African American Lives

PENNINGTON, JAMES WILLIAM CHARLES

(15 Jan. 1809–20 Oct. 1870), escaped slave, minister, and abolitionist, was born James Pembroke in Hagerstown, Maryland, to Bazil, a handyman and shepherd, and a woman named Nelly. Both his parents were slaves. James Tighlman, their owner, gave James’s mother and an older brother to his son, Frisbie Tighlman. The family was reunited when Frisbie Tighlman purchased Bazil, though they were relocated to an area some two hundred miles from Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Even though the family had been reunited, as slaves James’s parents were still unable to provide the nurturing attention he required. On one occasion Tighlman beat Bazil in James’s presence, and his remarks to Bazil had a lasting impact on the young boy: “I will make you know that I am master of your tongue as well as of your time” (Pennington, 7). While he did not immediately escape, James was committed to striking for freedom; in his mind he was never a “slave” after this incident. Although he, too, would experience the “tyranny and abuse of the overseers” (3), he managed to equip himself with skills requisite for life as a free man. At age eleven, he became a trained stonemason, and he worked as a certified blacksmith for more than nine years. But the expert blacksmith yearned for freedom and would become a fugitive. “The hour was come,” and he determined that he had to act “or remain a slave for ever” (7).

One afternoon in November 1827, he struck for freedom and, several days later, arrived in Pennsylvania, where the first person he met was a Quaker woman. He lived and worked for a while with a Quaker couple, Phebe and William Wright, who taught him to read. To protect himself, he adopted the name James William Charles Pennington. (Pennington was a common name among Pennsylvania Quakers.) After living with and working for Quaker families, he settled in Newtown, Long Island, New York. He became a Christian, and this intensified his concern for his parents and eleven siblings, as well as others in slavery.

Pennington decided to fight against the institution of slavery from northern soil. With the guidance of the Presbyterian family with whom he resided in Newtown, Pennington began formal preparation for the ministry in 1835. He moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he taught in a black school, and assisted the pastor of Temple Street Congregational Church. Although Pennington could not formally register at Yale Divinity School, he was allowed to sit in the hallway and listen to lectures. Three years later he returned to Newtown, was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, and served as pastor of the black Presbyterian Church from 1838 to 1840. During the next thirty-two years Pennington served seven churches in three denominations (Presbyterian, Congregational, and African Methodist Episcopal Zion) and five states.

On 16 July 1840 Pennington was called to serve at the Talcott Street (Fifth) Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut, and he came to play a role in the celebrated Amistad case, examining whether captured Africans who had rebelled and taken over the ship (the Amistad) they were being transported in were legally slaves. Most of the captives were from the Mende region of West Africa, in present-day Nigeria, and in April 1840 Judge Andrew T. Judson ruled that their leader CINQUÉ and the others be freed, delivered to the president of the United States, and returned to Africa.

In July 1840 Pennington helped raise money for the captives, whose case had been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where former President John Quincy Adams argued the captives’ case. While the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that they be freed, it did not require that the president return them to Africa. Along with his wealthy friend, the New York merchant Lewis Tappan, Pennington raised enough funds for the return of the Amistad victims. In September 1841 Pennington organized and was elected president of the Union Missionary Society. Hosted by Pennington’s church, the society sent the first two missionaries from an African American mission society to the interior of Africa.

Pennington’s role in helping the Amistad captives and in sending African American missionaries to Africa enhanced his popularity in Connecticut. In 1843 he was selected to represent the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society at the World Anti-Slavery Society Convention in London. He also represented the American Peace Society and his own Union Missionary Society at the World Peace Convention meeting in London that year. He then returned to Hartford, where he was twice elected president of the Hartford Central Association of Congregational ministers.

Still legally a fugitive slave, Pennington tried to secure his freedom. As of 1844 he had not even told his wife, Harriet, that he had escaped from slavery. (It is not known when Pennington married Harriet—who died in 1846—and there is no record that the couple had children.) He did not reveal his status to his congregation until 1846, when he traveled to Jamaica, in part to raise funds to purchase his freedom. After his return later that year, Pennington played a major role in the creation of the American Missionary Association, which absorbed his Union Missionary Society. Pennington was appointed to the executive committee of the new organization.

Following the death of Theodore S. Wright, in 1847, Pennington was invited to become the new pastor of Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City, the most influential African American Presbyterian congregation in the nation. After concluding a promised return to Talcott and becoming vice president of the National Negro Convention Movement, a northern association of blacks committed to improving the condition of freemen and working for the abolition of slavery in the South, Pennington began his duties as pastor at Shiloh. While settling in as the pastor of his new congregation, Pennington married Almira Way at the home of a Mr. Goodwin, the former editor of the Hartford Courant newspaper. It is not known whether the couple had children.

In 1849 Pennington made a second European tour to promote the cause of peace and abolitionism. On this visit the University of Heidelberg in Germany awarded him the doctor of divinity degree. He was the first African American to receive this honor. Conferred on 19 December 1849, it acknowledged Pennington foremost as a leader of his people as well as one who had published distinguished literary works while still legally a slave. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 prompted Pennington to more assiduously pursue the legal purchase of his freedom. From Scotland, where he was lecturing as a guest of the Glasgow Female Anti-Slavery Society, Pennington inquired whether he should return. His friend John Hooker of Farm-ington, Connecticut, advised Pennington to stay abroad while Hooker negotiated his purchase. On 3 June 1851 Hooker paid the Tighlman estate $150, making Pennington the property of Hooker. After contemplating the irony of “owning” a man with a doctor of divinity degree, Hooker executed the documents making Pennington a free man. James Pembroke had been transformed into James Pennington.

Now free, Pennington later purchased the freedom of his brother Stephen. Both of his parents had died in slavery, as had a sister. Several of his other siblings tasted freedom, though some were sold south. Legally free and armed with a doctorate in divinity, Pennington became even bolder. In June 1855 he defied the New York City law that prohibited African Americans from riding on the inside of a horse-drawn car. He was arrested and charged with violent resistance, but the New York Supreme Court, on appeal, ruled in Pennington’s favor; segregation was subsequently made illegal on public transportation in New York City, one hundred years before ROSA PARKS initiated the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama.

In addition to his activism, Pennington also contributed to African American scholarship, publishing twenty-four articles and sermons, including An Address Delivered at Newark, New Jersey, at the First Anniversary of West Indian Emancipation, August 1, 1839, and “The Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races of the World” in the Anglo-African Magazine (1859). He also published two books: his autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1850), and A Textbook History of the Origin and History of the Colored People (1841), which was one of the earliest works of African American historical scholarship.

Yet despite his many achievements, Pennington appears to have succumbed to alcohol addiction in the 1850s, perhaps brought on by the pressures of service. After 1865 he was no longer the spiritual leader of Shiloh. While he recovered from alcoholism, Pennington wrote several significant articles on the future of the black race, though he would never recapture the fame he had once known. He served as an ordained AME African Methodist Episcopal minister in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1865 and was pastor of a Congregational church in Portland, Maine, in 1868 before going to a Presbyterian church in Jacksonville, Florida, where he died in October 1870.

PERRY, LINCOLN.

See Fetchit, Stepin.

PETRY, ANN

(12 Oct. 1908–30 Apr. 1997), author and pharmacist, was born Ann Lane in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. The youngest daughter of Peter C. Lane, a pharmacist and proprietor of two drugstores, and Bertha James, a licensed podiatrist, Ann Lane grew up in a financially secure and intellectually stimulating family environment. After graduating from Old Saybrook High School, she studied at the Connecticut College of Pharmacy (now the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy) and earned her Graduate in Pharmacy degree in 1931. For the next seven years Lane worked as a pharmacist in the family business. Her family’s long history of personal and professional success served as the foundation for her own professional accomplishments. She cherished the family’s stories of triumph over racism and credited them with having “a message that would help a young black child survive, help convince a young black child that black is truly beautiful” (Petry, 257). These family narratives and their message of empowerment enabled her to persevere in the sometimes-hostile racial environment of New England.

After Lane’s marriage on 22 February 1938 to George D. Petry, of New Iberia, Louisiana, she and her husband relocated to Harlem, New York City. Harlem provided her with the environment in which to expand her creative talents and source material for her future fiction. From 1938 to 1944 Petry explored a variety of creative outlets: performing as Tillie Petunia in Abram Hill’s play On Striver’s Row at the American Negro Theater, taking painting and drawing classes at the Harlem Art Center, and studying creative writing at Columbia University. She also served as an editor and reporter for People’s Voice from 1941 to 1944. Equally important for her creative work, however, was the time Petry spent organizing the women in her community for Negro Women Inc., a consumer advocacy group, and running an after-school program at a grade school in Harlem. These experiences gave Petry insight into the harsh realities facing working-class black Americans and offered her a distinct contrast to the financially comfortable world in which she was raised. Witnessing the struggles of impoverished black families in Harlem and observing the social codes of more affluent communities, such as Old Saybrook, enriched Petry’s fiction, which explores the ways in which social expectations, along with the forces of racism and sexism, can constrain individual lives.

Ann Petry’s novel The Street, about a single mother in Harlem and her efforts to protect her child from the street’s dangers, sold 1.5 million copies in 1946. Schomburg Center

Petry published her first short story shortly after moving to Harlem. “Marie of the Cabin Club” (1939) appeared in an issue of Afro-American, a Baltimore newspaper, under the pseudonym Arnold Petri. In 1943, under her own name, Petry published “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” in the Crisis. An important turning point in her career came when this publication caught the attention of an editor who suggested that she apply for the Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. She submitted the first chapters and an outline of what would become her most famous novel, The Street, and won the fellowship in 1945. Funded by a $2,400 stipend, Petry finished the novel in 1946.

The Street garnered immediate critical and popular acclaim. Twenty thousand copies sold in advance of its release, and the novel’s sales surpassed 1.5 million copies, making it the first novel by a black woman to sell over a million copies. The story of Lutie Johnson, an ambitious black woman trying to work toward financial security, The Street uses the bleak landscape of an impoverished Harlem street to personify the relentlessness of racism. In its use of some elements of urban realism, The Street evokes comparison to RICHARD WRIGHT’S Native Son, in which Bigger Thomas’s social position—poor, black, and uneducated—inevitably leads to violence and tragedy. But Petry’s novel offers what some critics consider a more nuanced examination of the way in which racism shapes black experience. Lutie Johnson not only contends with racism but also confronts sexism from white and black communities alike on an almost daily basis. Furthermore, unlike Bigger Thomas, she is a reasonably well-educated and ambitious woman, driven by the mythology of the American Dream and convinced that her hard work will ultimately be rewarded. Lutie’s tragic failure to achieve her goals indicts not only the racism of American society but also the deceptive mythologies that encourage people like Lutie to believe that they have an equal chance at success.

The Street’s enthusiastic reception made Petry a public figure. Seeking privacy, she and her husband returned in 1947 to Old Saybrook, where they lived for the rest of Petry’s life. In the same year, Petry published Country Place, a novel that also explores the role of environment and community on individuals, though it does not deal explicitly with black characters or experiences. In 1949 Petry gave birth to the couple’s only child, Elisabeth Ann Petry, and published the first of what would be several books for children and young adults, The Drugstore Cat.

While it is not as well known as The Street, The Narrows, published in 1953, further complicates the issues Petry raises in her first novel. Set in a fictional New England city, The Narrows explores the repercussions of a love affair between a black man and a white woman. The nearly inevitable downfall of Link Williams in The Narrows revisits Lutie Johnson’s situation in The Street. Both characters are ambitious and intelligent, yet constrained by the mechanisms of racism, which prevent them from ever really succeeding. The Narrows offers a pointed commentary on social behavior, not only interracial romance but also excessive class consciousness. Within this frame, Petry suggests that social codes and behavioral expectations are damaging to black and white communities alike.

Petry’s themes of community relationships and the complexity of black experience in the United States continued in her later publications, including the nonfiction children’s books Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955), Tituba of Salem Village (1964), and Legends of the Saints (1970). In 1971 Petry published Miss Muriel and Other Stories. A compilation of stories from the 1940s through 1971, the collection draws on Petry’s experiences in Harlem as well as in small-town America. In addition to writing, Petry undertook several visiting lectureships, earned a National Endowment of the Arts creative writing grant in 1978, and was awarded several honorary degrees, including an honorary DLitt from Suffolk University in 1983 and honorary degrees from the University of Connecticut in 1988 and Mount Holyoke College in 1989. Petry died in Old Saybrook on 30 April 1997.

As the first best-selling African American woman writer, Ann Petry holds a firm place in American literary history as both a groundbreaker and a literary predecessor to some of the twentieth century’s most significant black women novelists. The works of Gloria Naylor, ALICE WALKER, and TONI MORRISON continue to explore the complicated interplay of race, gender, and socioeconomic status that Petry illuminated so well in her fiction.

PICKENS, WILLIAM

(15 Jan. 1881–6 Apr. 1954), was born in Anderson County, South Carolina, the sixth of ten children of Jacob and Fannie Pickens, both of whom were former slaves. The family of sharecroppers moved frequently—some twenty times by Pickens’s estimate—and relocated to Arkansas in 1887. William was raised in a household in which learning was revered, and he became valedictorian of his graduating class at Union High School in Litde Rock in 1899. Following a summer working with his father in railroad construction in Arkansas, Pickens entered Talledega College, a missionary institution in Alabama, where he majored in foreign languages, and earned a BA in 1902. Pickens earned a second bachelor’s degree, in linguistics, from Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, where he received the Phi Beta Kappa key in 1904. He later earned an MA degree from Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee; a doctorate in Literature from Selma University (Alabama); and an LLD from Wiley University (now Wiley College) in Marshall, Texas.

In 1905 Pickens married Minnie Cooper McAlpine, a graduate of Touga-loo College, with whom he had three children: William, Harriet, and Ruby. Pickens possessed diverse talents and authored two autobiographies, Heir of Slaves (1911) and Bursting Bonds (1923), as well as a short-story collection, Vengeance of the Gods (1922), and a collection of essays, The New Negro (1916). Between 1904 and 1914 Pickens taught foreign languages at his alma mater, Talladega, before moving to Wiley University to head their Greek and sociology departments. The following year he accepted a position as dean of Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore, Maryland. Although he initially supported BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’s more pragmatic approach to race relations, Pickens evolved into a civil rights militant fairly early in his intellectual career. He supported W. E. B. DU BOIS’s radical Niagara Movement and was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union. He was also ecumenical in his organization affiliations, working to some degree with the League for Industrial Democracy, the YMCA, and the Council for Pan-American Democracy. Given his broad education and training, Pickens was something of a maverick. He proposed to the businesswoman MADAME C. J. WALKER that he accompany her on a trip around the world and write a book about her travels, and in the early 1920s he flirted briefly with MARCUS GARVEY’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) while he was still an NAACP employee. Pickens was later a fierce critic of the UNIA, however, and even demanded that Garvey be imprisoned.

In 1919 Pickens left Morgan College—where he had risen to the vice presidency—to take a position as assistant to JAMES WELDON JOHNSON of the NAACP. As a founding member of the association, Pickens was well connected with its leadership and had also tirelessly recruited members at Talladega, Wiley, and Morgan College. In 1915 he had accompanied the NAACP chairman Joel E. Spingarn on a dangerous fact-finding mission to Oklahoma, to gather information for a test case challenging Jim Crow on the railroads. In 1920 Johnson was appointed the first black executive secretary of the NAACP, and Pickens was subsequently appointed to the post of field secretary.

During his tenure as field secretary, Pickens shepherded the NAACP through a period of fluctuating membership during the 1920s and the Depression, and he helped lay the groundwork for the association’s massive increase in resources and membership in the 1940s. His relations within the NAACP, however, were often rocky, especially with WALTER WHITE, who succeeded Johnson as executive secretary in 1930. Mary White Ovington, chair of the NAACP board, also reprimanded Pickens in 1931 for praising the Communist Party’s work in support of the SCOTTSBORO BOYS in the midst of open hostility between the Communists and the NAACP. Pickens subsequently adopted the NAACP party line and even traveled to Scottsboro, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the nine imprisoned youths to abandon their Communist backers. Pickens’s decision to accept a position with the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 1942 probably was motivated, at least in part, by his deteriorating relations with White. He was succeeded as field secretary by the radical grassroots organizer ELLA BAKER.

In 1942 Pickens was cited as a subversive by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and its conservative chairman, Martin Dies. In a gesture that eerily presaged Senator Joseph McCarthy’s allegations in Wheeling, West Virginia, almost a decade later, Dies, a conservative Texas Democrat, presented the House of Representatives with a list of thirty-nine “subversives” who should be removed from the federal payroll. Of those people, William Pickens was the only one in federal employ at the time. As a director of the War Savings Staff, Pickens was charged with increasing the number of African Americans purchasing war bonds. In short order, a measure was introduced that held up the federal budget until such time as Pickens’s allegiances could be ascertained. Wary of provoking conservative southern Democrats who had perpetually threatened to hobble Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, Pickens gave a politic response to the charges. “I do not know Mr. Dies,” he remarked, “but feel sure from the position he holds that he would not want to speak anything but the truth. Therefore, I conclude that somebody has misled Mr. Dies” (press release, 18 Sept. 1942, Associated Negro Press Papers, Library of Congress).

With the budget hanging in the balance, some members of the HUAC were surprised at Pickens’s appearance—not knowing that he was African American. Pickens’s appearance thus gave the arch-segregationist Dies an opportunity to link subversion and civil rights. Northern Democrats, mindful of the Great Migration and the swelling numbers of black Democratic voters, however, were less than thrilled with the prospect of questioning Pickens. William Dawson, the black freshman congressman from Chicago, devoted his maiden speech to Pickens’s defense, and Walter White sent a series of letters to members of the House of Representatives protesting the charges against Pickens. Those charges were ultimately dismissed, and Pickens remained in his position at the Treasury Department.

After World War II, Pickens attempted to return to the NAACP but was blocked by Walter White. Shut out of the organization where he had worked for twenty-three years, Pickens remained with the Treasury Department until 1951, when he retired. Pickens’s political radicalism diminished somewhat during this period, and strains of his youthful admiration for Booker T. Washington might be seen in his Treasury Department campaigns to educate blacks on economic matters, savings bonds, and thrift. Pickens traveled extensively after his retirement and died during a cruise aboard the SS Mauritania, on 6 April 1954, just one month before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

Pickens played a significant role in the development of the NAACP. Between 1920 and 1940 he recruited more members and organized more branches than any other officer in the association, and his efforts helped transform the organization from a small civil rights lobby to a mass organization with nationwide influence.

PICKETT, BILL

(5 Dec. 1871–2 Apr. 1932), African American rodeo entertainer, was born in Jenks-Branch community in Travis County, Texas, the son of Thomas Jefferson Pickett, a former slave, and Mary “Janie” Virginia Elizabeth Gilbert. The second of thirteen children, Pickett reportedly grew to be five feet, seven inches tall and approximately 145 pounds. Little is known about his early childhood, except that he attended school through the fifth grade. Afterward he took up ranch work and soon developed the skills, such as roping and riding, that would serve him well in rodeo. On 2 December 1890 Pickett married Maggie Turner of Palestine, Texas, the daughter of a white southern plantation owner and his former slave. They had nine children. The Picketts joined the Taylor Baptist Church, where Pickett served as deacon for many years.

Sometime prior to 1900 Pickett and his brothers organized the Pickett Brothers Bronco Busters and Rough Riders Association, operating out of Taylor, Texas. Benny was president, Bill was vice-president, Jessie was treasurer, Berry was secretary, and Charles was general manager. They proudly advertised in their handbills: “We ride and break all wild horses with much care. Good treatment to all animals. Perfect satisfaction guaranteed. Catching and taming wild cattle a specialty.” The association operated for several years and boasted of an excellent reputation among the residents of Taylor.

By this time Pickett had originated the tactic of “bulldogging,” for which he would become internationally known. A skilled steer wrestling maneuver, bulldogging involved the performer’s riding alongside a steer, throwing himself on its back, gripping the horns, and twisting the animal’s neck and head upward, causing the beast to fall over. The rider and the steer would skid to a stop in a cloud of dust. Pickett would then sink his teeth into the steer’s upper lip or nose and release both his hands. It is believed that Pickett developed his technique as a result of having witnessed a cattle dog holding a “cow critter” with its teeth. According to author Col. Bailey C. Hanes, Pickett perfected the maneuver when working with cattle in the brush country of Texas, where direct interaction with the steer was required to bring the animal under control. Pickett soon began displaying his bulldogging technique before audiences, first at stockyards and later at county fairs. These audiences would watch in amazement as Pickett restrained a steer only by his vise-like teething grip on the animal’s lip or nose. This unique approach to steer wrestling immortalized Pickett, as it became the first original rodeo technique that can be traced to one individual.

In 1904 Pickett became an instant celebrity at the Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming. The Wyoming Tribune reported in part,

The event par excellence of the celebration this year is the great feat of Will Pickett, a Negro who hails from Taylor, Texas . . . . Pickett is not a big man but is built like an athlete and his feat will undoubtedly be one of the great features of this year’s celebration. It is difficult to conceive how a man could throw a powerful steer with his hands unaided by rope or a contrivance of some kind and yet Pickett accomplishes this seemingly impossible task with only his teeth.

New York’s Harper’s Weekly had sent John Dicks Howe, a special reporter, to cover the event. He reported,

20,000 people watched with wonder and admiration a mere man, unarmed and without a device or appliance of any kind, attack a fiery, wild-eyed and powerful steer and throw it by his teeth. . . . The crowd was speechless with horror, many believing that the Negro had been crushed . . . Pickett arose uninjured, bowing and smiling. So great was the applause that the darkey again attacked the steer . . . and again threw it after a desperate struggle.

On 10 August 1905 Pickett was honored with national attention in Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly tabloid as “a man who outdoes the fiercest dog in utter brutality.” Capitalizing on his popularity, he signed a contract in 1907 with the Miller Brothers, owner of the famous 101 Ranch Wild West Show based along Oklahoma’s Cherokee Strip. Becoming the show’s headline performer, Pickett made appearances across the United States as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and England. Colonel Zack T. Miller described Pickett as “the greatest sweat and dirt cowhand that ever lived—bar none.” His style of bulldogging gave him many nicknames, including the “Dusky Demon,” “The Modern Ursus,” and the “Wonderful Colored Cowboy.” The wiry performer was also acclaimed for his bronco riding and steer and calf roping talents. Around 1914 he starred in a silent film called The Bull-Dogger, produced by the Norman Film Manufacturing Company. The film advertised the techniques of his steer-wrestling artistry, but no copies of the film have ever been located.

Pickett retired as a rodeo performer in 1916 and worked on the 101 Ranch until 1920, before settling on a 160-acre homestead near Chandler, Oklahoma. After Maggie’s death in 1929, he returned to the 101 Ranch as a ranch hand to overcome personal financial difficulties brought on by the Great Depression. While attempting to cut horses out of a herd, Pickett was roping a chestnut stallion on foot when the horse suddenly turned on him and fractured his skull. Never regaining consciousness, Pickett died eleven days later at a hospital in Ponca City, Oklahoma. The Cherokee Strip Cowpunchers Association erected a marker in honor of him, with a hand inscription of “Bill Pickett, C.S.C.P.A.,” on the 101 Ranch that he made famous, near the monument to Ponca Indian Chief White Eagle.

PINCHBACK, P. B. S.

(10 May 1837-21 Dec. 1921), politician, editor, and entrepreneur, was born Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback in Macon, Georgia, the son of William Pinchback, a Mississippi plantation owner, and Eliza Stewart, a former slave of mixed ancestry. Because William Pinchback had taken Eliza to Philadelphia to obtain her emancipation, Pinckney was free upon birth.

In 1847 young Pinckney and his older brother Napoleon Pinchback were sent to Cincinnati to be educated. When his father died the following year, Eliza and the rest of the children fled Georgia to escape the possibility of re-enslavement and joined Pinckney and Napoleon in Cincinnati. Because the family was denied any share of William Pinchback’s estate, they soon found themselves in financial straits. To help support his family, Pinckney worked as a cabin boy on canal boats in Ohio and later as a steward on several Mississippi riverboats. In 1860 he married Nina Emily Hawthorne. Four of their six children survived infancy.

When the Civil War started, Pinchback made his way back to the South. In May 1862 he jumped ship at Yazoo City, Mississippi, and managed to reach New Orleans, already in Union hands. There he enlisted in a white Union regiment as a private, but within a few months he was assigned to recruit black soldiers. He rose in rank to captain in the Second Louisiana Native Guards, later renamed the Seventy-fourth U.S. Colored Infantry. In September 1863 Pinchback resigned from the army, citing discriminatory treatment by white officers and voicing opposition to the army’s practice of better compensating white soldiers. He reentered the army as a recruiter when General Nathaniel P. Banks, commander of the New Orleans Union forces, decided to expand the participation of African American troops in the defense of New Orleans. When Banks refused Pinchback a commission as captain, he resigned again.

Pinchback’s advocacy of African American rights started during the Civil War. As early as November 1863 he spoke in New Orleans at a rally for political rights, asserting that if black Americans were not allowed to vote, they should not be drafted into the Union army. He then spent two years in Alabama speaking out publicly in support of African American education. On his return to Louisiana in 1867, he became involved in state politics. He was elected to the constitutional convention of 1868, where he worked to create a state-supported public school system and wrote the provision guaranteeing racial equality in public transportation and licensed businesses.

In 1868 Pinchback was elected to the Louisiana State Senate and, as a delegate, attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago. In 1871 he became president pro tempore of the senate and, because of this position, advanced to lieutenant governor upon the death of the incumbent Oscar J. Dunn late that year. Pinchback clashed politically with Governor Henry C. Warmoth, a carpetbagger who had previously vetoed a civil rights bill that Pinchback sponsored. When Warmoth was impeached in 1872, Pinchback served briefly as acting governor, from 9 December 1872 to 13 January 1873. He was the only African American to hold a governorship during Reconstruction.

Although Pinchback, a Republican, was an important figure in state politics, he was unable to hold any other major political office. Earlier in 1872 radicals in the state’s Republican Party had sought to nominate him for governor, but he declined the nomination in the interest of preserving party unity. As a reward for his withdrawal, he was nominated for the position of U.S. congressman at large, and he apparently won the election. While the outcome was being contested by the Democrats, during Pinchback’s tenure as acting governor, he was also elected by the state legislature to the U.S. Senate, again drawing protests from the Democrats. Eventually their allegations that Pinchback was guilty of bribery and election irregularities led to his being denied both the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and the one in the Senate. This was not Pinchback’s first brush with corruption. In 1870, when he was serving as a state senator, he acted on inside information to purchase a tract of land that he quickly sold to the city of New Orleans for a tidy profit.

In 1877 Pinchback left the Republican Party to support the newly elected Democratic governor, F. T. Nicholls. In return, Governor Nicholls appointed him to the state board of education. In 1879 Pinchback served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention, where he drafted a plan to create Southern University. He was a trustee of that school in the 1880s.

Pinchback was active in the New Orleans business community while he was engaged in politics. He was a co-owner of the city’s Louisianian newspaper, which not only gave Pinchback a forum to articulate his political views but also helped shape the political and social opinions of the local African American community. In addition, he operated a brokerage and commission house and from 1882 to 1886 was surveyor of customs for the port of New Orleans.

In 1887 Pinchback entered Straight University Law School and passed the state bar exam. After working as a U.S. marshal in New York City in the early to mid-1890s, he practiced law in Washington, D.C., and became part of the city’s black elite, entertaining often. He continued to profit from worthwhile business ventures as part owner of a cotton mill and sole owner of the Mississippi River Packet Company. His political activities shifted to support of BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, after whose death, however, Pinchback’s clout was sapped. Pinchback died in Washington, D.C.

PIPPIN, HORACE

(22 Feb. 1888–6 July 1946), painter, was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Horace Pippin. On a biographical questionnaire Pippin listed his mother as Harriet Johnson Pippin, but Harriet may actually have been his grandmother; she was the mother of Christine, a domestic servant, who may have been Pippin’s birth mother. When Pippin was quite young the family moved to Goshen, New York, so that his mother could find work, and it was there that Pippin attended a one-room school through the eighth grade. He showed an ability for and love of drawing while in school, but because he had to help support his family, he began a series of menial jobs at the age of fourteen. In 1905 he took a job as a porter in a hotel, and he worked there until his mother’s death in 1911. He then moved to New Jersey, where he worked at a number of manual labor jobs in industry until April 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany. Pippin enlisted in the army in July 1917 and was trained at Camp Dix, New Jersey, achieving the rank of corporal before leaving basic training.

Pippin continued to sketch, but soon he was sent abroad to France, where he became a part of the famous 369th Infantry, an all-volunteer black regiment (except for the white officers) whose bravery was so extraordinary that the entire regiment was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government. In the fall of 1918 Pippin was shot in the right shoulder, and the bullet destroyed muscle, nerves, and bone. His arm hung uselessly from his side, and after five months in army hospitals he was discharged, returning emotionally and physically exhausted to his mother’s relatives in West Chester.

This self-portrait of artist Horace Pippin painted in 1944 is oil on canvas adhered to cardboard. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pippin was unable to make a living through physical labor and attempted to survive simply on his small soldier’s pension. He met Jennie Ora Featherstone, a widow with a young son, and they were married in 1920. She took in laundry to help support him, but Pippin was psychologically devastated by his disability, and his memories of the war lingered. He found some relief in local American Legion meetings, and ultimately he began to make art again. He began with some decorated cigar boxes and then turned to burning his drawings into wooden panels. He strengthened his arm enough to draw and paint, and he began to create powerful images based on his memories of the war. Making art helped to heal him and gave him a sense of purpose. He soon expanded to oil paints, but because of his injury he rarely painted anything larger than 25 × 30 inches.

Pippin was an unschooled artist, called a “primitive” in the 1930s. However, he had a tremendous ability to relay a narrative using simple, flat forms that moved rhythmically and dramatically across the composition. His works are quite sophisticated in their constructions, even though Pippin stated quite emphatically that he simply painted what he saw. In spite of his talent, viewers of that time often connected his purity of vision with a certain naiveté and believed him to be only an instinctual artist, even linking that quality to the primitivism of Africa.

One of the most powerful images among his early works is The End of the War: Starting Home (1931), which depicts the grim reality of trench warfare. During this time painting was still an extremely slow process for Pippin, and his production was limited. As time went on he became more prolific, moving to images based on calendar art and then to portraits. He also turned to religious themes, images of African American life, interiors, and still life paintings.

In 1937 Pippin began to sell his paintings in local shops, and it was quite possibly in this way that the famous American illustrator N. C. Wyeth and the art critic Christian Brinton saw one of his important works, Cabin in the Cotton I (1935). Pippin’s paintings may also have come to Brinton’s attention through friends of the artist who alerted this connoisseur of new talent. Cabin in the Cotton I was the first of a series of paintings based on what the artist imagined was the African American’s life in the South, and it was the first work to deal with the life of his people, a subject that would soon make up a large part of Pippin’s oeuvre.

Brinton soon championed his new discovery and decided to hang two works by Pippin in the Chester County Art Association’s Sixth Annual Exhibition, which attracted 2,550 people. Pippin’s Cabin in the Cotton I captivated the public, encouraging Brinton to give his full support to his new “discovery,” thus helping connect Pippin to several important figures in the New York art scene, including Holger Cahill, then acting director of the Museum of Modern Art and a tremendous supporter of American folk art. Cahill included Pippin’s work in an important exhibition, Masters of Popular Painting—Artists of the People, at the Museum of Modern Art; Pippin was the only black artist to be included.

During this period ten of Pippin’s paintings and seven burnt-wood panels were also exhibited at the West Chester Community Center, a focus of black cultural activity. Pippin’s work also came to the attention of a Philadelphia dealer, Robert Carlen, and it was while the work was at Carlen’s gallery that Dr. Albert C. Barnes saw it. Barnes, an important collector, was very early interested in art by African Americans, and he immediately purchased several works, as did his assistant, Violet de Mazia. Barnes wrote a new essay for Pippin’s show with Carlen in which he commented on the artist’s ability to tell a story simply and directly with his own language. Both Brinton and Barnes tried on several occasions to “educate” Pippin about modern art and painting, but, fortunately, Pippin ignored them both and continued on his own individual path. However, Carlen and Pippin formed an enduring business relationship. Pippin later exhibited with the New York gallery of Edith Halpert, while still exhibiting with Carlen in Philadelphia.

Pippin’s African American heritage continued to offer subjects for the artist, ranging from images of Abraham Lincoln to portraits of the famous soprano MARIAN ANDERSON to scenes of everyday life. He created a series on the abolitionist John Brown, in addition to painting a number of images with religious themes, which reflected both his own devout nature and the importance of the church in black American life. Pippin was opposed to war and depicted the “peaceable kingdom” in a number of works titled Holy Mountain. He loved nature and continued to paint floral images as well as interiors remembered from his childhood. His originality attracted a wide audience, and his work became increasingly sophisticated over time, drawing admiration from a number of critics of modern art.

Unfortunately his last years, while financially secure, were personally unhappy. His stepson left to join the armed forces, and his wife was institutionalized because she suffered from emotional problems. Having grown more and more lonely, Pippin died in West Chester from a stroke in his sleep; his wife, who was confined to a state mental hospital, died two weeks later, never learning of her husband’s death.

PLEASANT, MARY ELLEN

(1812?–1904), legendary woman of influence and political power in Gold Rush and Gilded Age San Francisco, was born, according to some sources, a slave in Georgia; other sources claim that her mother was a Louisiana slave and her father Asian or Native American. Many sources agree that she lived in Boston, as a free woman, the wife of James W. Smith, a Cuban abolitionist. When he died in 1844 he left her his estate, valued at approximately forty-five thousand dollars.

Mary Ellen next married a man whose last name was Pleasant or Pleasants and made her way to California, arriving in San Francisco in 1849. Her husband’s whereabouts after this time have never been made clear. She started life in San Francisco as a cook for wealthy clients, then opened her own boardinghouse. Her guests were said to be men of influence, and it was rumored that her places were also houses of prostitution.

Many sources state that Pleasant was a very active abolitionist, helping escaped slaves find jobs around the city. When she heard of John Brown’s desire to incite slave rebellions, she supposedly met with him in Canada in 1858, handing him thirty thousand dollars of her own money to further his cause. When Brown’s attempt to seize the arsenal at Harpers Ferry failed, authorities began searching for her, though she was able to disguise herself and find her way back to San Francisco under the name of Mrs. Ellen Smith. When Brown was captured, he supposedly had a note in his pocket that said, “The ax is laid at the root of the tree. When the first blow is struck, there will be more money to help.” It was signed with the initials W. E. P., though some conjecture that Pleasant signed the note and deliberately made her “M” look like a “W.”

Mary Ellen Pleasant. William Loren Katz Collection

Back in San Francisco, Pleasant fought racism by suing a streetcar company for not allowing her to ride. She sued twice, once in 1866 and again in 1868. She finally received damages in the latter suit, but she had to have a white man witness the streetcar conductor refusing her a seat in order to win her case. During the 1860s she supposedly found wives for wealthy men as well as homes for their illegitimate children. She placed former slaves as servants in homes all over the city, creating a communication network for the receipt of gossip and information, in the much the same way that her contemporary, the voodoo priestess MARIE LAVEAUX, built a power base in New Orleans.

Pleasant is best known for being the housekeeper of banker Thomas Bell, who married Teresa Percy, one of Pleasant’s protégés. By this time Pleasant was known to white San Franciscans as “Mammy,” and was said to have some sort of power over the Bells. It was even rumored that voodoo rituals were held in the Bell home on Octavia Street, and the mansion soon became known as the “House of Mystery.” Pleasant was considered a woman of mystery herself, and was described in newspaper articles and in the memoirs of native San Franciscans as “strange” “mesmeric” and “picturesque.”

In 1883 and 1884 Pleasant’s name was again in local newspapers because of her involvement in the court case of Sarah Althea Hill v. William Sharon. Sharon, a millionaire, former Nevada senator, and owner of the opulent Palace Hotel, was being sued by Hill for support under the terms of a secret marriage contract. The contract later proved to be a forgery and supposedly had been arranged by Pleasant. Pleasant’s access to and seeming power over the rich men of San Francisco made this a believable story to most of the city’s citizens. During the trial, Hill claimed to be “controlled” by Pleasant, and Pleasant’s appearance in court always caused a stir, as recorded on 6 May 1884 in the San Francisco Call: “Mammy Pleasant, as the plaintiff calls her colored companion, shows herself in court only as a bird of passage, so to say. She bustles in, converses pleasantly with the young men attached to the defendant’s counsel . . . and like a wind from the south astray in northern climes departs and leaves but chill behind.”

One of the few established facts in the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant is that Thomas Bell died in 1892, after a fall from the second story landing of the House of Mystery. Many thought Pleasant had murdered him; if so, and if the murder was for gain, it was fruitless, for when his wife inherited Bell’s money, she eventually forced Pleasant out of the house and into a small flat in the city’s African American district. Living in poverty, Pleasant was taken in by the Sherwood family, to whom she had rendered assistance at one time. When Pleasant died in San Francisco, she was placed in the Sherwood family plot in the Tucolay Cemetery in Napa, California. At her request, her gravestone contained the words: “She Was a Friend of John Brown.” After her death the San Francisco Call (12 Jan. 1904) reported a mysterious matter that pertained to her association with John Brown: “Among her effects are letters and documents bearing upon the historical event in which she played an important part. The Brown family raided her flat when Mrs. Sherwood took her home. After her death, the Sherwoods found Mrs. Pleasant’s trunks in her Webster Street flat to be all but empty.”

Pleasant seems to have wielded power over influential people, yet because she was African American and female, her activities did not reflect her racial and social status, which possibly led to the rumors that she engaged in voodoo and even murder. She moved freely through the highest levels of society, yet she dressed always like a servant. She left nothing in writing, and surviving diaries and newspaper articles paint her as a mysterious and sinister figure. At the same time, some recalled Pleasant as “generous,” claiming that she used her own money to aid African American railroad strikers and assisted with other black causes. A few San Franciscans who were children during Pleasant’s lifetime remembered her as a churchgoing “lovely old lady” and said that they never believed the voodoo stories.

Historians have rediscovered Mary Ellen Pleasant, and perhaps new materials will come to light to reveal more about this woman whose presence haunts the annals of nineteenth-century San Francisco.

PLESSY, HOMER ADOLPH

(1858?–1925), plaintiff in the 1896 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, was born probably in New Orleans. Beyond the case, very little is known about Plessy. He was said to be thirty-four years old at the time of his arrest in 1892, which places his birth around 1858; yet his tombstone lists his age as sixty-three years old when he died in 1925, which places his birth around 1862. Described as a “Creole of Color,” Plessy was white in appearance but known to have had a black great-grandmother. He worked as a carpenter.

On 7 June 1892, on a sixty-mile train trip from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana, Plessy, defined as black by Louisiana law because of his mixed-race heritage, sat in the coach designated for white passengers. Railroad officials were aware that he had boarded the train in order to test the 1890 Louisiana statute requiring all railroad companies to provide and enforce separate-but-equal accommodations for black and white passengers. Thus, although Plessy had no discernible black features, he was asked to move to the car reserved for black passengers. When Plessy refused, he was arrested.

Through his attorneys, Albion Tourgée and S. F. Phillips, and with the aid of the Citizens Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law (Comité des Citoyens), an organization of blacks in New Orleans, Plessy filed a suit questioning the constitutionality of the state statute. After the suit was overruled by the lower court, Plessy petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for writs of prohibition and certiorari against the lower court judge, John Ferguson, prohibiting him from holding Plessy’s trial. The request was denied, but the court allowed his case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court on a writ of error.

The argument in Plessy v. Ferguson revolved around the constitutionality of the Louisiana statute and whether it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The question of equal accommodation was not discussed. As for race, Plessy did not admit to any court that he had African blood. Tourgée argued that because Plessy had no distinguishable black features he was entitled to all the privileges and immunities of white people. And, further, that the Louisiana law gave railroad officials the power to determine racial identity arbitrarily and assign coaches accordingly.

The Supreme Court rejected Tourgée’s arguments. With Justice Henry Billings Brown delivering the majority opinion, the Court ruled against Plessy. A compelling aspect of the decision was the opinion of Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter. Whereas Brown, employing nineteenth-century Darwinian reasoning, argued that blacks perceived “a badge of inferiority” because of the law enforcing segregation, Harlan argued that “our constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect to civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” However, the Court established the doctrine of separate but equal, which would not be revisited until well into the twentieth century when it was unanimously overturned in another landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Homer Plessy’s trial was held on 11 January 1897, four and a half years after his arrest. He pleaded guilty and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine. Plessy died in New Orleans.

POINDEXTER, HILDRUS AUGUSTUS

(10 May 1901–20 Apr. 1987), physician, microbiologist, and public health specialist, was born on a farm near Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Fred Poindexter and Luvenia Gilberta Clarke, tenant farmers. After attending the normal (teacher training) department of Swift Memorial College, a Presbyterian school for blacks in Rogersville, Tennessee (1916–1920), he entered Lincoln University (Pa.) and graduated with an AB cum laude in 1924. Also in 1924 he married Ruth Viola Grier, with whom he would have one child, a daughter. He attended Dartmouth Medical School for two years before earning an MD at Harvard University in 1929, an AM in Bacteriology at Columbia University in 1930, a PhD in Bacteriology and Parasitology at Columbia in 1932, and an MPH from Columbia in 1937.

Poindexter had hoped to proceed directly into public health fieldwork in 1929, following his graduation from Harvard, but his application for a laboratory post in a U.S. government laboratory in Manila was declined because of his race. Instead, he served an internship at the John A. Andrew Hospital at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, one of the few facilities open to African Americans seeking postgraduate training. In addition to his regular duties at the hospital, he began an epidemiological survey and implemented a health education program in Union Springs, Bullock County, a poor, predominantly black settlement. He left after ten weeks to accept a two-year fellowship offered by the General Education Board. This Rockefeller-funded fellowship, for graduate study at Columbia University, was part of a larger plan of the administration at Howard University to provide advanced training for several promising young black medical scientists, who, after earning their PhDs, would assume faculty positions at the medical school and help to upgrade the curriculum and research program.

Poindexter served at Howard University as assistant professor of bacteriology, preventive medicine, and public health (1931–1934), associate professor (1934–1936), and professor and department head (1936–1943). He also held posts at Freedmen’s Hospital as bacteriologist, immunologist, and assistant director of the allergy clinic. Despite the pressure of administrative, teaching, and clinical duties, he resumed the research he had begun as an intern in Alabama. For three years (1934–1937), he returned periodically to the South and worked, with Rockefeller support, as an epidemiologist for the states of Alabama and Mississippi. The information he had gathered earlier, along with new data, provided him with an opportunity to draw some general conclusions about the state of African American health in the rural South. Poindexter identified malnutrition, syphilis, insect-borne diseases such as malaria, and hookworm infestation as the four most important health problems confronting rural southern blacks. He distributed blame for these conditions almost equally among blacks and whites. Blacks, he felt, were overly swayed by an “illiterate religious leadership” and a “mania for cotton and corn crops,” while he believed whites tolerated an “apathetic county health service” and an “inequitable system of education.” His solution called for joint “practical education” efforts by state boards of health, black churches, and the schools.

In 1943 Poindexter was appointed a tropical medicine specialist in the U.S. Army, serving in the racially segregated hospital at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and later as a malariologist, parasitologist, and epidemiologist (with rank of major) at Guadalcanal and elsewhere in the Pacific. In recognition of his military service, he was awarded the Bronze Star and four combat stars. He retired from the army (with the rank of lieutenant-colonel) effective 26 March 1947.

Poindexter’s role during World War II laid the groundwork for nearly two decades of federal public health service. On 13 January 1947 he received a commission as senior surgeon with the United States Public Health Service (USPHS). His first post was with the USPHS Mission in Liberia (MIL) as chief of laboratory and medical research in West Africa. This post he held until his appointment a year later as medical director and chief of mission for MIL and as medical and health attaché to the American embassy in Monrovia. In 1953 he was transferred to Indochina and served (1955–1956) as chief of health and sanitation, U.S. Operation Missions (OM) in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Other OM appointments followed in Surinam (1956–1958), Iraq (1958–1959), Libya (1959–1961), and Sierra Leone (1962–1964). While in Iraq he also served as professor of preventive medicine at the Royal Baghdad Medical College. Poindexter was a consulting malariologist in Jamaica (1961–1962) and undertook several assignments under USPHS’s international section during the early 1960s. He retired from USPHS in 1965.

Poindexter’s work in Liberia included the training of indigenous health care personnel, conducting epidemiological surveys and other research projects, antibiotics assay and evaluation, implementing preventive programs, initiating immunization and epidemic control, improving nutrition, and orchestrating demonstration projects in health education. MIL was one of the programs that had emerged from a 1943 agreement between the U.S. and Liberian presidents for increased U.S. assistance in health, economics, agriculture, and other fields. Poindexter’s predecessor, John B. West, had begun the program in 1946. While their work focused on technical assistance, the doctors were interested in larger cultural factors as well. Poindexter, for example, wrote about the need not just to correct “social and economic handicaps” but also to develop—for the mutual benefit of Africans and non-Africans alike—“a clearer picture of the people as they live and breathe.” His approach to subsequent assignments in Indochina, South America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in Africa was similar.

Poindexter was a certified specialist of both the American Board of Preventive Medicine and Public Health and the American Board of Microbiology. In 1949 he became the first black member of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and subsequently served as a vice president of the Washington, D.C., chapter and as a trustee of the national body. He had been denied admission to the society in 1934 because of his race.

Following his retirement from USPHS, Poindexter returned briefly to Howard University as professor of community health practice. He remained active in teaching and research for the next fifteen years. He trained Peace Corps workers; served as a special consultant to the U.S. Department of State and the Agency for International Development, including a six-month tour of duty in 1965 with the relief and rehabilitation unit in Nigeria; and published several articles on public health issues, notably on malaria, sexually transmitted diseases, and medical problems of the elderly. He died at his home in Clinton, Maryland.

POITIER, SIDNEY

(20 Feb. 1927–), actor, director, and producer, was born the son of Reginald Poitier, a tomato farmer, and Evelyn in Miami, Florida, where his parents were visiting. The family of ten lived on Cat Island in the Bahamas, but when the tomato business no longer proved lucrative, they moved to Nassau, where Sidney attended Western Senior High School and Governor’s High School. But even in the more prosperous urban center of Nassau, the Poitier family remained impoverished, and Sidney was forced to leave school during the Depression in order to help his father.

Despite their financial difficulties, Reginald instilled a sense of pride in his family, and Sidney learned never to indulge in self-pity but rather to make the best out of every situation. With the urban landscape arrived the difficulties of adolescence and the influence of wayward youth, and when Sidney fell into some trouble his parents sent him to Miami to live with relatives. Working as a delivery boy, Sidney encountered racism in the form of police hostility and the Ku Klux Klan. Such experiences were jarring for a young teenager accustomed to the all-black environment of his native Bahamas, and, stifled by the oppressive racism, Sidney headed for New York. He quickly found a job as a dishwasher and struggled to make a reasonable living. In 1943 he joined the army, and after serving two years in a medical unit during World War II, he returned to Harlem in 1945.

While scouring local newspapers in search of a job, Poitier stumbled upon an advertisement for “actors wanted” and decided to audition at the American Negro Theater. But his first audition would end rather dismally; he was interrupted and told to stop wasting the director’s time. That director, FREDERICK DOUGLASS O’NEAL, was not impressed with Poitier’s halting, accented English as he struggled through the dialogue. Poitier was undaunted and left the theater even more determined to act. During the next six months he used the radio to help him learn American English, and by imitating the voices he heard, he managed to strip himself of his Bahamian accent. In addition, he devoured any available written text, knowing that reading extensively would help him accomplish his goal. Initially driven simply by a desire to show O’Neal that he could indeed act, Poitier soon began to take the theater seriously. His efforts paid off, and at his next audition O’Neal agreed to give him acting lessons in exchange for janitorial work.

Poitier was given his first break when he was designated to replace a then little known actor named HARRY BELAFONTE for a major run-through at which an important casting director would be present. The director was impressed by his performance and offered him a role in the Broadway production of Lysistrata. Unfortunately, what should have been a promising debut performance was tarnished by an attack of nervousness that caused Poitier to flub most of his lines. But the critics were gentle, noting particularly Poitier’s gift for comedy. Following this production, Poitier appeared in Anna Lucasta (1947) and in You Can’t Take It with You and On Striver’s Row. In 1959 he originated the role of Walter Lee Younger in Lloyd Richards’s production of LORRAINE HANSBERRY’S A Raisin in the Sun. Upon auditioning for an upcoming film, No Way Out (1949), he was cast in the leading role as a doctor struggling to do his job well during the tense racial climate after World War II. This “racial problem” film—in which the star struggles to negotiate his black identity under difficult circumstances caused by racism—was the first of many during his career. Also in 1950 Poitier married the dancer Juanita Hardy, with whom he would have four children before the couple’s divorce in 1965.

In 1964 Sidney Poitier became the first African American to win an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in Lilies of the Field. Corbis

The success of No Way Out led to roles in Cry, the Beloved Country (1952) and The Blackboard Jungle (1955). With these films under his belt, Poitier gained access to more of what Hollywood had to offer, and he worked consistently during the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Edge of the City (1957), Something of Value (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), and Porgy and Bess (1959). In each case he portrayed polite, well-spoken African Americans, defying the stereotype of the singing, dancing, and joking black man that had prevailed in American film. With his performance in The Defiant Ones he became the first African American to be nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor.

With his reputation established as an African American force to be reckoned with, Poitier delivered moving performances in All the Young Men (1960) and again as Younger in the film version of A Raisin in the Sun (1961). These two roles led up to his part in Lilies of the Field (1963), the story of a construction worker who comes to the aid of a group of German-speaking nuns. With this performance Poitier became the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1964. Thereafter Poiter was even more sought after as an actor, and in 1967 alone he appeared in three films for which he earned enormous success. He starred in To Sir with Love (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967), and then, in the role that he may be best known for, he was cast as a successful young doctor who is engaged to a young white woman and who meets her parents for the first time in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967).

With each role, Poitier was highly conscious of representing his family and his race, and he accepted only those roles that he believed portrayed African Americans in a positive light. For all of his efforts, he still received ample criticism from other black actors who believed Poitier was doing a disservice to his race by embodying the “good Negro” stereotype—the noble and magnanimous black man who never steps out of the mainstream perception of what a “proper” black man ought to be and do.

During the 1970s, however, Poitier starred in They Call Me Mr. Tibbs (1970) and Buck and the Preacher (1972), both roles that symbolized a departure from the distinguished characters he had previously portrayed. The latter was also his directorial debut. Two years later he collaborated with BILL COSBY in Uptown Saturday Night (1974). In 1974 he also married the actress Joanna Shimkus; they have two children. He also worked with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand, among others, to form First Artists, an independent production company. He subsequently filmed two sequels to Uptown Saturday Night: Let’s Do It Again (1975) and A Piece of the Action (1977).

In 1980 Poitier published an autobiography, This Life, and gave up acting in favor of directing such movies as Stir Crazy (1980), Hanky Panky (1982), and Fast Forward (1985). He collaborated with Bill Cosby once again in 1990 and directed Ghost Dad. When Poitier returned to acting, it was to make a few television films, such as Separate but Equal (1991), Children of the Dust (1995), To Sir with Love II (1996), and Mandela and de Klerk (1997); he ended the decade in the title role of the television film The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn (1999).

Poitier began the twenty-first century with the publication of a second autobiography, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000). He also served briefly as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. Poitier lives in Beverly Hills, California, with his family. He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and a knighthood from England’s Queen Elizabeth. At the seventy-fourth Academy Awards in 2001, Poitier was presented with a prestigious Honorary Oscar. During the presentation the academy president Frank Pierson declared, “When the academy honors Sidney Poitier, it honors itself even more,” thus indicating Poitier’s place as a Hollywood icon.

POOLE, ROBERT.

see Muhammad, Elijah.

PORTER, JAMES AMOS

(22 Dec. 1905–28 Feb. 1970), painter, art historian, and writer, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of John Porter, a Methodist minister, and Lydia Peck, a schoolteacher. The youngest of seven siblings, he attended the public schools in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and graduated cum laude from Howard University in 1927 with a bachelor of science in Art. That same year Howard appointed him instructor in art in the School of Applied Sciences. In December 1929 he married Dorothy Louise Burnett of Montclair, New Jersey; they had one daughter.

In 1929 Porter studied at the Art Students League of New York under Dimitri Romanovsky and George Bridgeman. In August 1935 he received the certificat de présence from the Institut d’Art et Archéologie, University of Paris, and in 1937 he received a master of arts in Art History from New York University, Fine Arts Graduate Center.

Porter first exhibited with the Harmon Foundation in 1928 and in 1933 was awarded the ARTHUR SCHOMBURG Portrait Prize during the Harmon Foundation Exhibition of Negro Artists for his painting Woman Holding a Jug (Fisk University, Carl Van Vechten Collection). Other early exhibitions in which he participated include the Thirty-second Annual Exhibition of the Washington Water Color Club (Gallery Room, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1928), Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture of American Negro Artists at the National Gallery of Art (Smithsonian Institution, 1929), Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by James A. Porter and Block Prints by James Lesesne Wells (Young Women’s Christian Association, Montclair, N.J., 1930), and Exhibition of Paintings by American Negro Artists at the United States National Museum (Smithsonian Institution, 1930); his first one-man show was Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by James A. Porter (Howard University Gallery of Art, 1930).

Porter began writing about art in the late 1920s. One of his earliest articles, “Versatile Interests of the Early Negro Artist,” appeared in Art in America in 1931. One of his most important and still-discussed articles, “Four Problems in the History of Negro Art,” published in the Journal of Negro History in 1942, mentions numerous artists and analyzes the following four problems: documenting and locating the earliest art by blacks—or the reality of handicrafts and fine arts by Negroes before 1820; discovering when racial subject matter takes vital hold on the black artist—or the Negro artist’s relation to the mainstream of American society; investigating the decline of productivity among black artists between 1870 and 1890 (a process that coincided with the end of an era, especially of neoclassicism and portraiture), concentrating on the period of Reconstruction; and determining the role of visual artists in the New Negro Movement of 1900–1920, the period of self-expression for the Negro.

Porter’s classic book, Modern Negro Art (1943), has proved to be one of the most informative sources on the productivity of the African American artist in the United States since the eighteenth century. Its placement of African American artists in the context of modern art history

was both novel and profound. For some, Modern Negro Art was considered presumptuous and certainly premature. But Porter’s bold and perceptive scholarship helped those who subsequently focused their attention on African American expression in the visual arts to see the wealth of work that had been produced in the United States for over two centuries” (James A. Porter Inaugural Colloquium on African American Art, brochure, 31 Mar. 1990, Howard Univ.).

First reprinted in 1963 for use as a standard reference work on black art in America, it was reprinted again in 1992 and is considered by many to be the fundamental book on black art history. As Lowery S. Sims of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has noted in the 1992 edition, Modern Negro Art “is still an indispensable reference work fifty years after its initial publication”; and, in the view of art historian Richard J. Powell, it “continues to provide today’s scholars with early source information, core bibliographic material, and other essential research tools for African American art history” (Modern Negro Art [1992]).

Porter also wrote about many artists, including HENRY OSSAWA TANNER, ROBERT S. DUNCANSON, Malvin Gray Johnson, and Laura Wheeler Waring. His other writings include monographs, book reviews, introductions to books, including Charles White’s Dignity of Images and LOÏS MAILOU JONES’S Peintures, 1937–1951, introductions and forewords to exhibition catalogs, and newspaper and periodical articles.

In 1953 Porter was appointed head of the Department of Art and director of the Gallery of Art at Howard University. This dual position enabled him to organize exhibitions featuring artists of many races from many countries who previously had not been recognized. He is credited with enlarging the permanent art collection of Howard University and strengthening the art department’s collection of works by black artists as well as its art curriculum. Porter’s leadership led the Kress Foundation to include Howard among the roughly two dozen American universities selected in 1961 to receive the Kress Study Collection of Renaissance paintings and sculpture as a stimulus to the study of art history.

In 1955 Porter received the Achievement in Art Award from the Pyramid Club of Philadelphia and also was appointed a fellow of the Belgium-American Art Seminar studying Flemish and Dutch art of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In 1961 he was a delegate at the UNESCO Conference on Africa, held in Boston, and he served as a member of the Arts Council of Washington, D.C. (1961–1963), and as a member of the conference Symposium on Art and Public Education (1962). In August 1962 he was a delegate-member of the International Congress on African Art and Culture, sponsored by the Rhodes National Gallery, in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.

In 1963–1964, having been awarded a Washington Evening Star faculty-research grant to gather materials for a projected book on West African art and architecture, Porter took a sabbatical leave to West Africa, including Nigeria and Egypt. From September 1963 to July 1964 he collected various pieces of African art throughout West Africa and Egypt and participated in a USIA exhibition. Also in this period he lectured on African and Afro-American art for the radio broadcast Voice of America. In August 1964 he traveled to Brazil in search of documentation of the African influence on and contribution to Brazilian colonial and modern art and to Latin American art and culture. Porter thought a worldview was needed to explore the transcontinental, historical, and cultural perspectives of the Negro, and he wanted the quantitative and qualitative factors examined that affected the African’s experience outside Africa. Only through comparative research of this kind, Porter argued, would it become possible to relate and reconstruct the dissimilar experiences and cultural expression of the transplanted Negro. Upon returning to the United States in the fall with twenty-five of his own paintings that he had completed while in Lagos, Nigeria, Porter said that he hoped “my paintings reflect the enthusiasm and the understanding [and] admiration which I have felt for Africa and the Africans, even though, admittedly the most skillful expatriate artist may utterly fail to capture those ineffable traits in the African people which we believe are made visible to us in their arts” (“Professor Porter Paints in Nigeria,” Howard University Magazine 7, no. 4 [July 1965]: 12–16).

In March 1965 Porter and twenty-six other teachers in the United States were named “America’s most outstanding men of the arts.” They received the first National Gallery of Art Medals and Honoraria for Distinguished Achievement in Art Education, which were presented at a White House ceremony by First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. These medals were specially designed as part of a daylong celebration commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the National Gallery of Art.

Since Porter’s death in Washington, D.C., his legacy has been honored in various ways. The James A. Porter Gallery of African American Art was dedicated at the Howard University Gallery of Art on 4 December 1970. Aesthetic Dynamics organized in Wilmington, Delaware, Afro-American Images (1971), an exhibition dedicated, according to the catalog, to “a man ahead of his time. Unique in the sense that he was totally involved in the creative expression which characterizes the Black life-style in African, Latin American and African American art as an historian and was an accomplished practicing artist as well.” In March 1990 the Department of Art at Howard University organized the James A. Porter Inaugural Colloquium on African American Art. This annual event seeks to continue Porter’s efforts to bring previously invisible artists to the attention of the American mainstream and to define and assess the enduring artistic values that are meaningful for African Americans. In James A. Porter, Artist and Art Historian: The Memory of the Legacy, the catalog for a retrospective exhibition held at the Howard University Gallery of Art in 1992–1993, ROMARE BEARDEN wrote that, because of Porter’s efforts, college art programs, in particular, art programs in traditionally black colleges, are no longer considered secondary to the other disciplines.

POWELL, ADAM CLAYTON, JR.

(29 Nov. 1908–4 Apr. 1972), minister and congressman, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Mattie Fletcher Shaffer. The family moved to New York City in 1909 after the senior Powell became minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, then located at Fortieth Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. In 1923, at the elder Powell’s urging, the church and the family joined the surge of black migration uptown to Harlem, with the church moving to 138th Street between Seventh and Lenox avenues.

Adam Powell Jr. earned an AB at Colgate University in 1930 and an AM in Religious Education at Columbia University in 1932. So light-skinned that he could pass for white, and did so for a time at Colgate, he came to identify himself as black, and, although from a comfortable background, he advocated the rights of workers.

Powell’s rise to power, and his adoption of various leadership roles in civil rights, dated from the 1930s. His power base throughout his career was the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where his father ministered to his flock’s social and economic as well as spiritual needs. There, during the Great Depression, young Powell directed a soup kitchen and relief operation that supplied thousands of destitute Harlemites with food and clothing. In 1930 he became the church’s business manager and director of its community center. In 1937 he succeeded his father as pastor. He married Cotton Club dancer Isabel Washington in 1933 and adopted her son from a previous marriage.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., congressman from Harlem, minister, and lifelong warrior for civil rights. Library of Congress

Beginning in 1936 Powell published a column, “The Soap Box,” in the black weekly Amsterdam News. Active in a campaign for equal employment opportunities for black residents of Harlem, his first major social campaign involved efforts to improve blacks’ employment opportunities and working conditions at Harlem Hospital. By the mid-1930s “Don’t buy where you can’t work” became a slogan in Harlem, as it already had become in Chicago and some other cities. Powell became a leader of organized picketing of offending stores. By 1938 he led the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, which pushed successfully in the next few years for jobs for blacks not only in stores but also with the electric and telephone companies, as workers at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, as drivers and mechanics on city buses, and as faculty at the city’s colleges.

During World War II Powell continued proselytizing from old platforms, and he found new ones. He preached at Abyssinian Baptist, which had the largest Protestant congregation in the United States; led the militant Harlem People’s Committee; published the People’s Voice, a Harlem weekly; and wrote Marching Blacks: An Interpretive History of the Rise of the Black Common Man (1945). Divorcing his first wife, he married pianist and singer Hazel Scott in 1945, and they had a son. Powell’s prominence in Harlem resulted in his election in 1941 to the New York City Council, where he continued to hone his combination of political and protest skills. And from this political base he ran for Congress in 1944 when a new congressional district was formed for Harlem. Winning, he became New York City’s first black congressman; William L. Dawson of Chicago was the only other African American then in Congress.

For many years an often lonely voice in Congress, Powell called for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, an end to the poll tax in federal elections, and an end to racial segregation in the military. Finding that House rules banned him because of his race from such facilities as dining rooms, steam baths, and barbershops, he nonetheless proceeded to make use of all such facilities, and he insisted that his staff follow his lead. He brought an end to the exclusion of black journalists from the press gallery in the House of Representatives. As early as the 1940s he was characteristically offering what became known as the “Powell Amendment” to spending legislation. The proviso, supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, would have banned federal funds from any project that supported racial segregation, and though it failed to pass it made him known as “Mr. Civil Rights.”

A New Deal Democrat, Powell nonetheless maintained political independence, whether from his father or from the Democratic Party’s leadership. Charting his own way, though his father remained a Republican, Powell campaigned in 1932 for the Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1944 he ran for Congress as the nominee of the Republican and American Labor parties as well as the Democratic Party. In 1956 he broke with the Democrats over the party’s temporizing stance on civil rights issues to support Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection campaign. Throughout his years in Congress he saw his main mission as thwarting the southern wing of his own party in Congress. He demonstrated no patience with liberal Democrats who trimmed sails or pulled punches when civil rights legislation was at stake.

One of Powell’s chief roles, often behind the scenes, was to monitor the behavior of organized labor and the federal government on the racial front. He believed apprenticeship programs in the labor market should be open to blacks, progressive legislation should be enacted, and no federal agency should practice or foster racial segregation or discrimination. During the 1960s he tried to ensure that blacks would hold leadership positions in the Peace Corps, the Poverty Corps, and federal regulatory agencies. Ambassadorships, cabinet positions, and the Supreme Court, he urged, should have black representation. His relations with the Eisenhower administration enabled him to arrange in 1954 for Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, while on a visit to the United States, to visit Abyssinian Baptist Church. There the emperor presented Powell with a large gold medallion, which he proudly wore on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life.

Powell divorced his second wife and married Yvette Flores in 1960, and they had a son. As a result of the seniority system in Congress, Powell’s peak in power came in the 1960s, the years of the New Frontier and the Great Society. For three terms, from 1961 to 1967, he chaired the House Committee on Education and Labor. From his committee came such landmark legislation as the 1961 Minimum Wage Bill, the Vocational Education Act, the Manpower Development and Training Act, various antipoverty bills, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. When the National Defense Education Act of 1958, with its promotion of education in science, mathematics, and foreign languages, came up for renewal in 1964, Powell steered through an expansion of coverage to the humanities and social sciences. And when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, Title VI, which authorized all federal agencies to withhold aid from institutions that practiced racial segregation or discrimination, embodied the “Powell Amendment.” His time had come; he pushed ahead to challenge school segregation in the North.

Powell’s fall from power came at the height of his national prominence. Always flamboyant and controversial, he displayed moral behavior anything but ascetic, spent tax dollars merrily on pleasure trips, and often missed important votes in Congress. In a television interview in March 1960 Powell referred to a Harlem widow, Esther James, as a “bag woman,” someone who collected graft for corrupt police. She sued and won. Powell refused to apologize, or pay, or even respond to subpoenas to appear in court to explain his failure to comply. After he was cited for contempt of court in November 1966, a Select Committee of the House investigated Powell’s affairs, partly because of the James case and partly because of an alleged misuse of public funds. Powell remained convinced that the real purpose was a racist attempt to silence a key proponent of civil rights. In March 1967 the Select Committee recommended Powell’s public censure and his loss of seniority. The full House went farther and voted to exclude Powell from the Ninetieth Congress. In a special election to fill the vacant seat, Powell trounced his opponents. Then after a successful fund-raising effort he paid James her award. An agreement was worked out that ended the threat of jail for contempt of court so—after spending much of 1967 in an idyllic exile on Bimini—he could return to New York whenever he wished. In January 1969 the House voted to seat him in the Ninety-first Congress, though it stripped him of his seniority and fined him for misuse of payroll and travel funds. Later that year, in Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court ruled against the House’s exclusion of him in 1967.

After being out of Congress in 1967–1969, Powell retrieved his seat. But he was no longer committee chairman, and his power had evaporated. Worse, in 1969 Powell was hospitalized with cancer. Weakened physically and politically he nonetheless entered the Democratic primary in 1970 but was narrowly defeated by state assemblyman CHARLES RANGEL. Powell’s time in Congress was over. He wrote an autobiography and retired in 1971 from Abyssinian Baptist.

Powell liked one characterization of him as “arrogant, but with style.” His legacy is a mixed one, for his personal presumptions clouded his political accomplishments. Yet during the 1940s and 1950s he ranked with A. PHILIP RANDOLPH among the great leaders of African Americans. He proved a resourceful and effective leader in America’s largest city from the 1930s through World War II. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s he combined his political position as a congressman with a commitment to progressive politics that far outstripped his few black congressional predecessors of the 1930s or his few black colleagues of the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s he had greater power to get things done, but he was also less irreplaceable, for American politics had begun to catch up with his positions on matters of race and class. He died in Miami, Florida.

POWELL, COLIN

(5 Apr. 1937–), U.S. Army general and secretary of state, was born in Harlem in New York City to the Jamaican immigrants Luther Powell, a shipping clerk, and Maud Ariel McKoy, a seamstress, both of whom worked in New York City’s garment district. When he was six years old, Powell moved with his family to Hunts Point, an ethnically diverse neighborhood in the South Bronx. Powell’s autobiography portrays Hunts Point as a community of stable families and a certain rough-hewn racial tolerance, but it does not ignore the neighborhood’s upsurge in drug-and gang-related crime, particularly after World War II. The Powells escaped the crumbling South Bronx tenements in the mid-1950s, however, a testament to his parents’ unstinting work ethic and shrewd housekeeping. But luck also played a part. Luther Powell, a regular numbers player, placed a twenty-five-dollar bet on a number that he had dreamed about and then saw again on a hymn board in church. That number hit and netted the Powells ten thousand dollars, a sum three times Luther’s annual salary and more than enough for a down payment on a three-bedroom home in the borough of Queens.

General Colin Powell became secretary of state in George W. Bush’s administration. Library of Congress

By the time his family moved to Queens, Powell had already enrolled in the City College of New York (CCNY). He was a competent, though not stellar, student, and his parents worried about their son’s apparent aimlessness. But in his first semester at CCNY, Powell found the structure and order that he had previously known only as an acolyte in the Episcopal Church. “Something had caught my eye,” Powell recalls in his autobiography, “young guys on campus in uniform” (Powell, 25). On joining the college ROTC and receiving his own uniform, he began, for the first time in his life, to feel a sense of purpose. Thereafter, Powell’s college career revolved around the Pershing Rifles, an ROTC fraternity, in which he enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow cadets and excelled as a drill leader. Such drills proved invaluable in strengthening his self-confidence, particularly in teaching him that “being responsible sometimes means pissing people off” (Powell, 35). Powell earned his degree from CCNY in June 1958 but found the ceremony anticlimactic after graduating first in his ROTC class with the rank of cadet colonel. He also received a commission as a second lieutenant in the army.

Powell’s first military assignment was in Fort Benning, Georgia. He resented the racism and indignities that he encountered, particularly in the segregated communities surrounding the camp, but he refused to let his anger dictate his actions. He vowed then to answer racist critics of blacks in the military by striving to be the consummate professional soldier. This he did at Fort Benning and on later assignments in West Germany; at Fort Owens, Massachusetts; and at the Unconventional Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he trained as one of sixteen thousand military advisers who were to be sent by President John F. Kennedy to assist the anti-communist South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem. Powell arrived in Saigon on Christmas Day 1962, leaving behind his wife of just four months, Alma Johnson, a speech pathologist from Birmingham, Alabama, whom he had met in Boston while he was serving at Fort Owens. The Powells had three children: Annemarie, Linda, and Michael.

Powell’s first tour of duty in Vietnam was relatively uneventful, though he returned to Fort Benning in November 1963 with a Purple Heart, after being wounded by a Vietcong booby trap. In 1967 he attended the highly selective U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and graduated second in a class of 1,244. Powell’s military reputation was further enhanced when he returned to Vietnam in 1968 and received a second Purple Heart, the Legion of Merit, and the Soldier’s Medal for rescuing two crewmen from the burning wreckage of a helicopter.

On his first Vietnam tour, Powell had believed that the American presence in Indochina was justified by the goal of defeating communism, but by 1969 he had begun to question—in private, at least—the course of that war. He later came to believe that the expansion of the U.S. military draft after 1965 resulted in a breakdown in morale and in the deployment of too many poorly trained officers and noncommissioned personnel. The inexperience of these soldiers, he argues in his 1995 autobiography, led to atrocities such as that at My Lai in the Batangan peninsula in March 1968, in which 347 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly old men, women, and children, were tortured and killed by troops of the Americal Division. Powell, a major in the same division, arrived in Vietnam after that incident, but has been criticized for not thoroughly investigating subsequent reports of a massacre at My Lai.

Powell left Vietnam in July 1969 to study for an MBA at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He graduated in 1971, was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and began working in the Pentagon as an operations research analyst. While that position marked Powell’s ascent on the military career ladder, his selection for a White House Fellowship in 1972–1973 brought him into the quite different milieu of Washington politics. Powell chose to work in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an unglam-orous but powerful department, where he worked with Frank Carlucci, the deputy to the OMB’s director, Caspar Weinberger. On completing his fellowship, Powell served for a year as a battalion commander in South Korea before returning to Washington to attend the National War College. He graduated in 1976; was given a brigade command with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky; and then served as a Pentagon aide in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, an appointment that resulted in Powell’s promotion to brigadier general at the age of only forty-two. Powell did not, however, support his commander in chiefs reelection and voted for Carter’s Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, in 1980.

Reagan’s victory enabled Powell to work again with his former bosses Weinberger and Carlucci, who became secretary and deputy secretary, respectively, at the Defense Department. Both men valued Powell highly and did much to further his career, alternatively recommending him for military promotions and recalling him to Washington to serve in various political posts. In 1981 they encouraged his return to a military posting by appointing him assistant division commander in Fort Carson, Colorado. Powell’s next assignment, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, further broadened his résumé, acquainted him with the army’s newest weaponry and technology, and gained him a second star and promotion to the rank of major general.

Powell was reluctant to leave the Kansas base, where he had helped establish a memorial honoring the Buffalo Soldiers, black cavalry and infantrymen who had served on America’s western frontier after the Civil War. In 1983, however, he returned to Washington to serve as Weinberger’s military assistant, a post that made him the chief gatekeeper of information to and from the defense secretary. By all accounts, Powell excelled at this role. His direct, even blunt approach ruffled some feathers, but most Pentagon insiders found his honesty, humor, and apparent lack of political guile refreshing. Above all, he earned high marks in Washington for his consummate people-handling skills. One Pentagon veteran remarked of Powell that he had “never seen anyone who could run a meeting more effectively with senior people and cut through the crap and get a decision” (Means, 206).

Although he was Weinberger’s chief aide from 1983 to 1986, Powell was not tainted by the Iran-Contra affair that resulted in Weinberger’s indictments in 1992 for perjury and for misleading Congress. A full accounting of Powell’s role in the scandal may never be known, however, since President George H. W. Bush pardoned Weinberger in 1992, just weeks before his trial for perjury. Powell, for his part, denies any complicity in Iran-Contra and notes in his autobiography that he and Weinberger opposed the arms-for-hostages deal hatched by the national security adviser Admiral John Poindexter. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s investigation into the affair found, though, that Weinberger and his closest aides had greater knowledge of the illegal arms sales than they had admitted. Nonetheless, Iran-Contra advanced Powell’s career. At the time the scandal broke, he was in command of the Fifth U.S. Corps in Frankfurt, West Germany, but returned to Washington in January 1987 as deputy to Frank Carlucci, whom Reagan had appointed to replace the disgraced Poindexter as national security adviser. Ten months later, when Carlucci replaced Weinberger as secretary of defense, the president appointed Powell, by then a lieutenant general, as America’s first African American national security adviser.

Powell took that post at a time of rapid change in global affairs. By the late 1980s the radical reforms instituted by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had set in motion the breakup of the Eastern Bloc, although at that time neither the Soviets nor the Americans predicted that it would happen so rapidly. At the same time, the Reagan administration came to portray Islamic fundamentalism as an even greater threat to the American national interest than the Soviets. On most matters, Powell shared the basic foreign policy philosophy of the Reaganites—increased military spending, support for anti-communist regimes, and unswerving loyalty to Israel. Powell’s genius lay, however, in quickly summarizing and analyzing a complex and rapidly changing world to President Reagan, a man he viewed as a “visionary” but who, as Iran-Contra made abundantly clear, had only a vague grasp of the details and constitutionality of foreign policy. Capitol Hill veterans, military professionals, and television pundits were likewise impressed by the professionalism and clarity of Powell’s briefings on national security affairs.

Although Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, offered Powell a number of high-ranking cabinet posts, he chose to return to the military. Powell’s time as commander in chief of Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia, lasted only four months, long enough to earn him a fourth star and the service record required for the military’s top post, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. In August 1989 Bush duly nominated Powell to that post, making him the youngest soldier and the first African American to lead the nation’s military. The implosion of the Soviet empire in that year left the United States as the world’s largest superpower and set the stage for an era of unprecedented American military engagement across the globe. As chairman, Powell oversaw the most significant deployments of American military force since Vietnam.

Powell initially advised Bush against the use of force in Panama in 1989, but he earned plaudits for his deft handling of both the military and media campaigns once the president decided to remove from power the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. Many in the international community condemned the death of nearly one thousand Panamanian civilians, but the war proved highly popular in the United States, primarily because the military had used a strategy that became known as the “Powell doctrine.” According to this doctrine, the United States in Vietnam had fought a half-hearted war “for half-hearted reasons that the American people could not understand or support” (Powell, 144–145). Powell’s strategy for future American wars, therefore, was to “have a clear political objective and stick to it.” He advocated that the United States “use all the force necessary,” and that it should not “apologize for going in big if that is what it takes. Decisive force ends wars quickly and in the long run saves lives” (Powell, 420–421).

As with Panama, Powell initially advised President Bush to act cautiously in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Once Bush had decided on a military campaign to remove Iraqi forces, however, Powell again proved highly effective. He oversaw the logistics of a massive American military buildup in Saudi Arabia and proved adept at handling the unprecedented demands of the emerging twenty-four-hour global news media. Most famously, Powell informed the watching billions of his “very, very simple” strategy for defeating Iraq: “First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it” (Means, 278). With strong international support, the Allied forces did just that in 1991, suffering only 246 combat deaths—60 percent of them American—in the 45-day air-and ground-war campaign.

By contrast, Iraqi losses were devastating. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, 158,000 Iraqis died as a result of the war and its immediate aftermath, three-quarters of them civilians. Such figures make it all the more remarkable that Powell was subsequently attacked in some quarters for advocating a ceasefire once Kuwait was liberated and Iraqi forces crushed. He answered those critics in his 1995 autobiography by arguing that occupying Iraq would have eroded the powerful international coalition that had made victory possible. Assassinating the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, Powell added, would have destabilized the entire Middle East by fragmenting Iraq into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish enclaves. Shortly after the end of the conflict, the NAACP honored Powell with the Springarn Medal, its annual award for achievement by an African American.

Powell emerged from the Gulf War as the most popular American soldier since Dwight Eisenhower, and commentators speculated that President Bush might replace his widely ridiculed vice president, Dan Quayle, with the charismatic Powell for the 1992 presidential race. Bush, perhaps fatally for his re-election chances, remained loyal to Quayle. Powell likewise remained loyal to Bush, spurning the advances of Bill Clinton, who approached him regarding the Democratic vice-presidential nomination through their mutual friend VERNON JORDAN. Powell’s retirement as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in 1993 prompted further rumors about his presidential ambitions, speculation that was fueled by the enthusiastic reception that met Powell’s 1995 autobiography, My American Journey, and the vastly popular book tour that followed. Powell ultimately resisted strong pressure to challenge Clinton as either an independent or a Republican candidate, even though opinion polls suggested that he would have received support from Americans of both parties and all races. Republicans, mostly white, identified with Powell’s military record, while Democrats, who were disproportionately African American, applauded the general’s support for affirmative action and abortion rights. Powell chose instead to establish American Promise, an organization that advocates volunteerism and mentoring to help disadvantaged children. He did not entirely abandon politics, however, and campaigned for the Republican Party in both 1996 and 2000.

Powell returned to Washington in 2001, when President George W. Bush appointed him secretary of state in a foreign policy team that included CONDOLEEZZA RICE as national security adviser. Early reviews of the Bush presidency highlighted tensions between Powell, who believed that the United States should seek international cooperation in solving global crises, and others, such as Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who argued for a more unilateralist approach. Those distinctions blurred significantly in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Powell joined with a united Bush cabinet to advocate the removal from power in Afghanistan of the Taliban, a fundamentalist Muslim sect suspected of financing the al-Qaeda terrorist network that had carried out the terrorist attacks.

In 2002 Rumsfeld, Rice, and others advised President Bush to launch a preemptive strike on Iraq to destroy an alleged, though as yet unproven, link between that nation and al-Qaeda. Others in the Bush administration advocated a military invasion of Iraq to remove weapons of mass destruction, allegedly held by Iraq in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. Powell initially urged Bush to work toward those goals in association with the UN, but he apparently abandoned that strategy in early 2003, when France, Russia, and China made clear that they would use their Security Council veto powers against any preemptive strike by the United States. As a consequence, the United States launched a military invasion of Iraq in March 2003 without UN sanction, but with the support of about thirty allies described by Powell as a “coalition of the willing.” Since only Britain and Australia provided significant support to the American cause, some war critics contrasted Powell’s diplomatic efforts unfavorably with his predecessor during the first Gulf War, James Baker, who had enlisted financial and military support from France, Japan, Germany, and even some of Iraq’s Arab neighbors.

American military success in both Iraq conflicts owed much to Colin Powell. For three decades as a career soldier and Washington insider, he lobbied vigorously for the technologically advanced, state-of-the-art weaponry that devastated the Iraqi army and left minimal American casualties. Both military victories secured another of Powell’s career goals: restoring public support for and trust of the U.S. military that had eroded after Vietnam. Powell’s diplomatic legacy is less clear, however. In 2002–2003, he could not bridge the divide between an increasingly nationalistic Bush administration and members of the United Nations fearful of American military and economic supremacy. In the uncertain new world order that emerged after the second Iraq war, Secretary of State Powell would have to draw upon his much vaunted charisma and powers of persuasion to reconcile two potentially antagonistic objectives: maintaining American military hegemony while ensuring international cooperation and stability.

PRICE, LEONTYNE

(10 Feb. 1927–), opera singer, was born Mary Violet Leontine Price in Laurel, Mississippi, one of two children of James Anthony Price, who worked in the local sawmills, and Katherine Baker, a popular Laurel midwife. Katherine nurtured her daughter’s talent by enrolling her in piano lessons at age three, and by encouraging her to sing in church and community events. Listening to recordings at home and attending concerts, including a memorable performance by MARIAN ANDERSON, enlarged Leontyne’s passion for music. In 1944 she graduated from Oak Park Vocational High School and received a scholarship to Wilberforce College in Ohio. Although she planned a career in music education, Leontyne’s vocal gifts attracted such attention that she changed her major to voice, graduating with a BA in 1948.

After graduating, Price enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, which she attended on a four-year scholarship. While in her senior year at Wilberforce, she had performed on the same program as PAUL ROBESON. Wanting to help the young singer, Robeson helped her pay for Julliard by giving a fundraising concert for the Leontyne Price Fund, established by her professors. Living in New York enabled the young singer to attend the Metropolitan Opera, exposing her to the world’s finest operatic productions. When she sang the part of Mistress Ford in Verdi’s Falstaff in a Juilliard opera workshop, her talent so impressed composer Virgil Thomson that he cast her in the revival of his all-black American classic, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), which was staged in New York and Paris in 1952.

Leontyne Price in costume for her leading role in Louis Mélançon’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1966. Library of Congress

Price made her triumphant international debut as Bess in Robert Breen’s revival of George Gershwin’s dramatic masterpiece Porgy and Bess. Abandoning plans to study in Europe on a Ful-bright Fellowship, Price accepted the starring role in the touring production which opened in Dallas in June 1952 and continued in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., where President Truman attended the performance, and on to several major European cities. In March 1953 the show opened at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, where it continued for 304 performances. For a young singer in her mid-twenties, the applause and accolades were stunning. She was “a Bess of vocal glory” (Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess [1990], 155), and critics praised her imaginative interpretation and her focused soprano voice. As her repertoire expanded to include the operas of Mozart, Orff, Massenet, Verdi, and others, Price’s glamorous demeanor came to the fore. As one observer noted, she “literally spilled charm over the foot-light” (Harrison).

Price made history when in 1955 she became the first black prima donna to appear in a major production of opera on television. Despite some strenuous objections and cancellations by several local affiliates, Price sang the lead in Puccini’s Tosca on NBC. The following year, she appeared on the air as Pamina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. In September 1957 she thoroughly enchanted audiences at the San Francisco Opera and won high acclaim for her first appearance in a staged opera with a major company when she performed as the devout Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. When she sang Verdi’s Aida under Herbert von Karajan at the Vienna State Opera in 1958, a felicitous association with the noted conductor brought her engagements in such important European venues as the Verona Arena, the Salzburg Festival, and London’s Covent Garden.

The Ethiopian princess in Aida has long been a signature role for Price. When she sang Aida at La Scala in 1960, she was hailed as the quintessential Verdi soprano: “Our great Verdi would have found her the ideal” (Walsh, 67). Indeed, the monumental Requiem and other works by Verdi that Price has sung with the Metropolitan Opera, such as Aida, La Forza del Destino, Ernani, and Un Ballo in Maschera, are among the soprano’s most compelling showpieces. As Amelia in Un Ballo in Maschera, her lush lyrico spinto (a lyric soprano with dramatic power) dazzled audiences in the standing-room-only house. By the time Price left the Metropolitan Opera in Aida in 1985, she had sung the role at the Met more than forty-two times.

Price made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera in Verdi’s II Trovatore on 27 January 1961, receiving a forty-five-minute standing ovation. “As Leonora,” wrote Ronald Eyer, “Leontyne Price was a sensational success . . . . The lovely fast vibrato which is characteristic of her voice gave liquidity and warmth to the soaring line; her coloratura was of extraordinary flexibility and lightness of touch for so large a voice” (New York Herald Tribune, 28 Jan. 1961). Price’s other Metropolitan Opera roles have included Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and the Prima Donna/Ariadne in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Few, however, will forget her luminous tones and beautifully shaped phrases when she sang her last II Trovatore at the Met in 1982, at age fifty-five.

Perhaps the strongest character Price ever played was that of Cleopatra in Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. The opera, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the opening of its new fifty-million-dollar house at Lincoln Center, was given its premiere on 16 September 1966 with Thomas Schippers conducting. Although her interpretation of the character was spellbinding and her vocal powers in finest form, Price had to rise to the challenges of Franco Zeffirelli’s over-effulgent staging and an electrical upset that forced Cleopatra to make her entrance in total darkness. “I was locked in the pyramid at the first aria,” Price recounted. “There was no way in the world I could make that cue. I was to be dressed in the pyramid for the next scene, and I simply said ‘Zip this one back up, whether it fits or not. I’ll keep singing and just go out’” (Leontyne Price in an interview with Peter Dickinson, BBC broadcast, “Samuel Barber Retrospective,” 23 Jan. 1982). And so she did.

Few artists have received so many distinguished honors from U.S. presidents as Price. On 4 July 1964 Lyndon Johnson awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to both Price and the American composer Aaron Copland. They became the first musicians to receive the distinguished award, created by John F. Kennedy shortly before he died. Price also made history when she performed in the first nationally televised concert series from the White House, initiated by President Carter in 1978. On 26 March 1979 the soprano’s majestic interpretation of “Pace, pace, mio Dio,” from La Forza del Destino, for the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty at the White House moved all who heard her. She also sang for the White House ceremonies welcoming Pope John Paul II, and in 1980 she was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for a lifetime achievement in the arts. Price received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1965.

Price was one of the first African American prima donnas to appear regularly on the world’s great opera stages. In her later years she sang less in opera and more in recitals, focusing on spirituals, Broadway tunes, hymns, and art songs. For her many fine recordings she received at least eighteen Grammy Awards. Married on 31 August 1952 to the baritone William Warfield (her co-star in Porgy and Bess), Price was divorced in 1973. She continues to live in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, giving master classes and enjoying the picturesque charm of her federal-style home. With her vocal powers and distinguished presence, Leontyne Price has drawn international acclaim. Her fortitude and achievements have become models not only for young black singers but also for aspiring artists everywhere.

PRINCE, NANCY

(15 Sept. 1799–?), abolitionist, writer, lecturer, women’s rights activist, and social critic, was born Nancy Gardner in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the daughter of an African American and Indian mother and an African father, Thomas Gardner, who was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and died within three months of Nancy’s birth. What is known about her is drawn primarily from her 1850 memoir, A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince. While Prince does not name her mother in her narrative, she provides descriptions of both parents that highlight their African descent, and she recounts her grandfather’s violent removal to America, along with his memories of a proud life in Africa. She briefly notes the capture of her Indian grandmother by local English colonials. Her narrative speaks clearly to issues of race, gender, slavery, and morality in the United States and the Caribbean.

Nancy’s childhood in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was marked by poverty, homelessness, hard labor, and profound concern for her own survival and that of her more than seven siblings still living at home. Her mother married three times; each of her husbands died from illness or overwork, and her second and third husbands were hostile toward Nancy and the other children they did not father. By the time they reached adolescence, Nancy; her brother George; and her oldest sister, Silvia, had become responsible for their younger siblings and their mother. They collected fruits and fish to sell and ran errands in order to provide food and resources to support the struggling family. George, overwhelmed by the enduring poverty, soon signed on to a ship sailing from the local harbor, and Silvia hired out as a domestic with a family that lived seventy miles from their family home in Gloucester. Nancy took a service position in a home in Salem, Massachusetts, where she worked until she became ill from hard labor and poor treatment. Her employers were pious, and she had hoped to receive religious instruction while among them. But although they observed family prayers twice daily, their cruelty to fourteen-year-old Nancy provided her with an early opportunity to question the morality of white Christians.

The experiences of her sister and mother undoubtedly shaped Nancy’s adult choices. Silvia, who by 1815 had moved to Boston to secure better wages, became a prostitute. In the winter of 1816, with the help of friends, Nancy rescued her sister from a brothel. Never stable or comfortable among her family again, Silvia died in 1827. In her narrative, Nancy briefly eulogizes her sister, calling her “precious” and “very dear” and revealing that she had often protected Silvia from their stepfather’s abuse. Silvia’s fall and death were not the result of a flawed character, Prince argues, but rather a consequence of the limited choices available to poor women, especially poor African American women.

Thrice widowed and the mother of at least ten children who had been either hired out or placed for care with local families, Nancy’s mother became financially and emotionally dependent on her father, Tobias Wornton, called Backus, the only constant male presence in her life. When he died, about the same time as her third husband, she lost all reliable means of support. Unable to work because of her poor health, she eventually suffered a mental collapse and took to wandering miles from home until she died without ceremony in 1827, the same year as her daughter Silvia died. “My mother wandered about like a Jew,” Nancy wrote about her mother (17).

In her narrative, Nancy casts her childhood and adolescence as determined by her race, gender, and class. If her mother’s life was to be any model, Nancy saw her own life as proceeding toward misfortune and disease of the body, mind, and spirit. The chain of predetermination was broken for Nancy on 6 May 1819, however, when she was baptized by the Reverend Thomas Paul of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a religious and political leader known for his abolition work. Within three years, Nancy left employment as a domestic, learned a trade, and developed a “determination to do something for myself’ (20). By 1822 she decided to leave the country. In September 1823 Nancy met Nero Prince, who had recently arrived from Russia, where he served as one of twenty “colored” men in the court of the emperor Alexander. They married on 15 February 1824 and sailed for Russia on 14 April.

The Russian experience is at the heart of Prince’s narrative and at the core of her development as a political advocate, activist, and social critic. She was accepted as a member of her local St. Petersburg community quite easily, and during the flood of 1824 her home became a place of refuge for flood victims. In her narrative, Prince comments in travelogue style on the Russian folk, community life, holiday and funeral celebrations, religious and family life, the flood of 1824, high court culture, and the life and pastimes of the empress Elizabeth, and she details political assassination, violent regime change, and war between Russia and Turkey. She comments as well on the lack of race prejudice in the empire and the fact that serfs are treated better in Russia than slaves are treated in America. The contrast she draws between American and Russian laboring classes, although assailable today, formed the basis of her antislavery activism upon her return to the United States.

By late 1833, troubled by the harsh winter climate, Prince returned to the United States, while her husband remained in Russia, apparently in the court’s service under the new emperor. Nero Prince, intending to return to his wife in New England after two years of accumulating property, died before reaching home. Taking up the cause of children, Nancy Prince continued the work she had begun during the 1824 Russian flood, establishing an asylum for orphaned children. When the project failed financially after three months, Prince deepened her interest in antislavery causes, aligning her philosophy with that of William Lloyd Garrison’s. Impassioned statements in her narrative indict American immorality and sin and warn that the sins are not hidden from God’s notice.

After attending a lecture about the lives of former slaves in Jamaica and their need for spiritual, social, and financial support, Prince was persuaded to volunteer with a missionary contingent, and on 16 November 1840 she sailed from Charlestown, Massachusetts, to St. Ann Harbor, Jamaica. Her goal in Jamaica was to “raise up and encourage the emancipated inhabitants, and teach the young children to read and work, to fear God, and put their trust in the Saviour” (45). Her good intentions notwithstanding, Prince had considerable difficulty accepting the cultural and religious habits of local Jamaicans. In her narrative she complains of lax standards among religious leaders and the women’s societies within the church, and she opines that “the meeting house is more like a play house than a place of worship” (47).

In 1841 she published The West Indies: Being a Description of the Islands, a pamphlet in which she exposes and explains the destructive effects of slavery on the culture and character of the Jamaican people, and she reveals and derides corruption among black and white church-sponsored missionaries, who were colluding to take advantage of the recently emancipated population. In addition, The West Indies provided American readers with a thorough topographical description of the island and information about the island’s black, white, and “mulatto” inhabitants. Prince reports on the British colony’s violent internal civil conflict, turmoil in the church in the period immediately after emancipation, and extra-colonial efforts to aid the newly freed, industrious, often illiterate, and proud former slaves. The pamphlet, which is difficult to find in libraries today, is reprinted for the most part, though in slightly different order, in Prince’s narrative.

A life of labor on behalf of others placed Nancy Prince in the company of prostitutes, in the czarist court in St. Petersburg, and among missionaries selling Bibles in Jamaica. Through all these experiences, Prince remained self-sufficient, committed to her labors and her faith, and humble. Hard labor, extreme weather, and limited medical attention over her lifetime eventually left her infirm. In 1850 Prince published A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince. “My object is not a vain desire to appear before the public,” Prince wrote in her introduction, “but, by the sale, I hope to obtain the means to supply my necessities” (3). A second edition of Prince’s eighty-nine-page book was published in 1853. Although it is seldom anthologized, Prince’s narrative is a rare combination of faith story, travelogue, and narrative of political development. The date and place of Prince’s death remain unknown.

PROSSER, GABRIEL.

See Gabriel.

PRYOR, RICHARD

(1 Dec. 1940–), comedian and actor, was born Richard Franklin Lenox Thomas Pryor in Peoria, Illinois, the son of LeRoy “Buck Carter” Pryor Jr. and Gertrude Thomas. Carter managed the family bar, the Famous Door, while Thomas and her mother-in-law—whom Pryor called Mama—managed a handful of mixed clientele brothels in Peoria’s black neighborhood. Between spying on the couples (which occasionally included his mother) and frequenting the Famous Door, Pryor lived a childhood of inconsistency and emotional turbulence; he did, however, credit Mama and his parents for the relative affluence that accompanied their professions. Prompted by Thomas’s severe alcoholism and subsequent disappearances, sometimes for as long as six months, Carter divorced her in 1950. Thomas moved to her family farm in Springfield, Missouri, and Pryor would later identify his visits there as the most peaceful moments of his life.

When Pryor was six years old, a local teenager sexually molested him; at about the same age he also discovered he could make his family laugh with pratfalls off the front porch or by slipping on dog feces. He earned high marks at a Catholic grade school but was expelled at the age of ten when the school’s administration learned of his family’s businesses. In junior high his teacher bribed him to do homework by promising him a few minutes every week to tell jokes at the front of the classroom. Gaining confidence and enjoying the attention, Pryor continued his class shenanigans until a couple of years later, when another teacher requested that he stop. Pryor responded by jokingly—so he claimed—swinging at the teacher. He was expelled instantly and left to work odd jobs in Peoria for four years until he joined the army at age eighteen. Pryor was stationed in Idar-Oberstein in West Germany, but his tour ended in 1960 when he aided a fellow black soldier in a bar fight by stabbing the white opponent.

Narrowly escaping jail, Pryor was discharged and allowed to return home, where he flitted about for a couple of months before conning the manager of a local “black and tan” nightclub (that is, one catering to blacks and whites) into letting him play the piano and sing. Pryor could do neither. But his onstage charisma and likability rescued him, and he became the regular emcee. He began working other such clubs and was soon introduced to marijuana and amphetamines. Also in 1960 Pryor married his girlfriend, who was pregnant with his first son, but he left Peoria almost immediately after Richard Jr.’s birth, accompanying some local comedians and singers on a tour of the Midwest and Canada.

After a year of touring, Pryor, along with many black comedians of the time, was particularly affected in 1963 by seeing BILL COSBY on the cover of Newsweek, and he thought, “Goddamn it, this nigger’s doing what I’m fixing to do. I want to be the only nigger. Ain’t no room for two niggers” (Pryor, 68). He left immediately for New York, and although he “only had $10” in his pocket, he swore he looked at least “like $50” (Pryor, 69).

Pryor’s contemporaries in the Greenwich Village comedy scene included Cosby, Woody Allen, George Carlin, Dick Gregory, Flip Wilson, and Joan Rivers. Under pressure to avoid a resemblance to every club owner’s bête noire, the raunchy and unpredictable Lenny Bruce, Pryor emulated Cosby as closely as possible. Moving quickly from small jazz clubs to larger venues, such as the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Pryor made his first television appearance on 31 August 1964 on Rudy Vallee’s On Broadway Tonight; appearances on The Merv Griffin Show and The Ed Sullivan Show soon followed. By this time Pryor, at the urgings of a prostitute he was dating, had also begun using cocaine. Except for a purported seven-month period of sobriety more than a decade later, Pryor fought cocaine addiction until he reached a degenerative state of illness in the early 1990s.

The increasing turmoil of Pryor’s personal life provided a body of subject matter that he expertly wove into his performances, but the success that accompanied his newly emerging comedic style only worsened his addictions and increased his philandering. The late 1960s sped by in a whirlwind that included his first movie appearance—a bit role in Sid Caesar’s film The Busy Body (1967)—the birth of two more children, another failed marriage, and his father’s death. Finally, Pryor had a nervous breakdown in Las Vegas, when he walked onstage, froze, and spoke only one sentence before walking off: “What the fuck am I doing here?”

In 1969, with the help of friends, Pryor attempted to write, produce, and star in an innovative, yet poorly executed racial satire entitled The Trial, in which one white man is tried for every racial crime in American history. But Pryor destroyed the only copy of the script in a domestic dispute. His career brought to a standstill by unarticulated frustrations, Pryor moved to Berkeley, California, in 1970 and lived eccentrically, walking the streets in a kimono and getting high for days at a time. Still, he managed to stumble upon a sympathetic and like-minded emerging set of African American intellectuals and activists, namely ISHMAEL ERED, ANGELA DAVIS, and Claude Brown. Pryor shut himself in and compulsively read a collection of MALCOLM X’s speeches and listened to MARVIN GAYE’S song “What’s Goin’ On?” Determined to find his voice, he began delivering increasingly experimental performances in small clubs. He would typically speak a curse word, such as “bitch” or “motherfucker,” dozens of times, attempting to hit a different inflection for every one. Eventually he tried “nigger.” Speaking the one word that every club owner had hitherto prohibited provided the breakthrough he needed.

In 1971 Pryor returned to the Improv in New York City to record new material for his first concert film, Smokin’, and his second stand-up album, Craps after Hours. Mel Brooks then solicited him to help pen the ribald comedy Blazing Saddles, for which it was understood that Pryor would play the lead, a black sheriff in the Old West. The studio, however, apparently feared Pryor’s controversial edge and cast Cleavon Little instead. But Pryor demonstrated his commitment to acting by playing Piano Man in Diana Ross’s vehicle Lady Sings the Blues (1972), for which he earned an Academy Award nomination.

Television opportunities soon presented themselves: Pryor most enjoyed collaborating on Lily Tomlin’s variety show, but he also hosted NBC’s new skit series, Saturday Night Live, and the network quickly offered him his own show. He locked horns with the censors, however, and The Richard Pryor Show ran for only four episodes. Otherwise, Pryor continued to experience a creative boon in comedy and film. Three consecutive albums won Grammys: That Nigger’s Crazy (1974), Is It Something I Said? (1975), and Bicentennial Nigger (1976). He played his first dramatic film lead in Greased Lightning (1976), in which he portrayed race car legend WENDELL SOTT. Pryor teamed with Gene Wilder in Silver Streak that same year, and delivered in Blue Collar (1978) what some critics consider his most accomplished performance. His cocaine use dangerously increased as well, and he suffered the first of two heart attacks. A recovered Pryor then divorced his third wife, Deboragh McGuire, and began dating Jennifer Lee, with whom he traveled to Africa at decade’s end and later married.

In perhaps his most rounded concert film, Live on the Sunset Strip (1982), Pryor explains the revelatory experience of waiting in a Kenyan hotel lobby after a three-week sojourn: “A voice said, ‘What do you see? Look around.’ And I looked around, and I looked around, and I saw people of all colors and shapes, and the voice said, ‘You see any niggers?’ I said, ‘No.’ It said, ‘You know why? ’Cause there aren’t any’” (Pryor, 175). In three weeks Pryor had not used the word once; he vowed never to use it again, a vow he faithfully kept for some time. Many black entertainers, however, chastised him for “selling out” and rejecting what they believed was a reclaimed term of black empowerment. More important than such shifting semantics, however, was Pryor’s unique take on American racial dynamics, prompting one critic to observe that if Pryor “played the race card, it was only to show how funny he looked when he tried to shuffle the deck” (Als, 385).

In Sunset Strip, Pryor also speaks of the notorious self-immolation he had suffered a year earlier while freebasing cocaine, a tremendously dangerous method of using the drug that involves inhaling the fumes of a melted clump of cocaine laced with ether. Although accounts differ, a strung-out Pryor apparently poured cognac or rum over his body and flicked a lighter, then ran out of his Los Angeles house and down the street, where the fire extinguished itself by burning his clothes into his skin. In shock, Pryor continued walking alongside police officers who were asking him to stop for an ambulance. Pryor responded, “If I stop, I’ll die.”

Pryor’s work in subsequent years became uneven. Lee divorced him after six months, and his directorial debut, the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) teetered indecisively between comedy and drama. He fired his confidant and business partner, the former football star JIM BROWN, from his film production company, a decision that further strained his relationship with the black entertainment community, and he repeatedly agreed to appear in lifeless but high-paying movies like The Toy (1982), Superman III (1983), and Brewster’s Millions (1985). It was on the set of Critical Condition in 1986, however, that Pryor first felt the symptoms of multiple sclerosis; he was officially diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic later that year. Keeping the affliction secret, Pryor made another movie with Gene Wilder in 1986 and teamed with REDD FOXX and Eddie Murphy in 1989’s Harlem Nights. The multiple sclerosis, compounded with decades of heavy drug use, contributed to another heart attack and subsequent quadruple bypass surgery in 1991.

Pryor logged one final “stand-up” performance in 1992 at the Circle House Theater in San Francisco, sitting in a leather chair onstage with a cane by his side. Buoyed by positive reviews, he briefly attempted a tour, which exhaustion brought to a close in early 1993. He reunited with Jennifer Lee in 1994, who assumed caretaking duties. In 1998 Pryor was awarded the Kennedy Center’s inaugural Mark Twain Prize, a significant tribute for which he was feted by lifelong friends and fellow comedians.

PURYEAR, MARTIN

(23 May 1941–), sculptor, was born in Washington, D.C., the oldest of seven children of Reginald Puryear, a postal worker, and Martina Morse, a schoolteacher. Martin was an avid reader and an illustrator of detailed drawings of insects and birds. After graduating from Archbishop Carroll High School in 1959, he entered The Catholic University of America, switching his major from biology to art in his junior year. He also began working in wood, designing and building furniture, canoes, and a collapsible guitar. After receiving a BA in Art in 1963, Puryear joined the Peace Corps, serving from 1964 to 1966 in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He taught French, English, and biology and studied the work of local carpenters and artisans, whose work he discovered, combined beauty with utility. The vernacular architecture of the area and the centrality of simple man-made objects in West African daily life would serve as contributing forces in his later work.

An admiration for Scandinavian design and woodworking brought Puryear to Sweden after his service in Africa ended. While studying printmaking and wood sculpture at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, he fell further in love with objects and their construction. As he had been in Sierra Leone, he was drawn to sculptural work born of wood construction rather than wood carving, and he augmented his formal studies with a brief apprenticeship under the renowned furniture maker James Krenov. Puryear’s return to the United States in 1969 coincided with seismic and fast-moving developments in the history of modern sculpture, including minimalism, postminimalism, and earthworks—all profound influences on his work. Puryear began graduate training at Yale University in 1969, and, under the tutelage of Al Held, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and Salvatore Scarpitta, he earned an M.F.A. in Sculpture in 1971. From 1971 to 1973 he taught at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, after which he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he produced his first mature pieces, including Rawhide Cone (1974, artist’s collection), Bask (1976, Guggenheim Museum), and Circumbent (1976, artist’s collection). He also continued teaching, commuting to the University of Maryland from 1974 to 1978.

In February 1977 a fire destroyed Puryear’s studio. “The fire,” he later reflected, “was followed by a period of grieving and then by an incredible lightness, freedom, and mobility” (Benezra, 24). Having lost most of his work and possessions, Puryear responded with Cedar Lodge (1977) and Where the Heart Is (Sleeping Mews) (1977), two temporary installations inspired, respectively, by a teepee and a yurt (a portable hut used by Mongol and Afghan nomads), and several pieces were dedicated to the mountain man JIM BECKWOURTH. In 1978 Puryear accepted a teaching position at the University of Illinois and relocated to Chicago, where he remained until 1990.

By the late 1970s Puryear’s work began attracting critical attention. In 1977 he received both a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Grant, as well as his first solo museum exhibition, held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His sculptures appeared in exhibitions across the country, including the 1979 and 1981 Whitney Museum Biennials. One-person shows followed, culminating in a large traveling exhibition organized by the University of Massachusetts. Puryear’s studio works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, dominated by a series of wall-mounted, circle-like wood sculptures, mostly untitled, gave way to larger, freestanding wood sculptures, such as Old Mole (1985, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Cask Cascade (1985, private collection). He introduced wire in works like Keeper (1984, private collection) and wire mesh combined with tar in such pieces as Sanctum (1985, Whitney Museum) and Maroon (1987–1988, Milwaukee Art Museum). In the late 1980s and 1990s Puryear experimented further with new materials and delivered a variety of intriguing new compositions with the unique Lever Series (1988–1989) and such beguiling pieces as Horsefly (1996–2000, private collection)

Martin Puryear’s sculpture Old Mole (1985) is just over five feet tall and made of red cedar. Philadelphia Museum of Art

After receiving a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989, Puryear represented the United States at the Twentieth São Paulo Biennial in Brazil with a suite of eight large sculptures that won the grand prize. The following year he moved to upstate New York with his wife of four years, Jeanne Gordon, a classical pianist and artist. By then he was the father of a young daughter and no longer teaching full time, and his production and visibility increased. Puryear was the subject of a number of exhibitions, including a major traveling retrospective organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991. In 1992, at the invitation of the French government, he served as artist in residence at the Calder Atelier in Sache, and from 1997 to 1998 he was an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome.

A self-described outsider who “never felt like signing up and joining and being part of a coherent cadre of anything, ideologically, or esthetically, or attitudinally” (New York Times, 1 Nov. 1987), Puryear remained somewhat outside the shifting fashions and politics of the art world. Drawing from a diverse range of artists and styles, including Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, Jan Arp, Louise Bourgeois, dadaism, modernism, and Russian constructivism, Puryear’s work rejects pigeonholing. Inspired by the landscapes and artistic production of other cultures, he traveled worldwide, including to Japan, where he studied landscape design and architecture in 1983 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Perhaps his outsider status and journeyman’s spirit account for Puryear’s admiration for MATTHEW HENSON, JEAN BAPTISTE POINTE DU SABLE, and Jim Beckwourth, historic black men who transcended racial and social as well as spatial boundaries.

The surfaces and construction of Puryear’s wood and mixed-media sculptures are labor intensive, and they look it, revealing forms and methods borrowed from the folk technology, art, and architecture of nonindustrial cultures. Employing accumulative building processes such as wrapping, weaving, tying, and joinery associated with furniture making and shipbuilding, Puryear bridges the divide between art and craft. He celebrates traditional wood-bending techniques with Alien Huddle (1993–1995, private collection) and Plenty’s Boast (1994–1995, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), basket weaving with The Spell (1985, artist’s collection) and Charm of Substance (1989, St. Louis Art Museum), and architectural construction with Thicket (1990, Seattle Art Museum). “At bottom it’s a class issue really,” he argues. “‘Art’ means thought; ‘craft’ means manual work. In Japan you’ll never see that kind of snobbery; potters and carpenters are honored there as living national treasures” (Time, 9 July 2001).

In their geometric abstraction, economy of form, and clarity of shape, Puryear’s sculptures draw upon a minimalist sensibility, but he never considered himself a minimalist: “I tasted Minimalism. It had no taste. So I spat it out” (Washington Post, 25 Mar. 1988). Minimalism’s rejection of craft, its insistence on industrial materials and fabrication, and its denial of metaphor did not appeal to Puryear, whose work succeeds by its subjectivity, reverence for materials, and evocation of narrative through form. “I value the referential quality of work, the fact that it has the capacity to allude to things” (Chicago Tribune, 3 Nov. 1991). Enigmatic and mysterious, Puryear’s sculptures encourage interpretation. “I do not start with a particular thing and abstract from it. I have more a recombinant strategy. It’s like combining from many sources into something that has clarity and unity. I like a flickering quality, when you can’t say exactly what the reference is” (Chicago Tribune, 3 Nov. 1991). The results are complex and elegant abstractions—distilled essential forms—suggesting humans, animals, and objects, often in states of metamorphosis and transformation.

Evoking containers, boats, shelters, birds, tools, heads and profiles, cocoons, and amoebas, his sculptures suggest man-made and biomorphic elements without mimicking them. Some might see a bird’s beak, falcon’s talon, shark’s tooth, or birdcage in Seer (1984, Guggenheim Museum). At twelve feet high, Untitled (1997–2001, Donald Young Gallery) is simultaneously a children’s game, dinosaur, construction crane, and sea monster. “If you believe strongly,” Puryear contends, “you can pump life into materials” (Washington Post, 25 Mar. 1988).

Puryear plays with notions of inside and outside, size, volume, and perspective, challenging our sensual, emotional, and intellectual expectations. The basketlike Brunhilde (1998–2000, artist’s collection), for example, was laboriously constructed to look like weaving, though its pieces are not interlaced. Self (1978, Joslyn Art Museum), Confessional (1996–2000, artist’s collection), and Untitled (1997, Museum of Modern Art) appear solid but are actually hollow. Narrowing from two feet to one inch, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996, artist’s collection) teases the eye while meting out social commentary. Another poignant experimentation with perspective and transformation, This Mortal Coil (1998–1999) features an eighty-five-foot-high spiral staircase, its massive red cedar steps becoming lighter with its ascension, eventually turning into muslin. Aided by materials like wire mesh and tinted glass, Puryear achieves both solidity and transparency with massive pieces that are, in fact, quite fragile.

In addition to his studio work, Puryear created a number of significant outdoor sculptures, beginning with Box and Pole (1977, Artpark, Lewiston, New York), a dramatic juxtaposition of a one-hundred-foot-tall pole and a four-and-one-half-foot wooden cube. Other major outdoor installations include Bodark Arc (1982, Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park, Governor’s State University, Illinois), Knoll (1983, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, Seattle, Washington), Ampersand (1987–1988, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota), North Cove Pylons (1994, Battery Park, New York City), Bearing Witness (1995, Ronald Reagan Building Plaza, Washington, D.C.), and That Profile (1999, Getty Museum, Los Angeles), which Puryear conceived as “a drawing in space that would change as you walk around it.”

“This isn’t showoff sculpture,” explained critic Peter Plagens. “It’s just old-fashioned lyricism whose tires you can kick” (Newsweek 11 Nov. 1991). Encountering a Puryear sculpture is like discovering a vestigial artifact or relic, mysterious in its anachronism but rich in history.

QUARLES, BENJAMIN ARTHUR

(23 Jan. 1904–16 Nov. 1996), historian, was the eldest of five children born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Arthur Quarles, a subway porter, and Margaret O’Brien. Although he grew up in a poor neighborhood and, like his siblings, had to work menial jobs, Quarles graduated from English High School in 1922. Later, he and his brothers worked as waiters in Florida and as seamen on ships sailing from Boston to Bar Harbor, Maine. Both of these jobs were typical of the forms of employment available to African American men in New England from the late eighteenth century into the twentieth century.

In 1927 Benjamin Quarles enrolled at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he became a debater and a student leader, graduating in 1931 as valedictorian of his class. Following commencement he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after being awarded a Social Science Research Council Fellowship for graduate study in history. After studying there for four years and earning his master’s degree, Quarles returned to Shaw University to teach history. Two years later he married Vera Bullock of Greensboro, North Carolina. Their daughter, Roberta, was born in 1938. Still writing his dissertation in 1939, Quarles moved with his family to another black institution, Dillard University in New Orleans. After teaching at Dillard for two years, he became head of the social sciences division and, later, dean of the college.

While still a graduate student, Quarles began publishing in the Journal of Negro History. His 1940 article, “Frederick Douglass and the Woman’s Rights Movement,” became a classic, marking the beginning of his focus on gender in his discussions of black life in U.S. history. In the meantime, he completed his dissertation on FREDERICK DOUGLASS, earning his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1940. Quarles’s reputation as a young scholar began to grow, enabling him to earn five fellowships between 1931 and 1945, including one from the Rosenwald Fund.

By 1948 Quarles had expanded his dissertation into a full-length scholarly biography of Frederick Douglass, published by the Associated Publishers, Inc., an affiliate of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which CARTER G. WOODSON had cofounded in 1915. Frederick Douglass, the first definitive study of the nineteenth-century civil rights giant, was reprinted several times over the next five decades. According to the recollections of colleagues and family members, no white publishers had been interested in the manuscript, but the book was well received among black academics and intellectuals. Members of the Frederick Douglass Cultural Society, for example, held a book party, sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Book Center in Harlem, New York, to honor the publication. More than fifty years later Douglass’s biographer William S. McFeely described Quarles’s biography as an excellent study, still relevant to twenty-first-century readers interested in Douglass.

Although he was committed to academic publishing and research, Quarles, like many of his black cohorts in higher education, also served his community. While teaching and living in New Orleans during the 1940s, Quarles was secretary of the New Orleans Urban League and served on the New Orleans Council of Social Services. Always the scholar, during the 1950–1951 academic year Quarles went on sabbatical leave from Dillard to research his second book, The Negro in the Civil War (1953), a work that highlighted his expertise in black military history.

While he was away, his wife, Vera, died suddenly, leaving Quarles and their daughter, Roberta, alone and devastated. In December 1952, however, he married Dr. Ruth Brett, dean of students at Fisk University. The following academic year they left for Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, an historically black institution, where Quarles became chair of the history department; he remained in that position until the mid-1960s. Their daughter, Pamela, was born in 1954. By 1956 Ruth Brett Quarles was developing the Counseling Center at Morgan, of which she became coordinator; both she and her husband continued to work at the college (which became a university in 1974) until their retirement. While teaching and writing at Morgan, Quarles earned more fellowships, including a prestigious Guggenheim in 1959.

In his professional prime as a renowned historian, Quarles thrived at Morgan, where he became known as an outstanding mentor and popular professor and, in 1963, was selected as the college’s first Teacher of the Year. During the 1950s and 1960s he continued to serve the community and his profession as vice president of the Urban League and as vice president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. As a mentor and scholar during this period, the self-effacing Quarles never acknowledged that he was special. Others, however, always praised his willingness to help and promote them. Despite his claims of being unworthy of special awards, several were forthcoming. In 1967 Maryland’s U.S. Senator Daniel Brewster attended the Morgan State College celebration of Frederick Douglass’s birth and introduced Benjamin Quarles as the speaker. The senator was so impressed with Quarles’s lecture that he entered it into the Congressional Record (23 February 1967).

When Morgan’s president, Martin D. Jenkins, recommended Quarles to the governor of Maryland for a newly established honor, Distinguished Professor, Quarles became the first to receive such an award. Outside the state of Maryland, he continued to be honored for scholarship and mentoring. Between 1966 and 1996 Quarles received twelve honorary doctorate degrees. In addition, he received the American Historical Association’s Senior Historian Scholarly Distinction Award and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Lifetime Achievement Award (1996).

Retiring from active teaching in 1974 did not slow down Quarles’s scholarly work. He continued serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of Negro History and the Maryland Historical Magazine. Throughout the 1970s Quarles served on several community committees and boards, including the Joint Center for Political Studies’ Project Advisory Committee on Black Congress Members. He was also a member of the Committee of Advisers of the National Humanities Center Fellowships and the Department of Army Historical Advisory Committee. A prolific writer, Quarles continued to research and write into his mid-eighties, at which time he published the revised and expanded edition of his popular textbook The Negro in the Making of America (1987).

Although Quarles is best known for his biography of Frederick Douglass and his textbooks, scholars have also praised his influential and pathbreaking volume The Negro in the American Revolution (1961) and Black Abolitionists (1969). He has been revered as a major pioneer in writing about the African American experience before the Civil War, publishing a total of fourteen books from 1948 to 1988. In 1996 the historian V. P. Franklin wrote that Quarles was successful not only in writing about black troops in U.S. wars but also in examining the broad cultural contributions of African Americans to American society. Franklin described Quarles as one of the most distinguished scholars of African American history.

Quarles’s reputation as a mentor to the younger generation of African American scholars included his support in 1979 for black women historians seeking to organize their own professional association. As an adviser to the Association of Black Women Historians, he helped secure a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a research conference funded in 1983.

When Ruth Brett Quarles retired in 1980, the couple continued to reside in Baltimore. By 1988 they decided to donate Quarles’s papers and awards to the Morgan State University Soper Library and moved to the Collington Episcopal Life Care Community in Mitchellville, Maryland. They were living in this community when Quarles began to experience poor health. He died in Mitchellville of heart failure at the age of ninety-two.

The views of colleagues in his field may best speak to the impact that Benjamin Quarles had on his profession for over fifty years. In assessing his scholarship and historiographical development, the historian August Meier found that, in his work, Quarles, like his contemporary JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, brought attention to the diversity of black life in U.S. history.

PENNINGTON, JAMES WILLIAM CHARLES

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PLEASANT, MARY ELLEN

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PLESSY, HOMER ADOLPH

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POINDEXTER, HILDRUS AUGUSTUS

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POITIER, SIDNEY

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PORTER, JAMES AMOS

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POWELL, ADAM CLAYTON, JR.

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PRINCE, NANCY

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QUARLES, BENJAMIN ARTHUR

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