African American Lives

R

RAILROAD BILL

(?–7 Mar. 1896), thief and folk hero, was the nickname of a man of such obscure origins that his real name is in question. Most writers have believed him to be Morris Slater, but a rival candidate for the honor is an equally obscure man named Bill McCoy. But in song and story, where he has long had a place, the question is of small interest and Railroad Bill is name enough. A ballad regaling his exploits began circulating among field hands, turpentine camp workers, prisoners, and other groups from the black underclass of the deep South, several years before it first found its way into print in 1911. A version of this blues ballad was first recorded in 1924 by Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett, and THOMAS A. DORSEY, who sang blues under the name Railroad Bill. The ballad got a second wind during the folk music vogue of the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1981 the musical play Railroad Bill by C. R. Portz was produced for the Labor Theater in New York City. It subsequently toured thirty-five cities.

The name Railroad Bill, or often simply “Railroad,” was given to him by trainmen and derived from his penchant for riding the cars as an anonymous nonpaying passenger of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (L&N). Thus he might appear to be no more than a common tramp or hobo, as the large floating population of migratory workers who more or less surreptitiously rode the cars of all the nation’s railroads were labeled. But Railroad Bill limited his riding to two adjoining South Alabama counties, Escambia and Baldwin. Sometime in the winter of 1895 he began to be noticed by trainmen often enough that he soon acquired some notoriety and a nickname. It did not make him less worthy of remark that he was always armed, with a rifle and one or more pistols. He was, as it turned out, quite prepared to offer resistance to the rough treatment normally meted out to tramps.

An attitude of armed resistance from a black man was bound inevitably to bring him into conflict with the civil authorities, who were in any case inclined to be solicitous of the L&N, the dominant economic power in South Alabama. The conflict began on 6 March 1895, only a month or two after trainmen first became aware of Railroad Bill. L&N employees discovered him asleep on the platform of a water tank in Baldwin County, on the Flomaton to Mobile run, and tried to take him into custody. He drove them off with gunfire and forced them to take shelter in a nearby shack. When a freight train pulled up to take on water he hijacked it and, after firing additional rounds into the shack, forced the engineer to take him farther up the road, whereupon he left the train and disappeared into the woods. After that, pursuit of Railroad Bill was relentless. A month to the day later he was cornered at Bay Minette by a posse led by a railroad detective. A deputy, James H. Stewart, was killed in the ensuing gunfight, but once again the fugitive slipped away. The railroad provided a “special” to transport Sheriff E. S. McMillan from Brewton, the county seat of Escambia, to the scene with a pack of bloodhounds, but a heavy rainfall washed away the scent.

In mid-April a reward was posted by the L&N and the state of Alabama totaling five hundred dollars. The lure of this reward and a rumored sighting of the fugitive led Sheriff McMillan out of his jurisdiction to Bluff Springs, Florida, where he found Railroad Bill and met with death at his hands. The reward climbed to $1,250, and the manhunt intensified. A small army with packs of dogs picked up his scent near Brewton in August, but he dove into Murder Swamp near Castelberry and disappeared. During this period, from March to August, the legend of Railroad Bill took shape among poor blacks in the region. He was viewed as a “conjure man,” one who could change his shape and slip away from pursuers. He was clever and outwitted his enemies; he was a trickster who laid traps for the trapper and a fighter who refused to bend his neck and submit to the oppressor. He demanded respect, and in time some whites grudgingly gave it: Brewton’s Pine Belt News reported after Railroad Bill’s escape into Murder Swamp that he had “outwitted and outgeneraled at least one hundred men armed to the teeth.” During this period a Robin Hood-style Railroad Bill emerged, who, it was said, stole canned goods from boxcars and distributed them to poor illiterate blacks like himself. Carl Carmer, a white writer in the 1930s, claimed that Railroad Bill forced poor blacks at gunpoint to buy the goods from him, but Carmer never explained how it was possible to get money out of people who rarely if ever saw any. Railroad Bill staved off death and capture for an entire year, a virtual impossibility had he not had supporters among the poor black population of the region.

Sightings became infrequent after Murder Swamp, and some concluded Railroad Bill had left the area. The “wanted” poster with its reward was more widely circulated. The result was something like open season on vagrant blacks in the lower South. The Montgomery Advertiser reported that “several were shot in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and even in Texas,” adding with unconscious grisly humor, “only one was brought here to be identified.” That one arrived at Union Station in a pine box in August, escorted by the two men from Chipley, Florida, who had shot him in hopes of collecting the reward. Doubts about whether he remained in the area were answered on 7 March 1896, exactly a year and a day after the affair at the water tower when determined pursuit began. Railroad Bill was shot without warning, from ambush, by a private citizen seeking the reward, which by now included a lifetime pass on the L&N Railroad. Bill had been sitting on a barrel eating cheese and crackers in a small Atmore, Alabama, grocery. Perhaps he was tired as well as hungry.

Railroad Bill’s real name probably will never be known. At the time of the water tower incident and up to the killing of Deputy Stewart he had only the nickname, but in mid-April the first “wanted” posters went up in Mobile identifying Railroad Bill as Morris Slater, who, though the notice did not state it, had been a worker in a turpentine camp near Bluff Springs, Florida. These camps were often little more than penal colonies. They employed convict labor and were heavily into debt peonage. People were not supposed to leave, but Slater did, after killing the marshal of Bluff Springs. When railroad detectives stumbled on this story their interest was primarily in Slater’s nickname. He had been called “Railroad Time,” and “Railroad” for short, because of his quick efficient work. The detectives quickly concluded, because of the similarities in nicknames, that Slater was their man. The problem, of course, is that the trainmen called their rider Railroad Bill precisely because they had no idea who he was and well before railroad authorities heard about Slater. If the detectives were right, then it follows that the same man independently won strangely similar nicknames in two different settings, once because he was a good worker, and again because he was a freeloader.

No one from the turpentine camp who had known Slater identified the body, but neither the railroad detectives nor the civil authorities involved questioned the identification. The body was taken to Brewton, on its way to Montgomery, where it would go on display for the public’s gratification, but it was also displayed for a time in Brewton and recognized. The Pine Belt News reported that residents recognized the body as that of Bill McCoy, a man who would have been about forty, the approximate age of the corpse, since he had been brought to the area from Coldwater, Florida, as a young man eighteen years earlier. McCoy was remembered as a town troublemaker who two years earlier had threatened T. R. Miller, the richest man in town, when he worked in Miller’s sawmill and lumberyard. He had fled the scene hastily, not to be seen again until his corpse went on display as Railroad Bill. But, apart from the local newspaper stories, no one disputed the Slater identification, and the local Brewton people seem to have concluded that Morris Slater must have been a name used by Bill McCoy after he fled the town. The problem with that conclusion is that when the incident at Miller’s sawmill occurred Morris Slater had already earned the nickname “Railroad Time” in a Florida turpentine camp.

RAINES, FRANKLIN DELANO

(14 Jan. 1949–), corporate executive and government official, was born Franklin Delano Raines in Seattle, Washington, the fourth of seven children of Delno Thomas Raines, a custodian, and Ida Mae Raines, a cleaning woman. He was named after his uncle Frank and his father, but the hospital misspelled his middle name as “Delano.”

The Raines family eventually moved into a house that Delno Raines had built himself over the course of five years. The household was constantly fighting economic challenges. When Raines was a young boy, his father was hospitalized for an illness and lost his job. As a result, the family received welfare for two years. Eventually, Delno Raines got full-time work as a custodian for the city of Seattle. Ida Raines added to their income by working as a cleaning woman for the aircraft company Boeing. But Raines would always remember the lessons of being on the brink of financial ruin. He later recalled that the experience of living with nothing to fall back on made him “quite sensitive to issues of personal and financial security. That probably made me very conservative in my own financial dealings and also made me worry a lot about people” (Stevenson, New York Times, 17 May 1998).

Very early in his life it was clear that Raines was an achiever and destined for great things. When he was in high school, the Seattle Times called him “Mr. Everything” (Karen Tumulty, Time, 10 Feb. 1997). He was state debate champion, captain of the high school football team, and student president of his high school. His academic excellence (reflected in his 4.0 average) earned Raines a four-year scholarship to Harvard University, which he entered in 1967. He worked toward a BA in Government and impressed many, including Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future U.S. senator. In 1969 Raines was asked to intern at the White House in the Urban Affairs Department headed by Moynihan. At age twenty Raines was making a presentation to President Nixon.

After graduating in 1971 Raines went to Magdalen College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After that, in 1974, he entered Harvard Law School, from which he graduated cum laude in 1976. After a seven-month stint at the law firm Preston, Gates, and Ellis, Raines’s impressive résumé earned him a position as assistant director for economics and government in the Office of Management and Budget in President Jimmy Carter’s administration. This was the beginning of a career that would marry his political savvy and his financial acumen. In 1979 he moved to Wall Street and became an investment banker for the prestigious firm Lazard Frères.

Raines worked in the municipal finance department and advised cities and states about their finances and ability to raise money for government projects, such as bridges and buildings. The political skills that he had developed over his career continued to help him in his new position. Raines landed accounts with major cities like Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Detroit. He also worked on statewide accounts for Texas and Iowa, among others. With his help these municipalities, many of which were in dire financial trouble, were able to strengthen their finances. The most dramatic example of his work came in Washington, D.C. He helped reorganize the city’s finances with such success that Wall Street allowed Washington to borrow money for the first time in a century.

Raines’s success was rewarded in 1985 when he was named a partner at Lazard Frères. This appointment had broader implications. He had already been one of a handful of African Americans investment bankers in the clubby world of Wall Street. Now he was the first African American partner at a major investment bank. Raines once reflected about the importance of his achievement in the securities industry by saying, “I felt it was significant because for years, people would be wowed by the fact that you were black and a vice president. Now partner or managing director became the new standard” (Bell, 143).

During this period things were also blossoming in Raines’ personal life. He married Wendy Farrow in 1982, and the couple went on to have three daughters. His commitment to his family persuaded Raines to make a career-altering decision. In 1991, after twelve years of working in municipal finance, he decided to leave Lazard. Tired of the extensive traveling that was necessary in his work with municipalities around the country, a workload that had him on a plane as many as five days a week, he decided that he would quit his lucrative career on Wall Street to spend more time with his family.

Raines, with his impeccable reputation, was not out of work for long. Later that year he was asked to join Fannie Mae, a huge mortgage corporation located only minutes from his house. Fannie Mae, formerly known as the Federal National Mortgage Association, was created in 1938 as a government agency. In the 1960s it was turned into a corporation owned by shareholders. It purchases mortgages from lending institutions and resells them to the secondary market. As vice chairman, Raines had the main responsibility to improve Fannie Mae’s technology. He was also in charge of the firm’s credit policy and legal issues, along with sundry other functions.

Franklin Raines on Fox TV in April 1998. Getty Images

Raines continued in this position until 1996, when President Bill Clinton called to ask him to head the Office of Management and Budget. He reentered public service and led the country to its first balanced budget since 1969. After years of success in this position, Fannie Mae came calling again, and in January 1999 Raines made history. He became the first African American to lead a Fortune 500 company, and soon other black executives like STANLEY O’NEAL, RICHARD DEAN PARSONS, and KENNETH CHENAULT would also head major corporations.

Fannie Mae is the largest source of private financing for home mortgages. One of Raines’s primary objectives was to increase his company’s business by spurring more home ownership in the minority community. It is an issue close to his heart, because his father could not get a mortgage loan until the house he was building was almost finished. The company itself also is concentrating on creating a talented and diverse workforce. In 2002 Fortune ranked Fannie Mae number one on their “50 Best Companies for Minorities” list (Jonathan Hickman, Fortune, 8 July 2002).

Frank Raines has come a long way from his old neighborhood in Seattle. He has conquered prestigious universities, Wall Street, and government and now heads one of the biggest corporations in the world. In addition to his responsibilities to his shareholders and employees, he also recognizes the responsibility of being a “first.” As he once said, “It’s part of my job to insure that the path I’ve been able to follow can be followed by other black kids. There are a lot of shoulders I get to stand on. I need to provide a hand and shoulders for others to follow” (Stevenson, New York Times, 17 May 1998).

RAINEY, MA

(26 Apr. 1886–22 Dec. 1939), vaudeville artiste and “Mother of the Blues,” was born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of Ella Allen, an employee of the Georgia Central Railroad, and Thomas Pridgett, whose occupation is unknown. Around 1900, at the age of fourteen, Pridgett made her debut in the Bunch of Blackberries revue at the Springer Opera House in Columbus, one of the biggest theaters in Georgia and a venue that had been graced by, among others, Lillie Langtry and Oscar Wilde. Within two years she was a regular in minstrel tent shows—troupes of singers, acrobats, dancers, and novelty acts—which traveled throughout the South. At one show in Missouri in 1902 she heard a new musical form, “the blues,” and incorporated it into her act. Although she did not discover or name the blues, as legend would later have it, Gertrude Pridgett was undeniably one of the pioneers of the three-line stanza, twelve-bar style now known as the “classic blues.”

In 1904 the seventeen-year-old Gertrude married William Rainey, a comedian, dancer, and minstrel-show veteran. “Ma” and “Pa” Rainey soon became a fixture on the southern tent-show circuit, and they achieved their greatest success in 1914–1916 as Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues, part of the touring Tolliver’s Circus and Musical Extravaganza. Their adopted son, Danny, “the world’s greatest juvenile stepper,” also worked with the show.

The summer tent shows took the Raineys throughout the South, where Ma was popular among both white and black audiences. Winters brought Ma, billed as Madame Gertrude Rainey, to New Orleans, where she performed with several pioneering jazz and blues musicians, including SIDNEY BECHET and KING OLIVER. Around 1914 Ma took a young blues singer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, BESSIE SMITH, under her wing—legend erroneously had it that she kidnapped her—and the two collaborated and remained friends over the next two decades. During these tent-show years, Ma honed a flamboyant stage persona, making her entrance in a bejeweled, floor-length gown and a necklace made of twenty-dollar gold pieces. The blues composer THOMAS A. DORSEY recalled that Ma had the audience in the palm of her hand even before she began to sing, while LANGSTON HUGHES noted that only a testifying Holiness church could match the enthusiasm of a Ma Rainey concert.

Rainey’s voice was earthy and powerful, a rural Georgian contralto with a distinctive moan and lisp. One blues singer also suggested that Ma held a dime under her tongue to prevent a stutter. Far from hindering her performance, these imperfections made Rainey’s vocal style even more appealing to an audience that shared her down-to-earth philosophy, captured in “Down in the Basement”:

Grand Opera and parlor junk

I’ll tell the world it’s all bunk

That’s the kind of stuff I shun

Let’s get dirty and have some fun.

Rainey often sang of pain and love lost or betrayed, but her songs—and her life—also celebrated the bawdy and unabashed pleasures of the flesh. Ma joked with her audiences that she preferred her men “young and tender” (Barlow, 159), but in songs such as “Lawd Send Me a Man Blues,” the preference matters less than the pleasure: “Send me a Zulu, a voodoo, any old man,/I’m not that particular, boys, I’ll take what I can.”

By World War I, Ma Rainey’s star had eclipsed that of Pa’s. (They separated in the late teens, and Pa died soon after.) In 1923 Rainey began a recording career with Chicago’s Paramount Records, which brought her down-home country blues to a national audience. Over the next five years, she recorded more than a hundred songs with many of the leading instrumentalists of the day, including Lovie Austin, Coleman Hawkins, and Thomas A. Dorsey, who also led Ma’s touring band. In 1924 a young LOUIS ARMSTRONG played cornet on her most famous release, “See See Rider.” Though already a blues standard, Ma’s rendition was the first and, bluesologists contend, the definitive recording of the song.

Her success as a recording artist and the general popularity of the “race records” industry led to a string of headlining tours with the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA). Black performers often called the organization “Tough on Black Asses,” because of its low wages and grueling schedule, but Rainey’s sense of fairness may have assuaged any complaints from the touring entourage of singers, dancers, and comedians. Unlike many TOBA head-liners, Ma never skipped town without paying her fellow performers. As a teenager, Lionel Hampton, who knew Ma through his bootlegger uncle in Chicago, “used to dream of joining Ma Rainey’s band because she treated her musicians so wonderfully and always bought them an instrument” (Lieb, 26). Rainey’s TOBA shows were even more popular than her tent shows had been, and her audience spread to midwest-em cities, whose black populations had swelled during the Great Migration. The shift from tents to theaters also provided new outlets for Ma’s showmanship. She now made an even grander entrance, stepping out of the doors of a huge Victrola onto the stage, wearing her trademark spangles and sequins.

Contemporaries often contrasted Ma’s evenhanded temperament with Bessie Smith’s hard-drinking, fiery temper, but Rainey was not unacquainted with the wrong side of the law. Ma’s love of jewelry once led to an arrest onstage in Cleveland, Ohio, when police from Nashville, Tennessee, arrested her for possession of stolen goods. Ma denied knowing that the items were hot, but was detained in Nashville for a week and forced to return the jewelry. More notoriously, Rainey spent a night in jail in Chicago in 1925, when neighbors called the police to complain about a loud and drunken party that she was holding with a group of women. When the police discovered the women in various states of undress, they arrested Ma for “running an indecent party.” Her friend Bessie Smith bailed her out the next day.

That incident and several biographies of Smith have highlighted Rainey’s open bisexuality and the possibility of a lesbian relationship between the two women. To be sure, Ma Rainey’s life and songs rejected the prevailing puritan orthodoxy when it came to sexuality. In “Sissy Blues,” written by Tom Dorsey, she bemoans the loss of her man to his male lover: “My man’s got a sissy, his name is Miss Kate, / He shook that thing like jelly on a plate.” Most famously, in “Prove It on Me Blues,” Rainey declares, “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends, / They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.” Ma’s bold assertion of her preference for women alternated with a coy, but knowing wink to the taboo of that choice: “’Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me,/Sure got to prove it on me.” Paramount’s advertisement for the record was somewhat less coy, depicting a hefty Ma Rainey in waistcoat, men’s jacket, shirt, tie, and fedora—though still wearing a skirt—towering over two slim, femininely dressed young women while a policeman looks on.

The sexual politics of the lyrics were just one aspect of the song, however. Paramount appeared just as keen to highlight that it was “recorded by the latest electric method,” all the better to hear Ma’s vocals and the “bang-up accompaniment by the Tub Jug Washboard Band.” Indeed, the company saw no problem in promoting some of its most popular gospel spirituals on the same advertisement. Like Ma Rainey herself, the race records industry of the 1920s may have been less squeamish about open declarations of homosexuality than many media giants in the late twentieth century.

Paramount ended Rainey’s recording contract in 1928, shortly after the release of “Prove It on Me Blues,” but not because of any controversy regarding the record itself. The company argued that Ma’s “down home material had gone out of fashion,” though that did not deter the label from signing male country blues performers who accepted lower fees. Ma returned to the southern tent-show circuit with TOBA, but by the early 1930s the Great Depression and the rival attractions of radio and the movies had destroyed the mass audience for the old-time country blues and black vaudeville at which Rainey excelled. Undeterred, though as much through necessity as choice, Ma returned to her southern roots, touring the oil-field towns of East Texas with the Donald MacGregor Carnival. Gone were the gold necklaces, the touring bus, and the grand entrance out of a huge Victrola. Now MacGregor, formerly the “Scottish Giant” in the Ringling Brothers’ circus, stood outside Ma’s tent and barked his introduction of the “Black Nightingale” inside. Rainey’s performances were as entertaining as ever, but the uncertainty and poor wages of the tent-show circuit may have somewhat diminished her trademark good humor and generosity. A young guitarist who toured with her in those years, Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, described Rainey as “mean as hell, but she sang nice blues and never cursed me out” (Lieb, 46–47).

The death of her sister Malissa in 1935 brought Ma Rainey back to Columbus to look after her mother. At some time before that Ma had separated from her second husband, whose name is not known. Although she no longer performed, Rainey opened two theaters in Rome, Georgia, where she died of heart disease in December 1939, aged fifty-three. The obituary in Ma’s local newspaper noted that she was a housekeeper but failed to mention her musical career. In the 1980s, however, both the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognized Ma Rainey’s significance as a consummate performer and as a pioneer of the classic blues.

RANDOLPH, A. PHILIP

(15 Apr. 1889–16 May 1979), labor organizer, editor, and activist, was born Asa Philip Randolph in Crescent City, Florida, to Elizabeth Robinson and James Randolph, an African Methodist Episcopal Church preacher. In 1891 the Randolphs moved to Jacksonville, where James had been offered the pastorship of a small church. Both Asa Philip and his older brother, James Jr., were talented students who graduated from Cookman Institute (later Bethune-Cookman College), the first high school for African Americans in Florida.

Randolph left Florida in 1911, moving to New York to pursue a career as an actor. Between 1912 and 1917 he attended City College, where he was first exposed to the ideas of Karl Marx and political radicalism. He joined the Socialist Party in 1916, attracted to the party’s economic analysis of black exploitation in America. Randolph, along with W. E. B. Du Bois, HUBERT HENRY HARRISON, and Chandler Owen, was one of the pioneer black members of the Socialist Party—then led by Eugene Debs. Like a number of his peers, Randolph did not subscribe to a belief in a “special” racialized oppression of blacks that existed independent of class. Rather, he argued at this point that socialism would essentially “answer” the “Negro question.” His faith in the socialist solution can be seen in the title of an essay he wrote on racial violence, “Lynching: Capitalism Its Cause; Socialism Its Cure” (Messenger, September 1921).

In 1916 Randolph and Owen began working to organize the black labor force, founding the short-lived United Brotherhood of Elevator and Switchboard Operators union. Shortly thereafter, they co-edited the Hotel Messenger, the journal of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society. After being fired by the organization, they created The Messenger in 1917—with crucial financial support from Lucille Randolph, a beauty salon owner whom Randolph had married in 1914. The couple had no children. Lucille Randolph’s success as an entrepreneur was a consistent source of stability—despite the fact that her husband’s reputation as a radical scared away some of her clientele. Billing itself as “The Only Radical Negro Magazine,” the boldly iconoclastic Messenger quickly became one of the benchmark publications of the incipient “New Negro” movement. A single issue contained the views of Abram Harris, KELLY MILLER, GEORGE SCHUYLER, ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON, COUNTÉE CULLEN, EMMETT JAY SCOTT, and CHARLES S. JOHNSON.

Civil rights leader and editor A. Philip Randolph in 1964. Library of Congress

In the context of the postwar red scare, however, Randolph’s leftist politics brought him to the attention of federal authorities determined to root out radicals, anarchists, and communists but who showed little regard for civil liberties. With the Messenger dubbed “the most dangerous of all Negro publications” by the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), Randolph and Owen were arrested under the Espionage Act in 1918 but were eventually acquitted of all charges.

When the Socialist Party split in 1919 over the issue of affiliation with the newly created socialist state in Russia, Randolph and Owen remained in the Socialist Party faction. The left wing of the party broke away, eventually coalescing into the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). Randolph’s ties to the Socialist Party remained firm, and he ran as the party’s candidate for New York State comptroller in 1920 and as its candidate for secretary of state in 1921. Initial relations with the black CPUSA members were warm, with the communists Lovett Fort-Whiteman and W. A. Domingo writing for the Messenger. By the late 1920s, however, Randolph had become involved in the sometime fractious politics of the black left in the New Negro era.

In the early 1920s Randolph worked for the “Garvey Must Go” campaigns directed by an ad-hoc collection of black leaders opposed to the charismatic—and often belligerent—black nationalist MARCUS GARVEY. Randolph and Garvey had shared a common mentor in the socialist intellectual Hubert Harrison. Randolph claimed, in fact, to have introduced Garvey to the tradition of Harlem street corner oratory. Randolph’s opposition to Garvey appears to have been rooted in his perspective that Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association ignored the “class struggle nature of the Negro problem,” as well as in his belief that Garvey was untrustworthy.

At the same time that W. A. Domingo charged that the Messenger’s attacks on Marcus Garvey had metastasized into a general anti-Caribbean bias, the magazine began devoting much less attention to radical politics in general and Russia specifically. Randolph’s embryonic anticommunism was partially responsible for this shift, but the Messenger had also attempted to broaden its base by appealing to more upwardly mobile black strivers.

With the Messenger in editorial and financial decline, Randolph accepted a position as the head of the newly established Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) and spearheaded a joint drive for recognition of the union by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Pullman Company. Randolph led the organization to affiliation with the AFL in 1928—a significant accomplishment in the face of the racial discrimination practiced by many of their sibling unions in the AFL. Randolph’s decision to cancel a planned BSCP strike in 1928, however, resulted in a significant loss of confidence in the union and opened him up to criticism from the Communist Party, among others.

The Communist Party-affiliated American Negro Labor Congress, created in 1925, became increasingly critical of Randolph and the BSCP by the end of the decade. At the same time, Randolph’s thinking and writing took a strong and persistent anticommunist turn. In the 1930s the economic upheaval of the Great Depression and the controversial treatment of the wrongfully imprisoned SCOTTSBORO BOYS brought Communists an unprecedented degree of recognition and status within black America. The era’s radicalism found expression in 1935 in the creation of the National Negro Congress (NNC)—an umbrella organization with liberal, radical, and moderate black elements. Randolph was selected as the organization’s first president in 1936. Given his standing as a radical socialist, labor organizer, and civil rights advocate, Randolph was one of the few prominent African Americans with ties to many of the diverse constituencies that made up the NNC.

Global politics shaped the organization from the outset. The NNC had been founded in the midst of the “Popular Front” era and, in many ways, had been facilitated by the shared concern of communists, liberals, socialists, and moderates about the spread of fascism across Europe and the lack of civil rights for blacks in America. However, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 effectively ended the Popular Front, and tensions within the NNC increased. Randolph resigned in 1940, charging that Communist influence had undercut the NNC’s autonomy and saying famously that “it was hard enough being black without also being red” (press release, 4 May 1940, in NAACP papers, A-444).

World War II brought Randolph a new set of challenges. With America on the verge of the war in 1941, he organized the March on Washington movement, an attempt to bring ten thousand African Americans to Washington to protest discrimination in defense industries. President Franklin Roosevelt, recognizing the possible impact upon morale and public relations and the significance of the black vote in the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections, issued Executive Order 8806, which forbade discrimination in defense industries and created the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In response, the proposed march was cancelled. Randolph, however, remained at the head of the organization until 1946.

In 1948 Randolph, along with BAYARD RUSTIN, with whom he would work closely in later years, organized the League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience against Military Segregation. The organization’s efforts led to a meeting with President Harry S. Truman in which Randolph predicted that black Americans would not fight any more wars in a Jim Crow army. As with the planned march on Washington, the 1948 efforts influenced Truman’s decision to desegregate the military with Executive Order 9981.

During the 1950s Randolph became more closely aligned with mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP—organizations that he had fiercely criticized earlier in his career. He also became more outspokenly anticommunist, traveling internationally with the Socialist Norman Thomas to point out the shortcomings of Soviet Communism. He was elected to the executive council of the newly united AFL-CIO in 1955. The high-water mark of his influence, however, had passed. Randolph did not exert as much influence with the union president George Meany as he had with the AFL president William Green, whom he had known since the BSCP’s affiliation in 1928. In 1959 Randolph assumed the presidency of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC). That same year, Randolph’s address on the subject of racism within the AFLCIO elicited a stern rebuke from Meany. Wedged between the radical younger members of the NALC and his contentious relationship with Meany, Randolph resigned his position in 1964.

Randolph reemerged in the 1960s in connection with the modern civil rights movement; in 1962 Rustin and the seventy-two-year-old Randolph proposed a march on Washington to MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. and the NAACP’s ROY WILKINS. Randolph was the first speaker to address the 200,000 marchers at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963, stating that “we are not a pressure group, an organization or a group of organizations, we are the advance guard for a massive moral revolution for jobs and freedom.” The march was a decisive factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Randolph presided over the creation of the A. Philip Randolph Institute in 1964 and spearheaded the organization’s efforts to extend a guaranteed income to all citizens of the United States. His anticommunist views led him to support the war in Vietnam—a stance that put him at odds with his onetime ally Martin Luther King, among others. He distrusted the evolving radicalism that characterized the decade, stating that Black Power had overtones of black racism. His public support for the United Federation of Teachers in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict of 1968, in which black community organizations attempted to minimize the authority of the largely white teachers union, further alienated Randolph from the younger generation of Black Power advocates.

By the time of his death in Manhattan in 1979 Randolph had become an icon in the struggle for black equality in the twentieth century. More than any other figure, A. Philip Randolph was responsible for articulating the concerns of black labor—particularly in the context of the civil rights movement. His organizing abilities and strategic acumen were key to the desegregation of defense contracting and the signal legislative achievement of the civil rights era: passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

RANGEL, CHARLES

(11 June 1930–), member of the U.S. Congress, was born in Harlem, New York City, the second of three children of Ralph Rangel and Blanche Wharton. When Rangel was still young, his father abandoned them; his mother worked in New York’s garment industry and occasionally did house cleaning to support them. She was active in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and in Harlem’s civic life. In 1948 Rangel joined the army, serving until 1952; he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service during the Korean War. Discharged as a staff sergeant, Rangel attended New York University on the G.I. Bill and in 1957 earned a BA in Business Administration. In 1960 he earned a law degree from St. John’s University Law School, Brooklyn, and began the practice of law in Harlem, where he also joined the local Democratic Party club. Rangel subsequently worked in a variety of legal positions, including legal assistant to the New York district attorney, counsel to the New York City Housing and Redevelopment Board, and assistant U.S. attorney. In 1964 he married Alma Carter, a social worker, and together they had two children.

In 1966 Rangel’s involvement in Harlem Democratic Party politics paid off, when he was elected to the New York State General Assembly. Rangel’s rise in Harlem politics was promoted by the legendary J. Raymond Jones, the first African American chair of the New York County (Manhattan) Democratic Party Committee. Four years later Rangel defeated another legend in Harlem politics—ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR.—and was elected to the House of Representatives. Powell, the pastor of one of Harlem’s most influential churches and the first African American elected to the U.S. Congress from New York, for years had been the best-known and most influential black politician in the United States. However, despite his iconic status in Harlem and among African Americans in general, by 1970 he was vulnerable—in 1967 he had been expelled from Congress, and though he was reelected in 1968, his power was greatly diminished. In addition, because of an outstanding civil warrant, Powell could visit Harlem only on Sundays. Rangel seized the opportunity to challenge him, narrowly defeating him in the four-person Democratic primary election. Winning by a mere 150 votes and one percentage point, Rangel was successful mainly as a result of white votes. In a development unrelated to the election, a largely white section of the Upper West Side of Manhattan had been added to Powell’s district. Rangel won in these white areas by fifteen hundred votes. However, like most incumbent members of the House, once elected Rangel was easily returned to office, often running unopposed or winning by margins of victory of 80 percent or more against little-known opponents. The only serious challenge to his reelection occurred in 1994, when Adam Clayton Powell IV, a city councilman and the son of the former congressman, ran against him. Fearing the allure of the Powell name, Rangel raised nearly a million and a half dollars and easily defeated the young Powell.

Rangel came to the House the year several new black members were elected, including Bill Clay of Missouri, Louis Stokes of Ohio, and SHIRLEY CHISHOLM of New York, increasing the size of the black congressional delegation from six to thirteen. Younger and more activist than their senior colleagues, Rangel and these new members decided to form the Congressional Black Caucus. Many white and several of the senior black members of the House, including Robert C. Nix of Pennsylvania and Augustus Hawkins of California, opposed the formation of the caucus, arguing that it was inappropriate for members of Congress to organize on the basis of race. But influenced by the ascendant Black Power philosophy, which called on blacks to establish racially separate organizations, Rangel and his colleagues argued that a caucus of blacks was necessary to advance the interest of blacks in the House, getting good committee assignments, for example, and nationally, through the development and articulation of a black legislative agenda. In 1974 Rangel was elected chair of the caucus, becoming its third chair after Congressmen Charles Diggs and Louis Stokes.

In his first term Rangel was assigned to two relatively minor committees—Public Works and Science and Aeronautics—whose jurisdictions had little to do with issues of concern to Harlem or blacks. However, in his second term he was assigned to the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over civil rights legislation, and to the Committee on the District of Columbia, which oversees the largely black city of Washington, D.C. Rangel was on the Judiciary Committee in 1974 when, in nationally televised proceedings, it considered articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. He spoke and voted in favor of each of the three articles charging Nixon with “high crimes and misdemeanors” that merited impeachment. Nixon resigned shortly after the committee approved the articles. In 1986 Rangel was appointed to the Ways and Means Committee, the oldest, most prestigious, and most powerful House committee, with jurisdiction over taxes, international trade, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and welfare. In 1995 Rangel, the first African American to serve on the committee, became the committee’s ranking Democrat, meaning that he will become its first African American chair if the Democrats win a majority of House seats.

Reflecting the concerns of his district specifically and, to some extent, the concerns of blacks nationwide, Rangel also served on the Select Committee on Crime and the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, chairing the latter from 1983 until it was abolished in 1993. More so than many big-city ghettos, Harlem has been plagued by problems of crime and drug trafficking. Rangel used his position of leadership on the Narcotics Committee to press for policies to interdict the flow of drugs into the country and to spend money on rehabilitation as well as incarceration. However, Rangel’s position on narcotics generally has been relatively conservative. For example, he opposed the legalization of marijuana and other drugs and the provision of free needles to addicts to combat AIDS.

Rangel has several important legislative accomplishments to his credit. He was a principal author of federal empowerment zone legislation (1993) and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit (1978), both designed to attract jobs to low-income areas like Harlem. He also sponsored the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (1986) to encourage home ownership among the poor. And he was a principal author of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, legislation designed to encourage trade between the United States and African nations.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, after more than thirty years in the House, Rangel was one of its most influential and widely respected members. He was also a leading player in national Democratic Party politics and a broker in New York City and New York State politics, successfully maneuvering in 2002 to obtain the Democratic Party nomination for governor for Carl McCall, an African American. He encouraged and helped Hillary Clinton, the wife of the former president, win a seat in the U.S. Senate, representing New York. He was also instrumental in persuading President Bill Clinton to locate his post-presidential office in Harlem. In 2003, as the United States approached war with Iraq, Rangel introduced legislation to reinstate the military draft, arguing that all social classes, rather than mainly the lower-middle class and the poor, should be represented in the military. Like his predecessor, Rangel managed to project his representation of Harlem onto a national platform, where he is recognized as one of the highest ranking and most influential black elected officials in the United States.

REASON, PATRICK HENRY

(April? 1816–12 Aug. 1898), printmaker and abolitionist, was born in New York City, the son of Michel Reason, of St. Anne, Guadeloupe, and Elizabeth Melville, of Saint-Dominique. Patrick was baptized as Patrick Rison in the Church of St. Peter on 17 April 1816. While it is not known why the spelling of his name changed, it may have been a homage to the political leader Patrick Henry. While he was still a student at the African Free School in New York, his first engraving was published, the frontispiece to Charles C. Andrews’s The History of the New York African Free-Schools (1830). It carried the byline “Engraved from a drawing by P. Reason, aged thirteen years.” Shortly thereafter, Reason became apprenticed to a white printmaker, Stephen Henry Gimber, and then maintained his own studio at 148 Church Street in New York, where he offered a wide variety of engraving services. Reason was among the earliest and most successful of African American printmakers.

A skilled orator, Reason delivered a speech, “Philosophy of the Fine Arts,” to the Phoenixonian Literary Society in New York on 4 July 1837. (It is unclear whether this association was the same as the Phoenix Society, a benevolent organization that had been founded by the Reverend Peter Williams in 1833.) The Colored American newspaper reported this speech to be “ably written, well delivered, and indicative of talent and research.” In 1838 Reason won first premium (prize) for his India ink drawing exhibited at the Mechanics Institute Fair, and he advertised himself in the Colored American as a “Historical, Portrait and Landscape Engraver, Draughtsman & Lithographer” who could produce “Address, Visiting and Business Cards, Certificates, Jewelry &c., neatly engraved.” He also gave evening instruction in “scientific methods of drawing,” worked for Harpers Publishers preparing map plates, and did government engraving. Reason appeared as a “col’d” (“colored”) engraver in New York City directories from 1846 to 1866.

Perhaps Reason’s best-known works are his copper engravings of chained slaves. The first, featuring a female figure and the caption “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” (1835), was a common letterhead of abolitionists from the mid-1830s onward and was reproduced on both British and American antislavery plaques, publications, coins, and medals. (However, while he was a staunch abolitionist, Reason did not initially support women’s rights; he attended the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 and signed a protest against extending the vote to women in the society and against their serving as officers.) A later similar engraving (1839?) depicts a kneeling young male slave wearing tattered clothing, his wrists bound by long, thick manacles. With his head cocked to the side in a forlorn expression, he clasps his hands in prayer. This version, entitled Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, embellished membership certificates of Philadelphia’s Vigilant Committee, a group of young African American activists who aided escaped slaves. The committee’s secretary, Jacob C. White Sr., or its president, Robert Purvis, whose names are on the certificate, may have commissioned the piece. Reason’s source for the imagery may have been Wedgwood relief designs or a seal (1787) bearing the same motto along with a chained kneeling slave in a similar position and attitude, used by the English Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

As a freelance engraver and lithographer, Reason produced portraits and designs for periodicals and frontispieces in slave narratives in the mid-nineteenth century. Typically, his portraits were profile or three-quarters, bust-length images of men with stoic expressions and dressed in coats and ties, set against black backgrounds. Examples appear in Lydia Maria Child’s The Fountain for Every Day in the Year (1836), A Memoir of Granville Sharp (1836) for which Reason based his work on an earlier engraving of the British abolitionist and reformer by T. B. Lord, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave: Who Was Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (1838), John Wesley’s Thoughts on Slavery Written in 1774 (reprinted in 1839), Liberty Bell (1839, “The Church Shall Make You Free”), and Baptist Memorial (members of the London Emancipation Society, the Reverend Baptist Noel and the Reverend Thomas Baldwin). Three works by Reason appeared in the U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review: portraits of the Ohio antislavery senator Benjamin Tappan, after a painting by Washington Blanchard (June 1840 which later appeared in the Annual Obituary Notices in 1857 and 1858); the lawyer and diplomat George Mifflin Dallas (Feb. 1842); and the mathematician Robert Adrain, after a painting by Ingraham (June 1844).

Reason also completed two portraits of the antislavery lecturer HENRY BIBB, a lithograph (1840) and a copper engraving featured in Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849). While the lithograph depicts Bibb standing rigidly before a draped window, the engraving portrays him casually holding a book in his right hand, posed against a dark background. Among Reason’s other works were an engraving of a mountainous landscape after a drawing by W. H. Bartlett and a copper nameplate for Daniel Webster’s coffin. Additional subjects included the slave James Williams (1838), the abolitionist PETER WILLIAMS JR., New York governor De Witt Clinton, and the physician JAMES MCCUNE SMITH. In 1838 Reason arranged a public meeting to honor Smith on his return from a European trip. In 1840 he worked with Smith at the Albany Convention of Colored Citizens in drafting a letter to the U.S. Senate protesting racist remarks made by Secretary of State John C. Calhoun to the British minister to the United States regarding a slave revolt onboard the Creole.

In the 1840s and 1850s Reason was active in a number of civic groups and fraternal orders. He served as secretary of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education among Colored Children, founded in 1847. As a member of the New York Philomath-ean Society, organized in 1830 for literary improvement and social pleasure, he petitioned the International Order of Odd Fellows for the society to become a lodge of the association. Although the application was refused, the society received a dispensation from Victoria Lodge No. 448 in Liverpool and became Hamilton Lodge No. 710 in 1844. Reason served as grand master and permanent secretary of the group in the 1850s. His speech at the annual meeting in 1856 was declared the finest given up to that time. Reason not only developed the secret ritual of the order but also composed the Ruth degree, the first “degree to be conferred under certain conditions on Females,” and in 1858 he was the first person to receive the honor.

Reason also served as grand secretary of the New York Masons from 1859 to 1860 and as grand master from 1862 to 1868, receiving the Thirty-third Degree of Masonry in 1862. Simultaneously, he was grand master of the Supreme Council for the States, Territories, and Dependencies. The printmaker created original certificates of membership for both the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and the Masonic Fraternity.

Reason may have taught in the New York schools after 1850. Public School No. 1 was associated with the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, an organization with which Reason had close ties. In 1852 MARTIN R. DELANY described Reason in The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States as “a gentleman of ability and a fine artist” who “stands high as an engraver in the city of New York. Mr. Reason has been in business for years… and has sent out to the world, many beautiful specimens of his skilled hand.” Reason also produced other artistic work. During the New York draft riots of 1863, merchants formed a committee for the relief of African American victims. The Reverend HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET wrote an address to the group that was “elaborately engrossed on parchment and tastefully framed by Patrick Reason, one of their own people.”

In 1862 Reason married Esther Cunningham of Leeds, England; the couple had one son. Invited to work as an engraver with several firms in Cleveland, Reason moved to Ohio in 1869 and for the next fifteen years worked for the Sylvester Hogan jewelry firm. When Reason died in Cleveland, he left behind a large body of work that established him as one of the finest printmakers of the nineteenth century.

REED, ISHMAEL

(22 Feb. 1938–), writer, was born Ishmael Scott Reed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Thelma Coleman, a saleslady. Coleman never married Reed’s natural father, Henry Lenoir, a fund-raiser for the YMCA, but before 1940 she married an autoworker, Bennie Reed, whose surname Ishmael received. (Ishmael has seven siblings and half-siblings.) Coleman moved with her children to Buffalo, New York, in 1942, where Ishmael attended two different high schools before graduating in 1956; he also made his initial forays into journalism by writing a jazz column in a local black newspaper the Empire Star, while still a teenager.

Reed began his college studies in evening courses at the University of Buffalo but ascended to the more rigorous daytime curriculum when an instructor read one of his short stories, in which Reed satirized the Second Coming of Christ by making him an advertising agent who is scorned by the industry because of his unique sales approach. “Something Pure,” as the story was titled, gave an early indication of what would become Reed’s inimitable style. Reed had read Nathanael West in high school, and West’s biting social fiction and floating narrative voice were critical influences. In classes at Buffalo, Reed also absorbed the poetry of William Blake and William Butler Yeats, both of whom developed personal mythologies as an integral part of their work.

Reed’s soaring intellectual life at the university was grounded by the meager prospects of a young, black, male adult of the time. Low on money and discontented with academe’s aloofness to social realities, he abandoned school to return as a correspondent with the Empire Star, moved into a Buffalo housing project in order to better assimilate the concerns of the city’s underprivileged black population, and embarked on what turned out to be a discouraging attempt at activism. In one instance, he knocked on doors and registered voters on behalf of a black councilman who covertly threw the election to win favor for another job. In 1961 Reed tried his hand at moderating a radio program that was subsequently cancelled when he and another Star editor interviewed MALCOLM X, who was at the time the controversial spokesman for the Nation of Islam.

Compounding Reed’s professional frustrations were his new responsibilities as a husband and father. In September 1960 he married Priscilla Rose, with whom he had a daughter, Timothy Brett, in 1962. Shortly after his daughter was born, however, Reed left for New York City and officially separated from his wife in 1963.

Determined to become a full-time writer, Reed immersed himself in the literary and creative cityscape of 1960s New York. He extended his literary talents to poetry through his association with the Umbra Workshop, a collective for black poets, and bolstered his journalistic expertise by working for a New Jersey weekly called the Newark Advance, assuming the editorship in 1965. Revamping the Advance inspired Reed to start his own paper, which he accomplished later that year by cofounding the East Village Other, taking the name from Carl Jung’s theory of “Otherness.” Increasingly enamored of the possibilities of cultural collision, Reed was finally beginning to enjoy an artistic career that had expanded sufficiently to satisfy his interests. This creative growth was especially marked by the release of his first novel, The Freelance Pallbearers (1967), a critically successful debut.

The Freelance Pallbearers grew out of Reed’s attempt to parody Newark politics, but it eventually developed into a satire of the United States as a whole—in particular, the volatile social failures of the 1960s and the country’s problematic participation in the Vietnam War. The novel’s stand-in country for the United States is “HARRY SAM,” which, as one critic points out, is a virtual homonym for “harass ’em,” an attitude that Reed asserts the country takes toward its ideological opponents (Fox, 42). Reed directs his satire toward blacks as well, by drawing as his novel’s protagonist Bukka Doopyduk, a black hospital worker representing African Americans who prefer assimilation over social protest. The title refers to the liberals who, in Reed’s story, permit their leaders to be murdered, yet tardily appear over their corpses to praise their work and carry them away. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. asserts, the novel adopts the self-discovering confessional prose that is the most identifiable convention of African American literature, seen most notably for Reed in RALPH ELLISON’S Invisible Man. Through this voice, The Freelance Pallbearers establishes a fundamental element of Reed’s writing; namely, the interrogation of artistic conventions in western culture, both white and black and everything in between.

Roused by the acclaim he received from The Freelance Pallbearers, Reed soon realized he needed to leave New York. His conscientious lower-class background made him suspicious of fame and the damage it would inflict upon his art. “If I had remained,” he later wrote, “I would have been loved and admired to death” (Reader, xiv). So he left for California and eventually settled in Oakland, accepting a guest lecturing position at the University of California at Berkeley. He has held the post ever since, though not without some friction; after a few years he was encouraged to apply for tenure and was then refused, though he was allowed to continue teaching. Oakland proved to be an even more fertile environment for Reed’s creativity than New York, as it cast him among a community of grassroots activist-intellectuals and cultural personalities, such as Cecil Brown, ANGELA DAVIS, and, for a short while in the 1970s, RICHARD PRYOR. He finally divorced Rose in 1940 and married Carla Bank, a dancer, with whom he had his second daughter, Tennessee.

In 1969 Reed released his second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, which he has described as an effort to deconstruct (“break down”) the yellowback serial novels of the Old West and, by inference, the history of America. Yellow Back also expands upon Reed’s increasing fascination with aspects of voodoo as a means of restructuring our perspective of American culture. Most telling, however, are Reed’s emerging ideas concerning the novel and art generally, specifically in regard to its potential utilization by underrepresented communities. One character rages, ‘“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons. All art must be for the end of liberating the masses.’”

It logically followed that Reed’s next novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972), would serve as a manic exploration for an authoritative African American text, an entity that, as Reed’s novel powerfully points out, simply does not exist—but this nonexistence only emphasizes that the monolithic text of whiteness and homogeneous western culture holds no true ballast either. Put differently, Mumbo Jumbo is an articulate defense of the dynamism of American race and culture, with particular attention to the instability of the form of the novel. Calling on his own idiosyncratic background in various media—music, radio, newspapers, magazines, and fiction—Reed infuses his novel with photographs, illustrations, charts, footnotes, copies of handbills, door signs, a bibliography, and more. The term Reed chooses for African American culture is “Jes Grew”—a rubric that lays bare the fallacy that African American traditions simply sprang out of nowhere—and in the novel it assumes the form of an epidemic whose victims uncontrollably execute a ragtime dance step, thereby preventing their assimilation in American society.

Mumbo Jumbo was nominated for a National Book Award, the second such honor of Reed’s career; he had been likewise nominated for his first extensive collection of poetry, Conjure, the year before. Both Conjure and Mumbo Jumbo provide a name for Reed’s engagement with African American religion: “Neo-Hoodoo.” An integral figure in Neo-hoodoo is the trickster figure, whom Reed effectively emulates in his writing. Albeit any summation of Neo-hoodoo risks oversimplification, it can best be understood as a politicized and religious response to Judeo-Christian and Islamic ideologies. Reed’s art attempts to reconfigure the motley aggregate of beliefs that Westerners mistakenly hold as unshakable.

By the mid-1970s Reed was accepting awards from the Guggenheim Foundation (1974) and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1975), among others. Yet with his fourth and fifth novels, as well as a growing corpus of essays that express his vitriol in a more direct manner, the controversy surrounding his work steadily increased. Reviewing Reed’s fourth novel, The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), Barbara Smith wrote in the New Republic that Reed was showing a disturbing reliance on “the tired stereotypes of feminists as man-hating dykes” (23 Nov. 1974). And Reed reports that when he accepted an award for the novel, an “inebriated” Ralph Ellison—a longtime opponent of his work—shouted, “Ishmael Reed, you ain’t nothin’ but a gangster and a con artist” (Reader, xviii). With his fifth novel, Flight to Canada, a satirical rewriting of the slave narrative that is generally considered his most accessible work, Reed enjoyed a more positive response.

While Reed would publish four more novels by 1993—The Terrible Twos (1982), Reckless Eyeballing (1986), The Terrible Threes (1989), and Japanese by Spring (1993)—the emphasis of his writing clearly shifted to essays, poetry, and drama. While all of these writings demonstrate a consummate artistry, they rarely achieved for him the notoriety of his early novels. In a way, Reed suffered the mishap of publishing utterly original work in the first half of his career and then being forced to explain himself in the second half—a task he has undertaken grudgingly.

Nonetheless, perhaps the most consistently positive aspect of his career in letters has been his stewardship for culturally underrepresented writers, as an editor of both magazines and anthologies. Toward this end, Reed cofounded the Yardbird Publishing Company in 1971 and the Before Columbus Foundation in 1976, both of which endeavored to gain notice, if not notoriety, for American writers of all ethnic backgrounds. Recently, Reed has edited collections of Native American literature, Asian American literature, and multicultural poetry. With the emergence of the Internet in western literary discourse, Reed also launched, in the late 1990s, a variety of online magazines, most notably KONCH, a forum for current events, and VINES, a serial collection of student writing. In 2000 Reed culled his best work from fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction which he collected in The Reed Reader.

By creating an uninhibited space in his work for play and creativity, a space that invokes seemingly every facet of American life, from religion to pop culture, Reed ranks among the country’s preeminent postmodern writers. But unlike the works of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, to name just two other highly esteemed postmodernists, Reed’s writing is infused with a profound social concern that motivates a relentless indictment of the transgressions of modern America against minorities and the lower classes.

REID, IRA DE AUGUSTINE

(2 July 1901–15 Aug. 1968), African American sociologist and educator, was born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, the son of Daniel Augustine Reid, a Baptist minister, and Willie Robertha James. He was raised in comfortable surroundings and was educated in integrated public schools in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Germantown, a Philadelphia suburb. Reid’s academic promise was as apparent as his family connections were useful. Recruited by President JOHN HOPE of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1918 Reid completed the college preparatory course at Morehouse Academy and in 1922 received his BA from Morehouse College.

Reid taught sociology and history and directed the high school at Texas College in Tyler from 1922 to 1923. He took graduate courses in sociology at the University of Chicago the next summer. From 1923 to 1924 he taught social science at Douglas High School, Huntington, West Virginia. Reid then embarked on a model apprenticeship that George Edmund Haynes, cofounder of the National Urban League, had established for social welfare workers and young social scientists as part of the Urban League program. Selected as a National Urban League fellow for the year 1924–1925, Reid earned an MA in Social Economics at the University of Pittsburgh in 1925, and that same year he married Gladys Russell Scott. They adopted one child.

Also in 1925 Reid was appointed industrial secretary of the New York Urban League, a position he held until 1928. In this role he worked with CHARLES S. JOHNSON, director of research and investigations of the National Urban League, helping the league position itself as a source of information about the economic conditions of African Americans as well as an agency for social reform. Reid surveyed the living conditions of low-income Harlem African American families, conducted a study that was published as The Negro Population of Albany, New York (1928), and served as Johnson’s research assistant in a National Urban League survey of blacks in the trade unions.

Reid also served as Johnson’s assistant in collecting data for the National Interracial Conference of 1928 held in Washington, D.C. This conference represented a popular front of “new middle-class” social welfare activists and social scientists, white and black, who were professionally concerned with the race problem in the United States. The conference produced the landmark Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research (1930). It was a volume that witnessed the emergence of a liberal consensus on race that would be reaffirmed by Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 in An American Dilemma and certified by the U.S. Supreme Court a decade later.

Reid’s three-year tenure as industrial secretary completed another phase of his apprenticeship. In 1928 he succeeded Johnson as director of research for the national body, a position he held until 1934. As part of the league’s procedure for establishing local branches, Reid’s work included surveying seven black communities, which resulted in two important reports, Social Conditions of the Negro in the Hill District of Pittsburgh (1930) and The Negro Community of Baltimore—Its Social and Economic Conditions (1935). Drawing on earlier Urban League research, Reid also published one of the first reliable studies of blacks in the workforce, Negro Membership in American Labor Unions (1930).

Reid was enrolled as a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University throughout the period 1928–1934. While employed by the Urban League he began the research on West Indian immigration on which his PhD dissertation would be based.

In 1934 Hope, then president of Atlanta University, encouraged W. E. B. DU BOIS, chair of the Department of Sociology, to hire Reid. Du Bois complied happily. Reid, he remarked in 1937, “is the best trained young Negro in sociology today.” Six feet four inches tall, confident, well dressed, and witty, Reid was an impressive figure. His biting intelligence was acknowledged—if not always appreciated—and his urbane manner made him an effective interracial diplomat in an era when black equality was an implausible hypothesis for most white Americans.

Reid worked closely with Du Bois at Atlanta University until the latter’s forced retirement in June 1944, at which time he ascended to chair of the Department of Sociology, serving from 1944 to 1946. Having served under Du Bois as managing editor of Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture since 1940, the year of its founding, Reid also succeeded his senior colleague as editor in chief of the journal (1944–1948).

From 1934 until his departure from Atlanta University in 1946, Reid’s work as a social scientist also had important policy implications. Under the auspices of the Office of the Adviser on Negro Affairs, Department of the Interior, Reid directed a 1936 survey of The Urban Negro Worker in the United States, 1925–1936 (vol. 1, 1938), an undertaking financed by the Works Progress Administration. Three years later The Negro Immigrant: His Background, Characteristics and Social Adjustment, 1899–1937 (1939) was published; it was based on the dissertation that had earned him a PhD in Sociology from Columbia University that same year. In 1940 Reid published In a Minor Key: Negro Youth in Story and Fact, the first volume of the American Youth Commission’s study of black youths. This was a cooperative endeavor of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists to study the impact of economic crisis and minority-group status on the development of youngsters in black communities. From the standpoint of the history and politics of the social sciences, the project—funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial—reflected the Social Science Research Council’s endorsement of a “culture and personality” paradigm that would support liberal policy initiatives.

While at Atlanta Reid also drafted “The Negro in the American Economic System” (1940), a research memorandum used by Myrdal in An American Dilemma four years later. In 1941, in collaboration with sociologist Arthur Raper of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Reid published Sharecroppers All, a pioneering study of the political economy of the South. The text reflects the emerging characterization of the depression South by social scientists and New Dealers as the country’s number one economic problem; it signaled their growing impatience at the public costs of the region’s class and race relations and dysfunctional labor market.

After Du Bois’s retirement from Atlanta University, Reid grew restless there. As a result of his desire for more congenial academic surroundings, on the one hand, and the cracks emerging in the walls of segregation, on the other, Reid became one of the first black scholars to obtain a full-time position at a northern white university (New York University, 1945).

This was again an exemplary chapter in his life. Under the racial regime of “separate-but-equal,” job opportunities for black scholars, however well trained and qualified, were restricted to historically black institutions in the South. However, in the early 1940s, as tactical Trojan horses in a foundation-sponsored campaign to desegregate the ranks of the professoriat, a handful of accomplished black academics—among them anthropologist Allison Davis and historian JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN—were installed at northern institutions. Reid became visiting professor of sociology at the New York University School of Education (1945–1947) and, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, was visiting professor of sociology at Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania (1946–1947). In 1948 Reid became professor of sociology and chair of the Haverford Department of Sociology and Anthropology, a position he held until his retirement in 1966.

Reid and his wife joined the Society of Friends in 1950, and over the next fifteen years he was involved increasingly in the educational activities of the American Friends Service Committee. Though Reid’s scholarly output decreased during this period, his important earlier contributions were gradually acknowledged. He was named assistant editor of the American Sociological Review (1947–1950). Ironically, with the coming of the McCarthy era, Reid was honored for professional contributions that now earned him public suspicion. His passport was suspended from 1952 to 1953 by State Department functionaries for suspected communist sympathies. When he firmly challenged this action, the passport was soon returned. Reid served as vice president and president of the Eastern Sociological Society from 1953 to 1954 and from 1954 to 1955, respectively. He was elected second vice president of the American Sociological Association itself from 1954 to 1955.

After the milestone 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Reid was invited to edit “Racial Desegregation and Integration,” a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (304 [Mar. 1956]). This was another indication of his new visibility within the social science fraternity.

Reid’s wife died in 1956. Two years later he married Anna “Anne” Margaret Cooke of Gary, Indiana.

Late in his career Reid enjoyed a wider public. Among other activities, he served on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Commission on Higher Education and was a participant in the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth. In 1962 Reid was visiting director, Department of Extra-mural Studies, University College, Ibadan, Nigeria. From 1962 to 1963 he was Danforth Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan. Reid retired as professor of sociology at Haverford College on 30 June 1966. He died in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

In addition to his personal achievements, Ira Reid is an important representative of the first numerically significant cohort of professional black social scientists in the United States.

REMOND, CHARLES LENOX

(1 Feb. 1810–22 Dec. 1873), abolitionist and civil rights orator, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of John Remond and Nancy Lenox, prominent members of the African American community of that town. His father, a native of Curaçao, was a successful hairdresser, caterer, and merchant. Charles attended Salem’s free African school for a time and was instructed by a private tutor in the Remond household. His parents exposed him to antislavery ideas, and abolitionists were frequent guests in their home. He crossed the paths of a number of fugitive slaves while growing up and by the age of seventeen considered himself an abolitionist. He had also developed considerable oratorical talent.

Remond was impressed by William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery views, particularly the notion of slaveholding as a sin. He heard Garrison speak in 1831 in Salem, and the two became longtime associates when in 1832 Remond became a subscription agent for Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator. This move helped launch his career as a professional speaker and organizer at a time when the antislavery movement was gaining large numbers of new adherents. Remond traveled in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine in 1837, soliciting subscriptions and encouraging abolitionists to form local antislavery societies. The Weekly Anglo-African depicted Remond’s early abolitionism: “He labored in its early movements most faithfully: he bore the brunt of the calumnies and oppression, the mobbings, the hootings, the assaults which were heaped upon that noble band in the times of 1834–7” (1 Feb. 1862).

The American Anti-Slavery Society hired Remond as its first black lecturing agent in 1838. He brought a new authenticity to the speakers’ platform; his charm and eloquence aroused and impressed the predominantly white audiences. In 1842 he was joined by his younger sister, SARAH PARKER REMOND. An associate of Garrison’s wing of the antislavery movement, Remond recommended immediate emancipation through moral suasion rather than political action or colonization, positions that isolated him from a growing group of black abolitionists. He opposed HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET’s call for slave insurrection at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens. Citing a flawed U.S. Constitution that sanctioned slavery, Remond advocated the dissolution of the Union, a view unpopular with former slaves. While Remond claimed that none of his ancestors had been slaves, he consistently declared southern slavery and northern discrimination dual violations of the Bill of Rights. He urged blacks to protest the discrimination they experienced daily. “We need more radicalism among us,” he wrote to the Liberator. “We have been altogether too fearful of martyrdom—quite too indifferent in our views and sentiments—too slow in our movements” (21 May 1841).

The highlight of Remond’s career came in 1840, when the American Anti-Slavery Society selected him as a delegate to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Financed by female antislavery groups, Remond welcomed women’s involvement in the movement and refused to take his seat at the convention when it voted to bar women’s participation. In the eighteen months following the convention, he lectured to great acclaim throughout the British Isles on such topics as slavery, racial prejudice, and temperance. The anti-slavery press commented widely on Remond’s gracious reception in England, in contrast to the discriminatory treatment he endured on his passage abroad and upon his return to Boston. His comparison between travel in the United States and Britain formed the basis of his noted 1842 address to the Massachusetts legislature, “The Rights of Colored Persons in Travelling,” with which he became the first African American to speak before that body. His address is an important document of the widespread campaign to end segregated seating in railway cars in the 1840s. Throughout his career he reminded whites of the proscriptive laws and practices against blacks in northern states.

Remond was the most renowned African American orator until 1842, when FREDERICK DOUGLASS began speaking to American audiences. The two men often toured together in the 1840s, and in the fall of 1843 they sustained a heavy lecturing schedule in the Midwest, amid fears of antiabolitionist riots. On 28 October 1845 Douglass wrote Garrison of Remond’s effective antislavery oratory: “His name is held in affectionate remembrance by many whose hearts were warmed into life on this question by his soul-stirring eloquence” (CARTER G. WOODSON, The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written during the Crisis 1800–1860 [1926]). Remond’s and Douglass’s friendship deteriorated when Douglass publicly broke with Garrison in 1852. Contemporaries remarked that Remond felt shunned when Douglass swiftly rose to eminence in antislavery circles. Remond’s corresponding decline in stature may be due to the fact that he suffered from tuberculosis, which forced him to abandon the lecture field for long periods of time.

Remond became increasingly impatient with the progress of antislavery, prompting him to reevaluate the utility of moral suasion in the antislavery struggle. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which strengthened slaveholders’ ability to reclaim their human property, prompted Remond to defend forcible resistance, to relax his opposition to slave insurrection, and to endorse political action. He became increasingly critical of white abolitionists for not attacking racial prejudice as vehemently as they did slavery. Though he remained ambivalent about the Republican Party, Remond welcomed the outbreak of the Civil War. When Massachusetts opened enlistment to African Americans in January 1863, Remond, Douglass, Garnet, WILLIAM WELLS BROWN, and other black leaders traveled through the northern states and Canada to recruit African Americans to the ranks of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. With the war’s end Remond supported the continuation of antislavery societies to secure civil and political rights for blacks, a position that divided him from Garrison. He rejected the inclusion of women’s rights issues in the campaign for black suffrage, arguing that their inclusion would hinder the achievement of black male enfranchisement, on which the eventual success of woman suffrage depended. Remond made his final lecture tour for a New York State Negro suffrage campaign in 1867. His poor health permitted him to appear only sporadically at civil rights meetings thereafter.

Remond spent most of his time lecturing rather than writing on behalf of antislavery. As one of the earliest black orators, he served as a role model, yet his ideological proximity to the predominantly white Garrisonians isolated him from other black abolitionists. Contemporaries extolled his oratory and compared his style to that of Wendell Phillips. However, as a black man who had never been a slave, his appeal and value to the antislavery movement were limited. Fellow abolitionists remarked upon his increasingly querulous demeanor, bitterness, and irascibility.

Beginning in 1865 Remond worked as a streetlight inspector and was appointed as a stamp clerk in the Boston Custom House in 1871. He died of tuberculosis at his home in Wakefield, Massachusetts. He was married twice, first to Amy Matilda Williams, who died on 15 August 1856, and then to Elizabeth Thayer Magee, who died on 3 February 1872. He and his second wife had four children.

REMOND, SARAH PARKER

(6 June 1826–13 Dec. 1894), abolitionist, physician, and feminist, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the daughter of John Remond and Nancy Lenox. Her father, a native of Curaçao, immigrated to the United States at age ten and became a successful merchant. Her mother was the daughter of African American revolutionary war veteran Cornelius Lenox. Sarah grew up in an antislavery household. Her father became a life member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, and her mother was founding member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, which began as a black female organization in 1832. Sarah’s brother, CHARLES LENOX REMOND, was a well-known antislavery lecturer in the United States and Great Britain.

Sarah Parker Remond attended local public schools in Salem until black students were forced out by committee vote in 1835. Determined to educate their children in a less racist environment, the Remond family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1835. After the family returned to Salem in 1841, Remond’s education was further developed at home with English literature and anti-slavery writings. She was an active member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society, and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Her experience with the Salem school committee led to early activism against racial segregation. She was awarded five hundred dollars by the First District Court of Essex after being forcibly ejected from her seat at a public place of entertainment in 1853.

In 1842 Remond began touring on the antislavery circuit with her brother Charles, who was the first black lecturing agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Sarah and Charles toured New York State with Wendell Phillips, Abigail Kelley Foster, Stephen Foster, and Susan B. Anthony in 1856. Remond accepted an appointment as a lecturing agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1858. On 28 December 1858 she sailed to Great Britain with three goals: to work for the antislavery cause, to pursue an education, and to live for a time away from American racism. She attended the Bedford College for Ladies in London while traveling as an antislavery lecturer to more than forty-five cities in England, Scotland, and Ireland between 1859 and 1861. Her approach on the antislavery circuit was different from black male American abolitionists. She won over the British public by drawing on her demeanor as a “lady,” while recounting stories of sordid sexual exploitation forced on female slaves. She was popular in Great Britain, where lectures by women were rare. She was one of the first women to lecture in Great Britain to “mixed-sex” audiences. Because she was removed by both her race and nationality from British class politics and gender conventions, she was able to appeal to both the working class and the social elite.

Sarah Parker Remond became a popular lecturer on abolition and women’s rights, especially in England in the 1850s. Peabody and Essex Museum

Perhaps her popularity as an abolitionist in London caused the American legation in London to deny her request for a visa to travel to France in November 1859. The legation claimed that because of her race she was not a citizen of the United States. Support for her included editorials in most of the major London papers. The Morning Star compared the “visé affair” to the DRED SCOTT decision, which had been used by the United States as a basis for its actions. Benjamin Moran, the American assistant secretary of legation, wrote on 10 December 1859 that George Dallas, the American minister to Great Britain, threatened to go home should any more attacks of the kind appear, and if he went, he would be the last American minister in England for some time. Moran believed that public opinion on this matter reached Buckingham Palace. On 25 February 1860 he wrote, “on the subject of darkies, I am reminded that the queen looked at me very [oddly] on Thursday, & I now suspect the Remond affair was dancing about in her mind, and that she wished to know what kind of person (if she thought of the matter at all) the Secretary was that refused that lady of color a visé.”

Remond’s manner and standing in American antislavery circles made her a great many friends in the “upper circle” of British abolitionists. She lived for a time at the home of Peter Alfred Taylor, a member of Parliament and treasurer of the London Emancipation Committee. A center for London radicals, the Taylor home was also the meeting place for many of London’s early female reformers because Taylor’s wife, Mentia, was active in the woman suffrage movement. Remond worked with the Taylors in establishing the first two emancipation groups in London. In June 1859 concerned individuals, including famed runaway slaves WILLIAM AND ELLEN CRAFT, formed the London Emancipation Committee. Remond was active in this group until 1 August 1859. After the committee failed to invite her to address a public meeting held in London to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the abolition of British colonial slavery, Remond stopped attending its meetings. The London Emancipation Committee concluded operations in February 1860 at a meeting attended by men only.

Four years later Remond and Mentia Taylor were founding members of the London Ladies Emancipation Society, which claimed that slavery was a question especially and deeply interesting to women. In 1864 the society put into circulation more than twelve thousand pamphlets printed by the feminist publisher Emily Faithful. Remond’s contribution was entitled The Negroes and Anglo-Africans as Freed Men and Soldiers. After the end of the Civil War, Remond was a member of the Freedman’s Aid Association along with Ellen Craft. In 1865 she wrote a letter of protest to the London Daily News when the London press began attacking blacks after an insurrection in Jamaica.

Remond returned to the United States later in 1865 and worked for a short time with the American Equal Rights Association. She had served as a delegate to the National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1858. In 1866 she moved to Florence, Italy, to attend a medical training program at Santa Maria Nuovo Hospital. After receiving a diploma for “professional medical practice” in 1871, she started a medical practice in Florence. On 25 April 1877 she married an Italian named Lazzaro Pintor. Sarah Parker Remond is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Italy.

REVELS, HIRAM RHOADES

(27 Sept. 1827?–16 Jan. 1901), clergyman, educator, and first African American senator, was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the son of free parents of mixed blood. Little is known of his family or early years. At eight or nine he enrolled in a private school for black children, where he was “fully and successfully instructed by our able teacher in all branches of learning.” About 1842 his family moved to Lincolnton, North Carolina, where Revels became a barber. Two years later he entered Beech Grove Seminary, a Quaker institution two miles south of Liberty, Indiana. In 1845 he enrolled at another seminary in Darke County, Ohio, and during this period may also have studied theology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Hiram Rhoades Revels, in 1869 the first African American elected to the U. S. Senate. Library of Congress

Revels’s preaching career with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church began at this time. He was ordained as a minister in the Indiana Conference at some point between 1845 and 1847 and was confirmed as an elder by the same organization in 1849. His first pastorate may have been in Richmond, Indiana, and he is known to have served the Allen Chapel Church in Terre Haute during the 1840s. In the early 1850s he married Phoeba A. Bass, with whom he had six children.

Revels traveled extensively, becoming a noted preacher in the Indiana-Ohio-Illinois area before the end of the 1840s. An urge to carry the gospel to slaves led him to expand his circles, and in the 1850s he journeyed to lecture and teach in Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. His freedom of movement suggests that Revels was not a known abolitionist, but he later recounted that he “always assisted the fugitive to make his escape” when in a free state (Thompson, 31).

In late 1853 Revels moved his ministry to an AME church in St. Louis, but because of a dispute with the bishop during the following year, he left both the congregation and the AME denomination, accepting the pastorate of Madison Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland. He stayed in that position for two years before entering Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. In 1857 he returned to Baltimore and to his former denomination, becoming the pastor of an AME church in the city. He also was named principal of a high school for blacks, beginning his career as an educational administrator.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Revels helped organize black work battalions for the Union army. In 1863 he moved back to St. Louis to teach at a high school for blacks and there continued his efforts to aid the North, participating in the organization of the first black regiment from Missouri. Again he did not stay long, moving to Mississippi in 1864 to work with the freed-men. Based primarily in Jackson, he was instrumental in the establishment of several schools and churches in the Jackson-Vicksburg area. Some sources claim that he was also a regimental chaplain and worked with the Vicksburg provost marshal’s office.

In late 1865 Revels aligned himself with the AME Church North, the denomination with which he would be associated for the rest of his career. He held pastorates in Leavenworth, Kansas, Louisville, Kentucky, and New Orleans, Louisiana, before becoming the presiding elder at a church in Natchez, Mississippi, in June 1868. That summer Adelbert Ames, military governor of Mississippi, appointed Revels to the city board of aldermen. Although little is known about his term of service, his primary focus was apparently on improving the city educational system.

As his prominence in the community grew, Revels, who was one of the most highly educated African Americans in the state, was encouraged to seek higher office, and in late 1869 he agreed to run as a Republican for the Adams County seat in the state senate. With the military Reconstruction government assuring black voting privileges, Revels won easily, as three-fourths of the people in the county were African Americans. He was one of thirty-six blacks chosen for the legislature from across the state.

Revels was invited to offer the invocation at the opening of the legislative session. One participant later recalled that the prayer “made [him] a United States Senator, because he made a deep, profound and favorable impression upon everyone who was fortunate enough to be within the sound of his voice” (Journal of Negro History 16: 107). Two unexpired Senate terms, dating from before the Civil War, did have to be filled, and the black legislators were insistent that at least one seat be given to an African American. Their preferred candidate, James Lynch, had been appointed secretary of state, so they turned to Revels. After three days and seven ballots, Revels was elected on 20 January to fill the seat vacated by Jefferson Davis in 1861.

The nation’s first African American senator arrived in Washington ten days after his election. He could not present his credentials until Mississippi was formally readmitted to the Union, which finally took place on 23 February. Three days of contentious debate over whether to seat Revels followed, with the Senate voting forty-eight to eight in favor of accepting his credentials on 25 February. Revels was then sworn in and seated.

Although his brief Senate term was relatively undistinguished, Revels’s skill as an orator, honed through decades in the pulpit, earned favorable attention from the national press. He introduced three bills, but only one passed—a petition for the removal of civil and political disabilities from an ex-Confederate. He favored amnesty for white southerners “just as fast as they give evidence of having become loyal men and of being loyal,” a stance that drew criticism from some in the black community. Revels served briefly on the District of Columbia Committee and nominated the first African American for enrollment at West Point (the candidate failed the entrance examination).

Revels returned to Mississippi upon the completion of his term in March 1871, and Governor James L. Alcorn asked him to oversee the establishment of a college for black males. The legislature suggested that the school be named Revels University, but the former senator declined the honor, recommending that the governor’s name be used. In 1872 Alcorn University opened in Claiborne County, Mississippi, with Revels as the first president. His duties were interrupted briefly in 1873, when he was named secretary of state ad interim.

The new governor, Ames, who had given Revels his start in politics, pressured Revels into resigning the Alcorn presidency in July 1874, apparently because of Revels’s political ties with ex-governor Alcorn. A third of the student body and a number of faculty members left in protest against the action. Revels was reappointed as president two years later, when John M. Stone became governor. In the interim he served churches in Holly Springs and New Orleans and briefly edited the Southwestern Christian Advocate.

Health problems and Alcorn’s financial woes led Revels to resign again in 1882. He moved back to Holly Springs, where he taught theology at Rust College for a few years and assisted the pastor of the local AME North church. He died while attending a religious conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi.

REVEREND IKE

(1 June 1935–), religious leader, was born Frederick Joseph Eikerenkoetter II in Ridgeland, South Carolina, to Frederick Joseph Eikerenkoetter Sr., a Baptist minister and architect, and Rema Estelle Matthews, a teacher. As a boy, he was exposed to the fundamentalist theology of the Bible Way Church in Ridgeland, where his father was the pastor, and he became an assistant minister at the age of fourteen. After graduating from high school in 1952, Frederick won a scholarship to the American Bible College in New York and earned a Bachelor of Theology degree in 1956. He then became a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force and started what might have become a traditional and uneventful ministerial career. However, after only two years, Eikerenkoetter left the security of the chaplaincy to embark on a new vocation as an evangelist.

Back in South Carolina, he veered from his Baptist roots and began to develop an eclectic ministry, akin to Pentecostalism, that relied heavily on faith healing, the excitement of revival meetings, and the appeal of a charismatic preacher. By 1962 the United Church of Jesus Christ, which he had founded a few years earlier, had only a few members and met in a converted storefront, yet even then he anticipated building a great church empire, and, for this reason, he established the United Christian Evangelist Association, which would become the organizational and business umbrella for his future endeavors. In 1964 he married Eula Mae Dent; together they had one son, Xavier. Ultimately, his wife would become the co-pastor of his ministries, and his son would be given the title Bishop Coadjutor. They moved to Boston in 1965, where he founded the Miracle Temple and acquired his first radio audience.

Until Eikerenkoetter’s ascendance, the Reverend C. L. FRANKLIN, with his syndicated radio programs and recording contracts, was the most popular black preacher in America. Historically, the success of most black ministers relied on how well they delivered a standard Protestant message that emphasized faith in God and hard work and that generally deprecated the desire for material pleasures. Indeed, many ministers became quite wealthy by advocating this austere doctrine. Eikerenkoetter offered a radically different theology that contrasted sharply with the old-time religion in both form and substance.

Like FATHER DIVINE at the turn of the century, who was influenced by Charles Fillmore and Robert Collier, the pioneers of New Thought philosophy, Eikerenkoetter was also drawn to ideas that originated with New Thought because they placed greater power and responsibility upon the individual to affect the course of his or her life in this world, rather than praying for a better life in the hereafter. Eikerenkoetter, however, never proclaimed himself to be God or a messiah, as Father Divine and DADDY GRACE had strongly intimated. It is likely that Eikerenkoetter was exposed to New Thought philosophy through white ministers, such as Norman Vincent Peale, and motivational speakers, such as Dale Carnegie, who had popularized a new gospel of positive thinking. Eikerenkoetter was the first to package this concept within an African American religious ethos and successfully market it to black consumers.

In 1966 two decisions contributed greatly to Eikerenkoetter’s success: he established his flagship congregation on 125th Street in Harlem, New York, and he began to use the name Reverend Ike instead of the difficult-to-pronounce Dutch name Eikerenkoetter. Not even the flamboyant Harlem minister ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. was as flashy or as ostentatious as Reverend Ike, who flaunted his diamond rings, fur coats, and mink-upholstered Rolls-Royce. While the mainstream press ridiculed his extravagance and considered it proof that he was a charlatan, Reverend Ike argued to his critics and to the thousands who were drawn to him that his very wealth was proof that his program worked. In contrast to a long tradition of pie-in-the-sky preaching, Ike repeatedly said, “I want my pie now, with ice cream on top” (Morris, 180). He taught that “the LACK of money is the root of all evil” (Morris, 184) and to overcome the guilt that many religious people had about desiring money, he developed the mantra “I like money. I need money. I want money. . . . Money is not sinful in its right place. Money is good” (Morris, 176).

The response to this theology of prosperity was so overwhelming that in 1969 the congregation purchased the historic Palace Auditorium, which occupied a full block on Broadway and 175th Street. Five thousand people attended services there each week, and the building also contained his school, the United Church and Science of Living Institute. Reverend Ike claimed that millions of people subscribed to his magazine, Action!, or listened to him on more than eighty-nine radio stations. In 1971 he became the first black leader since MARCUS GARVEY to pack Madison Square Garden, and in 1973 he became the first black preacher to acquire a television program, Joy of Living. Through all of these outlets he sold literature extolling his “Blessing Plan,” as well as products promising to heal or enrich the purchaser—if the person had faith and contributed to his church.

At the height of his popularity in the late 1970s, Ike was prominent among a new generation of televangelists. He received offers to speak to diverse audiences and once even lectured on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In an effort to deflect criticism that his ministry was completely self-serving, his church sponsored programs to help drug addicts, and he purchased a lifetime membership with the NAACP. During the 1980s, however, his star began to fade, and the former religious icon quickly became a parody of black preachers who prey on the poor and desperate. His public image also suffered from a number of unsuccessful criminal investigations by the Internal Revenue Service and the Postal Service and by a sexual harassment suit brought by a male employee against him in 1995. Reverend Ike’s ministry survived these accusations, but it never regained its former stature.

Lingering questions about Reverend Ike’s motives and character obscured the theological innovations that he pioneered, and excessive attention to Ike’s showmanship prevented many observers from recognizing that at its core his message appealed to African Americans who legitimately wanted a greater share of American prosperity.

RICE, CONDOLEEZZA

(14 Nov. 1954–), national security adviser and educator, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of John Wesley Rice Jr., an educator and minister, and Angelena Ray, a teacher. Her mother, an accomplished pianist, named her after the Italian musical direction con dolcezza, meaning to play “with sweetness.” The Rices viewed the restrictions of Jim Crow Alabama as obstacles for their daughter to overcome. She did so effortlessly, taking early lessons in ballet, French, flute, and piano. Extra tutoring from her father enabled her to skip the first and seventh grades.

Though she enjoyed a comfortable, if by no means wealthy, childhood, Rice was not immune to the harsh realities of Birmingham under Bull Connor, the city’s notoriously racist commissioner of public safety. Like everyone else in the city, she attended segregated schools, and one of her classmates was killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white supremacists. While her mother fostered Condi’s interest in music, her father inspired a love of politics. He was an avid Republican—as were many middle-class blacks at a time when Governor George Wallace dominated the Alabama Democratic Party—and he sat with his five-year-old daughter to watch the televised Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates in 1960. Family lore has it that on a childhood trip to Washington, D.C., Condoleezza stood in front of the White House and declared that she would one day live there.

When her family moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1968, however, Rice appeared more likely to follow a career in music than politics. At the age of fifteen, she entered the University of Denver, where her father served as an administrator, to study piano. Midway through college, she left the music program, believing that she could not succeed as a concert pianist. Rice focused her energies on a new love, studying the politics and policy of the Soviet Union. Her mentor, Joseph Korbel, a Czech refugee from both Nazism and Stalinism, headed the university’s School of International Studies and was influential in shaping Rice’s belief that the United States should adopt hard-line policies against the Soviet Union. After receiving her BA in 1974, Rice spent a year in Indiana at Notre Dame earning a master’s degree in International Studies. By then, she had developed a passion for the Russian language and for the arcana of Soviet military strategy, and she returned to the University of Denver to complete a doctoral dissertation in 1981, later published as Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984).

A postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 1981 helped Rice shift her interests from the more purely academic to public policy. Stanford was home to several conservative think tanks, notably the Hoover Institution, where she found much in common with a new mentor, Brent Scowcroft, a military affairs specialist who had advised presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, and who became national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Scowcroft appointed Rice, by then a tenured professor at Stanford, to the National Security Council staff that same year. Rice’s time in the first Bush White House coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and her expertise in that policy area greatly enhanced her personal and political standing with the president. Unlike Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and other hard-liners, Rice urged Bush to work pragmatically with the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in his efforts to reform the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. That stance, and her moderate views on abortion and affirmative action, earned Rice the enmity of the conservative hawks who came to dominate the Republican Party after Bush’s defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992.

Condoleezza Rice at the announcement of her appointment by President-elect George W. Bush as National Security Advisor, 2000. Corbis

During the Clinton years, Rice returned to academia and, with Philip Zelikow, published an award-winning examination of the end of the cold war, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1999). She also served from 1993 to 1999 as the provost of Stanford, and was the first woman and the first African American to hold that post. She succeeded in reversing Stanford’s financial problems by slashing the university budget, a move that won her the admiration of the board of trustees but also the ire of many faculty, staff, and students. The U.S. Department of Labor even began an investigation into racial and gender discrimination at the university after several women complained that Rice’s budget cuts had disproportionately harmed minorities. Rice later admitted that her tenure as provost had been her toughest ever job and that she may have been too much of a “hardass” (Lemann, 171).

Those brusque, no-nonsense qualities proved invaluable, however, when President George Bush’s son, George W. Bush, was seeking a national security expert to advise him for the 2000 presidential campaign. The younger Bush, a man with little knowledge of foreign affairs, needed a clear-thinking, direct mentor to guide him through the thickets of global policy. In Rice, famed for her lucid and entertaining lectures at Stanford, he found the ideal teacher and a common spirit, as well as someone who shared his love of professional sports and physical exercise. She was also an intimate of his father’s, a family connection that mattered greatly to “Team Bush.” After his controversial victory in the 2000 election, George W. Bush appointed Rice as his national security adviser.

Rice’s actions in the first Bush White House had placed her in the camp of COLIN POWELL and others who advocated a pragmatic foreign policy based on cooperation with America’s allies and the United Nations. But she now gravitated toward the “moralist” camp of Vice President Dick Cheney, who believed that America should stand alone in foreign affairs. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, appear to have cemented Rice’s commitment to a more unilateral foreign policy.

In 2002 Rice received the NAACP’s President’s Award for her expertise and influence in foreign affairs. That tribute recognizes Rice’s role as one of President Bush’s closest advisers in foreign affairs. It also reflects her achievement as the nation’s first female national security adviser and as perhaps the most influential black woman in global politics since Cleopatra.

RILLIEUX, NORBERT

(17 Mar. 1806–8 Oct. 1894), inventor, chemical engineer, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Vincent Rillieux Jr., an engineer, and Constance Vivant, who belonged to a wealthy free black family of landowners and landlords. Vincent Rillieux Jr., a businessman and inventor of a steam-operated press for baling cotton, was white, but Norbert and his mother belonged to the mainly Francophone and Catholic ethnic group of “free people of color” (often referred to as “Black Creoles” after the Civil War). Little is known of Norbert Rillieux’s childhood from the time of his baptism in the St. Louis Cathedral of New Orleans to the time he and his brother Edmond were sent, like many other young free men of color, to France to be educated. By 1830 Norbert was an instructor in applied mechanics at the École Centrale in Paris and is reported to have published several papers on steam power.

The following year, in 1831, Norbert Rillieux made an extraordinary discovery that prompted his return to New Orleans and would eventually transform the sugar-refining process in Louisiana and throughout the world. The traditional manner of reducing sugarcane juice for sugar production, called the “Jamaica Train,” required the tedious and backbreaking labor of numerous slaves who, armed with long ladles, skimmed the boiling sugar juice from one open kettle to the next. Rillieux developed an ingenious apparatus, employing condensing coils that used the vapor from one vacuum chamber to evaporate the juice from a second chamber. The new invention—safer, more efficient, and less expensive than the open-kettle system—has been described as having been as significant for the sugar industry as Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was for the processing of cotton.

Rillieux failed to interest French planters in his invention, but in 1833 he was invited back to New Orleans by the planter and banker Edmund Forstall to be chief engineer of a new sugar refinery. The appointment did not materialize, but Rillieux continued to perfect his apparatus and also made a fortune in land speculation, which he lost in the nationwide financial collapse of 1837. Some elegant architectural drawings that he produced with his brother Edmond during this period survive in the Notarial Archives in New Orleans. In 1843 two prominent planters hired Rillieux to install evaporators, Theodore Pack-wood at his plantation later known as Myrtle Grove, and Judah P. Benjamin at his Bellechasse plantation. Within three years Packwood won first prize and Benjamin and Packwood second prize for best sugar, the awards mentioning use of Rillieux’s patent sugar boiling apparatus. On 26 August 1843 Norbert Rillieux was awarded his first patent from the U.S. Patent Office for a double effect evaporator in vacuum, followed by a patent in 1846 for a triple effect evaporator with horizontal tubular heating surface. Approval for a later patent (1857) was at first denied on the erroneous assumption that Rillieux was a slave and therefore not a U.S. citizen. “Now, I was the applicant for the patent and not the slave. I am a Citizen of the United States and made oath of the fact in my affidavit,” Rillieux wrote.

Judah Benjamin, the brilliant Jewish jurist who later served as Jefferson Davis’s secretary of state for the Confederacy, became Rillieux’s major supporter in Louisiana sugar circles. He publicized Rillieux’s apparatus in a series of articles in J. D. B. De Bow’s popular commercial magazine (which came to be known as De Bow’s Review). In 1846 Benjamin described the sugar produced by Rillieux’s method as the best in Louisiana, its “crystalline grain and snowy whiteness… equal to those of the best double-refined sugar of our northern refineries.” For ten years at least, Rillieux was a conspicuous figure in New Orleans manufacturing. Benjamin’s earliest biographer, Pierce Butler, reported that “frequently, for quite long visits, came the dried-up little chemist Rillieux, always the centre of an admiring and interested group of planters from the neighborhood as he explained this or that point in the chemistry of sugar or the working of his apparatus.” Rillieux was described by one contemporary as “the most sought-after engineer in Louisiana,” but he was still, by Louisiana law, a “person of color,” suffering under increasing legal and social restrictions as North-South tensions escalated.

It is not known exactly when Rillieux returned to France. He had many reasons, including the new restrictions imposed in 1855 on free people of color in New Orleans. Apparently Rillieux returned to France just before or during the Civil War and remained there until his death. There is no evidence that he knew his most famous relative, the Impressionist Parisian painter Edgar Degas, whose mother was Rillieux’s first cousin. (This family connection was recently announced by Christopher Benfey in “Degas and the ‘Black World’: Art and Miscegenation in New Orleans,” New Republic, 21 [Oct. 1996].) Late in life Rillieux became interested in Egypt, and in 1880 he was found deciphering hieroglyphics in the Bibliothèque Nationale by the Louisiana planter Duncan Kenner. During his seventies he was still working on refinements to various devices for beet and cane sugar production. Norbert Rillieux was buried in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery, survived by his wife, Emily Cuckow Rillieux, who lived in comfortable circumstances for another eighteen years.

ROBESON, PAUL

(9 Apr. 1898–23 Jan. 1976), actor, singer, and civil rights activist, was born Paul Leroy Robeson in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of William Drew Robeson, a Protestant minister, and Maria Louisa Bustill, a schoolteacher. Robeson’s mother died when he was six years old, and he grew up under the influence of a perfectionist father, a former runaway slave who fought in the Union army. During his senior year at the Somerville, New Jersey, high school, he achieved the highest score in a statewide scholarship examination to attend Rutgers College (later Rutgers University). The lone black at Rutgers as a freshman in 1915 and only the third African American to attend the institution, Robeson was an outstanding student and athlete. A varsity debater, he won class prizes for oratory all four years, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, was one of four seniors chosen for membership in the Cap and Skull honorary society, and was named class valedictorian. The six-foot, three-inch, 215-pound Robeson earned twelve varsity letters in four sports (baseball, basketball, football, and track) and was twice named football All-America (1917 and 1918). According to former Yale coach Walter Camp, “There never has been a more serviceable end, both in attack and defense, than Robeson.” Despite his popularity with fellow students, a series of social slights and racial incidents in football brought to the fore long-standing concerns about race. Robeson’s senior thesis predicted the eventual use of the Fourteenth Amendment to advance civil rights, and his commencement address boldly combined the accommodationist philosophy of BOOKER T. WASHINGTON with the more militant views of W. E. B. DU BOIS.

Paul Robeson, an individual of extraordinary talents, as photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1933. Library of Congress

Robeson received the BA degree in 1919 and moved to Harlem preparatory to entering the Columbia University Law School in 1920. He helped finance his legal education by playing professional football for three seasons (1920–1922) with the Akron Pros and the Milwaukee Badgers. In 1921 he married Eslanda “Essie” Cardozo Goode, a member of a prominent Washington, D.C., black family, who worked as a laboratory pathologist at Columbia’s medical school; they had one child. Recognizing Robeson’s lack of enthusiasm for the law and football, his wife urged him to take up acting. After playing the lead in a Harlem YMCA production of Simon the Cyrenian in 1920, he appeared in several other local productions and became acquainted with the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village theatrical group that included Eugene O’Neill. He debuted professionally in a short-run Broadway play, Taboo, in 1922. Robeson, meanwhile, finished his legal studies, received the LLB degree in February 1923, and joined a New York City law firm headed by a Rutgers alumnus. But discouraged by discrimination within the firm and the legal profession generally, he quit a few months later, before taking the bar exam, to pursue an acting career.

Robeson launched his stage career in 1924 in the lead roles in two O’Neill plays, The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, the latter a daring drama about interracial marriage. He achieved a spectacular triumph in London in 1930 when he not only became one of the first black actors to play Othello but also rendered the finest portrayal of the character yet seen. Robeson was also an accomplished singer, and at Essie’s urging he performed at Carnegie Hall in 1925. The first soloist to devote an entire concert to Negro spirituals, Robeson both enthralled the sold-out audience and boosted the popularity of the musical genre. Robeson steadfastly refused to sing operatic and classical music, preferring to emphasize Negro spirituals and international folk songs. In time his rich basso-baritone voice was familiar to millions through national and international concert tours, radio performances, and more than three hundred recordings. He combined singing and acting in several musicals and was best known for his rendition of “01’ Man River” in Show Boat (London, 1928; New York, 1932; Los Angeles, 1940). Robeson also appeared in eleven motion pictures, including film versions of The Emperor Jones (1933) and Show Boat (1936) and Hollywood extravaganzas such as King Solomon’s Mines (1937). Robeson chafed at the stereotyping and racial slights suffered by blacks in the movie industry and demanded positive leading roles; he was most proud of his work in Song of Freedom (1936) and The Proud Valley (1940). Robeson’s legacy, as actor/director SIDNEY POITIER noted, was profound: “Before him, no black man or woman had been portrayed in American movies as anything but a racist stereotype” (quoted in Current Biography [1976], 345–46).

Robeson’s political ideas took shape after George Bernard Shaw introduced him to socialism in 1928. To escape American racism, he lived during most of the 1930s in Europe, returning to the United States only for movie and concert appearances. Impressed by the absence of racial and class discrimination in the Soviet Union during a concert tour in 1934, Robeson subsequently spent extended periods in Moscow, learned Russian, and enrolled his son in Soviet schools. He became politically active in opposing fascism, imperialism, and racism. He gave benefit performances in England for refugees from fascist countries, associated with British left-wing political groups, became acquainted with key figures in the West African Political Union, including Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, and in 1938 traveled to Spain to support the republican troops engaged in the civil war against Francisco Franco’s fascists.

When forced by the outbreak of World War II to return to the United States in 1939, Robeson was as well known as a critic of American racism and champion of the Soviet Union as an entertainer. He protested the segregation of organized baseball, appeared frequently at union and labor meetings, delivered antiracist lectures during concerts, joined the Pan-Africanist Council on African Affairs, and quit Hollywood because “the industry is not prepared to permit me to portray the life or express the living interests, hopes, and aspirations of the struggling people from whom I come.” Robeson’s political activism drew criticism but did not hurt his career, primarily because of the U.S.-Soviet military alliance. Indeed, he enjoyed his greatest hour as a performer in October 1943 when he became the first black actor to play Othello in the United States. Following a then record-setting 296 performances for a Shakespearean drama on Broadway, the company undertook a nationwide tour and Robeson received the Donaldson Award as the best actor of the year. In 1945 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) awarded him the prestigious Spingarn Medal.

However, when Robeson continued to use the Soviet Union as a hammer to pound against racism in the United States, he suffered the fate of other political leftists during the anti-Communist hysteria of the cold war. In 1946 he denied under oath to a California State Legislative committee that he was a member of the Communist Party but thereafter refused as a matter of conscience and constitutional right to comment on his political beliefs or affiliation. Instead, he continued to speak out against American racism and to praise the Soviet “experiment in socialism,” associated openly with Marxist organizations, and, as a founder and chairman of the Progressive Party, campaigned for Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election. While addressing the World Peace Congress in Paris in 1949, he said: “It is unthinkable that American Negroes could go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” He was immediately denounced by the black and white press, repudiated by most black civil rights organizations, and attacked by government agencies and congressional committees. The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities labeled him a “Communist” and a “Communist sympathizer” and enlisted JACKIE ROBINSON, who in 1947 had integrated organized baseball, to “give the lie” to Robeson’s statement. He was hounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and in 1950 the State Department took away his passport, refusing to issue a new one until he signed a non-Communist oath and pledged not to give political speeches abroad. He refused, and his persistent use of the Fifth Amendment during House and Senate hearings and the Soviet Union’s awarding him the International Stalin Peace Prize in 1952 only exacerbated the public’s perception of him as a subversive. Outraged Rutgers alumni demanded that his name be excised from the school’s athletic records and that the honorary master of arts degree awarded to him in 1930 be rescinded. He was blacklisted as an entertainer, and his recordings were removed from stores. His income fell from over $100,000 in 1947 to $6,000 in 1952. Unable to travel abroad to earn money, Robeson was forced to sell his estate, The Beeches, in Enfield, Connecticut.

By the late 1950s the burgeoning civil rights movement along with the lessening of cold war paranoia and the demise of McCarthyism led to a rehabilitation of Robeson’s reputation, particularly among African Americans. Critical was Here I Stand (1958), a brief autobiography as manifesto in which Robeson reaffirmed his admiration for the Soviet Union and in which he stated, “I am not and never have been involved in any international conspiracy.” He also declared his “belief in the principles of scientific Socialism” as the basis for a society “economically, socially, culturally, and ethically superior to a system based upon production for private profit.” Although essentially a recitation of the stands he had taken all along, as the first sentence of the foreword—“I am a Negro”—made clear, the book was primarily a declaration of allegiance to the black community. Here Robeson presaged the Black Power politics of the 1960s by rejecting gradualism in civil rights, insisting that “the Negro people’s movement must be led by Negroes,” and advocating change through the “mass action” of “aroused and militant” black masses. He performed several concerts, recorded an album, and after being reissued a passport in 1958 (following a Supreme Court decision in a related case that confirmed his contention that the right to travel was independent of political views), left for Europe to revitalize his career.

But fifteen years of persistent harassment and political attacks had taken its toll, destroying not only his career but also his health and, ultimately, his sanity. Despite a tumultuous welcome, his sojourn in the Soviet Union was bleak. He was frequently hospitalized for exhaustion and a circulatory ailment as well as emotional instability. He attempted suicide; excessive drug and electric shock therapy likely caused permanent brain damage. He returned to the United States in 1963 and went into seclusion. His wife’s death in 1965 ended their long marriage of convenience. Robeson’s numerous infidelities had led to several separations, but Essie, who obtained a PhD in Anthropology and wrote African Journey (1945), resignedly managed his career in exchange for economic and social status. Robeson then moved to Philadelphia, where he lived with a sister. Virtually an invalid and suffering from acute depression, he refused interviews and was seen only by family and close friends. Too ill to attend the “75th Birthday Salute to Paul Robeson” staged at Carnegie Hall in April 1973 by leaders in the entertainment and civil rights fields, he sent a recorded message: “I want you to know that I am still the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace and brotherhood.” Three years later he died in Philadelphia.

Paul Robeson is an American tragedy. He was an enormously talented black man whose imposing personality and uncompromising political ideals were more than a racist and anti-communist United States could appreciate or tolerate. One of the major performing artists of the twentieth century, his achievements as a stage actor, movie star, and singer are individually outstanding but collectively astounding. He was easily the most influential black entertainer of his day. Because he spent so much time abroad, Robeson never established close political associations in black America and thus served the African American community more as a symbol of black consciousness and pride than as a spokesperson. A victim of character assassination during the cold war, Robeson—unlike many black (and white) entertainers who maintained silence to protect or advance their careers—courageously combined art and politics. If he was politically naive and oblivious to the realities of Stalinist Russia, he astutely connected American racism and the international oppression of colored peoples. And Robeson proved to be ahead of his time in rejecting both the black nationalism of separation and repatriation as well as the assimilationism of the NAACP in favor of a cultural pluralism in which ethnic integrity was maintained amid international solidarity. For all his achievements, Robeson’s pro-Soviet stance continues to preclude just recognition. He remains the only two-time All-American not in the College Football Hall of Fame.

ROBINSON, BILL

(25 May 1878–25 Nov. 1949), tap dancer, known as “Bojangles,” was born Luther Robinson in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Maxwell Robinson, a machinist, and Maria (maiden name unknown), a choir director. After both parents died in an accident around 1885, Luther and his brother William lived with their grandmother, Bedilia Robinson, a former slave who sought salvation through faith and disavowed dancing of any kind in her house. Too old and infirm to care for the boys, she entrusted them to a local judge, John Crutchfield.

Robinson appropriated his brother’s name, calling himself Bill, and took to the streets to earn nickels and dimes by dancing and scat-singing. In Richmond, he got the nickname “Bojangles,” from “jangler,” meaning contentious, and he invented the famous phrase “everything’s copasetic,” meaning everything’s tiptop or first-rate. Robinson ran away to Washington, D.C., picking up odd jobs dancing in beer gardens around town. He got his first professional break in 1892 as a pickaninny in the chorus line of Whallen and Martel’s South Before the War, a touring show that featured Mayme Remington, a former French burlesque dancer who became a top headliner in the 1890s. Shortly after arriving in New York in 1900, Robinson challenged In Old Kentucky star dancer Harry Swinton to a Friday night buck-and-wing dance contest and won. With a gold medal and the valuable publicity attendant on winning, he was quickly targeted as the man to challenge.

Considered by many the greatest tap dancer of all time, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (left) appears with LENA HORNE and CAB CALLOWAY in a 1943 publicity still from the Hollywood movie Stormy Weather. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Robinson worked wherever and whenever he could, and with a variety of partners, including Theodore Miller, Lula Brown, and Johnny Juniper. Bound by the “two-colored” rule in vaudeville, which restricted blacks to performing in pairs, he teamed with George W. Cooper from 1902 to 1914. They played the classiest tours in white vaudeville, the Keith and Orpheum circuits, without the blackface makeup expected of African American performers at the time. They also toured London with great success. Robinson married Lena Chase in 1907, although touring and professional activities kept them apart and forced them to separate around 1915 and divorce in 1922.

Robinson was a staunch professional, adamant about punctuality and a perfectionist with his routines. He was also known to anger quickly, gamble, and carry a gold-plated revolver. After an assault charge in 1908 that split up his act with Cooper, Robinson decided to launch his solo career and became one of the few blacks to perform as a soloist on the Keith circuit. He was a head-liner at New York’s Palace Theatre, the undisputed crown jewel of vaudeville theaters. At one point in his career, he made $6,500 a week in vaudeville and was billed as the “World’s Greatest Tap Dancer.” Being billed as a champion dancer meant winning dance competitions of the toughest kind to stay on top. Contests were audited by a panel of judges who sat under the stage, in the wings, and in the house, judging the dancer on the tempo and execution of steps. Robinson was challenged to dozens of contests and won, and according to tap dance lore competed against dancers such as James Barton, Will Mahoney, Jack Donahue, Fred Astaire, and Ray Bolger. Robinson’s stair dance, first performed in 1918, was distinguished by its showmanship and sound, each step emitting a different pitch and rhythm. Onstage his open face, twinkling eyes, and infectious smile were irresistible, as was his tapping, which was delicate and clear. Buck or time steps were inserted with skating steps or crossover steps on the balls of the feet that looked like a jig, all while he chatted and joked with the audience. Robinson danced in split clog shoes, ordinary shoes with a wooden half-sole and raised wooden heel. The wooden sole was attached from the toe to the ball of the foot and left loose, which allowed for greater flexibility and tonality.

In 1922, Robinson married Fannie Clay, who became his business manager, secretary, and partner in efforts to fight the barriers of racial prejudice. He was a founding member of the Negro Actors Guild of America. Hailed as the “Dark Cloud of Joy” on the Orpheum circuit, Robinson performed in vaudeville from 1914 to 1927 without a single season’s layoff. Yet Broadway fame did not come until he was fifty years old, with the all-black revue Blackbirds of 1928, in which he sang and danced “Doin’ the New Low Down.” Success was instantaneous and he was saluted as the greatest of all dancers by at least seven New York newspapers. Broadway shows that followed included Brown Buddies (1930), Blackbirds of 1933, All in Fun (1940), and Memphis Bound (1945). The opening of The Hot Mikado (1939) marked Robinson’s sixty-first birthday and he celebrated by dancing down Broadway, from 61st Street to the Broadhurst Theatre at 44th Street.

In the 1930s Robinson also performed in Hollywood films, a venue that had hitherto restricted African American performers. His first film, Dixiana (1930), had a predominantly white cast, but Harlem Is Heaven (1933) was one of the first all-black films ever made. Other films include Hooray for Love (1935), In Old Kentucky (1935), The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1935), One Mile from Heaven (1937), By an Old Southern River (1941), and Let’s Shuffle (1941). The well-known all-black film Stormy Weather (1943) featured Robinson, LENA HORNE, CAB CALLOWAY, and KATHERINE DUNHAM and her dance troupe. Robinson and Shirley Temple teamed up in The Little Colonel (1935), The Littlest Rebel (1935), Just Around the Corner (1938), and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), in which he taught the child superstar to tap dance.

In 1936, Robinson opened the downtown Cotton Club in New York (south of the more famous uptown Harlem Cotton Club) and introduced a new dance, the “Suzi-Q”; he was later featured in several Cotton Club shows. Claiming to have taught tap dancing to Eleanor Powell, FLORENCE MILLS, Fayard and Harold Nicholas, and Astaire, Robinson profoundly influenced the next generation of dancers at the Hoofers Club in Harlem, where he also gambled and shot pool. Throughout his lifetime, he was a member of many clubs and civic organizations and an honorary member of police departments in cities across the United States. Robinson was named “Mayor of Harlem” in 1933. His participation in benefits is legendary and it is estimated that he gave away well over one million dollars in loans and charities. During his long career, he never refused to play a benefit, regardless of race, creed, or color of those who were to profit by his performance. In 1943 he divorced Fannie Clay and married the young dancer Elaine Plaines.

“To his own people,” Marshall Stearns wrote in Jazz Dance, “Robinson became a modern John Henry, who instead of driving steel, laid down iron taps.” Although he was uneducated, Robinson was accepted in high places that were previously beyond the reach of most African Americans. He commanded the respect due to a gifted artist and became the most famous tap dancer of the twentieth century. Robinson’s exacting yet light footwork was said to have brought tap “up on its toes” from an earlier flat-footed shuffling style. Although he invented few new steps, he presented those he used with technical ease and a sparkling personality, turning relatively simple tap dancing into an exciting art.

When Robinson died in New York City, newspapers claimed that almost 100,000 people witnessed the passing of the funeral procession, a testament to the esteem in which he was held by members of his community. The founding of the Copasetics, a fraternity of male tap dancers formed the year Robinson died, ensured that his excellence would not be forgotten.

ROBINSON, EDDIE

(13 Feb. 1919—), college football coach, was born Edward Gay Robinson in Jackson, Louisiana, the son of Frank Robinson, then a sharecropper, and Lydia Stewart, a domestic worker. His parents separated when he was six years old and he lived in a two-room house with his grandparents. Both parents and grandparents were hard-working, industrious people and strict disciplinarians. Looking to break the cycle of sharecropping, Frank Robinson moved in 1925 to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to work for Standard Oil and later separated from Lydia Stewart and married Ann Floyd, a schoolteacher. Young Eddie marveled at the respect and special status that Floyd enjoyed in the community, reflecting the high esteem that African Americans conferred on education and teachers.

While Eddie was attending Scott Street Elementary School in Baton Rouge, one of his teachers invited football players dressed in full uniform to class for a project. Eddie was quite taken with the coach, Julius Kraft, and was greatly impressed by the respect his players gave him. Although he was only ten years old, he knew then that he wanted to be a football coach. Football became an obsession for him. Eddie was the first in his family to finish elementary school, and he later graduated from McKinley High School. Although he initially wanted to attend Southern University in Baton Rouge, he was not offered a scholarship, so he chose to attend Leland College in nearby Baker, Louisiana.

Robinson was raised in a segregated community with little contact with whites. He worked at several jobs to make ends meet, including one at an icehouse, where he loaded fifty-pound blocks. He also worked at a fish market after school and during the summers, making only four dollars per week. Upon graduation from Leland College, he married Doris Mott, his childhood sweetheart, in June 1941. They had two children, Lillian Rose and Eddie Jr. That same year Robinson was hired to coach football at the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute, a two-year college with fewer than one hundred male students. The school, later renamed Grambling State University, offered Robinson a starting salary of $63.75 a month.

Robinson coached at Grambling State University for fifty-six years (1941–1997). His tenure lasted through eleven presidents and four major American wars, and he retired as the winningest coach in the history of college football, with a record of 408 wins, 165 losses, and 15 ties. That mark bettered the winning records of such coaching greats as Amos Alonzo Stagg, Pop Warner, and even Alabama’s legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant. During Robinson’s tenure, the Grambling Tigers won eight national black college titles and seventeen conference championships. In 1942, his second season, Robinson fielded a team that went undefeated and was not scored against, a feat that has been repeated only once in the history of college football.

Under Robinson’s leadership, Grambling also became one of professional football’s most productive training grounds. All told, he sent more than two hundred Grambling players to the National Football League, including the Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees Willie Davis, Junius “Buck” Buchanan, and Willie Brown. The first African American drafted (in 1949) from a historically black college, Tank Younger, was from Grambling, while the Tiger defensive standout Junius “Buck” Buchanan was the first African American to be selected in the first round of the NFL’s draft (1963). Another Grambling favorite, James Harris, signed for the Los Angeles Rams, and in 1969 became the first black quarterback to start an NFL play-off game in 1969. Perhaps the most successful of Eddie Robinson’s protégés, however, was Doug Williams, who starred for Grambling in the late 1970s and in 1988 became the first African American quarterback to start in a Super Bowl. Williams, who led the Washington Redskins to victory, was selected the Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXII.

Although desegregation sapped much of the talent from historically black colleges like Grambling, Robinson continued to recruit talented student-athletes. Recognizing that historically white schools were now competing for the best and brightest black student-athletes, Robinson formed a strategy to ensure that Grambling remained attractive to African American athletes. He created and promoted a series of national games for Grambling against other Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s) that drew network coverage and large audiences. The most significant of them, the annual Bayou Classic between Grambling and Southern, attracts an annual attendance of over sixty-five thousand spectators. Following the assassination of MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. in 1968, Robinson also established the Urban League Classic at New York’s Yankee Stadium. The game was later renamed the Whitney Young Classic, after the death of the National Urban League’s former executive director WHITNEY YOUNG. The success of the first of these “classics” led to three other national games that embodied Robinson’s philosophy of linking sport and the civil rights movement.

Coach Eddie Robinson has won more games than any coach in the history of college football. His fifty-six-year tenure at the same institution may never be repeated, and he has observed the social transformation of America through sports for over six decades. Penn State’s coach, Joe Paterno, summed up the Grambling legend’s legacy: “Nobody has ever done or will do what Eddie Robinson has done for this game. Our profession will never be able to repay Eddie Robinson for what he has done for the country and the profession of football” (Lapchick).

ROBINSON, JACKIE

(31 Jan. 1919–24 Oct. 1972), baseball player, was born Jack Roosevelt Robinson in Cairo, Georgia, the son of Jerry Robinson, a farmworker and sharecropper, and Mallie McGriff, a domestic worker. Six months after Robinson’s birth, his father deserted the family. Faced with severe financial difficulties, Robinson’s mother moved her family to Pasadena, California, in pursuit of a better life. The Robinsons settled in a white Pasadena neighborhood—where they received a chilly reception—and Robinson’s mother supported her family in modest fashion as a domestic worker.

Robinson demonstrated his athletic prowess from an early age. After graduating from high school in Pasadena in 1937 as one of the city’s most celebrated athletes, he entered Pasadena Junior College. He established himself as an exceptional multi-sport athlete at Pasadena and won junior college All-American honors in football. By the time of his graduation from Pasadena in 1939, he was one of the most widely recruited athletes on the West Coast. Robinson eventually decided to enter the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which he attended from 1939 to 1941. Playing four sports at UCLA, Robinson continued to display extraordinary athletic ability, causing one sportswriter to label him “the Jim Thorpe of his race” (Tygiel, 60). He twice led the Southern Division of the Pacific Coast Conference in basketball scoring, averaged 11 yards per carry as an Ail-American running back during his junior year on the football team, and won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) broad jump championship in track and field. Ironically, Robinson’s weakest performance came in baseball; he played only one season at UCLA and had minimal success, batting only .097. Robinson was not the only athlete in his family; his older brother Mack finished second to JESSE OWENS in the 200-meter sprint at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

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