African American Lives

Upon graduation from college, White became an executive with the Standard Life Insurance Company, one of the largest black-owned businesses of its day. Part of Atlanta’s “New Negro” business elite, White was a founder of a real estate and investment company and looked forward to a successful business career. He also participated in civic affairs: in 1916 he was a founding member and secretary of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP. The branch experienced rapid growth, largely because, in 1917, it stopped the school board from eliminating seventh grade in the black public schools. White was an energetic organizer and enthusiastic speaker, qualities that attracted the attention of NAACP field secretary JAMES WELDON JOHNSON. The association’s board of directors, at Johnson’s behest, invited White to join the national staff as assistant secretary. White accepted, and in January 1918 he moved to New York City.

During White’s first eight years with the NAACP, his primary responsibility was to conduct undercover investigations of lynchings and racial violence, primarily in the South. Putting his complexion in service of the cause, he adopted a series of white male incognitos—among the cleverer ones were itinerant patent-medicine salesman, land speculator, and newspaper reporter intent on exposing the libelous tales being spread in the North about white southerners—and fooled mob members and lynching spectators into providing detailed accounts of the recent violence. Upon White returning to New York from his investigative trips, the NAACP would publicize his findings, and White eventually wrote several articles on the racial carnage of the post-World War I era that appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Herald-Tribune, and other prestigious journals of liberal opinion. By 1924 White had investigated forty-one lynchings and eight race riots. Among the most notorious of these was the 1918 lynching in Valdosta, Georgia, of Mary Turner, who was set ablaze. Turner was nine months pregnant, her womb was slashed open, and her fetus was crushed to death. White also investigated the bloody race riots that left hundreds of African Americans dead in Chicago and in Elaine, Arkansas, during the “red summer” of 1919, and the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that resulted in the leveling of the black business district and entire residential neighborhoods. White’s investigations also revealed that prominent and respected whites participated in racial violence; the mob that perpetrated a triple lynching in Aiken, South Carolina, in 1926, for example, included local officials and relatives of the governor.

White wrote of his undercover investigations in the July 1928 American Mercury and in Rope and Faggot (1929), a detailed study of the history of lynching and its place in American culture and politics that remains indispensable. His derring-do in narrowly escaping detection and avoiding vigilante punishment was also rendered in verse in LANGSTON HUGHES’S “Ballad of Walter White” (1941).

At the same time that he was exposing lynching, White also emerged as a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance. He authored two novels. The Fire in the Flint (1924) was the second novel to be published by a New Negro, appearing just after JESSIE FAUSET’S There Is Confusion. Set in Georgia after World War I and based on White’s acquaintance with his native state, The Fire in the Flint tells the story of the racial awakening of Kenneth Harper, who pays for his new consciousness when a white mob murders him. The novel was greeted with critical acclaim and was translated into French, German, Japanese, and Russian. His second work of fiction, Flight (1926), set in New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York, is both a work about the Great Migration of blacks to the North and story about “passing.” Flight’s reviews were mixed. White’s response to one of the negative reviews—by the African American poet Frank Home, in Opportunity magazine—is instructive. He complained to the editor about being blindsided and parlayed his dissatisfaction into a debate over his book’s merits that stretched over three issues. To White there was no such thing as bad publicity—in art or in politics. The salient point was to keep a topic—a book or a political cause—firmly in public view, which would eventually create interest and sympathy.

White’s dynamism and energy was central to the New Negro movement. He was a prominent figure in Harlem’s nightlife, chaperoning well-connected and sympathetic whites to clubs and dances. He helped to place the works of Langston Hughes, COUNTÉE CULLEN, and CLAUDE MCKAY with major publishers, and promoted the careers of the singer and actor PAUL ROBESON, the tenor Roland Hayes, and the contralto MARIAN ANDERSON.

When James Weldon Johnson retired from the NAACP in 1929, White, who had been looking to assume more responsibility, succeeded him. As the association’s chief executive, White had a striking influence on the civil rights movement’s agenda and methods. In 1930 he originated and orchestrated the victorious lobbying campaign to defeat President Hoover’s nomination to the Supreme Court of John J. Parker, a North Carolina politician and jurist who had publicly stated his opposition to black suffrage and his hostility to organized labor. During the next two election cycles, the NAACP worked with substantial success to defeat senators with significant black constituencies who had voted to confirm Parker. The NAACP became a recognized force in national politics.

During Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, White raised both the NAACP’s public profile and its influence on national politics. White’s success owed much to his special knack for organizing the more enlightened of America’s white elites to back the NAACP’s programs. Over the decade of the 1930s, he won the support of the majority of the Senate and House of Representatives for a federal antilynching law; only southern senators’ filibusters prevented its passage. His friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt likewise gave him unparalleled access to the White House. This proved invaluable when he conceived and organized Marian Anderson’s Easter Sunday 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, which was blessed by the president and had as honorary sponsors cabinet members, other New Deal officials, and Supreme Court justices. As NAACP secretary and head of the National Committee against Mob Violence, White convinced President Truman in 1946 to form a presidential civil rights commission, which the following year issued its groundbreaking antisegregationist report, To Secure These Rights. In 1947 he persuaded Truman to address the closing rally of the NAACP’s annual meeting, held at the Washington Monument; it was the first time that a president had spoken at an association event.

As secretary, White oversaw the NAACP’s legal work, which after 1934 included lawsuits seeking equal educational opportunities for African Americans. He was also instrumental in convincing the liberal philanthropists of the American Fund for Public Service to commit one hundred thousand dollars to fund the endeavor, though only a portion was delivered before the fund became insolvent. After 1939 the day-to-day running of the legal campaign against desegregation rested with CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON and THURGOOD MARSHALL’S NAACP Legal Defense Fund, but White remained intimately involved in the details of the campaign, which culminated with the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional.

White had married Gladys Powell, a clerical worker in the NAACP national office, in 1922. They had two children, Jane and Walter Carl Darrow, and divorced in 1948. In 1949 he married Poppy Cannon, a white woman. This interracial union provoked a major controversy within both the NAACP and black America at large, and there was widespread sentiment that White should resign. In response, White, who was always an integrationist, claimed the right to marry whomever he wanted. He weathered the storm with the help of NAACP board member Eleanor Roosevelt, who threatened to resign should White be forced from office. Though White maintained the title of secretary, his powers were reduced, with ROY WILKINS taking over administrative duties. White continued to be the association’s public spokesperson until his death on 21 March 1955. In declining health for several years, he suffered a fatal heart attack in his New York apartment.

Unlike other NAACP leaders such as W. E. B. DU BOIS and Charles Houston, Walter White was neither a great theoretician nor a master of legal theory. His lasting accomplishment lay in his ability to organize support for the NAACP agenda among persons of influence in and out of government and to persuade Americans of all races to support the cause of equal rights for African Americans.

WIGGINS, THOMAS BETHUNE.

See Blind Tom.

WILDER, DOUGLAS

(17 Jan. 1931–), Governor of Virginia, was born Lawrence Douglas Wilder in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Robert J. Wilder Sr., a door-to-door insurance salesman, church deacon, and strict disciplinarian, and Beulah Richards, an occasional domestic and mother of ten children, including two who died in infancy. Wilder’s paternal grandparents, James and Agnes Wilder, were born in slavery and married on 25 April 1856 in Henrico County, Virginia, north of Richmond. They were later sold separately, and on Sundays, James would travel unsupervised to neighboring Hanover County to visit his wife and children. According to family lore, he was so highly regarded that if he returned late, the overseer would feign punishment by beating on a saddle. Agnes Wilder, a house servant, learned to read while overhearing the lessons of a handicapped child for whom she cared. Less is known of the origins of Wilder’s mother. She was raised by a grandmother and aunt in Richmond after her mother and stepfather died. Her father’s identity is unknown.

Douglas (later called Doug by non-family members) was the next to youngest of the Wilder children and one of only two boys who survived. He was named for FREDERICK DOUGLASS, the fiery abolitionist, and PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, the contemplative poet. He grew up in what the family describes as “gentle poverty,” surrounded by sisters and as the apple of his mother’s eye. Clever and high-spirited, the young Douglas shined shoes, hawked newspapers, and teased the family that “some rich people left me here, didn’t they?” “They’re coming back for me, aren’t they?” he would ask (Baker, 8). As a youth in segregated Richmond, Douglas had few associations with whites, other than as an elevator boy in a downtown office building and, while in college, as a waiter at private country clubs and downtown hotels.

Shortly after graduating in 1951 from Virginia Union University with a degree in chemistry, Wilder was drafted into the U.S. Army. While serving in the Seventeenth Infantry Regiment’s first battalion during the Korean War, he and a comrade captured twenty North Koreans holed up in a bunker, an action that won Corporal Wilder a Bronze Star. Back in the United States, Wilder began work as a technician in the state medical examiner’s office. In 1956 he enrolled in the Howard University law school, taking advantage of a state stipend encouraging African Americans to pursue advanced degrees out of state. Wilder married Eunice Montgomery in 1958, and after his graduation in 1959 they returned to Richmond, where his focus was less on dismantling segregation than on establishing a successful law practice. Over time he became known as one of the city’s leading criminal trial attorneys. That record was blemished somewhat by a 1975 reprimand from the Virginia Supreme Court for “inexcusable procrastination” in a car-accident case. Wilder apologized for and did not repeat the mistake.

In 1969 Wilder entered politics by winning a special election to a state senate seat against two white opponents in a majority-white district. Arriving as the first black member since Reconstruction of a body still dominated by rural white conservatives, Wilder made waves with his maiden floor speech denouncing the state song, “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny.” Over the next several years he pursued a legislative agenda that was liberal by Virginia standards. He fought for fair-housing laws, pushed for a national holiday honoring MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr., and opposed the reinstatement of the death penalty. Although he later claimed to have done so primarily as a courtesy, he introduced legislation calling for statehood and voting rights for the District of Columbia, whose residents are largely African American. In 1978 Wilder’s marriage, which produced three children, ended in divorce.

A pivotal moment in Wilder’s rise came in 1982, when a moderate Democratic legislator, Owen B. Pickett, launched his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat by invoking the name and record of Harry Flood Byrd Jr., the retiring senator and the epitome of Old Virginia. Already angry at the treatment of black lawmakers in the 1982 assembly, Wilder threatened to run as an independent if Pickett did not withdraw. Governor Charles S. “Chuck” Robb and other Democratic kingpins calculated the odds of winning without the black vote and advised Pickett to exit. He did. Wilder had demonstrated the power of black voters in Virginia. When he announced his candidacy for lieutenant governor in 1985, the white establishment fretted, but no Democrat was willing to challenge his nomination. Benefiting from lackluster Republican opposition, Wilder ran a lively, shoestring campaign, hoarding his dollars for a final television blitz. He captured almost fifty-two percent of the vote, including support from an estimated forty-four percent of white Democrats who voted.

In the four years leading up to his 1989 race for governor, Wilder honed his trademark blend of contentiousness and charm. He quarreled with former governor Robb over politics and the present governor, Gerald Baliles. As the election approached and his chief rival for the Democratic nomination dropped out of the race, friction gave way to civility. Slight in stature, immaculately dressed, his mustache shaved, and his once bold Afro trimmed to a sedate silver cap, Wilder wooed audiences with an easy, engaging laugh and an increasingly centrist, nonthreatening message. He declined offers from JESSE JACKSON and other nationally prominent black politicians to travel to Virginia to campaign, and he deliberately avoided references to race and the historic nature of his campaign. Wilder drew support from a broad network of social acquaintances, but as in past campaigns, he kept few confidantes, relying on a small circle of advisers whose members fell in and out of grace.

Perhaps the determining event of the governor’s campaign occurred on 5 July 1989, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Webster v. Reproductive Services that states could restrict abortions beyond the limits set in 1973. Wilder deftly framed the issue as a matter of personal freedom. He trusted the women of Virginia to make the proper individual choice, he said. Wilder’s opponent, former Republican Attorney General J. Marshall Coleman, attempted to soften his hard-line, antiabortion message adopted in order to win a three-way contest for the Republican nomination. But in public opinion polls, both campaigns saw women in the vote-rich Washington, D.C., suburbs swing to Wilder.

Entering the final weekend of the campaign, opinion polls showed Wilder leading Coleman by as much as eleven percentage points. As soon as the voting ended on election night, an exit survey taken by Mason-Dixon Opinion Research appeared to confirm that margin. The celebration began. But as the evening wore on, the “landslide” turned into a cliffhanger. Wilder won by 6,741 votes of a record 1,787,131 cast. As in previous American elections involving black candidates, it appeared that many voters simply lied when asked about their vote.

In office Wilder encountered an unexpected $1.4 billion budget shortfall. By his second year, revenues lagged further. Rather than raise taxes, the option adopted by almost every other state during the recession of the early 1990s, Wilder instituted across-the-board spending cuts, laid off state workers, canceled salary increases, and insisted on holding the line on taxes. He pushed also for creation of a “rainy-day fund” to help tide the state over in future economic crises. His managing of the economic crisis was widely applauded, particularly after Virginia was cited twice in a row by Financial World magazine as the nation’s best managed state.

Wilder also won acclaim for the passage of legislation limiting guns sales in Virginia to one per month, thereby halting extensive gun running from Virginia to the northeast, and for extensive appointments of African Americans to prominent government posts. Less lauded was his 1991 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, a campaign that alienated many Virginia voters before his voluntary withdrawal and during which he engaged in public spats with Robb and other prominent Democrats, including some members of the legislative black caucus. An article in U.S. News & World Report stated that “Virginia’s governor is capable of transcendent, triumphal moments and of astonishing pettiness” (13 May 1991).

Prohibited by the Virginia constitution from seeking more than one consecutive gubernatorial term, Wilder left office in January 1994. That spring he mounted a brief, independent run for Robb’s U.S. Senate seat. Both money and support lagged, and Wilder withdrew. Out of office, he conducted a radio call-in show, held a distinguished professorship at Virginia Commonwealth University, and pursued various personal interests, including plans for the creation of a national slavery museum. If his later career did not match expectations prompted by his 1989 election, he nonetheless retained the distinction at the arrival of the twenty-first century of being the only black man yet elected to the high honor of governor of an American state.

WILKINS, J. ERNEST, JR.

(27 Nov. 1923–), mathematician and engineer, was born in Chicago, the son of J. Ernest Wilkins, a prominent lawyer, and Lucile Beatrice Robinson, a school teacher with a master’s degree. Wilkins developed an intense interest in mathematics at an early age, and with the encouragement and support of his parents and a teacher at Parker High School in Chicago, he was able to accelerate his education and finish high school at the age of thirteen. After graduation, he was immediately accepted by the University of Chicago, where he was the youngest student ever admitted by that institution. Within five years, Wilkins received three degrees in Mathematics, a BA in 1940, an MS in 1941, and a PhD in 1942. He was also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1940 and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, in 1942. While at the university, he was university table tennis champion for three years and won the boys’ state championship in 1938.

After earning his PhD from the University of Chicago, Wilkins received a Rosenwald Fellowship to carry out postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During his stay, from October 1942 to December 1942, he worked on four papers. All were published within one year, with three appearing in the Duke Mathematical Journal and one in Annals of Mathematics.

In January 1943 Wilkins began teaching at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he had accepted a position as instructor of freshmen mathematics. However, in March 1944 he was recruited to work in the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ program to develop an atomic bomb. At the laboratory, he was given the title of “Associate Physicist” rather than “Mathematician,” a designation that allowed him to receive a higher salary. Wilkins worked under Eugene Wigner, who directed the Theoretical Physics Group, which provided the theoretical basis for the design of the Hanford, Washington, fission reactor. Wilkins’s duties consisted of applying his expertise in mathematics to help resolve various issues related to the understanding and design of reactors. During his stay at the Metallurgical Laboratory, Wilkins made several major contributions to the field of nuclear-reactor physics. It was in his Manhattan District reports that the concepts now referred to as the Wilkins effect, and the Wigner-Wilkins and Wilkins spectra for thermal neutrons, were developed and made quantitative.

At the completion of his duties at the Metallurgical Laboratory, Wilkins accepted a position as mathematician in the Scientific Instrument Division of the American Optical Company in Buffalo, New York. There he worked on the design of lenses for microscopes and ophthalmologic instruments. His research on “the resolving power of a coated objective” was published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America (1949, 1950), and was the first of a long series of publications, extending over four decades, on various problems related to apodization—methods that can be used to improve the resolving power of an optical system. In addition to the solution of several specific problems, Wilkins brought to the field of apodization a certain mathematical rigor, whose absence left many earlier results suspect.

On 22 June 1947 Wilkins married Gloria Louise Stewart; they had two children. Gloria Wilkins died in 1980. In May 1950 Wilkins moved to White Plains, New York, to accept the position of senior mathematician at the United Nuclear Corporation. After accepting a series of increasing managerial responsibilities, he became manager of the Research and Development Division, a group of about thirty individuals in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and metallurgy doing contract work for the Atomic Energy Commission in the areas of theoretical reactor physics and shielding. Wilkins developed and applied a variety of mathematical tools to problems in these fields, and some of his methods are now presented in the standard textbooks. In addition, his work with H. Goldstein on the transport of gamma rays through various materials was the standard reference for many years and is still cited in the current literature.

Although Wilkins’s work required him to provide mathematical support to the engineering staff, he discovered that many of them did not approach him for aid until their projects were substantially complete, often resulting in cost overruns. Wilkins concluded that his colleagues might respond better if he were a fellow engineer, and in 1953 he entered the Department of Mechanical Engineering at New York University. He graduated in 1957 with a BME magna cum laude and in 1960 received an MME degree. As he had hoped, his engineering colleagues at United Nuclear Corporation greatly increased their early consultations with him.

In September 1960 Wilkins accepted a position at the General Atomic Company in San Diego, California, as assistant chair of the Theoretical Physics Department. Shortly thereafter, he was promoted to assistant director of the John Jay Hopkins Laboratory, followed by further promotions to director of the Defense Science and Engineering Center and director of Computational Research. His managerial responsibilities included making sure that safety concerns were being treated seriously, insuring the progress of various technical projects, and providing both technical and policy advice to his administrative superiors. Particular programs included work on thermoelectricity, the design of high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors, plasma physics as it relates to fusion reactors, and Project ORION, a program exploring the use of nuclear power to propel rockets.

In March 1970 Wilkins accepted a position at Howard University in Washington, D.C., as Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics. During his stay at Howard he supervised seven MS theses and four PhD dissertations. Wilkins had become a member of the American Nuclear Society in 1955; his increasing participation in the activities of the organization and his international prominence in several areas of mathematics and engineering led to his selection as national president in 1974–1975. In 1976 he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. The citation for this honor reads, “Peaceful application of atomic energy through contributions to the design and development of nuclear reactions.”

In September 1976 Wilkins took a sabbatical leave from Howard University to go to the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois. As a visiting scientist, he provided mathematics consultation in reactor physics and engineering. He also continued his own research interests in apodization and “a variational problem in Hilbert space.” Before Wilkins could return to Howard, he received an offer to return to industry as vice president and associate general manager for Science and Engineering at EG and G Idaho, Inc., in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He accepted this responsibility and began work in March 1977, officially resigning from the faculty at Howard in 1978. In 1978 he was promoted to deputy general manager for Science and Engineering, but he continued his position as vice president, with the responsibility of insuring the high quality of work and of representing the company in its dealings with the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In 1984 Wilkins retired from EG and G Idaho and returned to Argonne National Laboratory as a Distinguished Argonne Fellow. That summer he married Maxine G. Malone, who died in 1997; they had no children. At the completion of his stay at Argonne in May 1985, Wilkins went into full retirement. However, he continued to work as a consultant and adviser to a number of technical companies, professional organizations, and universities. It was during this period that Wilkins initiated a new area of research concerned with the real zeros of random polynomials, published in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society (1988, 1991).

Wilkins’s retirement ended in 1990 when he accepted the position of Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta. A major factor influencing this decision was the opportunity to collaborate with Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid, an internationally recognized mathematician, on random polynomials. Unfortunately, Bharucha-Reid died before Wilkins arrived at the university, but Wilkins continued his research, publishing over the next decade five fundamental papers on the mean number of real zeros for random hyperbolic, the French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre, and trigonometric polynomials. During this period he also supervised eleven MS theses in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. Wilkins retired from Clark Atlanta University in August 2003, and in September he married Vera Wood Anderson in Chicago.

J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.’s distinguished career as a research mathematician and engineer has lasted almost six decades, and his contributions to research and management have been recognized by a large number of honors and awards received throughout his life.

WILKINS, ROY

(30 Aug. 1901–8 Sept. 1981), reporter and civil rights leader, was born Roy Ottaway Wilkins in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William DeWitte Wilkins, a brick kiln worker, and Mayfield Edmundson. Upon his mother’s death in 1905, Wilkins was sent with his brother and sister to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with their aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Sam Williams, because his mother worried that her husband could not handle raising their three children and would send them back to Mississippi. The family had fled Mississippi after an incident in which William had beaten a white man over a racial insult.

Roy Wilkins in the national headquarters of the NAACP in New York City in 1963. Library of Congress

Wilkins grew up in a middle-class household in a relatively integrated neighborhood. A porter who oversaw operations in the personal car of the chief of the Northern Pacific Railroad, Sam Williams taught Wilkins the virtue of education. Stressing the importance of faith, Sam and Elizabeth also regularly took Wilkins to the local African Methodist Episcopal Church. He developed an interest in writing in high school and then went on to the University of Minnesota, where he became the first black reporter for the school’s newspaper. Wilkins also served as editor of the Saint Paul Appeal, a weekly African American paper, and was an active member of the city’s NAACP branch.

After graduating from college with honors in 1923, Wilkins became a reporter with the Kansas City Call. He covered the NAACP’s Midwestern Race Relations Conference and was deeply inspired by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON’S message stressing the need for African Americans to fight for constitutional rights. Wilkins was outraged over the widespread racism in Kansas City in housing, public accommodations, education, law enforcement, and employment, but his middle-class values of thrift and hard work also led him to look disdainfully at blacks who behaved in ways that affirmed negative white stereotypes. “A lot of the things we suffered came as wrapped, perfumed presents from ourselves,” he later wrote (Wilkins, 73). Wilkins soon became secretary of the Kansas City branch of the NAACP, and in 1929 he married Aminda Badeau, a social worker who came from a prominent St. Louis family. The couple had no children.

Wilkins’s writing and NAACP work soon caught the attention of WALTER WHITE, the executive secretary of the national organization, and in 1931 White persuaded Wilkins to move to New York to become his chief aide. His duties included writing, lecturing, raising money, and speaking out against racial injustice. When Will Rogers used a racial epithet four times in a radio broadcast, for example, Wilkins organized a nationwide effort to bombard the National Broadcasting Company with telegrams of protest. In 1932 he traveled to Mississippi to do an undercover investigation of the low pay and horrible working conditions suffered by African Americans working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Wilkins’s findings encouraged Senator Robert Wagner of New York to hold hearings on the conditions, and as a result the workers received modest pay increases. In 1934 Wilkins became editor of the Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, and brought changes to the periodical that boosted its financial position and broadened its coverage. W. E. B. DU BOIS, the magazine’s former editor, looked upon Wilkins and his changes with disdain, and the two would later clash over Du Bois’s growing radicalism. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Wilkins also battled Communists within the NAACP. Holding a strong faith in America’s democratic promise, he disagreed profoundly with their philosophy and viewed them as politically harmful to the struggle for racial equality.

Upon Walter White’s death in 1955, Wilkins was unanimously selected as the new executive secretary of the NAACP, a post he would hold for twenty-two years. Wilkins strongly believed that working through the courts for legal changes and lobbying presidents and lawmakers in Congress for civil rights legislation offered the best way to effect lasting, significant improvements for African Americans. He regularly testified before Congress on behalf of legislation, met with every president from Harry Truman through Jimmy Carter, rallied NAACP branches and other progressive organizations to support various civil rights initiatives, and appeared before Democratic and Republican conventions to urge both parties to take strong stands for racial equality. Wilkins’s efforts helped produce such landmark federal laws as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation in public accommodations and employment discrimination; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Like many other civil rights leaders, Wilkins found President Lyndon Johnson to be a valuable ally. Conversely, he regularly criticized Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy for doing too little.

As direct-action protests became more prominent in the 1950s and early 1960s, Wilkins steadfastly held to his legalistic approach. He was initially skeptical about seminal protests, such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, though he ultimately supported them. Similarly, Wilkins and BAYARD RUSTIN urged the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to accept President Johnson’s compromise offer of two at-large seats at the 1964 Democratic convention if they would moderate their demands for broader representation. The MFDP’s FANNIE LOU HAMER and ROBERT P. MOSES refused to compromise, however.

Fearing that civil rights protests might turn to violence and play into the hands of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Wilkins also organized an effort among several black leaders that summer to call for a moratorium on civil rights demonstrations until after the presidential election. Wilkins often criticized MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. and groups such as CORE and SNCC, because he doubted that direct action would lead to meaningful change. “When the headlines are gone, the issues still have to be settled in court,” he observed (Branch, 557). Wilkins’s views also reflected his personal jealousy over the growing popularity of such groups and King. “The other organizations,” he angrily commented, “furnish the noise and get the publicity while the NAACP furnishes the manpower and pays the bills” (Branch, 831). Wilkins especially feared that King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would erode the NAACP’s financial and political strength in the South. Thus, though the two leaders often worked together, they maintained an uneasy relationship throughout the 1960s. King believed the NAACP was often too timid, while Wilkins saw King as a self-promoter. Wilkins distanced himself and the NAACP from King as the SCLC leader grew more critical of the Vietnam War.

Wilkins came under sharp attack from more radical African Americans in the mid- to late 1960s for his unwavering faith in integration, willingness to work with white allies, and confidence in American institutions. Critics also alleged that the NAACP was too timid and had no program to help African Americans economically. Wilkins bristled at these charges and fired back that Black Power was “the father of hatred and the mother of violence” (Fairclough, 320). Younger African Americans sympathetic to Black Power, Wilkins insisted, were “unfair, ungrateful, and forgetful” regarding NAACP accomplishments (New York Times, 9 Sept. 1981). One radical group, the Revolutionary Action Movement, even hatched plans to assassinate Wilkins in 1967, though no attempt on his life was carried out, because police raided the group’s headquarters and broke up the plot.

At the same time he faced these conflicts with external rivals, Wilkins battled critics within the NAACP. A group of junior NAACP board members known as the Young Turks challenged Wilkins’s positions on economic issues, race riots, and the NAACP’s endorsement of Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. Supporting Johnson contradicted the organization’s longstanding policy of nonpartisanship, but Wilkins saw the right-wing Republican Goldwater as a threat to recent civil rights advances. Critics also believed that Wilkins wielded too much power within the organization. The Young Turks endorsed structural changes that would give more power to local branches and would strip some authority from the national leadership. They first made their case at the NAACP’s annual convention in 1965, when they came within one vote of removing Wilkins from the leadership post. The feud lasted for three years. By 1968, however, Wilkins had firmly consolidated his power and put down the rebellion. His means included co-opting some of the Turks’ agenda and, at the 1968 NAACP convention in Atlantic City, calling in law enforcement officials to keep order, turning off microphones and lights when some of the Turks attempted to speak, and tabling the dissenters’ proposals quickly, with little or no debate.

Wilkins continued to advocate for laws and programs to improve black life in education, housing, employment, health care, and other areas throughout the 1970s. He sharply criticized Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford over school desegregation, busing, and voting rights, but failing health slowed his activities somewhat. In 1969 he had suffered a second bout with cancer. Ill health forced him to retire from the NAACP in 1977, when he was replaced by Benjamin Hooks. Four years later, Wilkins died from kidney failure at New York University Medical Center. Upon hearing of Wilkins’s death, JESSE JACKSON observed that he was “a man of integrity, intelligence, and courage who, with his broad shoulders, bore more than his share of responsibility for our and the nation’s advancement” (New York Times, 9 Sept. 1981).

WILLIAMS, BERT

(12 Nov. 1874–4 Mar. 1922), and GEORGE WALKER (1873–6 Jan. 1911), stage entertainers, were born, respectively, Egbert Austin Williams in Nassau, the Bahamas, and George Williams Walker in Lawrence, Kansas. Williams was the son of Frederick Williams Jr., a waiter, and Julia Monceur. Walker was the son of “Nash” Walker, a policeman; his mother’s name is unknown. Williams moved with his family to Riverside, California, in 1885 and attended Riverside High School. Walker began performing “darkey” material for traveling medicine shows during his boyhood and left Kansas with Dr. Waite’s medicine show. In 1893 Williams and Walker met in San Francisco, where they first worked together in Martin and Selig’s Minstrels.

To compete in the crowded field of mostly white blackface performers, “Walker and Williams,” as they were originally known, subtitled their act “The Two Real Coons.” Walker developed a fast-talking, city hustler persona, straight man to Williams’s slow-witted, woeful bumbler. Williams, who was light-skinned, used blackface makeup on stage, noting that “it was not until I was able to see myself as another person that my sense of humor developed.” An unlikely engagement in the unsuccessful Victor Herbert operetta The Gold Bug brought Williams and Walker to New York in 1896, but the duo won critical acclaim and rose quickly through the ranks of vaudeville, eventually playing Koster and Bial’s famed New York theater. During this run they added a sensational cakewalk dance finale to the act, cinching popular success. Walker performed exceptionally graceful and complex dance variations, while Williams clowned through an inept parody of Walker’s steps. Aida Reed Overton, who later become a noteworthy dancer and choreographer in her own right, was hired as Walker’s cakewalk partner in 1897 and became his wife in 1899. They had no children. The act brought the cakewalk to the height of its popularity, and Williams and Walker subsequently toured the eastern seaboard and performed a week at the Empire Theatre in London in April 1897.

Bert Williams and George Walker performed in WILL MARION COOK’s musical In Dahomey on the lawn of Buckingham Palace in 1902. Museum of London

Vaudeville typically used stereotyped ethnic characterizations as humor, and Williams and Walker developed a “coon” act without peer in the industry. For the 1898 season, the African American composer WILL MARION COOK and the noted poet PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR created Senegambian Carnival for the duo, the first in a series of entertainments featuring African Americans that eventually played New York. A Lucky Coon (1898), The Policy Players (1899), and Sons of Ham (1900) were basically vaudeville acts connected by Williams and Walker’s patter. In 1901 they began recording their ragtime stage hits for the Victor label. Their popularity spread, and the 18 February 1903 Broadway premiere of In Dahomey was considered the first fully realized musical comedy performed by an all-black company. In 1900 Williams had married Charlotte Louise Johnson; they had no children.

Williams and Walker led the In Dahomey cast of fifty as Shylock Homestead and Rareback Pinkerton, two confidence men out to defraud a party of would-be African colonizers. Its three acts included a number of dances, vocal choruses, specialty acts, and a grand cakewalk sequence. Critics cited Williams’s performance of “I’m a Jonah Man,” a hard-luck song by Alex Rogers, as a high point of the hit show. In Dahomey toured England and Scotland, with a command performance at Buckingham Palace arranged for the ninth birthday of King Edward VII’s grandson David. The cakewalk became the rage of fashionable English society, and company members worked as private dance instructors both abroad and when they returned home.

Williams composed more than seventy songs in his lifetime. “Nobody,” the most famous of these, was introduced to the popular stage in 1905:

When life seems full of clouds and rain, And I am filled with naught but pain, Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain? Nobody!

The sense of pathos lurking behind Williams’s plaintive delivery was not lost on his audience. Walker gained fame performing boastful, danceable struts, such as the 1906 “It’s Hard to Find a King Like Me” and his signature song, “Bon Bon Buddie, the Chocolate Drop,” introduced in 1907. During this period Williams and Walker signed their substantial music publishing rights with the black-owned Attucks Music Publishing Company.

Walker, who was more business-minded than Williams, controlled production details of the 1906 Abyssinia and the 1907 Bandanna Land. Walker demanded that these “all-Negro” productions play only in first-class theaters. His hard business tactics worked, and Williams and Walker played several theaters that had previously barred black performers. In 1908, at the height of their success, the duo were founding members of The Frogs, a charitable and social organization of black theatrical celebrities. Other members included composers Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson, bandleader JAMES REESE EUROPE, and writer/directors Alex Rogers and Jesse Shipp.

During the tour of Bandanna Land, Walker succumbed to general paresis, an advanced stage of syphilis. He retired from the stage in February 1909. Aida Walker took over his songs and dances, and the book scenes were rewritten for Williams to play alone. Walker died in Islip, New York.

Williams continued doing blackface and attempted to produce the 1909 Mr. Lode of Koal without Walker. His attention to business details languished, and the show failed. Williams’s performances, however, received significant critical praise, and he gained stature as “an artist of pantomime” and “a comic genius.” In 1910 he joined Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. He told the New York Age (1 Dec. 1910) that “the colored show business—that is colored musical shows—is at the low ebb just now. I reached the conclusion last spring that I could best represent my race by doing pioneer work. It was far better to have joined a large white show than to have starred in a colored show, considering conditions.”

Williams was aware of the potential for racial backlash from his white audience and insisted on a contract clause stating that he would at no time appear on stage with any of the scantily clad women in the Follies chorus. His celebrity advanced, and he became the star attraction of the Follies for some eight seasons, leaving the show twice, in 1913 and 1918, to spend time with his family and to headline in vaudeville. His overwhelming success prompted educator BOOKER T. WASHINGTON to quip, “Bert Williams has done more for the race than I have. He has smiled his way into people’s hearts. I have been obliged to fight my way.”

An Actor’s Equity strike troubled Ziegfeld’s 1919 edition of the Follies, and Williams, who had never been asked or allowed to join the union because of his African ancestry, left the show. In 1920 he and Eddie Cantor headlined Rufus and George Lemaire’s short-lived Broadway Brevities. In 1921 the Shuberts financed a musical, Under the Bamboo Tree, to star Williams with an otherwise all-white cast. The show opened in Cincinnati, Ohio, but in February 1922 Williams succumbed to pneumonia, complicated by heart problems, and died the next month in New York City.

Although Williams’s stage career solidified the stereotype of the “shiftless darkey,” his unique talent at pantomime and the hard work he put into it was indisputable. In his famous poker game sketch, filmed in the 1916 short A Natural Born Gambler, Williams enacted a four-handed imaginary game without benefit of props or partners. His cache of comic stories, popularized in his solo vaudeville and Ziegfeld Follies appearances, were drawn largely from African American folk humor, which Williams and Alex Rogers duly noted and collected for their shows. Williams collected an extensive library and wrote frequently for the black press and theatrical publications.

The commercial success of Williams and Walker proved that large audiences would pay to see black performers. Tall and light-skinned Williams, in blackface and ill-fitting tatters, contrasted perfectly with short, dark-skinned, dandyish Walker. Their cakewalks revived widespread interest in African American dance styles. Their successful business operations, responsible for a “$2,300 a week” payroll in 1908, encouraged black participation in mainstream show business. The Chicago Defender (11 Mar. 1922) called them “the greatest Negro team of actors who ever lived and the most popular pair of comedy stars America has produced.”

WILLIAMS, CATHAY

(Sept. 1844–?), cook, laundress, and Buffalo Soldier, was born into slavery in Independence, Missouri. Nothing is known of her parents, except that her father was reported to be a free black man. At some point in her early childhood, she went with her master’s family to a farm near Jefferson City, where she toiled as a house servant until the start of the Civil War.

Probably in the summer of 1861, when she was nearly seventeen years old, Williams fled the plantation and joined the large group of escaped and newly freed slaves seeking the protection of Union troops occupying Jefferson City. Within months she was pressed into service as a laundress and cook for a Union regiment, possibly the Eighth Indiana Infantry. She maintained that position for nearly two years, accompanying the troops on campaigns in Missouri and Arkansas. In the summer of 1863 Williams found employment as a government cook in Federal-controlled Little Rock. Within a year she was a regimental laundress and cook again, purportedly working throughout the Red River campaign in Louisiana before being sent east, where she said she obtained employment as “cook and washer woman” for the staff of General Philip Sheridan during the second Shenandoah Valley Campaign in Virginia. By January 1865 Williams was back with her old regiment, traveling with them to Savannah, Georgia, until the end of the war.

After the cessation of hostilities, Williams managed to return to Missouri to reunite with her family. In November 1866, in the company of a male cousin and a “particular friend,” she disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the U.S. Army in St. Louis under the alias of William Cathey. Her reasons for doing so have never been clearly delineated. She may have viewed the military as an opportunity for a decent livelihood and a semblance of respect, since as a black woman in postwar Missouri her economic prospects were dim. Her years with the Union army undoubtedly made the military seem a familiar place in which to stake her future. Or perhaps her motivation was a strong desire to accompany her cousin and her friend.

Army regulations of the time forbade the enlistment or commissioning of women as soldiers, but since recruiters did not seek proof of identity and because army surgeons often failed to fully examine enlistees, it was not very difficult for women to infiltrate the military. During the Civil War, for example, hundreds of women pretended to be men and served in both the Union and Confederate armies. Williams, however, holds the distinction of being the only known female Buffalo Soldier, and the only documented African American woman to serve in the U.S. Regulars in the nineteenth century. At least three black women served as soldiers in the Civil War: Lizzie Hoffman and another unidentified woman in the U.S. Colored Troops, and Maria Lewis, passing as a white man, in a New York cavalry regiment.

Williams, using the name William Cathey, informed the recruiting officer that she was twenty-two years old and a cook by occupation. Her enlistment papers reveal that she was illiterate at the time of her induction. The recruiting officer described Private William Cathey as five feet, nine inches tall, with black eyes, black hair, and black complexion. She was one of the tallest soldiers in her company. An army surgeon reportedly examined her upon enlistment and determined that she was fit for duty. The exam was obviously a farce or incomplete, as neither the surgeon nor the recruiter realized that she was a woman. Assigned to Company A of the segregated Thirty-eighth U.S. Infantry, Private Cathey did not have an illustrious or exciting army career. She was an average soldier, never singled out for praise or punishment, and, apparently, neither distinguished nor disgraced herself. Opinions held of Private Cathey by her fellow soldiers and officers are unknown.

From her enlistment until February 1867, Williams was stationed at Jefferson Barracks, except for one visit to a St. Louis hospital for treatment of an undocumented illness. By April 1867 Private Cathey and her company had marched to Fort Riley, Kansas, where she and fifteen others were described as “ill in quarters” for two weeks. In June 1867 her company arrived at Fort Harker, Kansas, and the following month they arrived at Fort Union, New Mexico, after a march of 536 miles. By October the company was encamped at Fort Cummings, New Mexico. It appears that Private Cathey withstood the marches as well as any man in her unit, and although she participated in her share of soldierly obligations, the company never engaged the enemy or saw any direct combat while she was a member. In January 1868 her health began to deteriorate, and she was hospitalized for rheumatism that month and again in March. In June the company marched for Fort Bayard, New Mexico, where she was admitted into the hospital in July and diagnosed with neuralgia, a catch-all term for any acute pain of the nervous system. She did not report back to duty for a month.

On 14 October 1868 Private Cathey and two others in Company A were discharged from the Thirty-eighth Infantry on a surgeon’s certificate of medical disability. She had served her country for just less than two years. Although Cathey’s discharge papers do not indicate that the surgeon was aware of her true sex, Williams later related that she grew tired of being a soldier and eventually confessed her true identity to obtain release from the military. Indeed, none of the records of the Thirty-eighth Infantry—including carded medical records, enlistment papers, and the muster rolls and returns of Company A, Thirty-eighth U.S. Infantry—reveal any awareness of a woman in the ranks.

Upon resuming civilian life, she traveled to Fort Union and worked as a cook until some time in 1870, when she moved to Pueblo, Colorado, and worked as a laundress for two years. She next moved to Las Animas County, Colorado, staying for a year, again working as a laundress. She finally settled, more or less permanently, in Trinidad, Colorado, making her living as a laundress, seamstress, and nurse. In 1875 Williams told her life story to a St. Louis journalist traveling in Colorado, who described her as “tall and powerfully built, black as night, muscular looking.” The full newspaper article published the following year remains the only written story of her life told in her own voice. In the mid-1880s Williams moved to Raton, New Mexico, where she may have operated a boarding house. By 1889 she was back in Trinidad, hospitalized for nearly a year and a half with an undisclosed illness.

Williams was probably indigent when she left the hospital, so in June 1891 she petitioned for an “invalid pension” based upon her military service. Her sworn application gave her age as forty-one, and she declared that she was the same William Cathey who served as a private in the Thirty-eighth Infantry. She produced her original discharge certificate as proof. She claimed she was suffering deafness, contracted in the army; she referred to her rheumatism; and she declared she was eligible for the government pension because she could no longer sustain herself by manual labor. A supplemental declaration, filed the following month, contended that she had contracted smallpox at St. Louis in 1868, and, while still recovering, swam the Rio Grande on the way to New Mexico. She believed that the combined effects of smallpox and exposure led to her deafness. All of her pension papers were signed by her, as she had learned to read and to write since her time in the army more than two decades earlier.

On 8 September 1891 a medical doctor in Trinidad, commissioned by the Pension Bureau, examined Williams. Charged with providing a thorough examination of the patient and a complete description of her physical condition, the doctor described her as five feet, seven inches tall, 160 pounds, and “stout.” He reported that she was not deaf and he could find no evidence of rheumatism. Most horrifying, the doctor reported that all her toes on both feet had been amputated, and she could walk only with the aid of a crutch, but he provided no explanation of the cause of amputation. Other than the loss of her toes, the doctor stated she was in good general health and gave his opinion as “nil” on a disability rating. In February 1892 the Pension Bureau rejected her claim for an invalid pension, and Williams never received any government assistance. The bureau rejected her claim on medical grounds, but it never questioned her identity. No one appeared to doubt that William Cathey of the Thirty-eight Infantry and Cathay Williams of Trinidad were the same person.

Nothing definite is known of Williams after her pension case closed, although it is believed that she died before 1900. Where and how she lived, the date and place of her death, and her final resting place are undetermined.

WILLIAMS, DANIEL HALE

(18 Jan. 1856–4 Aug. 1931), surgeon and hospital administrator, was born in Hollidaysburg, south central Pennsylvania, the son of Daniel Williams Jr. and Sarah Price. His parents were black, but Daniel himself, in adult life, could easily be mistaken for being white, with his light complexion, red hair, and blue eyes.

Williams’s father did well in real estate but died when Daniel was eleven, and the family’s financial situation became difficult. When Williams was seventeen, he and a sister, Sally, moved to Janesville, Wisconsin. Here Williams found work at Harry Anderson’s Tonsorial Parlor and Bathing Rooms. Anderson took the two of them into his home as family and continued to aid Williams financially until Williams obtained his MD.

Medicine had not been Williams’s first choice of a career; he had worked in a law office after high school but had found it too quarrelsome. In 1878 Janesville’s most prominent physician, Henry Palmer, took Williams on as an apprentice. Williams entered the Chicago Medical College in the fall of 1880 and graduated in 1883. He opened an office on Chicago’s South Side and treated both black and white patients.

Late in 1890 the Reverend Louis Reynolds, a pastor on the West Side, asked Williams for advice about his sister, Emma, who had been turned down at several nursing schools because of her color. As a result Williams decided to start an interracial hospital and a nursing school for black women. He drew on black and white individuals and groups for financial support. Several wealthy businessmen, such as meat-packer Philip D. Armour and publisher Herman H. Kohlsaat, made major contributions to the purchase of a three-story building at Dearborn and Twenty-ninth Street and its remodeling into a hospital with twelve beds. Provident Hospital and Training School Association was officially incorporated on 23 January 1891 and opened for service on 4 May of that year. The Training School received 175 applicants for its first class, and Williams selected seven for the eighteen-month course.

Provident had both white and black patients and staff members, although the lack of suitably qualified black physicians led to some problems. Williams appointed black physicians and surgeons who had obtained their medical degrees from schools such as the Rush Medical College and his own alma mater and who, in addition, had suitable experience. However, he had to deal diplomatically with some leaders of the black community who were pushing the appointment of young George Cleveland Hall, who had a degree from an eclectic school and only two years of experience (mostly in Chicago’s red light district). Hall (and his equally aggressive wife) never forgave Williams for this early judgment to oppose Hall’s appointment.

The hospital soon became overcrowded, but many donations—again including major contributions from Armour and Kohlsaat—resulted in the construction of a new sixty-five-bed hospital at Dearborn and Thirty-sixth streets. The new Provident opened in late 1896.

In 1893 a longtime Chicago friend of Williams, Judge Walter Q. Gresham, recently named secretary of state by President Grover Cleveland, urged Williams to seek the position of surgeon in chief at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. This, Gresham pointed out, would bring Williams onto the national scene. Williams, believing that Provident was in good hands, finally agreed to Gresham’s suggestion and in 1894 was appointed to Freedmen’s where his predecessor, Charles B. Purvis, unhappy at being replaced and often with the aid of Hall, made life as difficult as possible for Williams.

Williams, nevertheless, accomplished much at Freedmen’s. He reorganized the staff interracially, created an advisory board of prominent physicians for both professional and political help, and founded a successful nursing school. Williams also began an internship program, improved relationships with the Howard University Medical School, and helped establish an interracial local medical society.

Williams also worked hard on the national scene and became one of the founders of the National Medical Association in 1895. Because at the time the American Medical Association did not accept black physicians, such a national organization was a necessary part of the educational and professional growth for black healthcare givers. In 1895 Williams turned down the presidency but did become vice president of the organization.

With the election in 1896 of a new U.S. president, the control of Freedmen’s became involved in partisan congressional hearings. These were sufficiently upsetting for Williams, but then William A. Warfield, one of Williams’s first interns at Freedmen’s, accused his chief, before the hospital’s board of visitors, of stealing hospital supplies. Although the congressional hearings came to no conclusion and the board of visitors exonerated Williams, he had become soured on Washington and resigned early in 1898.

In April 1898 Williams married Alice Johnson in Washington, D.C. The couple moved to Chicago, and Williams returned to his old office. There the Halls continued to undermine the Williamses’ professional and social lives. Hall finally forced Williams to resign from Provident in 1912 because the latter had become an associate attending surgeon at St. Luke’s Hospital and was, therefore, “disloyal” to Provident. That this was a trumped-up charge was apparent from the fact that, since 1900, Williams had regularly had patients in up to five other hospitals at the same time.

National recognition, however, counterbalanced such sniping; in 1913 Williams was nominated to be a charter member of the American College of Surgeons, the first black surgeon to be honored in this manner. At the board of regents meeting to act on this, a surgeon from Tennessee objected because of the social implications in the South. After vigorous discussion, during which it was pointed out that “if you met him [Williams] on the street you would hardly realize that he is a Negro,” Williams was accepted.

As a surgeon, Williams is best known for his stitching of a stab wound to the pericardium of Jim Cornish, an expressman, on 9 July 1893. After Williams had realized that conservative care would not be sufficient for Cornish, he searched the medical literature for reports of surgery in this area. Finding none, he nevertheless decided to perform surgery. Cornish lived for fifty years after the operation. While strictly speaking not an operation on the heart itself, this was the first successful suturing of the pericardium on record.

Perhaps more important surgically was Williams’s successful suturing of a heavily bleeding spleen in July 1902, one of the earliest such operations in the United States. Williams also operated on many ovarian cysts, a condition that had not been believed to occur in black women. In 1901 he reported on his 357 such operations, almost equally divided between black and white patients.

Well aware of the lack of training opportunities available to black surgeons in the South, Williams readily accepted an invitation near the end of the century to be a visiting professor of clinical surgery at the Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. He spent five or ten days there without pay each year for over a decade. He began operating in a crowded basement room, but by 1910 growing financial support for the college programs resulted in a separate hospital building with forty beds. Williams also operated and lectured at other schools and hospitals in the South.

In 1920 Williams built a summer home near Idlewild, Michigan, to which he and his wife moved. There Alice died of Parkinson’s disease a few years later, and Williams then succumbed to diabetes and a stroke.

Williams became known for his long and successful efforts for medical care and professional training for blacks, although much of his work was multiracial. His logically developed and pioneering surgery, especially on the pericardium and the spleen, increased the possibilities and scope of surgical action.

WILLIAMS, GEORGE WASHINGTON

(16 Oct. 1849–2 Aug. 1891), soldier, clergyman, legislator, and historian, was born in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, the son of Thomas Williams, a free black laborer, and Ellen Rouse. His father became a boatman and, eventually, a minister and barber, and the younger Williams drifted with his family from town to town in western Pennsylvania until the beginning of the Civil War. With no formal education, he lied about his age, adopted the name of an uncle, and enlisted in the United States Colored Troops in 1864. He served in operations against Petersburg and Richmond, sustaining multiple wounds during several battles. After the war’s end Williams was stationed in Texas, but crossed the border to fight with the Mexican republican forces that overthrew the emperor Maximilian. He returned to the U.S. Army in 1867, serving with the Tenth Cavalry, an all-black unit, at Fort Arbuckle, Indian Territory. Williams was discharged for disability the following year after being shot through the left lung under circumstances that were never fully explained.

For a few months in 1869 Williams was enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C. But with an urgent desire to become a Baptist minister, he sought admission to the Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts. Semiliterate and placed in the English “remedial” course at the outset, Williams underwent a remarkable transformation. He became a prize student as well as a polished writer and public speaker and completed the three-year theological curriculum in two years. In 1874, following graduation and marriage to Sarah Sterret of Chicago, Williams was installed as pastor of one of the leading African American churches of Boston, the Twelfth Baptist. A year later he went with his wife and young son (their only child) to Washington, D.C. There he edited the Commoner, a weekly newspaper supported by FREDERICK DOUGLASS and other leading citizens and intended to be, in Williams’s words, “to the colored people of the country a guide, teacher, defender, and mirror.” It folded after about six months of publication.

The West beckoned, and Williams moved in 1876 to Cincinnati, where he served as pastor of the Union Baptist Church through the end of the next year. Also engaged as a columnist for a leading daily newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial, he contributed sometimes autobiographical pieces on cultural, racial, religious, and military themes. He spent what spare time he had studying law in the office of Judge Alphonso Taft, father of William Howard Taft. Even before passing the bar in 1881, Williams had become deeply immersed in Republican politics—as a captivating orator, holder of patronage positions, and, in 1877, an unsuccessful legislative candidate. In 1879 the voters of Cincinnati elected him to the Ohio House of Representatives, making Williams the first African American to sit in the state legislature. He served one term, during which he was the center of several controversies, ranging from the refusal of a Columbus restaurant catering to legislators to serve him to a furor in the African American community over his support for the proposed closing of a black cemetery as a health hazard. Williams’s effort to repeal a law against interracial marriage failed; he also supported a bill restricting liquor sales.

By this time Williams had developed an interest in history. In 1876 he delivered an Independence Day Centennial oration titled “The American Negro from 1776 to 1876.” While in the legislature, Williams made regular use of the Ohio State Library to collect historical information. After completing his stint as a lawmaker in 1881, he devoted his full attention to writing History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens. Based on extensive archival research, interviews, and Williams’s pioneering use of newspapers, and published in two volumes by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1882–1883, the work was the earliest extended, scholarly history of African Americans. Comprehensive in scope, it touched on biblical ethnology and African civilization and government but gave particular attention to blacks who served in America’s wars. Widely noticed in the press, Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America was, for the most part, well received as the first serious work of historical scholarship by an African American. Williams followed it in 1887 with another major historical work, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1865. Drawing on his own experiences (but also on the wartime records then being published for the first time), Williams wrote bitterly of the treatment of black soldiers by white northerners as well as by Confederates. Despite disadvantages, their conduct, in his opinion, was heroic, and he concluded that no troops “could be more determined or daring.” Though not as widely heralded as his earlier volumes, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion was generally well reviewed by the white and black press. Williams also planned a two-volume history of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy, but he never went beyond incorporating some of the materials he had collected for the project into his lectures in the United States and Europe. In his writings and lectures, Williams expressed an optimism based on faith in a divine power that preordained events and enlisted adherents to assist in evangelizing the rest of the world’s peoples.

Williams had begun to lecture extensively early in the 1880s, and by the end of 1883 had returned to Boston, where he practiced law. He later resided in Worcester and continued his research at the American Antiquarian Society. In March 1885 lame-duck president Chester Arthur appointed Williams minister to Haiti. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and sworn in during the final hours of the outgoing Republican administration, but before Williams could assume the post, Democrat Grover Cleveland appointed someone else to it.

Ever restless and aggressively ambitious, Williams turned his sights toward Africa, already an occasional subject of his writing and public speaking. He attended an antislavery conference in Brussels in 1889 as a reporter for S. S. McClure’s syndicate and there met Leopold II, king of the Belgians. In the following year, without the blessing of the king but with the patronage of Collis P. Huntington, an American railroad magnate who had invested in several African projects, he visited the Congo. After an extensive tour of the country, which took him from Boma on the Atlantic coast to the headwaters of the Congo River at Stanley Falls, he had a clear impression of what the country was like and why. Having witnessed the brutal conduct and inhumane policies of the Belgians, Williams decided to speak out. He published for circulation throughout Europe and the United States An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, thus becoming a pioneering opponent of Leopold’s policies and anticipating later criticisms of Europe’s colonial ventures in Africa. Among the barrage of charges against the king was that his title to the Congo was, at best, “badly clouded” because his treaties with the local chiefs were “tainted by frauds of the grossest character.” He held the king responsible for “deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave-raiding, and general policy of cruelty” in the Congo. “All the crimes perpetrated in the Congo have been done in your name,” he concluded, “and you must answer at the bar of Public Sentiment for the misgovernment of a people, whose lives and fortunes were entrusted to you by the august Conference of Berlin, 1884–1885.” While the attack inspired denunciations of Williams in Belgium, it was little noted in the United States, though Williams had already written a report on the Congo for President Benjamin Harrison at the latter’s request. A closer scrutiny of conditions in the Congo would come only after such “credible” persons as Roger Casement of the British foreign office and Mark Twain made charges against Leopold that echoed those of Williams.

Following his exploration of the Congo and southern Africa, Williams fell ill in Cairo, Egypt, after giving a lecture before the local geographical society (he had not been in robust health since being wounded in the army). Separated but not divorced from his wife, he subsequently went to London with his English “fiancée,” Alice Fryer, intending to write a lengthy work on colonialism in Africa. There, tuberculosis and pleurisy overtook him, and he died in Blackpool. In the United States, his death was noted in the national media as well as in the black press.

To the end, George Washington Williams remained a difficult person to understand fully. To many on both sides of the racial divide he possessed a curious combination of rare genius, remarkable resourcefulness, and an incomparable talent for self-aggrandizement. Although Williams was justifiably chided during his lifetime for making inflated claims about his background, W. E. B. Du Bois did not hesitate to pronounce him, long after his death, “the greatest historian of the race.”

WILLIAMS, JOHN ALFRED

(5 Dec. 1925–), novelist, journalist, and teacher, was born in Jackson, Mississippi, to John Henry Williams and Ola Mae, whose maiden name is unknown. Soon after his birth, the family returned to Syracuse, New York, where his father was a laborer and his mother a domestic. Williams attended Central High School in Syracuse, leaving in 1943 to enter the U.S. Navy. After service in the Pacific theater during World War II, he returned to Syracuse, completed high school, and, in 1947, married Carolyn Clopton; the couple had two sons, Gregory and Dennis. Williams entered Syracuse University and graduated in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and English. He did graduate work in 1951–1952 before financial circumstances forced him to withdraw; he and Clopton also divorced in 1952.

Williams held several paid writing positions in the 1950s: he was a public relations writer in Syracuse, publicity director for Comet Press Books, editor of Negro Market Newsletter, a publisher’s assistant, and European correspondent for both Ebony and Jet magazines. He incorporated these experiences into his first novel, The Angry Ones (1960), which draws mainly on his employment at Comet Press.

Williams’s second novel, Night Song (1962), marks the start of his deep exploration of African American music, especially jazz. An account of the life of Richie “Eagle” Stokes, a fictitious saxophonist who closely resembles CHARLIE PARKER, the novel describes the opportunities and limitations that an artistically talented black man must confront in his attempt to forge meaningful art in racist America. On the strength of it, Williams was informed that he would be selected to receive the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

After receiving the informal letter of congratulations that promised him the prize, the author had an interview with the director of the academy, supposedly a mere formality. Instead, after the interview, the director informed Williams that the award had been rescinded. (Williams fictionalized the events in The Man Who Cried I Am [1967] and recounted them in “We Regret to Inform You That,” an essay reprinted in his collection Flashbacks [1973].) The director offered no explanation, though Williams speculated that his impending marriage to Lorrain Isaac, a white Jewish woman, was the cause. At this writing, Williams remains the only candidate to ever have had the prize retracted. Williams later married Isaac in 1965, and the couple had a son, Adam.

Williams produced another fine novel, Sissie, in 1963 and a compelling travelog about his exploration of America, This Is My Country, Too, in 1964. It was the publication of The Man Who Cried I Am, however, that won him international acclaim and secured his literary reputation. The novel recounts the experiences of Max Reddick, a terminally ill expatriate African American writer. As his marriage and his health deteriorate, Max pursues information left to him by a writer friend, Harry Ames. Ames, who is clearly modeled on RICHARD WRIGHT, has discovered an international plot for the subjugation of black peoples; a subset of this plot, the King Alfred Plan, is a blueprint for the annihilation of African Americans. Knowledge of King Alfred proves fatal for Max, as it has for all other blacks who have discovered it.

This novel appeared when the struggle for American racial equality was swinging away from the nonviolent resistance of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the more aggressive stance of the Black Power movement. Williams reflects that shift through his negative portrayal of Paul Durrell, a MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. figure whom the novelist portrays as little more than a government puppet. He intensifies that critique in his stinging biography of King, The King God Didn’t Save (1970).

Williams’s work portrays the activist as a failure whose outmoded integrationist views necessarily gave way to the militancy of the black power movement. In his introduction he argues, “So now the man is dead, and time is already proving that his philosophy began to die before he did” (23). He builds on that idea, claiming that strife is the natural outcome of white America’s racist past. In telling the story of King’s being hit by a brick during the Marquette Park march, for instance, Williams remarks that the minister had won the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that elsewhere in the world would have afforded him some protection. Not so in America; indeed, in Williams’s view white Americans’ inability to recognize and revere King “damned them to a restless racial future—which they well deserve and, in fact, have long deserved” (97). One finds a similar tone in the novel that he wrote while working on the King biography, Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969).

At almost exactly the same time that Williams was writing these two books, he began his teaching career. Subsequent to his initial appointment as teacher and lecturer in writing at City College of the City University of New York, he has held positions at more than a dozen colleges and universities. His commencement of teaching coincided with a shift in his fiction toward a fascination with history. This did not translate into a de-emphasis on contemporary social commentary, however; rather, it provided him a means of extending his commentary through his contextualization of the present era within a larger continuum. One sees a masterly example of this in Captain Blackman (1972).

Grievously wounded in a Vietnam firefight, the novel’s eponymous hero moves backward in time, hallucinating the entire history of African Americans’ military activity up until World War II. When he emerges from his coma, he reflects on his own career, which includes World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Although the novel ends with a somewhat fanciful call for infiltration and subversion of the American military, it provides a solidly researched, powerful commentary on the neglected contributions that African American soldiers have made to a nation that has perpetually, systematically denied them their humanity.

Captain Blackman also exhibits Williams’s most striking formal achievement: a flexible chronology that embroiders a linear plot with facts, dates, and experiences that thoroughly complicate the reader’s understanding of what history is and how it is constructed. This pattern demonstrates Williams’s rejection of history as a monolithic, fundamentally accurate, and basically just entity. Much of his fiction identifies a plethora of intellectual-economic-racial tensions that infiltrate the telling of American history and distort the reader’s perception of past (and present) events. A subsequent generation of African American writers who concern themselves with historical questions, including John Edgar Wideman, Charles Johnson, and TONI MORRISON, cite Williams as an important influence on their work.

In some of his later works, Williams applies the historical lens to more personal subjects. As Gilbert Muller notes, !Click Song (1982) provides a sequel to The Man Who Cried I Am. !Click Song’s narrator, Cato Caldwell Douglass, is Max Reddick’s emotional and spiritual heir; nevertheless, his interest in aesthetics saves him from the destruction that political activity visits on Reddick. In The Berhama Account (1985), Williams effectively mixes the personal and the political, setting a love story against the backdrop of effective political action. The Berhama Account shows a small Caribbean nation addressing its racially inspired internal strife in the wake of a specious assassination attempt. In the midst of all this social upheaval, a cancer survivor and journalist reignites an old affair and finds personal salvation in the relationship. On many levels this plot represents a rewriting of The Man Who Cried I Am, with a shift in emphasis away from the annihilation plot and toward the possibility of enduring human connection.

The same is true in Williams’s compelling Clifford’s Blues (1999), which recounts the story of the gay black jazz musician Clifford Pepperidge’s confinement in the Dachau Nazi concentration camp near Munich, from 1933 until 1945. (The plot of the novel is not entirely fictional; several African Americans, including the jazz singer Valaida Snow, were interned in concentration camps by the Nazis). Saved from the general camp population by his musical abilities and by a gay SS officer’s sexual desire for him, Pepperidge spends his years in Dachau never fully suffering what most prisoners do and yet always remembering that he is not, cannot be, free. In the face of this, Pepperidge struggles to retain some sense of self. The emphasis on his experiences with jazz as a salvific force lends an air of hopefulness to the work. Williams tempers that hope, however, with a constant reminder that racism in America is little better than the discrimination that lands Pepperidge in Dachau initially; furthermore, by leaving the question of Pepperidge’s survival unresolved, he complicates the notion that black identity and selfhood are sustainable, no matter what resources one brings to the struggle.

The appearance of this powerful novel, almost four decades after the publication of Williams’s first book, indicates that at this writing his is a vital and viable career. Furthermore, it demonstrates how his evolving approach to literature and his views about racial questions mirror shifts in the larger national populace. From an early hopeful emphasis on the chance for racial amelioration, through his strong hand in the articulation of a revolutionary black arts ethos, to a rich, subtle engagement with the issue of what black life means in America, Williams spans a range of attitudes and literary techniques that make his one of the most important American literary voices of his age.

WILLIAMS, PAUL REVERE

(18 Feb. 1894–23 Jan. 1980), architect, was born in Los Angeles, California, to Chester Stanley Williams and Lila Wright Churchill. Orphaned by the age of four, he was raised by foster parents. His foster father, Charles Clarkson, was a bank janitor. Paul was one of only a few African American students at Sentous Elementary School on Pico Street. While at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School, Paul decided to become an architect after reading about African American architect William Sidney Pittman, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S son-in-law and a graduate of Tuskegee Institute and Drexel Institute in Philadelphia.

Paul graduated high school in 1912, and the following year he went to work for Wilbur Cook Jr., a landscape architect. Two years later he took a job as a draftsman for noted Pasadena residential architect Reginald Johnson, and in 1919 Hollywood architect Arthur Kelly hired as him a junior architect. Williams’s art training had begun with evening classes from 1915 to 1920 at the Los Angeles atelier of the Beaux Arts Institute of Design, where he learned rendering techniques and the use of color. From 1916 to 1919 he attended the School of Architecture, at University of California at Los Angeles although he left before earning a degree. In 1922 Williams took a position in the office of John Austin, an architect specializing in schools and government buildings.

Architect Paul Revere Williams. Schomburg Center

Williams married Los Angeles native and socialite Delia Mae Givens in June 1917. They had two children, Marilyn Francis and Norma Lucille, the latter of whom became an interior designer. In 1923 Williams opened his own office at the 1400 Stock Exchange Building in downtown Los Angeles. He secured his first major construction project by promising auto industrialist Everett Lobban Cord a complete set of sketches for a house, fifteen-car garage, swimming pool, and stables within twenty-four hours. Williams won the commission for the $250,000 country house. From the 1930s to the 1950s—his most productive period—Williams’s office was located on the top floor of the swank Wilshire Building in downtown Beverly Hills. Williams was the most successful African American architect of his era in a business that necessitates a delicate balance of art and commerce. In 1948 his practice grossed $140,000. His drafting room, which at the firm’s height included twenty full-time people, was an interracial mix of Chinese, German, and African American architects. Unlike James Garrott, another Los Angeles African American architect, Williams did not go out of his way to apprentice “junior” architects. With as many as thirty projects on the boards simultaneously, he needed experienced architects in order to meet production deadlines.

A competitive tennis player, Williams was lithe and muscular. His matinee-idol good looks and chic Southern California “cool” style of attire helped Williams get his foot in the door of potential white clients. Once inside, he marketed himself assiduously. Williams was a medal-winning freehand artist who rendered all the buildings he designed. He taught himself to sketch upside down (right side up to the client). An eye-catching attention-getter, the technique also positioned him on the opposite side of the table from clients, avoiding a hovering stance that made some white clients uncomfortable. Swiftly and with flair, Williams sketched design ideas before awestruck potential clients. By 1935 Williams had received commissions for close to forty houses.

During the 1930s and 1940s Williams became known as the “architect to the stars of Hollywood,” and over the years his celebrity clients included Tyrone Power, Robert Holden, ZaSu Pitts, Julie London, Lon Chaney, William Paley, Charles Cottrell, Will Hays, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Anthony Quinn, and Otto Preminger. In 1956 Williams teamed up with his daughter Norma in designing the interior of Frank Sinatra’s swinging bachelor’s pad, creating custom-designed chandeliers, lamps, and furniture. Williams also designed several Hollywood restaurants and lounges famous for celebrity watching: Chasen’s (1936), Perino’s (1949), and the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge (1959).

Williams’s architectural style captured the casual, informal, Mediterranean “look” characteristic of hot, sunny climates such as Southern California’s. Williams was neither an innovator nor trendsetter like Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he knew personally and admired professionally. For nonresidential buildings he generally chose an “historic” Tudor or Georgian style, applying exterior details to a functional façade. For palatial homes he used a more modernist approach. Williams described his design philosophy in Architecture Magazine in 1940 as “the pleasing assembly of parts and not the assembly of pleasing parts.” Williams was a master of interior color coordination and was meticulous about interior architectural detailing, whether it was the joinery of a spiral grand stair or cabinetry trim.

Williams was a versatile residential architect capable of designing one-hundred-thousand-dollar country houses as well as small, practical houses for World War II veterans. A collection of his floor plans for houses costing less than five thousand dollars were compiled in two books Williams wrote in 1946: Small Homes of Tomorrow and New Homes for Today. With the publication of these books, Williams became the first African American architect to have his books distributed nationwide. Flattering profiles on Williams in Life, and later Ebony, further heightened his name recognition and attracted clients.

Over his career Williams made a profound impression on the architecture of Los Angeles. While most of his business came from wealthy white clients building homes in upscale Los Angeles neighborhoods like Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, and Bel Air, his firm also designed commercial real estate, schools, and public buildings. Williams’s designs include the Shrine Auditorium, the Hollywood YMCA, the Los Angeles County Court House, and the MCA Building in Beverly Hills, for which he won an American Institute of Architects (AIA) award in 1939. In the 1960s Williams served as an associate architect in the design of the Los Angeles International Airport, whose futuristic look became a visual icon of its era.

In 1936, acting on a referral from a friend in the industry who was a former client of Williams, Adam Gimbel had commissioned Williams to renovate the Beverly Hills annex of the Saks Fifth Avenue department store. Williams’s use of motifs more typical of residential architecture—oval recessed ceilings, bowed counters, and curvilinear display cases—was credited with increasing retail sales. Other commercial projects followed over the years, including designs for the Arrowhead Springs Hotel, the W. & J. Sloan department store, the Palm Springs Tennis Club, the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building, and the renovation of the Ambassador Hotel. Ecumenical in pursuit of church commissions, Williams designed the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Reno, Nevada (1939), and St. Nicholas Orthodox Church (1948) and Founders Church of Religious Science (1960), both in Los Angeles. In 1962, at the behest of television comedian and benefactor Danny Thomas, Williams volunteered to design St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Williams was well aware, however, that as an African American, he could not live in many of the neighborhoods in which he designed houses. In the July 1937 American magazine article “I Am a Negro,” Williams conceded, “Sometimes I have dreamed of living there,” referring to a client’s home. “I could afford such a home. But this evening, leaving my office, I returned to my small, inexpensive home in an unrestricted, comparatively undesirable section of Los Angeles . . . because . . . I am a Negro.” Williams did, however, make several contributions to the architecture of Los Angeles’s African American community, including the Second Baptist Church (1924) and the 28th Street Colored YMCA.

Williams was the first African American architect with enough government buildings in his portfolio to qualify as having a government practice. As early as 1925 Williams was commissioned to design a U.S. Post Office in Ontario, California. President Herbert H. Hoover appointed him to direct the designing of a Negro Memorial to be erected in Washington, D.C. (which was never built). In 1937, in association with Washington, D.C., African American architect Hilyard Robert Robinson, Williams designed the 274-unit Langston Terrace Public Housing, the first federally financed public housing project. Back in Los Angeles, he worked as chief architect of the Pueblo Del Rio, a housing project built in 1941. After World War II Williams and six engineers formed Allied Engineers, Inc., which was contracted in 1947 by the Defense Department to design U.S. Navy bases in Los Alamitos, Long Beach, and San Diego, California. He was also the architect for the Grave of the Unknown Sailor (1953) at Pearl Harbor.

Williams gathered an impressive list of “firsts.” He was the first African American appointed to serve on the Los Angles Planning Commission, which he did beginning in 1920. In 1923 he became the first black American architect licensed in the state of California; in 1935, the first admitted to the AIA; and in 1957, the first elevated to the distinguished rank of AIA Fellow. In 1943 he was the first African American chosen to serve on a Los Angeles County grand jury, and in 1953 he became the first architect to win the NAACP’s prestigious Spingarn Medal.

Paul Williams closed his office in the mid-1970s, having designed more than three thousand buildings, and gracefully transitioned into retirement. Suffering from diabetes, he died at age eighty-six in 1980. His funeral was held at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, which he had designed seventeen years earlier.

WILLIAMS, PETER, JR.

(1780?–17 Oct. 1840), clergyman and abolitionist, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of Peter Williams, a slave, and Mary Durham, a black indentured servant from St. Kitts. A patriot soldier during the American Revolution, his father was sexton and undertaker for John Street Methodist Church in New York City. In an unusual arrangement, the church in 1783 purchased him from his departing Loyalist master and allowed him to purchase himself over time, completing his freedom in 1796. A founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and a tobacconist and funeral home owner, he was a leader of the small black middle class in New York City.

Williams Jr. was educated first at the African Free School and tutored privately by a white minister, Reverend Thomas Lyell, of John Street Methodist Church. He became involved in Sunday afternoon black congregations at Trinity Episcopal Church, and in 1798 he was confirmed by John Henry Hobart. Williams was licensed by the Episcopal bishop in 1812 when the fledgling black Episcopalian group elected him lay reader. In the next six years Williams organized the congregation as a separate institution, acquired land, and constructed a church costing over eight thousand dollars, much of it contributed by wealthy white Episcopalians. In 1819 the new edifice was consecrated as St. Philip’s African Church. The following year the wooden church burned down. It was fully insured, however, and a new brick church was quickly constructed. Baptismal rolls indicate that the church’s membership included primarily black middle-class tradesmen and female domestics. Among the young candidates for baptism were future abolitionists JAMES MCCUNE SMITH, George Thomas Downing, ALEXANDER CRUMMELL, and Charles L. Reason.

Williams was a significant figure in black New York politics. He published a speech he had delivered celebrating the close of the slave trade in 1808, An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Delivered in the African Church, in the City of New York. He was a prominent member of the African Society for Mutual Relief, a benefit and burial organization. In 1817 he preached the funeral sermon after the death of his close friend, colonizationist PAUL CUFFE SR.

Despite deep reservations about the white American Colonization Society, Williams remained open to the possibility of voluntary black migration out of the United States. He favored colonization to the black republic of Haiti and visited there in 1824. In 1830 he delivered a speech at St. Philip’s for the benefit of the Wilberforce colony in Canada. He also helped JOHN BROWN RUSSWURM immigrate to Liberia in 1829 under the aegis of the American Colonization Society. Williams increasingly believed, however, that blacks should remain in the United States to work for full citizenship. He eventually denounced the efforts of the American Colonization Society as racist.

Although Williams enjoyed equality in reform organizations, he was forced to accept an inferior status within the Episcopal Church, where he finally advanced to priesthood in 1826. His mentor, Bishop Henry Hobart, counseled him not to seek representation for himself or St. Philip’s at the diocesan convention, even though all white clerics and churches assumed this privilege. Williams nevertheless accepted these limitations.

Williams was ubiquitous in black reform efforts in the late 1820s and 1830s. He was cofounder in 1827 of Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper. A staunch believer in black education, in 1833 he helped found the Phoenix Society in New York, which enabled poor blacks to attend school, encouraged church attendance, and established a library. Williams personally assisted several young blacks, including Alexander Crummell, and frequently wrote letters of recommendation to potential white employers. Very active in the early black national convention movement, Williams was inspired by the 1831 convention to attempt to establish a manual training college in New Haven, Connecticut (the attempt was unsuccessful).

In 1833 Williams became deeply involved in the American Anti-Slavery Society as one of six black managers. In 1834 he suffered terribly for his beliefs. During early July, white mobs, angered by abolitionist efforts and competition with blacks for jobs, and inflamed by rumors of interracial marriages, terrorized New York City blacks for three days. After hearing rumors that Williams performed an interracial marriage, a mob sacked and burned St. Philip’s and its rectory. Rather than support and defend Williams, Bishop Benjamin T. Onderdonk demanded that Williams refrain from public abolitionist activity. Reluctantly, Williams acceded to Onderdonk’s commands. In a moving statement, published in New York newspapers, he described childhood conversations with his father about his revolutionary war service. His father’s words, he said, “filled my soul with an ardent love for the American government.” Williams longed for the day when his brethren “would all have abundant reason to rejoice in the glorious Declaration of American Independence.” He also expressed his lifelong love for New York City. Although his congregation supported him, acquiescence cost him much respect among younger, more militant black abolitionists. Williams continued to work for social reform and lead St. Philip’s until his death in New York City.

WILLIAMS, SMOKEY JOE

(6 Apr. 1886–25 Feb. 1951), baseball player and manager, was born Joseph Williams in Seguin, Texas, the son of an unknown African American father and Lettie Williams, a Native American. He attended school in San Antonio, but it is not known how many years he completed. As a young boy Joe was given a baseball, which he carried with him everywhere and which he even slept with under his pillow. He pitched in the sandlots around Seguin until 1905, when he began playing professionally with the San Antonio Black Broncos. Williams quickly became the ace of the pitching staff and in the following seasons posted records of 28–4, 15–9, 20–8, 20–2, and 32–8, all with San Antonio except 1906, when he played with Austin. In the autumn of 1909 he signed to play with the Trilbys of Los Angeles, California, which marked the first of many years that he played baseball in both summer and winter.

In 1910 Joe was recruited by Chicago Giants’ owner Frank Leland, who wrote, “If you have ever witnessed the speed of a pebble in a storm you have not even seen the speed possessed by this wonderful Texan Giant” (Riley, 856). The Giants were the only black team in the semiprofessional Chicago League that season. Williams then played during the 1910–1911 winter in California, where he compiled a 4–1 record with 78 strikeouts in 60 innings. After another season with the Giants, Williams made his first visit to Cuba, where he tied for the most wins, with a 10–7 record for the 1911–1912 Cuban Winter League champion Havana Reds. In the spring of 1912 he toured with the Chicago American Giants on the West Coast and defeated every Pacific Coast League team except Portland, finishing the tour with a 9–1 record.

Smokey Joe Williams, known as “Cyclone,” whose fastball struck fear in the hearts of batters. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.

After the 1912 tour Williams joined the New York Lincoln Giants for $105 a month; he remained with the franchise through 1923. At this point of his career he was called “Cyclone,” but later in his career he would become better known as “Smokey Joe.” With the Lincoln Giants, Joe joined another hard-throwing right-hander, “Cannonball” Dick Redding, and the duo pitched the Lincolns to the Eastern Championship in 1912. After the close of the 1912 regular season, Williams shut out John McGraw’s National League champion New York Giants 6–0 on four hits while fanning nine. A week later he tossed another four-hit shutout, defeating Hal Chase’s All-Stars, a team comprised mostly of New York Yankees. Joe was at his best against white major leaguers and compiled a lifetime 20–7 record against them. When the weather turned cold, the Lincoln Giants toured Cuba, where Joe split a pair of games with Cuban ace José Mendez. After the tour ended, Williams stayed on the island and had a 9–5 record to lead the Fe team to the 1913 Cuban Winter League championship.

After returning to the United States for the 1913 summer season, Williams jumped to the Mohawk Giants of Schenectady, New York, but the Lincoln Giants quickly paid him five hundred dollars to return, and he pitched the team to their finest season, capping the year with six victories in the championship series against RUBE FOSTER’S Chicago American Giants. When the triumphant Lincoln Giants returned to New York, a large crowd was on hand at Olympic Park to welcome them home. In the fall Williams resumed his postseason performances against major leaguers. He struck out sixteen in a two-hit 9–1 win over Mike Donlin’s All-Stars, fanned nine in defeating Hall-of-Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Philadelphia Phillies 9–2, whiffed twelve in a 1–0 loss to Earl Mack’s All-Stars, avenged that loss when he fanned fourteen to take a 7–3 win over the same team, and hurled a three-hit 2–1 victory over a white all-star team that featured Chief Bender, the Philadelphia Athletics ace pitcher.

In 1914 Williams joined the Chicago American Giants during their preseason spring barnstorming tour through the Northwest and pitched a no-hitter against Portland. Back with the Lincoln Giants for the regular season, he compiled a record of 41–3 against all levels of opposition. In the fall Williams again faced major league opposition, defeating the Philadelphia Phillies 10–4, and then fanning a dozen as he battled Hall-of-Famer Rube Marquard and the New York Giants to a 1–1 draw that was ended by darkness.

Williams suffered two injuries in 1915, a broken arm and a broken wrist, and missed much of the season, but was back in action by the fall exhibition games against major leaguers. He struck out nine in a 3–0 shutout over a combination of players from the Federal League’s Buffalo and Brooklyn franchises, and fanned ten in pitching a three-hit 1–0 shutout over the National League champion Philadelphia Phillies. In the winter of 1915–1916 Williams pitched for the Chicago American Giants in California, making his last appearance on the West Coast. Later that winter he also made his final appearance in Cuba, when he joined the struggling San Francisco franchise for the second half of the season. He finished with a lifetime 22–15 record in the Cuban Winter League.

In 1917 Hilldale, a team based in the Philadelphia suburb of that name, scheduled a postseason series against major leaguers and recruited Williams to pitch. Williams rose to the occasion and defeated Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics 6–2, beating Athletics’ ace Joe Bush, and then whiffed ten in a teninning 5–4 win over Rube Marquard and Chief Meyers’s All-Leaguers. Joe also fanned twenty and tossed a no-hitter against John McGraw’s National League champion New York Giants but lost the game 1–0 on an error. According to oral accounts, in this game Giants’ star Ross Youngs gave him the nickname “Smokey Joe.”

As manager of the Lincoln Giants, Williams took his team to Palm Beach, Florida, in the winter of 1917–1918 to represent the Breakers Hotel in the Florida Hotel League, where they opposed Rube Foster’s Royal Poinciana team. In one memorable match-up, Williams struck out nine and tossed a two-hitter to out-duel his old rival Dick Redding 1–0. Williams continued playing and managing in the winter Florida Hotel League for several years, including a stint as manager of the Royal Poinciana team in 1926.

There was no dominant team in the East in 1918, but when Williams pitched, the Lincoln Giants were the best team. He defeated rival Brooklyn Royal Giants’ ace lefthander John Donaldson 1–0 and 3–2 on successive weekends, and in the fall he continued his pitching prowess against major leaguers and fashioned an 8–0 shutout over Marquard and his All-Nationals team. On opening day 1919 the largest crowd to ever attend a game in Harlem watched Williams hurl a no-hit 1–0 masterpiece over Redding and the Brooklyn Royal Giants.

In 1922 Williams married Beatrice Johnson, a Broadway showgirl, and they had one daughter. In the spring of 1924 he became a victim of the Lincoln Giants’ preference for young players and was released. He joined the Brooklyn Royal Giants and, although he was their top pitcher, was released after the season. Williams then joined the Homestead Grays in 1925 and remained with the franchise through 1932. During his years with the Grays, the nickname “Smokey Joe” was used almost exclusively, and he developed a mystique about his age, encouraging people to think that he was older than he was, that the press kept alive.

In 1929 owner Cum Posey entered the Grays in the American Negro League, and Williams, appointed captain, compiled a 12–7 record. The league folded after its only year of existence, and in the absence of an eastern league, the Grays returned to independent play. In 1930 Williams and Chet Brewer hooked up in a historic pitching duel under the Kansas City Monarchs’ portable lighting system, with Joe fanning twenty-seven batters in the twelve-inning game while allowing only one hit in a 1–0 victory. At the end of the season the Grays defeated Williams’s old team, the New York Lincoln Giants, in a playoff for the Eastern championship. In 1931 the Grays fielded one of the greatest teams in the history of the Negro Leagues. As an aging veteran, Williams paired with the youthful JOSH GIBSON to form an exceptional battery.

Following his retirement from baseball, Williams worked as a bartender in Harlem. In 1950 he was honored with a special day at the Polo Grounds in ceremonies before a game between the New York Cubans and Indianapolis Clowns. Less than a year later, in 1951, he died of a brain hemorrhage in New York City. In a 1952 poll conducted by the Pittsburgh Courier, Smokey Joe was chosen the greatest pitcher in the history of black baseball, winning over SATCHEL PAIGE by one vote. In 1999 he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

WILLIAMS, VENUS

(17 June 1980–), and SERENA WILLIAMS (26 Sept. 1981–), professional tennis players, are the fourth and fifth daughters, respectively, born to Richard Williams, a security agency owner, and Oracene Price, a nurse. Venus Ebone Starr Williams was born in Lynwood, California, and Serena Williams in Saginaw, Michigan. Both girls were homeschooled. By age ten Venus had won the under-twelve division tennis title in Southern California and was on the front page of the New York Times and in Sports Illustrated. In 1991 the family moved from Compton, California, so that Venus could accept a scholarship at Rick Macci’s tennis academy in Haines City, Florida.

At the age of fourteen, in October 1994, Venus turned professional at the Bank of the West Classic in Oakland, California, where she nearly upset second-ranked Arantxa Sanchez Vicario. She also put in limited appearances on the circuit before making her major debut at the 1997 French Open. At the start of the 1997 season she was ranked 211th in the world. By the end of the year she had climbed to 64th. Serena, meanwhile, attended a private high school in Miami, and she, too, turned pro at age fourteen, in 1995. Although she was ranked only 304th in 1997, Serena defeated fourth-ranked Monica Seles and seventh-ranked Mary Pierce at a tournament in Chicago, in only her fifth professional tournament.

Serena (left) and Venus Williams work together in their Ladies Doubles match at Wimbledon, 2003. © AFP/CORBIS

During the 1998 season Venus reached the semifinals of the U.S. Open, advanced to the quarterfinals at the Australian Open, the French Open, and Wimbledon, and won her first career singles title, the IGA Tennis Classic in Oklahoma City. Her serve was clocked that year at an unprecedented 127 miles per hour. Serena started the year ranked number 96, but climbed to number 40 after besting several higher-ranked players and losing narrowly to the world’s top-ranked player, Martina Hingis. In 1999 Venus defended her Lipton title by beating Serena in the first WTA Tour final between siblings and won her first singles title on clay, in Hamburg, Germany. That year the Williamses became the first sisters to be ranked simultaneously in the top ten and the first sisters in the twentieth century to win a Grand Slam doubles crown at the French Open. Serena continued to improve her game, winning her first singles title at an indoor tournament in Paris, France.

Serena’s dramatic breakthrough came at the 1999 U.S. Open, when, seeded seventh, she upset Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport, and Monica Seles, the number one, two, and four seeds, respectively, to win her first career Grand Slam singles tide. Serena was the first African American woman to win the singles title since ALTHEA GIBSON won the last of her five U.S. championships in 1958. She and Venus also joined forces to win the U.S. Open doubles title that year.

The year 2000 proved to be even more successful for the Williamses. Venus won her first two Grand Slam singles titles, at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and she and Serena won the Wimbledon doubles title. At the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, Venus won the singles gold medal, and when the two sisters then took the gold medal in the doubles, she became the first tennis player to win both Olympic titles since 1924.

At the 2001 U.S. Open, Venus faced her sister Serena for the title in the finals. The match was an exciting event that drew a crowd of celebrities and high television ratings, in part, at least, because the two sisters had become superstars in a sport traditionally dominated by white athletes. It was the first time since 1884 that two sisters had played each other in a Grand Slam final, and the first time that two African Americans had competed against each other in the final. Their father, Richard, had a difficult time watching the match and left before its conclusion, when Venus beat Serena, 6–2, 6–4. To cap off her banner year, Venus received the ESPY award for Outstanding Women’s Tennis Performance.

Serena’s first title in 2001 generated controversy when she was scheduled to face Venus in the semifinal of the State Farm Evert Cup in Indian Wells, California. When Venus withdrew from the match, rumors circulated that their father had ordered her to not play against Serena. He charged the crowd with racism, saying, “I really just think a lot of people in tennis and the business world are jealous of me. They’d rather see me sweeping the floor at the U.S. Open or picking cotton somewhere. But I’m not” (Newsweek, 2 July 2001). The sisters continued their winning ways and their emerging rivalry into 2002, with Serena dominating her older sister. She beat Venus for the first time since 1999 in Miami and again in the finals of the French Open, after which they became the first siblings to be ranked first and second in the world. Serena won three Grand Slam titles in 2002, Wimbledon, the French Open, and the U.S. Open, putting her in the select company of only seven women who have won three consecutive major titles. Venus won four WTA tour titles and was runner-up to Serena at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

Serena continued to dominate Venus in the 2003 season, besting her for the Australian title, the one Grand Slam title Serena had not been able to win. She also defeated Venus in the ladies’ singles at Wimbledon, in a match that many observers viewed as a complex psychological battle. Serena appeared initially unwilling to punish her sister’s weaknesses—Venus was suffering from leg, hip, and stomach injuries—but she eventually recaptured the form that had led her to the final with some ease. Venus later revealed that she had played through great pain and would have retired from the match had her opponent been anyone other than her sister.

Venus’s heroic and gracious performance in the 2003 Wimbledon final perhaps answers those critics who have suggested that the sisters default from matches too easily, especially when they play each other. But it seems likely that the dominance of the game by two sisters will continue to provoke controversy.

The role of Richard Williams, their father and coach, has also been highly controversial. Williams has been outspoken in defending his daughters from criticism, claiming that their critics are motivated by a combination of racism and jealousy. When his daughters sign endorsement deals, Williams requests that the companies donate goods to the black community. He has also criticized the WTA for being “a close-knit community that tends to embrace its own. We’ve never been a part of it. But then, we never planned to be a part of them either. We’re a part of ourselves. People can criticize me and complain about me, but no one wants to see a tournament that Venus and Serena aren’t in. We breathed life into this game, and people dislike us for it” (Newsweek, 2 July 2001). Richard Williams’s criticisms can hardly be leveled at advertisers and the media, however, who have ensured that the Williams sisters have become the most prominent women in professional sports. In 2000 Venus signed a five-year, forty-million-dollar contract with Reebok International, the highest amount ever paid to a female athlete. She and Serena together signed a deal with Avon, making them the first athletes since Jackie Joyner-Kersee to represent the world’s largest direct seller of beauty products. Avon then in the process of aggressively marketing its products to the growing global teenage market, could hardly have chosen better examples of attractive, successful young woman hood. As one Avon representative stated, “These were two very young women who were all about empowerment and caring and sharing. Their appeal goes very far and wide” (Advertising Age, 22 Jan. 2001).

Despite the earlier successes of LUCY DIGGS SLOWE, ORA MAE WASHINGTON, Althea Gibson, and ARTHUR ASHE, most Americans have tended to view tennis as a white upper-class sport. Like TIGER WOODS in golf, the Williams sisters have taken it as their mission to persuade African Americans that it is their game too.

WILSON, AUGUST

(27 Apr. 1945–), playwright, was born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children of Frederick Kittel, a German baker who emigrated to the United States at age ten, and Daisy Wilson, a cleaning woman. Frederick Kittel was an infrequent visitor to the family’s two-room apartment in the city’s racially mixed Hill District. As an adult, August symbolically severed ties to his father by taking his mother’s maiden name, Wilson.

In 1959 David Bedford, Wilson’s stepfather, moved the family to the white suburb of Hazelwood, Pennsylvania, where Wilson attended Central Catholic High School. He suffered racial taunts from other students and transferred the following year to Gladstone High School, where the greatest assault on his intelligence came from a black teacher who accused him of plagiarizing a twenty-page paper, believing that Wilson was not capable of writing such lucid prose. Confused and frustrated, Wilson dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He worked at a series of odd jobs, wandered the streets, and found solace in the public library, where he took responsibility for completing his own education, devouring the works of LANGSTON HUGHES, JAMES BALDWIN, RICHARD WRIGHT, and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. With no career goal in mind, he joined the army just shy of his eighteenth birthday and was discharged a year later, unable to conform to the strict rules of the military.

Wilson’s life started to come into focus on 1 April 1965, when he purchased a twenty-dollar typewriter and began to explore the written word as a critical means of self-expression and as a viable occupation. His first efforts were highly charged poems that might be appreciated for their passion, though their precise meanings could be a mystery even to their author. Wilson’s aesthetic sensibilities were forged by the emerging Black Arts Movement, which identified culture as an important battleground and enlisted black artists in every medium as soldiers in the struggle for racial liberation. Just as W. E. B. Du Bois influenced artists of his generation with the publication of “Criteria of Negro Art” during the Harlem Renaissance, Wilson and his cohorts were influenced by AMIRI BARAKA, who, in his poem “Black Art,” called for “poems like fists” and urged his generation to use their creative talents to achieve collective ends. Imbued with this philosophy, Wilson drew inspiration from blues musicians such as BESSIE SMITH and visual artists such as ROMARE BEARDEN for both their cultural relevance and their aesthetic excellence.

Wilson began to establish his credentials and reputation as both an artist and an advocate for black theater by becoming a founding member of the Center Avenue Poet’s Theater Workshop and, with Rob Penney in 1967, an organizer of the Black Horizon Theater Company. “Youngblood,” as Wilson was called by his friends, published his first poems, “Muhammad Ali” and “For Malcolm X and Others,” in Black World and the Negro Digest in 1969. In 1972 his three-year marriage to Brenda Burton, a member of the Nation of Islam with whom he had one child, ended in divorce. The following year Wilson wrote his first play, Recycle, exploring the painful disintegration of a marriage. The Homecoming, a play based on the mysterious death of the legendary blues guitarist BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON, was performed at the University of Pittsburgh’s Kuntu Theater in 1976. Yet Wilson still considered himself to be primarily a poet until 1978, when he accepted an assignment in St. Paul to write children’s plays for the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Writing convincing dialogue was difficult for Wilson until he was encouraged by his friend Claude Purdy at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis to listen to the authentic voices of his characters and allow them to tell the story. In 1977, drawing on this advice, Wilson completed Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, a musical satire based on the infamous outlaw. In 1978 Wilson moved to St. Paul, where he met Judy Oliver, a white social worker whom he married in 1981. Wilson then wrote Jitney (1979), a two-act play centered on the lives of men in a gypsy cab station who confront the problems of urban renewal, the Vietnam War, and a developing generation gap. The local acclaim that Jitney received allowed Wilson to begin thinking of himself as a serious playwright. Later, in describing his development, Wilson said with pride, “I consider it a blessing that when I started writing plays in earnest, in 1979, I had not read Chekov. I hadn’t read Ibsen. I hadn’t read Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or O’Neill. . . . It took me eight years to find my own voice as a poet. I didn’t want to take eight years to find my voice as a playwright” (Lahr, 53).

Critics have not missed the irony that America’s most celebrated black playwright, whose plays make millions on Broadway, are financed by white producers, and win the acclaim of New York socialites, is, in fact, an “unrepentant black nationalist” (New York Times, 2 Feb. 2003) who publicly champions independent black theater and supports race-specific casting. Taking note of this apparent contradiction, Henry Louis Gates Jr. opined, “The Revolution will not be subsidized” (Gates, 138). However, Wilson’s entrée into the elite circles in which he now travels was made possible by the support of a black network, particularly Lloyd Richards, an influential black insider who had directed LORRAINE HANSBERRY’S A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. By 1982, when Wilson met him, Richards was dean of the Yale Drama School and director of the National Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut, which invited Wilson to be one of fifteen playwrights that summer to have their work critiqued and staged. Wilson’s play was MA RAINEY’s Black Bottom, set in a recording studio in Chicago during the 1920s. The depth and complexity he weaves into a single day in the life of the audacious blues singer and her musicians elevate Wilson’s exposition of racism beyond mere agitprop to a nuanced tale of exploitation, the struggle for dignity, and the dangers of uncontrolled and misdirected rage.

Richards brought Wilson and the actor Charles Dutton, who would play the lead in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, to the Yale Repertory Theater, where Richards was the artistic director and their future producer, Ben Mordecai, was the managing director. Together with Wilson they further refined the play before bringing it to the Cort Theater on Broadway in 1984. It won both the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a Tony nomination in 1985. Richards would direct Wilson’s next six plays, usually opening at the O’Neill, continuing at Yale, and traveling a circuit of local theaters on the way to Broadway, where each play in turn also won the Drama Critic’s Circle Award.

Wilson and Richards next produced Fences (1987). Set in the 1950s and partly based on Wilson’s stepfather, the play uses a sports plot to explore the physical and emotional barriers that fragment the lives of black men. Fences garnered a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award and grossed eleven million dollars. Wilson’s favorite play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988), set in 1911, explores themes of cultural dislocation and the search for identity as the main characters struggle to make the transition from slavery to freedom and have difficulty embracing an African heritage infused with occult mystery. The Piano Lesson (1990) turns on the dilemma of a family in the 1930s confronted with a decision to keep or sell the piano that links them with their past. This play earned Wilson a second Pulitzer and brought him together with his third wife, Constanza Romero, who designed costumes for the Yale production; they have one child. Two Trains Running (1992) takes place in a 1960s diner that becomes a window into the hearts and minds of its patrons, each of whom presents a slice of black life. Seven Guitars (1996) is ostensibly about a group of musicians in the 1940s who gather to remember the life of a blues guitarist tragically cut down on the verge of fame. Ultimately, however, their soliloquies combine to bespeak the blues of an entire people.

With the Broadway production of Jitney (2000), Richards was replaced by Marion McClinton, who has directed all of Wilson’s subsequent plays. Wilson’s break with Richards divides his career into two eras that are, nevertheless, united by an overarching objective: capturing the African American experience by devoting one play to each decade of the twentieth century. With King Hedley II (1999), a look at the desperate conditions and pandemic ills of the 1980s, and Gem of the Ocean (2002), a play set in 1904 about a man on the run who passes through a labyrinth of challenges leading to self-discovery, Wilson is poised to achieve his goal. Indeed, no playwright in history has explored so much of the African American odyssey in drama. Wilson has placed race center stage in the American theater and has advanced a philosophical discussion about the roles of history and art.

WILSON, HARRIET E.

(c. 1828?–?), servant and writer, was born Harriet Adams to parents whose names and occupations remain unidentified. Very little is known about the woman who, in 1859, published Our Nig, the first novel published by an African American in the United States and one of the first novels published by a black woman in any country. Harriet was probably born in 1827 or 1828 in Milford, New Hampshire, according to her marriage record and federal census records. Although there is no record of Harriet’s education, the quality of writing in Our Nig and the skillful use of epigraphs, including excerpts from Shelley, Byron, and Thomas Moore, indicate that she received some schooling. Evidence suggests that Harriet spent her childhood and adolescence living with and in service to the Nehemiah Hayward family. Following nineteenth-century trends in poor relief, Harriet would have been “bound out” to the Haywards as an indentured servant. After the Haywards moved to Baltimore in 1847, it appears that Harriet remained behind and supported herself until 1850, when her name appears on Milford’s charity roll.

Records show that in 1851 Harriet married Thomas Wilson in Milford and that in the spring of 1852 a son, George Mason Wilson, was born in nearby Goffstown. There is no further trace of Thomas Wilson, who seems to have abandoned his wife before the birth of their son. Because Milford’s charity reports for 1851–1854 are missing, there is no evidence as to whether Wilson needed financial assistance during these years. She is, however, listed on Milford’s charity rolls in 1855 and 1856, and documents indicate that her son, then three years old, spent a month on the county poor farm in 1855. Charity reports for 1857–1859 list only “Harriet E. Wilson’s child,” suggesting that Wilson left her son behind in New Hampshire. City directories show that Wilson was most probably living in Boston during these years.

On 18 August 1859 a “Mrs. H. E. Wilson” copyrighted Our Nig, and the book was published several weeks later, on 5 September. Wilson states in the preface to Our Nig that she was motivated to write the book by financial reasons: “Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child… I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren universally for patronage.” Sadly, only five months after the publication of Our Nig, Wilson’s seven-year-old son, George Mason, died of “bilious fever.” Wilson reappears on Milford’s 1863 charity roll, after which there is no trace of her in either Milford or Boston records. The date of her death is unknown.

Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, By “Our Nig” was printed by G. C. Rand and Avery in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1859. Our Nig’s protagonist is Alfrado, nicknamed Frado, the daughter of Mag, a white servant, and Jim, a free black artisan. After her father’s death, Frado, then five or six years old, is abandoned by her mother and left with the Bellmonts, a white family for whom she works as an indentured servant until she is eighteen. Most of the novel describes the brutal treatment and severe deprivation Frado receives at the hands of Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter. Despite occasional attempts by the male members of the Bellmont family to protect her, Frado is treated so harshly that her health is permanently ruined. In the last pages of the book, Frado marries Samuel, a fugitive slave “lecturer” who, before deserting her, discloses “that he had never seen the South, and that his illiterate harangues were humbugs for hungry abolitionists” (128). Their son is born on the county poor farm, and Frado is forced to give him over to the county’s care shortly after he is weaned. Looking for work, she travels through New England, facing contempt by racists unwilling to help, until a kind woman gives her a recipe for a home remedy, which Frado begins to sell. Our Nig ends with an appeal to the reader for financial assistance.

When the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. bought Our Nig at a used bookshop in 1981, he could not foresee that his fifty-dollar investment would alter African American literary scholarship, causing a literary sensation. Gates and his research team found only a handful of nineteenth- and twentieth-century references to the novel, most of which listed the author as white or male or both. But after a copyright search at the Library of Congress yielded the name “Mrs. H. E. Wilson,” Gates set out to identify the novel’s author and establish her race. Research confirmed, through city directories, that a “Harriet Wilson” lived in Boston during the time of Our Nig’s publication. They then found an 1850 census document listing Wilson’s race as black. (The questionnaire’s choices were “white,” “black,” or “mulatto.”) Further historical detective work produced Wilson’s 1851 marriage record and the 1860 death certificate of her son, George Mason. “Ironically,” Gates explained, “George’s death certificate helped to rescue his mother from literary oblivion.… The record of his death, alone, proved sufficient to demonstrate his mother’s racial identity and authorship of Our Nig” (xiii).

Gates’s reconstruction of Wilson’s life, augmented by other scholars, shows the novel to be a semiautobiographical work written by Harriet E. Wilson. While the novel’s fictional form allows Wilson greater narrative and creative possibilities than traditional autobiography, Our Nig is grounded in the economic deprivation and racism Wilson herself had experienced. Wilson borrows heavily from her own life in fashioning Frado’s life, although some events, including the mixed marriage of Frado’s parents, are probably fictional creations.

The complexity of Our Nig begins with its title. Gates was immediately drawn to Wilson’s daring and ironic use of the racist epithet “Our Nig”: “Harriet E. Wilson allows these racist characters to name her heroine, only to invert such racism by employing the name, in inverted commas, as her pseudonym of authorship” (li). The descriptive phrasing of Wilson’s subtitle, “in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There,” highlights the book’s explicit indictment of northern racism and the hypocrisy of many northern abolitionists. “My mistress was wholly imbued with southern principles,” Wilson offers in Our Nig’s preface. Anticipating a hostile reaction from abolitionists, she continues, “I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home.” By the novel’s end, however, Wilson has dropped her accommodating tone: “Strange were some of her adventures. Watched by kidnappers, maltreated by professed abolitionists, who didn’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North. Faugh! to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next to one; awful!” (129). While Wilson’s candor underlies the novel’s daring, it also doomed sales of her book. “All the abolitionists chose to ignore Our Nig,” Gates explains. “There were two things you couldn’t do if you were a foe of slavery. One was to write about racism in the North—and this book is all about racism in the North. Second, the man Alfrado marries is a black man pretending to be an escaped slave” (New York Times, 8 Nov. 1982).

Our Nig is the first representation in American fiction of an interracial marriage in which the wife is white and the husband is black. Furthermore, this unusual literary union is brought about by a black man’s pity for a destitute white woman and is presented in a positive light: “He loved Mag to the last. So long as life continued, he stifled his sensibility to pain, and toiled for her sustenance long after he was able to do so” (15). Along with Wilson’s fundamental reconfiguration of the theme and character of the “tragic mulatto,” the novel’s other characters—the brutal Bellmont women, ineffectual Bellmont men, the “fugitive slave” con artist, Samuel—are equally complex, refusing to adhere to strict literary racial or gender stereotypes.

“Wilson’s achievement,” Gates argues, “is that she combines the received conventions of the sentimental novel with certain key conventions of the slave narrative, then combines the two into one new form” (lii). Our Nig conforms to many of the conventions of the sentimental novel but deviates from the formula in its ambiguous ending, in which the heroine neither triumphs nor lives happily ever after. Instead, Wilson appeals directly to the reader for financial support. In the tradition of slave narratives, which often include testimonial letters from whites to help get works published, Our Nig appends three supporting letters attesting to the truthfulness of the narrative and pleading for the “friends of our dark-skinned brethren and sisters” to help the author by buying the book. Scholars continue to debate whether the letters are, in fact, authentic recommendations or were created by Wilson to mimic the slave narrative model.

When ALICE WALKER first encountered Our Nig, she “sat up most of the night reading and pondering the enormous significance of Harriet Wilson’s novel Our Nig. It is as if we’d just discovered PHILLIS WHEATLEY—or LANGSTON HUGHES” (quoted in Wilson, vii). Since its initial publication in 1982, Our Nig has been canonized by its inclusion in major anthologies and classroom curricula worldwide. Written during a critical period for African Americans marked by the DRED SCOTT decision (1857), the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), Our Nig offers unique insights into the circumstances of a quarter-million free blacks in the North and especially into the lives of black women living in small-town New England. Before the rediscovery and verification of Our Nig, it was believed that the first African American-authored novel published in the United States was written after the Civil War by a man. “Harriet Wilson’s novel,” Gates concludes, “inaugurates the Afro-American literary tradition in a manner more fundamentally formal than did either WILLIAM WELLS BROWN or Frank J. Webb” (xlvi-xlvii).

WILSON, WILLIAM JULIUS

(20 Dec. 1935–), sociologist, was born in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, one of six children of Esco Wilson, a coal miner and steelworker, and Pauline Bracy. Wilson grew up in Blairsville, a small mining town outside of blue-collar Pittsburgh, and his family struggled alongside neighboring black families, all of whom experienced firsthand the slow decline of American manufacturing in the postwar era. Blairsville, Wilson later suggested, helped him realize the importance of work in organizing personal and family life, a theme that would echo in all of his writings. On graduating from high school, Wilson left for Ohio, where he attended Wilberforce University, receiving a BA in 1958. After earning an MA at Bowling Green State University in 1961, he headed west to study at Washington State University. He earned his doctorate there in 1966, a year after he received his first full time teaching position, as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose book The Truly Disadvantaged is an unflinching assessment of the causes of urban poverty. Courtesy of Martha Stewart

Although Wilson is best known for his work on urban poverty in the United States, he began his career as a com-parativist, focusing in particular on race relations in South Africa under apartheid and America during the civil rights era. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he began work on Power, Racism and Privilege (1973), a set of essays in which he examines the relationship of race and social inequality in South Africa and the United States. Wilson married Beverly Huebner in 1971; they had two children. Wilson also had two children from a previous marriage to Mildred Hood.

In 1972 Wilson began teaching in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. In doing so, he continued a long-standing tradition at the university, one that could be traced to the writings of Robert Park and E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER, of addressing American race relations. Wilson credited his arrival in Chicago for helping him to see the variegated class structure in America’s black community. While the city’s class-segregated black neighborhoods motivated his thinking, Chicago itself did not appear prominently in either of his first two books. This changed in the late 1970s as Wilson initiated several major research initiatives in the city.

As a young scholar, Wilson was committed to the spirit of American left—he would play a guiding role in the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1970s. However, he bucked the trend of his liberal colleagues by questioning what he felt to be the overtly polemical character of civil rights era political discourse. Looking concretely at the changing place of black Americans in U.S. society, he noticed the growing cleavages, mostly along class lines, and wondered whether this signaled a need for a new political platform. As he would remark years later in a New Yorker profile, “You had to live in Chicago to appreciate the changes that were taking place. I felt we had to start thinking about the black class structure.… One segment seemed to be improving, with higher incomes, better life styles, while the rest were falling further and further behind” (Remnick). Liberal-democratic policies did not take this bifurcation into account; neither did social scientists adequately capture the import of this phenomenon for American race relations.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Wilson focused intently on the social and political implications of the changing class dynamics within the black community, questioning whether different strata of black Americans experienced daily life uniquely and thus needed different kinds of social support. He wrote The Declining Significance of Race (1978) as a means of specifying the unique configuration of race relations in post-civil rights era America. Numerous critics and observers have interpreted this work in terms of the growing distance it seemed to create between Wilson and segments of the black intellectual and political leadership. Many black public figures interpreted Wilson as being skeptical of government intervention in providing redress for black Americans; more extreme critics suggested that Wilson was championing the end of racism. Wilson took great pains to state that racism continued to oppress America’s black community and that his argument about the diminishing impact of race was in terms of economic advancement, not quality of life in general. He insisted that affirmative action and government subsidies were reaching mostly middle-class blacks, not the poor who lived in depressed inner cities. In noneconomic areas, discrimination, segregation, and outright antipathy to black Americans continued to be pressing problems that the nation needed to contend with. With this argument, Wilson had charted his own ground and faced the criticism of conservatives and liberals alike.

The Declining Significance of Race was also a significant academic achievement in terms of its mode of argumentation. Wilson had presented a historical argument about the relative weight of race and class as factors inhibiting the social advancement struggles of black Americans. Skillfully using a mix of statistical data and secondary sources, Wilson analyzed the intersection of race and class in distinct historical periods: the pre-industrial, antebellum South; early nineteenth century industrialization; the period between the World Wars; and the modern era. It would no longer be sufficient to speak of “racism” as a continuous social process. Wilson took what historians often argued—that American race relations were continuously evolving—gave it an empirically rigorous treatment, and then presented it to social scientists in such a way that they were forced to reconceptualize and analyze anew the black experience. The public reception of the work missed this important contribution, focusing instead on the title of the book and the possible fallout for black political practice.

As Wilson prepared for the writing of The Truly Disadvantaged, perhaps his most influential and widely held book, Chicago assumed a prominent role. His presence at the university drew a cadre of like-minded graduate students and young faculty, many of whom would move on to prominent academic careers in urban studies. Wilson supervised several empirical projects in the city’s African American inner-city neighborhoods. Some were large-scale survey studies under his direct supervision, and others were solitary, often rich ethnographic investigations by his graduate students in fields as diverse as boxing, gangs, religious behavior, and domestic life. His focus on U.S. inner cities eventually helped to sponsor a rejuvenated interest in urban poverty in America’s leading research institutions.

As he marshaled empirical data on the city, Wilson found himself in a new political battle. On the one hand, with their writings on the supposed disfunctionality within black inner-city communities, Reagan-era intellectuals such as Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead provided fodder for an increasingly conservative public attitude towards welfare and urban inequity. Liberals challenged them—as they did in the 1960s—by suggesting that these communities were not rife with social pathology, but that black social structure was different because of the impact of racism, discrimination, and slavery. Once again, Wilson found himself challenging both views: in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), he acknowledged that black Americans were growing farther from the social mainstream, but unlike conservatives, he suggested that a compromised economic opportunity structure was at the root of high crime, low marriage rates, and other indicators of nonnormative behavior.

Wilson’s unflinching assessment of the conditions of inner-city communities may not have won him immediate political support, but a growing number of scholars and policymakers noted the significance of his argument. The Truly Disadvantaged received scholarly and popular awards and was listed as one of the fifteen notable books of 1987 by the New York Times. Perhaps the greatest sign of the book’s reach was President Bill Clinton’s admission that The Truly Disadvantaged had the strongest impact on his own thinking on race and urban America. In 1990 Wilson was elected as president of the American Sociological Association, the first time that an African American had held that post since E. Franklin Frazier forty-two years earlier.

In 1996 Wilson took up a post in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he eventually became the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor. He continued to write prolifically on U.S. urban poverty, but his research also returned to his comparative roots. He incorporated experiences of white and Latino urban communities into his writings and worked actively to shape a research agenda on European and American urbanism, notably in When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996).

Since the civil rights era, no author has been more influential in shaping our understanding of poverty in American society than William Julius Wilson. This description has been given to Wilson not only by scholars and policymakers, but also by a U.S. president. In his academic career, Wilson has accumulated numerous honorary doctorate degrees and awards, two of the most prestigious being a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987 and the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States. When he received the latter award from President Clinton in 1998, the citation praised William Julius Wilson for having “revitalized the field of urban sociology, pioneering methods of interdisciplinary social science research, advancing understanding of the interaction between the macroeconomic, social structural, cultural and behavioral forces that cause and reproduce inner city poverty”.

WINFREY, OPRAH

(29 Jan. 1954–), talk show host, actor, and entrepreneur, was born Oprah Gail Winfrey in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to eighteen-year old Vernita Lee, and Vernon Winfrey, a twenty-year-old soldier. Vernita intended to call the baby “Orpah,” after the biblical figure, but accepted “Oprah” when the name was misspelled by a clerk. Shortly after her daughter’s birth, Vernita left Mississippi for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, leaving her newborn under the watchful eye of Oprah’s paternal grandparents, Hattie Mae Bullock and Earless Lee, who were pig farmers. In 1960 Oprah went to Milwaukee to join her mother, who was working as a maid and who had given birth to a second daughter, Patricia. Another child, Jeffrey, followed a few years later, and Vernita struggled to support herself and her three young children. Bright and precocious, Oprah skipped several grades in elementary school but, despite her siblings and her early academic achievements, she felt the same loneliness and isolation she had experienced in Mississippi. Her outlet became performing and public speaking. Oprah spent fourth grade with her father and his wife, Zelma, in Nashville, Tennessee, but returned to Milwaukee after the school year ended.

The traumatic events of the next several years had lifelong consequences. Vernita’s Milwaukee apartment was increasingly crowded with visitors and, at one point, Oprah shared her bed with a fourteen-year-old cousin who sexually molested her. Shortly after, she was sexually abused by her father’s brother. Behavioral problems soon surfaced, and while she was performing well academically—she won a scholarship to an all-white high school in suburban Milwaukee—Oprah’s behavior became increasingly rebellious. By age fourteen, she was running away and stealing from her mother, and she had become sexually promiscuous. Failing to get her daughter admitted to a home for wayward teens, Vernita sent Oprah to live with Vernon and Zelma Winfrey in Nashville. A few months after her arrival, Oprah gave birth to a son, who died several weeks after delivery. She has never revealed the name of the father.

Vernon and Zelma, who had no children of their own, insisted on Oprah’s obedience. Oprah, or Gail as she was known in high school, thrived under her father’s strict discipline and high expectations. She excelled in school, made friends, was elected senior class president, and got a part-time job reading the news at WVOL, a predominantly black local radio station. In 1971 Oprah graduated from Nashville High School and won a local beauty pageant, Miss Fire Prevention, after which she enrolled at Tennessee State University. While in college she worked evenings as at WTVF-TV in Nashville.

In 1976, several credits shy of graduation, Winfrey left Tennessee State for a job anchoring the evening news at WJZ-TV, Baltimore’s ABC affiliate. Promoting their new hire, the station peppered billboards with the question, “What’s an Oprah?” WJZ management itself wasn’t quite sure, and attempted a makeover, sending Winfrey to a voice coach and to a salon, where she lost her hair to a botched permanent. Having arrived with little technical training and virtually no journalistic background or education, Winfrey was ill prepared for the constraints of objective news reporting. Within a year, she was moved off the news desk to People Are Talking, a morning talk show where she could practice her more emotional and subjective journalistic style. In this format, Winfrey found her niche. She remained as co-host of the show until 1983, when she was hired as host of A. M. Chicago at WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. Within months A. M. Chicago’s ratings surpassed those of the popular The Phil Donahue Show. Winfrey had turned a faltering show into a hit.

Oprah Winfrey chats with Vice President Al Gore on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2000. © Reuters NewMedia Inc./CORBIS

In 1985 A. M. Chicago was expanded from a half-hour to a one-hour format and re-launched as The Oprah Winfrey Show. That same year Winfrey starred with Danny Glover and WHOOPI GOLDBERG in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of ALICE WALKER’S novel The Color Purple, earning both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Winfrey’s meteoric rise began in 1986 when The Oprah Winfrey Show went into national syndication. Within six months the show was the highest-rated talk show and the third-highest-rated program in syndication. Within a decade, twenty-four talk shows had followed The Oprah Winfrey Show into national syndication.

Winfrey’s syndication deal placed her in charge of her own public relations, an indication of her savvy approach. Indeed, news stories from the mid-1980s set the tone for much of Winfrey’s future press coverage, highlighting her ease on camera and her open, hands-on approach with guests and audiences. Reports also focused on the biographical details of her life, including revelations of sexual abuse, issues with regard to her weight, and the influence of such role models as SOJOURNER TRUTH and MADAME C. J. WALKER. Proof that Winfrey’s celebrity was solidifying came in December 1986 when she was interviewed by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. Her cameo appearance in Throw Momma from the Train in 1987 was the first of several films in which she played herself.

Winfrey formed Harpo Productions (Oprah spelled backwards) in 1986 and acquired ownership of The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988, the same year she was named broadcaster of the year by the International Television and Radio Society. Harpo Entertainment Group, chaired by Winfrey and headquartered in an 88,000-square-foot production facility, now includes production, film, video, and print divisions. In 1989 Winfrey combined her talents by producing and starring in The Women of Brewster Place, a television movie based on the book by Gloria Naylor, and about which the New York Times commented, “There hadn’t been this kind of assembly of black actors for any TV productions since Roots” (12 Mar 1989). Under the umbrella “Oprah Winfrey Presents,” Winfrey has produced, and occasionally starred in, the television movies There Are No Children Here (1993); Before Women had Wings (1997); David and Lisa (1998), starring SIDNEY POITIER; The Wedding (1998), based on the novel by DOROTHY WEST; Tuesdays with Morrie (1999); and Amy and Isabelle (2001).

In 1998 Winfrey returned to the silver screen in Jonathan Demme’s film adaptation of TONI MORRISON’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 book Beloved. Winfrey, who produced the film, starred as Sethe, opposite Beah Richards and Danny Glover. “What I love about the story of Beloved,” Winfrey wrote in her 1998 book Journey to Beloved, “is that it allows you to feel what slavery was like; it doesn’t just intellectually show you the picture” (19).

Despite her various projects, The Oprah Winfrey Show remains the heart of Winfrey’s empire. The highest-rated talk show for eighteen consecutive seasons, it has earned thirty-five Emmy awards. Each week twenty-one million American viewers watch the show, which is broadcast in 109 countries. Twenty-five thousand letters arrive at the Harpo offices each week, and the show earns $260 million a year in advertising sales.

Statistics only hint at the range and depth of Winfrey’s influence on American culture. Through programs showcasing “real people” discussing heretofore “private” issues before a live audience, Winfrey and her many imitators changed both popular debates and private attitudes by introducing such new or previously ignored topics as women’s empowerment, talk therapy, and new age self-help into the mainstream. Because of Winfrey, these revolutions were televised and, certainly, altered as a result. It seemed that the personal stories and voices of everyday Americans, especially women, were being heard for the first time. The show also engendered a revolution in television itself, changing syndication and advertising patterns, expanding the role of women in the medium, and bringing about the explosion of talk-television, which paved the way for “women’s programming,” celebrity brand-naming, and reality, home, and how-to TV. From the beginning, Winfrey’s unique approach to broadcasting, drawing on forerunners such as Donahue and Barbara Walters, rested on her success with on-air guests and audience members. Winfrey’s wit and easy, conversational style, along with her empathetic manner, endeared her to audiences. “She’s like the one friend you trust,” explained a woman waiting in line at The Oprah Winfrey Show, “the one you know has good taste” (Los Angeles Times, 9 Mar. 1997).

Winfrey has both fomented and served Americans’ growing interest in celebrity and good taste, consistently booking top musicians, Hollywood stars, politicians, television personalities, and cultural figures on her show. Notable black figures, such as MICHAEL JORDAN, MICHAEL JACKSON, QUINCY JONES, BILL COSBY, and MAYA ANGELOU were celebrated and placed on equal footing with white stars. Such was the power of Winfrey’s show that an on-air appearance often catapulted ordinary guests into the realm of minor celebrity.

Over the years, Winfrey transformed herself from a poor, female, black, and overweight outsider to the ultimate insider—rich, powerful, popular, and connected. Worldwide audiences are kept abreast of her lavish lifestyle (she owns several homes, including a fifty-million dollar estate in Montecito, California) and the machinations of her private life, especially her long-time romantic relationship with businessman Stedman Graham Jr. Tabloid reports also chronicled her often tumultuous family relationships, stemming in part from her sister’s revelations of Oprah’s past, and Oprah’s rift with her brother, who died of AIDS in 1989.

Winfrey features two Oprah personas on her show. “Celebrity Oprah” gives audiences behind-the-scenes access to her life and celebrity friends, albeit in a carefully selected way. In 2002 she began airing a daily half-hour show, Oprah After the Show. “Everyday Oprah,” however, struggles with the same problems as her audience. Issues of importance to Winfrey off-air, chiefly topics relating to weight, body image, and self-esteem, are consistent themes on-air. Winfrey’s 15 November 1988 show, during which she revealed how she lost sixty-seven pounds on a liquid diet, won a 16.4 rating. Winfrey soon regained weight, and she shared that fact with audiences. In the early 1990s she hired a chef and a trainer and lost seventy pounds. Winfrey parlayed her weight-loss success into a minor industry, beginning with the 1996 publication of Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body and a Better Life.

Most pointedly with her popular—and legally trademarked—segments “Get with the Program,” “Remembering Your Spirit,” and “Change Your Life TV,” Winfrey uses her show as a forum for group therapy, but also as a bully pulpit. Most significantly, she took on the issues of child and sexual abuse, revealing on-air in 1990 that she had been molested as a child. The following year, she testified before Congress in support of the National Child Protection Act, which established a national database of convicted child abusers. “Oprah’s Bill,” as the legislation came to be known, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Winfrey, who chairs The Oprah Winfrey Foundation and The Oprah Winfrey Scholars Program, brought her philanthropic endeavors to the air with the establishment of Oprah’s Angel Network in 1997. When she asked viewers to send in their spare change, the show raised 3.5 million dollars. The Angel Network went on to raise a total of twelve million dollars and established the “Use Your Life Award,” which provides $100,000 to individuals whose work benefits the broader community. Recently, Winfrey has shown a new interest in Africa, establishing Christmas Kindness South Africa 2002, and donating ten million dollars to build the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls South Africa, about which she told TV Guide, “I’m going to teach classes in leadership and life lessons from Chicago via satellite. I am all about girl power!” (4 Oct. 2003).

One measure of her influence was seen in 1996 when Winfrey remarked off-the-cuff during a show on mad cow disease, “It has just stopped me cold from eating another hamburger.” After what the plaintiffs dubbed the “Oprah crash of 1996,” which saw cattle prices plummet, a group of Texas catde ranchers sued her. In 1998, following a jury’s ruling in her favor, Time magazine wrote, “The winner Oprah. She’s the most powerful woman in the United States. Laws be damned” (12 Jan. 1988).

If her criticism could send a market into decline, Winfrey’s recommendation could also send a stock soaring. Such was the case with Oprah’s Book Club, launched in 1996. Each of the book selections became instant best-sellers. In recognition of her unprecedented influence on the publishing industry, Winfrey was presented with the National Book Foundation’s Fiftieth Anniversary Gold Medal.

Winfey has evolved from television personality to celebrity to media mogul to synergistic pioneer. In addition to the relationship between Oprah’s Book Club and Harpo Productions, which owns the rights to many of the books selected, Winfrey has introduced a host of projects with the “Oprah” brand name. In 1995 “Oprah Online,” a collaboration with AOL, debuted. Three years later she cofounded Oxygen Media Inc., a cable network offering shows inspired by Oprah Winfrey Show material. Another outgrowth of the show, the syndicated series The Dr. Phil Show, was launched in 2002. In 2000 Winfrey expanded into a new medium with the wildly successful O, The Oprah Magazine, co-published with Hearst Magazines. Winfrey owns a stake in Granite Broadcasting, a media company that owns eleven television stations. In 1999 Winfrey brought her entrepreneurial lessons into the classroom, co-teaching “Dynamics of Leadership” with Stedman Graham at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Winfrey’s major honors include a George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award, Lifetime Achievement and Bob Hope Humanitarian Award Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and an International Radio and Television Society Foundation Gold Medal award. In 2003 Forbes magazine disclosed that Winfrey, the world’s richest entertainer after Steven Spielberg, had become the first African American woman billionaire. Winfrey constantly tops lists of the most influential, popular, or powerful people in America. As Fran Lebowitz told Time magazine in 1996, “Oprah is probably the greatest media influence on the adult population. She is almost a religion” (17 June 1996).

More than a household name, or even a brand name, Oprah has become part of American language itself, as critics write about the “Oprahization” or “Oprahfication” of American culture. Although she will continue to appear each day on television, at least through the 2007–2008 season, she can rarely be found in front of a small screen; Winfrey rarely watches television, complaining, “It promotes false values” (Life, Sept 1997).

WONDER, STEVIE

(13 May 1950–), songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and political activist, was born Steveland Judkins in Saginaw, Michigan, to Calvin Judkins and Lula Mae Hardaway, who separated early in his life. Steveland came into the world with the odds stacked firmly against him; he was poor, black, and born two months premature with a birth weight barely reaching four pounds. He spent his first fifty-two days in an incubator, resulting in the permanent loss of his eyesight. Stevie was raised largely by his mother under difficult economic and social circumstances. Calvin, a street hustler, forced his wife to work as a prostitute for a short period before the family moved from Saginaw to Detroit’s Brewster Housing Projects in 1953. The couple separated shortly thereafter.

Despite his hardscrabble upbringing, Stevie never thought himself disadvantaged. With unwavering optimism, he compensated for his impairment by developing his other senses. By age five Stevie showed an aptitude for music, taking up percussion and imitating the day’s top R&B artists, including Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, and the Coasters, heard on WCHB’s Sundown show. At eight, without formal training, Stevie played piano and harmonica, sang in the Whitestone Baptist Church’s gospel choir, and busked on street corners.

In 1960 one of Stevie’s best friends, Gerald White, convinced his brother Ronnie White of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles to give his friend an audition. The confident ten year old, who bragged he could “sing badder than Smokey,” backed up his audacious claim with a show-stopping performance. White brought Stevie to BERRY GORDY JR., owner of Detroit’s fledgling Motown label, where Stevie played every instrument in the studio. Lula signed her son’s recording contract, which stipulated his earnings be held in a trust until he turned twenty-one.

Motown producer and songwriter Clarence Paul became Wonder’s producer and mentor. His first two recordings, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, an all-instrumental album showcasing Wonder’s instrumental virtuosity, and A Tribute to Uncle Ray, a homage to his idol RAY CHARLES, were held back until 1963. His first release, the 1962 single “I Call It Pretty Music (But the Old People Call It the Blues),” written by Paul, was released under the Gordy-coined moniker Little Stevie Wonder; it failed to chart.

Despite his early recordings’ lack of commercial success, Wonder gave electrifying live performances. And Gordy captured Wonder’s dynamism on a 1963 live recording of “Fingertips Pt 2,” a seven-minute, two-sided single, complete with Wonder’s inspired harmonica improvisations and an uproarious audience call and response. It became Wonder’s first number-one single and the first live recording to top the charts. That track and the single “Workout Stevie Workout” propelled Wonder’s album The 12 Year Old Genius to number one.

With a Song in My Heart, an album of treacly ballads, and Stevie at the Beach, an improbable surf album, predictably failed to chart. In 1965 Wonder embodied Motown’s infectious pop and soul fusion with “Uptight (Everything’s Alright),” a number-one single and title cut that he cowrote. The album also contained a countrified, gospel-inflected version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” showcasing the sixteen-year-old’s burgeoning political consciousness.

Down to Earth, released in 1967 with the un-Motown-like album cover of Wonder in a ghetto landscape, featured the number-one R&B song “I Was Made to Love Her.” The summer following the album’s release saw racial confrontations turn into full-scale urban riots in Newark, New York City, Cleveland, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit, and in April 1968 MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. was assassinated. Wonder became more politicized, performing at benefits for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Chicago and for SCLC’s Poor People’s March on Washington in 1968.

From 1968 to 1970 Wonder’s fame grew precipitously on the strength of four top-ten hits: “For Once in My Life,” “My Cherie Amour,” “Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday,” and “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” After graduating from Michigan School for the Blind in 1969, Wonder was able to devote himself full-time to music, and he began moving beyond Motown’s rigid hit-factory system, coproducing and playing most of the instruments on 1969’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered. The record included a broader repertoire, including his inspired rendition of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out,” the socially conscious ballad “Heaven Help Us,” and, especially, the title track, written with his paramour Syreeta Wright, a Motown secretary and backup singer, whom he married in 1970. The couple divorced two years later.

That same year, with his Motown contract about to expire, Wonder was granted full artistic control of Where I’m Coming From, the first album he produced and cowrote himself. The album contained a more cohesive political message with songs like “Think of Me as Your Soldier,” expressing his opposition to the Vietnam War, and “I Wanna Talk to You,” commenting on the widening generation gap.

In May 1971 Wonder turned twenty-one and received a million dollars from his Motown trust. He remained unsigned while holing up in the late JIMI HENDRIX’s state-of-the-art Electric Ladyland Studio in New York. With his groundbreaking album Music of My Mind in hand, Wonder successfully renegotiated his Motown contract, winning complete artistic control, increased royalty rates, and his own publishing company, Black Bull.

Wonder’s new artistic freedom resulted in an extraordinary burst of creativity that cemented his place as one of the twentieth century’s most important musicians. The five successive albums he released in the early to mid-1970s, Music of My Mind (1972), Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976), represent a body of work and a creative zenith few artists ever reach.

At Electric Ladyland, Wonder delved into sound and instrument experimentation with synthesizers, Moogs, and clavinets, creating category-defying hybrids—parts jazz, R&B, rock, soul, and pop. At a session with Richie Havens, Wonder met engineers and electronic musicians Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, who became his collaborators and teachers. While Music of My Mind had only one single, the breezy, jazz-inflected “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You),” the album’s progressive music experimentation represented an enormous paradigm shift.

Following a 1972 summer tour opening for the Rolling Stones, Wonder began work, with the help of Margouleff and Cecil, on one of his most seminal recordings, Talking Book. The album yielded two consecutive number-one hits, the romantic, melodious “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” and the classic funk jam “Superstition,” featuring Wonder’s jaunty clavinet backed by bawdy horns.

Innervisions, another Wonder masterpiece, was filled with spirituality and introspection (“Visions,” “Jesus Children of America,” “Higher Ground”), ballads (“All in Love Is Fair,” “Golden Lady”), jazz influences and psychedelia (“Too High”), political statements (“Living for the City,” “He’s Misstra Know It All,”), and Latin grooves (“Don’t You Worry about a Thing”). Thirty years later tracks like “Higher Ground,” “Living for the City,” “Don’t You Worry about a Thing,” and “Golden Lady” remained in heavy rotation at radio stations across the globe.

On 6 August 1973, while Wonder was driving with his brother on a South Carolina highway, a log from a truck slammed into Wonder’s forehead and fractured his skull. He lay in a coma for a week before regaining consciousness and was forced to stop performing until the following January. While convalescing, he met Yolanda Simmons, who became his partner and the mother of two of his children, Aisha and Keita, although they never married. In 1974 Wonder won five Grammy Awards for Innervisions, including Album of the Year.

Wonder’s new zeal for life on 1974’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale was evident on songs like “Smile Please,” the metaphysical “Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away,” the syncopated and stomping “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” and the politically charged “You Haven’t Done Nothin.’” The album went on to win four Grammy Awards.

Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life remains his veritable magnum opus, a double album featuring some of his finest work, including “Sir Duke” (a tribute to DUKE ELLINGTON), “I Wish,” “Isn’t She Lovely” (about his daughter Aisha), “Pastime Paradise,” and “As.” While detractors called the work sprawling and excessive, most saw the ambitious recording as the musical culmination of his career.

While most critics would agree that Wonder’s creativity dropped off after 1980, his commercial success continued to grow. Hotter than July (1980) included the hit “(Master Blaster) Jammin,” a tribute to Bob Marley, and “Happy Birthday,” an anthem to the battle Wonder had spearheaded to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday. In 1982 he had a number-one single with his duet with Paul McCartney, “Ebony and Ivory.” That same year he released Musicquarium, a greatest hits album that produced two new hits, “That Girl” and “Do I Do.” Wonder’s 1984 Oscar-winning soundtrack for The Woman in Red featured “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” his biggest-selling single. In 1989, at age thirty-nine, Wonder was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Although he scored the soundtrack for SPIKE LEE’s 1991 film Jungle Fever and released the 1995 Grammy-winning album “Conversation Peace,” his output flagged in the 1990s.

Throughout the 1990s and into the new century, Wonder’s legacy was enriched by the neo-soul movement, the members of which rightfully deified him, and by hip-hop, with many artists, including TUPAC SHAKUR, Wu-Tang Clan, and A Tribe Called Quest, sampling his music and introducing him to a new generation.

WOODS, GRANVILLE T.

(23 Apr. 1856–30 Jan. 1910), mechanical and electrical engineer and inventor, was born in Columbus, Ohio. Nothing is known of Woods’s parents except that they may have been named Tailer and Martha Woods. The effects of racism in Columbus, shortly before and during the Civil War, were somewhat blunted by the economic influence of a sizable African American population, which included artisans and property holders, and by growing sympathy among whites for abolitionism. Only a few years before Woods’s birth, the city established a system of segregated schools for black children, which provided him an education until he was ten years old.

Like almost all American engineers during the nineteenth century, Woods obtained his technical training largely through self-study and on-the-job experience, rather than from formal schooling. Sometime after 1866 he began apprenticing as a blacksmith and machinist, probably in Cincinnati, where several decades earlier German immigrants had established a flourishing machine tool industry. Machinists considered themselves members of an elite profession, and by and large they selected only the most promising and ambitious candidates for apprenticeships. Success depended on a vivid spatial imagination, mathematical adroitness, and draftsmanship. Indeed, Woods’s letters patent displayed abundant evidence of all these talents, most apparently the latter. His drawings were consistently rendered with the flair of a first-rate draftsman—presumably Woods himself.

Most of Woods’s inventions were electromechanical devices and systems related to railroad technology. His interest in these fields grew out of an eclectic early experience with railroads and from dogged self-study. In November 1872 Woods moved east and was soon hired as an engineer on the St. Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad in Missouri. Given his training and youth, he likely operated lathes and drill presses in a machine shop. During his employment with Iron Mountain, he began studying electricity—at least three years before Thomas Edison patented his revolutionary lighting system. Since almost no American university provided such training, Woods had to learn about electricity from technical books and periodicals. Woods left the Iron Mountain Railroad in early 1876, and then spent two years studying at Stern’s Institute of Technology. In February 1878 he signed on to the British steamer Ironsides as chief engineer. Two years later he returned east, where he handled locomotives for the Southern Railway, whose line ran near Danville, Kentucky.

Inventor Granville T. Woods, whose many inventions include the “third rail” that carries electricity to electric-powered trains. Ohio Historical Society

Sometime after 1880 Woods began his career as an inventor in Cincinnati, probably only to sell one or two ideas. He chose a propitious historical moment and region. Cincinnati was home to a larger and more cohesive and prosperous African American community than that which resided in Columbus, and southwestern Ohio boasted some of the best machine shops in America. With few corporations willing to invest in their own research laboratories, independent inventors like Woods filled a niche by feeding the burgeoning appetite of those corporations for technological innovation. From the outset he made money. His first patent, filed on 18 June 1883, was a replacement for Alexander Graham Bell’s crude telephone transmitter (i.e., mouthpiece). His second invention followed almost immediately, an improved steam-boiler furnace. Significantly, he sold the transmitter to two local investors for a modest fee. This success sharply contrasted with the typical experience of a patentee during the period, when ownership of almost all inventions remained forever in the hands of their profitless inventors.

Woods resided in Cincinnati for most of the 1880s, applying for some seventeen patents while he lived there. Around 1886 he founded the Woods Electric Company. One newspaper reported Woods’s intention to capitalize his new firm at one million dollars and to sell shares for fifty dollars, which suggests that he planned a large-scale factory, but if so the proposal fell through and the firm functioned only as a temporary assignee—i.e., the legal owner—for ten of his patents. The company last appears in the historical record in April 1890, as assignee on Woods’s last Ohio patent.

By August 1891 Woods had relocated to the New York City area. Earlier, he had traveled extensively among large northeastern cities, probably as an engineering consultant, so he likely moved to be nearer to his work. He lived out the remaining seventeen years of his life in New York, maintaining the vigorous pace he had established in Ohio. The U.S. Patent Office issued him twenty-eight letters patent for his New York inventions, seven of which listed a brother, Lyates, as co-inventor. Incredibly, he found assignees for all but five.

As an engineer, Woods was no revolutionary, and his inventions characteristically tackled problems associated with established technological systems. He focused primarily on inventing communications, power distribution, and control devices for electric trains, a cutting-edge technology that large cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., were increasingly adopting. In 1884 he filed a patent application for “Telegraphony,” a combination telegraph and telephone system that he sold to American Bell Telephone. His “Induction Telegraph System” enabled moving railroad cars to exchange telegraph messages, which proved crucial for preventing collisions. Today his most recognizably famous idea is the “third rail,” a high-current electrical conductor laid inside the two ordinary rails that guide the wheels of an electric-powered train. The Woods invention with the widest-ranging importance, though, was a method of regulating the rotational velocity of electric motors. Formerly, motors were slowed by diverting part of their electrical current to resistive elements that transformed the excess power to dangerous waste heat. Woods devised a dramatically safer tapped-inductive system that wasted far less energy. The speed of virtually almost every alternating-current electric motor today is controlled by a similar method.

Regrettably, no historian has thoroughly assessed the true technological and commercial significance of all Woods’s inventions. For that matter, no one has accurately determined their number, although one reliable authority on black inventors in 1917 credited him with “upwards of 50 different inventions” (Baker, 1917). The fact that Woods sold the rights to well over half of his patents to corporations, many of which included future electrical giants like Westinghouse, General Electric, and American Bell, and one for a reported ten thousand dollars, however, indicates that he was not only a prolific inventor but also a commercially successful entrepreneur and respected engineer.

Woods died in New York City of a cerebral hemorrhage, some five years after applying for his last known patent in October 1904, and perhaps in poverty. He left a distinguished but ambiguous legacy. On one hand, he merits a place in the top tier of independent electrical inventors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, his position with respect to African American history must remain unfixed. Americans have admired the “Black Edison” for well over a century, but even contemporary African American writers rarely mentioned public statements on his part, except for matters of patent litigation, or when he lectured to Cincinnati audiences “on the various laws and theories that pertain to electricity and magnetism” (Cleveland Gazette, 7 Aug. 1886). Doubtless, white journalists, who almost entirely ignored him, deserved blame for much of the mystery surrounding Woods. But to the extent that he chose his reticence, he resembled engineers in general, who, thanks to the increasing influence of capitalism during the nineteenth century, began to adopt a hands-off approach to political and social questions, rather than risk their clients and employers. In any case, his exceptional success as an independent inventor depended on an ability to negotiate a career in an increasingly discriminatory society, and it is difficult to see how a more outspoken individual could have survived professionally in such an environment.

WOODS, TIGER

(30 Dec. 1975–), golfer, was born Eldrick Woods to Earl Woods, a retired army lieutenant colonel who had been the first black baseball player at Kansas State University, and Kultida Punsawad, a native of Thailand and army secretary who met Earl when he was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Kultida chose the name Eldrick because it begins with the first initial of Earl’s name and ends with the first initial of her name. The fusion of identities thus symbolized by his name would have far reaching influences on the boy’s life. The sobriquet Tiger was chosen by Earl in honor of Colonel Nguyen Phong, whom Earl nicknamed Tiger because of his courage. Earl, who had three children from a previous marriage, married Kultida in 1969 while he was based at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, New York. He was forty-two years old and three months shy of retiring from the army when a fellow black officer invited Earl to play golf for the first time. Thus, Earl began cultivating a love for the greens that would propel his son into the world of golf.

African American golfers had played in mostly segregated venues since Reconstruction. In 1896 John Shippen became the first black golf professional when he was invited to play in the second U.S. Open Championship at the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, but when some white golfers refused to play with an African American, Shippen was forced to pretend that he was half Shinnecock Indian in order to participate. In 1899 Dr. George Grant, a black Boston dentist, patented the first golf tee—and though he did not make any money from his invention, variations on his design revolutionized the game. Charles Sifford was the first African American to finally break the “Caucasian only” barrier when he entered the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) in 1962. The following year ALTHEA GIBSON did the same in the Ladies Professional Golfers Association (LPGA) when she put down her tennis racket and began swinging a golf club.

As an infant, Tiger was often placed in a high chair in the garage so that his father could hit golf balls into a net while at the same time watching the child. When Earl put an improvised club into Tiger’s hands, the eleven-month-old prodigy swung from his left side—as it had appeared from his perspective in the high chair. When Earl placed Tiger in the correct position, Tiger intuitively switched the club to his right, and the astonished father began to sense that his son was a natural. At the age of two Tiger made his first television appearance, on The Mike Douglas Show, where he demonstrated his putting (and charm) with comedian Bob Hope. Tiger was featured in Golf Digest magazine at the age of five and appeared on the ABC program That’s Incredible.

Despite the early recognition of Tiger’s talent, golf did not entirely consume his childhood to the exclusion of all other interests and activities. Earl was not the overbearing father of Little League infamy, trying to live vicariously through his son’s playing. Kultida was an exacting disciplinarian who did not exempt the boy wonder from household chores, excuse poor academic performance, or tolerate arrogance. Nor did Tiger have to be prodded to practice; on the contrary, he enjoyed listening to subliminal tapes that told him, “You have the power to move mountains.” Tiger and his family were the first black residents to move into their neighborhood in Cypress, California. Growing up in what became a diverse community, Tiger experienced a world filled with video games, rap music, and shopping malls—and though he liked The Simpsons more than the Cosby Show, he was inescapably a product of the black middle class of the 1980s. In high school he played basketball, football, and baseball and showed aptitude in each. At six feet, two inches in height, he could have pursued these more popular sports, but golf was his first love, only passion, and undeniable forte.

Kultida worked hard to make sure that his Asian identity was not overshadowed by his brown skin. She took him to Thailand when he was nine and instructed him in Buddhist traditions, which Tiger came to cherish. She taught him to be proud of his Thai ancestry even though most people were not aware of it. Exasperated by a media that referred to her son as black exclusively, she once scolded a reporter that to do so was to “deny his grandmother and grandfather. To deny me!” (Sports Illustrated, 27 Mar. 1995, 62). Tiger would one day tell an audience on The OPRAH WINFREY Show that he was a mixture of Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian, which made him a “Cablinasian.” This racial construction displeased some African Americans who suspected that Woods was uncomfortable being black, but it encouraged others who resented racial categories that blotted out parts of their identities, and it prompted some members of Congress to introduce a “Tiger Woods Bill” to make “mixed race” an option on the 2000 census forms. Earl was confident that Tiger could handle the social challenges that awaited him and focused instead on building Tiger’s mental toughness for the pressure he would encounter in high stakes tournaments. For example, he would try to break Tiger’s concentration before his son took a shot by jingling coins in his pocket, coughing, or dropping his golf bag. Tiger developed the ability to remain focused in tight situations and became a relentless competitor.

As a teenager Woods amassed a room full of trophies, including an unprecedented three consecutive U.S. Junior Amateur Championships; when he won the first one at fifteen, he became the youngest player to ever do so. In 1994 he became the youngest player to win a U.S. Amateur Championship, which he did by staging the largest comeback in tournament history. Later that year Woods enrolled at Stanford University on a golf scholarship and decided to major in economics. By the end of his freshman year he had successfully defended his U.S. Amateur title, played in his first professional major—the Masters, where he was the only amateur in the field to make the cut—and was named NCAA First Team All-America. By his sophomore year Woods had garnered a record-setting three U.S. Amateur Championships and was winning other tournaments all over the country, all while maintaining a B average. The decision to drop out of Stanford in August 1996 and become a professional golfer was a difficult one, but the forty-million-dollar endorsement deal from Nike and twenty-million-dollar deal with Titleist helped to ease the pain.

Success as a professional was not guaranteed for Woods. Like other sports, golf has seen many amateur stars fail to meet expectations when put up against seasoned veterans; others prove unable to handle the pressures and distractions that come with celebrity status. Winning even one major tournament over the course of a long professional career is quite an achievement. Woods, in comparison, became the number-one player in the world in just forty-two weeks as a pro, smashing records as he went. His first major victory was the Masters in 1997 at the Augusta National Golf Club. This exclusive all-male club in Georgia did not admit its first black member until 1990. On the final day of competition, Woods wore a red shirt, as he always does on the last day of play because his mother said that red is his lucky color of power. As he approached the final hole on that day, his ailing father was waiting to greet him, along with Lee Elder, who had been the first black golfer to play in the Masters at Augusta, doing so the year Woods was born. With this win, Woods became the first African American to win a major, and he did so by twelve strokes, the widest margin of victory in the history of that vaunted tournament.

By tradition, the winner of the Masters chooses the menu for the following year’s dinner. Realizing this honor would fall to Woods, a previous Masters champion, Fuzzy Zoeller, told reporters, “Tell him not to serve fried chicken, or collard greens, or whatever the hell they serve” (Callahan, 61). Despite the firestorm of controversy that ensued, Woods took such comments in stride and proceeded to become golfs greatest ambassador, bringing millions of minority players to the game and attracting television viewers to the sport in numbers that rivaled baseball and basketball.

Woods went on to play on the United States teams for the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup. He won the PGA Championship in 1999 and from 2000 through 2001 built up a phenomenal string of victories that demonstrated his growing prowess. He opened the 2000 season by winning the Mercedes Championship and then captured the U.S. Open Championship by fifteen strokes, breaking a record that had stood since 1899. He then won the British Open at St. Andrews, Scotland, by eight strokes on the course where the modern game of golf was born, and registered the best score (19 under 269) in the history of the British Open. With this victory Woods became the youngest player, at age twenty-four, to complete the Career Gland Slam—winning the four top tournaments over the course of one’s career. Only four other players have achieved this feat. However, Woods was not finished; he won the PGA Championship again in 2000 to become the first player to win the U.S. Open, British Open, and PGA Championship in the same year. And when he won the Masters again early in 2001, Woods became the first person in history to own all the major crowns of modern golf at the same time.

When Jack Nicklaus began to establish his dominance over golf a generation earlier, Bobby Jones, a leading competitor, said of Nicklaus, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar” (Callahan, 55). Similarly, Woods unveiled a game never before seen: long off the tees, skillful on the fairways, and accurate on the putting greens. He stated that his professional goal was to surpass Nicklaus’s record of eighteen major PGA titles. He delayed marriage and child rearing to pursue this quest.

When Woods met Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Mandela urged him to do something with his fame to help others. Woods subsequently established the Tiger Woods Foundation, whose goal was to help American youth through scholarships, charitable gifts, and educational programs. Woods, like his good friend MICHAEL JORDAN, chose to avoid most political issues—particularly those pertaining to race. His reticence about admitting women into the PGA or rescinding the male-only membership rules at Augusta, two controversies that erupted in 2003, disappointed those who believed that Woods had a special obligation to be outspoken on such matters. However, Woods did not relish becoming a role model, nor did he see himself becoming a champion of causes like MUHAMMAD ALI or JACKIE ROBINSON.

WOODSON, CARTER GODWIN

(19 Dec. 1875–3 Apr. 1950), historian, was born in New Canton, Virginia, the son of James Henry Woodson, a sharecropper, and Anne Eliza Riddle. Woodson, the “Father of Negro History,” was the first and only black American born of former slaves to earn a PhD in History. His grandfather and father, who were skilled carpenters, were forced into sharecropping after the Civil War. The family eventually purchased land and eked out a meager living in the late 1870s and 1880s.

Woodson’s parents instilled in him high morality and strong character through religious teachings and a thirst for education. One of nine children, Woodson purportedly was his mother’s favorite, and was sheltered. As a small child he worked on the family farm, and as a teenager he worked as an agricultural day laborer. In the late 1880s the Woodsons moved to Fayette County, West Virginia, where his father worked in railroad construction, and where he himself found work as a coal miner. In 1895, at the age of twenty, he enrolled in Frederick Douglass High School where, possibly because he was an older student and felt the need to catch up, Woodson completed four years of course work in two years and graduated in 1897. Desiring additional education, Woodson enrolled in Berea College in Kentucky, which had been founded by abolitionists in the 1850s for the education of ex-slaves. Although he briefly attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Woodson graduated from Berea in 1903, just a year before Kentucky passed the “Day Law,” prohibiting interracial education. After college Woodson taught at Frederick Douglass High School in West Virginia. Believing in the uplifting power of education, and desiring the opportunity to travel to another country to observe and experience the culture firsthand, he decided to accept a teaching post in the Philippines, teaching at all grade levels, and remained there from 1903 to 1907.

Woodson’s worldview and ideas about how education could transform society, improve race relations, and benefit the lower classes were shaped by his experiences as a college student and as a teacher. Woodson took correspondence courses through the University of Chicago because he was determined to obtain additional education. He was enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1907 as a full-time student and earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in European History, submitting a thesis on French diplomatic policy toward Germany in the eighteenth century. Woodson then attended Harvard University on scholarships, matriculating in 1909 and studying with Edward Channing, Albert Bushnell Hart, and Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1912 Woodson earned his PhD in History, completing a dissertation on the events leading to the creation of the state of West Virginia after the Civil War broke out. Unfortunately, he never published the dissertation. He taught at the Armstrong and Dunbar/M Street high schools in Washington from 1909 to 1919, and then moved on to Howard University, where he served as dean of arts and sciences, professor of history, and head of the graduate program in history in 1919–1920. From 1920 to 1922 he taught at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute. In 1922 he returned to Washington to direct the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History full time.

Woodson began the work that sustained him for the rest of his career, and for which he is best known, when he founded the association in Chicago in the summer of 1915. Woodson had always been interested in African American history and believed that education in the subject at all levels of the curriculum could inculcate racial pride and foster better race relations. Under the auspices of the association, Woodson founded the Journal of Negro History, which began publication in 1915, and established Associated Publishers in 1921, to publish works in black history. He launched the annual celebration of Negro History Week in February 1926 and had achieved a distinguished publishing career as a scholar of African American history by 1937, when he began publishing the Negro History Bulletin.

The Journal of Negro History, which Woodson edited until his death, served as the centerpiece of his research program, not only providing black scholars with a medium in which to publish their research but also serving as an outlet for the publication of articles written by white scholars when their interpretations of such subjects as slavery and black culture differed from mainstream historians. Woodson formulated an editorial policy that was inclusive. Topically, the Journal provided coverage in various aspects of the black experience: slavery, the slave trade, black culture, the family, religion, and antislavery and abolitionism, and included biographical articles on prominent African Americans. Chronologically, articles covered the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Scholars, as well as interested amateurs, published important historical articles in the Journal, and Woodson kept a balance between professional and nonspecialist contributors.

Woodson began celebration of Negro History Week to increase awareness of and interest in black history among both blacks and whites. He chose the second week of February to commemorate the birthdays of FREDERICK DOUGLASS and Abraham Lincoln. Each year he sent promotional brochures and pamphlets to state boards of education, elementary and secondary schools, colleges, women’s clubs, black newspapers and periodicals, and white scholarly journals suggesting ways to celebrate. The association also produced bibliographies, photographs, books, pamphlets, and other promotional literature to assist the black community in the commemoration. Negro History Week celebrations often included parades of costumed characters depicting the lives of famous blacks, breakfasts, banquets, lectures, poetry readings, speeches, exhibits, and other special presentations. During Woodson’s lifetime the celebration reached every state and several foreign countries.

Among the major objectives of Woodson’s research and the programs he sponsored through the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History (the name was changed in the 1970s to reflect the changing times) was to counteract the racism promoted in works published by white scholars. With several young black assistants—RAYFORD W. LOGAN, CHARLES HARRIS WESLEY, Lorenzo J. Greene, and A. A. Taylor—Woodson pioneered in writing the social history of black Americans, using new sources and methods, such as census data, slave testimony, and oral history. These scholars moved away from interpreting blacks solely as victims of white oppression and racism toward a view of them as major actors in American history. Recognizing Woodson’s major achievements, the NAACP presented him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, in June 1926. At the award ceremony, John Haynes Holmes, the minister and interracial activist, cited Woodson’s tireless labors to promote the truth about Negro history.

During the 1920s Woodson funded the research and outreach programs of the association with substantial grants from white foundations such as the Carnegie Foundation, the General Education Board, and the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation. Wealthy whites, such as Julius Rosenwald, also made contributions. White philanthropists cut Woodson’s funding in the early 1930s, however, after he refused to affiliate the association with a black college. During and after the Depression, Woodson depended on the black community as his sole source of support.

Woodson began his career as a publishing scholar in the field of African American history in 1915 with the publication of The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. By 1947, when the ninth edition of his textbook The Negro in Our History (1922) appeared, Woodson had published four monographs, five textbooks, five edited collections of source materials, and thirteen articles, as well as five collaborative sociological studies. Among Woodson’s major works are A Century of Negro Migration (1918), A History of the Negro Church (1921), The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), and The African Background Outlined (1936). Covering a wide range of topics, he relied on an interdisciplinary method, combining anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and history.

Among the first scholars to investigate slavery from the slaves’ point of view, Woodson studied it comparatively at institutions in the United States and Latin America. His work prefigured the concerns of later scholars of slavery by several decades, as he examined slaves’ resistance to bondage, the internal slave trade and the breakup of slave families, miscegenation, and blacks’ achievements despite the adversity of slavery.

Woodson focused mainly on slavery in the antebellum period, examining the relationships between owners and slaves and the impact of slavery upon the organization of land, labor, agriculture, industry, education, religion, politics, and culture. Woodson also noted the African cultural influences on African American culture. In The Negro Wage Earner (1930) and The Negro Professional Man and the Community (1934) Woodson described class and occupational stratification within the black community. Using a sample of twenty-five thousand doctors, dentists, nurses, lawyers, writers, and journalists, he examined income, education, family background, marital status, religious affiliation, club and professional memberships, and the literary tastes of black professionals. He hoped that his work on Africa would “invite attention to the vastness of Africa and the complex problems of conflicting cultures.”

Woodson also pioneered in the study of black religious history. A Baptist who attended church regularly, he was drawn to an examination of black religion because the church functioned as an educational, political, and social institution in the black community and served as the foundation for the rise of an independent black culture. Black churches, he noted, established kindergartens, women’s clubs, training schools, and burial and fraternal societies, from which independent black businesses developed. As meeting places for kin and neighbors, black churches strengthened the political and economic base of the black community and promoted racial solidarity. Woodson believed that the “impetus for the uplift of the race must come from its ministry,” and he predicted that black ministers would have a central role in the modern civil rights movement.

Woodson never married or had children, and he died at his Washington home; he had directed the association until his death. For thirty-five years he had dedicated his life to the exploration and study of the African American past. Woodson made an immeasurable and enduring contribution to the advancement of black history through his own scholarship and the programs he launched through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.

WORK, MONROE NATHAN

(15 Aug. 1866–2 May 1945), sociologist, was born in rural Iredell County, North Carolina, the son of Alexander Work and Eliza Hobbs, former slaves and farmers. His family migrated to Cairo, Illinois, in 1866 and in 1876 to Kansas, where they homesteaded, and Work remained to help on the farm until he was twenty-three. He then started secondary school and by 1903 had received his MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago. That year he accepted a teaching job at Georgia State Industrial College in Savannah.

Living in the deep South for the first time, Work became concerned about the plight of African Americans, who constituted a majority of Savannah’s population. In 1905 he answered a call from W. E. B. DU BOIS to attend the conference that established the Niagara Movement, a militant black rights group that opposed BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S accommodationist approach to black advancement. While continuing to participate in the Niagara Movement, Work founded the Savannah Men’s Sunday Club. It combined the functions of a lyceum, lobbying group, and civic club, engaging in such activities as petitioning the city government, opening a reading room, organizing youth activities, and conducting a health education campaign among lower-class African Americans. Quickly accepted into the city’s black elite, he married Florence E. Henderson in 1904. Their marriage lasted until his death, but no children survived infancy.

In 1908 Work was offered a position at Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama. As an ally of Du Bois, Work found it difficult to accept the position, but he did. By 1908 he had begun to doubt the efficacy of protest. A streetcar boycott had not halted legalized segregation in Savannah, and the Niagara Movement had failed to expand. Work had begun to see another way to use his talents on behalf of black advancement. He was not a dynamic speaker or a natural leader, but a quiet scholar and researcher. He believed that prejudice was rooted in ignorance, and this suggested reliance on education rather than protest. In a 1932 interview Work declared that while still a student, “I dedicated my life to the gathering of information, the compiling of exact knowledge concerning the Negro.” Disillusioned about the power of protest, Work believed that the resources and audience available at Tuskegee would allow him to make his skills useful: “It was the center of things relating to the Negro,” he noted.

Although Washington had hired Work primarily as a record keeper and researcher for his own articles and speeches, Work used every opportunity to expand the functions of his Department of Records and Research. In 1908 he began compiling a day-to-day record of the African American experience. His sources included newspaper clippings, pamphlets, reports, and replies to his own letters of inquiry. All were organized by category and date, providing the data for the Negro Yearbook and the Tuskegee Lynching Report, both of which began in 1912. Each year he distributed the Tuskegee Lynching Report to southern newspapers and leaders to publicize the extent and injustice of lynch law. Under his editorship, nine editions of the Negro Yearbook provided information on discrimination and black progress to educators, researchers, and newspaper editorialists. In 1928 Work supplied another valuable research tool with the publication of A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America. It was the first extensive, classified bibliography of its kind.

Work did not spend all his time compiling data for others; he was also a teacher, department head, crusader, and researcher. He published over seventy articles and pamphlets. His research usually highlighted either the achievements of Africans and African Americans or the obstacles to black progress. Earlier than most black scholars, Work wrote in a positive manner about African history and culture. In a 1916 article for the Journal of Negro History, he declared that “Negroes should not despise the rock from which they were hewn.” Work also investigated African American folktales and their African roots. Even before the Harlem Renaissance, Work celebrated the distinctiveness of African American culture. His meticulous scholarship was widely recognized in the academic community. In 1900 he became the first African American to publish an article in the American Journal of Sociology; the article dealt with black crime in Chicago and pointed to the lack of social services for African Americans. In 1929 he presented a paper at the American Historical Association annual meeting.

Although Work eschewed protest when he left the Niagara Movement and went to Tuskegee, he remained a quiet crusader for change. Early in his career Work developed a special interest in black health issues. In Savannah he started health education programs through the churches. He encouraged Booker T. Washington to establish National Negro Health Week in 1914. Work organized the week for seventeen years before it was taken over by the United States Public Health Service. He was also deeply concerned with the problem of lynching, and he became active in a southern-based movement to eradicate the evil. Work’s estrangement from Du Bois made cooperation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s antilynching campaign difficult, but Work found allies in the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. The latter groups sought to change the South through education, while the NAACP sought change through legislation. Through his contacts in the antilynching campaign, Work became actively involved in numerous interracial groups in the South.

Monroe Work overestimated the power of education to eliminate prejudice, but his numerous articles and his quiet, dignified presence in biracial professional organizations and reform groups undoubtedly helped to dispel some of the southern white stereotypes of African Americans. He accepted the constraints required to work in the deep South in order to use his abilities to change it. After his death, in Tuskegee, two of his protégés established the Tuskegee Civic Association, which brought majority rule and desegregation to Macon County. Monroe Work was one of the lesser-known figures who tilled the soil from which the civil rights movement sprouted in the 1950s and 1960s.

WRIGHT, LOUIS TOMPKINS

(22 July 1891–8 Oct. 1952), surgeon, hospital administrator, and civil rights leader, was born in La Grange, Georgia, the son of Ceah Ketcham Wright, a physician and clergyman, and Lula Tompkins. After his father’s death in 1895, his mother married William Fletcher Penn, a physician who was the first African American to graduate from Yale University Medical School. Raised and educated in Atlanta, Wright received his elementary, secondary, and college education at Clark University in Atlanta, graduating in 1911 as valedictorian of his class. His stepfather was one of the guiding influences that led to his choice of medicine as a career.

Wright graduated from Harvard Medical School, cum laude and fourth in his class, in 1915. While in medical school he exhibited his willingness to take a strong stand against racial injustice when he successfully opposed a hospital policy that would have barred him (but not his white classmates) from the practicum in delivering babies (obstetrics) at Boston-Lying-in Hospital. Despite an early record of publications, because of restrictions based on race, Wright completed an internship during 1915–1916 at Freedmen’s Hospital, the teaching hospital at the Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., one of only three black hospitals with approved internship programs at that time.

While he was an intern at Freedmen’s, Wright rejected a claim in the medical literature that the Schick test for diptheria could not be used on African Americans because of their heavy skin pigmentation. A study he conducted proved the validity of the usefulness of this test on dark-skinned people and was the basis of his second published paper, “The Schick Test, with Especial Reference to the Negro” (Journal of Infectious Diseases 21 [1917]: 265–268). Wright returned to Atlanta in July 1916 to practice medicine. In Atlanta he launched his civil rights career as a founding member of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, serving as its first treasurer (1916–1917).

With the onset of World War I, Wright applied for a military commission and became a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. A month before going overseas in June 1918, he married Corrine M. Cooke in New York City. They had two daughters, both of whom became physicians: Jane Cooke Wright and Barbara Penn Wright.

While Wright was in France, his unit was gassed with phosgene, causing him permanent lung damage. Because his injury (for which he received a Purple Heart) imposed physical limitations, he served out the rest of the war in charge of the surgical wards at three field hospitals. As a medical officer he introduced the intradermal method for smallpox vaccination (“Intradermal Vaccination against Smallpox,” Journal of the American Medical Association 71 [1918]: 654–657), which was officially adopted by the U.S. Army.

In 1919, when Wright settled in Harlem to start a general medical practice, Harlem Hospital, a municipal facility with a 90 percent black patient population, had no African American doctors or nurses on staff. With an assignment effective 1 January 1920 as a clinical assistant (the lowest rank) in the Out-Patient Department, he became the first African American to be appointed to the staff of a New York City hospital. His steadfast and successful efforts during the 1920s working with hospital administrators and with city officials led gradually to appointments for other African Americans as interns and attending physicians. His push for greater opportunities for African American professionals at Harlem Hospital culminated in a reorganization mandated in 1930 by William Schroeder, commissioner of the Department of Hospitals for the City of New York. The result was the first genuine effort to racially integrate the entire medical staff of a major U.S. hospital. By then Wright had risen to the position of visiting surgeon, and in October 1934 he became the second African American to be admitted to the American College of Surgeons (established in 1913). In 1938 he was appointed to a one-year term as the hospital’s director of surgery. In 1929 he had achieved yet another breakthrough, as the first African American to be appointed as a police surgeon through the city’s competitive civil service examination. He retained the position until his death.

In 1935 Wright was elected chairman of the national board of directors of the NAACP, a position he held until 1952. As a civil rights leader he opposed the establishment of hospitals exclusively for black people, and in the 1940s he argued for national health care insurance; he also challenged discriminatory policies and practices of the powerful American Medical Association. In a published open letter (dated 28 Jan. 1931) in response to an offer from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to build a hospital for blacks in New York City, Wright wrote: “A segregated hospital makes the white person feel superior and the black person feel inferior. It sets the black person apart from all other citizens as being a different kind of citizen and a different kind of medical student and physician, which you know and we know is not the case. What the Negro physician needs is equal opportunity for training and practice—no more, no less.”

Treating common injuries in the surgical wards of Harlem Hospital led Wright to develop, in 1936, a device for handling fractured and dislocated neck vertebrae. In addition to this neck brace, he also designed a special metal plate to treat certain fractures of the femur. He became an expert on bone injuries and in 1937 was asked to write the chapter on head injuries for Charles Scudder’s monumental textbook The Treatment of Fractures (1938), this being the first contribution by an African American to a major authoritative medical text.

Wright became ill with tuberculosis in 1939 and for nearly three years was confined to Biggs Memorial Hospital in Ithaca, New York. In 1939, while hospitalized, he was elected a diplomate of the American Board of Surgery. The year before, Life magazine had recognized him as the “most eminent Negro doctor” in the United States. In 1940 he was awarded the NAACP’s prestigious Spingarn Medal for his achievements and contributions to American medicine.

In 1942, after returning to Harlem Hospital, Wright was appointed director of surgery, a position he held until his death. In 1945 he established a certified four-year residency program in surgery, a first for a black hospital. In 1948 he led a team of resident doctors in the first clinical trials of the antibiotic aureomycin with human beings. This pioneering testing at Harlem Hospital and subsequently at other hospitals paved the way for the approval of this drug and eventually other antibiotics by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In 1948 he established and became director of the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation, funded by the U.S. Public Health Service. Perhaps his crowning achievement was his election, that year, as president of the hospital’s medical board.

Over the course of his long career at Harlem Hospital, Wright welded together into a harmonious whole the various white and black groups within the hospital. He recognized and confronted directly the problems faced by other ethnic professionals, particularly Jewish and Italian-American physicians, so that shortly before his death, at the dedication of the hospital’s Louis T. Wright Library, he said, “Harlem Hospital represents to my mind the finest example of democracy at work in the field of medicine.”

Wright died in New York City. His presence at Harlem Hospital and on the national civil rights scene, and his voice and actions in public and private health forums and debates, had significant consequences on American medicine in three areas: it led to a rapport between black and white doctors that generated scientific and clinical research yielding important contributions in several areas of medicine; it dispensed with myths regarding black physicians that excluded them from any hospital staff on grounds other than those related to individual competence and character; and it led to the admittance of qualified physicians who were African American into local and national medical and scientific societies.

WRIGHT, RICHARD

(4 Sept. 1908–28 Nov. 1960), author, was born Richard Nathaniel Wright in a log cabin in the backwoods of Adams County, Mississippi. He was the eldest of the two sons of Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper, and Ella Wilson, a semi-literate schoolteacher. Since the boll weevil had ravaged the local cotton industry, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and shortly afterwards, Nathaniel Wright abandoned them.

Ella Wright eked out a living by working as a servant in white households, but after a severe stroke in 1918, she was never able to work again. She and the boys went to live with her parents, Richard and Margaret Wilson, in Jackson, Mississippi. Wright’s autobiographical narrative Black Boy (1945) gives a vivid picture of those difficult years in his grandparents’ house. There were constant arguments and violent beatings. The family resources were stretched to the limits, and his grandmother, the family matriarch, bitterly resented Richard’s independent spirit. She was a devout Seventh Day Adventist who believed that all books other than the Scriptures were “Devil’s Work,” and pressured Wright to be “saved” by the church. Wright remained an atheist all his life.

Richard Nathaniel Wright, author of militant protest novels Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Library of Congress

After a year at the Negro Seventh Day Adventist School in Jackson, Wright attended the Jim Hill Primary School and, in eighth grade, the Smith Robertson Elementary School. For the first time, he came into contact with the striving black middle class, whose models were people like W. E. B. DU BOIS and BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. He blossomed and soon proved an outstanding student. In 1925 Wright was the school valedictorian. That same year, he had a short story published in the Southern Register, a local African American weekly. A black high school opened in Jackson for the first time that year, but Wright could not buy books or clothes from the money he earned from odd jobs after school. In November 1925 he left behind the hostile atmosphere in his grandmother’s house and took the train to Memphis to seek full-time work.

His job opportunities were severely curtailed by the color of his skin. The best he could find was work as a messenger in an optical company. One day, in the local newspaper, he came across the name H. L. Mencken. It would prove a turning point. As a black man, Wright was not able to borrow books from the public library, but he persuaded an Irish coworker to lend him his card, and he went to the library, pretending to be picking up books for this white man. He took out two books by Mencken. Wright was excited to discover that the iconoclastic Baltimore journalist and literary critic used words like a weapon. He realized he wanted nothing more than to do the same. With Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces as his guide, Wright began to read voraciously. He was painfully aware that his formal education extended only to the eighth grade, and that famous writers, as well as their subject matter, were invariably white.

Wright left the segregated South in November 1927. For the next ten years he lived in Chicago. He was one of twelve million black people who made that journey from the rural South to the industrial North during the Great Migration of 1916–1928, and he would describe it as the most traumatic journey of his entire life. His narrative Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), accompanied by WPA photographs, movingly conveys the two different worlds.

Wright soon landed a job as an unskilled laborer, sorting mail on the night shift at the Chicago Post Office—the best-paying job in town for a black man. Wright brought his mother, brother, and aunt to live with him in Chicago. During the Depression, however, Wright took whatever work he could find, while also pursuing his reading and writing with extraordinary determination.

In the fall of 1933 a white friend from the post office told him about the John Reed Club, a national organization of “proletarian artists and writers” founded by the Communist Party. Wright went along and met other aspiring artists and writers—mostly sons of Jewish immigrants. Stimulated by this environment, he began to write poems, several of which were published in Communist magazines. His poem “I Have Seen Black Hands” was printed in the national weekly The New Masses in June 1934.

Early in 1934 Wright was pressured to join the Communist Party. Since it consciously fought racism and was one of the few places in the United States where blacks and whites mixed on an equal footing, Wright decided to do so, but from the beginning there were conflicts. He disliked being told what to do, and in his spare time, his writing was far more important to him than party work. Nevertheless, the party provided crucial support to Wright, both as an artist and as a bulwark against racism in America. He did not leave it until 1944, when he became an outspoken anti-Communist. He was disgusted that the Communist Party put civil rights issues on hold during World War II, at a time when blacks were expected to fight in segregated armed forces, and as he explained in his famous essay, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in August and September 1944, while the party claimed to be democratic, it actually took its orders from Moscow.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was established by President Franklin Roosevelt in May 1935, with the Federal Writers Project as one of its offshoots. Wright, who by now had published two short stories and thirteen poems, was signed on to the Illinois Writers Project as a supervisor. He could hardly believe his luck. This was a thirty-hour-a-week job, and the U.S. government was paying him to write. In his spare time Wright wrote a volume of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), and a novel, Lawd Today! (1963).

Wright was influenced by Marxism and the Chicago School of Sociology, which related neurotic behavior and crime to environment, and both were important influences on the South Side group of black writers that Wright organized in 1936. Other members who became well-known writers were Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Walker, and Theodore (Ted) Ward.

In May 1937 Wright moved to New York City. He became a friend and mentor to RALPH ELLISON, encouraged the young JAMES BALDWIN, and championed CHESTER HIMES and GWENDOLYN BROOKS. Wright was briefly the Harlem correspondent for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker, before he was transferred to the New York Writers Project. In February 1938 his writing career took off when he won a national competition of WPA writers for his collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children, which portrayed the barbarism of black life and lynching in the Jim Crow South. Harper and Brothers published the book, which won Wright national recognition.

In 1939 a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Wright to work full-time on his novel Native Son (1940). With its negative depiction of black ghetto life and its hint of interracial sex, the novel was controversial at the time and would remain so for decades to come. Promoted by the Book-of-the-Month Club, though the judges insisted on deleting nearly all allusions to interracial sexual attraction, the book sold a quarter of a million copies. Wright became the first best-selling African American writer. In 1941 the play Native Son, written by Wright and Paul Green and directed by Orson Welles, opened on Broadway to rave reviews. In 1945 Wright’s autobiographical narrative Black Boy, again promoted by the Book-of-the-Month Club, sold an incredible half million copies. The original manuscript, entitled American Hunger, referring to the spiritual hunger of oppressed American blacks, portrayed Wright’s formative years up to the beginning of the war, focusing on his experience of racism in both the deep South and in the North. The Book-of-the-Month Club insisted that he cut the second half, with its depiction of racism in the North and Wright’s experiences in the Communist Party. Similarly, the judges disliked the unpatriotic title, and finally Wright changed it to Black Boy. The original manuscript was finally published posthumously in 1977, under its original title.

After a brief marriage to Dhimah Meidman in 1939, Wright married Ellen Poplowitz in March 1941, and their daughter Julia was born in 1942. His marriage to a white woman and the taunts that followed them when they walked together around New York and when Ellen went out with Julia reinforced Wright’s desire to leave the country. He desperately wanted to expand his horizons and see the world. Encouraged by Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris and whose work he greatly admired, Wright and his family left for Paris in May 1946. Their second daughter, Rachel, was born in Paris on 17 January 1949.

Wright was thirty-eight and in his prime when he left for Europe, but that ship voyage across the Atlantic marked a dramatic downturn in his career. For the next fourteen years he continued to write prolifically, both fiction and nonfiction. In Europe his work was celebrated by the famous existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He was interviewed frequently and his work was widely translated. He was regarded as an important American writer and public intellectual. In the United States he was largely ignored. Even today, few Americans have heard of the titles he wrote after he left the U.S.—The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1957), White Man, Listen! (1957), The Long Dream (1958), Eight Men (1961), and Haiku: This Other World (1998). Wright’s exile writing had the same power, the same emotional persuasiveness. His nonfiction—a mixture of travel essay, memoir, biographical sketch, and political commentary—was in many ways ahead of its time. But in the highly conservative atmosphere of the McCarthyist 1950s, hard-hitting critiques of American racism and Western imperialism—and protest literature, in general—were no longer in vogue.

Wright’s world opened up considerably after he left the United States. In 1949–1950 he spent almost a year in Argentina, where he played Bigger Thomas in the movie Native Son. (The film, made in an adverse political climate, with the forty-year-old Wright badly miscast as an eighteen-year old, was a financial flop.) In 1953 he visited the Gold Coast, a trip he chronicled in Black Power. In 1955 he attended the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, an experience he recalled in The Color Curtain. He spent time exploring life in Franco’s Spain for the book Pagan Spain (1957), and he gave lectures that were collected in White Man, Listen! (1957).

American critics often refer to Wright’s last fourteen years as his “exile” years. The term is hardly appropriate, however, since Wright’s entire body of work prior to his departure for France was a passionate portrayal of what it was like to live as an exile in his native land. The prevalent view, even today, is that living abroad was bad for his writing, that it cut him off from the reality of contemporary America, from his roots, and from the anger that fueled his writing. Others claim that Wright did not lose his power in the 1950s. What changed were the historical circumstances in which he was writing.

Wright died in Paris at the age of fifty-two. His death certificate gives a heart attack as the cause, but the circumstances of his premature death have always aroused suspicion, especially as it is known that the U.S. State Department watched him closely, throughout the 1950s. As someone who ceaselessly criticized American racism from his prominent vantage point as a black intellectual in Europe, Wright was something of a threat to the 1950s propaganda war.

Richard Wright was the first African American writer to enter mainstream American literature. A watershed figure in African American literature, he pushed back the horizons for black writers, expanding their possible subject matter. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Wright’s writing continued to provoke passionate responses, from deep admiration to vehement hostility. He is an uncomfortable writer. He challenges, he tells painful truths, he is a disturber of the peace. He was never interested in pleasing readers. Wright wanted his words to be weapons.

WRIGHT, RICHARD ROBERT, SR.

(16 May 1855–2 July 1947), educator and banker, was born in Whitfield County, Georgia, the son of Robert Waddell and Harriet (maiden name unknown), both slaves. His father, of mixed African and Cherokee descent, was the coachman on a plantation where his mother was a house servant. When Richard was two years old, his father escaped to free territory. Richard and his mother were taken by their slave owner to Cuthbert, Georgia, where she married Alexander Wright and had two children. After emancipation Harriet Wright moved with her three children to Atlanta to take advantage of the recent opening of a Freedman’s Bureau School for Negroes. While Harriet supported the family by running a boarding house, Richard entered Storrs School, which was run by the American Missionary Association. In 1866 General Oliver Otis Howard, then current commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, visited the Sunday school at the Storrs Church and asked the students what message he should tell the children of the North about them. The young Wright stood up and said, “Tell them we are rising.” This incident inspired the poem “Howard at Atlanta” by the great abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Wright attended Atlanta University where he received a BA and was valedictorian of the university’s first graduating class in 1876. Wright married Lydia E. Howard in 1869, and they had nine children.

After graduation from Atlanta University, Wright became the principal of a primary school in Cuthbert. In Cuthbert he helped organize local farmers into cooperatives and coordinated the state’s first county fair for blacks. In 1878 he organized the Georgia State Teachers’ Association (for black educators), served as its first president, and began publishing the association’s Weekly Journal of Progress, later called the Weekly Sentinel. Wright represented Georgia at the 1879 National Conference of Colored Men of the United States, held in Nashville, Tennessee, which sought primarily to assist in the plight of African Americans.

In 1880 Wright was asked to set up and direct Ware High School in Augusta, Georgia, which became the state’s first public high school for blacks. His political activities definitely aided his career in education. Wright was an alternate delegate in 1880 to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, a participant at the conference of the Afro-American League in Minneapolis (1881), a member of the State Republican Central Committee (1882), a special agent for the U.S. Department of the Interior Development in Alabama (1885), and a delegate for Georgia to the Republican National Convention through 1896. In return for his political influence with the black voters, Wright was appointed by President William McKinley to the position of paymaster in the army with the rank of major during the Spanish-American War.

In October 1891 the Georgia legislature established the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth in Savannah. Wright, an obvious candidate to lead the school because of his long experience in teaching and administration, remained president for thirty years, until his retirement in 1921. One of the members of his faculty was MONROE NATHAN WORK, who later wrote the well-known Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America.

Wright’s tenure as president was troubled by the control of an all-white board of trustees for the college that objected to higher education for blacks. Especially controversial were Wright’s efforts to include classical education in the curriculum. Early in his presidency he organized the Negro Civic Improvement League in Savannah. This political organization proved to be very unpopular with the college trustees, and, under much pressure from them, Wright withdrew from the organization and politics in general. He decided to follow the emphasis placed by many black scholars and leaders of the day, such as BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, on programs of self-help and cooperative efforts with whites. It was during this time that Wright wrote A Brief Historical Sketch of Negro Education in Georgia (1894), which addressed his inability to obtain sufficient support for an adequate curriculum at the college.

In 1921 Wright retired as president of the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth and began a new career as a banker and elder statesman. Along with a son, Richard R. Wright Jr., and a daughter, Lillian W. Clayton, Wright founded in Philadelphia in 1921 the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company. Wright’s reputation as an honest and well-qualified man provided the kind of stability needed to survive such economic crises as the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The fact that Wright managed to maintain banking operations during the Depression can be credited to both the diversity of his investment portfolio and the conservative policy of his bank.

In 1945 he attended the conference in California that organized the United Nations. A banquet was held at the conference in recognition of his long career, which included the presidency of the National Association of Presidents of A & M Colleges (1906–1919) and the presidency of the National Association of Teachers of Colored Schools (1908–1912). He helped to establish the National Freedom Day Association, supported a 1940 commemorative stamp for Booker T. Washington, and gathered information for the Georgia Archives about African Americans who fought in the First World War. In 1946, a year before his death, Wright accepted the Muriel Dobbin’s Pioneers of Industry Award from the business community of Philadelphia. He died in Philadelphia.

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WIGGINS, THOMAS BETHUNE.

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