African American Lives

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MABLEY, MOMS

(19 Mar. 1894?–23 May 1975), comedian, was born Loretta Mary Aiken in Brevard, North Carolina, the daughter of Jim Aiken, a businessman and grocer. Her mother’s name is not known. Details of her early life are sketchy at best, but she maintained in interviews she had black, Irish, and Cherokee ancestry. Her birth date is often given as sometime in 1897. Her grandmother, a former slave, advised her at age thirteen “to leave home if I wanted to make something of myself.” However, she may have been unhappy over an arranged marriage with an older man. Mabley stated in a 4 October 1974 Washington Post interview, “I did get engaged two or three times, but they always wanted a free sample.” Her formative years were spent in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C., and in Cleveland, Ohio, where she later maintained a home. She had a child out of wedlock when she was sixteen. In an interview she explained she came from a religious family and had the baby because “I didn’t believe in destroying children.” Mabley recalled that the idea to go on the stage came to her when she prayed and had a vision. But in a 1974 interview she said she went into show business “because I was very pretty and didn’t want to become a prostitute.” Another time she explained, “I didn’t know I was a comic till I got on the stage.”

In 1908 she joined a Pittsburgh-based minstrel show by claiming to be sixteen; she earned $12.50 a week and sometimes performed in blackface. By 1910 she was working in black theatrical revues, such as Look Who’s Here (1920), which briefly played on Broadway. She became engaged to a Canadian named Jack Mabley. Though they never married, she explained she took his name because “he took a lot off me and that was the least I could do.”

Moms Mabley, “The Funniest Woman in the World,” shown here in character on a television appearance. © Bettmann/CORBIS

In 1921 Mabley was working the “chitlin circuit,” as black entertainers referred to black-owned and -managed clubs and theaters in the segregated South. There, she recalled, she introduced a version of the persona that made her famous, the weary older woman on the make for a younger man. The dance duo Butterbeans and Suzie (Jody and Susan Edwards) caught her act and hired her, polishing her routines and introducing her to the Theater Owners Booking Association, or TOBA—black artists said the initials stood for Tough on Blacks. She shared bills with Pigmeat Markham, Tim “Kingfish” Moore, and BILL “BOJAN-GLES” ROBINSON.

In the late 1920s when Mabley struggled to find work in New York, black comedian Bonnie Bell Drew (Mabley named her daughter in her honor) became mentor to Mabley, teaching her comedy monologues. Soon Mabley was working Harlem clubs such as the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club and Atlantic City’s Club Harlem. She appeared on shows with BESSIE SMITH and CAB CALLOWAY (with whom she had an affair), LOUIS ARMSTRONG, and the COUNT BASIE, DUKE ELLINGTON, and Benny Goodman orchestras. During the Depression, when many clubs closed, she worked church socials and urban movie houses, such as Washington’s Howard and Chicago’s Monogram and Regal Theatres, where she later returned as a headliner.

Mabley had bit parts in early talkies made in the late 1920s in New York. She played a madam in The Emperor Jones (1931), based on the Eugene O’Neill play and starring PAUL ROBESON. In 1931 Mabley collaborated on and appeared in the short-lived Broadway production Fast and Furious: A Colored Revue in 37 Scenes with flamboyant Harlem Renaissance writer ZORA NEALE HURSTON. In the late 1920s she appeared in a featured role on Broadway in Blackbirds. She played Quince in Swinging the Dream (also featuring Butterfly McQueen) in 1939, a jazz adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Other films include Killer Diller (1947), opposite NAT KING COLE and Butterfly McQueen; Boardinghouse Blues (1948), in which she played a role much like her stage character; and Amazing Grace (1974), in which McQueen and STEPIN FETCHIT had cameos. It was drubbed by critics but did well at the box office.

The most popular Mabley character was the cantankerous but lovable toothless woman with bulging eyes and raspy voice who wore a garish smock or rumpled clothes, argyle socks, and slippers. Though she maintained, “I do the double entendre . . . and never did anything you haven’t heard on the streets,” the nature of her material, more often than not off-color, was such that, in spite of the brilliance of her comic timing and gift of ad-libbing, she was denied the route comics such as Flip Wilson, DICK GREGORY, and BILL COSBY took into fine supper clubs and Las Vegas. A younger brother, Eddie Parton, wrote comedy situations for her, but most of her material was absorbed from listening to her world. Offstage Mabley was an avid reader and an attractive woman who wore furs, chic clothes, and owned a Rolls-Royce, albeit an inveterate smoker, a card shark, and a whiz at checkers.

In 1940 she broke the gender barrier and became the first female comic to appear at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, where her act, which included song and dance, played fifteen sold-out weeks. Mabley was mentor to young PEARL BAILEY and befriended by LANGSTON HUGHES, who wrote a friend that he occasionally helped Mabley financially. Legend has her acquiring the nickname “Moms” because of her mothering instincts toward performers.

Her first album, Moms Mabley, the Funniest Woman in the World (1960), sold in excess of a million copies. In 1966 she was signed by Mercury Records. She made over twenty-five comedy records, many capturing her live performances; others, called “party records,” had laugh tracks. She said black and white comics stole her material, then forgot her when they became famous.

Television was late to discover Mabley. Thanks to fan HARRY BELAFONTE, she made her TV debut in a breakthrough comedy he produced with an integrated cast, A Time for Laughter (1967), as the maid to a pretentious black suburban couple. Merv Griffin invited her on his show, and appearances followed with Mike Douglas and variety programs starring Flip Wilson, Bill Cosby, and the Smothers Brothers. Mabley had been known mainly to black audiences. Of this late acceptance, she mused, “It’s too bad it took so long. Now that I’ve got some money, I have to use it all for doctor bills.” Mabley was not always career savvy. She passed up an appearance on CBS’s top-rated Ed Sullivan Show, saying, “Mr. Sullivan didn’t want to give me but four minutes. Honey, it takes Moms four minutes just to get on the stage.”

Because of her influence with African Americans, Mabley was seriously courted by politicians such as ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR., whom she called “my minister.” She did not aggressively support the 1960s civil rights movement, and she expressed outrage at the riots in Harlem. She was invited to the White House by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Of the latter event, she told a (fictional) joke about admonishing Johnson to “get something colored up in the air quick” (a black astronaut). She said, “I happen to spy him [and] said, ‘Hey, Lyndon! Lyndon, son! Lyndon. Come here, boy!’” She brought the house down merely by the gall in her delivery. Mabley maintained she corresponded with and met Eleanor Roosevelt to “talk about young men.”

Various articles, which say nothing of a first husband—if there was one—note that Mabley had been separated from her second husband, Ernest Scherer, for twenty years when he died in 1974. The comedian had three daughters and adopted a son, who became a psychiatrist.

Late in her career, Mabley played Carnegie Hall on a bill with singer Nancy Wilson and jazz great Cannonball Adderley, the famed Copacabana, and even Washington’s Kennedy Center (Aug. 1972).

During the filming of her last movie, Mabley suffered a heart attack, and production was delayed for her to undergo surgery for a pacemaker. Her condition weakened on tours to publicize the film, and for six months she was confined to her home in Hartsdale, in New York’s Westchester County. She died at White Plains Hospital. Her funeral at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church drew thousands of fans.

MALCOLM X

(19 May 1925–21 Feb. 1965), Islamic minister and political leader, also known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of five children of Earl Little and Louise (also Louisa) Norton, both activists in the Universal Negro Improvement Association established by MARCUS GARVEY. Earl Little, a Georgia-born itinerant Baptist preacher, encountered considerable racial harassment because of his black nationalist views. He moved his family several times before settling in Michigan, purchasing a home in 1929 on the outskirts of East Lansing, where Malcolm spent his childhood. Their previous home had been destroyed in a mysterious fire. In 1931 Earl Little’s body was discovered on a train track. Although police concluded that the death was accidental, the victim’s friends and relatives suspected that he had been murdered by a local white supremacist group. Earl’s death left the family in poverty and undoubtedly contributed to Louise Little’s mental deterioration. In January 1939 she was declared legally insane and committed to a Michigan mental asylum, where she remained until 1963.

Malcolm X, national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, delivers a fiery address in Harlem, 1963. Corbis

Although Malcolm Little excelled academically in grammar school and was popular among classmates at these predominantly white schools, he also became embittered toward white authority figures. In his autobiography he recalls quitting school in the eighth grade after a teacher warned that his desire to become a lawyer was not a “realistic goal for a nigger.” As his mother’s mental health deteriorated and he became increasingly incorrigible, welfare officials intervened, placing him in several reform schools and foster homes. In 1941 he left Michigan to live in Boston with his half sister, Ella Collins.

In Boston and New York during the early 1940s, Malcolm held a variety of railroad jobs while also becoming increasingly involved in criminal activities, such as peddling illegal drugs and numbers running. At this time he was often called Detroit Red because of his reddish hair. First arrested in 1944 for larceny and given a three-month suspended sentence and a year’s probation, Malcolm was arrested again in 1946 for larceny as well as breaking and entering. When the judge learned that Malcolm was involved in a romantic relationship with a white woman, he imposed a particularly severe sentence of from eight to ten years in prison. While in Concord Reformatory in Massachusetts, Malcolm responded to the urgings of his brother Reginald and became a follower of ELIJAH MUHAMMAD (formerly Robert Poole), leader of the Temple of Islam (later Nation of Islam—often called the Black Muslims), a small black nationalist Islamic sect. Attracted to the religious group’s racial doctrines, which categorized whites as “devils,” he began reading extensively about world history and politics, particularly concerning African slavery and the oppression of black people in America. After he was paroled from prison in August 1952, he became Malcolm X, using the surname assigned to him in place of the African name that had been taken from his slave ancestors.

By 1953 Malcolm X had become Elijah Muhammad’s most effective minister, bringing large numbers of new recruits into the group during the 1950s and early 1960s. By 1954 he had become minister of New York Temple No. 7, and he later helped establish Islamic temples in other cities. In 1957 he became the Nation of Islam’s national representative, a position of influence second only to that of Elijah Muhammad. In January 1958 he married Betty X (Sanders), who later became known as Betty Shabazz; together they had six daughters.

Malcolm’s cogent and electrifying oratory attracted considerable publicity and a large personal following among discontented African Americans. In his speeches he urged black people to separate from whites and win their freedom “by any means necessary.” In 1957, after New York police beat and jailed Nation of Islam member Hinton Johnson, Malcolm X mobilized supporters to confront police officials and secure medical treatment. A 1959 television documentary on the Nation of Islam, called The Hate That Hate Produced, further increased Malcolm’s notoriety among whites. In 1959 he traveled to Europe and the Middle East on behalf of Elijah Muhammad, and in 1961 he served as Muhammad’s emissary at a secret Atlanta meeting seeking an accommodation with the Ku Klux Klan. The following year he participated in protest meetings prompted by the killing of a Black Muslim during a police raid on a Los Angeles mosque. By 1963 he had become a frequent guest on radio and television programs and was the most well known figure in the Nation of Islam.

Malcolm X was particularly harsh in his criticisms of the nonviolent strategy to achieve civil rights reforms advocated by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. His letters seeking King’s participation in public forums were generally ignored by King. During a November 1963 address at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit, Michigan, Malcolm derided the notion that African Americans could achieve freedom non-violently. “The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution,” he announced. “Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way.” Malcolm also charged that King and other leaders of the recently held March on Washington had taken over the event, with the help of white liberals, in order to subvert its militancy. “And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising,” he insisted. Despite his caustic criticisms of King, Malcolm nevertheless identified himself with the grass-roots leaders of the southern civil rights protest movement. His desire to move from rhetorical to political militancy led him to become increasingly dissatisfied with Elijah Muhammad’s apolitical stance. As he later explained in his autobiography, “It could be heard increasingly in the Negro communities: ‘Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything, unless somebody bothers Muslims.’”

Malcolm’s disillusionment with Elijah Muhammad resulted not only from political differences but also from his personal dismay when he discovered that the religious leader had fathered illegitimate children. Other members of the Nation of Islam began to resent Malcolm’s growing prominence and to suspect that he intended to lay claim to leadership of the group. When Malcolm X remarked that President John Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost,” Elijah Muhammad used the opportunity to ban his increasingly popular minister from speaking in public.

Despite this effort to silence him, Malcolm X continued to attract public attention during 1964. He counseled the boxer Cassius Clay, who publicly announced, shortly after winning the heavyweight boxing title, that he had become a member of the Nation of Islam and adopted the name MUHAMMAD ALI. In March 1964 Malcolm announced that he was breaking with the Nation of Islam to form his own group, Muslim Mosque, Inc. The theological and ideological gulf between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad widened during a month-long trip to Africa and the Middle East. During a pilgrimage to Mecca on 20 April 1964 Malcolm reported that seeing Muslims of all colors worshiping together caused him to reject the view that all whites were devils. Repudiating the racial theology of the Nation of Islam, he moved toward orthodox Islam as practiced outside the group. He also traveled to Egypt, Lebanon, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Morocco, meeting with political activists and national leaders, including the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. After returning to the United States on 21 May, Malcolm announced that he had adopted a Muslim name, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, and that he was forming a new political group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), to bring together all elements of the African American freedom struggle.

Determined to unify African Americans, Malcolm sought to strengthen his ties with the more militant factions of the civil rights movement. Although he continued to reject King’s nonviolent, integrationist approach, he had a brief, cordial encounter with King on 26 March 1964 as the latter left a press conference at the U.S. Capitol. The following month, at a symposium in Cleveland, Ohio, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, Malcolm X delivered one of his most notable speeches, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which he urged black people to submerge their differences “and realize that it is best for us to first see that we have the same problem, a common problem—a problem that will make you catch hell whether you’re a Baptist, or a Methodist, or a Muslim, or a nationalist.”

When he traveled again to Africa during the summer of 1964 to attend the Organization of African Unity Summit Conference, he was able to discuss his unity plans at an impromptu meeting in Nairobi with leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After returning to the United States in November, he invited FANNIE LOU HAMER and other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be guests of honor at an OAAU meeting held the following month in Harlem, New York. Early in February 1965 he traveled to Alabama to address gatherings of young activists involved in a voting rights campaign. He tried to meet with King during this trip, but the civil rights leader was in jail; instead, Malcolm met with CORETTA SCOTT KING, telling her that he did not intend to make life more difficult for her husband. “If white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King,” he explained.

Malcolm’s political enemies multiplied within the U.S. government as he attempted to strengthen his ties with civil rights activists and deepen his relationship with ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR., JAMES BALDWIN, Dick Gregory, and black leaders around the world. The Federal Bureau of Investigation saw Malcolm as a subversive and initiated efforts to undermine his influence. In addition, some of his former Nation of Islam colleagues, including Louis X (later LOUIS FARRAKHAN), condemned him as a traitor for publicly criticizing Elijah Muhammad. The Nation of Islam attempted to evict Malcolm from the home he occupied in Queens, New York. On 14 February 1965 Malcolm’s home was firebombed; although he and his family escaped unharmed, the perpetrators were never apprehended.

On 21 February 1965 members of the Nation of Islam shot and killed Malcolm as he was beginning a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. On 27 February more than fifteen hundred people attended his funeral service held in Harlem and OSSIE DAVIS gave a moving eulogy that contrasted the public’s perception of an angry Malcolm with the loving and gentle man he knew, a person who gave voice to the pain of his people and gave courage to those who were afraid to speak the truth. Although three men were convicted in 1966 and sentenced to life terms, one of those involved, Thomas Hagan, filed an affidavit in 1977 insisting that his actual accomplices were never apprehended.

After his death, Malcolm’s views reached an even larger audience than during his life. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with the assistance of ALEX HALEY, became a best-selling book following its publication in 1965. During subsequent years other books appeared, containing texts of many of his speeches, including Malcolm X Speaks (1965), The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches (1971), and February 1965: The Final Speeches (1992). In 1994 Orlando Bagwell and Judy Richardson produced a major documentary, Malcolm X: Make It Plain. His words and image also exerted a lasting influence on African American popular culture, as evidenced in the hip-hop or rap music of the late twentieth century and in the director SPIKE LEE’s film biography, Malcolm X (1992).

MALONE, ANNIE TURNBO

(9 Aug. 1869–10 May 1957), entrepreneur and philanthropist, was born Annie Minerva Turnbo on a farm in Metropolis, Illinois, the tenth of eleven children of Robert Turnbo and Isabella Cook, both farmers. Robert and Isabella owned the land they farmed and were able to provide comfortably for themselves and their children. After her parents died of yellow fever in 1877, Annie went to live with an older sister in Peoria, Illinois. As a young woman, Annie grew dissatisfied with the hair-grooming methods then in use by African American women which often involved the use of goose fat, soap, and harsh chemicals for straightening purposes. Stronger products to straighten naturally curly hair generally damaged the hair follicles or scalp. One of the methods recommended by such products advised users to wash their hair and lay it out flat while using a hot flatiron to apply the solutions. Even washed and laid out, the hair of many women was not long enough to iron, and one of the most common beauty complaints among African American women was burned scalps; indeed, many black women suffered from baldness at an early age. In response, by 1900 Turnbo formulated and perfected a product line she named “Wonderful Hair Grower” which she sold through local stores near her home in Lovejoy, Illinois. Turbo also invented and patented both a pressing iron and a pressing comb, devices that, when used in conjunction with her products, aided in straightening African American hair.

In 1902, in an effort to expand her business opportunities, Turnbo relocated from Lovejoy to St. Louis, Missouri, where she and three assistants began selling her products door-to-door, offering women free, on-the-spot hair treatments. The approach was successful, and Turnbo undertook a highly profitable sales tour of the South in 1903. That same year she married a Mr. Pope but soon divorced him after her new husband attempted to exert control over her thriving door-to-door business. After the divorce, Turnbo opened her own salon, and a year later her products, which she called “Poro,” were being sold throughout the Midwest.

In 1906 Malone copyrighted the name “Poro,” a West African term that denotes an organization whose aim is to discipline and enhance the body both physically and spiritually. The company name might have another source, however: in advertisements for the company in 1908 and 1909, Annie Turnbo Pope is pictured with a woman named L. L. Roberts. Though there are no records indicating Roberts’s relationship to the company, it is possible that “Poro” is a contraction composed of Pope and Roberts.

The company’s sales growth was spurred by Malone’s understanding and use of modern business practices, including holding press conferences, advertising in African American newspapers, and using female salespeople. By the first decades of the twentieth century, Malone’s business was thriving, and by 1910 she had opened larger offices in St. Louis. In 1917 she opened Poro College, the first cosmetology school founded to train hairdressers to care for African American hair. The large, lavish facility included well-equipped classrooms, an auditorium, ice cream parlor, bakery, and theater, as well as the manufacturing facilities for Poro products. The college was soon a center of activity and influence in St. Louis’s black community, with several prominent local and national African American organizations housed on site. The college offered training courses that included etiquette classes for women interested in joining the Poro System’s agent-operator network. By the 1920s the Poro business employed 175 people in St. Louis and boasted of seventy-five thousand agents working throughout the United States and the Caribbean. In 1930 Turnbo opened new headquarters in Chicago that became known as the Poro Block. At the peak of her career, in the 1920s, Turnbo’s personal worth reached fourteen million dollars.

Turnbo’s business success has often been overshadowed by that of her contemporary, MADAME C. J. WALKER. In fact, Walker’s successful use of door-to-door sales agents was a business strategy she learned from Turnbo while employed as a Poro sales agent for several months in 1905. That same year, Walker informed friends that she had learned how to make a hair product that really worked. Perhaps in an effort to avoid direct competition with Turnbo, she moved to Denver early in 1906 to begin her own company.

In 1921 Turnbo married Aaron Malone, a decision that proved disastrous for the company. During much of the 1920s the Malones were engaged in a debilitating, behind-the-scenes power struggle that was kept hidden from all but a few Poro System executives. Before the couple’s divorce in 1927 and his subsequent termination from his position as chief manager and president, Aaron Malone sought support in a bid to take over the company. In asking the courts to award him half of the company, Malone claimed the success of his wife’s business was due to connections he had brought to the marriage. While Aaron managed to get support from key members of the black community, Annie Malone, with the help of influential black women leaders, including MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, succeeded in keeping control of Poro after paying her ex-husband a settlement of around one hundred thousand dollars.

Malone’s largesse had certainly helped sway public opinion in her favor. She had become a generous contributor to African American organizations. She supported a pair of black students at every African American land-grant college in the country; orphanages for African American children regularly received donations of five thousand dollars; and during the 1920s alone, she gave sixty thousand dollars each to the St. Louis Colored Young Women’s Christian Association, the Tuskegee Institute, and the Howard University Medical School. Within her company Malone was equally magnanimous. Five-year employees received diamond rings, and punctuality and attendance were rewarded as well.

Soon after her divorce, Malone was back in court, when Edgar Brown filed suit against her for one hundred thousand dollars. The case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Ten years later, a former employee successfully brought suit against Malone. These legal and financial troubles exacerbated longstanding management problems at Poro. Poor oversight by Malone, bad hiring choices, rapid expansion, and the prolonged, behind the scenes power struggle with Aaron Malone had dire consequences for the company. These battles, both public and private, and her unmatched—and unchecked—generosity spelled the beginning of the end for Malone’s Poro empire. Malone was forced to sell her St. Louis property in order to pay for debts incurred, in part, by her divorce and court settlements. Due to her failure to pay excise and real estate taxes, the federal government seized control of the company in 1951. Malone died of a stroke in a Chicago hospital six years later, in 1957, at age eighty-seven. Upon her death, her estate was worth only one hundred thousand dollars.

MARRANT, JOHN

(15 June 1755–Apr. 1791), minister and author, was born in the New York Colony to a family of free blacks. The names and occupations of his parents are not known. When he was four years old, his father died. Marrant and his mother moved to Florida and Georgia; subsequently Marrant moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to live with his sister and brother-in-law. He stayed in school until he was eleven years old, becoming an apprentice to a music master for two additional years. During this time he also learned carpentry. His careers in music and carpentry ended in late 1769 or early 1770, when he was converted to Christianity by the famous evangelical minister George Whitefield.

Over the next few years, Marrant converted many Native Americans, including members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations. In 1772 he returned to his family for a short time. For the next three years Marrant worked as a minister in the Charleston area. There he saw a plantation owner and other white males whip thirty slaves for attending his church school.

With the onslaught of the revolutionary war, Marrant was impressed as a musician into the British navy in October or November of 1776. Not much is known of his exploits during this period besides the fact that he fought in the Dutch-Anglo War (1780–1784). As a result of his injuries, he was discharged in 1782.

Marrant eventually married. A listing in the New York City Inspection Roll of Negroes in 1783 cited a Mellia Marrant as “formerly the property of John Marrant near Santee Carolina”; this document also states that she “left him at the Siege of Georgetown.” Apparently, his wife had been a slave; he bought and freed her in order to marry her. The same listing claimed that Mellia was aboard the William and Mary with her children Amelia and Ben, heading for Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. There is no evidence to support or deny that they were Marrant’s children. The information in this record is all that is known of his marriage and offspring.

To further his opportunities, Marrant moved to London, England, living there between 1782 and 1785. In Bath on 15 May 1785, he was ordained a minister in the chapel of Selina Hastings, countess of Huntingdon and a supporter of the African American poet PHILLIS WHEATLEY. During this time, despite being literate, Marrant told his story to Methodist minister William Aldridge, who later published it as A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova-Scotia) Born in New-York, in North-America (1785). The narrative, in which Marrant describes his conversion and his life as a traveling minister, was so popular that it went through twenty editions by 1835. In 1785 S. Whitchurch and S. Hazard both published The Negro Convert: A Poem; Being the Substance of the Experience of Mr. John Marrant, a Negro.

In November 1785 Marrant moved to Birchtown, Nova Scotia, to minister to the black Loyalists who had immigrated there after the American Revolution. For the next two years he was persecuted and harassed by fellow ministers because he preached Calvinistic Methodism to whites, blacks, and Native Americans in Nova Scotia. Despite his persecution, he built a chapel in Birchtown, taught at the Birchtown school, preached to the congregation, and ministered in other towns. In late November 1786 Marrant gave up control of his school because of his exhaustion and decided to concentrate on being a traveling minister. He contracted smallpox in an epidemic in February 1787 and was ill for six months.

In Nova Scotia, Marrant lived a life of poverty and illness. In late January 1788 he moved to Boston, where he preached and apparently taught school. However, Marrant could not escape persecution. On 27 February 1789 he eluded a mob of forty armed men who were attempting to kill him because their girlfriends went to his Friday sermon. In March of that year he became a Freemason in the African Lodge. As a Freemason, Marrant gave a sermon at the Festival of John the Baptist; the sermon was published in 1789. On his way back to England, Marrant wrote his last journal entry on 7 March 1790. The journal was later published as A Journal of the Rev. John Marrant (1790), along with Marrant’s sermon of a funeral service in Nova Scotia. The preface of the journal gave the publication date of 29 June 1790. Marrant died somewhere in England and is buried at Islington.

In his sermons, Marrant tried to teach people to love God through a comparison of biblical allegories and everyday life. For example, in his Narrative, Marrant’s travels after his conversion are reminiscent of John the Baptist’s sojourn in the wilderness. His theme is clear: let Jesus and God be your guides. This message is stressed when faith saves him from being executed by a Native-American nation: “I fell down upon my knees, and mentioned to the Lord his delivering of the three children in the fiery furnace, and of Daniel in the Lion’s den, and had close communion with God. . . . And about the middle of my prayer, the Lord impressed a strong desire upon my mind to turn into their language, and pray in their tongue. . . which wonderfully affected the people” (Porter, 437).

In his short life, Marrant dedicated himself to helping others reach their religious potential. Through his published sermons and conversions, Marrant wanted to help humankind the best way he knew how: by giving them God’s lessons. Even though he never reaped an earthly reward in his lifetime, his works stand as a model for religious colonial life.

MARS, JAMES

(3 Mar. 1790–?), slave narrative author, was born in Canaan, Connecticut, the child of slaves. James’s father, Jupiter Mars, was born in New York State. He had a succession of owners, including General Henry Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, with whom Jupiter served in the Revolutionary War. He was subsequently owned in Salisbury, Connecticut, and later by the Reverend Mr. Thompson, a minister in North Canaan, Connecticut. James’s mother, whose name remains unknown, was born in Virginia and was owned there by the woman who became Thompson’s wife. His mother, who had one child while living in Virginia, was relocated to Connecticut when Mrs. Thompson moved to Canaan to join her husband. Reverend Thompson married Mars’s parents, and they had James and four other children, three of whom died in infancy.

Of Mrs. Thompson, James Mars told his father that “if she only had him South, where she could have at her call a half dozen men, she would have him stripped and flogged until he was cut in strings” (Mars, 5). The Thompsons eventually did move south, leaving the farm to be tended by Mars’s parents. In 1798, when James was eight years old, Thompson, who had always preached that slavery was divinely sanctioned, returned to Connecticut, intending to sell the farm and bring his slaves to the South for sale on the southern slave market. The Mars family—James’s mother, father, fourteen-year-old older brother Joseph, and younger sister—resisted by escaping to Norfolk, Connecticut. They went deeper into hiding when news arrived that Thompson had hired slave catchers to locate them and transport them to Virginia. After several days, during which the family successfully evaded recapture, Thompson decided to focus his attentions on Joseph and James, since they would bring the highest prices on the slave market.

Thompson, who originally refused to go to Virginia without the boys, eventually proposed a compromise by which Mars’s father would agree to sell his sons to owners in Connecticut in exchange for his freedom and that of his wife and daughter. Jupiter Mars was permitted to approve the men to whom his sons would be sold. On 12 September 1798, Joseph was sold to a farmer named Bingham (who had once owned Jupiter) and James was sold to a man named Munger from Norfolk. Thompson received one hundred dollars for each. Under the terms of the sale, the boys would be slaves until the age of twenty-five, the limit to which Connecticut law allowed slaves to be held. James’s parents and sister remained in Norfolk, and he was permitted to see them once every two weeks.

By the age of thirteen or fourteen, James had grown dissatisfied with his lack of education, his owner’s cruelty, and the terms of his servitude in comparison with the terms of indentured white boys, who were bound in service until they were twenty-one and who received one hundred dollars at the conclusion of their terms. On one occasion, when Mars was sixteen, Munger threatened to whip him, and Mars responded saying, “You had better not.” Munger backed down, and as Mars tells it, “From that time until I was twenty one, I do not remember that he ever gave me an unpleasant word or look” (Mars, 25). Mars was generally able to live as freely as any of the other boys who lived in the neighborhood.

For the next few years, Mars worked in relative contentment. “I was willing to work, and thought much of the family, and they thought something of me,” he later wrote (26). Munger seems not to have been aware that under Connecticut law he could hold Mars in his service after he turned twenty-one, and he made an offer to Mars on the condition that he would stay longer. Mars thought “the offer was tolerably fair. I had now become attached to the family” (27), but Munger withdrew the verbal offer after learning that he had the legal right to keep Mars as a slave until his twenty-fifth birthday, especially since no written agreement could be produced proving otherwise.

Mars was further disappointed when Munger reneged on an agreement to give him some livestock, and he threatened to leave unless Munger would put the agreement in writing. When Munger declined, Mars left the farm for his parents’ home. Munger asked Mars to return voluntarily. Instead, Mars and Munger agreed to abide by the decision of three mutually acceptable arbiters. The arbiters ruled that Mars should pay Munger ninety dollars for his freedom. After paying Munger, Mars hired himself out to another family, but after a four-year break he returned to work for the Munger family. After a trip west, he returned to find that Munger had suffered a decline in his fortunes and that his daughter was in poor health. Mars, “accustomed to take care of the sick” (31), remained with Munger’s daughter until she died peacefully soon after. “That was a scene that I love to think of. It makes me almost forget that I ever was a slave to her father; but so it was” (32). Although Mars worked where he chose for the next several years, he was frequently at the Munger home and remained in close contact with his former owner until he, like his daughter, died with Mars at his side.

Mars married after Munger’s death and fathered eight children. He lived in Norfolk and Hartford, Connecticut, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In the appendix to his narrative, Mars notes that his children followed a variety of vocations: one son enlisted in the U.S. Navy, another went to sea and fell out of touch with the family, a third enlisted in the navy at the beginning of the Civil War, and a fourth son enlisted as an artillery man and was most likely killed in the Civil War. One of Mars’s daughters went to Africa and became a teacher, and another moved to Massachusetts with her family.

What we know about James Mars comes entirely from his narrative Life of fames Mars, a Slave Born and Sold in Connecticut. Written by Himself, published in 1864. Mars indicates in his introduction that publication was not his intention when he began writing at his sister’s request during the Civil War. His sister, who had lived in Africa for more than thirty years, had been born in freedom and knew little of her parents and siblings’ experiences under slavery. Unlike the narratives published by escaped slaves who wrote, often with abolitionist sponsorship, with the intention of educating readers about the atrocities of the slave system and in the hopes of bringing about its end, Mars’s original intentions were entirely personal: “When I had got it written, as it made more writing than I was willing to undertake to give each of them [the members of his family] one, I thought I would have it printed, and perhaps I might sell enough to pay the expenses, as many of the people now on the stage of life do not know that slavery ever existed in Connecticut” (3). In addition to revealing the facts of his own life, Mars’s narrative contributes to our understanding of the lives of slaves in the North as well as the peculiarities of slavery in the North. It provides a rare illustration of the economic and social disparities and the grave distinction between the freedom promised by the North and the actual social and economic limitations imposed upon blacks in northern states.

Mars reports that at the age of seventy-nine, he was living on meager savings and unable to work because of a fall he experienced in 1866. He intended his narrative as a testament to the experiences of other slaves who labored in Connecticut, a place that many readers were unaware ever countenanced slavery. Despite the restrictions imposed by the state of Connecticut, Mars tells his readers, he had voted in five presidential elections and twice voted for Abraham Lincoln. Mars concludes his narrative with a condemnation of his home state: “If my life is spared I intend to be where I can show that I have the principles of a man, and act like a man, and vote like a man, but not in my native State; I cannot do it there, I must remove to the old Bay State for the right to be a man. Connecticut, I love thy name, but not thy restrictions” (38). How long Mars lived after his memoir was reprinted in 1868 and the circumstances of his death remain unknown.

MARSALIS, WYNTON

(18 Oct. 1961–), trumpeter, was born in Kenner, Louisiana, the second of six sons of Ellis Marsalis, a jazz pianist and teacher, and Dolores Ferdinand. He was named after the jazz pianist Wynton Kelly. Wynton Marsalis was raised in a musical family with his brothers, Branford (tenor and soprano saxophones), Delfeayo (trombone), and Jason (drums).

Marsalis began playing the trumpet at the age of six, starting on an instrument given to him by the bandleader and trumpeter Al Hirt, with whom his father was then playing. At age eight, he was playing in a children’s marching band and performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. A prodigiously talented instrumentalist, Marsalis studied both jazz and classical music from an early age and at age twelve began classical training on the trumpet. His early musical experience was diverse and included playing in local marching bands, jazz groups, and classical youth orchestras. At high school he played first trumpet with the New Orleans Civic Orchestra. He made his professional debut at age fourteen in a performance of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1977 Marsalis’s performance at the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina led to him being awarded the festival’s Most Outstanding Musician Award. In 1978, at age seventeen, he performed Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 (on piccolo trumpet) with the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. In the same year, Gunther Schuller admitted him to the summer-school program at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, in Lenox, Massachusetts, after he had auditioned with the same Bach concerto. Schuller recounted how Marsalis “soared right through it and didn’t miss a note” (Giddins, 158), afterward receiving the school’s Harry Shapiro Award for Outstanding Brass Player. In 1979 Marsalis was awarded a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. At that time he also performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Mexico City Symphony orchestras as well as playing in the pit band for Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Sweeney Todd.

In 1980, with a leave of absence from Juilliard, Marsalis joined ART BLAKEY’s Jazz Messengers. He then toured in a quartet led by Herbie Hancock, performing at the Newport Jazz Festival and on the album Herbie Hancock Quartet (1981). In 1983 Marsalis appeared again with Hancock in a quintet that included his brother Branford. By 1982 Marsalis was touring extensively with his own quintet and appearing at such venues as the Kool Jazz Festival at Newport and with the Young Lions of Jazz in New York. In London at the end of the year he appeared at Ronnie Scott’s club and made his first classical recordings: trumpet concertos by Haydn, Hummel, and Leopold Mozart, with Raymond Leppard and the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Also in 1982 he recorded his debut album as leader, Wynton Marsalis. In the same year, he won the Jazz Musician of the Year Award in Down Beat’s readers’ poll. In 1984 Marsalis undertook a classical tour, playing with orchestras across the United States and Canada. Also in 1984 he became the first (and only) musician to win Grammy Awards in both jazz and classical categories, taking Best Soloist for his jazz album Think of One, and Best Soloist with Orchestra for the concerto set with Leppard. He won both awards again the following year.

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, himself a jazz traditionalist, has spurred debate on “what jazz is—and isn’t.” Corbis

By the middle of the decade Marsalis was recording prolifically and accumulating significant awards and prizes. This period saw the release of Hot House Flowers (1984), Black Codes (from the Underground) (1985), and J Mood (1986). Subsequent recordings included the first volume of the Standard Time series (1987), Live at Blue Alley (1988), The Majesty of the Blues (1989), the three-volume Soul Gestures in Southern Blue (1991), and Blue Interlude (1992). In 1992 Marsalis became artistic director of jazz at New York’s Lincoln Center and leader of its Jazz Orchestra (LCJO).

In 1997 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his “oratorio,” Blood on the Fields, which was commissioned by Lincoln Center and premiered there with the LCJO in 1994. Jazz musicians had hitherto been ineligible for the award—it was denied to DUKE ELLINGTON in 1965—and it was a measure of Marsalis’s distinction, and the enhanced prestige of jazz, that he should be the first to receive the award. The oratorio, about American slavery, was self-consciously Ellingtonian in style, theme, and scope, recalling Ellington’s 1943 suite, Black, Brown and Beige.

In addition to his jazz albums, Marsalis has made several classical recordings: Baroque Music for Trumpets (1988), a collection of orchestral works by Vivaldi, Telemann, and Biber, with Raymond Leppard and the English Chamber Orchestra (ECO); On the Twentieth Century . . . (1993), with Judith Lynn Stillman (piano), including works by Ravel, Honegger, Bernstein, and Hindemith; and In Gabriel’s Garden (1996), with Anthony Newman and the ECO, featuring orchestral works by Mouret, Torelli, Charpentier, and Jeremiah Clarke. Marsalis also composed for dance: in collaboration with Garth Fagan for Citi Movement (1993); with Peter Martins and Twyla Tharp for the ballet works on Jump, Start and Jazz (1997); and with JUDITH JAMISON of the ALVIN AILEY American Dance Theater (Sweet Release), and the Zhong Mei Dance Company (Ghost Story), issued together as Sweet Release & Ghost Story (1999). His first composition for string quartet, At the Octoroon Balls (1999), was performed by the Orion String Quartet conducted by Marsalis.

Although Marsalis has enjoyed phenomenal success as a practicing musician, it is his concomitant “ambassadorial” role that has made him such a crucially significant figure in jazz. An indefatigable writer, broadcaster, educator, and administrator, he has assumed a position of unprecedented authority in shaping the meaning and value of jazz, particularly through his influential position at Lincoln Center. No one has done more than Marsalis to validate the artistic status of jazz and popularize its cultural standing. An unstinting proselytizer for jazz, he has embraced a pedagogical role through school programs, lectures, workshops, and master classes in addition to the Lincoln Center’s education and performance programs and through his involvement with television and radio series, such as PBS’s Marsalis on Music (1995), NPR’s Making the Music (1995), and Ken Burns’s PBS series Jazz (2001). In these endeavors, he found a firm ally and mentor in ALBERT MURRAY, the critic and author, who is also on the board of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Marsalis’s ascendancy as jazz’s quasi-official spokesperson occurred during a period in which the condition of jazz appeared in disarray; his star was rising when jazz criticism was increasingly concerned with the compromised integrity of contemporary jazz. Critics complained that jazz had fragmented into hybridized, bastardized subcategories (like fusion), forms corrupted by ersatz electronic instrumentation and produced by MILES DAVIS and other musicians, who were seen to have “sold out” their jazz credentials. Marsalis sought to “reclaim” jazz from what he saw as the depredations of a commercialized popular culture (pop, rap, hip-hop) that had led to its marginalization. Hence, he has advocated a “neoclassical” agenda and subsequently has been both praised and criticized for playing the predominant role in what was often described as a “jazz renaissance” (Sancton, 66). Impeccably attired in retro-tailoring, he is, in himself, reminiscent of swing-era iconography.

Drawing on critical perspectives from his mentor and champion, Stanley Crouch, Marsalis’s polemical writing has insistently repudiated the white romantic conception of jazz’s “down” status as the imputed cultural expression of black lowlife. Marsalis also rejects the spurious stereotype of black musicians’ intuitive primitivism, which he calls “the noble savage cliché” (Marsalis, 21, 24). For Marsalis, jazz is—was—a cultural form of the highest order, and he has worked assiduously to safeguard its “purism” through his emphasis on the centrality of a highly selective canonical jazz tradition. With an emphasis on jazz purism, rather than its pluralism, Wynton Marsalis has marked out the parameters of “what jazz is—and isn’t.”

MARSHALL, KERRY JAMES

(17 Oct. 1955–), painter, photographer, printmaker, and installation artist, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the second son of James Marshall, a Postal Service worker, and Ora Dee Prentice Marshall, a songwriter and entrepreneur, both of Birmingham. Marshall’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1963, living in the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in Watts before settling in South Central Los Angeles.

Winner of a MacArthur Foundation Award, Kerry James Marshall created Watts 1963 as part of his 1995 Garden Series. Watts comments on the hopes associated with the “gardens” of housing projects built after the Korean War and the disappointment brought on by their decay. St. Louis Art Museum

Marshall’s artistic inclinations were kindled by a kindergarten teacher at Birmingham’s Holy Family Catholic School, who kept a picture-filled scrap-book for her young charges. This image compendium fed Marshall’s obsession with making art. Impressed by his creativity and drive, his elementary, junior high, and high school teachers encouraged him with special opportunities. Marshall learned his first painting techniques from his third grade teacher. Later, an art instructor at George Washington Carver Junior High introduced Marshall to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a special summer drawing class taught by George De Groat at Otis Art Institute. There Marshall saw the book Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White. White’s drawings depicting realistic African American subjects with aesthetic richness and highly charged emotion inspired Marshall to reflect his own experiences in art. De Groat took his class to visit White’s studio, where Marshall had his first encounter with a living artist. After meeting White, who was on the faculty at Otis, Marshall determined to attend college there.

Marshall embarked on a self-tutorial to develop his figure-drawing skills. Drawings made when he was about fifteen years old show his emerging technical proficiency. He created his own workspace in the family garage, complete with easel and still-life set-ups. In this “studio” he experimented with egg tempera and made his own charcoal and ink. In the summer of 1972, just before his final year of high school, Marshall enrolled in a Saturday adult painting class at Otis. His instructor, the painter and animator Sam Clayberger, showed Marshall how to analyze pictorial structure. During his final year in high school, Marshall also attended Charles White’s life-drawing class at Otis. These artists remained a significant mentoring influence on Marshall, who spent two years after high school graduation in 1973 working as a dishwasher and then for a flooring company. In his spare time he painted in his garage studio and audited White’s and Clayberger’s classes.

College was not a foregone conclusion in Marshall’s family; on reaching majority children were expected to earn a living. In fact, with the exception of his Otis experiences, Marshall was not immediately aware of higher education opportunities. Laid off from the flooring company in 1975, he approached Otis about enrollment and discovered that he needed two years of liberal arts education to enroll. He registered at Los Angeles City College, planning to transfer to Otis as a third-year student, which he did in 1977. Clayberger had given Marshall a glimpse of the kind of education he dreamed of—one based on inquiry, skills, knowledge, and standards. While attending Otis, though, Marshall began to realize that traditional practices and techniques had been subsumed by conceptual and theoretical approaches—notions that were in conflict with Marshall’s ideals about formal art education. His discontent with Otis was instrumental in his subsequent formulation of a pedagogical approach emphasizing definition and clarification of skills through the acquisition of knowledge, standards, judgments, and values.

The painter and draftsman Arnold Mesches was Marshall’s most challenging influence at Otis, urging Marshall to expand his artistic horizons. His entire senior year was occupied with creating a collage series loosely based on the work of ROMARE BEARDEN. The first, entitled Thirty Pieces of Silver, symbolically portrayed the artist as Judas with a wide grin. This grin quickly became a signature element in his paintings. After graduation in 1978, Marshall applied to the government-sponsored Comprehensive Employment Training Act program for cultural employment and training opportunities through Brockman Art Gallery and was assigned to Mesches as a paid studio assistant.

In 1980 Marshall created Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, a painting he feels was his first to unify completely process and meaning. Portrait signals the beginning of his signature style of the highly stylized, streamlined iconic black persona, rendered in pure black paint, with barely discernible features, except for gleaming white eyes and teeth. A series of paintings featuring stylized black figures followed. These works were exhibited at the art gallery at Los Angeles Southwest College, and on the strength of this show Marshall secured a part-time teaching job there. Additional works from this series were featured in his first commercial gallery exhibition, at James Turcotte Gallery in Los Angeles; the show was reviewed positively by the L.A. Times critic William Wilson. Marshall’s professional career developed quickly: in 1985 he had his first solo exhibition, at Koplin Gallery in Los Angeles; that same year he was awarded a resident fellowship at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Packing his possessions in a Volkswagen van, he set off with the intention of moving to New York permanently. However, in New York he met his future wife, the Chicago native and actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce. After completing the residency and working for a few months at the print publishers Chalk & Vermillion, he followed Bruce to Chicago in 1987. They married in April 1989.

Also in 1987 Marshall began working with the cinematographer Arthur Jaffa and his wife, the director Julie Dash, as production designer for Dash’s film Daughters in the Dust (1989). Marshall collaborated with Dash and Jaffa on several additional film projects (Hen-drix Project and Praise House, both from 1991); he also worked with Haile Gerima on Sankofa (1990). Meanwhile, his work as a visual artist progressed. From his first Chicago residence, a 6 x 9 foot room at the Chicago YMCA, he moved with Bruce into an apartment in Hyde Park. Marshall’s larger space allowed him to increase the scale of his work dramatically. Large-scale narrative paintings were the focus of a second show at Koplin (1991) and the basis for his successful National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Visual Art Fellowship grant application. Receiving NEA support was a major career milestone, allowing him to establish his first professional studio outside his home.

The painting The Lost Boys (1993) epitomized his next period of artistic growth. Marshall believes that it was in this artwork that he achieved the surface beauty and compositional sophistication he had been striving for. With this work, he began to think in terms of larger narrative series, or installations, rather than individual pictures. The year 1993 marked his first participation in museum exhibitions (Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York). He also had his first New York gallery show, at the Jack Shainman Gallery, and received the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award in painting. He began teaching at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, gaining full professorship and tenure in 1998. His first solo museum show, organized by the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art in 1994, included a catalogue and a four-city tour.

For Marshall, 1997 was a banner year. He received the Alpert Award in the Arts and was given the prestigious MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows Program grant. He also was included in Documenta 10, that year’s edition of the important international art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Marshall’s idea for a multifaceted project came to fruition in 1998 with Mementos, organized by the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago. His subject was broad: the tumultuous 1960s, loss, remembrance, and commemoration. Four mural-sized paintings entitled Souvenir formed the installation’s core. Additional components, including paintings portraying MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy; a video installation; free-standing sculptures in the shape of giant rubber stamps; and relief prints of popular slogans from the 1960s, such as “Black Is Beautiful” and “We Shall Overcome,” conveyed an overall sense of gravity and reverence.

Marshall explored social and political issues further in the show Carnegie International 1999/2000, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. His work Rythm Mastr consisted of hand-drawn and commercially printed comic-book-style narratives that were displayed in a site-specific installation incorporating exhibition cases normally used to show fragile artifacts. These cartoons were later published as a supplement to the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. As a professional artist, Marshall has always sought to create works that commingle the aesthetics and sociology of African American popular culture. With Rythm Mastr he deftly conjoined the worlds of popular culture and fine art. In 1999, twenty-one years after he entered the program, Otis conferred an honorary doctorate on Marshall in recognition of his creativity, dedication, and career achievements.

Marshall’s work is indicative of a significant development in twenty-first-century artistic discourse being practiced by a new generation of art makers: a concern with modern and postmodern art idioms combined with social and political content and a profound dedication to classical art traditions. His work is deeply rooted in the great tradition of representation and historical narrative painting, yet is imbued with personal expression and social awareness. Like other artists of his generation, such as Lorna Simpson, Glen Ligon, and Carrie Mae Weems, he has charted a new course based on the solid foundations of the past.

MARSHALL, PAULE

(9 Apr. 1929–), writer, was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, the second of three children of Barbadian immigrants Samuel Burke, a factory worker, and Ada (maiden name unknown), a domestic. As a child Marshall read the great British novelists Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Henry Fielding. Their influence is especially apparent in her sense of setting and characterization.

Later, she discovered African American writers such as RICHARD WRIGHT and PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR. The latter’s use of dialect helped to legitimate her use of the cadences and grammatical structures of the vernacular used by the Bajan women of her community. Marshall writes beautifully about these women and their language in her New York Review of Books essay “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen” (1983).

As a young adult Marshall was greatly influenced by RALPH ELLISON’s Shadow and Act, which she has called her “literary bible,” and by GWENDOLYN BROOKS’S lone novel, Maud Martha. In addition, she claims JAMES BALDWIN as crucial to her formation as a writer and thinker. These three writers emerged as significant literary figures who received mainstream acclaim in the early 1950s. By the end of that decade, Marshall joined them as the newest and one of the most original voices of the time.

In 1948 Marshall entered Hunter College in New York City, but illness forced her to take time off from her studies. During her recuperation she began writing short stories. Marshall married her first husband, Kenneth Marshall, in 1950; nine years later she gave birth to her only child, a son, Evan Keith. Before long her artistic aspirations began to challenge her domestic life. In 1953 she graduated cum laude with a degree in English from Brooklyn College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Following graduation Marshall worked as a librarian at the New York Public Library while seeking work in journalism. As is the case with her fictional character Reena, in the novella of the same name, Marshall found that the sophisticated world of Manhattan magazine publishing was still closed to black writers unless they were already well known. Eventually, she joined the staff of Our World magazine, a black publication, as its only female correspondent. At Our World she encountered sexism in both her superiors and her colleagues, who voiced expectations that she would fail. Nonetheless, while at Our World, Marshall traveled extensively throughout the Caribbean and South America.

In 1954 Marshall published her first short story, “The Valley Between,” the story of a young white wife and mother who, in defiance of her husband, wants to continue her education and eventually pursue a career. The story chronicles the character’s ambition as well as her guilt. Marshall later said that she might have made her characters white in order to avoid having to confront the similarities between herself and her protagonist. Against her own husband’s wishes, Marshall enlisted the services of a babysitter so that she would have time to work on her writing. In 1959 she published her first and best-known novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1963 her marriage ended in divorce.

In Brown Girl, Brownstones Marshall renders the speech of a Brooklyn community of Bajan immigrants, as well as African American migrants from the South, with extraordinary beauty and poetry. Along with Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen and Maud Martha, Brown Girl, Brownstones—a portrait of Selina Boyce, a young, strong-willed girl—is one of the first books in American literature to concern itself with the interior life of a young black girl. In addition, Brown Girl, Brownstones is also the earliest novel to explore the intricacy of black mother-daughter relationships and one of the first to give such a complex portrait of a community of Caribbean immigrants.

In 1960 Marshall received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to write a collection of four novellas titled Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961). Each novella—“Barbados,” “Brooklyn,” “British Guiana,” and “Brazil”—presents an elderly man who has to come to terms with his meaningless life. The settings range from sites in the United States to Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. Marshall received an American Academy Arts and Letters Award for Soul Clap Hands and Sing.

Her next work, the exquisite, complex novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, is one of Marshall’s greatest accomplishments. Set in a fictional Caribbean nation, the novel explores a number of characters, black and white, male and female, North American, West Indian, and European. Through them, Marshall explores larger issues of power and dominance, colonialism, slavery, and neocolonialism. Perhaps most importantly, the novel introduces Merle Kinbona, an eccentric, educated, middle-aged, sensual, radical, intellectual black woman, and one of the most original and complex characters in contemporary fiction.

Fourteen years passed before the publication of Marshall’s next novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983). During this creative hiatus she married Nourry Menard, a Haitian businessman. Praisesong continues Marshall’s portrayal of older women, her concern for characters who have lost their spiritual centers, and her exploration of the relationship between African American and Afro-Caribbean history. If her earlier work focused on specific locations, in Praisesong for the Widow she begins to include the Caribbean and Central and South America in her conception of the black South.

Marshall’s next novels turn to the children of diaspora. Daughters (1991), which received the Columbus Foundation American Book Award, is the story of Ursa MacKenzie, the buppie daughter of a West Indian politician father and a middle-class black woman from the United States. While these are her biological parents, her father’s mistress, a childless businesswoman, and his own nursemaid also mother her. But most significantly she is the daughter of Afro-diasporic history; in documenting that history, she gives birth to herself.

Marshall’s most recent novel, The Fisher King (2000), centers on a little boy, Sonny, who is a true child of the African Diaspora. His mother was raised in Paris and his father is a Senegalese street vendor in Paris. His maternal grandparents are two American expatriates, Sonny Rhett-Payne and a character modeled after LENA HORNE. One of his great-grandmothers is an aristocratic African American woman with roots in the deep South, and another is a stern West Indian woman; both of them live in brownstones on the same Brooklyn block. Thus, Sonny has roots throughout the African Diaspora, and as he is brought to live with his great-grandmothers in Brooklyn it is tempting to see that Marshall’s work has come full circle.

Since 1995 Marshall has divided her time between Richmond, Virginia, and New York City. She teaches creative writing at New York University, where she also introduced the Paule Marshall and the New Generation Reading Series. The series has featured a number of young writers before they achieved public acclaim. Among these are Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Denzy Senna, and A. J. Verdelle. In 1993 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Marshall is a cosmopolitan intellectual whose work traces the complex connections and conflicts among black people throughout the Americas. Long before academics turned their attention to the African diaspora or the “Black Atlantic,” Marshall mapped this terrain in novels, novellas, and short stories. Her experience as the child of immigrants, her childhood in a Brooklyn populated by blacks from the Caribbean and the American South, and her travels as an adult throughout the Americas all inform her artistic vision. Her literature underscores the relationship between slavery, colonialism, racism, and neocolonialism and the formation of the modern black subject.

MARSHALL, THURGOOD

(2 July 1908–24 Jan. 1993), civil rights lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born Thoroughgood Marshall in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of William Canfield Marshall, a dining-car waiter and club steward, and Norma Arica Williams, an elementary school teacher. Growing up in a solid middle-class environment, Marshall was an outgoing and sometimes rebellious student who first encountered the Constitution when he was required to read it as punishment for classroom misbehavior. Marshall’s parents wanted him to become a dentist, as his brother did, but Marshall was not interested in the science courses he took at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated with honors in 1930. He married Vivian “Buster” Burey in 1929; they had no children.

Unable to attend the segregated University of Maryland Law School, Marshall enrolled in and commuted to Howard University Law School, where he became a protégé of the dean, CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, who inspired a cadre of law students to see the law as a form of social engineering to be used to advance the interests of African Americans. After graduating first in his class from Howard in 1933, Marshall remained in Baltimore, where he opened a private law practice and struggled to make a living during the Depression. Marshall was active in the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in 1936 Houston persuaded both the NAACP board and Marshall that Marshall ought to join him in New York as a staff lawyer for the NAACP. After Houston returned to Washington in 1938, Marshall remained and became the chief staff lawyer, a position he held until 1961.

Early in his Baltimore practice Marshall had decided to attack the policies that had barred him from attending the state-supported law school. Acting under Houston’s direction, Marshall sued the University of Maryland on behalf of Donald Murray. The Maryland state court’s 1936 decision ordering the school to admit Murray because the state did not maintain a “separate but equal” law school for African Americans was the first step in a two-decade effort to undermine the constitutional basis of racial segregation. Over the next fourteen years, Marshall pursued his challenge to segregated higher education through two main areas. In Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938), a case Houston developed and argued, the U.S. Supreme Court directed the University of Missouri to either admit Lloyd Gaines to its law school or open one for African Americans. The attack culminated in Marshall’s case of Sweatt v. Painter (1950), in which the Supreme Court held that the law school Texas had opened for African Americans was / not “equal” to the well-established law school for whites.

The cases that the Supreme Court decided under the name Brown v. Board of Education constituted Marshall’s main efforts from 1950 to 1955. Assembling a team of lawyers to develop legal and historical theories against segregation, Marshall had his greatest triumph as a lawyer in Brown (1954), in which the Supreme Court held that segregation of public schools by race was unconstitutional. In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court had upheld segregation, saying that segregation was a reasonable way for states to regulate race relations and that it did not “stamp the colored race with a badge of inferiority.” Examining the background of the Fourteenth Amendment, Marshall’s team concluded that the amendment’s framers did not intend either to authorize or to outlaw segregation. From this research Marshall came to the conclusion that under modern conditions, given the place of education in twentieth-century life, segregated public education was no longer reasonable. Marshall also relied, though less heavily, on arguments based on the psychological research of KENNETH B. CLARK showing that, Plessy notwithstanding, segregation did in fact damage the self-images of African American school children. During oral arguments Marshall occasionally stumbled over technical and historical details, but his straightforward appeal to common sense captured the essence of the constitutional challenge: “In the South where I spend most of my time,” he said, “you will see white and colored kids going down the road together to school. They separate and go to different schools, and they come out and they play together. I do not see why there would necessarily be any trouble if they went to school together.”

The Supreme Court Justices of 1967. Left to right, seated: Associate Justices John M. Harlan and Hugo L. Black, Chief Justice Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, and William J. Brennan Jr. Standing: Abe Fortas, Potter Stewart, Byron R. White, and Thurgood Marshall. Corbis

There was trouble, however, as officials in the deep South engaged in massive resistance to desegregation. Marshall argued the case of Cooper v. Aaron (1958), which arose after Arkansas governor Orval Faubus sought to circumvent desegregation by closing four Little Rock schools on the first day of class. Marshall pointed out that Faubus’s attempts to thwart the Supreme Court directive in Brown threatened fundamental American ideas about the rule of law, and he asked the Court to assert its constitutional authority by directing Little Rock officials to reopen and racially integrate the schools. Marshall told the justices that a ruling in favor of Faubus would be tantamount to telling the nine black boys and girls who had endured harassment and intimidation at Little Rock’s Central High School throughout the 1957–1958 school year, “You fought for what you considered democracy and you lost . . . . go back to the segregated school from which you came.” Again the Supreme Court agreed with Marshall, and in August 1959 the schools reopened in line with federal desegregation orders.

A gregarious person who was always ready to use an apt, humorous story to make a point, Marshall traveled throughout the segregated South to speak to teachers and NAACP members, and in the 1940s and 1950s he became a major civil rights leader. By the mid-1950s his role as a civil rights leader had superseded his work as an attorney and he had become a widely sought-after speaker and fund-raiser. He also was active in the Episcopal Church and the Prince Hall Masons. His wife died of lung cancer in February 1955, and the following December he married Cecilia Suyatt, a secretary in the NAACP’s national office; they would have two children, both boys.

Fending off attacks on the NAACP, its lawyers, and its members as well as attempting to push desegregation forward took a toll on Marshall. His travels kept him away from his family, and his NAACP salary, even when supplemented by gifts from wealthy white members, was inadequate to provide a college education for his sons. Moreover, the emergence of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee shifted the civil rights movement away from the legal strategies Marshall favored toward more direct-action tactics. Because of this, and to ease his financial burden and make more time for his family, in 1961 Marshall accepted an appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (in New York). Political maneuvering delayed his confirmation for nearly a year, after which he served on the Second Circuit for five years. His opinions were solid but hardly path-breaking. Aware of his lack of experience in business and tax law, which constituted an important portion of the Second Circuit’s business, Marshall took guidance from Judge Henry Friendly in those areas.

In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson named Marshall U.S. solicitor general, the government’s chief lawyer before the Supreme Court. Although neither said so explicitly, both Johnson and Marshall expected that Johnson would name Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible. In 1967 Johnson manipulated Justice Tom Clark into resigning from the Court by naming his son Ramsey Clark attorney general, and that same year, saying it was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place,” Johnson named Marshall to be the first African American Supreme Court justice.

Marshall joined a Court that was dominated by liberals, but within five years the Court’s composition had changed dramatically following the retirement of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the deaths of Justice Hugo Black and Justice John Marshall Harlan. Instead of being active in the coalition that determined the Court’s positions, Marshall found himself in a beleaguered minority that opposed the more conservative justices appointed by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Marshall rarely got the opportunity to write important majority opinions, even when his liberal colleagues led by William J. Brennan were able to cobble together a majority, because such opinions had to appeal to one or two of the justices who were significantly more conservative than Marshall, and Marshall was relatively uncompromising on matters he cared about.

Marshall’s repertoire of stories endeared him to nearly every one of his colleagues, although initially some conservatives, including Lewis F. Powell, were put off by what they saw as Marshall’s failure to approach the job with appropriate seriousness. Marshall did delight in puncturing what he took to be Chief Justice Warren Burger’s pomposity, occasionally greeting Burger with, “What’s shakin’, Chiefy baby?” Yet most of Marshall’s colleagues came to understand that he used his stories, often about the experiences of black Americans in the nation’s court system, to make points about the cases the justices were considering. At the time of his retirement in 1991, Marshall brought more experience as a practicing lawyer to the Court than did any of his colleagues, and he often urged them to take more account of courtroom realities than of abstract deliberations about the Constitution.

Court watchers, particularly those who were unsympathetic to Marshall’s positions on constitutional issues, criticized him for delegating too much of his work to his law clerks. Familiar with numerous aspects of the law from his experiences on the court of appeals and as solicitor general, Marshall had a facility for quickly determining the main thrust of each party’s contentions and for deciding what result to reach. He would provide a sketchy outline of what an opinion should say; after that, the law clerks did substantially all of the opinion drafting in his chambers, as was the case in other chambers as well. Marshall did not edit his clerks’ drafts as closely as other justices did, but he rejected drafts that did not capture the substance or the intensity of his views, and thus the guidance he gave made the opinions his own.

Marshall’s most important contribution to constitutional doctrine was his “sliding-scale” theory of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws, which he stated in most detail in dissenting opinions in Dandridge v. Williams (1970) and San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973). The Court’s stated doctrine distinguished between two “tiers” of judicial scrutiny. One tier involved “suspect” classifications, such as race or “fundamental” interests; statutes using those classifications received strict scrutiny and rarely were upheld. The other tier contained all other statutes; statutes in this category simply had to have a “rational basis” and rarely were struck down. As the Court grappled with more and more cases involving discrimination against women, aliens, and nonmarital children, and cases dealing with the provision of public assistance, Marshall pointed out that the rigid two-tiered approach was inadequate, because for one thing, it failed to take account of variations in the importance of different interests; perhaps even more important, it failed to describe the outcomes of the Court’s cases. Marshall proposed that the Court adopt an approach that openly balanced the importance of the goals the government was trying to achieve, the nature of the interests) affected, and the character of the group adversely affected by the classifications of a given statute. Although the Court did not expressly adopt Marshall’s suggestion, some of its decisions seemed implicitly to do so, and many scholars believe that his analysis was more representative of the Court’s decision making than was the doctrine that the Court claimed to be applying.

Beyond his specific doctrinal contributions, Marshall provided a voice on the Court, and in the Court’s internal deliberations, for black Americans and others with few champions. After he retired, several of his colleagues said that Marshall’s opinions had brought the real world into the Court’s deliberations. When the Court, in upholding a federal filing fee for bankruptcy (United States v. Kras [1973]), suggested that it should not be difficult for a poor person to set aside about $2 a week to pay the fee, Marshall became indignant, writing in his published opinion, “No one who has had close contact with poor people can fail to understand how close to the margin of survival many of them are.”

Marshall drew on his experience as a criminal defense lawyer when he argued that in all cases capital punishment is a form of cruel and unusual punishment barred by the Constitution. After the Court rejected that proposition in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Marshall continued to express his disagreement; his dissents often asserted that the fair administration of justice was compromised in death penalty cases, particularly when defendants facing death sentences had received inadequate legal assistance.

Marshall’s overall approach to constitutional law combined Charles Hamilton Houston’s view that it is a form of social engineering with a pragmatic grasp of courtroom and practical realities. For example, he refused to deem that the police practice of arresting drunks was unconstitutional, in part because he believed that society had not instituted a better method of dealing with the problem than to lock up drunks until they were sober. He was willing to endorse large-scale reforms through constitutional law, as in attempts to effect desegregation and to rid the law of the death penalty, because Brown had taught him that a bold Supreme Court pronouncement often had an indirect but lasting impact on social practices.

Feeling the effects of age, and having lost his closest ally on the Court when Brennan retired in 1990, Marshall announced his retirement on 27 June 1991. The Court was substantially more conservative when Marshall left than when he arrived. During his tenure the nation’s political system had drifted to the right; so had the Court, a trend that would continue with the appointment of his successor, CLARENCE THOMAS. Marshall never was able to act as a social engineer on behalf of African Americans and others who had made up the New Deal and Great Society political coalition; instead he came to occupy a different role on the Court, that of the great dissenter.

Earlier on the day of his retirement Marshall filed his final dissent. In Payne v. Tennessee a majority of the Court overruled the controversial decision in Booth v. Maryland (1987) and allowed prosecutors to introduce statements about the personal impact that a murder had had on the victim’s family and friends. Beginning with the statement “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decision making,” Marshall’s dissent bitterly criticized the majority opinion. Although the Warren Court, whose work Marshall had endorsed and contributed to during the 1960s, was not averse to overruling precedents, Marshall believed that those cases were different: old rules that either did not work or were inconsistent with later developments had been displaced. In Payne, by contrast, Marshall believed that the only change that had taken place between 1987 and 1991 was the makeup of the Court. To have constitutional law turn on the personalities of the judges was, in Marshall’s view, inconsistent with the ideal of the rule of law.

Marshall died at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Many tributes noted that he would have deserved a major place in histories of constitutional law even had he not served on the Supreme Court, because his efforts as chief lawyer for the NAACP in leading the Court to restructure constitutional law with regard to race was as important a contribution as any in modern history. Marshall made fewer contributions to constitutional law as a justice, largely because he was not part of the Court’s more conservative majority, but his passionate voice for the poor and for African Americans resonated in his dissenting opinions, and he remained an inspiration to those who believed in the possibility of achieving justice through the Constitution.

MASSEY, WALTER EUGENE

(5 Apr. 1938–), physicist, science and engineering administrator, and college president, was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the first of two sons born to Almar C. Massey, a manual laborer for the Hercules Chemical Company, and Essie Nelson, an elementary school teacher and principal. Massey received support and encouragement not only from his parents, but also from a cadre of excellent African American teachers, who, due to restricted employment opportunities in rigidly segregated Mississippi, pursued teaching with passion and dedication. Massey attended the Sixteenth Section Elementary School in Hattiesburg, where his mother taught, and the Royal Street High School in the same city. He excelled in school and entered Atlanta’s Morehouse College on a Ford Foundation scholarship after completing the tenth grade. As a student at Morehouse, Massey, like MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. and other African American men who attended the college between 1940 and 1967, came under the influence of the president, the renowned Dr. BENJAMIN MAYS.

Buttressed by the high standards of excellence advocated by Mays and by the mentoring he had received from a cast of outstanding teachers from the Sixteenth Section to Morehouse College, Massey embarked on a journey that led him to an international reputation as an educator and science and engineering administrator. After spending one year in graduate school at Howard University, Massey entered Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. At Washington University he began work on understanding the behavior of liquid helium with Dr. Eugene Feenberg as his adviser. Massey’s interest in liquid helium led later in his career to work for which he is best known as a physicist. This work, in which he collaborated with Humphrey Maris, provided a theoretical explanation for the anomalous dispersion of sound in superfluid helium. He received both a master’s degree and a doctorate from Washington University in 1966.

Subsequently he became a staff physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, an institution to which he returned in 1979 as director. Massey joined the faculty at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor of physics in 1968. In 1969 he married Shirley A. Streeter of Chicago, Illinois. The couple had two sons, Keith and Eric. After two years at Illinois, Massey became associate professor of physics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he remained for nine years. While at Brown, Massey became Professor of Physics and served as Dean of the College from 1975 until 1979. After leaving Brown he served for five years as director of the Argonne National Laboratory; he also accepted the position of vice president for research at the University of Chicago, where he remained for seven years. In 1991 he became the director of the foremost federal agency for the support of basic research in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering, the National Science Foundation (NSF). At the NSF he advocated a stronger coupling between academe and industry in the pursuit of research in science and engineering. In 1993 he joined the University of California system as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. In 1995 he returned to Morehouse as its ninth president. In this leadership position he has advocated the development of leaders and high academic standards; he has also sought to enhance the stature of the college both nationally and internationally.

Massey’s career has been characterized by a number of firsts. He was the first African American to receive a doctorate in physics at Washington University, the first African American dean at Brown University, the first African American director at the Argonne National Laboratory and at the National Science Foundation, the first African American vice president at the University of Chicago, and the first African American provost of the University of California system. As an educator, Massey has taught physics at several universities; however, the leadership he has provided in the development of policy and direction in educational organizations has been more significant. In 1971 and 1972 he served on the executive committee on “Physics in the Predominantly Black Colleges” for the American Institute of Physics. During the same period he implemented a program at Brown University to prepare teachers to teach science and mathematics in urban school systems. Later in the same decade he served on the board of advisers for the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, the Energy Advisory Committee of the Association of American Universities, and the Commission on Institutional Development and National Affairs of the American Association of Colleges. He has served on the boards of trustees of Washington University, Brown University, and Rockefeller University. In 1996 he became a member of the Annenberg Institute of School Reform and the advisory board of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined the board of directors of the Morehouse School of Medicine in 1997. In 1999 he became a member of the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century and the Gates Millennium Scholars Advisory Council.

Walter Massey’s career has been characterized by his willingness to serve in leadership roles in varied organizations. He has not just remained active in professional and civic organizations but has often assumed the mantle of leadership. Notably, he served as chairman (1989–1990) and president (1988–1989) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as vice president (1990) of the American Physical Society. He served on the National Science Board from 1978 through 1984 and the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology from 1990 until 1992. He rejoined the president’s council in 2001. Also in 2001 he became a member of the board of directors of the Rotary Club of Atlanta. Since 1998 he has served as chairman of the Atlanta Committee for Public Education.

At Morehouse, Massey has been actively involved in the college’s Minority Research Institute, which has focused on research to strengthen and improve prospects for African American male youth, who at the end of the twentieth century were disproportionately affected by numerous American societal maladies and pathologies. At Morehouse he fostered the development of a formal leadership program and established the goal of being the best liberal arts college as an aim commensurate with the Morehouse legacy. As president of Morehouse, Massey found the ideal arena in which to meet the challenges of Benjamin Mays and that cast of outstanding African American educators who men-tored and nurtured him.

MATTHEW, WENTWORTH ARTHUR

(23 June 1892–3 Dec. 1973), rabbi and educator, is believed to have been born in St. Marys, St. Kitts, in the British West Indies, the son of Joseph Matthew and Frances M. Cornelius. Matthew gave seemingly contradictory accounts of his ancestry that put his place of birth in such places as Ethiopia, Ghana, and Lagos, Nigeria. Some of those lingering discrepancies were partially clarified when Matthew explained that his father, a cobbler from Lagos, was the son of an Ethiopian Jew, a cantor who sang traditional Jewish liturgies near the ancient Ethiopian capital of Gondar. Matthew’s father then married a Christian woman in Lagos, and they gave their son, Wentworth, the Hebrew name Yoseh ben Moshe ben Yehuda, also given as Moshe Ben David. His father died when he was a small boy, and his mother took him to live in St. Kitts, where she had relatives.

In 1913 Matthew immigrated to New York City, where he worked as a carpenter and engaged in prize fighting, though he was just a scrappy five feet, four inches tall. He reportedly studied at Christian and Jewish schools, including the Hayden Theological Seminary and the Rose of Sharon Theological Seminary (both now defunct), Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and even the University of Berlin, but there is no independent evidence to corroborate his attendance at these institutions. In 1916 Matthew married Florence Docher Liburd, a native of Fountaine, Nevis, with whom he had four children. During World War I Matthew was one of many street exhorters who used a ladder for a pulpit and Harlem’s bustling sidewalks as temporary pews for interested pedestrians. By 1919 enough people were drawn to his evolving theology of Judaism and black nationalism that he was able to found “The Commandments Keepers Church of the living God The pillar and ground of the truth And the faith of Jesus Christ.” He attempted to appeal to a largely Christian audience by pointing out that observance of the Old Testament commandments was the faith of Jesus; however, it became apparent that visitors often missed this point and assumed that any reference to Jesus implied a belief in Jesus. To avoid this confusion with Christianity, Matthew ceased to use the title “Bishop” and removed all references to Jesus from the organization’s literature and papers of incorporation.

The transition from a church-based organization holding Jewish beliefs to a functioning synagogue that embraced most of the tenets of mainstream Orthodox Judaism was accomplished by Matthew’s association with Rabbi ARNOLD FORD. Ford was a luminary in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the black nationalist organization led by MARCUS GARVEY. Ford offered Hebrew lessons and religious instruction to a number of laypeople and clergy in the Harlem area. He worked with both Matthew’s Commandments Keepers Congregation and the Moorish Zionist Congregation led by Mordecai Herman in the 1920s before starting his own congregation, Beth B’nai Abraham. In 1931, after Ford immigrated to Ethiopia, he sent a letter to Matthew granting him “full authority to represent Us in America” and furnishing him with a Shmecah, a certificate of rabbinic ordination (Ford to Matthew, 5 June 1931). Throughout the rest of his career, Matthew would claim that he and his followers were Ethiopian Hebrews, because in their lexicon “Ethiopian” was preferred over the term “Negro,” which they abhorred, and because his authority derived from their chief rabbi in Ethiopia.

As an adjunct to his congregation, Matthew created a Masonic lodge called the Royal Order of Aethiopian Hebrews the Sons and Daughters of Culture. He became a U.S. citizen in 1924 and the following year created the Ethiopian Hebrew Rabbinical College for the training of other black rabbis. Women often served as officers and board members of the congregation, though they could not become rabbis. In the lodge there were no gender restrictions, and women took courses and even taught in the school. Religion, history, and cultural anthropology, presented from an Afrocentric perspective, were of immense interest to Matthew’s followers and pervaded all of his teaching. The lodge functioned as a secret society where the initiated explored a branch of Jewish mysticism called kabbalah, and the school sought to present a systematic understanding of the practice of Judaism to those who initially adopted the religion solely as an ethnic identity. While the black press accepted the validity of the black Jews, the white Jewish press was divided; some reporters accepted them as odd and considered their soulful expressions exotic, most challenged Matthew’s identification with Judaism, and a few ridiculed “King Solomon’s black children” and mocked Matthew’s efforts to “teach young pickaninnies Hebrew” (Newsweek, 13 Sept. 1934).

Matthew traveled frequently around the country, establishing tenuous ties with black congregations interested in his doctrine. He insisted that the original Jews were black and that white Jews were either the product of centuries of intermarriage with Europeans or the descendents of Jacob’s brother Esau, whom the Bible describes as having a “red” countenance. Matthew argued that the suffering of black people was in large measure God’s punishment for having violated the commandments. When black people “returned” to Judaism, he believed, their curse would be lifted and the biblical prophecies of redemption would be fulfilled. Most of the black Jewish congregations that sprung up in the post-Depression era trace their origin to Matthew or to William Crowdy, a nineteenth century minister whose followers also embraced some aspects of Judaism but who, unlike Matthew’s followers, never abandoned New Testament theology. Matthew often inflated the size of his community by counting those with only a loose affiliation and who exhibited any affinity to Judaism along with the members who adhered more strictly to his doctrine of Sabbath worship, kosher food, bar mitzvahs, circumcision, and observance of all Jewish holidays. His core supporters probably never exceeded ten thousand followers from a few small congregations in New York, Chicago, Ohio, and Philadelphia. Many of his students established synagogues in other parts of New York City, often these were shortlived, and those that thrived tended to become rivals rather than true extensions of Matthew’s organization.

Two of Matthew’s sons served in the military during World War II, and the congregation watched with horror as atrocities against Jews were reported. In 1942 Matthew published the Minute Book, a short history of his life’s work, which he described as the “most gigantic struggle of any people for a place under the sun.” Matthew would later create Malach (Messenger), a sporadically published newsletter. Having supported the Zionist cause, the congregation celebrated the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, but by the 1950s their dreams of settling in Africa or Israel had been replaced by a more modest vision of establishing a farming collective on Long Island. The congregation purchased a few parcels of land in North Babylon in Suffolk County, New York, and began building a community that was to consist of a retirement home for the aged, residential dwellings, and small commercial and agricultural industry. Opposition from local residents and insufficient funding prevented the property from being developed into anything more than a summer camp and weekend retreat for members, and the land was lost in the 1960s.

When a new wave of black nationalism swept the country during the civil rights movement, there were periods of solidarity between blacks and Jews, but also painful moments of tension in major cities. Matthew maintained a supportive relationship with ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. in Harlem, with Percy Sutton, who as borough president of Manhattan proclaimed a day in Matthew’s honor, and with congressman CHARLES RANGEL, who was a frequent guest at Commandments Keepers. Matthew also became affiliated with Rabbi Irving Block, a young white idealist who had recently graduated from Jewish Theological Seminary and started the Brotherhood Synagogue. Block encouraged Matthew to seek closer ties with the white Jewish community, and he urged white Jewish institutions to accept black Jews. Matthew applied for membership in the New York Board of Rabbis and in B’nai B’rith but was rejected. Publicly, leaders of the two organizations said that Matthew was turned down because he was not ordained by one of their seminaries; privately, they questioned whether Matthew and his community were Jewish at all. After reflecting on this incident and its aftermath, Matthew said, “The sad thing about this whole matter is, that after forty or fifty years . . . they are planning ways of discrediting all that it took us almost two generations to accomplish” (Howard Waitzkin, “Black Judaism in New York,” Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs 1, no. 3 [1967], 31).

In an effort to circumvent Matthew’s leadership of the black Jewish community, the Committee on Black Jews was created by the Commission on Synagogue Relations. The committee in turn sponsored an organization called Hatza’ad Harishon (The First Step), which attempted to bring black people into the Jewish mainstream. Despite the organizers’ liberal intentions, the project failed because it was unable to navigate the same racial and ritual land mines that Matthew had encountered. Matthew had written that “a majority of the [white] Jews have always been in brotherly sympathy with us and without reservation” (New York Age, 31 May 1958), but because he refused to assimilate completely he met fierce resistance from white Jewish leadership. As he explained,

We’re not trying to lose our identity among the white Jews. When the white Jew comes among us, he’s really at home, we have no prejudice. But when we’re among them they’ll say you’re a good man, you have a white heart. Or they’ll be overly nice. Deep down that sense of superiority-inferiority is still there and no black man can avoid it.

(Shapiro, 183)

Before Matthew’s death at the age of eighty-one, he turned the reins of leadership over to a younger generation of his students. Rabbi Levi Ben Levy, who founded Beth Shalom E. H. Congregation and Beth Elohim Hebrew Congregation, engineered the formation of the Israelite Board of Rabbis in 1970 as a representative body for black rabbis, and he transformed Matthew’s Ethiopian Rabbinical College into the Israelite Rabbinical Academy. Rabbi Yehoshua Yahonatan and his wife, Leah, formed the Israelite Counsel, a civic organization for black Jews. Matthew expected that his grandson, Rabbi David Dore, a graduate of Yeshiva University, would assume leadership of Commandments Keepers Congregation, but as a result of internecine conflict and a painful legal battle, Rabbi Chaim White emerged as the leader of the congregation and continued Matthew’s legacy.

Matthew and his cohorts were auto-didacts and organic intellectuals who believed that history and theology held the answers to their racial predicament. In their Darwinian view of politics, people who do not know their cultural heritage are inevitably exploited by those who do. Hence, discovery of their true identities was essential to achieving self-respect and political freedom. In this regard, Matthew, NOBLE DREW ALI, and ELIJAH MUHAMMAD agreed in their cultural assessment of the overriding problem facing black people, though they chose different religious paths.

MATTHEWS, VICTORIA EARLE

(27 May 1861–10 Mar. 1907), writer, educator, and activist, was the youngest of nine children born to Caroline Smith, a former slave, in Fort Valley, Georgia. Oral family history has it that Victoria’s father was her mother’s owner. Her mother migrated to New York with her daughters Victoria and Anna around 1873. Victoria attended Grammar School 48 in New York City until she was compelled to leave because of poverty; she took work as a domestic servant, the only employment available to many African American women at that time. HALLIE QUINN BROWN’s Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (1926) notes of Matthews, however, that she “never lost an opportunity to improve her mind” (209). Matthews developed her own literacy program, acquiring knowledge from independent study, lectures, and contact with educated people. Marriage at the age of eighteen to William Matthews, a carriage driver, enabled her to escape her home life, but it led to an unhappy and perhaps lonely domestic situation.

During the early years of her marriage, Matthews contributed articles about her childhood to Waverly Magazine, the New York Weekly, and Family Story Paper. She was also a news correspondent for the New York Times, the New York Age, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Boston Advocate, the Washington Bee, and the Richmond Planet. In 1893, under the pen name “Victoria Earle,” she published her most ambitious work, the short story Aunt Lindy. Five years later, with encouragement from the New York Age editor T. THOMAS FORTUNE, she edited Black Diamonds: The Wisdom of Booker T. Washington, a selection of his speeches and talks to students.

Matthews’s writing brought her into contact with prominent white and black women and led to membership in the Women’s National Press Association. Linking the written word and action, she organized a dinner to honor the achievements of the anti-lynching crusader and New York Age journalist IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT. This event inspired Matthews and Maritcha Remond Lyons, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, to organize the Woman’s Loyal Union, which became involved in racial protest and women’s issues. As a delegate of the union, Matthews attended the 1895 Congress of Colored Women in Atlanta and presented a stunning address, “The Value of Race Literature,” emphasizing the importance of preserving the cultural contributions of African Americans. An outgrowth of the Congress was the founding of the National Federation of Afro-American Women (NFAAW). Matthews was appointed to the editorial board of the Woman’s Era, the NFAAW’s official journal, and chair of its executive committee. Her resourcefulness was invaluable in planning the 1896 convention in Washington, D.C., which merged the NFAAW and the National Colored Women’s League of Washington into the National Association of Colored Women.

Matthews felt compelled to raise her voice and pen in defense of black womanhood. Addressing the San Francisco Society of Christian Endeavor in 1897, she expressed her indignation over the attacks on black females as immoral women. In her lecture, “The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman,” she also challenged black and white women to assume some responsibility for the less fortunate. Matthews believed that all women’s educational, religious, and temperance organizations should cooperate to combat both negative public attitudes and discriminatory laws that degraded black womanhood.

After the death of her only child, Matthews dedicated her life to social welfare work among the black poor. On 11 February 1897 she established the White Rose Mission “as a Christian nonsectarian Home for Colored Girls and Women and to train them in the principles of practical self-help and right living” (Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 [1978], 134). Incorporated in 1898 with a biracial board of directors, the White Rose Home and Industrial Association for Working Girls provided a space where black women newly arrived from the South were befriended, counseled, and prepared for jobs through courses in cooking, sewing, and housekeeping. The women were then found jobs, usually in domestic service. Seeking to protect rural women from the dangers of urban life, the White Rose Home rigorously enforced its rules and curfews.

To further race consciousness, Matthews established a library of African American history books and taught a course in black history. Ruth Alice Moore (later ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON) ran a kindergarten at the home, while other volunteers provided a range of programs, lectures, and clubs. Matthews’s leadership of the White Rose Home allowed her to exchange ideas with like-minded white reformers and social workers, among them Mary Stone, Mary White Ovington, Grace Hoadley Dodge, and Frances Kellor.

Prior to Matthews, only a few reformers addressed the influence of the urban environment on the behavioral patterns of black women in both the North and the South. She toured the South in 1895 and, appalled by the red-light districts in New Orleans and other southern cities, warned the Hampton Negro Conference of the dangers faced by young black female migrants to the cities. Matthews’s Hampton address inspired the organization of volunteers at the nearby Norfolk, Virginia, docks to counsel arriving migrants. White Rose agents in New York likewise watched the docks to prevent the women from becoming victims of a “white slave” traffic that existed from New Orleans to New York. These developments led Matthews to establish the White Rose Travelers’ Aid Society in 1905.

When Matthews discovered that several New York employment agencies sent black women seeking work as domestic servants to houses of ill repute, she decided to “check the evil” of these “unprincipled men who haunted the wharves” (Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 [1971], 56). Afraid that this practice would prevent these migrants from acquiring respectable employment, Matthews expertly gathered evidence and reported similar conditions for black women in New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco.

Matthews’s death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-five left the White Rose Home without a public figure immersed in social work. She is recognized in connection with the organization not only of women’s clubs but also of a movement in New York City to aid African American women. Her name is inextricably linked to the White Rose Home and its mission of providing social services for thousands of African American women.

MATZELIGER, JAN EARNST

(15 Sept. 1852–24 Aug. 1889), inventor, was born in Paramaribo, Surinam (Dutch Guiana), the son of Carl Matzeliger, a Dutch engineer in charge of government machine works for the colony, and a native Surinamese mother. At the age of ten, Matzeliger began serving an apprenticeship in the machine works. In 1871 he signed on to the crew of an East Indian merchant ship and set out to seek his fortune overseas. After a two-year voyage, he landed at Philadelphia, where he probably worked as a cobbler. In 1877 he settled in the town of Lynn, Massachusetts, the largest shoe-manufacturing center in the United States. His first job there was with the M. H. Harney Company, where he operated a McKay sole-stitching machine. He also gained experience in heel-burnishing, buttonholing, machine repair, and other aspects of shoe manufacture. Later, he was employed in the shoe factory of Beal Brothers. In his spare time Matzeliger drove a coach, studied to increase his proficiency in the English language, and painted oils and watercolors (mostly landscape scenes). After covering rent and other essentials, his small earnings went into the purchase of books, including such useful reference tools as Popular Educator and Science for All.

At the time, a major challenge facing the shoe industry was how to improve the technique of “lasting”—or connecting the upper flaps to the soles of the shoe. Lasting was still done entirely by hand, an arduous process that slowed production. Several lasting machines had been tried without success. With characteristic zeal, Matzeliger took up this challenge, which had eluded the best mechanical minds. He spent long evening hours in his garret room experimenting and building models. In March 1883 he finally received Patent No. 274,207 for his “Lasting Machine.” With sole and upper positioned on a lathe, the machine alternately drove tacks, rotated the shoe, and pleated the leather—an automated replication of the manual technique. Two years later he ran a successful factory test in which, over the course of a day, his machine lasted a record seventy-five pairs of shoes (a hand laster could produce no more than fifty in a ten-hour period). With further improvements, it lasted up to 700 pairs a day. This invention, dubbed the “niggerhead,” came into universal use in the shoe industry. (It is unclear how the machine acquired its name. The term “niggerhead,” applied in several contexts at the time was used in the apparel industry to designate a type of fabric.)

Matzeliger’s “dark complexion” made him stand out among his mostly white fellow workers, and his reception by the community varied. A religious man, he tried without success to join the local Unitarian, Episcopal, and Catholic churches. In 1884 he was accepted into the Christian Endeavor Society, the youth wing of the North Congregational Church. He was active in the society’s Sunday school and fund-raising work. His diligence, polite bearing, and easygoing personality endeared him to those whose minds had not been completely closed by racial prejudice. Among his circle of friends were the younger group of factory workers and members of the Christian Endeavor Society. He never married.

Although he remained active in the developing shoe machinery technology, and was awarded four related patents between 1888 and 1891, Matzeliger’s financial benefit from the work was relatively modest. He sold the patents to his backers for fifteen thousand dollars worth of stock in their company. By the end of the century, this company had become part of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation. Matzeliger’s patents provided a nucleus of economic strength for the corporation in its early years. Matzeliger was long since gone, however, having died of tuberculosis. At the time of his death he was being cared for by friends at his home in Lynn. Three of his five patents were granted posthumously.

MAYS, BENJAMIN E.

(1 Aug. 1894–28 Mar. 1984), educator and clergyman, was born Benjamin Elijah Mays in Greenwood County, South Carolina, the youngest of eight children of Hezekiah Mays and Louvenia Carter, both tenant farmers who had been born in slavery. Mays’s earliest memory was of the 1898 Phoenix Riot in Greenwood County, which was sparked by internecine battles for control of the Democratic Party and white efforts to disfranchise African Americans. Mays, who was only four at the time, recalled a mob riding with guns and making his father kowtow to save his life. He also remembered the problems his parents had faced living as tenant farmers in the cotton economy of South Carolina.

Three things about his formative years were significant to Mays. The first was his father’s abuse of alcohol. He recalled that his father drank even near the church, and he remembered the fights between his parents when his father was drunk. As a result of his father’s behavior, Mays abstained from alcohol. The second formative influence on Mays was the religious life of his mother. She would lead the family in nightly ritual prayer, and her abiding faith instilled a disciplined spirituality into Mays’s life. Her piety strongly influenced his religious sensibilities and her belief in the power of education helped to shape his emerging worldview. Third, Mays benefited from support at church and school, and from his oldest sister, Susie, who taught him rudimentary reading and math. Throughout his adolescent years, such encouragement at home, church, and school persuaded Mays to seek an education as a means of overcoming rural poverty. Later in life, he would remember his prayers in the cotton fields to God to grant him the opportunity to get an education.

Mays left home after his father objected to his being a full-time student. He completed high school at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, graduating as the valedictorian of his class in 1914. From there he would follow the abolitionist nexus, attending Virginia Union University in Richmond, a Baptist-affiliated historically black college founded by the American Home Mission Society in 1865. While a student at Virginia Union, Mays met two alumni of Bates College, who had joined Union’s faculty; they encouraged him to transfer to Bates College, a predominantly white Baptist-affiliated institution, in Lewiston, Maine. Bates was liberating for Mays. He attended the college so that he could compete academically with northern whites. The experience satisfied his need to gain respect and overcome the culture of inferiority with which segregated society had marked all African Americans. Mays became a member of Phi Beta Kappa Society, and, at the age of twenty-six, graduated from Bates with honors.

After completing his degree at Bates, Mays decided upon a career in the ministry. Although numerous black Baptist congregations would have accepted him as pastor with only a bachelor’s degree, he declined to take any such post and instead chose to enroll in the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1920. He initially wanted to attend Andover-Newton Seminary in Massachusetts, but he was not accepted because of his race. Chicago proved to be stimulating and on the cutting edge of theology and sociology. Unfortunately, the university offered him very little money to complete his master’s work without interruption.

After having finished the first year of his program, Mays delayed his education for three years to teach at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Georgia. More-house’s president, JOHN HOPE, recruited Mays to teach math and psychology. Though the original contract was for one year, Mays remained at Morehouse for three years, during which he taught and influenced many students and colleagues who would go on to notable achievements, among them the sociologist E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER, the theologian HOWARD THURMAN, and the civil rights lawyer James Nabrit. The high standards set at Morehouse under Hope’s leadership was an inspiration to Mays. It was a model of how dedicated leadership could bring about racial uplift and inspire African Americans to even greater accomplishments.

Although Mays loved Morehouse, he still wanted to be an active church pastor. While at Morehouse, he served as pastor of a small congregation—Shiloh Baptist Church. Tragically for Mays, his first wife, Ellen Harvin, who had encouraged him in his pursuit of the ministry, died in Atlanta in childbirth in 1923. Although the tragic loss of his wife grieved him, Mays pursued his calling and returned to the University of Chicago in the academic year 1924–1925 to complete his master’s thesis, entitled “Pagan Survivals in Christianity,” under the New Testament historian Shirley Jackson Case.

In the spring of 1925, Robert Shaw Wilkinson, the president of South Carolina State College, recruited Mays to teach at his alma mater. During his brief tenure in Orangeburg, Mays met Sadie Gray, a teacher and social worker, and married her in 1926. Their marriage broke the college’s rule that married women could not be members of the faculty, which sent Mays and his wife in search of employment. The National Urban League soon employed them both as social workers in Tampa, Florida, where they stayed for two years, with Mays serving as director of the league. Although Mays did not find the job fulfilling, with characteristic dutifulness he completed a study of Tampa in 1928 with the white liberal sociologist Arthur Raper. In 1928 Mays and his wife returned to Atlanta, where he worked for the national YMCA while continuing to seek the pastorship of a church. At the end of his term with the YMCA in 1930, Mays received a stipend from a Rockefeller Foundation-funded organization, the Institute for Social Religious Research, to study African American churches.

After the publication in 1933 of The Negro’s Church, co-authored with Joseph Nicholson, Mays was able to return to the University of Chicago to complete a PhD in Theology. His dissertation, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature, was published as a book in 1938. Upon completion of his degree, Mays once more sought a pulpit. Once again, however, the academy, not the church, called him. In 1934 MORDECAI JOHNSON, the president of Howard University, recruited Mays to be the dean of the university’s School of Religion. Mays thought that if he could not actively lead a church, the next-best calling was to the train the clergy. During his six-year tenure at Howard, he recruited faculty and students, built the library, and secured accreditation for the School of Religion. As a result of his work at Howard and the internal struggle that took place after the death of John Hope, Mays was voted by the trustees to the post of president of Morehouse College in 1940.

From 1940 to 1967 Mays served as president of Morehouse College. While working in this capacity, he continued to build on the legacy of John Hope. Like Hope, he was active in the Federal Council of Churches, serving as the first African American vice president and on the central committee of the World Council of Churches as well as pursuing civil rights causes. In addition, he was widely sought after as a public speaker and weekly columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier. As president of the college, he mentored a generation of students engaged in the struggle for human rights. Mays’s most famous student, MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., called him “his spiritual and intellectual mentor” (New York Times, March 29, 1984, D23). For Mays, it was tragic that he was called upon to give the eulogies for King and, later, for WHITNEY YOUNG Jr., the director of the National Urban League.

Upon his retirement, Mays nursed Sadie Gray Mays through her last illness; she died in 1969. He also wrote his autobiography, Born to Rebel, took speaking engagements, and served as the president of the Atlanta Board of Education. In 1982 the NAACP awarded him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. In 1984, just short of his ninetieth birthday, Mays died in Atlanta. He is buried on the campus of Morehouse College.

MAYS, WILLIE

(6 May 1931–), baseball player, was born Willie Howard Mays Jr. in West-field, Alabama. His paternal grandfather, Walter Mays, and his father, William Howard Mays Sr., were semiprofessional baseball players, and his mother was a high school track star. After his parents divorced when he was three years old, Mays was raised by his father and two adopted sisters in Fairfield, Alabama.

Mays starred in football and basketball at Fairfield Industrial High School. As the school had no baseball team, Mays began playing semiprofessional baseball as a young teenager. By age fourteen he was playing right field with his father’s semiprofessional steel mill team. In 1947 his father introduced him to Piper Davis, the manager of the Birmingham Black Barons, a professional baseball team in the Negro American League. He got two hits in his first game for the Black Barons and was signed for $250 per month, even though he could play only home games because he was still in high school. In a sign of things to come, Mays hit a double in his first at bat against the great pitcher SATCHEL PAIGE of the Kansas City Monarchs. He played for the Black Barons from 1947 through 1949.

The Boston Braves scouted Mays in 1949 and 1950 but did not sign him. However Eddie Montague, a scout for the New York Giants, reported that Mays was the greatest ballplayer he had ever seen, and the Giants signed him at a salary of five thousand dollars on the day Willie graduated from high school. They paid the Black Barons ten thousand dollars for Mays’s contract. In 1950 Mays was assigned to a minor league team in Sioux City, Iowa, but because the team would not accept black players, he was subsequently sent to the Trenton, New Jersey, minor league team. In 1951 he was promoted to the New York Giants top farm team, the Minneapolis Millers. He batted .477 during the first two months of the season and was promoted to the New York Giants on 25 May 1951. Despite his short stay in Minneapolis, he became such a fan favorite that the Giants placed an advertisement in the local newspaper to apologize to the community for promoting him.

Willie Mays, the first African American to captain a major league baseball team, drives in a run for the Giants, 1965. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Mays’s impact on the Giants was immediate and profound. Although he did not hit well in his first games, his fielding prowess was so extraordinary that the Giants’ manager, Leo Durocher, affirmed that Mays was to be his regular center fielder no matter how poorly he batted. His hitting improved as he helped the Giants win the National League pennant in his first season. Mays’s performance earned him the Rookie of the Year award. His enthusiastic “Say Hey” greeting and impassioned play led to his nickname, the “Say Hey Kid.”

In 1952 Mays was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to Fort Eustis, Virginia. During this time he played baseball and created his distinctive technique of catching fly balls at the level of his belt buckle, his famous “basket catch.” He finally returned to a languishing New York Giants team in 1954. When a fan noticed Durocher greeting Mays, he remarked, “Leo is shaking hands with the pennant.” Mays won the batting title, hit forty-one home runs, and was awarded the National League Most Valuable Player award. That year he led the Giants to the pennant and the World Series championship against the favored Cleveland Indians.

The 1954 World Series was marked by one of the most remarkable fielding plays in baseball history, known as “the Catch.” In the eighth inning of the first game, with the score tied and two runners on base, Vic Wertz of the Indians hit a fly ball over Mays’s head in center field. Mays turned around, ran straight back, and caught the ball over his shoulder 450 feet from home plate. He twirled around in one motion and threw to the infield, which kept any runners from scoring. “The Catch” epitomizes Mays’s place as the greatest fielding center fielder in baseball history.

Mays married Margueritte Wendell in 1956 and they adopted a son, Michael, in 1959. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1961. The breakdown in his marriage coincided with the Giants’s move to San Francisco in 1958. Although he was the star of the team, Mays was not immediately accepted into the community and was kept from buying a house in a white neighborhood when homeowners protested. On the diamond he was often unfavorably compared to San Francisco’s local hero, Joe DiMaggio, who, ironically, had been Mays’s boyhood idol. Mays let his play overcome the critics. He led the Giants to a pennant in 1962, and in 1964 he became the first African American ever to captain a major league baseball team. Two years later, Mays signed a contract with the Giants that made him the highest-paid player in baseball history. Sporting News voted him the player of the decade for the 1960s. Mays married Mae Louise Allen in 1971, a year before the Giants traded him to the New York Mets, and two years before he completed his career as the Mets’ player-coach. In 1979, he became the ninth player to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

Mays’s greatness lies in his superiority in all areas of the game: running, fielding, throwing, power hitting, and hitting for average. The adulation of his fans for one of baseball’s greatest all-around players rests on Mays’s twenty-two-year career of consistently phenomenal statistics and defensive plays. From 1954 through 1962 he led the National League in at least one offensive category every year. He holds the records of 7,290 outfield chances and 7,095 putouts and led the league in outfield double plays from 1954 to 1956 and, remarkably, ten years later, in 1965. He also holds seven club records for the New York Giants (for which he played only five full seasons) and fifteen club records for the San Francisco Giants.

Mays’s career totals put him in the top ten in nine offensive categories, including 2,992 games played, 660 home runs, 63 multiple-home-run games, 1,903 runs batted in, and 2,062 runs scored. He won the Most Valuable Player award in 1954 and 1965 and led the league in batting in 1954. He also led the National League four seasons in home runs and four consecutive seasons in stolen bases. He had ten seasons batting over .300, ten seasons batting in at least a hundred runs, and twelve consecutive seasons scoring at least a hundred runs. He hit at least thirty home runs in eleven seasons, twenty doubles in sixteen seasons, and five triples in twelve seasons. In 1971, he hit five triples at the age of forty.

Mays is one of only three players to have five hundred home runs and three thousand hits and one of only six players to hit four home runs in a single game. He was the first player to have twenty doubles, triples, home runs, and stolen bases in a season (1957), thirty home runs and thirty stolen bases in a season (1956 and 1957), and fifty home runs and twenty stolen bases in a season (1955). He also was the first player to reach three hundred home runs and three hundred stolen bases. In recognition of all these accomplishments, Mays was selected for the National League All-Star team twenty-four consecutive times.

Despite all Mays gave to the game, Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banished him from baseball in 1979 because he was hired to work in public relations by Bally’s Casino; Major League Baseball had long prohibited players and coaches from having any association with gambling entities. He was finally welcomed back into baseball in 1985 by Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. The San Francisco Giants then hired him in 1986 as a special assistant to the president and made this a lifetime appointment in 1993.

Mays’s impact in baseball, sports, and society goes well beyond his statistics and awards. Remembering his humble beginnings, he has continuously promoted activities to help underprivileged children. During his adolescence he watched Saturday football games at Miles College, a black school in Birmingham. In 1968 he returned to Miles College as national chair of their fund-raising campaign to build the Willie Mays Health and Physical Education Center. During his years as a New York Giant, he was famous for playing stickball with neighborhood children in Harlem; in San Francisco in the 1960s he became a mentor to O. J. SIMPSON, who was at that time a wayward teenager from the city’s Potrero Hill housing projects. When Mays returned to New York with the Mets, he supported New York’s Fresh Air Fund to allow inner-city children to spend time in summer camps outside the city. Mays’s Say Hey Foundation, formed in 1980, is dedicated to providing higher education for underprivileged children.

Mays has actively promoted the inclusion of Negro League players into the Hall of Fame. When the Hall of Fame proposed setting up a separate exhibit for Negro League players and accomplishments, he forcefully argued that Negro League baseball should be recognized as part of the highest level of baseball and that its players should be integrated into exhibits of baseball’s greatest athletes. Although blacks and whites played separately, he believed they should be remembered together. In 2000 the San Francisco Giants honored Mays by addressing their new ballpark “24 Willie Mays Plaza” and adorning it with a nine-foot-tall statue of the “Say Hey Kid.”

McCLENDON, ROSE

(27 Aug. 1884–12 July 1936), actress, was born Rosalie Virginia Scott in Greenville, South Carolina, the daughter of Sandy Scott and Tena Jenkins. Around 1890 the family moved to New York City, where her parents worked for a wealthy family as a coachman and a housekeeper, respectively. An avid reader, McClendon and her brother and sister were educated at Public School No. 40 in Manhattan. Although she admitted to having no inclinations for the stage at this time, as a child she participated in plays at Sunday school and later performed in and directed plays at St. Mark’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1904 she married Henry Pruden McClendon, a licensed chiropractor and Pullman porter for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The couple had no children and McClendon was content as a housewife for a number of years while also active in the community and at St. Mark’s.

In 1916 McClendon received a scholarship to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Art at Carnegie Hall, studying acting under Frank Sargent and others. Three years later McClendon made her professional theatrical debut at the Davenport Theatre in New York during the 1919–1920 season, appearing in John Galsworthy’s Justice with the Bramhall Players. For the next fifteen years McClendon appeared in almost every important drama about black life that was produced in New York, which earned her the title of the “Negro race’s first lady.”

McClendon gained some critical attention in a touring production of Rosearnne (1924), which starred Charles Gilpin, but it was the small role of Octavie in Laurence Stallings and Frank Harling’s Deep River that first brought McClendon critical success and the acknowledgment of her peers. The play opened on 21 September 1926 in Philadelphia and on 4 October moved to New York City. As Octavie, McClendon entered and walked slowly down a grand staircase and exited through a garden—all without saying a word. Of her performance, critic John Anderson of the New York Evening Post said McClendon created “out of a few wisps of material an unforgettable picture” (5 Oct. 1926). In Philadelphia, director Arthur Hopkins convinced Ethel Barrymore to “watch Rose McClendon come down those stairs,” and Barrymore later referred to McClendon’s performance as “one of the memorable, immortal moments in the theatre” (Journal of Negro History, Jan. 1937).

Rose McClendon, photographed in 1935 by Carl Van Vechten. Library of Congress

On 30 December 1926 McClendon appeared as Goldie McAllister in Paul Green’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play In Abraham’s Bosom for the Province-town Players at the Provincetown Theatre, which also starred Abbie Mitchell and Julius Bledsoe. The play was a success and ran for 277 performances. A revival was staged after the Pulitzer was awarded. In 1928 McClendon played Serena in Dorothy and Du Bose Heyward’s Porgy. The play had an extended run of 217 performances in New York, after which McClendon toured with the show across the country and abroad. McClendon was called “the perfect Aristocrat of Catfish Row” and won critical acclaim for her role. In 1931 she played Big Sue in Paul Green’s House of Connelly, the first production of the Group Theatre. The production, which opened 23 February 1931, starred Franchot Tone and Morris Carnovsky and was sponsored in part by the Theatre Guild. House of Connelly was an immediate success and became an important part of the Group Theatre’s contribution to American theater. In 1932 McClendon took the role of Mammy in Never No More, and for the 1933 season she played various roles in the radio series John Henry, Black River Giant.

In 1935 McClendon played Cora in LANGSTON HUGHES’s Mulatto, which premiered at the Vanderbilt Theatre in New York on 24 October. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre asserts that the play itself was inferior but succeeded on the strength of McClendon’s performance. Doris Abramson expressed a similar sentiment and praised McClendon, saying, “This great Negro actress brought power and dignity to the role” (Abramson, 79). The New York critics agreed. Brooks Atkinson called her “an artist with a sensitive personality and a bell-like voice. It is always a privilege to see her adding fineness of perception to the parts she takes” (New York Times, 25 Oct. 1935). The show ran 373 performances, a record for a play by a black author. However, ill health forced McClendon to leave the cast a few months after the opening. She died of pneumonia a year later in New York City.

Beyond her own acting, McClendon was deeply concerned with the state of the black theater art, and she used her influence to promote it during what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. She directed productions for the Harlem Experimental Theatre, founded in 1928, and helped found in 1935 the Negro People’s Theatre, which through McClendon’s guidance became incorporated into the Federal Theatre Project’s Black Unit in Harlem. McClendon also served on the advisory board of the Theatre Union, a nonprofit producing company founded in 1932 to produce socially significant plays at popular prices. She saw the theater as an important medium for depicting a true picture of African American life. She hoped the Federal Theatre Project support would produce quality black actors and writers.

As one of the great actresses of her time, McClendon became a strong symbol for black theater at a time when African Americans were just gaining their theatrical voice; indeed, when McClendon first appeared on the stage, blacks were not yet allowed into theater audiences. In the year after her death, the Rose McClendon Players were organized by Dick Campbell in memory of her vision for the black theater. While the company faltered after the Second World War, it launched the careers of numerous artists who would make their mark in the postwar American theater—her vision fulfilled.

McCOY, BILL.

See Railroad Bill.

McCOY, ELIJAH

(27 Mar. 1843–1929), inventor, was born in Colchester, Canada West (now Ontario), the son of George McCoy and Mildred Goins, former slaves who had escaped from Kentucky. In 1849 his parents moved the family to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where Elijah began attending school. In 1859 he went to Edinburgh, Scotland, to undertake an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer; he stayed there five years.

Unable to obtain a position as an engineer after he returned to the United States, McCoy began working as a railroad fireman for the Michigan Central Railroad. This position exposed him to the problems of steam engine lubrication and overheating. Locomotive engines had to be periodically oiled by hand, a time-consuming task that caused significant delays in railroad transport of commercial goods and passengers. Poorly lubricated locomotives also used more fuel than those that were efficiently lubricated.

The patent illustration for Elijah McCoy’s displacement lubricator, 1900. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

McCoy began his career as an inventor by first examining and improving the lubrication of stationary machines. On 23 June 1872 he patented “an improvement in lubricators for steam engines,” the first of his automatic lubrication devices for use on stationary engines. The rights for this patent were assigned to S. C. Hamlin of Ypsilanti. McCoy received several additional patents for improvements in lubricators that were all for use on stationary engines and on steam engines for ships.

In 1882 McCoy began receiving patents for lubricators specifically designed for railroad locomotive engines. His hydrostatic lubricator for locomotives made quite an impact. Largely constructed of brass, the lubricators, approximately twelve inches in height, had valves that fed the oil to the engine and that regulated the steam pressure. These lubricators were assigned to Charles and Henry Hodges and were manufactured by the Detroit Railway Supply Company. The money McCoy received from these patent assignments he used for further studies of the problems of lubrication.

McCoy continued to receive patents for improvements to his hydrostatic lubricator, and railroad officials soon took note. Even though other locomotive lubricators were on the market, McCoy’s lubricators sold well. He became an instructor in the correct installation and maintenance of his lubricators and also served as a consultant for several lubricator manufacturing companies, such as the Detroit Lubricator Company.

In 1915 McCoy patented a graphite lubricator, specifically designed for use on the newly introduced “superheater” locomotive engines. Because of the extreme temperatures of the steam, it was difficult to control and regulate the supply of oil with which the superheater engines were lubricated. McCoy’s new lubricator relied on the use of a solid lubricant, graphite, combined with oil that solved this problem. The basic design was economical and simple with few moving parts. The amount of lubricant was controlled by an equalizing valve that regulated the flow of oil and graphite over the engine cylinder. One enthusiastic customer reported that his locomotive made thirteen round trips between Chicago and the Mississippi River, and when the engine was examined it was in “perfect condition.” On these trips the amount of oil used for lubrication was reduced by one-third to one-half, and the amount of coal was reduced by four to six tons. McCoy considered the graphite lubricator to be his greatest invention.

The Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company, located in Detroit, was established in 1916 to sell the graphite lubricator. But apparently McCoy was only a minor stockholder; the company went out of business a few years after it began. Many questions remain about the extent to which McCoy himself profited from his own inventions. McCoy could have become a very wealthy man given the commercial success of his lubricator design. But many of his patents were quickly assigned to others, and he merely served as a figurehead for the company bearing his name.

McCoy married Mary E. Delaney, his second wife, in 1873. They later moved to Detroit, where she became a well-known civil rights and women’s rights activist and clubwoman. The McCoys were very close, and after her death in 1923 Elijah McCoy’s health began to deteriorate. Never a very sociable man, he began to withdraw from the world around him. In 1928 he was committed to Eloise Infirmary, suffering from senile dementia, and he died there. By the time of his death he had received at least fifty patents, many held in foreign countries and virtually all of them in the area of engine lubrication.

The theory is often propounded that one of McCoy’s enduring legacies is the phrase “the real McCoy.” The proposed explanation is that the quality of his lubricators was so outstanding in comparison to others on the market that railroad inspectors and engineers are said to have challenged their crews as to whether they had installed “the real McCoy.” Actual evidence of such use has yet to be discovered. However, the phrase, in the form “the real Mackay” (pronounced muh-KYE in Scotland), may have been used as an advertising slogan by the G. Mackay and Co. distillery in Edinburgh, Scotland, as early as 1870, and it appears in a letter by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson in 1883, only a year after McCoy patented his locomotive lubricator. In 1899 a San Francisco newspaper applied the idiom to a flamboyant white boxer known as “Kid McCoy.” This and other evidence suggests that “the real McCoy” could easily be applied to anyone of note named McCoy. Its application to Elijah McCoy has certainly helped in recent years to keep his memory alive.

McDANIEL, HATTIE

(10 June 1895–26 Oct. 1952), film actress and singer, was born in Wichita, Kansas, the youngest daughter of Henry McDaniel, an itinerant preacher, carpenter, and entertainer, and Susan Holbert. The McDaniels moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1901, where Hattie enjoyed a more settled childhood than her seven older siblings had. Five other children had died in infancy. At home, at school, and at church, Hattie sang spirituals and recited passages from the Bible. Usually she enchanted, though not always. She later recalled: “My mother would say, ‘Hattie, I’ll pay you to hush,’ and she’d give me a dime. But in a few minutes I’d be singing and shouting again” (Jackson, 9). By 1910 Hattie was already an accomplished singer and dancer, appearing in several minstrel shows in Denver. She later toured with her father and her brothers Sam and Otis in the Henry McDaniel Minstrel Show, a troupe popular throughout Colorado.

Around 1920 Henry’s poor health and Otis’s death forced Hattie to find work as a cook, a clerk, and a laundress, though she longed to return to the stage. Her break came later that year, when she joined Professor George Morrison and his Melody Hounds on a tour throughout the West and Mexico. McDaniel’s well-received performances on that tour led to steady employment in the vaudeville circuits of the West and South for most of the 1920s. In 1925 she sang on the Denver radio station KOA, an appearance often credited as the first on radio by an African American. Although she could dance and displayed a keen talent for comedy, McDaniel rose to prominence as a blues singer, performing standards and recording some of her own compositions, including “Brown-Skin Baby Doll” and “Just One Sorrowing Heart.”

McDaniel’s singing career prospered until the Great Depression, when she was forced to find work as an attendant in the ladies room of Club Madrid, a nightclub and casino near Milwaukee. Some of the customers, unaware of McDaniel’s two decades in show business, urged the manager to let the singing washroom attendant perform with the house band; a rousing rendition of the “St. Louis Blues” earned her a standing ovation and more than ninety dollars in tips that night. McDaniel quickly became one of the hottest acts in Milwaukee, and the regulars at Club Madrid urged her to leave for Los Angeles and take her chances in the movies. The rags-to-riches scenario could have made a great Hollywood script, if only Hollywood wrote such scripts for blacks.

Hattie McDaniel (left) receives her Academy Award for her supporting role as the feisty Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939). © Bettmann/CORBIS

The “riches” part took a few years. McDaniel arrived in Los Angeles in 1931, not exactly an ingénue but still a relative unknown. With characteristic optimism, she made the most of her only connection, her brother Sam, who played the Doleful Deacon on the weekly KNX radio show “The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour.” Within a few weeks she was the star of the show and also wrote her own songs and gags. Despite her popularity, McDaniel received only five dollars per show. She earned the same amount for each movie in which she appeared as an extra or sang in the chorus. To augment her meager wages, she worked as a domestic, later joking that she had washed three million dishes on her way to stardom. By the mid 1930s McDaniel no longer needed to wash those dishes, as she had become that rarity in Hollywood: an actress with steady employment, and would ultimately appear in more than three hundred movies, most often as a maid. Her most notable performances came in John Ford’s Judge Priest (1934) with Will Rogers and in James Whale’s Show Boat (1936), where she played Queenie alongside PAUL ROBESON.

McDaniel’s most acclaimed role, as Mammy in David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind (1939), also proved to be the most controversial. To be sure, the NAACP and the black press criticized the film’s romanticized depiction of the antebellum South. Yet most commentators—black and white—credited McDaniel’s performance as the feisty but loyal Mammy to Scarlett O’Hara as worthy of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. McDaniel displayed her trademark flair for biting asides and broad comedy, but it was the melodramatic scene in which she mourned the death of Scarlett’s child that clinched the Oscar. Accepting the award—the first ever won by an African American—a tearful McDaniel expressed the hope that she would always be a credit to the motion picture industry and to her race.

During World War II, however, McDaniel found herself under fire from the NAACP’s executive secretary, WALTER WHITE, for allegedly failing in that latter goal. At a time when the NAACP was spearheading a “Double V” campaign for victory against fascism abroad and racism at home, White criticized black actors for portraying the servile stereotypes of eye-rolling Mammies and cringing Uncle Toms. As the most prominent black actress at that time, McDaniel became a lightning rod for these attacks, and she deeply resented what she saw as White’s interference in her livelihood. She passionately believed that her skills as an actor glorified African American womanhood, and indeed, at her best, she portrayed servant characters with greater depth and complexity than White charged. Moreover, sexism as much as racism restricted her roles. The slim, glamorous LENA HORNE—the black role model favored by Walter White—could insert a clause in her contract refusing to play maids; McDaniel had a clause in her contract forbidding her to lose weight.

The final years of McDaniel’s life were not particularly happy. Although she appeared in several more movies, none brought her the acclaim of Gone with the Wind. She remained in the public eye, notably as the star of Beulah, a highly popular CBS radio show that ran from 1947 to 1951, in which she played a maid who did not speak in dialect. In 1951 a heart attack forced her to stop working on a television version of the show. McDaniel had suffered from diabetes and heart disease, and also from depression, for several years. An unsettled family life did not help. All four of her marriages were brief and often stormy, and her fervent desire for a child was never fulfilled; a well-publicized false pregnancy at the age of forty-nine made matters worse. At her lavish parties she remained the gregarious “Hi-Hat Hattie,” but her friends noticed that she drank a little more, swore a little more, and on one occasion attempted suicide. Criticism from the NAACP still rankled, particularly because she had worked with the organization in 1945 to challenge successfully a restrictive covenant in her Los Angeles neighborhood. That court ruling helped the NAACP build its national campaign against restrictive covenants, which was finally endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer decision. In 1952 McDaniel was diagnosed with breast cancer; she died in the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.

It is not surprising that McDaniel’s favorite poem was “We Wear the Mask,” by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR. It stands as an appropriate tribute to a woman whose image received so much attention that the person behind the mask was often lost:

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.

MCDONALD, GABRIELLE KIRK

(12 Apr. 1942–), federal judge and international war crimes jurist, was born to James G. Kirk, a railroad dining car waiter, and Frances Retta English in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her father, who was later the director of the Community Development Corporation in St. Paul, and her mother divorced when Gabrielle was a young child, and she moved with her mother and brother, James, to New York City and later to Teaneck, New Jersey. Kirk’s mother, an editor at Prentice-Hall, was a forceful presence who resisted a New York landlord’s attempt to evict the Kirk family from their home when he discovered that they were black; he had rented to the light-skinned Frances English believing that she was white. Determined from an early age to become a civil rights attorney, Kirk briefly attended Boston University and Hunter College in New York City before enrolling in Howard Law School in Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s.

In 1966 Kirk received the Kappa Beta Pi Legal Sorority Award for Academic Excellence and an award for best oral argument and graduated first in her class at Howard Law School, a distinction that she shares with THURGOOD MARSHALL, who was at that time solicitor general of the United States. In a tribute to Marshall in 1993 Kirk wrote that she had been driven by his vision of using the law as an instrument of liberation. She began her legal career as a staff attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), an organization shaped by Marshall’s leadership in the 1940s and 1950s. By 1966, however, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had transformed the legal terrain upon which the LDF operated. It now focused on using Title VII of that act, which deals with employment discrimination, to assist African Americans seeking workplace fairness in large, unionized companies. Kirk led the LDF attorneys on several of these cases, notably a successful suit against Philip Morris, which, like other tobacco companies, had hired blacks for only the lowest-paying, most menial tasks. Kirk’s victory in that 1967 case marked the first successful use of Title VII to improve equal employment opportunities.

After three years of working for the LDF, Kirk married the attorney Mark McDonald and with him founded McDonald and McDonald, a law firm in Houston, Texas, specializing in discrimination lawsuits against major Texas corporations. The couple had two children, Michael and Stacy, and later divorced. Even opposing corporate attorneys admitted that Kirk McDonald was one of the best trial lawyers in the South, particularly in 1976, when her firm won a settlement of $1.2 billion for four hundred black workers at the Lone Star Steel Company. In addition to her work in private practice, Kirk McDonald also taught at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University in 1970 and from 1975 to 1977, and at the University of Texas at Austin in 1978. Recognizing her broad legal expertise, President Jimmy Carter appointed Gabrielle McDonald in 1979 to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, the first federal judgeship awarded to an African American in that state.

As a federal judge, McDonald faced a vast caseload—nearly one thousand a year—focusing on a broad spectrum of constitutional matters. Her earliest rulings were broadly liberal, notably, Andrews v. Ballard (1980), which overturned provisions of Texas law that had virtually outlawed acupuncture and other alternative medical practices in the state. McDonald’s highest-profile case came in a 1981 dispute between white and Vietnamese shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ku Klux Klan, supporting the white shrimpers, asked McDonald to recuse herself from the case, claiming that they could not receive a fair trial from a “Negress.” Her family was also sent hate mail, including four one-way tickets to Africa. McDonald refused to remove herself from the case, however, and ultimately enjoined the Klan from intimidating the Vietnamese shrimpers. Commentators noted that her carefully worded injunction did not infringe upon the Klan’s constitutional right to assemble.

Indeed, in her nine years on the federal bench, McDonald earned a reputation for fairness across the political spectrum. Conservatives praised her in 1986 when she upheld as constitutional a Houston ordinance that restricted the location of and signage used by topless bars. MacDonald ruled that topless dancing “is not without its First Amendment right to freedom of expression” but also that the ordinance, which prohibited such bars from operating within 750 feet of a church, school, or day-care center, did not restrict free speech, since it did not prevent them from operating elsewhere in the city. Such rulings did not endear her to some civil rights lawyers who viewed her jurisprudence as too cautious.

By 1988 McDonald had begun to chafe at her ever-increasing caseload, and she stepped down from her lifetime judicial appointment. She worked for law firms in San Antonio and Austin until 1993, when a former LDF colleague at the U.S. State Department asked her to serve on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Although she was surprised by the request, given her lack of experience in international law, she accepted, and the administration of President Bill Clinton submitted her name to the United Nations. In September 1993, after receiving the highest number of votes cast by the U.N. General Assembly for the tribunal’s members, McDonald began to divide her time between Houston and the ICTY headquarters at The Hague in the Netherlands.

In May 1996 McDonald sat as one of three judges at the first war crimes proceedings since the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Exactly one year later, the panel sentenced Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb, to twenty years in prison for systematically raping, torturing, and murdering Muslims in a Serb-run prison camp in 1992. International commentators noted that, as the presiding judge, McDonald skillfully balanced her concern for the victims of the war crimes, especially rape victims, with scrupulous fairness and respect for the rights of the defendants.

The ICTY’s findings in the Tadić case were significant in that they proved under international law the Serb policy of “ethnic cleansing” and set a precedent for further prosecutions. At the end of her tenure as president of the ICTY, McDonald praised the tribunal for melding different legal systems and traditions and for establishing clear international procedures for indictments and rules of evidence. She also argued that a permanent court with stronger backing from the United Nations would have brought war criminals to trial more quickly than had been the case in Serbia and in the similar tribunal dealing with atrocities in Rwanda. The establishment by the United Nations of an International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 appeared to have furthered McDonald’s ideals, but the U.S. government declared its implacable opposition to such a court. Fearing, as President George W. Bush stated, that “our diplomats and our soldiers could be drug into this court,” his administration joined Iraq, Israel, and North Korea in opposing a permanent organization to adjudicate war crimes.

After stepping down from the ICTY in 1999, McDonald accepted a position as a human rights adviser to Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, Inc. This New Orleans-based company had come under attack from human rights organizations for dumping toxic waste from its copper and gold mines, the world’s largest, in West Papua, Indonesia. By 2002 Freeport-McMoRan’s more enlightened corporate policies had facilitated the passage of new legislation that ensured the indigenous population of West Papua a greater share of natural resource revenues. McDonald also participated in 2001 in an international mock tribunal that found the Japanese government guilty of creating, regulating, and maintaining a policy of sexual enslavement of “comfort women” for its troops in several Asian countries during World War II.

Several organizations have recognized McDonald’s contributions to civil rights and human rights, among them, the National Bar Association, an African American organization that gave her its RONALD BROWN International Law Award, and the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession, which chose her as its “Woman Lawyer of Achievement” in 2001. Perhaps the greatest testament to Gabrielle McDonald’s commitment to human rights was given by Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, who wrote:

Perhaps more than any other single person, Judge McDonald helped bring us closer to a world which once seemed beyond attainment—a world in which those whose deeds offend the conscience of humankind will no longer go unpunished, in which human rights will be truly universal and in which the rule of law will finally prevail.

McGUIRE, GEORGE ALEXANDER

(26 Mar. 1866–10 Nov. 1934), bishop and founder of the African Orthodox Church, was born in Sweets, Antigua, British West Indies, the son of Edward Henry McGuire and Mary Elizabeth (maiden name unknown). He graduated from the Antigua branch of Mico College for Teachers in 1886. Baptized in his father’s Anglican Church, he was educated in the Moravian tradition of his mother, graduating in 1888 from the Moravian seminary at Nisky, St. Thomas, in the Danish West Indies. Thereafter he pastored a Moravian congregation at Frederiksted, St. Croix. He married Ada Roberts in 1892; they had one daughter.

McGuire immigrated to the United States in 1894. The following year he was confirmed in the Protestant Episcopal Church. He studied for the Episcopal ministry under a fellow West Indian, Henry L. Phillips of Philadelphia. McGuire found himself in a church that desired to minister to African Americans but was generally unwilling to accept any blacks as equal to whites. McGuire’s talent and Phillips’s mentorship allowed him to advance swiftly through the offices open to him. Ordained deacon in 1896 and priest the next year, he pastored a succession of black congregations, including St. Andrew’s, Cincinnati (1897–1899); St. Philip’s, Richmond (1899–1901); and St. Thomas’s, Philadelphia (1901–1904).

In 1905 McGuire accepted the appointment of Bishop William Montgomery Brown as archdeacon for colored work in the diocese of Arkansas. This was the highest position open to a black man serving the church within the United States. The denomination’s national General Convention, however, was considering two proposals for allowing blacks to serve as domestic bishops: the first would place black bishops in charge of all-black missionary districts independent of local dioceses; and the second would allow dioceses to elect suffragan bishops who would work under the supervision of the diocesan bishop. Soon after McGuire’s arrival, Brown proposed a third plan: black Episcopalians should be separated into an independent denomination. In 1906 McGuire seems to have preferred the missionary plan; later, under his own initiative, he attempted to enact Brown’s plan.

Racial conflicts in the Arkansas diocese led McGuire to accept an invitation to return to the North in 1909 to pastor St. Bartholomew’s, a young congregation of West Indians in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Under McGuire’s leadership the church grew dramatically, but again he was frustrated by the racism of the Episcopal Church, evident in the diocese’s refusal to grant the congregation voting rights. In 1911 he moved to New York to become field secretary of the American Church Institute for Negroes. Two years later he accepted a call to serve as rector of St. Paul’s Church, Falmouth, in his native Antigua.

While in the Islands McGuire encountered the ideas of racial independence and nationalism advocated by MARCUS GARVEY. These resonated with McGuire’s experience of whites’ inability to treat blacks as equals within the church. He returned to New York in 1919 to support Garvey’s newly formed Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and African Communities League. McGuire soon established his own congregation, the Church of the Good Shepherd, which affiliated briefly with the Reformed Episcopal Church but soon united with a few other congregations to form the Independent Episcopal Church.

In August 1920 the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World elected McGuire chaplain-general of the UNIA and “titular Archbishop of Ethiopia.” McGuire strengthened the work of local UNIA chaplains and, according to the UNIA’s Negro World, sought to create a church “big enough for all Negroes to enter, retaining their own worship” (2 Apr. 1921). McGuire linked Christianity and racial independence in The Universal Negro Catechism (1921) and The Universal Negro Ritual (1921), which he composed for the UNIA. The catechism taught that if one “had to think or speak of the color of God” it should be described “as black since we are created in His image and likeness.” The infant baptism rite charged the baptized to “fight manfully . . . for the freedom of his race, and the redemption of Africa unto his life’s end.”

The formality of the rituals did not appeal to many Protestant supporters of the UNIA, nor did McGuire’s ordination of a UNIA leader as a presbyter of the church. Within a year the Negro World was at pains to stress, “We favor all churches, but adopt none as a UNIA Church” (16 July 1921). Although Garvey desired to unite blacks into “a great Christian confraternity,” he did not want the church and hierarchy that McGuire sought to create. After a brief period of estrangement McGuire resumed a prominent role in the UNIA, presiding over the movement’s “canonization” of Jesus as the “Black Man of Sorrows” in 1924.

Unable to establish a church linked to the UNIA, McGuire sought to provide an independent black church for Anglo-Catholics. Elected bishop of the Independent Episcopal Church in September 1921, he insisted that the church be renamed the African Orthodox Church (AOC) to emphasize its racial leadership. He maintained that his new church was “neither schismatic nor heretical,” but a legitimate national or racial “branch” of the one Holy Catholic Church.

When trying to form a church linked to the UNIA, McGuire had been willing to forgo apostolic succession, but he believed this was essential to authenticate the claims of the AOC. Refused consecration by Episcopal, Catholic, and Russian Orthodox bishops, he finally received it from Joseph René Vilatte of the Old Catholic Church of America. Having an autonomous church headed by a black bishop in apostolic succession was a great source of pride for McGuire and his followers, but the questionable authenticity of Vilatte’s consecrations haunted their relations with other churches.

McGuire crafted a liturgy for his church based largely on the Book of Common Prayer and Anglo-Catholic practices, but also incorporating a few elements from Eastern Orthodoxy. The liturgy included prayers for the race and the redemption of Africa, though less pronounced than those in the Universal Negro Ritual. McGuire also founded Endich Theological Seminary in 1923 and edited the church’s monthly Negro Churchman from 1923 to 1931. By the mid-1920s church membership numbered twelve thousand, with congregations in the northeastern United States, Nova Scotia, and the Caribbean. In 1927 McGuire was raised to the rank of patriarch and expanded the church to South Africa by receiving a few congregations and consecrating their leader, Daniel William Alexander, as bishop. McGuire died in New York City as head of a slowly expanding church.

McGuire broke new ground in extending the autonomy enjoyed by many black Protestants to black Anglo-Catholics. He was among the most important religious leaders in Garvey’s movement and a talented member of the corps of West Indian clergy serving the Episcopal Church in the United States. The churches led by Alexander in Africa proved to be an enduring and significant presence on that continent. Yet in the U.S. the AOC became a small, though enduring, community of less than 6,000 people. As a black church leader who boasted of a claim to apostolic succession that few recognized, McGuire remained a marginal figure in both the church and predominantly Protestant black America.

McKAY, CLAUDE

(15 Sept. 1890–22 May 1948), poet, novelist, and journalist, was born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the son of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, farmers. The youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an early age to live with his oldest brother, a schoolteacher, so that he could be given the best education available. An avid reader, McKay began to write poetry at the age of ten. In 1906 he decided to enter a trade school, but when the school was destroyed by an earthquake he became apprenticed to a carriage-and cabinet-maker; a brief period in the constabulary followed. In 1907 McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman residing in Jamaica who became his mentor, encouraging him to write dialect verse. Jekyll later set some of McKay’s verse to music. By the time he immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had established himself as a poet, publishing two volumes of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912).

Having heard favorable reports of the work of BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, McKay enrolled at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama with the intention of studying agronomy; it was here that he first encountered the harsh realities of American racism, which would form the basis for much of his subsequent writing. He soon left Tuskegee for Kansas State College in Manhattan, Kansas. In 1914 a financial gift from Jekyll enabled him to move to New York, where he invested in a restaurant and married his childhood sweetheart, Eulalie Imelda Lewars. Neither venture lasted a year, and Lewars returned to Jamaica to give birth to their daughter. McKay was forced to take a series of menial jobs. He was finally able to publish two poems, “Invocation” and “The Harlem Dancer,” under a pseudonym in 1917. McKay’s talent as a lyric poet earned him recognition, particularly from Frank Harris, editor of Pearson’s magazine, and Max Eastman, editor of The Liberator, a socialist journal; both became instrumental in McKay’s early career.

As a socialist, McKay eventually became an editor at The Liberator, in addition to writing various articles for a number of left-wing publications. During the period of racial violence against blacks known as the Red Summer of 1919, McKay wrote one of his best-known poems, the sonnet, “If We Must Die,” an anthem of resistance later quoted by Winston Churchill during World War II. “Baptism,” “The White House,” and “The Lynching,” all sonnets, also exemplify some of McKay’s finest protest poetry. The generation of poets who formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance, including LANGSTON HUGHES and COUNTÉE CULLEN, identified McKay as a leading inspirational force, even though he did not write modern verse. His innovation lay in the directness with which he spoke of racial issues and his choice of the working class, rather than the middle class, as his focus.

McKay resided in England from 1919 through 1921, then returned to the United States. While in England, he was employed by the British socialist journal, Workers’ Dreadnought, and published a book of verse, Spring in New Hampshire, which was released in an expanded version in the United States in 1922. The same year, Harlem Shadows, perhaps his most significant poetry collection, appeared. McKay then began a twelve-year sojourn through Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa, a period marked by poverty and illness. While in the Soviet Union he compiled his journalistic essays into a book, The Negroes in America, which was not published in the United States until 1979. For a time he was buoyed by the success of his first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which was critically acclaimed but engendered controversy for its frank portrayal of the underside of Harlem life.

His next novel, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), followed the exploits of an expatriate African American musician in Marseilles, a locale McKay knew well. This novel and McKay’s presence in France influenced Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and other pioneers of the Negritude literary movement that took hold in French West Africa and the West Indies. Banjo did not sell well. Neither did Gingertown (1932), a short story collection, or Banana Bottom (1933). Often identified as McKay’s finest novel, Banana Bottom tells the story of Bita Plant, who returns to Jamaica after being educated in England and struggles to form an identity that reconciles the aesthetic values imposed upon her with her appreciation for her native roots.

McKay had moved to Morocco in 1930, but his financial situation forced him to return to the United States in 1934. He gained acceptance to the Federal Writers Project in 1936 and completed his autobiography, A Long Way from Home, in 1937. Although no longer sympathetic toward communism, he remained a socialist, publishing essays and articles in The Nation, the New Leader, and the New York Amsterdam News. In 1940 McKay produced a nonfiction work, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which gained little attention but has remained an important historical source. Never able to regain the stature he had achieved during the 1920s, McKay blamed his chronic financial difficulties on his race and his failure to obtain academic credentials and associations.

McKay never returned to the homeland he left in 1912. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940. High blood pressure and heart disease led to a steady physical decline, and in a move that surprised his friends, McKay abandoned his lifelong agnosticism and embraced Catholicism. In 1944 he left New York for Chicago, where he worked for the Catholic Youth Organization. He eventually succumbed to congestive heart failure in Chicago. His second autobiography, My Green Hills of Jamaica, was published posthumously in 1979.

Assessments of McKay’s lasting influence vary. To McKay’s contemporaries, such as JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, “Claude McKay’s poetry was one of the great forces in bringing about what is often called the ‘Negro Literary Renaissance.’” While his novels and autobiographies have found an increasing audience in recent years, modern critics appear to concur with Arthur P. Davis that McKay’s greatest literary contributions are found among his early sonnets and lyrics. McKay ended A Long Way from Home with this assessment of himself: “I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience.”

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McCOY, BILL.

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