African American Lives

Jackie Robinson at bat for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954, seven years after he broke the color line in major league baseball for the first time since 1885. Library of Congress

Robinson dropped out of college during his senior year at UCLA to help support his family. After brief stints as an assistant athletic director at a National Youth Administration camp in California and as a player with two semiprofessional football teams—the Los Angeles Bulldogs and the Honolulu Bears—Robinson was drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1942.

The U.S. Army of the 1940s was a thoroughly segregated institution. Although initially denied entry into the army’s Officers Candidate School because of his race, Robinson, with the assistance of boxer JOE LOUIS, successfully challenged his exclusion and was eventually commissioned a second lieutenant. Robinson spent two years in the service at army bases in Kansas, Texas, and Kentucky. During this time Robinson confronted the army’s discriminatory racial practices; on one occasion he faced court-martial charges for insubordination arising from an incident in which he refused to move to the back of a segregated military bus in Texas. A military jury acquitted Robinson, and shortly thereafter, in November 1944, he received his honorable discharge from the army.

Following his discharge, Robinson—who continued to enjoy a reputation as an extraordinarily gifted athlete—spent the spring and summer of 1945 playing shortstop with the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. Robinson proved to be a highly effective player, batting about .345 for the year. At this time major league baseball did not permit black players to play on either minor league or major league teams, pursuant to an unwritten agreement among the owners that dated back to the nineteenth century. Pressure to integrate baseball, however, had steadily increased. Many critics complained of the hypocrisy of requiring black men to fight and die in a war against European racism but denying them the opportunity to play “the national pastime.” During the early 1940s a few major league teams offered tryouts to black players—Robinson had received a tryout with the Boston Red Sox in 1945—but no team actually signed a black player.

In the meantime, however, Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, had secretly decided to use African Americans on his team. Rickey was convinced of the ability of black ballplayers, their potential gate attraction, and the injustice of their exclusion from major league baseball. Using the ruse that he wanted to develop a new league for black players, Rickey deployed his scouts to scour the Negro Leagues and the Caribbean for the most talented black ballplayers during the spring and summer of 1945. In particular Rickey sought one player who would break the color line and establish a path for several others to follow; he eventually settled on Robinson. Although Robinson was not the best black baseball player, his college education, experience competing in interracial settings at UCLA, and competitive fire attracted Rickey. In August 1945 Rickey offered Robinson a chance to play in the Dodgers organization but cautioned him that he would experience tremendous pressure and abuse. Rickey extracted from Robinson a promise not to respond to the abuse for his first three years.

Robinson spent the 1946 baseball season with the top Dodgers minor league club located in Montreal. After leading the Montreal Royals to the International League championship and winning the league batting championship with a .349 average, he joined the Dodgers the following spring. Several of the Dodgers players objected to Robinson’s presence and circulated a petition in which they threatened not to play with him. Rickey thwarted the boycott efforts by making clear that such players would be traded or released if they refused to play.

Robinson opened the 1947 season as the Dodgers’ starting first baseman, thereby breaking the long-standing ban on black players in the major leagues. During his first year he was subjected to extraordinary verbal and physical abuse from opposing teams and spectators. Pitchers threw the ball at his head, opposing base runners cut him with their spikes, and disgruntled fans sent death threats that triggered an FBI investigation on at least one occasion. Although Robinson possessed a fiery temper and enormous pride, he honored his agreement with Rickey not to retaliate to the constant stream of abuse. At the same time he suffered the indignities of substandard segregated accommodations while traveling with the Dodgers.

Robinson’s aggressive style of play won games for the Dodgers, earning him the loyalty of his teammates and the Brooklyn fans. Despite the enormous pressure that year, he led the Dodgers to their first National League championship in six years and a berth in the World Series. Robinson, who led the league in stolen bases and batted .297, was named rookie of the year. Overnight, he captured the hearts of black America. In time he became one of the biggest gate attractions in baseball since Babe Ruth, bringing thousands of African American spectators to major league games. Five major league teams set new attendance records in 1947. By the end of the season, two other major league teams—the Cleveland Indians and the St. Louis Browns—had added black players to their rosters for brief appearances. By the early 1950s most other major league teams had hired black ballplayers.

In the spring of 1949, having fulfilled his three-year pledge of silence, Robinson began to speak his mind and angrily confronted opposing players who taunted him. He also enjoyed his finest year, leading the Dodgers to another National League pennant and capturing the league batting championship, with a .342 mark, and the most valuable player award. Off the field, Robinson received considerable attention for his testimony in July 1949 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in opposition to PAUL ROBESON’s statement that African Americans would not fight in a war against the Soviet Union. During the next few years Robinson, unlike many other black ballplayers, became outspoken in his criticism of segregation both inside and outside of baseball.

Robinson ultimately played ten years for the Dodgers, primarily as a second baseman. During this time his team won six National League pennants and the 1955 World Series. Robinson possessed an array of skills, but he was known particularly as an aggressive and daring base runner, stealing home nineteen times in his career and five times in one season. In one of the more memorable moments in World Series history, Robinson stole home against the New York Yankees in the first game of the 1955 series. Robinson’s baserunning exploits helped to revolutionize the game and to pave the way for a new generation of successful base stealers, particularly Maury Wills and Lou Brock. Robinson batted .311 for his career and in 1962 became the first black player to win election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. On 15 April 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson’s first major league game, Major League Baseball, in an unprecedented action, retired Robinson’s number 42 in perpetuity.

After the 1956 season, the Dodgers traded Robinson to the New York Giants, their crosstown rivals. Robinson declined to accept the trade and instead announced his retirement from baseball. Thereafter, Robinson worked for seven years as a vice president of the Chock Full O’Nuts food company, handling personnel matters. An important advocate of black-owned businesses in America, Robinson helped establish several of them, including the Freedom National Bank in Harlem. He also used his celebrity status as a spokesman for civil rights issues for the remainder of his life. Robinson served as an active and highly successful fundraiser for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and conducted frequent fund-raising events of his own to support civil rights causes and organizations. He wrote a regular newspaper column throughout the 1960s in which he criticized the persistence of racial injustice in American society, including the refusal of baseball owners to employ blacks in management. Shortly before his death, Robinson wrote in his autobiography I Never Had It Made that he remained “a black man in a white world.” Although a supporter of Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign, Robinson eventually became involved with the liberal wing of the Republican Party, primarily as a close adviser of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Robinson had married Rachel Isum in 1946, and the couple had three children. Robinson suffered from diabetes and heart disease in his later years and died of a heart attack in Stamford, Connecticut.

Probably no other athlete has had a greater sociological impact on American sport than did Robinson. His success on the baseball field opened the door to black baseball players and thereby transformed the game. He also helped to facilitate the acceptance of black athletes in other professional sports, particularly basketball and football. His influence spread beyond the realm of sport, as he emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s as an important national symbol of the virtue of racial integration in all aspects of American life.

ROBINSON, JAMES HERMAN

(24 Jan. 1907–6 Nov. 1972), minister and founder of Operation Crossroads Africa, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, one of six children of Henry John Robinson, a slaughterhouse laborer, and Willie Bell Banks, a washerwoman. Robinson grew up in abject poverty in a section of town called the Bottoms, where poor blacks and whites lived. Because of his father’s frequent periods of unemployment and his mother’s failing health, the Robinson family could not escape the reality of poverty and segregation in the Jim Crow South. Those already at the bottom of the economic pile were also denied access to the educational opportunities that might otherwise have helped them to escape poverty. Given the dire circumstances in which the family lived, James had a difficult time accepting the strong religious convictions of his father, who was a member of a sanctified church and spent much of his free time there. As his family’s economic conditions remained unchanged, James began to view religion as a waste of time, and questioned his father’s and his own faith in God.

In 1917 the Robinson family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to escape poverty and segregation, but the greater opportunities they had anticipated remained elusive. Robinson attended an integrated school for the first time and found the experience unsettling because of the discrimination he faced from white teachers and students. His father did find work, in another slaughterhouse, but the family continued to live in poverty and in overcrowded housing. Because of these economic hardships, Robinson was not encouraged to remain in school. After his mother died, he moved to Youngstown, Ohio, to live with his grandparents, but was forced to return to Cleveland after the death of his grandmother. Henry Robinson, who had since remarried, had little interest in furthering his son’s desire to get an education. James, nevertheless, found various jobs to support himself and, without his father’s knowledge, attended Fairmont Junior High School and East Technical High School.

Even as a child, Robinson understood that racism was nefarious and contradictory to Christian teaching. His thoughts and feelings on this issue intensified after he moved north to the “Promised Land,” because, although there were no “white” and “colored” signs to dictate where and how one lived, invisible racial boundaries continued to restrict his mobility and opportunities. Robinson’s early life had been marked by many negative experiences, but there were also positive ones, most notably at the Cedar Branch Hi-Y Club, a high school chapter of the YMCA. Before coming to Hi-Y, Robinson was discouraged and distraught, but his experiences at the club expanded his worldview through interaction with middle- and upper-middle-class African Americans. He joined the debate club and through its outings he learned more of himself, the state of race relations, and the role and importance of religion. Ernest Escoe, the debate club’s adviser, and Escoe’s wife, Sally, supported Robinson and encouraged him to attend St. James African Methodist Church. It was there that he found his calling in life: “to be a servant of the people” (Road without Turning, 132). Robinson graduated from East Technical High School in 1929 at the age of twenty-two, but money problems continued to hinder him. He would have been homeless if it were not for Percy and Daisy Kelley. Percy, a waiter in a coffee shop, befriended Robinson, and the Kelleys allowed him to share their home.

Robinson continued his education at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, but dropped out due to financial problems. He then approached the minister of Mount Zion Congregational Church with a plan for a sports program to keep young men out of trouble; after Robinson had established several more clubs, a Presbyterian minister noticed his hard work and informed him that the church would fund his education. He enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, but because the church did not provide enough funding to support him completely, Robinson spent his summers serving as pastor of a church in Beardon, Tennessee, near Knoxville. He described the social and economic conditions in Beardon as worse than the Bottoms, and used the pulpit to speak out against racial injustice and for civil rights. Robinson’s experiences at Beardon, along with those at Lincoln, further expanded his understanding of race relations and the plight of the less fortunate. Because he was older than most of his classmates, Robinson found the practice of freshmen and fraternity hazing immature and self-defeating. Even more perplexing to him was the fact that, although Lincoln was a historically black college, most of the faculty and administration were white. Robinson spoke out against this glaring inequality throughout his time at Lincoln, where he graduated in 1935 at the top of his class.

After graduating from Lincoln, Robinson attended New York City’s Union Theological Seminary (1935–1938), where he was president of his senior class, and director of the Morningside Community Center (1938–1961). In spite of those successes, his time at Union Seminary was troubled. He tried to uphold Christian values while enduring discrimination from his white classmates. But he also found it difficult to befriend other African American students, as he found them aloof and indifferent to the racism and discrimination they faced. Robinson’s seminary experiences encouraged him to propose greater multiracial cooperation within the ministry.

The year 1938 proved to be a turning point in Robinson’s life: he graduated from Union, was ordained as a minister, became head of Church of the Master Presbyterian Church in Harlem, and married Helen Brodie. They had no children. He also worked as a youth director for the NAACP from 1938 to 1940.

For the rest of his career and life, Robinson saw his mission as being a servant of the people. He believed that his ministry and church could improve communities by providing people with the economic and social resources that they need to empower themselves. Believing that interracial cooperation was central to this goal, he recruited mainly white students from colleges in New York City to work on projects near his church in Harlem. These projects were very successful, and in 1948 land was donated in New Hampshire to establish Camp Rabbit Hollow, a rural setting in which black children from Harlem and white college students could interact and work together, fostering mutual understanding, cooperation, and respect.

The success of these interracial programs, and his experiences touring Africa, Asia, and Europe in the 1950s, encouraged Robinson to found Operation Crossroads Africa in 1958. Believing that “men will lose consciousness of their differences and divisions when they interest themselves in the common problems of one another” (Jet obituary, 48), Robinson encouraged American students and other volunteers to work on community development projects in Africa. In its first twenty years, over 5,000 American volunteers of all races traveled to Africa and the Caribbean to help build and repair housing, roads, health clinics, and schools. Civil rights activists figure prominently among Operation Crossroads alumni, including ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, later chair of the EEOC and a U.S. congresswoman, who helped build a school in Gabon in the early 1960s. That experience, Norton recalled in 1977, “made me think about myself as a black person and as an American more profoundly than at any point since” (Rule, 58).

Robinson continued to focus on African affairs throughout the 1960s. His development efforts gained worldwide admiration and spurred other transnational volunteer programs, including Canadian Crossroads International and the U.S. Peace Corps, which John F. Kennedy founded in 1961. President Kennedy recognized his debt to Robinson by calling Operation Crossroads Africa “the progenitor of the Peace Corps” (Rule, 58). During the 1950s Robinson published four books, Tomorrow Is Today (1954), Adventurous Preaching, Love of This Land, and Christianity and Revolution in Africa (all 1956). Following his divorce from Helen Brodie in 1954, he married Gertrude Cotter in 1958. The couple had no children. In 1962, he resigned from Church of the Master to be a minister-at-large and to direct Operation Crossroads Africa on a full-time basis. That same year, he published Africa at the Crossroads.

James Robinson died in New York City in 1972, having dedicated his life to fostering a better understanding among people throughout the world. His greatest achievement lay in forging links between Africans and African Americans and between Africa and the United States. “The darkest thing about Africa,” Robinson once remarked, “is America’s ignorance of it” (Rule, 58). Since 1958 Operation Crossroads Africa has worked diligently to remove that veil of ignorance.

ROBINSON, JO ANN

(17 Apr. 1912–29 Aug. 1992), civil rights activist, was born Jo Ann Gibson on a farm in Crawford County, Georgia, the youngest of twelve children of Owen B. Gibson and Dollie Webb. After the death of her father in 1918, her mother struggled to operate the farm. In 1926, however, her mother sold out and moved the family to the nearby city of Macon, to live with a son who was a postman. Jo Ann attended high school in Macon, graduating in 1929 as the valedictorian of her class. She then began teaching in the Macon public schools, continuing to do so while also attending Fort Valley State College. She received a BS degree from Fort Valley in 1936. In 1943 she married Wilbur Robinson, a soldier in the U.S. Army, and in 1944 they had a child. But the child died in infancy, and in 1946 the Robinsons divorced. Robinson then resigned her position with the Macon school system and entered graduate school at Atlanta University, from which she received an MA in 1948. In the school year 1948–1949 she taught English at Mary Allen College in Crockett, Texas, and in the fall of 1949 she joined the faculty of Alabama State College for Negroes in Montgomery.

Almost as soon as she arrived in Montgomery, she became an active member of the Women’s Political Council, which had been formed the preceding spring by female Alabama State College faculty as a black analogue of the all-white League of Women Voters. Robinson became the council’s president in 1952 and registered to vote for the first time on 6 January 1953. As early as October 1952 the council had begun pressing the Montgomery bus company and the Montgomery City Commission to adopt the pattern of bus segregation in use in the Alabama city of Mobile, under which drivers could not unseat black passengers to make room for boarding whites. Robinson became the principal black spokesperson in meetings with city authorities during 1953 and 1954 about racial problems on the city buses. These meetings rectified one significant black complaint, that buses would stop at every corner in white neighborhoods but only at every other corner in black areas. But no progress was made on the problem of the unseating of black passengers.

On 21 May 1954, just after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision forbidding racial segregation in public schools, Robinson sent Mayor William A. Gayle a letter warning him that unless concessions on the bus-seating question were made, Montgomery’s blacks might undertake a boycott of the busses. The arrest and conviction of a black high school student, Claudette Colvin, in March 1955 for failing to obey a driver’s order to yield her seat, further exacerbated the tensions surrounding this issue. Thus, when the black attorney Fred D. Gray called Robinson on the evening of 1 December 1955 to tell her of the arrest of ROSA PARKS under exactly the same circumstances, Robinson was primed for action. Early the next morning she went to her office at Alabama State College and mimeographed a leaflet calling for a one-day boycott of the buses on the day Parks’s trial was to be held, 5 December. She and her council associates spent the rest of the day distributing the leaflets throughout the black sections of the city. The result was that when Montgomery’s black leaders met that evening at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, at the call of EDGAR D. NIXON, president of the local of the Pullman porters’ union, to discuss the possibility of a boycott, they found themselves faced with a fait accompli because of Robinson’s actions, and so they voted to support the boycott proposal.

The boycott on 5 December proved to be a complete success. When Parks was convicted and fined ten dollars and costs, black leaders at a meeting that afternoon decided to continue the boycott until the bus company adopted the Mobile pattern of segregation. They formed an organization to run the protest, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), and chose Robinson’s pastor, the Reverend MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., to head it. During the boycott, which lasted for more than a year, Robinson continued to play a crucial role. She was one of the black negotiators who met with a white mediation committee appointed by the mayor, and she insisted that the two racial delegations be equal in numbers. She was also a member of the Improvement Association’s executive board and its strategy committee. In this role, she was a central figure in persuading these bodies in January 1956 to agree to file suit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation, even though doing so meant abandoning the demand for the adoption of the Mobile pattern of seating. Both during and after the boycott, she edited the MIA’s newsletter, which assisted in raising contributions for the organization from throughout the country.

She had promised the president of Alabama State College, H. Councill Trenholm, that she would keep secret her part in initiating the boycott, to protect the college from state legislative reprisal, and her contributions did not become publicly known until 1980, when historical investigation finally revealed them. Nevertheless, she found herself caught up in Governor John M. Patterson’s furious attacks on the college when its students organized sitins at segregated Montgomery facilities in the spring of 1960, and she was compelled to resign from the faculty in May of that year. She taught at Grambling College in Louisiana during the academic year 1960–1961 and then became a public school teacher in Los Angeles, California. She taught in Los Angeles until her retirement in 1976. In 1987 the University of Tennessee Press published her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It.

ROBINSON, JOHN C.

(26 Nov. 1903–27 Mar. 1954), aviator who promoted flight training for African Americans but gained his greatest fame as a pilot for Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, was born in Carabelle, Florida. His father’s name is unknown; his mother, Celest Robinson, may have been born in Ethiopia. Raised by his mother and stepfather in Gulfport, Mississippi, Robinson graduated from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1924. For the following six years, he was a truck driver in Gulfport. Then he moved to Chicago, where he and his wife, Earnize Robinson, operated a garage. In 1931 he graduated from the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical Institute in Chicago. He taught at Curtiss-Wright Institute and organized African American men and women pilots in the Chicago area into the Challenger Air Pilots Association.

Early in 1935 the Tuskegee Institute invited Robinson to organize the first course in aviation entirely for African Americans. By that time, he held a transport flying license and had piled up 1,200 hours of flight time, much of it as an instructor at South Side Chicago airports. At about the same time as the Tuskegee offer, a nephew of Emperor Haile Selassie invited Robinson to come to Ethiopia. Benito Mussolini’s Italian legions were threatening, and Ethiopia needed experienced aviators, even though some press reports at the time said that none of the emperor’s twenty-five airplanes was flyable. Robinson appeared to have selfless motives, in contrast with the many intriguers and opportunists who flocked into Addis Ababa during Ethiopia’s futile attempts to repel the Italians. He “had come to Ethiopia to testify to the solidarity of the colored peoples” (Del Boca, 86).

Soon after arriving, Robinson displayed what would become a familiar penchant for prickly behavior toward others. He clashed with the only other African American pilot on the scene, Col. Hubert Julian, a Harlem native who had renounced his U.S. citizenship to serve in the Ethiopian air force. Julian, known as the “Black Eagle,” apparently lost the contest, because he was banished to a far-off province to drill infantry recruits. That left Robinson, the “Brown Condor,” in charge of the ragtag air force. Now a colonel, he had to deal with an Italian air force that controlled the skies over Ethiopia during the invasion in 1935 and 1936. In an unarmed monoplane, he repeatedly flew courier missions between the front lines and Addis Ababa. Robinson escaped from Ethiopia on 4 May 1936, the day before the country capitulated. Returning to the United States, he toured the country on behalf of United Aid for Ethiopia. That fall, he returned to Tuskegee Institute to teach the aviation course he had given up before he left for Ethiopia.

When World War II ended, Robinson returned to Ethiopia, where Selassie granted him his old rank of colonel. Within a year, however, he was at odds with a group of Swedish technicians who were in Ethiopia to work with equipment sent by Swedish munitions makers. In August 1947 the conflict exploded into violence. Robinson was arrested and jailed for an assault on Swedish Count Carl Gustav von Rosen, who was then commander in chief of the Ethiopian air force. Robinson was found guilty by a jury, lost his appeal, and spent an undetermined amount of time in prison.

In 1951 Ebony magazine reported that Robinson—still the best-known African American in Ethiopia—had become disillusioned by his conviction and was thinking of returning to the United States. “But,” said Ebony’s reporter, “despite Selassie’s apparent indifference to him, he remains something of a national hero to the Ethiopian people.”

Robinson died as a result of severe burns sustained on 13 March 1954, when the training plane he was flying crashed and burned at the Addis Ababa airport, after narrowly missing a nurses’ home. The apparent cause of the accident was engine failure. Also killed in the accident was Bruno Bianci, an Italian engineer.

Although Robinson was a glamorous figure in Ethiopia’s highly publicized resistance to Mussolini, his greatest legacy may have been his attempt to increase African American interest in aviation in the United States. Had he remained in his native country after World War II, he would have witnessed the integration of the armed forces—perhaps by some of the pilots he helped train.

ROBINSON, RANDALL

(6 July 1941—), lawyer, human rights activist, and founder and president of TransAfrica and TransAfrica Forum, was born in Richmond, Virginia, one of four children of Maxie Cleveland Robinson Sr., a high school history teacher, and Doris Alma Jones, an elementary school teacher. His sister Jewell was the first African American admitted to Goucher College in Maryland, and his brother Max was the first African American to anchor a national news program. Although both his parents attended college, the family experienced poverty early on, like most African American families living in Richmond at the time. Robinson attended public schools and felt the effects of racism and discrimination as he negotiated his way within the confines of a segregated society.

Following graduation from high school in 1959, Robinson attended Norfolk State College in Virginia on a basketball scholarship, but he left the university during his junior year. He married Brenda Randolph, a librarian, in 1965. They had two children, Anike and Jabari, before divorcing in 1982. Robinson served in the army, and, following his discharge, attended Virginia Union University, graduating in 1967. Robinson then entered Harvard University Law School but soon discovered that his life’s work would not include practicing law.

After my first year of law school, I all but knew that I would never practice law . . . . I knew early that I simply couldn’t endure the tedium of practice. I couldn’t make myself enjoy the numbing task of drafting coma-inducing legal briefs and then plodding through the even more deadly labyrinthine and dreary passageways of legal procedure

(Robinson, 1998:68)

Nonetheless, he graduated in 1970. His experiences at Harvard and living in the predominantly African American community of Roxbury had a profound effect on him. As a southerner, he had endured segregation, and knew what to expect from the whites he encountered, but Boston was in the North, and he had anticipated an integrated city. The racial strife that polarized the city in the sixties and seventies and its accompanying violence surprised and perplexed him.

Robinson became increasingly fascinated by Africa as he began to read more about the continent. He became interested in the liberation struggles of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, and in 1970 he established the Southern Africa Relief Fund to provide military assistance to those who were struggling to end colonial and white minority rule, raising four thousand dollars. In addition, he became interested in U.S. foreign policy in Africa and its relationship to American multinational corporations. Robinson recalls in his autobiography that, “at the age of twenty-nine, I knew only that I wanted to apply my career energies to the empowerment and liberation of the African world” (Robinson, 69). He realized that black people throughout the world were in a similar situation; they suffered from the same legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. In Robinson’s view it was essential that the peoples of the black diaspora had a voice in the decisions that affected their daily lives.

Robinson’s sense of mission about the African continent was fulfilled in 1970 when he was given a Ford Foundation grant that allowed him to spend six months in Tanzania. Again he could not escape racism and discrimination, and he achieved a broader understanding of the effects of colonialism. When he attempted to rent a car he was informed by an East Indian clerk that he would have to pay a deposit and that no cars were available. He returned to his hotel room and telephoned the same business. This time, when the clerk heard an American accent, but did not see Robinson’s skin color, he was told that a car was available and that the deposit was much lower. Even in Tanzania, he could not escape his skin color, and he realized the economic impact of the East Indian community brought to that nation by the British, who dominated the private retail sector.

Upon his return to the United States in 1971, he practiced law for the Boston Legal Assistance Project and then worked as community organizer for the Roxbury Multi-Service Center. Robinson’s interest in Africa continued, and he organized the Pan African Liberation Committee to bring attention to American investment on the continent and its role in colonial liberation struggles. He devoted particular attention to the roles of his alma mater, Harvard University, and Gulf Oil in sustaining corrupt regimes in Africa and other parts of the third world. In 1975 Robinson moved to Washington, D.C., serving first as a staff assistant for Congressman William Clay and then as an administrative assistant for Congressman Charles Diggs. While working on Diggs’s staff, he visited South Africa in 1976 and gained a deeper understanding of the pernicious nature of that country’s apartheid system.

Two years later TransAfrica was established under Robinson’s leadership. The organization soon emerged as the leading African American advocacy group on issues affecting people of African descent: white minority rule in southern Africa, ethnic strife and war throughout the African continent, human rights violations, the plight of Haitian refugees, and the lack of economic, social, and political resources available to black people throughout the diaspora. Through Robinson’s leadership, people from various religious, ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds attempted to shape American foreign policy in Africa through a series of protests, marches, and demonstrations. Robinson believed that civil disobedience was important to draw national attention to the conditions of blacks living under apartheid. It was a mechanism to galvanize students, workers, intellectuals, politicians, celebrities, the young and old, blacks, whites, and others around a common issue. His ultimate goal was to convince Congress to pass economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid government. Others inspired by TransaAfrica constructed shantytowns on college campuses to protest their universities’ investment in apartheid South Africa. Though TransAfrica’s methods were much more confrontational, Robinson’s anti-apartheid efforts paralleled those of LEON SULLIVAN, who worked closely with American corporations to end investment in South Africa.

Robinson thought that it was important for college students to understand the role that university investments played in maintaining apartheid. He also believed that people should be conscious of how their governments and companies invested their money in South Africa, and he encouraged them to push for divestment. Robinson appeared on national television, before congressional committees, and wherever else he could, to encourage the U.S. government to change its policy toward South Africa by enforcing economic sanctions against the apartheid regime and to call for the end of white minority rule in Namibia. To further debate on such matters, he established the TransAfrica Forum in 1981, an organization that engages in outreach work for the African American community and the broader public by providing seminars and conferences to inform people about the impact of US foreign policy on Africa and its diaspora.

In 1986 Robinson’s hard work with the Congressional Black Caucus and other members of Congress resulted in the passage—over President Ronald Reagan’s veto—of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which served to strengthen existing sanctions and urged a transition to democratic rule in South Africa. (Some Reagan administration officials felt a closer affinity to the anti-communist regime in Pretoria than to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which included communists like Joe Slovo in leadership positions).

Robinson married Hazel Ross, who worked with him at TransAfrica, in 1987. They have one daughter, Khalea.

Although ending white minority rule in southern Africa was at the forefront of Robinson’s work, he continued to push for improved economic conditions in the Caribbean, better treatment of Haitian refugees by the U.S. government, and the removal of dictators in Africa. In addition, he spoke out against the human rights violations committed by Sani Abacha’s dictatorship in Nigeria and democratic failures in other African countries. He also called for reparations for blacks in the United States and was a vocal critic of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, passed by Congress in 2000 in an effort to move Africa-U.S. policy from aid to trade. His books include Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (1998), The Debt: What America Owes Blacks (2001), and The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other (2002). These works, like Robinson’s life and career in general, have been dedicated to ensuring that American foreign policy makers address the issues, concerns, and needs of the African diaspora.

ROBINSON, SUGAR RAY

(3 May 1920?-12 Apr. 1988), world boxing champion, was born Walker Smith Jr. in Detroit, Michigan, the third child of Walker Smith, a laborer, and Leila Hurst, a seamstress. Robinson divided his youth between Detroit and Georgia and later moved to New York City. It was in Detroit that he was first exposed to boxing. As he recalls in his biography, Sugar Ray, he carried the bag of the future heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis Barrow, soon to be JOE LOUIS, to the local Brewster Street Gymnasium.

Smith adopted the name Ray Robinson quite unintentionally. When his manager, George Gainford, needed a flyweight to fill a slot in a boxing tournament in Kingston, New York, young Walker Smith was available. In order to box, however, he needed an Amateur Athletic Union identity card. The AAU card verified that participating boxers were not professionals. Gainford had a stack of cards and pulled one out with the name “Ray Robinson” on it. The real Ray Robinson no longer boxed for Gainford’s team, but the name stuck. The “Sugar” moniker was added later after Gainford, or perhaps a reporter or bystander (reports vary), declared that Ray was “as sweet as sugar.”

Sugar Ray Robinson boxing Bobo Olson in 1956 and regaining the middleweight championship of the world. Corbis

Robinson turned professional on 4 October 1940, after great success as an amateur, including winning the Golden Gloves featherweight title. He was also briefly married at this time to a woman named Marjorie. That marriage was annulled after a short period, though they had a son together named Ronnie. Robinson had two other marriages. The second, in 1943, was to Edna Mae Holly. They had a son named Ray Robinson Jr., born on 13 November 1949. Ray Sr.’s final marriage was to Millie Bruce.

In 1943 Robinson joined the U.S. Army, where he spent most of his time fighting in boxing exhibitions and renewed his relationship with Joe Louis. The two men were arrested on one occasion at a military camp in Alabama for refusing to use a segregated waiting area, but were later released.

Robinson held the world welterweight title from 1946 to 1951 and was then middleweight champion five times between 1951 and 1960. At his peak his record was 128–1–2 with 84 knockouts. He never took a ten-count in his 202 fights, though he once suffered a TKO. In Robinson’s day a boxer typically fought only eighty to one hundred bouts; today’s boxers fight far fewer contests. Such a punishing schedule and his advancing years finally took their toll; thirteen of his nineteen defeats occurred between 1960 and 1965, when he was in his forties and well past his prime.

One of the most poignant bouts in Robinson’s career was his June 24, 1947, fight with Jimmy Doyle in Cleveland, Ohio. A week before the fight Robinson dreamed that he had killed Doyle in the ring. He told his manager, “the kid dropped dead at my feet, George.” Robinson informed all who listened that he did not want to fight, fearing that the premonition would come true. In the end it did. Robinson knocked Doyle out in the eighth round of this fight, and Doyle never awakened.

Robinson’s most notable bouts were those against Jake LaMotta in the mid 1940s and early 1950s, when they battled each other a total of six times. Those fights and LaMotta’s life were intertwined with Robinson’s. With the exception of their first encounter, Robinson won all of these bouts, including his first world middleweight title on February 14, 1951. LaMotta’s life was memorialized in the Academy Award-winning motion picture Raging Bull.

Perhaps Robinson’s greatest boxing accomplishment was his success at a wide range of fighting weights. As an amateur he had been a featherweight, a division restricted to those weighing between 122 and 130 pounds, and began his professional career as a lightweight, where the fighting limit was 140 pounds. His first world championship victory came at the welterweight division (140–147 pounds) in December 1946, when he defeated Tommy Bell after fifteen bruising rounds in New York. In 1950 Robinson moved up to the middleweight division, where a fighter can weigh up to 160 pounds. It was at that weight that he defeated Jake LaMotta to win the world championship in 1951. In the late 1950s he even contemplated a bout with the then heavyweight champion of the world, Floyd Patterson. Though that bout never took place, press reports claimed that Robinson was offered one million dollars to take on a boxer who outweighed him by dozens of pounds.

Robinson did, however, challenge light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim. That bout was held in Madison Square Garden on 25 June 1952, which turned out to be one the hottest nights in fifty-three years. The temperature at ringside was 104 degrees. Although most of the scorers had Robinson ahead on points at the end of the bout, he lost when he passed out from exhaustion in the thirteenth round. In the tenth round the referee had to be relieved of his duties, as he was also on the verge of passing out from the heat.

Six months after the Maxim fight, Robinson announced his retirement and his intention of becoming a full-time entertainer. He developed a stage show that included tap dancing, singing, and telling jokes. He performed at venues including the French Casino in New York City as well as clubs on the French Riviera. For a variety of reasons, including the need for cash, Robinson reentered the ring three years later.

Beyond the ring and his boxing records, Robinson was responsible for a number of firsts. One of his little-mentioned contributions to sports is that Robinson was the first to have an official “entourage,” the precursor of the modern athlete’s posse. He first heard the word as he was disembarking from the cruise ship Liberté on a trip to France. When one of the porters asked whose trunks and suitcases were being unloaded, he was told that it was for Robinson’s “entourage.” Robinson used that term from then on. Perhaps because so many other boxers, notably Joe Louis, suffered financially at the hands of unscrupulous managers and agents, Robinson was deeply involved in the management of his boxing career, as well as his investments outside of the ring. Those outside investments included the ownership of a bar, a dry cleaning store, a barbershop, and a lingerie store in Harlem. He often negotiated his own boxing deals and was known for pulling out of agreements when he did not feel that promoters were adhering to the negotiated terms.

Robinson’s final moment of glory in the ring came on 10 December 1965. That night he formally retired from boxing before a crowd of 12,146 fans at Madison Square Garden. Four of his key lifetime opponents entered the ring before him. As Robinson entered to a standing ovation, he was lifted by his competitors and former challengers, Carmen Basilio, Gene Fullmer, Randy Turpin, and Carl “Bobo” Olson. Jake LaMotta, Robinson’s best-known opponent, was not invited, as he had thrown a fight in that very venue in 1957. Robinson closed out that evening with a speech where he said, “I’m not going to say goodbye. As they say in France, it’s a tout à l’heure—I’ll see you later.”

Following his second retirement from the ring, Robinson focused again on his entertainment career. He appeared in a number of motion pictures, notably The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra, and Candy (1968), with Richard Burton and Marlon Brando. He was a regular on television, appearing on The Flip Wilson Show, among other variety programs, and on Mission Impossible, The Mod Squad, and Fantasy Island. He also focused much of his time and efforts on his Sugar Ray Youth Foundation, founded in 1969 and based in Los Angeles, California, and which provided the means for tens of thousands of children to participate in sports and other programs. One of its most distinguished alums was the Olympian and 100 meter dash world record holder FLORENCE GRIFFITH-JOYNER.

In his final years Robinson suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and curtailed almost all of his public appearances. His third wife, Millie, was constantly by his side at this stage. He died as a consequence of diabetes and Alzheimer’s in Culver City, California. The mourners at his funeral included boxers Archie Moore and Mike Tyson, as well as Elizabeth Taylor and Red Buttons. The Reverend JESSE JACKSON delivered the eulogy. Robinson is buried, in the company of numerous other celebrities, at Inglewood Cemetery in Ingle-wood, California.

Sugar Ray Robinson is best known as the greatest boxer, pound for pound, of all time, according to Ring magazine. During his life his presence extended beyond his boxing skills to showmanship, class, and grace. In 1999 the Associated Press named him both the greatest welterweight and greatest middleweight boxer of all time and ultimately named him the fighter of the century, just ahead of MUHAMMAD ALI.

ROPER, MOSES

(1815–?), fugitive slave, antislavery agitator, memoirist, and farmer, was born in Caswell County, North Carolina, the son of a white planter, Henry H. Roper, and his mixed-race (African and Indian) house slave, Nancy. Moses Roper’s light complexion and striking resemblance to his father proved embarrassing to the family. The animosity of the wife of his father, coupled with the death of Moses’s legal owner, probably a man named John Farley, led to Henry Roper’s decision to trade mother and son to a nearby plantation when Moses was six years of age. Soon after, he was sold to a “Negro Trader” and shipped south. He never saw his mother again. Over the next twelve years he was sold repeatedly in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Moses Roper’s white skin had an impact on his value on the slave market. Unable to secure a buyer, various slave traders found it necessary to hire the young boy out. Before the age of eleven, he worked first as a waiter and then as a tailor’s apprentice. When he was eleven, Roper was sold to a Dr. Jones, a planter from Georgia, beginning a remarkable period during which, by his own accounting, he was sold at least thirteen times. It was his last owner, John Gooch, a cotton planter from Kershaw (“Cashaw” in Roper’s narrative) County, South Carolina, who proved the worst. Gooch was a brutal man who flogged Roper unmercifully for minor offenses. Roper claimed that when Gooch was away on business, his wife stood in, whipping him with impunity. After repeated torture, the fourteen-year-old Roper could take no more and attempted to escape. He was soon captured near the Gooch plantation and harshly flogged. But this began a period during which Roper ran away whenever the opportunity presented itself. Once he made it as far as Charlotte, North Carolina, before being captured and returned to Gooch, who always stood ready to make his slave pay for the transgression.

In 1833 Roper’s life changed for the better when Gooch sold him to a northern Florida slave trader whose economic travails soon led to bankruptcy. To pay his debts, the trader sold Roper to a local planter with a reputation for extreme brutality. Rather than endure that abuse, Roper once again took to the roads and swamps, eventually making his way to Savannah, Georgia, where he convinced a sea captain to take him on as a steward. After a period of extreme anxiety for Roper, the ship set sail for New York.

Roper took advantage of an escape network along the eastern seaboard that historian David Cecelski has characterized as the “maritime underground railroad.” Coastal geography as well as demography made this region of the slaveholding South more porous than most. In North Carolina alone, blacks composed 45 percent of the population of the tidewater counties. Black watermen worked as stevedores, stewards, and pilots. Many lived and worked as squatters and swampers. Their world was the “underside of slavery,” where the institution was anything but stable. Their actions betrayed the “complex, tumultuous, and dissident undercurrent to coastal life in the slavery era” (Cecelski, “Shores of Freedom,” 176). Runaway slaves like Roper found a ready-made network of allies willing to assist them on their way northward. Roper estimated that he had traveled nearly five hundred miles to get to Savannah from Florida along the tangle of rivers and creeks that crisscross the region.

In August 1834 Roper arrived in New York City. His euphoria was short-lived, however, when he was informed that he could easily be recaptured. He continued up the Hudson River towards Poughkeepsie, New York, battling both a racist crew who claimed to know his true identity and a cholera outbreak that nearly killed him. Roper eventually journeyed into Vermont, securing work as a farmhand. Soon after his arrival, he was informed that he was being “advertised” in area newspapers. He fled Vermont for New Hampshire and after a short while went to that hotbed of abolitionist agitation, Boston, Massachusetts, where he made contact with local abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison. Roper’s name appears as one of the signatories of the constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society. But even in Boston, life for a fugitive slave was precarious. After several weeks of working for a Brookline shopkeeper, Roper was told by two of his black neighbors that a “gentleman” had been inquiring for a person matching his description. He left Boston, hiding first in the Green Mountains and then making his way to New York City, where he was able to secure passage on a ship, the Napoleon, bound for England.

Roper arrived in Liverpool, England, in November 1835, armed with letters of recommendation to noted British abolitionists John Morrison, John Scoble, and George Thompson, who quickly embraced the young fugitive and pressed him into service as an antislavery lecturer. When Roper expressed an interest in getting an education, his patrons convinced Dr. Francis Cox to assume the financial burden for sending him to boarding school, first at Hackney and then at Wallingford. Roper also attended University College in London for a short while in 1836. All the while he continued lecturing to reform audiences across the country, becoming one of the first former slaves to play such a role.

In 1837 Roper published in London a narrative of his life as a slave, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery; it was published in the United States one year later. The publication was accompanied by an extensive lecture tour. In 1839 he married Ann Stephen Price, an Englishwoman from Bristol who assisted him in carrying on the antislavery work. In 1844, after nine years of lecturing, Roper estimated that he had given two thousand lectures. He informed the British Anti-Slavery Society that he was going to retire and asked that they assist him in putting together the funds to purchase a farm in the British colony on the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. There he hoped to put the agricultural knowledge that he had gleaned during his labors as a slave to better use. Roper never made it to Africa, but he did secure the capital to purchase a farm in western Canada. He returned to England twice, in 1846 to supervise another edition of his narrative, and in 1854 to lecture. Unfortunately, historians have been unable to determine how Roper spent the remainder of his life.

Given the intense suffering of Roper’s early years, his is a remarkable tale of resilience that ultimately illuminates the network that was the “maritime underground railroad.” If Roper is a minor character in the history of American slavery and abolitionism, it is important to note that he was also a key transatlantic connection in the early stages of an international movement to abolish slavery.

ROSE, EDWARD

(?–1833?), mountain man and Indian interpreter, may have been born in Kentucky, near Louisville, most likely of African, Indian, and white ancestry. The year and date of his birth remain unknown, as do the names and occupations of his parents. It is possible that Rose was born a slave. The details of Rose’s life have been gleaned from the narratives and records of others, including Washington Irving, who claimed that after leaving home as a teenager, Rose became a kind of roving bandit, “one of the gangs of pirates who infested the islands of the Mississippi, plundering boats as they went up and down the river . . . waylaying travelers as they returned by land from New Orleans . . . plundering them of their money and effects, and often perpetuating the most atrocious murders” (Astoria, ch. 24). It appears that Rose left New Orleans after the police broke up his gang, eventually settling in St. Louis, where, in the spring of 1806, the local newspaper described him as big, strong, and hot-tempered, with a swarthy, fierce-looking face.

That same year Rose traveled up the Osage River with a group of hunters, after which he must have returned to St. Louis, because in the spring of 1807 he left from there with Manuel Lisa’s fur-trading expedition up the Missouri River, the first major expedition organized after Lewis and Clark’s return to St. Louis. Led by Lisa, a St. Louis businessman, the party traveled north, up the Missouri River through present-day North and South Dakota, and then southwest, along the Yellowstone River to the mouth of the Bighorn River, where they established the first trading post on the upper river, Fort Manuel (also called Fort Lisa), in what became Montana. After trading jewelry, tobacco, liquor, weapons, and blankets for pelts with the local Crow Indians (Absaroke or Sparrowhawk people), Lisa and his men returned to St. Louis. Rose, however, chose to remain behind. Living with the Crow in what is now southern Montana and northern Wyoming, Rose learned their culture and language. Because of his appearance, Rose was known as Nez Coupe (“Scarred Nose”) and later, after a particularly fierce battle, as Five Scalps.

It has been suggested that during this time Rose partnered with the French frontiersman and husband of Sacagawea, Toussaint Charbonneau, in escorting Arapaho women captured by Snake Indians to European trappers willing to pay for Indian women. In any event, in the spring of 1809 Rose joined an expedition organized for the purpose of escorting Sheheke (also known, by whites, as Big White), the principal chief of Matootonha, a lower Mandan village, through hostile territory back to his tribe. In 1806 Sheheke, along with his wife and children, had accompanied Lewis and Clark to St. Louis and Washington, D.C., via Monticello, where they met Thomas Jefferson. The first attempt to return Sheheke in 1807, led by Nathaniel Pryor, had failed because of resistance from the Sioux and Arikara. Two years later, with a contract for seven thousand dollars paid to the Missouri Fur Company by the U.S. government, twenty men, including Rose, spent three months traveling with the chief and his family northwest, up the Missouri River to Matootonch, in present-day North Dakota. On the way back to St. Louis, Rose elected to rejoin the Crow.

In 1811 Rose was hired by the “Asto-rians”—John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company—as a guide for the first expedition to the Pacific Ocean since Lewis and Clark had returned six years earlier. Led by Wilson Price Hunt, a merchant from New Jersey with no experience as a hunter or trapper, the party included sixty-four men and eighty-four horses. Rose joined the party on the plains near the Arikara villages just north of the present-day border between North and South Dakota and guided the expedition through Crow territory. Suspicious of his loyalty to the Crow, Hunt never trusted Rose. Predisposed to believe reports that Rose was organizing a mutiny, Hunt fired him as soon as the party reached the Black Hills of South Dakota, an error in judgment that contributed to many of the expedition’s failures. Immediately after dispatching Rose, in an indication of what lay ahead, Hunt and his group became lost as they tried to pass through mountains. A few days later Rose returned with several Crow and helped the party find a pass.

Washington Irving’s description of Rose in his 1836 book Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains must have been typical of attitudes toward Rose, whom Washington describes as “one of those anomalous beings found on the frontier, who seem to have neither kin nor country . . . and was, withal, a dogged, sullen, silent fellow, with a sinister aspect, and more of the savage than the civilized man in his appearance” (Astoria, ch. 22) “This fellow it appears,” Washington continues, “was one of those desperadoes of the frontiers, outlawed by their crimes, who combine the vices of civilized and savage life, and are ten times more barbarous than the Indians with whom they consort” (Astoria, ch. 24).

A year later, in 1812, Manuel Lisa found Rose living with the Ankaras and hired him as a scout. Rose, however, never it made it to their meeting place in New Orleans, having attached himself to an Omaha Indian woman, with whom he remained in her tribe until he was arrested for drinking and fighting and taken to St. Louis. Records show that Rose was released in 1813 by Superintendent of Indian Affairs William Clark, in exchange for Rose’s promise to stay out of Indian territory.

Historians are unsure of Rose’s activities in the following decade, until 10 March 1823, when he left St. Louis with one hundred men on the ill-fated trapping expedition of William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry, owners of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. From the outset Ashley dismissed Rose’s counsel against bartering for horses with the Arikara and against mooring company boats on the same side of the river as the tribe. More disastrously, Ashley ignored Rose’s warning of an impeding Arikara attack, and when the ambush came, the company’s losses were heavy. Attacks on the traders continued until Colonel Henry Leavenworth arrived from Fort Atkinson with two hundred fur traders, frontiersmen, and Lakota and Tankton warriors organized into a frontier militia known as the Missouri Legion. Rose was made an ensign, and the militia attacked the Arikara villages in August 1823. In his official report submitted to General Henry Atkinson and dated 20 October 1823, Leaven-worth singled out Rose: “I had not found anyone willing to go into those villages, except a man by the name of Rose . . . . He appeared to be a brave and enterprising man, and was well acquainted with those Indians. . . . He was with General Ashley when he was attacked. The Indians at that time called to him to take care of himself, before they fired upon General Ashley’s party” (quoted in Burton, 11).

Trying to salvage the expedition, Ashley assembled a small party of men, described by Harrison Clifford Dale in the Ashley-Smith Explorations (1941) as “the most significant group of continental explorers ever brought together.” This group included Rose and other such noted frontiersmen as James Clyman, David Jackson, William Sublette, Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, and Thomas Fitzpatrick. Led by Jedediah Smith, the party traveled up the Grand River and through the Black Hills to the Rockies. From Clyman’s diary we learn that Rose’s familiarity with the Indian language and customs saved the party from disaster.

Rose served with Smith for the next two years, leaving in May 1825 to join a large treaty-making expedition up the Missouri under the command of General Atkinson and Major Benjamin O’Fallon. Forty men on horseback, under the command of a Lieutenant Armstrong, went with Rose by land; the rest traveled up the river in nine boats. The Yellowstone expedition, as it came to be known, succeeded in signing peace treaties with all the tribes of the river except the Blackfoot. Reports of the expedition by several authors delight in recounting Rose’s mythmaking adventures. A clerk whose expedition journal was published in 1929 in the North Dakota Historical Society Quarterly documented one oft-repeated tale of Rose’s heroics and skill: “Thursday 30 June. Rose, an interpreter, one of the party, we understand, covered himself with bushes and crawled into the gang of 11 Bulls [buffalo] and shot down 6 on the same ground before the others ran off.”

Much of the information we know about Rose comes from a biographical sketch of him that Captain Ruben Holmes, a member of the Atkinson-O’Fallon expedition, published in the St. Louis Beacon in 1828 (reprinted in the St. Louis Reveille in 1848). In “The Five Scalps” (1848), Holmes describes Rose’s confrontation with a band of six hundred hostile Crow warriors: “One foot was on the pile of muskets, to prevent the Indians from taking any from it . . . his eye gleamed with triumphant satisfaction. There was an expression about his mouth, slightly curved and compressed, and a little smiling at the curves, indicative of a delirium of delight—his eye, his mouth, the position of his head, and scars on his forehead and nose all united in forming a general expression, that, of itself, seemed to paralyze the nerves of every Indian before him.”

Rose apparently rejoined the Crow after the 1825 expedition, and nine years later he rode alongside them in their battles with the Blackfoot. “The old Negro,” Zenas Leonard wrote in his autobiography, Adventures of Zenas Leonard, Fur Trader (1839), “told them that if the red man was afraid to go among his enemy, he would show them that a black man was not.” Rose was one of first black frontiersmen to earn a wide reputation, preceding JIM BECKWOURTH, who was born around 1800, by a generation. Indeed, Beckwourth, who in his autobiography, The Life and Times of James P. Beckwourth (1856), called Rose “one of the best interpreters ever known in the whole Indian country,” may have claimed some of the older man’s exploits for himself.

When and how Rose—whom Harold Felton describes as “a mountain man’s mountain man, a trail blazer’s trail blazer” (vii)—died remains unknown. Legend has it that Rose, Hugh Glass, and a third mountain man named Menard were killed and scalped on the frozen Yellowstone River in the winter of 1832–1833 by a band of Arikaras hostile to the Crow. A site called Rose’s Grave is located at the junction of the Milk and Missouri rivers, on the Milk River near the Yellowstone River.

ROSS, DIANA

(26 Mar. 1944–), singer and actress, was born in Detroit, Michigan, the second of six children of Fred Ross, a college-educated factory worker, and Ernestine Moten. Although Fred and Ernestine had intended to name their daughter Diane, a clerical oversight at the hospital altered the name to Diana. She was known as Diane to family and close friends, and the use of this familiar name has remained an indicator throughout her life of those among her inner circle. The family lived in a black middle-class neighborhood where, as she ironed her family’s laundry, she could see from her window fifteen-year-old Smokey Robinson singing with his friends on his front porch (Taraborrelli, 36). When Ross turned fourteen the family moved to the Brewster projects, a low-income development that had not yet warranted the stigmatizing nomenclature of “ghetto” or “slum.” The Rosses had an affordable three-bedroom home and attended Olivet Baptist Church, where Ross sang in the junior choir with her siblings, while her parents sang in the adult choir.

Ross attended Cass Technical High School, an esteemed public school, where she registered high marks in cosmetology and dress design; upon graduating in 1962 she was voted the best dressed in her class. In high school many of Ross’s peers had begun singing at parties and on street corners. One of these groups, the Primes, would eventually become the Temptations—but in the meantime their manager wanted a sister group to complement their local performances. The manager began with his girlfriend’s husky-voiced sister, Florence Ballard, as the centerpiece; recruited two of her friends, Mary Wilson and Betty McGlown; and searched exhaustively for the final voice. Primes singer Paul Williams finally suggested Ross, and the Primettes—undaunted by McGlown’s leaving the group to get married—quickly established themselves on the Detroit scene, earning fifteen dollars a week in local clubs and signing a deal with LuPine records, with whom they recorded two singles that were never released. But BERRY GORDY JR. at Motown Records, heeding the advice of his young star in the making, Smokey Robinson, was ready on 15 January 1961 to sign the four women. (They had recruited Barbara Martin to replace McGlown.) Gordy renamed the group the Supremes and began processing them through the Motown Artists Development Department, where they were schooled in style, public speaking, and overall deportment.

Hardly an immediate success, the Supremes floundered for three years, one album, and eight mediocre singles, in addition to weathering the first of many personnel changes. Ballard briefly departed in 1962 to tour with the Marvelettes, and Martin quit in order to have a baby. Ross sang lead only about half the time, and, at that point, the Supremes were attempting to succeed as a trio that sang songs with four-part harmonies. They toured briefly in 1962 under the auspices of a Motown revue, but it was not until another tour in June 1964, when Motown released “Where Did Our Love Go?,” that the Supremes had their first number-one hit. Written by Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland—three of Motown’s premier writers and producers—the single was the first of a string of hits that helped define the Motown sound as a successful crossover hybrid of gospel, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and pop.

The Supremes made numerous television appearances, most often on the Ed Sullivan Show, where their glamorous evening gowns and dashing wigs projected an image of black womanhood rarely seen by white Americans. During the mid-1960s the Supremes could boast a yearly income of $250,000 each. Ross literally took center stage by this point, singing lead and prompting Gordy to change the group’s name to “Diana Ross and the Supremes.” By 1969 they had hit number one with eleven singles, registering about half a dozen in the pop music canon: “Baby Love” (1964), “Come See about Me” (1964), “Stop! In the Name of Love” (1965), “I Hear a Symphony” (1965), and “You Can’t Hurry Love” (1966). They finished the decade with their twelfth hit, the ironically titled “Someday We’ll Be Together”—almost nine years to the day after signing with Motown, on 14 January 1970. Ross left to pursue a solo career. The Supremes continued shuffling personnel for another seven years before disbanding in 1977, never again hitting number one.

Ross continued manufacturing hit after hit for Motown, starting with 1970’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” She would eventually score seven more number-one hits as a solo artist, first with Motown and then with RCA, with whom she signed in 1981 for twenty million dollars. But the most dynamic element of her career to develop in the 1970s was her acting. She landed the lead in the BILLIE HOLIDAY biopic Lady Sings the Blues (1972) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Her next project, the Motown-backed vehicle Mahogany (1975), attempted to capitalize on her superstar status. The film’s production was notoriously troubled, as rumors surfaced about Ross’s demanding personality and Gordy’s curious decision to direct the film himself. Mahogany garnered hardly any positive reviews, but Ross did gain another number-one hit from the soundtrack, “The Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To?).”

In 1978 she again compelled her critics to claim that she was overbearing—and her supporters to praise her business acumen—by purchasing the movie rights to the Broadway smash The Wiz and reworking the story so that she could play the lead of Dorothy. The ensemble cast of MICHAEL JACKSON, RICHARD PRYOR, and LENA HORNE was not nearly enough to salvage this African American retelling of The Wizard of Oz from more sternly negative reviews.

The 1970s were also tumultuous personally for Ross. In 1970 she married Robert Silberstein, a music manager, with whom she had three children (though the first, she later admitted, was fathered by Gordy). They divorced in 1975; two years later, Ross married an international businessman named Arne Naess Jr., with whom she had two more children, but they divorced in 2000. Musically, she seemed to fall into a rut, always staying even with the latest trend, as with her tepid disco tracks, rather than innovating, as she had with the Supremes earlier in her career. In 1989 she returned to Motown as both a performer and a director of the company. She continued releasing albums but seemed to drift further and further from mainstream pop success. Ross wrote her autobiography, Secrets of a Sparrow, in 1993.

ROWAN, CARL THOMAS

(11 Aug. 1925–23 Sept. 2000), journalist, diplomat, and United States Information Agency director, was born in Ravenscroft, Tennessee. He was one of three children of Thomas David Rowan, a lumberyard worker with a fifth-grade education who had served in World War I, and Johnnie Bradford, a domestic worker with an eleventh grade education. When Rowan was an infant, his family left the dying coal-mining town of his birth to go to McMinnville, Tennessee, lured by its lumberyards, nurseries, and livery stables. But there, in the midst of the Great Depression, they remained mired in poverty. The elder Rowan sometimes found jobs stacking lumber at twenty-five cents an hour and, according to his son, probably never made more than three hundred dollars in a single year. Meanwhile his mother worked as a domestic, cleaning houses and doing the laundry of local white families.

The family lived in an old frame house along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks; Carl and his siblings slept on a pallet on a wooden floor. In his 1991 autobiography, Breaking Barriers, Rowan recalled a traumatic incident in 1933 when he, at age eight, awakened to his sister’s screams after she had been bitten on the ear by a rat. “We had no electricity, no running water, and, for most of the time, no toothbrushes,” Rowan wrote in Breaking Barriers. “Toilet paper was a luxury we did not know when secondhand newspapers were good enough for our outhouse” (Breaking Barriers, 10). He also recalled staving off hunger by hunting for rabbit. “I survived the Depression eating fried rabbit, rabbits and dumplings, broiled rabbit, rabbit stew and a host of similar dishes made possible because Two-Shot Rowan so often came home with a rabbit or two draining blood down his pants leg,” he said, referring to his father (Breaking Barriers, 11).

Rowan credited his mother, who often praised his abilities, and Bessie Taylor Gwynn, a teacher in his segregated high school, for rescuing him from a life of poverty. They instilled in him a love of academics, and because blacks were not allowed to use the local library, Gwynn smuggled books out of the white library for Carl. “This frail looking woman, who could make sense of the writings of Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, and bring to life BOOKER T. WASHINGTON and W. E. B. DU BOIS, was a towering presence in our classrooms,” he once wrote. During forty-seven years of teaching, Gwynn also taught Rowan’s mother and siblings. Rowan praised her for immersing him in a “wonderful world of similes, metaphors, alliteration, hyperbole, and even onomatopoeia. She acquainted me with dactylic verse, with the meter and scan of ballads, and set me to believing that I could write sonnets as good as any ever penned by Shakespeare, or iambic pentameter that would put Alexander Pope to shame (Breaking Barriers, 31–32). Gwynn insisted that Rowan keep up with world affairs, so he became a delivery boy for the Chattanooga Times, which afforded him the opportunity to read the newspaper each day. “Tf you don’t read, you can’t write, and if you can’t write, you can stop dreaming,’ Miss Bessie told me. So I read whatever she told me to read and tried to remember what she insisted that I store away.”

Carl Rowan with President Johnson in 1964, after Rowan’s appointment as director of the United States Information Agency. © Bettmann/CORBIS

While a student at Tennessee State University, an historically black college in Nashville, Rowan, at age nineteen, became one of the first twenty African Americans commissioned as officers in the United States Navy during World War II. Rowan was the only African American in a unit of 335 sailors. With the assistance of the GI Bill, he went on to earn a college degree in Mathematics from Oberlin College in Ohio and a master’s degree in Journalism from the University of Minnesota. In 1950 he married Vivien Murphy, the college-educated daughter of a Norfolk Navy Yard worker. The couple had three children: Carl Jr., Jeffrey, and Barbara.

Rowan began his journalism career in 1948 as a copy editor at the Minneapolis Tribune, and in 1950 the paper hired him as one of only a handful of black, general assignment reporters in the country. While African Americans had worked on mainstream newspapers as far back as the Civil War, black reporters were still a rarity in the early 1950s. His first major assignment was a series of articles on African American life in the Deep South, for which he traveled six thousand miles in six weeks. Flying out of Nashville, he said, “I was shocked in 1951 to see signs on two airport chairs proclaiming: FOR COLORED PASSENGERS NOLY. I was even more shocked to see four airport toilets marked WHITE MEN, COLORED MEN, then WHITE LADIES, and the last inviting COLORED WOMEN.” For his series he garnered an award for best newspaper reporting by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, and the Minneapolis Junior Chamber of Commerce named him Outstanding Young Man of 1951. He also secured a book contract for his first book, South of Freedom (1953). He went on to cover the Supreme Court’s historic school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and some of the other major civil rights battles of the fifties, including the Montgomery bus boycott, which formed the basis for his third book, Go South to Sorrow.

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed Rowan assistant secretary of state for public affairs, which at the time was the highest position held by an African American in the State Department. He later became a delegate to the United Nations during the Cuban missile crisis and served as the U.S. ambassador to Finland from 1963 to 1964. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson chose Rowan to replace Edward R. Murrow as director of the U.S. Information Agency, which, through its Voice of America radio broadcasts, provided information about the policies and culture of the United States. Though Rowan was picked for the job on his merits, his selection was also a major cold war propaganda coup for the U.S.; the Soviets, in their efforts to woo decolonizing nations in Africa and elsewhere, had long highlighted racial discrimination in the United States. In appointing Rowan and other African Americans like ROBERT C. WEAVER (Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) and THURGOOD MARSHALL (U.S. Solictor-General and later Supreme Court justice), to prominent positions in government, President Johnson was seeking to counter such Soviet claims. As a result of these two appointments, Rowan became the first African American to sit in on Cabinet and National Security Council meetings.

Rowan returned to journalism after more than four years in government and became one of the most widely known journalists, black or white, in the nation when he signed with West-inghouse Broadcasting to deliver three commentaries a week. He simultaneously signed with the Chicago Daily News and Publishers Newspaper Syndicate to write three columns a week, which would appear in more than one hundred newspapers. That made him the first syndicated black columnist, a position he used to highlight racial injustice and policies injurious to the poor. Rowan broke another racial barrier in 1972 when he became the first African American elected to membership in the Gridiron Club, a prestigious organization of Washington journalists established in 1885. Inclusion in elite circles, however, did not cause him to temper his outspoken views on racial injustice. In 1974, as the nation marked the twentieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Rowan noted that “we are still a racist society,” and added that some of the litigants in the decision never enjoyed ever one day of integrated education. Instead Rowan notes, “they saw evasion, circumvention, massive resistance and a generation of litigation.”

Rowan also was, for three decades, a regular panelist on the PBS talk show Inside Washington until he retired in 1996. During three decades he earned many awards and wrote eight books, including Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall and The Coming Race War in America, which took aim at the state of race relations in America.

In 1987 Rowan founded Project Excellence, a nonprofit group that by the time of his death in April 2000 had provided millions of dollars in scholarships to some three thousand black teenagers in Washington, D.C.

RUDD, DANIEL

(7 Aug. 1854–4 Dec. 1933), newspaper editor and Catholic lay leader, was born in Bardstown, Kentucky, the son of Robert Rudd, a slave on the Rudd estate, and Elizabeth “Eliza” Hayden, a slave of the Hayden family in Bardstown. He was baptized a Catholic when an infant. Although little information exists about his early life, it may be conjectured that his Catholic upbringing was due chiefly to his mother who acted as sexton in the local church for more than sixty years. After the Civil War, he went to Springfield, Ohio, where an older brother had already established himself, to get a secondary school education.

There is little information about Rudd until 1884 when he began a black newspaper, the Ohio State Tribune. In 1886 Rudd changed the name of the weekly newspaper to the American Catholic Tribune, proudly displaying on the editorial page the words “The only Catholic Journal owned and published by Colored men.” The newspaper’s focus was the Catholic Church and the African American. Rudd’s purpose was to demonstrate to African Americans that the Catholic Church was truly the best hope of black Americans. He was convinced that Catholicism would elevate the cultural level of the black race and thus attract an enormous influx of black converts to the Catholic Church. Believing that the authority structure of the church could change racist behavior and influence racist thought, he asserted, “The Catholic Church alone can break the color line. Our people should help her to do it.” Although black Catholics could point to the Catholic Church’s teaching on the dignity of the person as inherently antiracist, Rudd made the case more directly for the usefulness of Roman Catholicism in changing the moral and religious status of African Americans. He published the following on the front page of his paper: “The Holy Roman Catholic Church offers to the oppressed Negro a material as well as spiritual refuge, superior to all the inducements of other organizations combined. . . . The distinctions and differences among men are unrecognized within the pale of the Church. . . . The Negro and the Caucasian are equally the children of one Father and as such, are equally welcomed, with equal rights, equal privileges.”

On the other hand, Rudd used the newspaper to speak out forcefully against racial discrimination. He editorialized in favor of an integrated school system in Cincinnati, Ohio, and against segregated schools and institutions. Race pride was important to him, so he used his newspaper to highlight the achievements of leading African Americans of his day.

By 1887 Rudd had moved his weekly newspaper to Cincinnati, where he had a small staff of assistant editors and traveling correspondents who doubled as sales representatives. The paper in most editions ran to four pages. Front-page articles carried religious news from various black Catholic communities along with other items related to African Americans. A column or two was often dedicated to an exposition of Catholic belief or practice. Many articles were reprints from other newspapers, including items from the Catholic press and the African American press. According to some estimates, the newspaper had as many as ten thousand subscribers in the period prior to the move to Detroit, Michigan. Rudd received the approbation of some members of the church hierarchy and some small contributions, but there is no indication of any long-term subsidy from Catholic leaders or laypeople.

Rudd also traveled across the country as a tireless lecturer. The message was usually the same: “The Catholic Church is not only a warm and true friend to the Colored people but is absolutely impartial in recognizing them as the equals of all.” He spoke to varied audiences in places like Lexington, Kentucky, and Fort Wayne, Indiana (1887); Natchez, Mississippi, and Nashville, Tennessee (1891); Syracuse, New York (1895); and Lewiston, Maine (1896). Fluent in German, he spoke to German organizations such as the Central Verein in Toledo, Ohio, in 1886 and to students at a German orphanage in Linwood, Ohio, in 1890.

In the summer of 1889 Rudd was sent to Europe to participate in the Anti-Slavery Conference organized by Cardinal Charles-Martial Lavigerie, the primate of Africa. The trip was made possible, it seems, by a subvention from William Henry Elder, the archbishop of Cincinnati. Rudd was already in Germany when the conference which was to be held in Lucerne, Switzerland, was postponed; he nevertheless continued his trip to Lucerne, where he met with Cardinal Lavigerie, and to London, where he visited Cardinal Henry Edward Manning before returning to America.

Rudd was responsible for the five black Catholic lay congresses that were held between the years 1889 and 1894. He first called for a congress of black Catholics in the columns of his newspaper as early as 1888, writing, “Colored Catholics ought to unite. . . . Let leading Colored Catholics gather together from every city in the Union [where] they may get to know one another and take up the cause of the race.” The first nationwide assembly of black Catholics, meeting in Washington, D.C., in early January 1889, was well attended and widely acclaimed. The second congress was held in Cincinnati in 1890 and the third in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Rudd published the proceedings of these congresses on his own press. His influence in the last two congresses, held in Chicago, Illinois, in 1893 and in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1894, is less evident.

Rudd played other significant roles in American Catholicism and black journalism. He was on the steering committee for the first national Lay Catholic Congress held in Baltimore in November 1889 and was a founding member of the Catholic Press Association (1890) and the Afro-American Press Association and was actively involved in both. By 1894 he had moved the publication of the American Catholic Tribune to Detroit for unknown reasons. There are no extant copies of the newspaper dating after 1894, but only after 1897 did Rudd’s name cease to appear as a publisher in the Detroit City Directory.

Under circumstances that are not clear Rudd had, according to census records, moved to Bolivar County in Mississippi by 1910. He later moved to eastern Arkansas where he acted as accountant and business manager for two well-to-do black farmers. He seemingly had little contact with the small black Catholic community in Arkansas centered around Pine Bluff. The black Catholic congresses had ceased to meet after 1894 for reasons that remain unclear, and Rudd thereafter was no longer an influential leader in the black Catholic movement. In his correspondence with John B. Morris, the bishop of Little Rock, he alluded to his former role and indicated his continued interest in the cause of black Catholics, even expressing a desire to represent the diocese at a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1917 Rudd was the coauthor of a biography of Scott Bond, one of the successful black farmers of the region for whom he worked as an accountant (From Slavery to Wealth, the Life of Scott Bond: The Rewards of Honesty, Industry, Economy, and Perseverance, 1917, 1971). Rudd’s attention in his later years seemingly centered on the furtherance of black business. After suffering a stroke, he returned to Bardstown in 1932, where he died.

A member of the first generation of postslavery African Americans, Rudd was one of the more significant figures in the history of black Catholics in the United States. Here was a former slave welcomed by two cardinals, a black man lecturing to white audiences both in the North and in the South. He began the longest running African American Catholic newspaper in the country and single-handedly launched a black Catholic lay movement when he began the black lay congresses. From this effort emerged other black Catholic lay leaders from whom came the first articulation of a black Catholic theological position. As the first African American Catholic layman to call publicly for the Catholic Church to live up to its teachings on social justice and social equality, Rudd opened the way for later black Catholic activists in the civil rights movement.

Rudd never married. He could be difficult; many ecclesiastics and white lay leaders saw him as “pushy” because he would not accept circumstances that he deemed disrespectful to the black race. Among Catholic laymen of his time, he was unique; among black leaders of his generation, he was extraordinary; in the light of recent American Catholic history, he was prophetic.

RUDOLPH, WILMA

(23 June 1940–12 Nov. 1994), track and field athlete, was born Wilma Glodean Rudolph in St. Bethlehem, Tennessee, the daughter of Edward Rudolph, a railroad porter, and Blanche (maiden name unknown), a domestic. Born nearly two months premature and weighing only four-and-a-half pounds, Wilma was a sickly child who contracted both double pneumonia and scarlet fever, which resulted in her left leg being partially paralyzed. Her doctors doubted that she would ever regain the use of her leg. Undaunted, Wilma’s mother made a ninety-mile bus trip once a week with her to Nashville, Tennessee, so she could receive heat, water, and massage treatments. At age five she began wearing a heavy steel brace and corrective shoes to help straighten her leg. After years of physical therapy, at age twelve she was finally able to move about without her leg brace.

When she entered a racially segregated high school in Clarksville, Tennessee, Rudolph tried out for the basketball team and, in recognition of her abilities, made the all-state team four times. As an outstanding athlete she came to the attention of Ed Temple, the premier women’s track coach at Tennessee State University. Though Rudolph was still in high school, Temple invited her to spend the summer with other track athletes at the university training camp. In 1956 she participated in the national Amateur Athletic Union track and field competition, winning the 75-yard and 100-yard events as well as anchoring the winning relay team. Encouraged by her coach, she traveled with the Tennessee State team to the tryouts for the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. At sixteen Rudolph became the youngest member of the U.S. women’s track and field team. Though she did not make the Olympic finals in the 200-meter event, she and her team won a bronze medal in the 400-meter relay event.

Wilma Rudolph in 1960, when she became the first American woman to win three Olympic golds. Library of Congress

Rudolph returned home to complete her last two years of high school and looked forward to going to college. However, in her senior year of high school she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. Her boyfriend wanted to marry her, but Rudolph was unwilling to give up her fledgling track career. Her daughter was sent to live with a married older sister in St. Louis. In 1957 Rudolph enrolled at Tennessee State on a track scholarship and continued to train for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy.

During the 1960 Olympics, temperatures in Rome hovered around 100 degrees. Rudolph contended not only with the weather, but with an ankle injury she suffered the day before the first race. Despite her impairment she won three gold medals: one in the 100-meter event, setting a world record with a finishing time of 11.0 seconds; another in the 200-meter dash with a time of 23.2 seconds; and her third as anchor of the women’s 400-meter relay team. She thus became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympics.

In 1961 Rudolph competed in the previously all-male Millrose Games, tying her own world record in the 60-yard dash with a time of 6.9 seconds. She also became the first woman to compete in the heralded New York Athletic Club meet, the Los Angeles Times Games, and the Penn Relays. That year she received the Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete.

In 1962 Rudolph was awarded the coveted Babe Didrikson Zaharias Award as the most outstanding female athlete in the world. That same year she competed in a meet against the Soviet Union held at Stanford University. She won the 100-meter dash and overcame a 40-yard deficit to win the women’s 400-meter relay. When Rudolph recalled the race she said: “That was it. I knew it. The crowd in the stadium was on its feet, giving me a standing ovation, and I knew what time it was. Time to retire, with a sweet taste.”

After retiring from competition, Rudolph returned to college and graduated from Tennessee State University in 1963 with a degree in education. She first took a job teaching second grade and coaching basketball. She coached track for a brief time at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Over the next several years she worked in a variety of positions as a goodwill ambassador to French West Africa, a radio show co-host, an administrative assistant at the University of California at Los Angeles, and an executive for a hospital in Nashville. In 1982 Rudolph established the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and inspiring underprivileged children. In so doing she said, “If I have anything to leave, the foundation is my legacy.”

In 1961 Rudolph had married William Ward, but the marriage dissolved the next year. In 1963 she married Robert Eldridge, who was the father of her first child. They would have one more daughter and two sons before they divorced in 1976.

In July 1994, while giving a speech, Rudolph fainted. Diagnosed with brain cancer, she died at her home in Brentwood, Tennessee. Overcoming physical challenges and racial barriers, Rudolph became a world-class athlete whose legacy inspired successive generations. In an earlier interview she remarked, “I just want to be remembered as a hardworking lady with certain beliefs.”

RUFFIN, JOSEPHINE ST. PIERRE

(31 Aug. 1842–13 Mar. 1924), editor and woman’s club organizer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Eliza Matilda Menhenick of Cornwall, England, and John St. Pierre, a clothing seller whose father was a French immigrant from Martinique. Though Josephine’s complexion was very light, public schools in Boston were closed to people of color until 1855, so she received her early education at nearby Salem and Charlestown. Later she attended Boston’s Bowdoin School and took two years of private tutoring in New York. In 1858 she married George Lewis Ruffin, who made his living as a barber but later became a prominent Boston legislator and judge. The marriage produced five children.

Because of the slavery issue in the United States, Ruffin and her family moved briefly to Liverpool, England, in 1858 but soon returned to Boston to fight for civil rights when the Civil War began. Even at her young age, Ruffin was beginning to demonstrate her organizational and leadership skills. Despite the demands of raising a family, she was soon busy recruiting soldiers for the war effort and working for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. She also worked with other charitable groups, such as the Boston Kansas Relief Association, which helped freed slaves who migrated west, and the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association.

In 1890 Ruffin used what little was left of her husband’s resources (he died in 1886 nearly destitute because he gave much of his money to charitable and civil rights work) to embark on a new adventure. With her family’s help, she founded the Woman’s Era, a monthly magazine devoted almost exclusively to issues affecting African American women. The publication covered society news but also dealt with more serious social issues like abolition, suffrage, and living conditions in the cities. Though the articles were written by a staff, Ruffin acted as editor, layout person, and editorial writer—she even became her own advertising executive. Besides editing and publishing her own magazine, she supplemented her income in 1891 by acting as editor in chief of the Boston Courant, a black weekly newspaper. She gave up this work, though, in 1893 to devote more time to the Era, and she also joined the New England Women’s Press Association in 1893. Though the Woman’s Era gave Ruffin a decent living for several years, it suffered from insufficient advertising revenue, as did most of the African American periodical press of the time. Also the Woman’s Era catered to the elite African American society of Boston, and its one-dollar-per-year subscription price was more than most ordinary African American women could afford. The last issue was dated January 1897.

Ruffin’s work as an editor and her friendship with many influential people aroused in her an interest in the field for which she is best remembered. In 1894, influenced by Julia Ward Howe and others, she organized with her friend, Maria Baldwin, and her daughter, Florida Ruffin Ridley, the Woman’s Era Club. Using the Woman’s Era as its official publication, the club devoted itself to the education of young African American women and to charitable causes. The Woman’s Era Club became so successful under Ruffin’s leadership that it grew in 1896 from a sixty-member Boston club into the National Association of Colored Women, with thousands of members. Ruffin tried to gain more support from the white women’s clubs by joining the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs, and she also joined the all-white General Federation of Women’s Clubs and was asked to serve on its executive committee. Not realizing that she was president of a black club, the federation had accepted her membership. When she arrived at the biennial convention in Milwaukee in 1900, however, the situation was quite different. What happened there was one of the defining moments of Josephine Ruffin’s career and one of the most unfortunate incidents in the history of the women’s club movement. Southern delegates were outraged that an “octoroon” wanted to become a member of the General Federation, and they insisted that the membership remain white. The executive board of the federation claimed that she had violated the rules by not revealing that the Woman’s Era Club was a black club. The federation was fearful of losing southern members, and despite protests from Ruffin’s supporters, it refused to recognize her organization or seat her as a delegate to a black club, although it was willing to seat her as a member of the two white clubs to which she already belonged, the New England Women’s Press Association and the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs. Never one to compromise her principles, however, Ruffin refused its offer.

Ruffin remained president of the Woman’s Era Club until 1903, but her activities in it gradually began to dwindle, although her involvement in the community remained strong. Among other organizations to which she gave her time were the Association for the Promotion of Child Training in the South and the American Mount Coffee School Association, which helped raise funds for a school in Liberia. She was also instrumental in establishing the Boston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, of which she remained a member for many years.

Advanced age did not stop Josephine Ruffin from giving her time and energy to worthy causes. Her daughter, Florida Ridley, recalled that Ruffin attended the “Women’s Day” celebration in Boston when she was seventy-nine, and, at the age of eighty-two, she took a taxi on a stormy night to attend a meeting of the League of Women for Community Service. Less than a month later she died of nephritis at her home in Boston.

RUGGLES, DAVID

(15 Mar. 1810–26 Dec. 1849), abolitionist and journalist, was born in Norwich, Connecticut, the son of David Ruggles and Nancy (maiden name unknown), both free blacks. Educated at the Sabbath School for the Poor, he moved to New York City at the age of seventeen. In 1829 he opened a grocery, selling goods of “excellent quality” but no “spirituous liquors.” He later served as an officer in the New York City Temperance Union.

In 1833 Ruggles sharpened his speaking skills as an agent for the Emancipator and Journal of Public Morals, the organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He attacked colonization and spoke in support of the black national convention movement and the newly established Phoenix Society, organized to nurture black education. The society sponsored the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth, which by 1837 employed thirteen teachers.

With HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET, Ruggles organized the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association, named after famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, which sponsored a reading room. In 1834 he opened the first known African American-owned bookshop, which served the abolitionist and black community. An antiabolitionist mob destroyed the store, however, in 1835.

Ruggles became well known to white abolitionists through his numerous articles in the Emancipator. In 1834 he published his first pamphlet, the anticolonization satire, Extinguisher, Extinguished . . . or David M. Reese, M.D. “Used Up.” He expanded his abolitionist arguments in 1835 in The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment by the American Churches. Published by Ruggles’s own press, another African American first, the pamphlet stood proslav-ery arguments that the abolition of slavery would lead to interracial sex on their heads. He charged slaveowners with violating the Seventh Commandment by forcing slave women to surrender “to their unbridled lusts,” thus offending “every principle of feminine sensibility and Christian morals.” In this appeal to the emerging northern feminist movement, Ruggles beseeched northern women to shun their southern white sisters who brought their slaves north “while on a summer tour.” Those same women, he thundered, passively allowed their husbands to father children in the slave quarter or used as domestics “the spurious offspring of their own husbands, brothers, and sons.” He found these actions of southern white women “inexcusably criminal” and demanded that northern women close their churches to them. ANGELINA WELD GRIMKÉ used Ruggles’s arguments in a speech before the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women held in New York City in 1837.

In 1835 Ruggles founded and headed the New York Committee of Vigilance, which sought to shield the growing number of fugitive slaves from recapture and protect free blacks from kidnapping. Cooperating with white abolitionists Lewis Tappan and Isaac T. Hopper, Ruggles and other black leaders were daring conductors on the Underground Railroad and harbored nearly one thousand blacks, including FREDERICK DOUGLASS, before transferring them farther north to safety. A fearless activist, he raised funds for the committee, served writs against slave catchers, and directly confronted suspected kidnappers. In frequent columns for the Colored American, he exposed kidnapping incidents on railroads. In 1839 he published the Slaveholders Directory, which identified the names and addresses of politicians, lawyers, and police in New York City who “lend themselves to kidnapping.” His bold efforts often led to his arrest and imprisonment, which contributed to his failing health and eyesight.

Between 1838 and 1841 Ruggles published five issues of the Mirror of Liberty, the first African American magazine. Circulated widely throughout the East, Midwest, and the South, the magazine reported on the activities of the Committee of Vigilance, kidnappings and related court cases, antislavery speeches, and the activities of black organizations. Despite its irregular appearances, its publication was a significant achievement. In 1844 Ruggles attempted unsuccessfully to establish a second magazine, entitled the Genius of Freedom. In 1838 he attacked colonization once more in An Antidote for a Poisonous Combination.

Ruggles’s antislavery zeal caused a fractious dispute with SAMUEL CORNISH in 1838. Without the permission of editor Cornish, Ruggles published the accusation in the Colored American that John Russell, a local black and landlord of a home for African American seamen, trafficked in slaves. Russell successfully sued Ruggles and the newspaper for libel, and Cornish blamed Ruggles for the subsequent upheaval that split the black community. By 1839, stung by the divisive battle with Cornish, accused of mishandling funds by the Committee of Vigilance, and suffering from poor health and near blindness, Ruggles moved to Northampton, Massachusetts. There Lydia Maria Child and the Northampton Association of Education and Industry gave him succor in the 1840s while he continued his activities on the Underground Railroad. In 1841 he showed his old grit when he pioneered protest against segregation on public transit by refusing to leave his seat in a New Bedford, Massachusetts, railroad car.

Beset by illness and weary of failed cures, Ruggles in the 1840s tried successfully the water-cure treatments made famous by Vincent Priessnitz of Austrian Silesia. In Northampton, Ruggles overcame his poor health and built a prosperous practice as a doctor of hydropathy. In 1846, with the help of the Northampton Association, he refurbished an old watermill and opened the first establishment devoted to water cures in the United States. Using “cutaneous electricity” treatments, Ruggles became nationally known. He assisted a variety of patients, from the wife of a southern slave owner to William Lloyd Garrison and SOJOURNER TRUTH. He died in Northampton from a severe bowel inflammation. As an abolitionist, journalist, and physician, Ruggles gave selflessly to help others.

RUSSELL, BILL

(12 Feb. 1934–), basketball player and coach, was born William Fenton Russell in Monroe, Louisiana, the son of Charles and Katie Russell, both laborers. Mister Charlie, as his two sons called him, worked in a paper bag factory, while his wife worked odd jobs on a stopgap basis. She took jobs as a maid in white households only when money was especially scarce or when she particularly wished to spoil Bill, whom she openly considered her favorite child. Both Mister Charlie and Russell’s paternal grandfather, usually called simply “the Old Man,” set a high bar for their male progeny in Monroe. Before his ninth birthday, Russell had witnessed his father ward off an armed white man with only a tire iron and his grandfather punch a mule to its knees with just one blow.

In 1943, unable to tolerate the pressures of Jim Crow any longer, Mister Charlie left for Detroit, Michigan, and then for Oakland, California, to work as a laborer and save up enough money to send for his family. Bill, his brother Charlie, and Katie joined him in California later that same year. Oakland afforded the Russells slightly better opportunities; Mister Charlie launched a successful trucking business, and the family began saving money. But when Russell was twelve his mother died, and Mister Charlie had to abandon his business to take a foundry job closer to his sons.

Frustrated by their teachers’ skeptical opinions of their intellectual capacities, the Russell boys immersed themselves in athletics—Charlie, two years older than Bill, was much more successful early on. While Charlie’s basketball prowess got him into Oakland Tech high school, Bill drifted through Hoover Junior High, where he was cut from football and basketball teams, and finally landed at nearby McClymonds High. Discouraged after being cut from the varsity basketball team as a sophomore, Russell was accepted by the jayvee coach George Powles for his squad. With only fifteen jerseys for sixteen youths, Russell and a teammate alternated games as the fifteenth player.

By his senior year Russell had grown to six feet, nine inches but did not distinguish himself until his final game, scoring a career high of fourteen points. A University of San Francisco (USF) alumnus was informally scouting Russell’s opponent but signed Russell instead. It was the young center’s only scholarship offer. Before attending USF, Russell played for a few months on a California high school all-star team that toured the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Russell’s skills grew significantly, as did his body, and he entered his freshman year at his full height of six feet, ten inches.

Bill Russell, in a contest with the New York Knicks in 1960, led the Boston Celtics to eleven National Basketball Association championships between 1957 and 1969. Library of Congress

Led by Russell at center and K. C. Jones (also a future Celtic) at guard, the San Francisco Dons won fifty-five straight games, including national championships in 1955 and 1956. Russell was also a world-class high jumper for the track-and-field team but characteristically credited his success in that event more to what he called “the psych” than to any exceptional athletic ability. As he put it, “There wasn’t a guy I jumped against I couldn’t beat if I had the chance to talk to him beforehand” (Wolff, 138). Between his junior and senior years Russell was delighted to witness an NCAA rule change that sportswriters dubbed the “Russell rule.” Since an offensive player can stand in the foul lane for no longer than three seconds, officials widened the lane from six feet to twelve feet, hoping to push Russell, who by this time could redirect his teammates’ shots at will, farther from the basket. But since Russell himself placed more emphasis on defense, he relished the advantage he gained from defending a more spread out offense; he could now roam the less-crowded paint with ease and block a greater number of shots, each block a potential two-point advantage for the Dons.

After graduation, Russell played on the U.S. Olympic team in the 1956 Melbourne Games. By no means naive, he was still tremendously affected by the political and economic corruption that permeated the event. Russell later wrote in Go Up for Glory that the Olympics “has to be the greatest bit of sugar-’n-spice-in-the-mouth-and-bourbon-in-the-belly-carney-type-conning since Barnum and Bailey” (56). After beating the Russians in the gold medal game 89–55, Russell flew back to Oakland, married his college sweetheart, Rose Swisher, and joined the Boston Celtics in midseason.

The Celtics coach, Red Auerbach, had orchestrated a dramatic trade with their strongest rival, St. Louis, in order to sign Russell—which they did for $19,500, making him the highest-paid NBA rookie. Averaging 14.7 points and 19.6 rebounds per game, Russell infused the Celtics with a newfound defensive rigor, helping them beat St. Louis in 1957 for their first world championship. The next year Russell sprained his ankle early in the finals, and the Celtics lost to St. Louis. Then, from 1959 to 1966, the Celtics won eight consecutive NBA championships, a feat that has never even been approached by a professional team in any other American sport. Russell earned league MVP honors in 1958, 1961, 1962, 1963, and 1965 as well as an All-Star game MVP award in 1963. Besides his formidable scoring threat and Herculean rebounding—rivaled only by his legendary foe, WILT CHAMBERLAIN—Russell’s forte was the blocked shot, for which he routinely deployed the same “psych” he had developed as a college high jumper and player. (Unfortunately, statistics were not kept for the blocked shot during Russell’s career.)

Russell also distinguished himself as an outspoken human rights figure. (Like MALCOLM X, he vehemently preferred the phrase “human rights” over “civil rights.”) Already a notorious opponent of unwritten NBA quotas, he held integrated basketball camps in the South after the assassination of MEDGAR EVERS, and he visited Africa in 1959 as a liaison of the U.S. Department of State, to teach children basketball. He was so impressed with the ongoing project of Liberia that he invested in a rubber plantation that significantly bolstered their economy. Back home a few years later, he met with MUHAMMAD ALI to discuss Ali’s refusal to answer the U.S. draft, and he proclaimed afterward his belief in the boxer’s sincerity: “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. What I’m worried about is the rest of us” (Sports Illustrated, 19 June 1967). In 1964 Russell declared in the Saturday Evening Post that celebrity black athletes, no matter their fame or wealth, have a responsibility to “the total condition of the Negro.” In 1966 he demonstrated his commitment to that philosophy by writing a blistering autobiography, Go Up for Glory, in which he interprets his life primarily through challenges related to race, rather than sports.

Early in his career Russell became known for vomiting before every game; privately, during the last couple of seasons of the Celtics’ championship run, he came to depend on high doses of sleeping pills to calm his nerves. The vomiting embodied the tension in his life between an intense competitiveness and a high-strung vulnerability, all of which contributed to a nervous breakdown in 1965. Nonetheless, upon Auerbach’s retirement the next year, Russell was named player-coach for the 1967 campaign, thereby becoming the first African American coach of an integrated team in a major professional sports league. The next season the Celtics lost to Chamberlain’s Philadelphia 76ers, but before retiring in 1969 Russell would lead the Celtics to two more consecutive championships, quipping late in his career, “Now I just throw up for the playoffs” (Wolff, 138).

His last year as a player-coach was also the last year of his marriage to Rose, with whom he had three children, William “Buddha” Felton Jr., Jacob, and Karen Kenyatta. In 1974 Russell was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame despite his personal objections to the hall’s treatment of minority players as well as his aversion to the vacuity of celebrity honors. At this time Russell was still an NBA coach for the fledgling Seattle Supersonics; following a four-year record of 162–166, he backed away from the game and married Didi Anstett in 1977. A decade later Russell gave coaching another try, this time with the Sacramento Kings—but after a 17–41 start he stepped down before season’s end.

Russell wrote two more books: a supplemental autobiography in 1979, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (with Taylor Branch), and Russell Rules: Eleven Lessons on Leadership from the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Winner (2002). Whatever the mixed results of his latter-day coaching efforts, Russell holds the distinction of being the “winningest” competitor in any major U.S. sport in any era. Between 1955 and 1969 Russell tallied two NCAA championships, an Olympic gold medal, and eleven NBA world championships. Popularly regarded as a consummate team player, Russell still totaled seven MVP awards during that run.

RUSSWURM, JOHN BROWN

(1 Oct. 1799- 9 June 1851), journalist and first nonwhite governor of Maryland in Liberia Colony, West Africa, was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, the son of John Russwurm, a white American merchant, and an unidentified Jamaican black woman. As a boy known only as John Brown, Russwurm was sent to Canada for an education by his father. After his father’s settlement in Maine and marriage in 1813 to a white New England widow with children, he entered the new family at his stepmother’s insistence. John Brown thereupon assumed his father’s surname and remained with his stepmother even after the senior Russwurm’s death in 1815. His schooling continued at home and, later, at preparatory institutes such as the North Yarmouth Academy in Maine. He made a short, unhappy visit to Jamaica and returned to Portland, Maine, to begin collegiate study. Thrown on his own after just one year because of his sponsor’s inability to continue support, young Russwurm took a succession of brief teaching jobs at African free schools in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

Russwurm entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in September 1824 and soon evinced an interest in books by joining the Athenean Society, a campus literary group. He graduated two years later with a BA. Asked to give a commencement oration, he titled his speech, “The Condition and Prospects of Hayti.” He claimed that Haitians, having overthrown French rule, exemplified the truth that “it is the irresistible course of events that all men, who have been deprived of their liberty, shall recover this previous portion of their indefeasible inheritance.” That a young man partially of African descent had graduated from college, the second or third nonwhite to do so in the United States, and had spoken so eloquently of freedom garnered attention from several newspapers and journals, which published extracts of his remarks. Bowdoin College awarded Russwurm an honorary master of arts degree in 1829.

John Brown Russwurm, founder of the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in New York in 1827. Schomburg Center

As a college student Russwurm entertained the idea of emigrating to Haiti, but, diploma in hand, he went to New York City and, with SAMUEL CORNISH, a Presbyterian minister, began publishing Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. The editors declared in the inaugural issue, on 16 March 1827, that they wanted to disseminate useful knowledge of every kind among an estimated 500,000 free persons of color, to bring about their moral, religious, civil, and literary improvement, and, most important of all, to plead their cause, including their civil rights, to the public. They emphasized the value of education and self-help. Although they vowed that the journal would not become the advocate of any partial views either in politics or in religion, it spoke clearly for the abolition of slavery in the United States and opposed the budding movement to colonize freed blacks in Africa. Weekly issues carried a variety of material: poetry, letters of explorers and others in Africa, information on the status of slaves in slaveholding states, legislation pending or passed in states that affected blacks, notices of job openings, and personal news such as marriages and obituaries. Advertisements for adult education classes appeared frequently and Russwurm even appealed for subscribers to attend an evening school in lower New York where he taught reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar, and geography. Agents in twelve states as well as in Canada, Haiti, and England sold subscriptions, but total circulation figures can only be guessed as several hundred copies. Six months after the newspaper’s beginning Cornish resigned as an editor, ostensibly in order to return to the ministry and to promote free black schools, but more likely because he disagreed with Russwurm’s new views on African colonization.

Russwurm was becoming convinced that blacks could not achieve equality with whites in the United States and that emigration to Africa was their best hope. In one of his last editorials, he wrote that “the universal emancipation so ardently desired by us & by all our friends, can never take place, unless some door is opened whereby the emancipated may be removed as fast as they drop their galling chains, to some other land besides the free states.” The final issue of the journal appeared on 28 March 1829, whereupon, two months later, Cornish resumed its editorship under a new title, The Rights of All. His vigorous denunciation of the colonization movement in fact represented the majority view among slaves and free blacks.

That fall Russwurm sailed for Monrovia, capital of the colony of Liberia, which had been established in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, a national group that favored the voluntary repatriation of blacks to Africa as a solution to accelerating racial problems. He assumed editorship of the foundering, government-controlled Liberia Herald in 1830, became the official government printer by virtue of his appointment as colonial secretary, undertook the supervision of public education, and engaged in trade. In 1833 he married Sarah E. McGill, daughter of George R. McGill, a Baltimorean who had emigrated to Liberia six years earlier and was then acting colonial agent for the society. The couple had five children, including an adopted son. Russwurm’s tenure in the public affairs of Liberia was characterized by controversy over freedom of the press and his close links with unpopular colonial officials. The colonists wanted the Herald to be independently run, which it could not be, they believed, if the editor were a government employee. Russwurm was removed from his editorship and from other posts in 1835.

Of equal importance historically to his role in pioneering the American black press is Russwurm’s fifteen-year career as the governor of Maryland in Liberia, a colony founded in 1834 at Cape Palmas, two hundred miles south of Monrovia, by the Maryland State Colonization Society. This organization was originally a state auxiliary of the American Colonization Society, but its leaders, disappointed by the disparate views among supporters from northern and southern states, by the slow pace of emigration, and by poor management in Monrovia, created a settlement of their own to which primarily freed Maryland blacks would emigrate. It was heavily subsidized by annual grants from the Maryland legislature. The first two governors of the colony, both whites, were overcome by ill health during their brief stays on the West African coast. The society’s board of managers in Baltimore therefore concluded that it must appoint a nonwhite who was already acclimated to Africa and familiar with the governance of a settlement and who not only could survive but also develop in the colonists a sense of autonomy and an expectation of self-government.

Russwurm received his appointment in September 1836 and, proceeding immediately to Cape Palmas, found a small town called Harper, a few outlying farms, a mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and a population of about two hundred immigrants. Over the next ten years, the governor created a currency system, improved business procedures, and adopted a legal code. He attempted to smooth relations with neighboring African groups but, having mixed success, enlarged the militia and encouraged the American African Squadron, whose goal was the suppression of the slave trade, to visit along the coast as a display of support. He worked to stimulate agriculture, both by encouraging the colonists on their own farms and by the enlargement of the public farm on which he planted a nursery and experimented with various crops. He oversaw numerous public improvements and the addition of territory to the colony.

Russwurm’s judicious application of the colony’s constitution and ordinances, political preeminence over the often fractious settlers, and ability to govern well with decreasing supervision of the board in Baltimore coincided with a mounting demand among the colonists in the late 1840s that Maryland in Liberia either be granted independence or that it seek annexation to the newly created Republic of Liberia. The governor himself seems not to have taken a stand, possibly because of his disappointment with the current generation of colonists, whom he characterized as still too unenlightened to accomplish much. Furthermore he was in poor health and suffered from ulcerations on his foot, which may have been related to gout. In spite of these factors and the sudden death of his adopted son, Russwurm continued to direct the colony, and even on the day of his own death, he attended to a portion of his official duties before succumbing to multiple ailments at the government house in Cape Palmas.

The citizens lauded Russwurm as statesman, philanthropist, and Christian. They named an island off Cape Palmas and a township after him. Back in Baltimore, members of the board recalled his visit to the United States in 1848, when he not only exhibited an excellent and courteous bearing but confirmed that he was an educated and accomplished gentleman. They spoke of his faithful service and how he had vindicated their belief in “the perfect fitness of his race for the most important political positions in Africa.” They ordered the construction of a marble obelisk with suitable inscriptions over his grave at Cape Palmas. The board’s high estimate was reinforced by his stepmother in a laudatory letter in which she characterized him as a literary man whose family and library were to him the world. By the time of Russwurm’s death, the settlement numbered nearly a thousand inhabitants and owned a strip of coastline stretching northward more than a hundred miles.

Russwurm sometimes likened himself to Moses, leader of the Israelites, in trying to push his people ahead; indeed, under his administration a colony of former American slaves achieved a large degree of self-government. He proved capable of handling difficulties with settlers, with adjacent Africans, and with white missionaries. His physical and executive perseverance gave the settlement the benefit of stability until it could consider viable alternatives to its dependent relationship with the Maryland State Colonization Society. The survival of the colony, now known as Maryland County in the Republic of Liberia, is attributable principally to the success of Russwurm’s governorship.

RUSTIN, BAYARD TAYLOR

(17 Mar. 1912–24 Aug. 1987), civil rights organizer and political activist, was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Archie Hopkins and Florence “Cissy” Rustin. Hopkins abandoned his sixteen-year-old lover before their child was born, and it was not until Bayard was eleven that he discovered that Cissy was his mother, not his sister, and that his “parents” Janifer Rustin, a caterer, and Julia Rustin, a nurse, were, in fact, his grandparents. Throughout his life, Bayard Rustin referred to Janifer as “papa” and Julia as “mama” and enjoyed a more comfortable family life than his complicated origins might suggest.

Rustin attended the public schools of West Chester and displayed a precocious talent for dissent. In grade school he resisted teachers who tried to make him write with his right hand, and in high school he refused to compete in a state track meet unless he and a fellow black student could stay in the same hotel as their white teammates. In both cases he won. The teenaged Rustin was less successful in his attempts to desegregate West Chester’s movie theater, however, resulting in the first of nearly thirty arrests for civil disobedience. On graduating from high school in 1932, Rustin attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, though he spent barely a year there before being dismissed, either for refusing to join the ROTC or for falling in love with the son of the university’s president. He then returned to West Chester to study at Cheyney State Teachers College and appeared as a tenor soloist on several radio shows in Philadelphia. He also became active in the Society of Friends, a move that pleased his grandmother, who had been raised in the Society and remained a Quaker in spirit, even though she had joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

After Cheyney State dismissed him in 1937 for an indiscretion that he later alluded to as “naughty,” Rustin left for Manhattan (Anderson, 38). There he attended a few classes at the City College of New York but divided most of his time between social activism—serving as an organizer for the Young Communist League (YCL) in Harlem—and music. In 1939 he sang in the chorus of John Henry, an all-black musical starring PAUL ROBESON, and performed with the blues singer LEAD BELLY and the folksong revivalist Josh White at the Café Society Downtown, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village. Although he sang at demonstrations—and in jails—throughout his career, Rustin increasingly focused on social and political organizing.

In 1941 he began working with the labor leader A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, who mentored Rustin on the tactics and strategies required of mass political organizing and persuaded him to abandon communism in favor of democratic socialism. Randolph also introduced Rustin to the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the pacifist leader of the Indian resistance to British rule, and to A. J. Muste, who adhered to the Gandhian principle of achieving social change through nonviolent direct action and who led the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization. In 1942, after Muste appointed him the FOR’s youth secretary, Rustin traveled throughout the nation in the hope of recruiting a cadre of pacifists and raising awareness of the plight of Japanese Americans placed in internment camps. Given the vast public sympathy for the war effort once Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, that proved to be no mean task and often a dangerous one. In 1944 federal authorities imprisoned Rustin for refusing to appear before his military draft board.

On release from prison in 1947 Rustin joined the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in its Journey of Reconciliation, an attempt to end segregation in interstate travel by sitting in the front seats of buses designated by law and custom for whites only. The unwillingness of southern whites to countenance such a change became clear in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when Rustin was dragged from the front of a Trailways bus by police and sentenced to thirty days on a chain gang. The failure of CORE’s campaign did not shake Rustin’s belief that nonviolent direct action could help destroy Jim Crow, however, and in the early 1950s he embarked on a series of lectures and workshops promoting civil disobedience in the United States, Europe, South Africa, and Ghana. Many in the international peace movement viewed Rustin as an inspirational speaker and expert tactician and expected that he might replace the aging Muste as head of the FOR.

Bayard Rustin in August 1963. Library of Congress

Instead, in 1953, the FOR board demanded Rustin’s resignation after his arrest in Los Angeles on a morals charge, the euphemism of the day for performing homosexual acts in public. Rustin agreed to leave the organization immediately, reflecting both his inner conflict about his sexual orientation at that time and the prevailing homophobic mood of 1950s America. Even though he was unwilling to abandon his sexual preference, he agreed with Muste that his homosexuality was wrong and that his actions had diminished the FOR’s moral standing.

Although the arrest chilled his friendship with Muste, Rustin’s other mentor, A. Philip Randolph, stood by him, sending Rustin to Alabama in December 1955 to advise MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Rustin counseled King on the theories and practicalities of nonviolent direct action and helped transform the young minister’s narrowly defined boycott into a fully formed Gandhian mass movement. King later wrote of the Montgomery protest that “Christ furnished the spirit while Gandhi furnished the method” (quoted in Anderson, 188). He might have added that Rustin furnished the essential tactical knowledge, based on a lifetime of practicing nonviolent resistance. Along with ELLA BAKER, Rustin also founded In Friendship, a New York-based group, to raise northern awareness of, and money for, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a regional civil rights body led by King, which Rustin had helped organize in 1957.

In March 1960 Rustin headed the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, after the state of Alabama indicted the SCLC leader on trumped-up charges of tax evasion and perjury. Three months later, however, the congressman ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR. threatened to announce publicly—and mendaciously—that King and Rustin were lovers; Powell was furious that Rustin had planned a demonstration at that summer’s Democratic National Convention without consulting him. Even though he knew the charges were false, Rustin resigned as King’s special assistant, to prevent a scandal he feared would jeopardize the movement at a critical juncture. Rustin later commented that King’s refusal to support him or even to ask him personally to resign was “the only time Martin really pissed me off” (quoted in Levine, 121).

Exiled from the main leadership of the civil rights struggle, Rustin worked in 1961–1962 with the World Peace Brigade, an organization dedicated to the nonviolent overthrow of colonial rule in Africa. He returned a year later to an American civil rights struggle in which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had joined the SCLC and CORE in supporting nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation. Randolph, King, and Rustin believed that only a mass demonstration could build on those protests and persuade Congress to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, and Randolph insisted that his deputy should organize that mass protest. Building on a lifetime of working with civil rights, labor, and peace activists across the nation, Rustin orchestrated a broad, multicultural coalition of support for the March on Washington in August 1963. Most of the 250,000 marchers and the millions watching on television that day would remember King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but the overall success of the demonstration owed as much to Rustin’s meticulous attention to detail as to King’s stirring rhetoric.

The March on Washington served as a springboard for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but it also marked the high point of unity in the civil rights movement. While younger members of SNCC and CORE began to embrace “Black Power,” Rustin argued that blacks, poor whites, and other disenfranchised Americans could win social justice only through the same broad-based coalitions that had ended segregation. His equivocal stance on the Vietnam War provoked even more fury from former allies like JULIAN BOND of SNCC, who believed that Rustin had sold his soul to President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party. The reality was somewhat more complex. Rustin certainly wanted influence in the Democratic Party, and he feared that opposing Johnson’s policies in Vietnam would jeopardize the president’s domestic War on Poverty. But Rustin’s support for a gradual, negotiated withdrawal of U.S. troops also reflected an evolution in his thinking about war and peace. He had begun to question his absolute pacifism after World War II, in part because of guilt about being a conscientious objector in a war that had included the Holocaust. Like many former communists, he also despised the Soviet Union’s repressive domestic and foreign policies and feared that a victory for the Vietcong would destroy any vestiges of democracy in South Vietnam.

Rustin’s influence on international politics and the civil rights agenda waned in the 1970s and 1980s. He earned praise for his work to aid Haitian and Southeast Asian refugees, but was criticized for supporting increased U.S. economic and military aid to Israel, and for comparing the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Ku Klux Klan. On domestic matters Rustin gave qualified support to the affirmative action programs favored by most African Americans, but he continued to favor policies that would radically redistribute wealth to the poor of all races.

In his final decade Rustin became more open about his homosexuality, but he did not take an active role in the growing gay rights movement. He died in New York City in August 1987 after being hospitalized for a burst appendix and then suffering a heart attack in the hospital. He was survived by his partner of twelve years, Walter Naegle. Rustin’s most enduring legacy is his stewardship of the 1963 March on Washington, a demonstration that reflected his own dream of a grand multiracial coalition working peacefully for social and economic justice.

FURTHER READING

ROBINSON, JAMES HERMAN

FURTHER READING

ROBINSON, JO ANN

FURTHER READING

ROBINSON, JOHN C.

FURTHER READING

ROBINSON, RANDALL

FURTHER READING

ROBINSON, SUGAR RAY

FURTHER READING

ROPER, MOSES

FURTHER READING

ROSE, EDWARD

FURTHER READING

ROSS, DIANA

FURTHER READING

ROWAN, CARL THOMAS

FURTHER READING

RUDD, DANIEL

RUDOLPH, WILMA

FURTHER READING

RUFFIN, JOSEPHINE ST. PIERRE

FURTHER READING

RUGGLES, DAVID

FURTHER READING

RUSSELL, BILL

FURTHER READING

RUSSWURM, JOHN BROWN

FURTHER READING

RUSTIN, BAYARD TAYLOR

FURTHER READING