held until 1868. Despite rivalries within the league, Langston shaped it into the first viable national black organization. In 1865 and 1866 he lectured in the Upper South, the Midwest, and the Northeast and fought for full enfranchisement not only of the freed people, but also of African Americans denied suffrage in the North. In January 1867, on the eve of congressional Reconstruction, he presided over a league-sponsored convention of more than a hundred black delegates from seventeen states to Washington, D.C., to dramatize African American demands for full freedom and citizenship. That spring Langston assumed a signal role in the South as a Republican party organizer of black voters and the educational inspector-general for the Freedmen’s Bureau, traveling from Maryland to Texas. In Virginia, Mississippi, and North Carolina, he helped set up Republican Union Leagues, which instructed freed people on registration and voting; in Georgia and Louisiana he advised blacks elected to state constitutional conventions on strategy. In almost every southern state, Langston defended Reconstruction policy in addresses before audiences of both races. Insistent on guaranteeing the citizenship and human rights of freed people, he appealed to black self-reliance, self-respect, and self-assertion and to white enlightened self-interest, predicting that interracial cooperation would lead to an “unexampled prosperity and a superior civilization.” His charisma, refined rhetorical style, and ability to articulate radical principles in a reasonable tone drew plaudits across ideological and racial lines. Twice, in 1868 and 1872, fellow Republicans, one of whom was white, proposed that Langston run for vice president on the Republican ticket.

In the fall of 1869 Langston founded the Law Department at Howard University and took up his duties as law professor and first law dean. From December 1873 to July 1875 he was vice president and acting president of the university. He characteristically gained a warm following among students, who were particularly attracted by his manner, which was neither obsequious nor condescending. Despite Langston’s accomplishments at Howard, however, the trustees rejected his bid to assume the presidency for reasons that they refused to disclose but that clearly involved his race, his egalitarian and biracial vision, and the fact that he was not a member of an evangelical church. Embittered, he resigned.

Meanwhile Langston continued to function as one of the Republican Party’s top black spokesmen. In return, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to the Board of Health of the District of Columbia in 1871, and he moved his home from Oberlin to Washington, D.C. He served as the board’s legal officer for nearly seven years, during which time he helped devise a model sanitation code for the capital. On another front, at the behest of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, he contributed to the drafting of the Supplementary Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883. As radical Reconstruction crumbled, practicality and personal ambition led Langston in 1877 to endorse President Rutherford B. Hayes’s conciliatory policy toward the white South. Two years later, however, he condemned the condition of the freedpeople in the South as “practical enslavement” and called for black migration, the “Exodus” movement, to the North and the West. Langston served with typical efficiency as U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti from 1877 to 1885, winning settlement of claims against the Haitian government, especially by Americans injured during civil unrest, and some improvement in trade relations between the two countries. During his final sixteen months of duty, he was concurrently chargé d’affaires to Santo Domingo.

In 1885 Langston returned to Petersburg, Virginia, to head the state college for African Americans, the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. After his forced resignation less than two years later under heavy pressure from the Democrats who then controlled the state, he announced his intention to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in the mostly black Fourth District, of which Petersburg was the urban center. Running against a white Democrat and a white Republican, Langston waged a ten-month campaign “to establish the manhood, honor, and fidelity of the Negro race.” Although the Democratic candidate was initially declared the victor, Langston challenged the election results as fraudulent, and Congress voted in September 1890 to seat him. Within days he was back in Virginia campaigning for reelection to a second term. Again the official count went to the Democrat, a result Langston accepted because he could expect no redress from the new Democratic Congress. The first African American elected to Congress from Virginia, Langston used his three months in the House to put his ideas on education and fair elections into the national record. His most controversial proposal, one intended to head off black disfranchisement, was a constitutional amendment imposing a literacy requirement on all voters in federal elections and a corresponding adjustment in the size of state congressional delegations.

During the remainder of his life, Langston practiced law in the District of Columbia and continued to be active in politics, education, and promoting black rights. He published his autobiography, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (1894), and carried on an active speaking schedule in both the North and the South. He remained hopeful despite legal disfranchisement, segregation, and his own failure to obtain a federal judgeship. In 1896, while raising money to support the filing of civil rights cases, he predicted: “It is in the courts, by the law, that we shall, finally, settle all questions connected with the recognition of the rights, the equality, the full citizenship of colored Americans.” He died in Washington, D.C.

LARSEN, NELLA

(13 Apr. 1891–30 Mar. 1964), novelist, was born Nellie Walker in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Peter Walker, a cook, and Mary Hanson. She was born to a Danish immigrant mother and a “colored” father, according to her birth certificate. On 14 July 1890 Peter Walker and Mary Hanson applied for a marriage license in Chicago, but there is no record that the marriage ever took place. Larsen told her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, that her father was “a Negro from the Virgin Islands, formerly the Danish West Indies” and that he died when she was two, but none of this has been proven conclusively.

Larsen was prone to invent and embellish her past. Mary Hanson Walker married a Danish man, Peter Larson, on 7 February 1894, after the couple had had a daughter. Peter Larson eventually moved the family from the multiracial world of State Street to a white Chicago suburb, changed the spelling of his name to Larsen, and sent Nellie away to the South. In the 1910 census Mary Larsen denied the existence of Nellie, stating that she had given birth to only one child. The family rejection and the resulting cultural dualism over her racial heritage that Larsen experienced in her youth were to be reflected in her later fiction.

Nellie Larson entered the Coleman School in Chicago at age nine, then the Wendell Phillips Junior High School in 1905, where her name was recorded as Nellye Larson. In 1907 she was sent by Peter Larsen to complete high school at the Normal School of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she took the spelling “Larsen” and began to use “Nella” as her given name. Larsen claimed to have spent the years 1909 to 1912 in Denmark with her mother’s relatives and to have audited courses at the University of Copenhagen, but there is no record of her ever having done so. Her biographer, Thadious M. Davis, says, “The next four years (1908–1912) are a mystery…, and no conclusive traces of her for these years have surfaced” (67).

In 1912 Larsen enrolled in a three-year nurse’s training course at New York City’s Lincoln Hospital, one of few nursing programs for African Americans in the country. After graduating in 1915, she worked a year at the John A. Andrew Hospital and Nurse Training School in Tuskegee, Alabama. Unhappy at Tuskegee, Larsen returned to New York and worked briefly as a staff member of the city Department of Health. In May 1919 she married Dr. ELMER IMES, a prominent black physicist; the marriage ended in divorce in 1933.

Larsen left nursing in 1921 to become a librarian, beginning work with the New York Public Library in January 1922. Because of her husband’s social position, Larsen was able to move in the heights of the Harlem social circle, and it is there she met WALTER WHITE, the NAACP leader and novelist, and Carl Van Vechten, the photographer and author of Nigger Heaven (1926). White and Van Vechten encouraged her to write, and in January 1926 Larsen quit her job in order to write full-time. She had already begun working on her first novel, Quicksand, perhaps during a period of convalescence, and it was published in 1928. Earlier in the 1920s she had published two children’s stories in The Brownies’ Book as Nella Larsen Imes and then two pulp-fiction stories for Young’s Magazine under the pseudonym Allen Semi. Quicksand won the Harmon Foundation’s Bronze Medal for literature and established Larsen as one of the prominent writers of the Harlem Renaissance. After her second novel, Passing, was published in 1929, she applied for and became the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Larsen used the award to travel to Spain in 1930 and to work on her third book, which was never published. After a year and a half in Spain and France, Larsen returned to New York.

Nella Larsen, whose novels address the complexity of being of mixed race in America. Library of Congress

Two shocks appear to have ended Larsen’s literary career. In 1930 she was accused of plagiarizing her short story “Sanctuary,” published that year in Forum, when a reader pointed out its likeness to Sheila Kaye-Smith’s “Mrs. Adis,” a story that had appeared in Century magazine in 1922. The editors of Forum pursued the charge and exonerated Larsen, but biographers and scholars have concluded that Larsen never recovered from the attack, however unfounded. The second shock was Larsen’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity early in 1930, although she refrained from seeking a divorce until 1933. Imes supported Larsen with alimony payments until his death in 1941, at which time Larsen returned to her first career, nursing, in New York City. She was a supervisor at Gouverneur Hospital from 1944 to 1961, and then worked at Metropolitan Hospital from 1961 to 1964 to avoid retirement. Since her death in New York City, Larsen’s novels, considered “lost” until the 1970s, have been reprinted and reexamined. While she had always been included in the few histories of black American literature, her reputation was eclipsed in the era of naturalism and protest-writing (1930–1970), to be recovered along with the reputations of ZORA NEALE HURSTON and other African American women writers during the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s.

Larsen’s literary reputation rests on the achievement of her two novels of the late 1920s. In Quicksand she created an autobiographical protagonist, Helga Crane, the illegitimate daughter of a Danish immigrant mother and a black father who was a gambler and deserted the mother. Crane hates white society, from which she feels excluded by her black skin; she also despises the black bourgeoisie, partly because she is not from one of its families and partly for its racial hypocrisy about the color line and its puritanical moral and aesthetic code. After two years of living in Denmark, Helga returns to America to fall into “quicksand” by marrying an uneducated, animalistic black preacher who takes her to a rural southern town and keeps her pregnant until she is on the edge of death from exhaustion.

In Passing Larsen wrote a complicated psychological version of a favorite theme in African American literature. Clare Kendry has hidden her black blood from the white racist she has married. The novel ends with Clare’s sudden death as she either plunges or is pushed out of a window by Irene, her best friend, just at the husband’s surprise entrance. “What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly. One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone” (271).

Larsen’s stature as a novelist continues to grow. She portrays black women convincingly and without the simplification of stereotype. Larsen fully realized the complexity of being of mixed race in America and was able to render her cultural dualism artistically.

LATIMER, LEWIS HOWARD

(4 Sept. 1848–11 Dec. 1928), engineer and inventor, was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of George W. Latimer, a barber, and Rebecca Smith, both former slaves who escaped from Norfolk, Virginia, on 4 October 1842. When not attending Phillips Grammar School in Boston, Lewis spent much of his youth working in his father’s barber shop, as a paper-hanger, and selling the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Lewis’s life changed drastically when his father mysteriously disappeared in 1858. His family, placed in dire financial straits, bound out Lewis and his brothers George and William as apprentices through the Farm School, a state institution in which children worked as unpaid laborers. Upon escaping from the exploitation of the Farm School system, Lewis and his brothers returned to Boston to reunite the family. During the next few years, Latimer was able to help support his family through various odd jobs and by working as an office boy for a Boston attorney, Isaac Wright.

Late in the Civil War, Latimer enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He was assigned to the Ohio as a landsman (low level seaman) on 13 September 1864. He served until 3 July 1865, at which time he was honorably discharged from the Massasoit.

After returning from sea, Latimer began his technical career in Boston as an office boy for Crosby and Gould, patent solicitors. Through his assiduous efforts to teach himself the art of drafting, he rose to assistant draftsman and eventually to the position of chief draftsman in the mid-1870s. During this time, he met Mary Wilson Lewis, a young woman from Fall River, Massachusetts. They were married in 1873 and had two children.

During his tenure at Crosby and Gould, Latimer began to invent. His first creation, a water closet for railway cars, co-invented with W. C. Brown, was granted Letters Patent No. 147,363 on 10 February 1874. However, drafting remained his primary vocation. One of the most noteworthy projects he undertook was drafting the diagrams for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent application, which was approved on 14 February 1876. In 1879 after managerial changes at Crosby and Gould, Latimer left their employment and Boston.

Latimer relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut, initially working as a paperhanger. He eventually found part-time work making mechanical drawings at the Follandsbee Machine Shop. While drafting at the shop, he met Hiram Stevens Maxim, the chief engineer of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company. In February 1880, shortly after their first meeting, Maxim hired Latimer as his draftsman and private secretary. Latimer quickly moved up within the enterprise, and when the U.S. Electric Lighting Company moved to New York City, it placed him in charge of the production of carbon lamp filaments. Latimer was an integral member of the team that installed the company’s first commercial incandescent lighting system, in the Equitable Building in New York City in the fall of 1880. He was on hand at most of the lighting installations that were undertaken by the company, and in 1881 he began to supervise many of their incandescent and arc lighting installations.

Latimer also invented products that were fundamental to the development of the company while directing new installations for the U.S. Electric Lighting Company. In October 1880 Maxim was granted a patent for a filament that was treated with hydrocarbon vapor to equalize and standardize its resistance, a process that allowed it to burn longer than the Edison lamp filament. Latimer began working on a process to manufacture this new carbon filament, and on 17 January 1882 he was granted a patent for a new process of manufacturing carbons. This invention produced a highly resistant filament and diminished the occurrence of broken and distorted filaments that had been commonplace with prior procedures. The filament was shaped into an M, which became a noted characteristic of the Maxim lamp. Latimer patented other inventions, including two for an electric lamp and a globe support for electric lamps. These further enhanced the Maxim lamp during 1881 and 1882.

In 1881 Latimer was dispatched to London and successfully established an incandescent lamp factory for the newly founded Maxim-Weston Electric Light Company. In 1882 Latimer left this company and began working for the Olmstead Electric Lighting Company of Brooklyn as superintendent of lamp construction; at this time he created the Latimer Lamp. He later continued his work at the Acme Electric Company of New York.

In 1883 Latimer began working at the Edison Electric Light Company. He became affiliated with the engineering department in 1885, and when the legal department was formed in 1889, Latimer’s record of expert legal advice made him a requisite member of the new division. According to Latimer’s biographical sketch of himself for the Edison Pioneers, he was transferred to the department “as [a] draughtsman inspector and expert witness as to facts in the early stages of the electric lighting business. . . . [He] traveled extensively, securing witnesses’ affidavits, and early apparatus, and also testifying in a number of the basic patent cases to the advantage of his employers.” His complete knowledge of electrical technology was exemplified in his work Incandescent Electric Lighting, a Practical Description of the Edison System (1890).

Latimer continued in the legal department when the Edison General Electric Company merged with the Thomson-Houston Company to form General Electric Company in 1892. His knowledge of the electric industry became invaluable when the General Electric Company and the Westinghouse Electric Company formed the Board of Patent Control in 1896. This board was responsible for managing the cross-licensing of patents between the two companies and prosecuting infringers. Latimer was appointed to the position of chief draftsman, however his duties went far beyond drafting. He assisted inventors and others in developing their ideas. He used the vast body of knowledge he had acquired over the years in their efforts to eliminate outside competition. He remained at this position until the board was dissolved in 1911, after which Latimer put his talents to use for the law firm of Hammer and Schwartz as a patent consultant.

In 1918, when the Edison Pioneers, an organization founded to bring together for social and intellectual interaction men associated with Thomas Edison prior to 1885, was formed, Latimer was one of the twenty-nine original members. A stroke in 1924 forced him to retire from his formal position, and he spent much of his last four years engaged in two other activities that were most important in his life, art and poetry. He died at his home in Flushing, New York, which in 1995 was made a New York City landmark. Latimer was one of very few African Americans who contributed significantly to the development of American electrical technology.

LAVEAUX, MARIE

(10 Sept. 1801–16 June 1881), voodoo queen, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Charles Laveaux, a free man of color who owned a grocery store in that city, and Marguerite D’Arcantel, a free woman of color about whom very little is known, although it is rumored that she was a spiritualist or root doctor. Certain sources erroneously claim that Charles Laveaux was a prominent white planter and politician. He was not, but he was probably the illegitimate son of Don Carlos (or Charles) Trudeau, a high-ranking official in Spanish-controlled Louisiana and the first president of the New Orleans city council when the United States purchased Louisiana in 1803. The historical record, which in Marie Laveaux’s case is exceptionally imprecise, provides several spellings of her surname, often leaving out the “x,” but most archival records suggest that Charles Laveaux used that version of his name and that this spelling was also used in records related to his illiterate daughter.

There is considerable doubt, too, about Laveaux’s date of birth. Her 1881 death certificate claims that she died at the age of ninety-eight, suggesting that she was born in 1783, although most accounts give her birth date as 1794. In the late 1990s, however, a researcher found birth and baptismal records of a “mulatto girl child” named Marie Laveaux dated September 1801. This date coincides with information on her marriage certificate, which states that Laveaux was a minor, a month shy of eighteen, when she wed Jacques Paris, a Haitian-born carpenter, in August 1819.

Laveaux’s marriage to Paris was short-lived. After her husband’s death in the early 1820s, she became known as “the widow Paris” and began a thirty-year relationship with Captain Jean Louis Christophe Duminy de Glapion, a veteran of the War of 1812 usually referred to as a “quadroon” from Santo Domingo. It has often been claimed that the couple had fifteen children, but New Orleans church records suggest that they had only two sons, François and Archange, who died in childhood, and three daughters, Marie Héloïse, Marie Louise, and Marie Phélomise. In addition, Marie Laveaux had a half-sister, also named Marie Laveaux, born to Charles Laveaux and his wife, a wealthy member of Louisiana’s free colored Creole elite. Many of the legends about the power, wealth, and infamy of Marie Laveaux have arisen because of confusion in oral and literary sources about the women who shared her name, particularly her daughter Marie Héloïse, who was also a voodoo priestess.

In the 1830s Marie Laveaux emerged as a prominent spiritualist and healer at her home; at African American ritual dances on Sundays in New Orleans’ Congo Square; and at major religious festivals, such as the midsummer St. John’s Eve celebrations on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, which attracted people of all colors. Laveaux presided over ceremonies that blended elements of Roman Catholicism, such as the invocation of saints and the use of incense and holy water, and traditional African religious dances and rituals involving drumming, chanting, animal sacrifices, and worship of Damballa or Zombi, a snake god. The scanty record of these rituals suggests that Laveaux would blow alcohol on the faces of participants as a blessing and would also wrap a snake around their (usually naked) bodies as a symbol of her control over them. Later accounts of these ceremonies, both in oral tradition and in Robert Tallant’s Voodoo in New Orleans (1946), highlight the sexual abandon of the participants.

Laveaux’s legendary power came less from these infrequent ceremonies, however, than from her skills as an everyday spiritualist who used her charms to bewitch a highly superstitious public. Not unlike J. Edgar Hoover a century later, Laveaux understood that knowledge, particularly knowledge of private indiscretions, equals power. As a hairdresser to prominent women in New Orleans, she had access to gossip about the cit’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. She also gained information about the New Orleans elite from African American servants and slaves who, in return for Mamzelle Marie’s spiritual protection, brought Laveaux news about their masters’ and mistresses’ financial, political, and sexual affairs. Laveaux used that intelligence to make herself indispensable to women seeking information on their husbands’ philandering, to politicians keen to learn of their opponents’ foibles, and to businessmen who relied on her charms and amulets when the hidden hand of the market failed to work its own particular gris-gris. Such information—and the spells and potions to rid her clients of what ailed them—provided Laveaux with a steady income, though not the great riches that many of her followers and detractors claimed. It also ensured friends for her in the highest places in Louisiana society, which may explain why, unlike other voodooiennes, she was never arrested. Her seeming influence over whites strengthened her influence over black Louisianans and entrenched her position in African American folklore as one of the most powerful women of her time.

Depending on the source, white accounts of Laveaux’s mid-nineteenth century heyday depict her as either saint or whore. After her death in 1881, white Catholics in New Orleans eulogized her saintly role in helping victims of yellow fever and cholera in the 1850s and her tireless work to give comfort to the city’s death-row convicts. White Catholics downplayed any African elements in Laveaux’s religion and also praised her alleged devotion to the Confederate cause. On the other hand, an obituary in the white Protestant-controlled New Orleans Democrat dismissed these claims for Laveaux’s piety, describing her as “the prime mover and soul of the indecent orgies of the ignoble Voudous” (Fandrich, 267). Other newspaper accounts and later folklore suggested that Laveaux had used her Lake Pontchartrain home, the Maison Blanche, as a brothel that served wealthy white men seeking glamorous “high yellow” prostitutes, although it is possible that these accounts confused the elder Marie with her daughter, Marie Héloïse, who reputedly kept a bawdy house.

In death Laveaux remained almost as influential as in life, at least to the thousands who seek out her tomb every year in New Orleans, which, some claim, is the second most visited grave in the United States after Elvis Presley’s. Like Presley’s followers, Laveaux’s pilgrims leave candles, money, and other objects in hope that her spirit will grant their wishes. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania, some disciples even left notes asking that Laveaux administer punishment to the alleged perpetrator, Osama Bin Laden.

LAWRENCE, JACOB ARMSTEAD

(7 Sept. 1917–9 June 2000), artist and teacher, was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to migrant parents. His father, Jacob Lawrence, a railroad cook, was from South Carolina and his mother, Rose Lee Armstead, hailed from Virginia. In 1919 the family moved to Pennsylvania, where Jacob’s sister, Geraldine, was born. Five years later, Jacob’s brother, William, was born, and his parents separated.

Jacob Lawrence moved with his mother, sister, and brother to a Manhattan apartment on West 143rd Street in 1930. Upon his arrival in Harlem, the teenage Lawrence began taking neighborhood art classes. His favorite teacher was the painter Charles Alston, who taught at the Harlem Art Workshop. This workshop, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, was first housed in the Central Harlem branch of the New York Public Library before relocating to Alston’s studio at 306 West 141st Street. Many community cultural workers had studios in this spacious building. Affectionately called “306,” Alston’s studio in particular was a vital gathering place for creative people. Lawrence met ALAIN LOCKE, AARON DOUGLAS, LANGSTON HUGHES, CLAUDE MCKAY, RICHARD WRIGHT, and RALPH ELLISON at his mentor’s lively studio.

In 1935, at age eighteen, Lawrence started painting scenes of Harlem using poster paint and brown paper. Initially chosen for their accessibility and low cost, these humble materials would remain central to the artist’s work. The next year Lawrence began what would become his ritual of doing background research for his art projects at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Inspired after seeing W. E. B. DU BOIS’s play Haiti at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre in 1936, he began researching the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This eye-opening research culminated in a powerful series of forty-one paintings titled The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Completed in 1938, this series dramatically visualized the life of the formerly enslaved man who led the Haitian struggle for independence from France and the creation of the world’s first black republic. These paintings also signaled paths the artist would continue to explore in his work, namely, figurative expressionism, history painting, sequential narration, and prose captions. Moreover, the ambitious cycle revealed Lawrence’s deep interest in heroism and struggles for freedom.

Jacob Lawrence against the backdrop of one of his paintings, at the Harlem Arts Center, 1938, in a WPA photograph. Schomburg Center

In September 1938 AUGUSTA SAVAGE, the sculptor and influential director of the Harlem Community Art Center, helped Lawrence gain work as an easel painter on the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. During his eighteen months as a government-employed artist, Lawrence probably produced about thirty-six paintings. In addition, he worked on two more dramatic biographies of freedom fighters. In 1939 he completed The Life of FREDERICK DOUGLASS series. Based on the famous abolitionist’s autobiography, the thirty-two painted panels—each accompanied by text—-chart the heroic transformation of an escaped slave into a fiery orator and an uncompromising activist. The following year Lawrence completed The Life of HARRIET TUBMAN series. Composed of thirty-one panels, this epic visual and textual narrative features the courageous female conductor of the Underground Railroad. Both series were exhibited at the Library of Congress in 1940 in commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1941, at age twenty-four, Lawrence completed his signature narrative series, The Migration of the Negro, a group of sixty tempera paintings illustrating the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. This historical cycle was done in a modern visual style with its emphasis on strong lines, simplified forms, geometric shapes, flat planes, bold colors, and recurrent motifs. Gwendolyn Knight, a Barbados-born and Harlem-based artist, helped Lawrence complete the project by assisting with the preparation of the sixty hardboard panels and the accompanying prose captions. The creative couple married in New York on 24 July 1941, shortly after completing this pivotal work. Lawrence’s Migration series brought him wide public recognition and critical acclaim. Twenty-six of the panels were reproduced in Fortune magazine in November 1941. Simultaneously, New York’s prestigious Downtown Gallery exhibited the cycle, and, soon after the show opened, Edith Halpert, the gallery’s owner, asked Lawrence to join her roster of prominent American artists, which included Ben Shahn, Stuart Davis, and Charles Sheeler. Lawrence accepted Halpert’s offer, making him the first artist of African descent to be represented by a downtown gallery. A few months later the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) purchased half the Migration series and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., bought the other half, marking the first acquisition of works by an African American artist at either institution. In October 1942 MOMA organized a two-year, fifteen-venue national tour of the acclaimed series.

During World War II, Lawrence served in the U.S. Coast Guard, where he continued to paint. In 1944 a group of his paintings based on life at sea was exhibited at MOMA. The following year, while he was still on active duty, Lawrence successfully applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin work on a series devoted to the crisis of war. The fourteen somber panels that make up his War series were first shown at the New Jersey State Museum in 1947, and Time magazine touted the series as “by far his best work yet” (Time 50 [22 Dec. 1947], 61).

Lawrence began his distinguished career as a teacher in 1946 when the former Bauhaus artist Josef Albers invited him to teach summer session at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Until his retirement in 1983 Lawrence was a highly sought-after teacher. He taught at numerous schools, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and the New School for Social Research in New York City. From 1970 to 1983 Lawrence was a full professor of art at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Lawrence’s first retrospective began in 1960. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the show traveled to sixteen sites across the country. The artist had two other traveling career retrospectives during his lifetime: one organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and another organized by the Seattle Art Museum in 1986.

During the civil rights movement, Lawrence visually captured the challenges of the freedom struggle of blacks in works such as Two Rebels (1963). His first venture into limited-edition printmaking, Two Rebels dramatized the struggle between black protestors and white policemen through lithography. Over the next three decades the artist would also experiment with other print-making techniques, such as drypoint, etching, and silkscreen.

In 1962, Lawrence traveled to Nigeria, where he lectured on the influence of traditional West African sculpture on modernist art and exhibited his work in Lagos and Ibadan. Two years later the artist and his wife returned to Nigeria for eight months, to experience life in West Africa and to create work based on their stay.

After working primarily as a painter and a printmaker, Lawrence expanded his range in the late 1970s by also making murals. He received his first mural commission in 1979 when he was hired to create a work for Seattle’s Kingdome Stadium. He created a ten-panel work titled Games. Made of porcelain enamel on steel, the 9½ × 7½ foot mural features powerful athletes surrounded by adoring fans. This mural, which was relocated to the Washington State Convention Center in 2000, was followed by others at Howard University (1980, 1984), the University of Washington (1984), the Orlando International Airport (1988), the Joseph Addabbo Federal Building in Queens (1988), and the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago (1991). The artist’s final mural, a 72-foot-long mosaic commissioned by New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, was posthumously unveiled in the Times Square subway station in 2001.

When Jacob Lawrence died at home in Seattle at age eighty-two, he was exploring a theme that had captured his imagination at the beginning of his sixty-five-year artistic career. Lawrence was still painting pictures of laborers, their movements and constructions, and their tools. A collection of hand tools—hammers, chisels, planes, rulers, brushes, and a Pullman porter’s bed wrench—graced his studio and inspired his work. Concerning his prized collection, the artist explained: “For me, tools became extensions of hands, and movement. Tools are like sculptures. You look at old paintings and you see in them the same tools we use today. Tools are eternal. And I also enjoy the illusion when I paint them: you know, making something that is about making something” (Kimmelman, 210–211).

Jacob Lawrence’s lifelong interest in representing work and workers befits a man who left behind a monumental body of work—approximately seven hundred paintings, one hundred prints, eight murals, and hundreds of drawings, studies, and sketches. One of the most widely admired African American artists, he was passionately committed to employing his own expressive tools to creatively visualize historical struggles and modern American life.

LAWRENCE, MARGARET MORGAN

(19 Aug. 1914–), pediatric psychiatrist, was born Margaret Morgan in New York City, the daughter of the Reverend Sandy Alonzo Morgan, an Episcopal priest, and Mary E. Smith, a schoolteacher. Mistrusting segregated southern hospitals, the Morgans temporarily moved from Virginia to Harlem in 1914, living with Margaret’s aunt, so that their child could be born in New York. Margaret’s childhood, however, was spent primarily in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where her father’s next congregation was located. She grew up a precocious child, reading at three, and lived in a middle-class black neighborhood with her educated parents.

Every summer Morgan visited her aunts in Harlem, and at the age of fourteen she decided she wanted to live with them so that she could go to a better high school. She had decided to be a doctor, she told people, because her older brother had died in infancy before she was born and she wanted to save babies from dying. With her parents blessing, she moved to Harlem and attended the Wadleigh School, one of the two classical high schools for girls in New York City that required passing entrance exams. In this predominantly white high school, Margaret excelled, and on graduation day the top prize in Greek and Latin was awarded, as the principal put it, to “the Negro girl from Mississippi.” She received scholarships from Cornell University, Hunter College, and Smith College and chose Cornell partly because of her state regents scholarship but also for its strong reputation in the biological sciences and, as she told friends, because it had men.

At Cornell in the fall of 1932 Morgan was the only black student in the College of Arts and Sciences. She was not allowed to live in the women’s dormitory, but the dean of students found her a room with a business family, where she lived for two years. There, to pay for her room and board, she worked as a servant, wearing a uniform and waiting on the dinner table while she herself ate separately in the kitchen and slept in an uninsulated attic. She was also responsible for the housecleaning, washing, and ironing.

In her junior year Morgan moved in with a faculty family, where she had a large, comfortable room but where, once again, she earned her keep serving as household maid. In her senior year, however, she was taken in by Hattie Jones, a legendary figure in Ithaca’s tiny black community. Married to a big-time gambler and driven around town in her flashy car by a good-looking young chauffeur, Hattie rented rooms in her big house and cooked huge dinners for students she called “young Negroes coming up” (Lightfoot, 98).

Determined to be a doctor, Morgan preferred courses in organic chemistry and comparative astronomy to ancient history or sociology. In her senior year she worked as a technologist for a researcher in the Agricultural College, which paid the rent and taught her how to prepare tissue specimens for microscopic study. She received excellent grades and was told by the dean of the medical school that she had done “very well” in the Medical Aptitude Test. Medical school seemed certain, and again she chose Cornell.

Cornell Medical School rejected her application. The very same dean stunned her by saying that several meetings of the admissions committee had been devoted to her application, adding that she was a very good student and a promising physician, but still they were turning her down. The dean told her, in words she would always remember, that twenty-five years earlier the medical school had conducted “an experiment,” admitting a Negro, “and it didn’t work out. He got tuberculosis” (Lightfoot, 175).

Morgan was accepted at Columbia, however, and in 1936 she became the third black medical student in that school’s history; during her four years there she was the only African American in the school. She did well in her courses and won the respect of her teachers and classmates. Meanwhile, to pay for her meals at the residence hall, she worked in the kitchen drying silverware.

In 1938 Morgan married Charles Lawrence, but her life’s goal was still to save babies, so after medical school she sought a residency in pediatrics at New York’s Babies Hospital, affiliated with Columbia Medical School. Her application was rejected, because—as she was told and never believed—married interns could not live in the hospital’s quarters, even though her husband was then living in Georgia and attending Atlanta University. Instead, she did her pediatric internship at Harlem Hospital and then took a master’s degree in public health from Columbia in 1943.

In 1944 Lawrence left New York City and returned to the South for four years, teaching pediatrics and public health at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, then the premier medical school for black Americans, while her husband taught sociology at nearby Fisk University. Lawrence and her husband moved back to New York City in 1948. After psychoanalytic training at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute (as the first black person to go through the institute), she settled into a distinguished career of research, teaching, and clinical work at Harlem Hospital and Columbia Medical School, while her husband became an eminent sociologist at Brooklyn College.

The lucky break that put her on the path to professional distinction was her association at Columbia with a young pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, during the year she worked for her master’s degree in public health. Spöck opened Lawrence’s eyes to the link between physical health and psychological well-being. From Spock, who was also trained in psychoanalysis, she learned to look at the social and family context of childhood disease. She put these insights to work at Harlem Hospital, where she worked to reconstruct the shattered lives of young black children through treatment and therapy in the Developmental Psychiatry Clinic, which she founded and ran for many years.

Lawrence’s most important contribution to child psychiatry was her pioneering advocacy of placing in schools therapeutic teams composed of psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, social workers, and nurses. Her first book, The Mental Health Team in the School (1971), describing how visiting teams of mental health specialists could serve children in school, is recognized as a milestone in pediatric psychiatry, as are the programs in child psychiatry she developed in daycare centers and hospital clinics.

Throughout her career Lawrence was passionately involved in politics and a lifelong activist in the anti-poverty and civil rights movements, always seeking to improve, as she never tired of putting it, “the impoverished lives of black babies.” She was particularly interested in how poor urban black families coped with adversity and how some black children were able to develop ego strength under stress, themes she explored in her second book Young Inner City Families (1975).

Margaret and Charles Lawrence had three children, one of whom, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, has written a moving biography of her mother, Balm in Gilead: Journal of a Healer (1988). After her retirement at age seventy in 1984 from Harlem Hospital and Columbia University Medical School, Lawrence continued her private child psychiatry practice in Rockland County, New York, while remaining an active crusader to improve mental health for economically disadvantaged children. She has received many honorary degrees, the Joseph Bernstein Mental Health Award (1975), the Outstanding Women Practitioners in Medicine Award (1984), and the Cornell Black Alumni Award (1992).

In the spring of 2002, at the age of eighty-seven, Lawrence returned to Ithaca to give a talk to the Cornell community. She told the rapt audience that she had made it despite her difficulties as a student because “I knew who I was, and I knew my own gifts.”

LEAD BELLY

(15 Jan. 1888–6 Dec. 1949), folk singer and composer, was born Huddie Ledbetter on the Jeter plantation near Caddo Lake, north of Shreveport, Louisiana, the only surviving son of John Wesley Ledbetter and Sally Pugh, farmers who were reasonably well-to-do. Young Huddie (or “Hudy” as the 1910 census records list him) grew up in a large rural black community centered around the Louisiana-Texas-Arkansas junction, and he would later play at rural dances where, in his own words, “there would be no white man around for twenty miles.” Though he was exposed to the newer African American music forms like the blues, he also absorbed many of the older fiddle tunes, play-party tunes, church songs, field hollers, badman ballads, and even old vaudeville songs of the culture. His uncle taught him a song that later became his signature tune, “Goodnight, Irene.” Though Huddie’s first instrument was a “windjammer” (a small accordion), by 1903 he had acquired a guitar and was plying his trade at local dances.

Lead Belly captivated audiences with his powerful voice, his twelve-string guitar, and a mixture of blues, traditional songs, and songs of protest. Library of Congress

In 1904, when he turned sixteen, Huddie made his way to the notorious red-light district of nearby Shreveport; there he was exposed to early jazz and ragtime, as well as blues, and learned how to adapt the left-hand rhythm of the piano players to his own guitar style. He also acquired a venereal disease that eventually drove him back home for treatment. In 1908 he married Aletha Henderson, with whom he had no children, and the pair moved just east of Dallas, where they worked in the fields and prowled the streets of Dallas. Two important things happened to Huddie here: he heard and bought his first twelve-string guitar (the instrument that he would make famous), and he met the man who later became one of the best-known exponents of the “country blues,” BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON. Though Jefferson was actually Huddie’s junior by some five years, he had gained considerable experience as a musician, and he taught Huddie much about the blues and about how an itinerant musician in these early days could make a living. The pair were fixtures around Dallas’s rough-and-tumble Deep Ellum district until about 1915.

Returning to Harrison County, Texas, Huddie then began a series of altercations with the law that would change his life and almost destroy his performing career. It started in 1915, when he was convicted on an assault charge and sent to the local chain gang. He soon escaped, however, and fled to Bowie County under the alias of Walter Boyd. There he lived peacefully until 1917, when he was accused of killing a cousin and wound up at the Sugarland Prison farm in south Texas. There he gained a reputation as a singer and a hard worker, and it was there that a prison chaplain gave him the nickname “Lead Belly.” (Though subsequent sources have listed the singer’s nickname as one word, “Leadbelly,” all original documents give “Lead Belly.”) At Sugarland he also learned songs like “The Midnight Special” and began to create his own songs about local characters and events. When Texas governor Pat Neff visited the prison on an inspection tour, Lead Belly composed a song to the governor pleading for his release; impressed by the singer’s skill, Neff did indeed give him a pardon, signing the papers on 16 January 1925. For the next five years Lead Belly lived and worked around Shreveport, until 1930, when he was again convicted for assault—this time for knifing a “prominent” white citizen. The result was a six- to ten-year term in Angola, then arguably the worst prison in America.

In 1933, while in Angola, Lead Belly encountered folk-song collector John Lomax, who had been traveling throughout southern prisons collecting folk songs from inmates for the Library of Congress. Lead Belly sang several of his choice songs for the recording machine, including “The Western Cowboy” and “Goodnight, Irene.” Lomax was impressed and a year later returned to gather more songs; this time Lead Belly decided to try his pardon-song technique again and recorded a plea to the Louisiana governor, O. K. Allen. The following year Lead Belly was in fact released, and though he always assumed the song had done the trick, prison records show Lead Belly was scheduled for release anyway because of overcrowding.

Lead Belly immediately sought out Lomax and took a job as his driver and bodyguard. For the last months of 1934, he traveled with Lomax as he made the rounds of southern prisons. During this time he learned a lot about folk music and added dozens of new songs to his own considerable repertoire.

In December 1934 Lomax presented his singer to the national meeting of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia—Lead Belly’s first real public appearance—and then took him to New York City in January 1935. His first appearances there generated a sensational round of stories in the press and on newsreels and set the stage for a series of concerts and interviews. One of these was a well-publicized marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Martha Promise (it is not known how or when his first marriage ended); another was a record contract with the American Record Company. Lomax himself continued to make records at a house in West-port, Connecticut, a series of recordings that was donated to the Library of Congress and that formed the foundation for the book by John Lomax and Alan Lomax, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). For three months money and offers poured in, but complex tensions stemming in part from Lomax’s attempts to mold Lead Belly’s repertoire in a way that fit the classic folk music image of the day led to an estrangement between Lomax and Lead Belly, and before long the singer returned to Shreveport.

A year later Lead Belly and his wife returned to New York City to try to make it on their own. He found his audience not in the young African American fans of CAB CALLOWAY and DUKE ELLINGTON (who considered his music old fashioned), but in the young white social activists of various political and labor movements. He felt strongly about issues concerning civil rights and produced songs on a number of topics, the best of which were “The Bourgeois Blues” and “We’re in the Same Boat, Brother.” Lead Belly soon had his own radio show in New York, which led to an invitation to Hollywood to try his hand at films. He tried out for a role in Green Pastures and was considered for a planned film with Bing Crosby about Lomax. The late 1940s saw a series of excellent commercial recordings for Capitol, as well as for the independent Folkways label in New York. His apartment became a headquarters for young aspiring folk singers coming to New York, including a young Woody Guthrie. Martha Promise’s niece Tiny began managing Lead Belly’s affairs, and his career was on the upswing when, in 1949, he became ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). It progressed rapidly, and in December Lead Belly died in Bellevue Hospital in New York City. His body was returned to Mooringsport, Louisiana, for burial. Ironically, a few months later, his song “Goodnight, Irene” was recorded by the Weavers, a group of his folk-singing friends, and became one of the biggest record hits of the decade.

Lead Belly was one of the first performers to introduce African American traditional music to mainstream American culture in the 1930s and 1940s and was responsible for the popularity and survival of many of the nation’s best-loved songs.

LEDBETTER, HUDDIE.

See Lead Belly.

LEE, JARENA

(11 Feb. 1783–?), preacher and evangelist, was born in Cape May, New Jersey. She was not born a slave, but we know little about her family. They were obviously poor enough that at the age of seven Jarena was hired out as a live-in maid to a family that lived some sixty miles from her home. She had a religious awakening in 1804, and several years later she recounts achieving rebirth to a life free of sin and focused on spiritual perfection. Each of these spiritual transformations occurred after Jarena had experienced physical hardships. Her autobiography describes a long and laborious struggle that led her to the conviction that she should preach. In 1836 she published an autobiographical narrative, The Life and Religious Experiences of Jarena Lee. The narrative was reprinted in 1839, and in 1849 she produced an expanded version under the title Religious Experiences and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee: Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel.

Jarena Lee, evangelizing preacher who fought for the ordination of women. Schomburg Center

In the nineteenth century the social order of the United States and Great Britain did not condone women’s speaking in public about their spiritual experiences. Few women of any race dreamed or dared to preach publicly. However, Jarena felt that she had received from God the command to preach the Christian gospel, and eventually she began to do so. In search of a community of Christians, Jarena had sought to unite with the “English Church,” but she felt “there was a wall between me and a communion with that people” (Lee, 4). In 1809, at the age of twenty-six, Jarena found in the Bethel African Methodist congregation of Philadelphia a community of people who identified with issues close to her heart. It was in this company of African American Christians that she felt at ease and clear about her mission. She decided that “this is the people to which my heart unites” (5).

Jarena approached RICHARD ALLEN, the pastor of Bethel, about her desire and call to preach. But he did not grant her a license to preach under the authority of his congregation, because, he said, the congregation still operated under the authority of the white Methodist Episcopal Church, which did not authorize female ministers. But Jarena was not deterred and even expressed some defiance at Allen’s refusal to recognize her divine charge. She wrote of the incident, “O how careful ought we to be lest through our by-laws of church government and discipline, we bring into disrepute even the work of life. It should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God” (11).

Jarena married the Reverend Joseph Lee in 1811, and they would have two children before Joseph died six years into their marriage. Joseph had not supported Jarena’s desire to obey her call to preach, and he refused to relocate from the “Coloured Society” in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, where he had been assigned to serve as pastor. Although she was alone and a single mother after Joseph’s death, Jarena Lee was now free to pursue her ministry.

Lee began preaching and met with enough success that in 1817 she renewed her request to Richard Allen for a license to preach under the authority of the newly formed African Methodist Episcopal Church. There still was no precedent for authorizing women preachers, but by then Allen had seen and heard her preach and was convinced that she was a woman of God. More important, he was now a bishop and was eager to have enthusiastic people who could help the new denomination expand its missionary work. Allen directed Lee to hold prayer meetings and to preach.

Lee undertook her evangelical activity with seriousness and reported that she held many prayer meetings to exhort women and men to Jesus. She felt a bond with the AME Church, even though she never received an official license for her work. However, because Bishop Allen gave her speaking appointments in several Pennsylvania congregations, Lee proceeded with a sense of authority. She traveled with Allen and other AME ministers to denominational meetings in New York and New Jersey. She also traveled alone and with other women to large and small evangelical meetings throughout the Northeast. Lee’s steadfast commitment to her divine call, coupled with her preaching success, challenged the male religious hierarchy and set forth new possibilities for the preaching ministry of African American women.

Jarena Lee did not set out to become a revolutionary; she merely wanted to preach the gospel, but doing that inevitably became a revolutionary act because it challenged the ecclesiastical beliefs and gender roles of her day. Richard Allen was Lee’s most powerful friend and ally, even caring for her son for several years while she spread the word. After Allen died in 1831, Lee continued to preach at various Methodist churches and locations, but found herself ostracized from an increasing number of AME churches in Philadelphia. As she wrote, “I seemed much troubled, as being measurably debarred from my own Church as regards this privilege I had been so much used to” (77).

Not much is known of Lee’s final years, except that she worked for a time with the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Later in the nineteenth century many African American women within the AME Church and in other denominations followed her lead and realized their call to preach, but it was not until 1948 that Rebecca M. Glover became the first woman ordained by the AME Church. In 2000, with the way paved in part by the consecration in 1989 of BARBARA HARRIS in the Episcopal Church, Vashti McKenzie became the first female AME bishop.

A pathfinder for African American women and a trailblazer among Methodist women, Jarena Lee was the first known black woman to forcefully advocate for the right of women to preach in Methodist denominations. For this feat she must be considered among the vanguard of churchwomen in the United States.

LEE, RAPHAEL CARL

(29 Oct. 1949–), plastic surgeon, biomedical engineer, and educator, was born in Sumter, South Carolina, the son of Leonard Powell Lee, a physician, and Jean Maurice Langston Lee, a visual artist. His father had grown up in rural coastal South Carolina, part of a large family in which he and all his siblings, despite the limited opportunities available, earned higher degrees and went into either teaching or medicine. His mother came from a line of successful entrepreneurs with real estate interests in and near Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

As South Carolina’s public schools remained racially segregated until 1963, Lee’s parents enrolled him in a private Roman Catholic “mission” elementary and middle school for blacks. In the fall of 1963 he was among the first group of blacks to enter St. Jude High School in Sumter; he remained there for two years before attending Bishop England High School, also a Catholic institution, in Charleston (1965–1967). The environment at these two schools was hostile at times, he recalls, because of a vocal minority of local whites opposed to racial integration. Undeterred, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of South Carolina (1971). Lee then moved north to Philadelphia, where he earned a master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at Drexel University (1975) and an MD at Temple University (1975); in 1979 he received an ScD in Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lee’s professional interests began to take shape while he was a junior at the University of South Carolina. He took a wide range of courses—biology and other premedical units, in addition to electrical engineering—and discovered the excitement and rewards of interdisciplinary study. The potential medical applications of laser beams, for example, piqued his interest. As a result, Lee entered one of the nation’s first combined engineering and medicine programs at Drexel and Temple. This experience motivated him to pursue a career in academic surgery, and he went on to serve as an assistant resident in surgery at the University of Chicago Hospitals between 1975 and 1977. While at Chicago, he developed a special interest in wound healing and plastic surgery—particularly the relationship between electromagnetic fields, fluid mechanics, and human connective tissues—which led him to interrupt his clinical training for a period of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He earned his doctorate at MIT in two years with a thesis entitled “Cartilage Electromechanics: The Relationship of Physicochemical to Mechanical Properties.” He then completed his surgical training at the University of Chicago Hospitals, as resident in surgery (1979–1980) and chief resident in general surgery (1980–1981).

Lee returned to the Boston area in 1981 for further specialized training. He was senior assistant resident in plastic surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital (1981–1982), after which he held three academic appointments simultaneously: assistant professor of electrical and bioengineering at MIT, assistant professor of bioengineering and surgery at Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and assistant professor of surgery (plastic) at Harvard Medical School. These multiple appointments reflected the interdisciplinary emphasis of his work but also stretched him thin at times—requiring a determined balancing act that was “barely possible,” he felt, in the competitive environments of Harvard and MIT. In 1989 he returned to the University of Chicago as associate professor of surgery, anatomy, and organismal biology (biomechanics). He was promoted to full professor in 1992. Since 1991 he has also served as director of the Electrical Trauma Program and medical director of the Burn Unit at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

Lee’s research has resulted in several important developments in the surgical management of severe trauma, particularly electrical shock, thermal burns, and wounds (see Lee et al., Electrical Trauma: The Pathophysiology, Manifestations, and Clinical Management [1992]). He also established the usefulness of copolymer surfactants in repairing damaged cells after trauma (see Lee et al., “Surfactant-Induced Sealing of Electropermeabilized Skeletal Muscle Membranes In Vivo,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89 [1992]: 4524–4528). The mechanism involves sealing damaged cell membranes—a powerful illustration of how Lee’s engineering and surgical background and interests came together in deeply practical ways in the medical field.

Other important outgrowths of his research include pharmaceutical strategies to reduce scarring, the use of mechanical stress to control engineering of tissues, and surgical procedures for gynecological reconstruction. (On the second of these topics, see, for example, Lee et al., “A Review of the Biophysical Basis for the Clinical Application of Electric Fields in Soft Tissue Repair,” Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation 14 [1993]: 319–335.) Lee has founded two companies—Avocet Polymer Technologies, Inc. (1996), and Maroon Biotech, Inc. (2000)—to develop and market the scarring and surfactant discoveries, respectively, and he holds about a dozen related patents. Also important is a software package that he and a group of his students created to measure body surface area injury. This was the first technique to use three-dimensional simulation of individual patients to calculate burn involvement, complication, and survival rates in a vastly more accurate way than had been possible with traditional methods of visual estimation or with two-dimensional models.

Lee married Kathleen M. Kelley, MD, in 1983. Dr. Kelley holds joint appointments in the departments of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Chicago and is a sometime research collaborator with her husband. They have two children—Rachel Kelley Lee and Catherine Marie Lee.

A Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and diplomate of the American Board of Surgery and American Board of Plastic Surgery, Lee has held office in a number of professional associations. He was a charter member, membership chairman (1986–1988), and scientific council member (1991–1993) of the Bioelectric Repair and Growth Society; scientific council member (1994) of the Bioelectromagnetics Society; chairman of the plastic surgery section (1989–1991) of the National Medical Association; president (1996) of the Society for Physical Regulation in Biology and Medicine; and member of the research and education committee (1998) of the American Association of Plastic Surgeons. Among his numerous awards, he received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, the first year of the prestigious MacArthur Fellows Program. Lee was selected for his original, creative research combining techniques and knowledge in surgery, electrical engineering, biophysics, and electrochemistry. Science Digest included him in its 1984 list of America’s Top 100 Young Scientists. He was also one of four engineers featured in a 1988 exhibit—Black Achievers in Science—designed by the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In 1991 he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, University of South Carolina, in recognition of his distinguished career.

LEE, SPIKE

(27 Mar. 1957–), filmmaker and screenwriter, was born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest of four children of Bill Lee, a jazz composer and musician, and Jacquelyn Shelton, a schoolteacher. During Spike’s youth, his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they lived in the neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Cobble Hill, and Fort Greene. Lee later used his intimate knowledge of these racially integrated Brooklyn neighborhoods to dramatize in his films the relations between African Americans and their non-black neighbors. Movies and television, such as the Anglo American The Partridge Family and the African American Good Times, informed Spike’s understanding of popular culture. “I can remember my mother, Jacquelyn, taking me to see James Bond movies,” he reminisced. “She liked them. I used to like 007 myself. I remember seeing Help! with the Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night” (By Any Means, 2). Lee’s fiction film Crooklyn, which he co-wrote with his siblings, documents the influence television had on them.

In 1975 Lee enrolled at his father’s alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated in 1979 with a BA in Mass Communications. That summer Lee interned with Columbia Pictures, and the following fall he entered the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he cultivated a working friendship with cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. “We came in together,” Lee later recalled. “He was from Howard. I was from Morehouse. . . . We were the only blacks at NYU” (Gotta Have It, 32).

Lee produced his first student film, The Answer (1980), in response to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation. The following year his MFA thesis project, the forty-five-minute film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, which Dickerson shot, won the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ Best Student Film Award and became the first student film ever included in the Lincoln Center New Directors, New Films series.

In 1980 Lee and Monty Ross, a friend from Morehouse, established the production company, Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Named after the historically inaccurate, but often cited, “promise” made by the U.S. government to newly emancipated slaves, Lee’s company name expresses the consternation of African Americans at America’s broken promises and racist policies. The company’s first production, Lee’s first feature-length film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), with its mixture of humor and intensity, its bold exploration of sexuality and race, and its strong visual style, won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best New Director Prize. Shot in ten days for $175,000, the film made over seven million dollars at the box office. Lee himself played one of the film’s key roles, the fast-talking, big glasses–wearing bicycle messenger Mars Blackmon. Blackmon reappeared in a series of Lee-directed Nike commercials aired from 1988 to 1993 and reprised in 2003 upon the retirement of MICHAEL JORDAN.

In 1988 Lee reflected on his Morehouse College experiences with School Daze, a musical set in an historically black college. Controversial in its treatment of color and class divisions within the black community, the film pits wealthy, light-skinned “gammas” against working-class, dark-skinned “jigaboos.” School Daze was Lee’s first studio film and after the production costs reached four million dollars, Island Pictures pulled out, but Lee managed to secure additional financing from Columbia Pictures. The film eventually grossed fifteen million dollars.

With Do The Right Thing (1989), Lee won an Oscar for best screenplay and established himself as a filmmaker of unique vision and distinctive voice. The film, which Lee wrote and starred in, explores African American cultural life in the flashy and confident visual style that came to distinguish Lee’s work. Featuring OSSIE DAVIS, RUBY DEE, Danny Aiello, and John Turturro, Do The Right Thing, like School Daze, mines divisions and differences within the African American community and beyond. In the film, a Brooklyn pizza shop becomes the nexus of escalating racial tension between Italian Americans and African Americans. The action takes place on the hottest day of the summer and climaxes with a street riot and the killing of a black youth by white policemen. Unlike most American films, Do The Right Thing refuses to resolve its plot or its political conflicts. Instead, it ends with contradictory on-screen quotations from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Lee’s next film, Mo’ Better Blues (1990), about a jazz musician inspired by Lee’s father, marks the beginning of his collaboration with leading man Denzel Washington, who later starred in Malcolm X and He Got Game. In Jungle Fever (1991), about the romance between a married, black architect and his Italian American secretary, Lee presents another bold treatment of race and class.

Malcolm X (1992), based on ALEX HALEY’s biography and a script begun by JAMES BALDWIN, engendered controversy even before production began, most notably through attacks from AMIRI BARAKA . When it went over budget, Lee turned to black celebrities, including OPRAH WINFREY, MICHAEL JORDAN, and BILL COSBY, for funds. The film reputedly cost thirty-five million dollars, but it became Lee’s highest grossing film, earning forty-eight million dollars at the box office. The finished film drew praise from critics and audiences, but controversies remained, including concern over Lee’s refusal to implicate LOUIS FARRAKHAN and the Nation of Islam explicitly in Malcolm X’s death. Although Denzel Washington earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in the title role, the film received no other recognition from the Academy. However, the film’s influence on the public’s perception of the leader is unequivocal, as was its effect on the marketplace. Promotional merchandise and tie-ins for the film, including clothing, toys, posters, and books, were marketed by Lee himself.

Lee followed Malcolm X with the smaller coming-of-age drama, Crooklyn (1994), and the darker Clockers (1995). In 1996 Lee released both Girl 6, written by SUZAN LORI PARKS, about an unemployed actress who takes a job as a phone sex worker, and Get on the Bus, about a busload of black men heading to Washington, D.C., for the 1995 Million Man March. Lee again tapped Denzel Washington for a leading role in his next film, the father-son drama He Got Game (1998). Summer of Sam (1999), set in the Bronx in the summer of 1977, has a predominantly white cast led by John Leguizamo.

Lee confronts the history of the representation of African Americans head on with the satire Bamboozled (2000). The film stars Damon Wayans as an Ivy League-educated black network television writer who unintentionally creates a popular hit with a purposefully offensive modern-day minstrel show featuring black actors wearing blackface. While many viewers and critics complained about the film’s descent into melodrama, Bamboozled was praised for its fierce exposé of racism in the media. “On a deeper level,” wrote Steven Holden in the New York Times, “Bamboozled addresses the broader issue of minstrelsy and American culture and poses unanswerable questions about black identity, assimilation and the give and take between white and black cultures” (6 Oct. 2000).

In addition to his fiction projects, Lee has directed a number of documentary films. He won an academy award for best documentary with 4 Little Girls (1997), about the events surrounding the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four African American girls. In 2000 Lee captured the stand-up work of comedians Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Bernie Mac in the box office hit The Original Kings of Comedy, and in 2002 he produced and directed JIM BROWN ALL AMERICAN. For HBO, Lee directed a television adaptation of John Leguizamo’s one-person Broadway show, Freak, in 1998. Three years later, he directed a television adaptation of Roger Guenveur Smith’s Obie Award-winning off-Broadway solo performance in The HUEY P. NEWTON Story. Lee’s other television projects include filming the 1998 and 1999 Pavarotti & Friends concerts, organized to raise funds for children in Liberia, Guatemala, and Kosovo.

Family loyalty helped launch the acting career of Lee’s sister, Joie, and the careers in the technical areas of filmmaking of his brothers, Cinqué and David. Lee commissioned his father to write the original scores for many of his films, including She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, and Jungle Fever. Most of Lee’s films dramatize family and neighborhood issues. One also finds these themes in 25th Hour (2002), which explores a young Irish American working-class man’s ties to his father and two male friends.

In 1993 Lee married Tanya Lynette Lewis. The couple has two sons, Satchel and Jackson. For over twenty years Spike Lee has maintained his status as one of only a few American filmmakers whose work articulates a personal visual style and moral vision. He is one of a small number of African American filmmakers from the East Coast who received their film-school training in the 1980s and who produce interesting films about ordinary people, showing us that those lives are not so banal as many Hollywood films would have us believe.

LEWIS, CARL

(1 July 1961–), track and field athlete, was born Frederick Carlton Lewis in Birmingham, Alabama, the third of four children of William Lewis and Evelyn Lawler, both of them teachers and coaches who had been outstanding athletes themselves at Tuskegee Institute. Lewis’s father was an excellent pass receiver in football and sprinter in track and field, while his mother was a nationally ranked hurdler who was expected to compete in the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki before an injury cut short her career.

In 1963 Lewis’s parents, after brief stints as teachers in Montgomery, Alabama, following their graduation from Tuskegee Institute, moved the family to Willingboro, New Jersey, to further their professional careers and improve their social and economic positions. It was in Willingboro that Lewis honed his enormous physical talents and first garnered national attention for his exploits in track and field. Training alongside his sister Carol, who became a nationally ranked long jumper, and coached by his parents at their Willingboro Track Club, Lewis evolved into the top-ranked long jumper and one of the best interscholastic sprinters in the country. In 1979 he established a national high school record in the long jump with a leap of 26 feet, 6 inches and captured a bronze medal in the same event at the Pan American Games.

His accomplishments on the track were so extraordinary that Lewis was offered dozens of athletic scholarships by several prestigious colleges and universities. He ultimately decided to attend the University of Houston so that he could train under the highly respected coach Tom Tellez. Lewis blossomed athletically at Houston, capturing many championships and establishing numerous records in the sprints and long jump using the hitch-kick technique introduced to him by Tellez. In 1980 Lewis won the first of two consecutive indoor and outdoor National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) long-jump championships and was chosen to compete on the 4 × 100 United States Olympic relay team. Unfortunately, Lewis, along with FLO HYMAN and other American athletes, was denied the opportunity to compete in the Moscow Olympics because of President Jimmy Carter’s decision to boycott the games as a result of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The following year Lewis broke the world record in the long jump with a leap of 27 feet, 10.5 inches at the Southwest Conference championships, captured NCAA titles in the 100 meters and long jump, and garnered the first of many of his titles in the 100 meters and long jump at the Track Athletic Congress (TAC) championships.

Carl Lewis jumping at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain. © AFP/CORBIS

In 1982 Lewis left the University of Houston and joined the famed Santa Monica Track Club. The change in venue only seemed to fuel Lewis’s competitive spirit and enhance his talents on the track. He won titles in the 100 meters, long jump, and 4 × 100 meter relay at the 1983 World Championships in Helsinki and in the same year captured the 200 meters in a time of 19.75 seconds and the long jump with a distance of 28 feet, 10.25 inches at the TAC championships. In 1984 Lewis realized lasting fame by winning gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4 × 100 meter relay at the Los Angeles Olympic Games. His four-gold-medal-winning performance in Los Angeles was particularly significant since it matched the victories of JESSE OWENS in the 1936 Berlin Games and thus helped revitalize interest in the track legend and the political controversy surrounding Adolf Hitler and the Berlin Olympics. Lewis’s triumphs recalled the memory of Owens and the symbolic importance of his victories in a country espousing beliefs in Aryan racial superiority.

Lewis spent some time away from the track honing his artistic talents following his great performance in the Los Angeles Olympic Games. In 1986 he studied voice, dance, and acting at Warren Robertson’s Theater Workshop in New York. Always interested in the entertainment business, Lewis formed his own band and produced several records that sold particularly well in Sweden and Japan. In 1988, however, Lewis was once again devoting himself full time to track and field. At the Seoul Olympics in 1988, he captured a gold medal in the long jump, a silver medal in the 200 meters, and won the gold medal in the 100 meters after Canadian Ben Johnson was disqualified for drug use. In a sub-par Olympic performance by his standards, Lewis was denied an opportunity to win another medal at Seoul when the United States 4 × 100 meter relay team failed to get to the finals because of a mishandled baton pass in the first qualifying round.

Lewis continued his Olympic success in the 1992 Barcelona Games by winning the gold medal in the long jump with a leap of 28 feet, 5.5 inches and by anchoring the gold-medal-winning 4 × 100 meter relay team. Lewis closed out his Olympic career in grand style at the 1996 Games in Atlanta by winning the gold medal in the long jump. At the athletically old age of thirty-five, he overcame the challenges of arch-rival Mike Powell and a host of much younger jumpers. Lewis thrilled the Atlanta crowd by leaping 27 feet, 10.75 inches to become the only track and field performer in Olympic history besides discuss thrower Al Oerter to garner four gold medals in a single event. This victory also made him only the fourth man in history to win nine gold medals in the Summer Games, the others being the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, the American swimmer Mark Spitz, and Ray Ewry, an American who competed in the long jump, the high jump, and the triple jump.

Lewis finally ended his competitive track and field career in 1997. He retired with ten Olympic medals (nine gold, one silver), ten world records, and eight titles in major championships. He also retired as the most decorated man in the history of track and field. He was the recipient of the 1981 Sullivan Award, 1982 Jesse Owens Award, 1982 and 1984 Track and Field News World Athlete of the Year award, 1983 and 1984 Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year awards, and 1999 World Sports Award of the Century for track and field. He was, moreover, a 1985 inductee into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame.

Lewis has enjoyed a busy and largely successful post-athletic career. Although he was arrested for a second time in 2003 for driving drunk and was never able to endear himself to the American public because of his perceived aloofness and arrogance, Lewis has found success in business and devoted a great deal of time to charitable organizations and causes. He is a National Court Appointed Special Advocate Association spokesperson for abused and neglected children. He founded the Carl Lewis Foundation, which supports a number of charities, including the College Fund (formerly the United Negro College Fund), the Wendy Marx Foundation (organ donor awareness), and the Walkathon in Houston. He is also a board member of the “Best Buddies” program, which integrates people with special needs into society.

LEWIS, DAVID LEVERING

(25 May 1936–), historian and biographer, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to John Henry Lewis and Alice Ernestine Bell, both originally from Atlanta. When John Henry Lewis sacrificed his job as principal of Little Rock’s black high school to protest inequities in teachers’ salaries based on race, the family moved to Wilberforce, Ohio. Lewis spent ages seven to nine in the community of Wilberforce University, where his father was the dean of theology. Named after the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, the university is the oldest African American institution of higher education. At the age of twelve, David Levering Lewis met W. E. B. DU BOIS, a fraternity brother of his father’s and one of his mother’s teachers at Atlanta University. The famous scholar and activist asked the young Lewis what he intended to do with his life. In a historical twist, this young boy left speechless by the question would go on to dedicate over fifteen years of his life to writing the biography of the man who asked it.

The Lewis family returned to the South in the late 1940s as John Henry Lewis assumed the presidency of Morris Brown College in Atlanta, one of the five schools of Atlanta University. David Levering Lewis attended Booker T. Washington High School, following the path set by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. only a few years before. Also like King, Lewis left the high school early to attend Fisk University’s Early Entrants Program. If it seems odd that the biographer of W. E. B. Du Bois attended a high school named for the man’s great nemesis, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, it then seems fitting that Lewis went on to Du Bois’s alma mater of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Named to honor General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, Fisk was founded in 1866 with the help of the American Missionary Association to educate newly emancipated African Americans.

After arriving at Fisk in 1952, Lewis quickly became interested in international issues and student leadership. Lewis’s time there coincided with that of such prominent faculty members as August Meier and the thriving presidency of CHARLES S. JOHNSON. Lewis graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in History and Philosophy in 1956. He briefly attended the University of Michigan Law School but quickly realized that the law was not a good fit for him. He then entered the graduate program in History at Columbia University, where he wrote his master’s thesis on John Fiske, the American philosopher and historian, and graduated with a master’s degree in History in 1958. He spent the following summer working with Meier researching the history of the African American elite in Atlanta. Their work resulted in an essay that appeared in The Journal of Negro Education (Spring 1959). That fall Lewis entered a doctoral program at the London School of Economics to study European history with a specialization in modern France. He wrote his dissertation on French liberal Roman Catholicism and was awarded the doctorate in 1962. In the fall of that same year Lewis reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, for service in the United States Army. He spent the next year in Germany as a psychiatric technician for the military before returning to a career in academia.

Lewis held positions at the University of Ghana, Howard University, and the University of Notre Dame teaching European history. He then accepted a tenured position at Morgan State University in Baltimore and was asked by an editor at Penguin Books to write a biography of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. Lewis was initially skeptical, given that his area of academic specialty was European history, but he agreed to the project, and King: A Critical Biography was published in 1970. In the same year he accepted an associate professorship at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) and added courses on the civil rights movement to his repertoire. After ten years at the UDC, he moved on to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and taught there for the next five years. While on the faculty at UCSD, Lewis completed When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981), a well-received account of the Harlem Renaissance that traces the explosion of black cultural production during this period. In 1968 Rutgers University had created an endowed professorship in memory of Martin Luther King Jr., and Lewis accepted the chair in 1985. Two years later he published The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa.

In the late 1980s, Lewis continued to work on the biography of Du Bois he had begun a decade earlier with the help of Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson International Center fellowships. In addition to interviewing hundreds of people, Lewis traveled to three continents and over twenty archives conducting research on Du Bois. Lewis also drew on over 115,000 pieces of correspondence that the University of Massachusetts at Amherst had acquired from Shirley Graham-Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois’s wife, to which previous biographers had not had access. In 1993 Lewis completed the first volume of the biography, entitled W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, which won him the Pulitzer Prize, the Parkman Prize in History, and the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy. The book traces the life of Du Bois from his childhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to his experiences at Fisk and Harvard; his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, and his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the organization’s publication, The Crisis. When the second volume, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963, was published in 2000, Lewis became the first author to win two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography for back-to-back volumes. The second installment of the biography considers Du Bois’s conflict-laden relationships with other leaders of the time, most notably Booker T. Washington and MARCUS GARVEY, work with the Pan-African movement, Du Bois’s time in Nazi Germany, and his death in Ghana. As Lewis has noted in interviews, he “didn’t want to defend Du Bois,” but to “present a conflicted figure whose attempt to achieve his ideals caused him to contradict many of them” (Rutgers Focus, Feb. 2001). Lewis has also edited Du Bois’s study, Black Reconstruction, an anthology entitled The W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, and a collection of Du Bois’s correspondence. He also wrote the introduction to the one hundredth anniversary edition of Du Bois’s classic, The Souls of Black Folk.

A recipient of the coveted MacArthur Fellowship in 1999, Lewis has written on such diverse topics as the history of the District of Columbia (District of Columbia: A Bicentennial History, 1976), housing in Great Britain (New Housing in Great Britain, 1960, coauthored with Hansmartin Bruckmann), a cache of photographs selected by Du Bois at the turn of the twentieth century (A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress, 2003, coauthored with Deborah Willis), and the Dreyfus affair (Prisoners of Honor: The Dreyfus Affair, 1994). He has also edited anthologies regarding the civil rights movement (The Civil Rights Movement in America: Essays, 1986) and the Harlem Renaissance (Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, 1994, and Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America, 1994, coedited with David Driskell). He appears in “America 1900,” part of the Public Broadcasting Service’s documentary film series American Experience, in which he discusses African American life at the turn of the century. He was a scholar in residence at New York University in 2000, and he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001. In 2003 he joined the faculty at New York University as a university professor and professor of history. He is also a commissioner of the National Portrait Gallery.

David Levering Lewis has set the bar for highly readable, accessible, thorough, and layered renderings of periods in American history such as the civil rights movement and the Harlem Renaissance, while his ability to create biographies capturing the complexities of black leaders’ lives has earned him deserved acclaim. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, Lewis has worked for decades to preserve the history of African Americans and their leaders, particularly civil rights icons W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr.

LEWIS, EDMONIA

(c. 1844–after 1909), sculptor, was born to an African American father and a mother of African American and Mississauga descent, whose names are not known. The Mississauga, a Chippewa (Ojibway in Canada) band, lived in southern Ontario. Information about Lewis’s early life remains inconsistent and unverified. She was probably born in 1844 or 1845, most likely near Albany, New York. Orphaned by age nine, Lewis and her older brother, Samuel, were taken in by their maternal aunts, Mississaugas living near Niagara Falls. Lewis joined the tribe in hunting and fishing along Lake Ontario and the Niagara River and in making and selling moccasins, baskets, and other souvenirs. Although she later gave her Mississauga name as “Wildfire,” Lewis’s translation from the Chippewa may have been intended to authenticate her Indian background and appeal to whites. She remained with the Mississauga until age twelve, when Samuel, using earnings amassed during the gold rush in California, arranged for her schooling at New York Central College, an abolitionist school in McGrawville, New York.

In 1859 Lewis entered the Ladies Preparatory program at Oberlin College. There she adopted the name Mary Edmonia, using Mary with friends and faculty and Edmonia on her drawings. Lewis proceeded amiably until the winter of 1862, when two of her white housemates accused her of poisoning them with cantharides, or “Spanish fly.” Years of antiblack and anti-Oberlin feelings came to a head, and Lewis was badly beaten by a mob and left for dead. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON defended her at a two-day trial, securing a dismissal on the basis of insufficient evidence. The following year, when she was again falsely accused—this time of stealing art supplies—she was unofficially but summarily expelled.

Forever Free (1867). Howard University Gallery of Art

Undeterred by her lack of training, Lewis moved to Boston in 1863 with the intention of becoming an artist. Through supporters at Oberlin, she met William Lloyd Garrison and the portrait sculptor Edward Brackett. With the encouragement of Brackett, Lydia Maria Child, and other abolitionists, she learned the basics of clay sculpting. Her first sculptures were clay and plaster portrait medallions and portrait busts of antislavery leaders and Civil War heroes. In 1864 she sold over one hundred reproductions of her bust of Robert Gould Shaw, the Boston Brahmin who led and died with the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment, which included twenty-one men from Oberlin, some of whom Lewis knew. With enough money to travel abroad, in 1865 she sailed for Florence, Italy, where she was assisted by the world-renowned sculptor Hiram Powers. Six months later she settled in Rome, renting a studio once occupied by the neoclassicist Antonio Canova, arguably the greatest sculptor of his time.

Rome in 1866 was home to a vibrant community of American expatriate artists that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and the sculptor William Wetmore Story. Lewis was immediately taken under the wing of the sculptor Harriet Hosmer and her friend the actress Charlotte Cushman, principal members of the social set that Henry James called “that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’” (James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1903, 257). In this group, which included Cushman’s companion, Emma Stebbins; Anne Whitney; Louisa Lander; and Margaret Foley, Lewis saw rare examples of financially, sexually, and artistically independent women. Although she caused quite a sensation at Cushman’s trendy soirees and benefited from her new friends’ generosity, Lewis always remained on the perimeter, considered a bit of a novelty.

Resourceful and fiercely independent, Lewis taught herself to carve marble and established herself as a neoclassical sculptor. She eschewed the custom of employing assistants, fearing that the veracity of her work would be attacked, as had been the case with other black and women artists, including Hosmer and Whitney. Instead, Lewis, who was only four feet tall, undertook by herself what was often very physical work. In the 1860s and 1870s her studio, listed in all the fashionable guidebooks, was a frequent stop for American tourists. She supported herself primarily through commissions for small terra-cotta or marble portrait busts and marble copies of Classical and Renaissance masterworks. Over the years her busts of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Senator Charles Sumner, the poet Anna Quincy Waterston, and the abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman were purchased by American collectors. Catering to collectors’ tastes, she also produced “conceits” or “fancy pieces” (sculptures using children to convey sentimental themes), of which three survive; Poor Cupid (1873, National Museum of American Art [NMAA]), Asleep (1871), and Awake (1872) (both in the San Jose Public Library). After her 1868 conversion to Catholicism, Lewis received several major commissions for religious works, none of which survive.

Despite her faithfulness to the formal and thematic conventions of neoclas-sicism, Lewis rendered unique treatments of African American and American Indian themes and figures. Her first large-scale marble sculpture, The Freed Woman and Her Child (1866, location unknown), was the first by an African American sculptor to depict this subject. Forever Free (1867, Howard University), showing a man and woman casting off the shackles of enslavement, takes its name from a line in the Emancipation Proclamation: “All persons held as slaves shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Like The Freed Woman, the female figure in Forever Free strongly evokes the well-known abolitionist emblem engraved by PATRICK HENRY REASON in 1835, Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?, which shows an African American woman on bended knee, stripped to the waist, her head tilted toward the sky, and her clasped hands raised, revealing heavy chains attached at her wrists. While Lewis’s figure adopts the pose and gesture of the emblem, her freed slave, unchained and fully clothed, is no longer identifiable as African American by color or physiognomy. Lewis’s alterations, made according to the stylistic dictates of the period, simultaneously elide the issue of race and restore the dignity and humanity denied African Americans by slavery.

Lewis made several versions of the biblical figure Hagar, only one of which survives, Hagar (1868, NMAA). The Egyptian outcast, though used by other nineteenth-century artists as a symbol of slavery, had particular meaning for Lewis, herself the victim of racial violence and banishment. Reflecting on her sculpture in 1871, she told a journalist, “I have a strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.” Inspired by Longfellow’s popular poem “Song of Hiawatha,” Lewis produced a number of marble works featuring American Indians. These works include busts of Minnehaha and Hiawatha (both 1868, Newark Museum), The Marriage of Hiawatha (1867, Walter Evans Collection), and Old Arrow Maker, also known as The Wooing of Hiawatha (three versions survive, made between 1866 and 1872). Lewis broke from strict neoclassical aesthetics by giving the arrow maker idealized but recognizable American Indian features. His daughter, however, appears white, her ethnicity represented only by posture, gesture, and costume. Lewis’s depictions of American Indians as proud, dignified, and peaceful countered prevailing images of Indians (and blacks) as half-naked, eroticized savages.

Lewis returned to the United States on several occasions to exhibit and sell her work. Her 1873 cross-country trip terminating in San Francisco, certainly an unusual journey for an unaccompanied black woman, made her one of the first sculptors to exhibit in California. She reached the pinnacle of her career three years later at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition with the exhibition of Death of Cleopatra, a subject popular with nineteenth-century artists and abolitionists. Lewis’s enthroned life-size Egyptian queen in the throes of death directly challenged William Wetmore Story’s more traditional representation of the same subject also on view at the exposition. Cleopatra caused a commotion, provoking strong responses from audiences and critics, including William J. Clark Jr., who wrote in 1878, “The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellant. Apart from all questions of taste, however, the striking qualities of the work are undeniable, and it could only have been produced by a sculptor of genuine endowments” (Great American Sculptures). Death of Cleopatra, assumed lost until it was rediscovered in 1985, is now on view at the National Museum of American Art.

Ironically, the Centennial Exposition marked the beginning of the end for neoclassical sculpture and, with it, the demand for Lewis’s work. By the 1880s romanticism, exemplified by the work of Auguste Rodin, had challenged the stiffness of neoclassical sculpture, bronze had overtaken marble as the fashionable medium, and Paris had become the center of the art world. Lewis, however, remained in Rome, and by 1900 she was all but forgotten. FREDERICK DOUGLASS provided the last substantive account of Lewis’s activities, which included, according to his diary, hosting Douglass and his new wife in January 1887. Except for a brief mention in an American Catholic magazine in 1909, no further record of Lewis survives. The date and place of her death remain unknown.

A generation older than the sculptors META WARRICK FULLER and May Howard Jackson and two generations older than Nancy Prophet, AUGUSTA SAVAGE, and RICHMOND BARTHÉ, Lewis was the first African American sculptor to gain an international reputation. Lewis, who never married, was an independent woman and a skilled survivor, succeeding against unprecedented odds. In all, she created about sixty unique pieces, less than half of which have been located. Remarkably, Lewis succeeded amidst a social milieu deeply stratified according to race, gender, and class and within an artistic style exclusively devoted to ideas of Western beauty and history, even while she herself did not conform to any of these standards.

LEWIS, JOHN

(21 February 1940–), civil rights leader and member of Congress, was born John Robert Lewis near Troy, Alabama, the third of seven children. Lewis’s father, Eddie, was a sharecropper and small farmer, and his mother, Willie Mae, occasionally did laundry. Both of his parents were deeply religious, which may have helped shape Lewis’s lifelong commitment to Christianity. As a young man, Lewis recalls, he heard MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. preach on the radio and was inspired to make the ministry his vocation. Starting by preaching in the woods near his home, eventually he was allowed to preach at local churches. In 1957 he became the first of his family to graduate from high school. After graduating, Lewis enrolled in the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee.

John Lewis, with James Zwerg, after they were beaten in Montgomery, Alabama, on one of the first Freedom Rides, 1961. © Bettmann/CORBIS

In 1958, at the age of eighteen, he met Dr. King, and his life was changed forever: he decided to devote it to the struggle for civil rights. Two months before the famous 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lewis led sit-ins in Nashville. Although he was doused with cleansing powder and abused in other ways, the sit-ins eventually resulted in the desegregation of Nashville lunch counters. After graduating from seminary in 1961, Lewis enrolled at Fisk University, planning to study religion and philosophy. In 1963, however, he dropped out of college to devote his time to work in the civil rights movement. (In 1967 he returned to Fisk to earn a BA.) In 1968 Lewis married Lillian Miles; they adopted a son, John Miles.

In the spring of 1960 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed, with several Nashville students in leadership positions, notably Marion Barry, Diane Nash, and James Lawson. By 1961, two northerners, BOB MOSES and JAMES FORMAN, had also emerged as prominent SNCC activists. This interracial organization of black and white college students was created to coordinate student participation in the civil rights movement. Between 1961 and 1965 SNCC played a pivotal role in that movement, working on voter registration campaigns in the most dangerous areas of the rural south. In a sense, SNCC made up the movement’s frontline troops, and the young women and men in the organization exhibited extraordinary courage in facing danger and death. But of all the brave people in SNCC, perhaps none exhibited greater courage than Lewis. As Worth Long, a colleague in SNCC, said, “John was the most courageous person that I ever worked with in the movement . . . . John would not just follow you into the lion’s den, he would lead you into it” (Carson, 203). In 1961 Lewis was beaten unconscious in Montgomery, Alabama, in one of the first Freedom Rides to challenge segregated interstate bus travel, and in 1965 he suffered a similar fate as he helped lead a march from Selma to Montgomery in the movement’s last great protest. Arrested more then forty times, Lewis invariably responded peacefully and with expressions of Christian faith and love. Many years later, reflecting on Lewis’s work in the movement, Time referred to him as a “living saint” (Barone, 299).

In 1963 Lewis was selected SNCC’s second chair, succeeding Marion Barry. (Barry later became mayor of Washington, D.C.) As head of SNCC, Lewis was part of the so-called Big Six civil rights leadership group. This informal group attempted to develop and coordinate movement strategy. In addition to Lewis, the group comprised Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, ROY WILKINS of the NAACP, WHITNEY YOUNG of the Urban League, JAMES FARMER of the Congress of Racial Equality, and DOROTHY HEIGHT of the National Council of Negro Women. At the 1963 March on Washington, Lewis, in his capacity as SNCC chair, was among the persons designated to give one of the major speeches. The other leaders thought his prepared text too radical, and he was asked to tone it down. Lewis initially refused, but after much cajoling he agreed to the rewriting of the speech (removing some of the language considered too radical or revolutionary). Nevertheless, the speech as delivered was the most militant of the day, reflecting the fact that SNCC was the most selfconsciously radical of the major civil rights organizations.

Ironically, SNCC‘s evolving militancy and radicalism would lead to Lewis’s ouster as SNCC chairman. In 1966 SNCC embraced the philosophy of black power. This philosophy, influenced by the ideas of MALCOLM X, called on blacks to form racially separate or independent organizations (which for SNCC meant the ouster of its white members) and to abandon the philosophy of nonviolence. Having embraced this black power philosophy, many in SNCC thought that Lewis was unsuited to lead the group in this new direction. In the initial balloting Lewis was easily reelected, but then, in a move that probably violated SNCC rules, the balloting was reopened, and STOKELY CARMICHAEL defeated Lewis. Because of his unwavering commitment to interracialism and nonviolence, Lewis was unsuited to lead SNCC in its new direction, but he was disappointed and angry about the manner in which his colleagues removed him.

After leaving SNCC, Lewis worked with several organizations involved with community organizing and civil rights. From 1970 to 1976 he was executive director of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project (VEP). The VEP engaged in voter registration and education, a task that represented a blending of Lewis’s past civil rights activism with his future political activism. In 1976, when President Jimmy Carter appointed Congressman ANDREW YOUNG of Atlanta as ambassador to the United Nations, Lewis sought to succeed him in the House of Representatives. However, he was defeated rather easily by Wyche Fowler, the white president of Atlanta’s city council, although the district had a 65 percent black majority. President Carter then appointed Lewis associate director of ACTION, the umbrella agency with responsibilities for the Peace Corps and domestic volunteer service agencies. When Carter was defeated for reelection, Lewis returned to Atlanta, where in 1981 he was elected to the city council. In 1986 he was elected to the U.S. Congress.

Fowler retired from the House of Representatives in 1986 in order to run, successfully, for the U.S. Senate. Seven candidates sought to succeed him, including Lewis and JULIAN BOND, a state senator, a former SNCC worker, and a historically important figure in the civil rights movement. In the initial primary election Bond led Lewis 47 to 35 percent. But in the runoff Lewis defeated Bond 52 to 48 percent. Lewis won largely on the basis of the 90 percent support he received from the district’s white voters, while Bond carried the black vote 60 to 40 percent. Since his election, Lewis, like most incumbents, has faced little or no opposition and has easily been reelected.

In some ways, it was fitting that Lewis won through the support of a multiracial coalition, given his longtime commitment to forming interracial alliances. Because of his status as a genuine American hero, Lewis quickly earned the respect and admiration of his colleagues in the House of Representatives, black and white, liberal and conservative, and Democrats and Republicans. This support facilitated his efforts to build multiracial coalitions.

Lewis was initially assigned to two relatively minor committees, but in 1993 he was appointed to the Committee on Ways and Means. The Ways and Means Committee is the oldest and most prestigious and powerful in the House. Lewis’s appointment to this powerful committee (with jurisdiction over taxes, international trade, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and welfare programs) after a relatively short tenure is indicative of the esteem in which he is held by his Democratic Party colleagues in the House. Further evidence of his stature among his colleagues is his selection as one of four Democratic chief deputy whips. While Lewis has not authored major legislation, he is a frequent and passionate participant in House debates on foreign and domestic issues. He has devoted much of his time to persuading Congress to recognize the contributions of African Americans and the civil rights movement to U.S. history. His efforts include working toward the establishment of a memorial to Dr. King and a national museum of African American history on the Washington Mall and plans to make the route of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery a national trail. In 1999 he authored, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.

LEWIS, OLIVER

(c. 1863–?), jockey, was born the son of a slave woman some time during the period shortly before the Emancipation Proclamation. There is little known today about the early years of Lewis, who grew up to become one of the most renowned African American jockeys in horse racing history. Using other accounts and histories from the period, however, speculation about how Lewis came to be such an adept horseman is possible.

After the Civil War, sharecropping replaced slavery as a means for plantation owners to maintain control over their newly liberated charges. Some of these sharecroppers were used as stable hands and exercise boys for the plantation owners’ racehorses. The most proficient of these boys (for most of them were barely fourteen or fifteen) were chosen as jockeys, a highly desirable position. Even during slavery times, the title of “jockey” allowed an African American many freedoms that were refused his fellows. African American jockeys both during and after the Civil War were allowed free will of travel, as well as a sense of dignity and aristocracy that was denied most other blacks of the time.

Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that a woman with a young male child would have attempted to make her son as appealing and available as possible to the wealthy racehorse owners. Oftentimes, a woman employed by one of these men would bring her son along with her to work. During the course of the mother’s workday, the boy would occupy himself, playing in the vicinity of the manor house where his mother performed her duties. The plantation owner might take notice of a particularly agile or strong individual. From there, the boy went to live in the owner’s stable, sleeping with the horses, caring for them, and developing instincts about the animals that most people today can barely comprehend. By the age of ten or eleven years old, these boys were expert horsemen and spent their days exercising and training the powerful, high-strung racehorses.

Given such circumstances, it is not difficult to understand why these young men were natural choices as jockeys. However, even among these competent horsemen, there were standouts. One such standout was Oliver Lewis. Lewis rode for the McGrathiana stud farm, which was owned by H. Price McGrath. Also employed by McGrath was a trainer named Ansel Williamson. Williamson, born into slavery in Virginia in 1806, was eventually bought and freed by a prominent horse breeder, Robert A. Alexander. Williamson worked for Alexander, buying and training racehorses until Alexander’s death in 1867. He then went on to work at McGrathiana, training many famous racehorses as well as developing the young exercise boys into skilled jockeys. Lewis flourished under Williamson’s tutelage.

In addition to working for McGrath, Lewis was also employed as a utility rider at inaugural events for the Louisville Jockey Club. On 17 May 1875 Lewis won three races. One of these was the most significant race of his life. Ironically, it was also the race that he was not supposed to win.

H. Price McGrath had two horses entered in the inaugural running of the Kentucky Derby. The horse upon which his optimism rested was a large bay named Chesapeake. His other horse was a smaller chestnut named Aristides. McGrath made the decision that Aristides would be his “rabbit.” He would use the speedy horse to tire the others early in the race, leaving room for the late-closing Chesapeake to take the lead near the end. Trainer Ansel Williamson suggested that Lewis should ride Aristides, since he was one of the few jockeys able to hold back the fiery red horse.

The parade to the post, which began the race, found Lewis as one of thirteen African American jockeys in a field of fifteen horses. When the gates opened, beginning the race, McGrath’s favorite, Chesapeake, got off to a slow start. As the race progressed, Lewis had all that he could handle trying to hold back the determined Aristides. Meanwhile, Chesapeake never seemed to recover from his poor start. Owner McGrath, seeing the prospect of Chesapeake’s victory fading, ordered wildly from the sidelines for Lewis and Aristides to “Go on!” (Saunders and Saunders, 14). This command was all the impetus that horse and rider needed. Lewis gave Aristides free rein, and the pair won the derby, traveling the mile-and-a-half distance in a record time of two minutes, thirty-seven-and-three-quarters seconds.

Although McGrath was given the credit for the horse’s win, Lewis was undaunted by this lack of recognition and continued racing. Just a month after his derby win, Lewis was again set up on Aristides as the “rabbit.” (It appears that, in most of his races for McGrath, Lewis was used as the “rabbit” rider). This time, Lewis and Aristides were to race in the famed Belmont Stakes, one of the jewels in racing’s celebrated Triple Crown. As the race commenced, Lewis held his mount back, obeying the explicit orders of the horse’s owner. The horse strained to have his head, and the crowd shouted their disapproval, but Lewis kept the horse from taking the lead. Later, when Aristides won the Jerome Stakes and the Withers Stakes in New York, a white jockey, Bobby Swim, not Lewis, rode the tenacious little horse to victory. McGrath, it is reported, favored Swim because of his greater experience.

The remainder of Lewis’s career as a jockey is largely unknown. Records indicate, however, that after his racing career, he went on to work as a bookkeeper and later as a racehorse trainer in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1907 a newspaper reporter spotted Lewis at Churchill Downs, the site of the Kentucky Derby. An article in the following day’s newspaper related Lewis’s appearance as something quite unusual. Interestingly, no one is sure how often Lewis returned to the derby. Perhaps he was a regular attendant, making his visits clandestinely, or maybe he intentionally avoided the site of his most famous race.

After Lewis’s derby, fifteen of the twenty-eight following derbies were won by African American jockeys, with some of them, such as James Winkfield and ISAAC MURPHY, winning more than once. However, African Americans were slowly being pushed out of the sport. Other jockeys, resentful of their success, frequently resorted to dangerous and illegal practices to ensure that black jockeys no longer won races. African American jockeys were cut off, blocked in, jostled, and knocked off their horses to ensure their defeat. Consequently, these actions made horse owners reluctant to hire black jockeys. Eventually, black jockeys all but disappeared from the horseracing world. However, their legacy still remains.

LIELE, GEORGE

(C. 1751–1828), pioneering Baptist clergyman and African American émigré to Jamaica, said of his slave origins, “I was born in Virginia, my father’s name was Liele, and my mother’s name Nancy; I cannot ascertain much of them, as I went to several parts of America when young, and at length resided in New Georgia” (Baptist Annual Register, ed. John Rippon [1793], 332). Liele’s master Henry Sharp took him to Burke County, Georgia, as a young man. Liele wrote that he “had a natural fear of God” from his youth. He attended a local Baptist church, was baptized by Matthew Moore, a deacon in the Buckhead Creek Baptist Church about 1772, and was given the opportunity to travel, preaching to both whites and blacks. Liele preached as a probationer for about three years at Bruton Land, Georgia, and at Yamacraw, about a half mile from Savannah. The favorable response to Liele’s “ministerial gifts” caused Sharp, who was a Baptist deacon, to free him. Liele remained with Sharp’s family until Sharp’s death as a Tory officer during the revolutionary war when the British occupied Savannah.

Upset over his status as a free man, some of Sharp’s heirs had Liele imprisoned. Liele produced his manumission papers and with the aid of a British colonel named Kirkland resumed his public activities. He gathered a small congregation that included African Americans who had come to Savannah on the promise by the British of their freedom. One of Liele’s converts was ANDREW BRYAN, who was later responsible for the development of African American Baptist congregations in Savannah. DAVID GEORGE, the pioneering organizer of black Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, also was one of Liele’s converts. Despite increasing anxiety over escalating American-British hostilities, Liele continued to hold worship services.

When the British evacuated Savannah in 1782, Liele went as an indentured servant with Kirkland to Kingston, Jamaica. After working two years to satisfy his indebtedness to Kirkland, Liele received a certificate of freedom, and about 1784 he began to preach in a small house in Kingston to what he called a “good smart congregation.” It was organized with four other blacks who had come from America. The congregation eventually purchased property in the east end of Kingston and constructed a brick meetinghouse. Liele reported that raising money to pay for the new building was difficult because his congregation was composed mostly of slaves whose masters allowed “but three or four bits per week” out of which to pay for their food. The free people who belonged to Liele’s church were generally poor.

Despite initial opposition from some whites, Liele’s congregation grew to about 350 members by 1790. It included a few whites. Liele accepted Methodists after they had been baptized by immersion, but in a pragmatic move he did not receive slaves as members without, as he wrote, “a few lines from their owners of their good behavior toward them and religion.” Liele assisted in the organization of other congregations on the island and promoted free schools for slaves as well as free black Jamaicans. On his ministerial activities Liele wrote in the early 1790s, “I have deacons and elders, a few; and teachers of small congregations in the town and country, where convenience suits them to come together; and I am pastor. I preach twice on the Lord’s Day, in the forenoon and afternoon, and twice in the week, and have not been absent six Sabbath days since I formed the church in this country. I receive nothing for my services; I preach, baptize, administer the Lord’s Supper, and travel from one place to another to publish the gospel and settle church affairs, all freely.” By 1797 Liele had reason to be more pessimistic. Originally charged with “seditious preaching” because he was the leader of so many slaves, he was thrown into prison where he remained for three years, five months, and ten days. The charge of seditious preaching was dismissed, but his inability to satisfy debts incurred in the building of his church kept him in prison. During Liele’s imprisonment his eldest son conducted preaching services.

When Liele was about forty years old he reported that he had three sons and one daughter. His four children ranged in age from nineteen to eleven. His wife, whose name is unknown, had been baptized with him in Savannah. Liele worked as a farmer and teamster besides conducting regular worship services and conducting church business. George Liele has the distinction of being the first regularly ordained African American Baptist minister in America. He is also noteworthy as the founder of the first Baptist church in Jamaica. Liele reported in 1790, “There is no Baptist church in this country but ours.” An article sent to British Baptists in 1796 said of Jamaican Baptists whom Liele led: “They preach every Lord’s day from 10 to 12 o’clock in the morning, and from 4 to 6 in the evening; and on Tuesday and Thursday evening, from seven to eight. They administer the Lord’s supper every month, and baptism once in three months. The members are divided into smaller classes which meet separately every Monday evening, to be examined respecting their daily walk and conversation.” Details regarding the last few decades prior to Liele’s death in Jamaica are not known.

Liele’s pioneering work in establishing the Baptist church in Jamaica set the foundation for a denominational tradition that continued until the late twentieth century. Apart from being the spiritual father of the Jamaican black Baptist churches, he was the first missionary from any African American church body to the island and may well have been the first African American to be ordained a Baptist preacher. Although nothing is known of his political and social views, he seems to have considered his primary work that of preaching the Christian Gospel and caring for the spiritual welfare of his members.

LISTON, SONNY

(8 May 1932–30 Dec. 1970), world champion boxer, was born Charles Liston in rural St. Francis County, Arkansas, to the tenant farmers Helen Baskin and Tobe Liston. Like much in Liston’s story, the precise date of his birth and the exact number of his siblings are unknown. He was most likely born between 1927 and 1932, and was probably the tenth of eleven children born to Helen Baskin, and the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children born to Tobe Liston. His nickname, “Sonny,” may have been granted in childhood, though most people claimed that it was given to him in prison. Charles received no formal schooling. From an early age, he labored on the tenant farm with his father, who believed that if a child was big enough to sit at the dinner table, he was big enough to chop cotton. Sonny rarely spoke of his childhood, except to say, “The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating” (Tosches, 34). Liston’s autopsy would later reveal many whipping welts and the truth of that statement.

In 1946 he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where his mother had found employment a year earlier. Broad-shouldered, strong, and powerful, Liston occasionally found work as a laborer but more often found himself in trouble for a series of thefts and muggings. In 1950 he was sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary on charges of first-degree robbery and larceny. In prison the Catholic chaplain encouraged Liston to box. Sonny weighed two hundred pounds, stood six feet, one inch tall, and already had a reputation for brawling. Within his first month of training, no other prisoner would step into the ring with him—at least not alone. What Liston lacked in finesse, he more than made up for with a powerful left hand; at first he barely used his right, since he did not need it. His only problem was that his fists—fifteen inches in girth—were too large for standard boxing gloves. Most of Sonny’s contemporaries in prison recalled that he was amiable and quiet; Liston, who had experienced far harsher treatment in the Arkansas cotton fields and on the streets of St. Louis, later said that he did not mind his time in jail.

A ticket for the 1964 bout between Liston and Cassius Clay (MUHAMMAD ALI). Library of Congress

Liston’s potential as a heavyweight contender ensured his early release and the keen attention of underworld crime figures. In 1952 he was paroled, thanks to the efforts of a Catholic priest and Frank Mitchell, the publisher of the St. Louis Argus, a black newspaper. Mitchell had close ties to John Vitale, the leading mobster in St. Louis, who hired Liston to work at the Union Electric plant as a “head breaker,” beating or intimidating workers who, in the view of Vitale and the Teamster leadership, had stepped out of line. Mitchell also hired a former sparring partner of the heavyweight champion JOE LOUIS to work on Liston’s technical deficiencies as a boxer. Over the next year Liston defeated a string of amateur opponents, among them Ed Sanders, the 1952 Olympic heavyweight champion. He turned professional in 1953 and won fourteen of his first fifteen fights, seven of them by knockouts.

Liston’s personal life enjoyed an all too rare period of happiness in 1956, when he met Geraldine Chambers, who had been standing in a downpour waiting for a bus. On seeing her, he immediately reversed his car, jumped out, picked her up, and placed her on the front seat. Chambers did not appear to mind the boxer’s presumptuous chivalry, and she married him several months later, shortly before he was sentenced to nine months in the St. Louis workhouse for assaulting a police officer.

In 1958 Liston moved to Philadelphia, where he was managed by Frankie Carbo, the most powerful underworld figure in boxing. Four years later, having won twenty consecutive fights, Sonny earned the right to challenge the world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. Many in the African American community were wary of Liston replacing Patterson as heavyweight champion. Civil rights leaders viewed the graceful, contemplative Patterson as an ideal spokesman for the race, a man who, like Liston, had grown up in poverty, but one who used his fists only in the ring. Even President John F. Kennedy urged Patterson to fight Liston, telling the champion in the Oval Office, “You’ve got to beat this guy” (Remnick, 14). Yet for all of the media efforts to portray the fight as a battle between good and evil, it was, in fact, a fight between two boxers. Liston was hungrier and knocked Patterson out in the first round with a savage left hook that caught the champion squarely on the jaw. Liston defeated Patterson, again with a first-round knockout, in a July 1963 rematch in Las Vegas.

Although he was the undisputed world champion, Liston did not receive the adulation that other heavyweights had enjoyed. There was no victory parade in Philadelphia, though he did win an audience with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, himself a rough-hewn outsider in Kennedy’s Camelot. Foreign boxing fans were more appreciative of Liston and he of them. On a tour of Britain he won standing ovations in several cities and strode through the streets of Glasgow wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes. Told by Scots reporters that he was a warmer man than they had expected, Liston replied, “I am warm here because I am among warm people. . . . When I return to the United States, I will be cold again, for the people there . . . have treated me badly” (Tosches, 195).

Few expected Liston to lose the heavyweight crown to his young challenger, Cassius Clay, in 1964. Most experts viewed Clay’s promise to deliver a “total eclipse of the Sonny” as entertaining bombast at best, but the young fighter proved much fitter and faster than they expected. Clay danced and ducked Liston’s lethal jabs, frustrating the champion, cutting his eye, and then landing punch after punch of his own. At the start of the seventh round, Liston refused to leave his stool, claiming that he had an injured left shoulder. Many, including the U.S. Senate, suspected a fix, because victory for Clay would bring a profitable rematch for Liston’s underworld backers. The Senate’s investigation did not find evidence of collusion, though, and the rematch, in Lewiston, Maine, in May 1965 also resulted in a victory—a first-round knockout—for Clay, who had by then converted to Islam and adopted the name MUHAMMAD ALI. Again, commentators were incredulous that a single blow could knock out Liston. Slow-motion replays revealed, however, that Ali had caught Liston off balance and blindsided, with a corkscrew punch to his left temple.

Liston continued to box after that defeat, and he continued to win, though mainly against second-rate fighters. Rumors circulated about his friendship with gangsters and his involvement in narcotics. On 5 January 1971 his wife returned from a trip to St. Louis to find him dead in their Las Vegas home. He had been dead for a week, and though the coroner’s report found evidence of heroin use, medical officials cited heart failure as the cause of death. At his funeral in Las Vegas, the Ink Spots sang “Sunny” in his honor, though Liston would almost certainly have preferred JAMES BROWN’s “Night Train,” the song that he always listened to while training. Liston’s closest friends saw in him a quick, intuitive intelligence and noted his kindness, especially to children. In 1967 the Listons had adopted a three-year-old boy, Danieli. Others saw only Sonny’s boorishness, his criminal record, and his connection to mobsters. By inducting him into its International Hall of Fame in 1991, the boxing world recognized that Sonny Liston’s singular contribution came in the ring, as arguably the hardest-hitting fighter of his generation.

LITTLE, MALCOLM.

See Malcolm X.

LITTLE RICHARD

(5 Dec. 1932–), pioneering rock-and-roll singer, songwriter, and pianist, was born Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Georgia, the third of twelve children born to Charles “Bud” Penniman, a brick mason, and Leva Mae (maiden name unknown). It was a family of Seventh-Day Adventist preachers and bootleggers—not the last time that sin and salvation would mix in this performer’s life story. As a child, Richard suffered abuse from his peers because his right leg was shorter than his left. “The kids didn’t realize I was crippled,” he told his biographer. “They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine. The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak” (Rolling Stone, 19 July–2 Aug. 1984).

Although he learned to play piano and grew up singing in church with his family (as the Penniman Singers and Tiny Tots Quartet), Penniman was kicked out of the house at age thirteen for homosexual behavior his father thought sinful. Entering the world of carnivals and vaudeville, he was adopted by a white couple, Ann and Johnny Johnson, who ran the Tick Tock Club in Macon, and spent the late 1940s performing in a red evening gown as Princess Lavonne in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show. Traveling the South, he visited clubs like New Orleans’s Dew Drop Inn, where the emcee, Patsy Vidalia, was a female impersonator.

By the early 1950s rhythm-and-blues music was spreading across the country. Now known as Little Richard, the performer won an RCA recording contract in 1951 at an audition sponsored by Daddy Zenas Spears of Atlanta’s WGST, but these early sessions showed little of the outrageousness to come. Subsequent sessions in 1953 and 1955 with Peacock were equally unsuccessful. Finally, Art Rupe of Specialty Records arranged for Richard to record with a New Orleans band that included such greats as the drummer Earl Palmer and the saxophonist Lee Allen. On 14 September 1955 they recorded “Tutti Frutti” and made history.

The original verses of the song were the kind of material Richard was used to performing in Southern drag queen bars: “Tutti-frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy.” Richard was asked to sing it for a white female songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, so she could sanitize the lyrics, and the story goes that he was so embarrassed that he sang facing a wall. But the cleaned-up version was revelation enough: over pounding boogie-woogie piano and an ecstatic, gospel-charged, falsetto “whoo,” Richard brought matters to a head with the ecstatic yawp “A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!” It might be the quintessential 1950s rock-and-roll moment.

“Tutti Frutti” sold half a million copies, the bulk of them to white teenagers fascinated by a southern black man wearing mascara and a six-inch pompadour and raving like an out-of-control preacher. There had never been anything remotely like Little Richard in mainstream pop culture. A bland cover version of “Tutti Frutti” by the white singer Pat Boone went to number twelve on the pop charts, higher than the number seventeen showing of Richard’s original. Either way, the result was integrationist: a merger of black and white pop that was felt on radio and in clubs, where kids of all races began partying together.

Others picked up on Richard’s barely coded signals. Writing in the 1 April 1997 Advocate, Bruce Vilanch argued: “Little Richard was our starter queen, the first flamboyant gay figure of our lives. He may not have been open, but he was open all night. Richard was my hero because he didn’t seem to give a damn and I felt he was of my generation.” Richard himself has speculated on his explicitly high-camp image: “The people in power maybe felt I wouldn’t bother the white girls. Other guys looked more macho, you know, thick and built. JAMES BROWN had a much harder time—by him not having the ‘tender look’ like me” (Life, 1 Dec. 1992).

Little Richard fascinated teenage audiences with his pompadour, makeup, and the excitement of “Tutti Frutti,” 1956. © Bettmann/CORBIS

It is worth remembering Richard’s musical innovations as well. Earl Palmer, who drummed on these early sessions, recalled: “I’ll tell you, the only reason I started playing what they come to call a rock-and-roll beat came from trying to match Richard’s right hand. Ding-ding-ding-ding! . . . Little Richard moved from a shuffle to that straight eighth-note feeling . . . pounding on the piano with all 10 fingers” (New York Times, 25 Apr. 1999). Richard’s touring band, the Upsetters, were Macon players with links to James Brown and the subsequent rhythmic upheaval that turned rock and roll into 1960s funk.

Richard had a string of subsequent hits in the late 1950s: “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Reddy Teddy,” “She’s Got it,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Lucille,” “Send Me Some Lovin’,” “Jenny, Jenny,” “Miss Ann,” “Keep a Knockin’,” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” sold an estimated eighteen million singles. He was featured in several of the early rock-and-roll movies, most notably, The Girl Can’t Help It and Don’t Knock the Rock, both in 1956. Richard has talked about living wild in this period: for example, being handed ten thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills by D. J. Alan Freed and putting it all in the trunk of his Cadillac to draw upon as needed; and masturbating while watching his female companion, Angel, have sex with men like the white rock and roller Buddy Holly. Richard’s religious beliefs, long buried, started to nag at him, however, and he says that when he saw what turned out to be the Sputnik satellite flying across the sky after a show in Australia in 1957, he took it as a sign from God to stop performing rock and roll. He handed his mother the keys to the Cadillac and went back to church.

The rest is anticlimactic. Richard worked in a gospel vein for portions of the 1960s, recording with the great singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the arranger QUINCY JONES, and the Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler. One song from this collaboration, “He Got What He Wanted (But He Lost What He Had),” became something of a trademark for him. He enrolled in Oakwood College, a bible school in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1958.

Yet Richard could never remain out of the spotlight for long, and when the Beatles hit big in 1963, citing him as an influence (now it was Paul McCartney instead of Pat Boone making those “whoo’s”), he returned to rock and roll. JIMI HENDRIX played in Richard’s 1960s touring band for a while, telling him, “I want to make my guitar sound just like your voice” (Rolling Stone, 19 July 1984), and perhaps getting a lesson in onstage flamboyance before being fired for upstaging Richard one time too many. Success was more limited for Richard now; his repertoire had barely changed, as he was hauled out to provide nostalgia for the counterculture generation. “I’m the bronze Liberace,” he said at a 1970 concert. “Everything we do is ’56. We don’t do nothing that happened in ’66” (Felton, 430).

He had been using drugs since the 1950s, and this began to spiral out of control. Richard continued to put out failed pop material into the 1970s and then returned to Christianity again, after the death of his brother Tony. People magazine noted in 1984 that while MICHAEL JACKSON was playing Knoxville, Tennessee, to forty-five thousand people, his musical forefather, Little Richard, was appearing in town on the local Praise the Lord TV talk show, telling the host, “I was into homosexuality, and He changed me. . . . I was into rock ‘n’ roll, and He changed me.”

Then he came back into the limelight once more. In 1986 he was inducted into the inaugural Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was featured in a cameo performance in the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Ever since, he’s been a kind of rock-and-roll cartoon, brought in to emote campily in commercials for Revlon, Taco Bell, and Tostitos; playing Giants of Rock package tours; and performing for the first rock president, Bill Clinton, at his inauguration and at a 1994 presidential gala. “I’m the innovator. I’m the emancipator. I’m the originator. I’m the architect of rock ‘n’ roll,” Little Richard likes to say about himself (Dafydd Rees and Luke Crampton, Q Rock Stars Encyclopedia [1999], 601). But he never seems to have figured out what his accomplishment meant or reconciled his values, desires, and aspirations.

LOCKE, ALAIN LEROY

(13 Sept. 1885–9 June 1954), philosopher and literary critic, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Pliny Ishmael Locke, a lawyer, and Mary Hawkins, a teacher and member of the Felix Adler Ethical Society. Locke graduated from Central High School and the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy in Philadelphia in 1904. That same year he published his first editorial, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” in The Teacher, and entered undergraduate school at Harvard University. He studied at Harvard under such scholars as Josiah Royce, George H. Palmer, Ralph B. Perry, and Hugo Münsterberg before graduating in 1907 and becoming the first African American Rhodes scholar, at Hertford College, Oxford. While in Europe, he also attended lectures at the University of Berlin (1910–1911) and studied the works of Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, and C. F. von Ehrenfels. Locke associated with other Rhodes scholars, including Horace M. Kallen, author of the concept of cultural pluralism; H. E. Alaily, president of the Egyptian Society of England; Pa Ka Isaka Seme, a black South African law student and eventual founder of the African National Congress of South Africa; and Har Dayal from India—each concerned with national liberation in their respective homelands. The formative years of Locke’s education and early career were the years just proceeding and during World War I—years of nationalist uprising and wars between the world’s major nation-states. Locke joined the Howard University faculty in 1912, to eventually form the most prestigious department of philosophy at a historically African American university.

Alain Leroy Locke, portrayed here by German artist Winold Reiss, produced influential writings in the areas of philosophy, art and aesthetics, and education between the 1920s and the 1950s. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY

In the summer of 1915 Locke began a lecture series sponsored by the Social Science Club of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, titled “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: A Study of the Theory and Practice of Race.” Locke argued against social Darwinism, which held that distinct races exist and are biologically determined to express peculiar cultural traits. Locke believed that races were socially constructed and that cultures are the manifestation of stressed values, values always subject to transvaluation and revaluation. Locke introduced a new way of thinking about social entities by conceiving of race as a socially formed category, which, despite its foundation in social history, substantively affected material reality.

Locke received his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard in 1918 and shortly thereafter wrote “The Role of the Talented Tenth,” which supported W. E. B. DU BOIS’s idea that the upward mobility of approximately one-tenth of a population is crucial for the improvement of the whole population. Locke also became interested in the Baha’i faith, finding particularly attractive its emphasis on racial harmony and the interrelatedness of all religious faiths. Locke attended the 1921 Inter-Racial Amity conference on 19–21 May in Washington, D.C., and as late as 1932 published short editorials in the Baha’i World. Although he did not formally join the Baha’i faith, he remained respectful of its practices.

Locke went on to help initiate the Harlem Renaissance, 1925–1939, a period of significant cultural contributions by African Americans. The years 1924–1925 were a major turning point in Locke’s life. He edited a special edition of the magazine Survey titled the Survey Graphic, on the district of Harlem in Manhattan, New York. The editor of Survey was Paul U. Kellogg, and the associate editor was Jane Addams. That edition became the source for his seminal work reflecting the nature of valuation and the classicism of African American culture, The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, published in 1925. The New Negro was a collage of art by Winold Reiss and AARON DOUGLAS and representations of African artifacts; articles by J. A. Rogers, E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER, CHARLES S. JOHNSON, Melville J. Herskovits, and Du Bois; poetry by COUNTÉE CULLEN, LANGSTON HUGHES, Arna Bontemps, and ANGELINA WELD GRIMKÉ; spirituals; and bibliographies. The New Negro was intended as a work “by” rather than “about” African Americans, a text exuding pride, historical continuity, and a new spirit of self-respect not because a metamorphosis had occurred in the psychology of African Americans, “but because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man.” The New Negro embodied Locke’s definition of essential features of African American culture, themes such as the importance of self-respect in the face of social denigration, ethnic pride; overcoming racial stereotypes and idioms, such as call-and-response in the spirituals or discord and beats in jazz; and the importance that cultural hybridity, traditions, and revaluations play in shaping cross-cultural relationships. Locke promoted those features of African American folk culture that he believed could be universalized and thus become classical idioms, functioning, for Locke, as cultural ambassadors encouraging cross-cultural and racial respect. As debates over how to characterize American and African American cultural traits in literature became less a source of intellectual conflict, Locke’s interests moved on to issues in education.

In 1936 Locke began work on a book series, the Bronze Booklets on the History, Problems, and Cultural Contributions of the Negro, under the auspices of the Associates in Negro Folk Education. Eight booklets were published in the series, which became a standard reference for the teaching of African American history. In one of his frequent book reviews of African American literature for Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, Locke supported the controversial novel by RICHARD WRIGHT, Native Son, in 1941. The novel was controversial because Wright did not portray the lead character, Bigger Thomas, as a peace-loving, passive, and victimized African American, but as a critic of liberals and radicals. Locke’s support for Wright’s novel represented his belief that race divided America.

Locke published his first extensive article on his philosophy in 1935, “Values and Imperatives,” in American Philosophy: Today and Tomorrow, edited by Horace M. Kallen and Sidney Hook. Locke argued that values are inherently unstable, always subject to transvaluation and transposition. Locke contended that “All philosophies, it seems to me, are in ultimate derivation philosophies of life and not of abstract, disembodied ‘objective’ reality; products of time, place, and situation, and thus systems of timed history rather than timeless eternity” (313). Rather than believe that science is an adequate model for reasoning about social reality, Locke presented the view that knowledge is a function of experience and the categories of logic, science, math, and social science are heuristic value fields or distinctions.

Locke published his landmark work on education, “The Need for a New Organon in Education,” in Findings of the First Annual Conference on Adult Education and the Negro (1938), based on a lecture before the American Association for Adult Education, the Extension Department of Hampton Institute, and the Associates in Negro Folk Education, in Hampton, Virginia, on 20–22 October 1938. Locke proposed the concept of critical relativism (the view that there are no absolutely true propositions, but that we can have standards and criteria for critical evaluations). Locke warned against believing that all relevant knowledge can be acquired through application of formal logic and argued for the need to apply functional methods of reasoning and the importance of value judgments in considering defensible beliefs. Locke actively promoted adult education, working with the American Association of Adult Education in Washington, D.C., from 1948 to 1952.

In 1942 Locke edited, along with Bernard J. Stern, When Peoples Meet: A Study of Race and Culture. This anthology used a concept of ethnicity to account for both ethnic and racial contacts. Locke’s approach continued his view that racial identities were socially created and were not based on substantive biological categories.

In 1944 Locke became a founding conference member of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, which published its annual proceedings of debates on the relationship of these areas of thought. He promoted the idea that cultural pluralism was an analog for why one knowledge field was an insufficient reasoning model for sure knowledge, i.e., different cultures and civilizations supported laudable values just as different disciplines could sustain different spheres of knowledge. For Locke, there was no reason to believe in a unified theory of knowledge, i.e., a theory that would tell us about the nature of all forms of knowledge. Rather, a plurality of fields of knowledge and cultural values was a preferable perspective on Locke’s account.

Locke was a controversial figure. His aesthetic views contrasted with those of the Black Aesthetic Movement of the 1970s. He was satirized in novels, criticized by ZORA NEALE HURSTON as an elitist interested in controlling the definition of African American culture, reproached for failing to acknowledge the largest Pan-African movement of the 1920s, the MARCUS GARVEY–led United Negro Improvement Association, and denounced for placing too great a value on African American literature as a text representing a unique cultural texture.

Locke died in New York City. He lived a controversial life because his ideas of values, race, and culture often went against popular ideas. His concept of pragmatism was critical of, and different from, the dominant forms represented by William James and John Dewey. Locke’s effort to shape the Harlem Renaissance and define the “New Negro” went against those that believed folk culture should not be changed, and his advocacy of value-oriented education within the adult education movement was viewed as a new orientation. Locke’s philosophy, promoted by the Alain L. Locke Society, remains a source of controversy and debate.

LOGAN, RAYFORD WHITTINGHAM

(7 Jan. 1897–4 Nov. 1981), historian of the African diaspora, professor, and civil rights and Pan-Africanist activist, was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Arthur Logan and Martha Whittingham, domestic workers. Two circumstances of Logan’s parents are germane to his later life and work. Although he grew up in modest circumstances, his parents enjoyed a measure of status in the Washington black community owing to his father’s employment as a butler in the household of Frederic Walcott, Republican senator from Connecticut. And the Walcotts took an interest in the Logan family, providing them with occasional gifts, including money to purchase a house. The Walcotts also took an interest in Rayford Logan’s education, presenting him with books and later, in the 1920s and 1930s, introducing him to influential whites in government. Logan grew up on family lore about the antebellum free Negro heritage of the Whittinghams. It is open to question how much of what he heard was factual; nevertheless, he learned early to make class distinctions among African Americans and to believe that his elite heritage also imposed on him an obligation to help lead his people to freedom and equality.

Both lessons were reinforced by his secondary education at the prestigious M Street (later Dunbar) High School, a public but segregated institution in the District of Columbia. Jim Crow had narrowed the professional options of African American educators, and the faculty included such first-rate intellectuals as CARTER G. WOODSON, JESSIE FAUSET, and ANNA JULIA COOPER; its goal was education for leadership, and among its distinguished alumni were CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, WILLIAM HENRY HASTIE, CHARLES R. DREW, and BENJAMIN O. DAVIS SR. Logan was the valedictorian of the class of 1913. He continued his academic career at Williams College, from which he was graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1917. After he delivered one of three commencement speeches, he returned to Washington, where he enlisted in the military to fight in World War I.

The First World War was a turning point in Logan’s life. Like most African Americans, he followed the lead of W. E. B. DU BOIS and the NAACP in supporting the war effort with the expectation that blacks’ discharging a patriotic duty would bring them full citizenship rights. Logan rose from private to the rank of lieutenant in the segregated 372d Infantry Regiment, one of only four combat units open to black American soldiers; most blacks were restricted to militarized labor units.

Logan saw combat in the Argonne campaign of June 1918 and was wounded; the “war neurosis” that accompanied the injury triggered a series of outbursts by Logan directed at white American officers in retaliation for the accumulated racial humiliation and harassment they visited on him and all black military personnel. He spent the next year fighting the racism of the U.S. military. There were two wars going on—Mr. Wilson [Woodrow Wilson]’s and Mr. Logan’s—he asserted in his unpublished autobiography. When he was demobilized in August 1919, Logan chose to remain in France. “My experiences in the army left me so bitter . . . that I remained an expatriate in Europe,” he later wrote. “I hated white Americans.”

Between 1919 and 1924 Logan lived in Paris and became a leading member of the Pan-African Congress movement based there. Logan worked closely with W. E. B. Du Bois, the movement’s principal architect (it was the beginning of a collaboration that would last into the 1950s), as well as a number of prominent francophone blacks also resident in Paris. The Pan-African Congress, which met four times between 1919 and 1927, espoused the equality of the black race, an end to colonial abuses in Africa, eventual self-government for Europe’s African possessions, and full civil rights for African Americans.

In many respects Pan-Africanism between the two world wars was a precursor to America’s civil rights movement, as it was supported by the leading black Americans of the day. His five-year European expatriation introduced Logan to the international dimensions of the “race problem,” and his interactions with Haitian diplomat Dantes Bellegarde laid the basis for a lifelong scholarly and political interest in the first independent black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

Having exorcised white Americans from his spirit—largely by avoiding them in Paris—Logan returned to the United States in 1924 determined to pursue the fight for civil rights as both a scholar and an activist. Between 1925 and 1938 he taught at two elite, historically black colleges: Virginia Union University in Richmond (1925–1931) and Atlanta University (1933–1938). In the interim he served for two years as Carter Woodson’s assistant at the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. At Virginia Union, Logan taught French and history, and introduced the college’s first courses on black history and on imperialism; he earned a reputation as a serious scholar and an engaging teacher.

While on the Union faculty, Logan married Ruth Robinson in 1927; they had no children. He pursued advanced degrees in History, earning his MA from Williams College in 1929, and beginning in 1930 the residency and course requirements for his PhD from Harvard University. (He completed them in 1932.) While at Atlanta he researched and wrote his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1936, on the diplomatic relations between the United States and Haiti, a groundbreaking work on race and diplomacy that was published in 1941 as The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891. He visited Haiti twice, and was a firsthand witness to the 1934 end of the American occupation. In the 1920s and 1930s his scholarship on Haiti and colonial Africa earned him national recognition not only in the black diaspora—he was awarded Haiti’s Order of Honor and Merit in 1941 for his scholarship and advocacy—but also from influential, predominantly white organizations such as the Foreign Policy Association.

In Richmond and Atlanta—and in Washington, where between 1938 and 1968 he taught at Howard University—Logan engaged in innovative civil rights activity. In the 1920s and 1930s in the first two cities he organized, in conjunction with other outspoken African Americans like Lugenia Hope, voter registration drives; the citizenship schools, which taught African Americans how to register to vote and anchored the campaigns, became models for similar activities in the 1960s. On the eve of World War II, he spearheaded a drive of mass rallies and organizing local African American coalitions against the exclusion of African Americans from the U.S. military, the force of the campaign was such that in 1940 he was invited to meet with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the matter and drafted for the president an order prohibiting the exclusion of blacks from the service.

In 1941 Logan was a leader of A. PHILIP RANDOLPH’s March on Washington Movement, which pressured Roosevelt into issuing Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in defense industries; Logan participated in the final negotiations over the order. The March on Washington Movement declared victory, and the march was canceled. Logan edited What the Negro Wants (1944), a collection of essays by fourteen prominent African Americans that helped to bring before the entire American public the demand for a total elimination of segregation. Turning his attention once again to international affairs in the postwar era, Logan, in close alliance with Du Bois, fought to orient the United Nations, the United States, and the European powers toward justice and decolonization in Africa. He spent the last decade of his life organizing and editing with Michael R. Winston the Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1982).

The central point of Logan’s scholarship and activism was the promotion of the dignity and equality of black people throughout the world and the critical examination of American racial hypocrisy. But in an era dominated by the incipient cold war, his scholarship and activism were too strident for the U.S. political establishment, and he often found it difficult to attain a hearing in the white mainstream. What the Negro Wants saw life only after he threatened to sue the publisher for breach of contract; two of his other important works, The Negro and the Post-War World (1945) and The African Mandates and World Politics (1948), were issued privately by Logan because no publisher would bring them out. His best-known work, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (1954; revised and republished as The Betrayal of the Negro [1965]), which established a useful framework for historians to analyze that period of African American history, was turned down by one publisher, and Macmillan agreed to publish it only after Logan posted a five-thousand-dollar subvention.

Rayford Logan was a distinguished and talented intellectual. While he insisted on strict adherence to the historical record and was perhaps conservative in what he considered historical evidence, he knitted his scholarship together with a lifetime of activism. Just as he had hoped that his scholarship would reach a wide audience, he also wanted to be a major civil rights figure. He never reached this position, partly because he was often more strident than the mainstream race advancement organizations of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He was overlooked by the activists of the 1960s and 1970s in part, he believed, because that generation’s impetuousness prevented it from learning from and about the sacrifices and efforts of earlier activists. (In fact, such staples of the 1960s as voter registration drives had been pioneered by Logan three decades earlier.) But there were other reasons, notably his abrasive personality and his chafing at organizational discipline. As a result, he often was on the sidelines, an incisive but little-recognized critic. He perhaps was comfortable in this marginal role because he did not have to implement his visionary, but neglected, plans, but marginality also prevented him from achieving the stature he believed he deserved in both white and black America. He died in Washington, D.C.

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LEDBETTER, HUDDIE.

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LITTLE, MALCOLM.

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