Bethune was determined to become a missionary. She hoped to serve in Africa, but was denied because Blacks were not permitted to serve there by the Presbyterian Mission Board. Refocusing her efforts, she realized that “Africans in America needed Christ and school just as much as Negroes in Africa… my life work lay not in Africa but in my own country.”

As a young teacher in Chicago, she visited prisoners in jail, giving them inspiration through song. She worked at the Pacific Garden Mission, serving lunch to the homeless, and counseled the residents of Chicago’s slums. She was an instructor at the Presbyterian Mission School in Mayesville, S.C. in 1896, at the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia in 1896-1897, and at the Kindell Institute in Sumpter, S.C. in 1897-1898.

Starting a School using Crates as Desks

There she met and married Albert Bethune, and together they moved to Palatka, Florida. Albert found work as a porter, while Bethune started a Sunday school program and worked again with prisoners. In 1904, the 29-year-old Bethune scraped together $1.50 to start the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls with six initial students (five enrollees plus her own son). Tuition was set at 50 cents per week, but no needy child was turned away. Crates became makeshift desks, and charcoal substituted for pencils; Bethune acted as teacher, administrator, and custodian. She and her students held bake-sales to raise funds.

Despite obstacles, and overcoming widespread objection to educating African American children, Bethune triumphed by her example and her mission to “Invest in the human soul.” In 1912 James M. Gamble of the Proctor and Gamble Company was persuaded by Bethune to contribute funds to her school. By 1922 enrollment was 300 students with a staff of 25. Bethune served as president for over 40 years, overseeing its evolution into a junior college and then its 1922 merger with the Cookman Institute for Men, resulting in Bethune-Cookman College that still thrives today. Enrollment is now nearly 3,000.

Bethune also created a high school and a hospital for Blacks. In addition, she became involved in several business ventures. She actively defied Jim Crow restrictions, and insisted on desegregated seating in all of her schools. She and her staff made a point of voting in all elections, despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

Bethune began to focus her attention on political and organizational issues. Her advice to Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, Thomas Marshall, led to the Red Cross decision to integrate. She was appointed president of the Florida Federation of Colored Women in 1917. In 1924 she attained the highest office then available to an African American woman as president of the National Association of Colored Women.

She organized the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 at the age of 60. The Council’s first office was in Bethune’s living room, but soon moved to larger quarters in a Victorian townhouse in Washington D.C. In this “Council House,” she received government officials, heads of state, and leaders from around the world in her role as president. The organization grew to 800,000 members by 1955.

Advising United States Presidents

Bethune next became an advisor to U.S. Presidents and federal agencies, and served behind the scenes as a member of the “Black Cabinet.” She worked with Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt in areas such as housing, employment, education, and child welfare. She was named director of the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs in 1936, and served for eight years as the first Black woman in a federal agency at this level. She was named Vice-President of the NAACP in 1940, and served in 1951 on President Truman’s Committee of Twelve for National Defense.

She concurrently worked with many civic organizations, including the Association of American Colleges, the League of Women Voters, and the National Urban League, and campaigned for desegregation in the U.S. armed forces as a special assistant to the Secretary of War during World War II, while advising on the selection of the first female officer candidates. At this time, she also became a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and was appointed a consultant on interracial affairs and understanding at the charter conference of the United Nations.

When Bethune died on May 18, 1955, she had advanced the causes of educational opportunity and interracial cooperation immeasurably. She is honored with a statue in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park (the first Black woman to be so recognized), and her Council House is a National Parks Service Historic Site which houses the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum and the National Archives for Black Women’s History. Her many honorary awards and degrees include Commander of the Order of the Star of Africa from Liberia, and the highest award of the Haitian government, the Haitian Medal of Honor and Merit, in 1949. She is buried on the Bethune-Cookman College campus.

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Plantation Life

Alexander was born near Richmond, Virginia, sometime around 1810, on a plantation owned by a Presbyterian minister named Delaney. Both his father, Aleck, and mother, Chloe, were slaves owned by Delaney, and the family worked on the plantation until Delaney’s death in approximately 1831. At that time, Alexander became the property of Delaney’s son, Thomas, and moved with him to Missouri. Settling initially in St. Louis, Alexander was hired out as a laborer to a brickyard before moving again with his owner to a farm in St. Charles County. There, he met and married a slave named Louisa, with whom he would have 10 children.

After a period of roughly 10 years, Thomas Delaney decided to move to Louisiana, and sold Alexander to Louisa’s owner, a farmer named Hollman. Alexander worked the Hollman farm for roughly two decades, rising to a position of considerable responsibility as overseer. While slavery was legal in Missouri, it was also a controversial matter, and differing opinions rose in pitch and ferocity in the years leading up to the Civil War. During this time, Alexander was exposed to abolitionist ideas, and determined for himself that a life of freedom was his goal.

With the formal outbreak of war in 1861, lines were drawn and positions hardened. Union forces sought to prevent Missouri from seceding with the Confederate states, but local slave owners were eager to maintain their property and economy, and sympathized with the southern cause. A pro-slavery group, with Hollman among them, cut the supporting timbers under a railroad bridge in February of 1863, compromising its strength so that it would collapse under a Union troop train expected to pass through shortly. Alexander became aware of their treachery, and in the darkness of night, walked five miles to inform a Union supporter. As a result, the Union army was alerted, the bridge was repaired, and catastrophe was averted.

But the danger for Alexander had just begun. He was suspected by the pro-slavery group of having revealed their plot. Learning that they were planning to question him and certain that the outcome would be fatal, Alexander fled. He joined a band of runaway slaves he encountered, but all were taken into captivity by some of the many slave hunters active in the area, and locked up on the second floor of a tavern. Alexander alone managed to escape. He ultimately found his way back to St. Louis, where a sympathetic resident brought him to the attention of a Unitarian minister named William Greenleaf Eliot, who hired Alexander as a farmhand.

Free at Last?

Eliot, the founder of Washington University in St. Louis, was strongly opposed to slavery as an institution. He had declared publicly some years before that he would never return an escaped slave to his or her owner, and although Alexander did not tell him his status, Eliot guessed that he was a runaway. Acting on his principles, Eliot took measures to prevent his recapture, securing a certificate from the local marshal entrusting Alexander to his care for a minimum of 30 days. He then contacted Hollman, Alexander’s owner, with an anonymous offer to purchase the slave’s freedom at market price.

But the vindictive Hollman determined Alexander’s whereabouts, and at the expiration of the protected period, had him taken from Eliot’s home and beaten by bounty hunters. Eliot learned where Alexander was being held, and abetted by the martial law provisions in effect in Missouri, was able to have him returned to his home. He tried once more to come to terms with Hollman, failed, and then relocated Alexander to a friend’s farm in the non-slavery state of Illinois. When the Emancipation Proclamation began to take effect in Missouri in June of 1863 on a gradual basis, Alexander returned to Eliot’s farm. From there he was able to reach his wife, and Louisa escaped from her servitude with their teenaged daughter to join him. Full emancipation for the family and all slaves in Missouri took effect in January of 1865, the year of President Lincoln’s assassination.

In response to that tragedy, a number of former slaves worked to create a monument to Lincoln, raising money to commission a statue. Eliot, aware of their efforts, had an opportunity to speak with the selected sculptor, Thomas Ball, and gave him a photograph of Alexander for use as a model. The completed “Emancipation Memorial,” also known as the Lincoln Freedmen’s Memorial, was dedicated by Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, in 1876 at a Washington ceremony that included President Ulysses S. Grant. It shows a black man, modeled after Alexander, kneeling before Lincoln and overcome with emotion at just having been freed.

Alexander died roughly three years later in about 1879, having seen photographs of the sculpture. He was memorialized again, this time by Eliot himself, who wrote a biography published six years later in 1885 entitled The Story of Archer Alexander: From Slavery to Freedom, March 30, 1863. By Eliot’s own account, Alexander passed away thanking God that he had died in freedom, a fitting reminder of the earliest years of the struggle for African American liberty.

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A Man Who Never Gave Up

Rock was born in Salem County, New Jersey, on October 13, 1825. Living in a slave-free state but with modest means, his parents rejected the common but often necessary practice of putting black children to work instead of attending school. They continued to support their son’s diligent pursuit of education through the age of 18, and Rock returned the favor by demonstrating a deep love of learning and a brilliant intellect.

At age 19, proficient in Greek and Latin, Rock took a position as a teacher at a black public grammar school in the town of Salem. But he had greater things in mind: while teaching there during the years 1844–1848, he apprenticed himself to two white doctors, Quinton Gibbon and Jacob Sharpe, immersing himself in their libraries each day after his teaching duties. By 1848, Rock was exceptionally well versed in medicine, and sought but was refused entrance to medical school that year. Demonstrating the resolve that would characterize his entire life, he began an intense study of dentistry, again on his own. Obtaining a dentistry certificate, he opened a private practice in Philadelphia in 1850. The practice was immediately successful, but Rock had not given up on becoming a physician. He gained admission to Philadelphia’s American Medical College and received his M.D. degree at the age of 26 in 1852.

Rock made his mark in Philadelphia as a medical man of brilliance, and as a strong, eloquent advocate for African Americans. He married Philadelphia native Catherine Bowers in 1852, and the following year, having decided the northern, liberal environment in Massachusetts would be better suited to them, the couple moved to Boston’s Beacon Hill. There, Rock opened another successful practice in dentistry and medicine, and became increasingly involved in black advocacy. He served first as a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, giving free medical services to fugitive slaves, and then in 1855, as a delegate to the Colored National Convention in Philadelphia. In 1856, he was recorded as asking the Massachusetts legislature to delete the word “colored” from state documents.

A Brilliant Orator

During this period, Rock earned his lifelong reputation as a brilliant abolitionist orator. He argued in favor of black self-improvement and began speaking of the “inherent beauty” of African people and their culture. In 1858, the 33-year-old Rock delivered one of his most famous speeches in which he likely became the first person—and perhaps the last until the civil rights movement of the next century—to assert that “black is beautiful.” In these and all his speeches, Rock urged his listeners to take direct action. He demonstrated his own commitment by joining with other Blacks in organizing for the new, antislavery Republican Party.

For several years, a chronic illness, the precise nature of which is unknown, had seriously threatened Rock’s health. Using his knowledge of the latest medical developments, Rock made contact with a renowned group of physicians in Paris who agreed to take him on as a patient. Getting to France, however, proved an ordeal. The administration of President James Buchanan ruled that Rock could not be granted a passport because in the infamous Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court had ruled that Blacks could never be considered full citizens, free or not. Massachusetts, however, took the unprecedented step of issuing him a passport of its own, and Rock sailed for France in the summer of 1858.

After undergoing surgery, Rock toured France and studied the French language and literature, returning to Boston in February 1859. But his prognosis was poor, and he was advised to give up his medical and dental practices. It seems unlikely that Rock’s physicians intended him to replace medicine with a new, equally strenuous career as a lawyer, but this is what he did, and in 1861, he opened his own law practice. His offices soon became a favorite haunt of abolitionist activists and politicians. As a lawyer, Rock at first expressed impatience at the slow pace of newly elected President Lincoln’s actions on behalf of Blacks, but when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he changed his mind. When Congress authorized the creation of all-black regiments to help fight the south, Rock became one of the main recruiters for Massachusetts regiments.

In 1865, Rock made his greatest mark in history when in a widely celebrated breakthrough, he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court. Again, progress had not come easy. The previous year, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, had blocked Rock’s admission. But Taney died in October 1864, and was replaced by Salmon P. Chase who assented to Rock’s presence. In a stark reminder of reality as he boarded a train for the trip back to Boston, Rock was briefly placed under arrest because he lacked the travel pass still required of Blacks in the nation’s capital.

Still in chronically poor health, Rock had caught cold during the Washington ceremonies and never recovered. His health continued to deteriorate, and in December 1866, he died in Boston. His short life was a trailblazing combination of intellectual brilliance, professional success, and political action. The inscription on his tombstone reads:

John S. Rock, Oct. 13, 1825, Died Dec. 3rd, 1866. The 1st
colored lawyer admitted to the Bar of the United States
Supreme Court at Washington; On motion made by Hon.
Charles Sumner, Feb. 1st, 1865.

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To the Church Born

Powell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 29, 1908, the son of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Mattie Fletcher Shaffer. The year after his birth, his father was appointed minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, where the family took up residence and Powell attended school. In 1923, Reverend Powell moved his church and family uptown, to Harlem, where the church grew to become the largest congregation in America and a major force in the black community.

After the Great Depression began in 1929, the young Powell ran a soup kitchen serving hard-hit Harlem. There, he earned a reputation for tremendous compassion. It was said, for instance, that Powell gave his own shoes to a man unable to find the right size in the church shoe bin. Following a brief stint at the City College of New York, Powell entered Colgate University in upstate New York in 1930. His plan was to become a surgeon, but on graduation, he decided to follow his father’s footsteps—and advice—and study for the ministry, eventually earning a degree in religious education from Columbia University in 1932. In 1933, ever active in Harlem’s late-night social scene, he married a dancer from the famed Cotton Club, Isabel Washington. He succeeded his father at the helm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1937.

Before and after assuming leadership of the church, Powell was active in the world of politics. In 1935, he helped found the National Negro Congress, a coalition of black leaders, preachers, labor organizers, workers, businessmen, and politicians. Powell also wrote a column for a Harlem weekly called the Amsterdam News, and took the first steps to increase employment opportunities for African Americans by pressuring New York’s telephone and utility companies, its transit system, its colleges and universities, and even the 1939 World’s Fair to hire Blacks. During the 1940s, in the midst of war, Powell published his own weekly newspaper, The People’s Voice. He also moved easily in traditional political circles, gaining appointment to positions in the New York Office of Price Administration and the Manhattan civil defense committee. In the midst of all this, he published a history of the African American struggle for freedom and equal rights.

Powell was elected to the New York City Council in 1941. After serving for just three years, with the Council seat and his church as twin political bases, he won election to become Harlem’s first representative in Congress. Powell was outraged when he arrived in Washington to find that Jim Crow House rules banned even a member of Congress from its dining rooms, barbershops, and other facilities. He effectively ended this segregationist practice, however, by simply ignoring such bans and encouraging his staff to do the same. He also put an end to the tradition of excluding black reporters from the House press gallery.

New Deal Dealer

Powell’s years in Congress were marked by a direct, confrontational style and unwavering support for progressive causes. He never missed an opportunity to back equal employment opportunities for Blacks, and repeatedly introduced legislation to eliminate discrimination in federal agencies and by federal contractors. In 1956, impatient with the influence of the southern segregationists who made up a significant wing of the Democratic party, Powell shocked his fellow Democrats by endorsing Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in the President’s successful bid for reelection.

Powell divorced his first wife in 1945, and married pianist and singer Hazel Scott. This second marriage also ended in divorce, and in 1960, he married Yvette Flores, daughter of the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the same year, he made an error that haunted him to the end of his life. During a radio interview, he made inflammatory, off-the-cuff comments about another resident of Harlem, an action that led to a successful libel suit. When he refused to pay the judgment, Powell was cited for contempt of court, and this eventually led to an investigation of all his affairs by a Congressional committee.

From 1961 to 1967, as Chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Powell secured the passage of a series of groundbreaking laws promoting equality and equity in employment and education. These included acts establishing the federal minimum wage, vocational training programs, and the expansion of student loan and grant programs. But in 1967, after the investigative committee issued its findings, the House took the unprecedented, and it was later determined, unconstitutional step of voting to expel Powell from Congress. Harlem voters, though, refused to elect anyone else to fill his seat, which sat empty until 1969 when the House allowed his return. By this time, however, Powell had little influence or power, and in the 1970 primary, he was defeated by Charles Rangel. Exhausted and seriously ill, he resigned as minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and retired to Miami, Florida, where he died on April 4, 1972, at the age of 63. Powell’s life had extreme highs and lows, but he nevertheless left a legacy of historic proportions in the struggle for equal rights.

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Diverse Origins

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, where his black father and white mother had met. His mother, Ann Dunham, moved there with her parents from Kansas following World War II. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., grew up in rural Kenya, and earned a scholarship that enabled him to study at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where Ann was also a student. They married in 1961, and had one child.

The couple separated when Obama was two years old, and in 1964, they divorced. Barack Senior returned to Kenya, leaving Ann to raise her son. Her struggles as a working single mother made an early impression on the boy, as did her values of service and compassion. She remarried, and the family moved to her husband’s home country of Indonesia in 1967 where Obama remained until he was 10 years old. He then returned to Honolulu and was subsequently raised by his maternal grandparents. After graduating from high school, he studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years, then transferred to Columbia University in New York City where he majored in political science and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Obama spent several years working in New York, and relocated to Chicago in 1985. There, he began working with the Developing Communities Project, a church-based organization, as a community organizer, committed to destitute areas affected by high unemployment and crime. His achievements were significant, but as a result of the experience, he came to understand that effecting real change would require action at the level of the political and legal systems. Obama visited Kenya in 1988, where he met many of his deceased father’s relatives for the first time. He was accepted at Harvard Law School that year, graduating in 1991 after serving as the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. This resulted in a contract for him to write a book about race relations, which became the memoir Dreams from My Father.

Returning to Chicago shortly thereafter, Obama began teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, while practicing as a civil and neighborhood rights attorney and serving on numerous social action boards of directors. In 1992, he married Michelle Robinson, whom he’d met in 1989 as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm where she worked. They would have two daughters, Malia born in 1999 and Natasha (nicknamed Sasha) born in 2001. Following his path of progressive social action, Obama then ran for and was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. He served there for three terms and eight years, often reaching out to unify Republicans and Democrats to achieve important goals and progressive policies in areas such as taxation, welfare reform, and education.

Higher Office

Obama had run unsuccessfully in the Illinois Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. Nevertheless, in 2003, he began campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was exposed to a national audience for the first time when he delivered the keynote address. The response was immediate, with political insiders citing his presidential potential, and ordinary Americans resonating with his message of unity and promise as expressed by the speech’s title, “The Audacity of Hope.” Propelled by this electrifying debut, he won the primary and general election for the Senate in 2004 by the largest margin in Illinois history, and became only the third African American so honored since Reconstruction.

Acknowledged by his Senate peers as an exceptionally promising freshman, Obama continued to work with leaders from both parties in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation to create important legislation. He served on the Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, and Veterans’ Affairs Committees, and worked on arms proliferation, climate change, and ethics reform among other notable achievements. In 2006, he published a second book titled The Audacity of Hope, which climbed to the top of the best-seller lists.

On February 10, 2007, with Senator Hillary Clinton the self-described presumptive Democratic nominee for President in the 2008 election, Obama announced his unlikely candidacy for the office at the site of President Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858. Shattering fund-raising records and enlisting a vast army of small contributors, Obama emerged victorious in June of that year despite controversies over his former pastor that led to Obama’s historic speech on race entitled “A More Perfect Union.” In a difficult, and frequently acrimonious general campaign against Republican nominee Senator John McCain, Obama distinguished himself with his poise and articulate focus on key issues affecting all Americans, and continued to raise record-breaking sums from a growing grassroots base of support. His choice of Senator Joe Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as running mate offered a stark contrast to the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, as did his constant message of hope and unity epitomized by the hugely popular refrain, “Yes we can.”

Over the course of the campaign, Obama steadily established and widened a leading margin in polls, which accelerated with the deterioration of the U.S. economy in the fall of 2008. Toward the end of the contest, he campaigned actively in Republican strongholds, seeking a broad mandate from the electorate to enact his theme of “The change we need.”

On November 4, 2008, history was made. Obama became the 44th President-Elect of the United States with a landslide victory of 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 162, the first Black elected to the highest office in the land. One hundred and forty-six years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans’ march toward freedom, civil rights, equity, and full participation culminated in the leadership of this nation. A dream too long deferred had been realized. A new chapter in American history had begun.

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A Mysterious Messenger

Muhammad was born in Sandersville, Georgia, in October 1897, the son of William Poole, a sharecropper and itinerant preacher, and Mariah Hall, a maid. His given name was Robert Poole. In 1900, the Pooles moved to Cordele, Georgia, where Muhammad attended grammar school. He dropped out after the third grade and took work in a sawmill and a brick factory to help support the family. He left home at age 16.

Muhammad married Cordele resident Clara Evans in 1919 with whom he would have eight children. In the early 1920s, he and his wife moved north to escape the harsh, depressed economy of the south. Landing in Detroit, Muhammad found work in an assembly plant. In 1931, he met a door-to-door salesman named Wallace Fard, who maintained an alluring second life. Claiming to receive messages directly from God, Fard had proclaimed himself the redeemer of the black man, and attracted a small group of followers with services held in homes and storefronts under the name Temple of Islam. Muhammad was intrigued by Fard’s reading of muslim scripture and the Christian Bible, and became his lieutenant, taking the name Elijah Muhammad. He remained Fard’s second in command until one day in 1934 when Fard mysteriously disappeared. Muhammad barely survived a violent struggle for succession among Fard’s followers, and in 1936, moved to Chicago where he established a second Nation of Islam temple, with just 13 members.

Muhammad was jailed during World War II for refusing the draft and supporting Japan. When he emerged from three years of prison, he had grown in stature and began attracting followers at a growing rate, with hundreds instead of handfuls now attending his appearances. He proclaimed a new message as well: Wallace Fard, or Wali Farad as he was now referred to, was Allah and he, Elijah Muhammad, was Allah’s prophet. As prophet, Muhammad now set forth a doctrine that combined traditional Islamic teachings with elements of Christianity and black nationalism. He also offered a new story of creation: Blacks were a pure race created by God and Whites were a mixed race created by a mad scientist.

Muhammad commanded his followers to abandon their vices and those parts of their lives that had been determined by white society. The best known was replacement of one’s surname, usually descended from a slave owner, with the letter X. The X, Muhammad would say, stood for the vices, false ideas, and injustices that the member had now left behind (ex-alcoholic, ex-Christian, ex-slave).

To help assume their rightful positions in the world, Muhammad urged his followers to work hard, become economically independent, and separate themselves from mainstream culture. He told them to own their own businesses, send their children to Nation of Islam schools, and follow dietary rules. Later, to support the movement, men were required to sell copies of the Nation of Islam newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and a security arm was established that could instill fear in those both inside and outside the Nation.

Explosive Growth

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam grew rapidly, its membership reaching into the hundreds of thousands. But at the same time, it experienced turmoil and controversy. Most controversial, perhaps, was Muhammad’s assertion that black men owed no allegiance to the United States. He posed the question, “Why should a black man fight for a nation that enslaved and oppressed him?” He added that the goal of the Nation of Islam was to create a separate home and separate state for black people, and this alone would be worth fighting for.

It was a member of the movement named Malcolm X, however, who created the greatest turmoil, inside and outside. A charismatic speaker and ex-convict, Malcolm became a member of Muhammad’s inner circle in the 1950s and played a major role in the Nation’s growth to more than half a million members. He created a major source of income for the movement when he founded Muhammad Speaks in 1960, and Muhammad invested more and more power in him, putting him in charge of the Nation of Islam’s second most important temple, in Harlem.

Muhammad saw Malcolm, however, as a potential rival to his sons for future control of the movement, and he found Malcolm increasingly difficult to control. When Malcolm made a series of inflammatory public comments following the assassination of President Kennedy, Muhammad suspended him from his positions and ordered him to keep silent for a period of several months. Malcolm responded by leaving the Nation of Islam. He subsequently charged that Muhammad had fathered several illegitimate children with various secretaries. On February 22, 1965, Malcolm was gunned down while delivering a speech in Harlem. Suspicion fell on Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, but a connection was never proved.

Muhammad remained in charge of the Nation of Islam into the 1970s, but, suffering from chronic respiratory disease, spent more and more time at an estate in Arizona. It was in Chicago, his seat of power, where he died on February 25, 1975, and was succeeded by his son W. Deen Muhammad. The son soon shocked the movement by announcing its dissolution and his conversion to the Sunni sect of mainstream Islam. In 1978, Louis Farrakhan, a protégé of Malcolm X, successfully revived the Nation of Islam and proclaimed Elijah Muhammad’s birthday a sacred holiday. His legacy within the Nation of Islam intact, Muhammad, or simply “The Prophet,” is widely remembered for transforming a small temple into a nationwide movement with hundreds of thousands of devoted followers, culminating in an irrevocable effect on black culture and U.S. history.

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Crossing Racial Lines

Larsen was born Nellie Walker on April 13, 1891, in Chicago, Illinois, to immigrant parents. Her father, Peter Walker, was a black cook from the West Indies, and her mother, Mary Hanson, was a Danish seamstress. Soon after Larsen was born, her father disappeared. Her mother remarried a white man named Peter Larsen. Official marriage records and documents regarding the name change to Nella Larsen are nonexistent, leading some historians to believe that Peter Walker and Peter Larsen were the same man, and that the former had simply wanted to reinvent himself and become “White.” Larsen’s tendency throughout her life to invent stories and hold fast secrets only fed the mystery of her young life. Whatever the facts, when Larsen’s younger sister was born, Larsen herself was the only visibly black person in her nuclear family. This difficult dynamic was exacerbated by her claim that Peter Larsen was ashamed of his African American daughter.

Growing up in a white Chicago suburb, Larsen attended public schools until 1907 when at age 16, she enrolled at Fisk University’s Normal School in Nashville, Tennessee. The move to Nashville served to distance Larsen from her family, something she welcomed because of the shame she had been made to feel during her upbringing. Regarding being seen in public with her family, she said her racial ethnicity “might make it awkward for them, particularly my half-sister.” But Larsen was captivated by mixed race dynamics, which would become central themes in her novels, and after studying at Fisk for only one year, she moved to Denmark for the next four years, attempting to learn about that half of her ancestry. On her return to the United States, she studied to be a nurse in New York. After graduating from that program in 1915, Larsen briefly took a position with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, working as a head nurse.

In 1916, Larsen returned to New York where she worked as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital. After the chaos of the Spanish flu pandemic that struck the city in 1918 and 1919, she decided to become a librarian and was employed at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. Also in 1919, Larsen married the well-known physicist, Elmer Imes (he was the second African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics). A prominent member of Harlem’s elite class, Imes provided an entrée for Larsen to become acquainted with the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Walter White.

Though she and Imes were regular socialites, both in Harlem and in white intellectual circles in Greenwich Village, Larsen immersed herself in literature during her private time. She had a voracious appetite for books, as well as a newly focused passion for creating her own literature. Larsen wrote short stories and poems, and with the help of friends like Du Bois and White, began to publish her work. In 1926, she published several articles in the magazine for African American children, The Brownies’ Book. Under the nom de plume Allen Semi (Nella Imes in reverse), she continued to publish her articles and stories with some success. After publishing a short story titled “Correspondence” in the National Urban League’s literary publication, Opportunity, Larsen devoted herself full time to her budding literary career.

Fleeting Fame

In 1928, Larsen published her first novel, Quicksand, about the struggles and strife involved in being of mixed races in America. She also tackled themes of gender and sexuality, using an ironic and sophisticated approach that was both fresh and unique. Larsen was awarded the Harmon Foundation Bronze Medal for Literature and celebrated as one of the bright stars of the Harlem Renaissance. Just one year later in 1929, she published her second novel, Passing, which solidified her status as a significant literary voice. Passing was met by the critics with great acclaim, and her portrayals of the complexities of racial, sexual, and women’s issues are still considered pertinent and insightful today. On the strength of the book, Larsen became the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for literature. She traveled to Paris and Spain over the next six months, and worked on a third novel.

After publishing a story titled “Sanctuary” in 1930, plagiarism accusations were leveled at Larsen, with some suggesting too close a resemblance to a story published eight years earlier by Sheila Kaye-Smith. The original publishers of the Kaye-Smith story disagreed, and publicly stated their faith in Larsen’s work as being wholly original. But the shock of the accusation had a profound and paralyzing effect on her creative output. Coupled with a public and scandalous divorce involving Imes’ affair with a white woman, Larsen shrank from the limelight. She subsisted on alimony payments from Imes until he died in 1941, at which time she quietly resumed her nursing career. On March 30, 1964, Easter Sunday, Larsen died alone in her apartment in New York. Her body was discovered some time after that, and by then, most of her belongings were missing. Little more than two unfinished novel manuscripts had been left behind.

Larsen never published another word after the scandal involving “Sanctuary,” but her value to American literature is continually growing. Today, many critics consider her to be the greatest novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, and her work continues to be read nationally and internationally.

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An Expressive Family

Hopkins was born on August 13, 1859, in Portland, Maine. Her parents, Northrup Hopkins and Sarah Allen, were both artistic people with a passion for music and theater. Hopkins was born into the frantic, creative, and intellectual chaos that accompanied the Hopkins Colored Troubadours, a cadre of touring performers made up of her extended family. Attracted to plays, verse, and the written word, she proved her own mettle with a pen when at age 15, she won a prestigious essay contest sponsored by famed abolitionist writer and novelist William Wells Brown. Hopkins’ topic, considered ambitious for a teenaged writer, was The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedy.

By age 20, Hopkins was performing alongside her family, and the entire troupe was touting material she had written. Her first significant play, Peculiar Sam; or, The Underground Railroad, was taken through towns and communities throughout the northeastern United States. Hopkins earned good reviews as an actress and playwright, and for her lilting soprano voice during musical performances. Through her 20s and early 30s, she continued to perform and work on skits. She wrote another full-length play based on a Bible story entitled One Scene from the Drama of Early Days.

Despite the prolific nature of her life as a performer, the impoverished reality of such a career became increasingly difficult for Hopkins, especially as the needs of her aging mother increased. She learned the stenographer’s trade, and took up regular work and residence in Boston, Massachusetts. With her mind ever active, Hopkins continued to cast a critical eye on society—in particular on black and white relations—and to draft essays that delineated her ideas and observations. She also began to work on a novel that delved into personal and political tensions between the northern and southern United States. In 1900, she came into contact with the Colored Cooperative Publishing Company, a black-owned business that had created a journal for writing and discussing topics of interest to African Americans. Colored American Magazine eagerly accepted her nonfiction essays, and the Cooperative agreed to publish her novel as well.

Released in 1900, Hopkins’ novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South gained instant acclaim, as well as a certain amount of notoriety for her straightforward take on miscegenation and post-Civil War race relations. The novel was sent out as a gift to new subscribers of the magazine, and both the book and the periodical were rewarded with swelling popularity. Hopkins became a regular contributor to Colored American, and by 1901, she had taken a job with the publication as editor of its women’s department.

Triumph and Tribulation

Hopkins became an increasingly active member of the magazine’s staff over the next two years. Her contributions, which included a comprehensive series of biographies dubbed Famous Women of the Negro Race, followed the male counterpart to the series, and were so prolific that she sometimes was forced to omit her byline or use a pseudonym in order to avoid the appearance of having provided nearly all the content. Hopkins was named literary editor of Colored American in 1903. She took the charge seriously and solicited works by vibrant contemporary poets such as Benjamin Brawley, William Stanley Braithwaite, James Corrothers, and Angelina Weld Grimké.

In her own work, Hopkins was often compared to black novelist Charles Chestnutt, who tackled the politicized and tension-charged issue of interracial coupling and the resultant complexities with equal fervor. They both were part of an aggressive new vanguard of writers pushing material that did not become acceptable literary fashion for another 20 years. As Colored American skewed further toward her own literary sensibilities, Hopkins formed the Colored American League, a nationwide support group to bulwark the journal’s production and future goals. She toured the country in 1904, delivering speeches about the importance of a literary platform through which Blacks could understand their common experience.

But with the increasing popularity of more moderate views, such as those espoused by Tuskegee University founder Booker T. Washington, some Blacks felt that Hopkins was too political. Washington advocated a sense of shared community and mutual cooperation with Whites and with the U.S. government, whereas Hopkins and her peers were of the mind that fighting for their rights—whether in words or in deed—was the only way to secure them. When an associate of Washington’s purchased Colored American and brought in white investors, she resigned her post with the magazine.

For the next two years, Hopkins published frequently in another periodical, The Voice of the Negro. She started her own publishing company in 1905, but was unable to secure financial backing to print the kind of works she felt were important. For a time, Hopkins slipped into obscurity before suddenly initiating a magazine called New Era in 1916. Along with Walter Wallace, who also had worked for Colored American, she put out two ambitious issues before that effort also failed due to lack of funds. Hopkins returned to stenography in order to support herself, and took a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She never again appeared on the literary scene, and on August 13, 1930, she died in Cambridge.

Hopkins was a trail-blazing author and editor whose work, although popular, was never fully appreciated in its time. The authors and poets of the Harlem Renaissance who prospered in the 1920s, such as Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen, benefited from the stylistic doors she opened and the subjects her writings explored. In the 1980s, a number of her works was popularized by literary scholars, and her historical value was solidified. In 1988, the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers included Hopkins’ novels and short stories in its anthology in acknowledgement of their importance.

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A Natural Born Cartoonist

Harrington was born in New York City on February 14, 1912, the child of Herbert Harrington, a railroad porter, and the former Euzenie Turat, a recent immigrant from Austria-Hungary. Raised in an ethnically diverse neighborhood of the Bronx, Harrington’s childhood among a racially mixed family of limited means was challenging for himself and his four siblings. But from a very young age, he was an exceptional artist, and able to find solace by drawing satirical cartoons.

The New York public school system, recognizing Harrington’s artistic talent but blinded by racial stereotypes of the day, sent him to a Manhattan vocational high school designed to prepare students for a career in the textile industry. Harrington accepted the education, but kept his sights on cartooning and the flourishing black culture of the Harlem Renaissance. After finishing  his vocational training in 1931, he was able to enroll at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. There, he refined his skills as an artist under the school’s accomplished faculty and earned a modest living as an actor, puppeteer, set designer, and cartoonist.

In 1932, Harrington began selling political cartoons to Harlem newspapers, including the widely circulated and influential Amsterdam News. He also began attending classes at New York University and became close, lifelong friends with the artist Romare Bearden. The Amsterdam News put Harrington on staff in 1935, and began regular publication of a series. Harrington first called it “Dark Laughter,” but later changed it to “Bootsie” after its main character, an ordinary looking, somewhat corpulent resident of Harlem with a unique knack for revealing racial hypocrisy and irony wherever they were found. “Bootsie,” the first cartoon series by a black artist to break onto the national stage, cemented Harrington’s reputation.

During this period, Harrington increasingly associated himself with fellow left-wing and, in some cases, communist New York journalists. He continued to sell political cartoons, and took a position as art instructor in the Works Progress Administration, the Roosevelt administration program that employed thousands of artists during the Great Depression. Connections he made at the WPA led to his admission to the prestigious School of Fine Arts at Yale, where Harrington paid his tuition by continuing to sell cartoons and by waiting on tables. At Yale, Harrington won several awards for his art but also complained that many opportunities eluded him due to racism.

Harrington made an important connection in 1942 when Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., minister of the largest church in Harlem and future congressman, named him art editor of the new Harlem newspaper, People’s Voice. Harrington created a new comic strip for the Voice called “Live Gray.” The following year, he became war correspondent for Robert Lee Vann’s Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest African American newspapers in the country. In Europe, as a reporter and political cartoonist, Harrington covered black units such as the Tuskegee airmen. He also entered into the first of three marriages, this one barely outlasting the war.

After the war, Harrington was commissioned by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to help conduct a public relations campaign in support of returning black veterans, who, as a group, had been poorly treated. But Harrington’s politics were not in line with those of the NAACP. He had a falling out with the organization in 1947, and resumed his career as a political activist and cartoonist by reviving the “Bootsie” series for the Courier. In 1950, he was named art editor of Freedom, a left-wing newspaper founded by the singer Paul Robeson, and took a position as art instructor at New York’s Jefferson School of Social Sciences, a school with a prominent position on the long government list of purportedly subversive and communist organizations.

Exalted Expatriate

By 1952, it was clear to Harrington that he was walking straight into the teeth of the national crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy against left-wing activists. After he, himself, was questioned by the FBI over biting cartoons he had produced about the continued existence of lynching in the United States, and when one after another of his friends and associates was prosecuted or blacklisted, Harrington decided to leave the United States. Arriving in Paris, France, he became an important member of a community of expatriate black artists that included writers Richard Wright and Chester Himes, and supported himself, barely, by continuing to produce “Bootsie” for the Courier. Except for a second, equally brief marriage, and a short stint in England, Harrington remained in Paris until 1959 when he was honored with an invitation from the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil to serve as visiting artist. His acceptance, in the midst of the Cold War, did nothing for his political reputation in the United States.

Harrington entered the final phase of his life in 1961 when he left Paris for East Germany. There, he found a lasting marriage to Helma Richter, and an excellent position as journalist and cartoonist for communist state publications. Ironically, Harrington’s life and status on the other side of the Berlin Wall gave him the opportunity to travel extensively in the west, and in 1994, with the McCarthy era long over, he briefly returned to the United States as a visiting journalism professor at Michigan State University. After his death in Germany in 1995, Harrington was honored with the establishment of the Oliver Wendell Harrington Cartoon Art Collection at the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art in Savannah, Georgia.

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Famous Family

Grimké was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 27, 1880. Her mother, Sarah E. Stanley, was white and worked as a scholar and a homemaker. Grimké’s father, Archibald Henry Grimké, was a highly regarded attorney, diplomat, and scholar. Her parents had a turbulent and difficult relationship, in part due to the pressures of being a mixed-race couple, and they separated in 1883. Grimké’s mother moved to San Diego, California, and made a career as a lecturer on occult subjects, but had very little contact with her daughter after leaving Boston. Raised by her father in an environment that ranked education and social grace above all else, Grimké excelled academically and in public, but was privately haunted by the intense pressure she felt to succeed in his eyes.

Grimké’s attendance at some of the best schools available to African Americans amplified her sense of duty toward her family name. By the time she enrolled at the Boston Normal School, an institution that was eventually absorbed into Wellesley College, her father had already served as the American Consul to the Dominican Republic, and her fellow students were quite aware of the acclaim her great aunt, Angelina Emily Grimké, had earned as an activist for suffrage and abolitionist causes. Grimké retreated into her writing, quietly honing a poet’s voice as she sought to balance her sense of herself against her family’s significant presence and renown. She had published her first poem at age 13, and continued to be an avid writer.

After earning her degree, she moved to Washington, DC, where her uncle and aunt, Francis and Charlotte Forten Grimké, her aunt a notable educator and diarist, lived. Following her interest in education and mindful of her father’s wish that she become a respectable woman in society, Grimké took a job teaching physical education at a vocational school. Meanwhile, she continued to write. Her earliest notable poems, published in Boston and in Washington, DC, were pointedly activist in the realm of racial politics. Some critics feared that unflinching assaults on prejudice were enough to cause violence in the streets and incite Blacks to rise up in the face of oppression. But for all the excitement caused by her pen, Grimké remained personally introverted and dedicated to the quiet life of a teacher. During her summers, she took courses at Harvard, and in 1907, she became an English teacher at Washington’s M Street High School. Shortly afterward, Grimké began to publish love poems. She still lashed out against racism, but developed a more expansive public persona in which families and great loves were often torn apart by race issues.

Ascetic Restraint

When she suffered significant back injuries in a 1911 train crash, Grimké was further pushed into a sense of isolation. Always sheltered, her new physical handicap led her to spend increasing amounts of time at her writing desk, rather than risk the strain of leaving the house or entering the classroom. Soon after the accident, she began work on a three act play called Rachel, A Play of Protest. It chronicled the sad tale of African American women who choose to forgo having children in the face of a society that didn’t value Blacks. At the time, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was dedicated to promoting black culture through such programs as its Drama Committee. When the NAACP produced Grimké’s play in 1916, she became the first black woman to have a play staged in a public theater.

Notwithstanding Grimké’s commitment to her poetry, Rachel was a tremendous success, and the work earned her considerable acclaim. After follow-up stagings, it was published in 1920 and became a popular piece of theater. Around the same period, she also delved into short stories, publishing several investigations into notions of motherhood and femininity within a black culture that was subverted by Whites. It became common for readers and critics to assume that the reclusive Grimké, who never married or even engaged in public liaisons of any kind, was churning out representations of her own highly personal sense of persecution.

Although she was still relatively young, she retired from teaching in 1926, but remained in Washington, DC, where her father had also retired. His health was failing and she cared for him constantly until 1930. Her only notable forays into public events during these years were to attend literary salons hosted by poet Georgia Douglas Johnson. Grimké’s talents were much admired by the lauded poets and writers of the Harlem Renaissance including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, but she never fully engaged them or their efforts to have her become a more active member of the era’s black cultural community. Cullen did convince Grimké to be published in a 1927 anthology entitled Caroling Dusk, but even after her father died and she moved to New York in 1930, she kept to herself. In fact, she never again published and spent the remainder of her life in quiet isolation. Grimké died on June 10, 1958.

Compared to the spare amount of work that she allowed to be published during her life, Grimké left voluminous personal papers and unpublished works behind, including a play entitled Mara and a collection of poems called Dusk Dreams. The poems are such detailed works of love and passion that literary historians believe she was afraid to publish for fear of the scandal that might be cast on her family. Decades after her death and loss of public awareness, Grimké’s works returned to popularity. Despite her timid persona, she is now remembered as a lyrical and fearless chronicler of the personal and political dilemmas of her era.

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