Madam C. J. Walker

                                            Madam C. J. Walker

"I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself, for I am endeavoring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race. ... I want to say to every Negro woman present, don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them!"

"I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations....I have built my own factory on my own ground."

"I want you to understand that your first duty is to humanity. I want others to look at us and see that we care not just about ourselves but about others."

Sarah Breedlove December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919 , known as Madam C. J. Walker, was an African American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a political and social activist. Eulogized as the first female self-made millionaire in America, she became one of the wealthiest African American women in the country, "the world's most successful female entrepreneur of her time," and one of the most successful African-American business owners ever.

Walker made her fortune by developing and marketing a line of beauty and hair products for black women through Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the successful business she founded. Walker was also known for her philanthropy and activism. She made financial donations to numerous organizations and became a patron of the arts. Villa Lewaro, Walker’s lavish estate in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, served as a social gathering place for the African American community.

Sarah Breedlove–who later would come to be known as Madam C. J. Walker–was born on December 23, 1867 on the same Delta, Louisiana plantation where her parents, Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove, had been enslaved before the end of the Civil War.  This child of sharecroppers transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into one of the twentieth century’s most successful, self-made women entrepreneurs.

Orphaned at age seven, she often said, “I got my start by giving myself a start.” She and her older sister, Louvenia, survived by working in the cotton fields of Delta and nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi. At 14, she married Moses McWilliams to escape abuse from her cruel brother-in-law, Jesse Powell.

Her only daughter, Lelia (later known as A’Lelia Walker) was born on June 6, 1885. When her husband died two years later, she moved to St. Louis to join her four brothers who had established themselves as barbers. Working for as little as $1.50 a day, she managed to save enough money to educate her daughter in the city’s public schools. Friendships with other black women who were members of St. Paul A.M.E. Church and the National Association of Colored Women exposed her to a new way of viewing the world.

Initially, Sarah learned about hair care from her brothers, who were barbers in Saint Louis. Around the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World's Fair at St. Louis in 1904), she became a commission agent selling products for Annie Turnbo Malone, an African American hair-care entrepreneur and owner of the Poro Company. While working for Malone, who would later become Walker’s largest rival in the hair-care industry, Sarah began to adapt her knowledge of hair and hair products to develop her own product line.

In July 1905, when she was thirty-seven years old, Sarah and her daughter moved to Denver, Colorado, where she continued to sell products for Malone and develop her own hair-care business. Following her marriage to Charles Walker in 1906, she became known as Madam C. J. Walker and marketed herself as an independent hairdresser and retailer of cosmetic creams. (“Madam” was adopted from women pioneers of the French beauty industry.  Her husband, who was also her business partner, provided advice on advertising and promotion; Sarah sold her products door to door, teaching other black women how to groom and style their hair.

In 1906 Walker put her daughter in charge of the mail order operation in Denver while she and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern United States to expand the business. In 1908 Walker and her husband relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they opened a beauty parlor and established Lelia College to train "hair culturists." After closing the business in Denver in 1907, A'lelia ran the day-to-day operations from Pittsburgh, while Walker established a new base in Indianapolis in 1910. A'lelia also persuaded her mother to establish an office and beauty salon in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1913.

In 1910 Walker relocated her business to Indianapolis, where she established the headquarters for the Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. She initially purchased a house and factory at 640 North West Street. Walker later built a factory, hair salon, and beauty school to train her sales agents, and added a laboratory to help with research. She also assembled a competent staff that included Freeman Ransom, Robert Lee Brokenburr, Alice Kelly, and Marjorie Stewart Joyner, among others, to assist in managing the growing company.  Many of her company's employees, including those in key management and staff positions, were women.

In 1913, while Walker traveled to Central America and the Caribbean to expand her business, her daughter A’Lelia, moved into a fabulous new Harlem townhouse and Walker Salon, designed by black architect, Vertner Tandy. “There is nothing to equal it,” she wrote to her attorney, F.B. Ransom. “Not even on Fifth Avenue.”

Walker herself moved to New York in 1916, leaving the day-to-day operations of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis to Ransom and Alice Kelly, her factory forelady and a former school teacher. She continued to oversee the business and to work in the New York office. Once in Harlem, she quickly became involved in Harlem’s social and political life, taking special interest in the NAACP’s anti-lynching movement to which she contributed $5,000.                                                                                                                                      
In July 1917, when a white mob murdered more
than three dozen blacks in East St. Louis, Illinois, Walker joined a group of Harlem leaders who visited the White House to present a petition advocating federal anti-lynching legislation.

As her business continued to grow, Walker organized her agents into local and state clubs. Her Madam C. J. Walker Hair Culturists Union of America convention in Philadelphia in 1917 must have been one of the first national meetings of businesswomen in the country. Walker used the gathering not only to reward her agents for their business success, but to encourage their political activism as well. “This is the greatest country under the sun,” she told them. “But we must not let our love of country, our patriotic loyalty cause us to abate one whit in our protest against wrong and injustice. We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible.”

Between 1911 and 1919, during the height of her career, Walker and her company employed several thousand women as sales agents for its products. By 1917 the company claimed to have trained nearly 20,000 women. Dressed in a characteristic uniform of white shirts and black skirts and carrying black satchels, they visited houses around the United States and in the Caribbean offering Walker's hair pomade and other products packaged in tin containers carrying her image. Walker understood the power of advertising and brand awareness. Heavy advertising, primarily in African American newspapers and magazines, in addition to Walker's frequent travels to promote her products, helped make Walker and her products well known in the United States. Walker became even more widely known by the 1920s as her business market expanded beyond the United States to Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Panama, and Costa Rica.

In addition to training in sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how to budget, build their own businesses, and encouraged them to become financially independent. In 1917, inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, Walker began organizing her sales agents into state and local clubs. The result was the establishment of the National Beauty Culturists and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents (predecessor to the Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Culturists Union of America). Its first annual conference convened in Philadelphia during the summer of 1917 with 200 attendees. The conference is believed to have been among the first national gatherings of women entrepreneurs to discuss business and commerce.  During the convention Walker gave prizes to women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new sales agents. She also rewarded those who made the largest contributions to charities in their communities.

Walker contributed scholarship funds to the Tuskegee Institute. Other beneficiaries included Indianapolis's Flanner House and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church; Mary McLeod Bethune's Daytona Education and Industrial School for Negro Girls (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) in Daytona Beach, Florida; the Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina; and the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Georgia. Walker was also a patron of the arts.

In 1917 Walker commissioned Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black architect in New York City and a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, to design her house in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Walker intended for Villa Lewaro, which cost $250,000 to build, to become a gathering place for community leaders and to inspire other African Americans to pursue their dreams. She moved into the house in May 1918.

Walker became more involved in political matters after her move to New York. She delivered lectures on political, economic, and social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. Her friends and associates included Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. During World War I Walker was a leader in the Circle For Negro War Relief and advocated for the establishment of a training camp for black army officers.  In 1917 she joined the executive committee of New York chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which organized the Silent Protest Parade on New York City's Fifth Avenue. The public demonstration drew more than 8,000 African Americans to protest a riot in East Saint Louis that killed thirty-nine African Americans.

The New York Times pronounced it “a place fit for a fairy princess.” Enrico Caruso, the world-famous opera tenor, was so entranced by its similarity to estates in his native Naples that he coined the name “Lewaro” in honor of A’Lelia Walker Robinson, Madam Walker’s only daughter.

Walker told her friend Ida B. Wells, the journalist and anti-lynching activist, that after working so hard all her life -- first as a farm laborer, then as a maid and a cook, and finally as the founder of an international hair care enterprise -- she wanted a place to relax and garden and entertain her friends.

She also wanted to make a statement, so it was no accident that she purchased four and a half acres in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, not far from Jay Gould’s Lyndhurst and John D. Rockefeller’s Kykuit amidst America’s wealthiest families. She directed Vertner Woodson Tandy -- the architect who already had designed her opulent Harlem townhouse -- to position the 34-room mansion close to the village’s main thoroughfare so it was easily visible by travelers en route from Manhattan to Albany.

Indeed, the Times reported that her new neighbors were “puzzled” and “gasped in astonishment” when they learned that a black woman was the owner. “Impossible!” they exclaimed. “No woman of her race could afford such a place.”

The woman born in a dim Louisiana sharecropper’s cabin on the banks of the Mississippi River now awoke each morning in a sunny master suite with a view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. The child who had crawled on dirt floors now walked on carpets of Persian silk. The destitute laundress, who had lived across the alley from the St. Louis bar where Scott Joplin composed ragtime tunes, now hosted private concerts beneath shimmering chandeliers in her gold music room.

But the home was not constructed merely for her personal pleasure. Villa Lewaro, she hoped, would inspire young African-Americans to “do big things” and to see “what can be accomplished by thrift, industry and intelligent investment of money.”

“Do not fail to mention that the Irvington home, after my death, will be left to some cause that will be beneficial to the race -- a sort of monument,” she instructed her attorney, F. B. Ransom. As the largest contributor to the fund that saved Frederick Douglass’s Anacostia home, Cedar Hill, she understood the importance of preservation as a way to claim and influence history’s narrative.

For her opening gathering in August 1918, Madam Walker honored Emmett Scott, then the Special Assistant to the U. S. Secretary of War in Charge of Negro Affairs and the highest ranking African-American in the federal government. At this “conference of interest to the race” -- with its who’s who of black Americans and progressive whites -- she encouraged discussion and debate about civil rights, lynching, racial discrimination, and the status of black soldiers then serving in France during World War I.

After a weekend of conversation, collegiality, and music provided by J. Rosamond Johnson -- co-composer of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” -- and Joseph Douglass, master violinist and grandson of Frederick Douglass, Scott wrote to her, “No such assemblage has ever gathered at the private home of any representative of our race, I am sure.”

After Madam Walker died at Villa Lewaro on May 25, 1919 -- barely a year after moving in -- her daughter continued the tradition of hosting events, occasionally opening the home for public tours to honor Walker’s legacy. Later dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes because of her impressive soirees, A’Lelia Walker feted Liberian President Charles D. B. King and his entourage in 1921 with a Fourth of July fireworks display and concert by the Ford Dabney Orchestra.

       Black History Month Feature: Madam CJ Walker - The First Female Self-Made Millionaire


       Meet the First Self-Made Female Millionaire

Dr.Daniel Hale Williams III

                                            Dr.Daniel Hale Williams III

Biography.com Editors,and James Janega

Daniel Hale Williams III was born on January 18, 1856, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to Sarah Price Williams and Daniel Hale Williams II. The couple had several children, with the elder Daniel H. Williams inheriting a barber business. He also worked with the Equal Rights League, a black civil rights organization active during the Reconstruction era.

After the elder Williams died, a 10-year-old Daniel was sent to live in Baltimore, Maryland, with family friends. He became a shoemaker’s apprentice but disliked the work and decided to return to his family, who had moved to Illinois. Like his father, he took up barbering, but ultimately decided he wanted to pursue his education. He worked as an apprentice with Dr. Henry Palmer, a highly accomplished surgeon, and then completed further training at Chicago Medical College.

Williams set up his own practice in Chicago’s South Side and taught anatomy at his alma mater, also becoming the first African-American physician to work for the city’s street railway system. Williams—who was called Dr. Dan by patients— adopted sterilization procedures for his office informed by the recent findings on germ transmission and prevention from Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister.

Due to the discrimination of the day, African-American citizens were still barred from being admitted to hospitals and black doctors were refused staff positions. Firmly believing this needed to change, in May 1891, Williams opened Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the nation’s first hospital with a nursing and intern program that had a racially integrated staff. The facility, where Williams worked as a surgeon, was publicly championed by famed abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass.

The first successful open-heart surgery took place on Chicago’s South Side on July 9, 1893. The patient was James Cornish, a young man with a knife wound to the chest from a barroom brawl. The surgeon, was Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.
The surgery took place in Provident Hospital, the city’s first interracial hospital, which Williams helped to found. Both patient and surgeon were African-American.

Medical textbooks of the time said that operating on a human heart was too dangerous, and there was no precedent for opening the chest, longtime Tribune science and medical reporter Ronald Kotulak wrote more than a century later.

Despite lacking X-rays, antibiotics, adequate anesthesia or other tools of modern surgery, Williams stepped in.

“With a scalpel, he cut a small hole in Cornish’s chest,” Kotulak wrote, “carefully picking his way past nerves, muscle, blood vessels and ribs until he reached the rapidly beating heart. Exploring the wound, Williams found a severed artery. He closed it with sutures, but then discerned an inch-long gash in the pericardium, the tough sac that surrounds the heart. The heart itself had only been nicked and did not need sutures. But the damaged sac had to be closed. With Cornish’s heart beating 130 times a minute beneath his nimble fingers, Williams closed the wound with catgut.”

Cornish lived, and Williams went on to acclaim. In 1894, Williams was appointed chief surgeon at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington D.C.,The facility had fallen into neglect and had a high mortality rate. Williams worked diligently on revitalization, improving surgical procedures, increasing specialization, launching ambulance services and continuing to provide opportunities for black medical professionals, among other feats. In 1895, he co-founded the National Medical Association, a professional organization for black medical practitioners, as an alternative to the American Medical Association, which didn’t allow African-American membership.

Williams left Freedmen’s Hospital in 1898. He married Alice Johnson, and the newlyweds moved to Chicago, where Williams returned to his work at Provident. Soon after the turn of the century, he worked at Cook County Hospital and later at St. Luke’s, a large medical institution with ample resources.

Beginning in 1899, Williams also made annual trips to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was a voluntary visiting clinical professor at Meharry Medical College for more than two decades. He became a charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.

Daniel Hale Williams experienced a debilitating stroke in 1926 and died five years later, on August 4, 1931, in Idlewild, Michigan.

Today, Williams's work as a pioneering physician and advocate for an African-American presence in medicine continues to be honored by institutions worldwide.
 
                   Dr Daniel Hale Williams 300

Dr. Patricia Bath

From Wikipedia

Patricia Era Bath ,born November 4, 1942 in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. She is an American ophthalmologist, inventor and academic. She has broken ground for women and African Americans in a number of areas. Prior to Bath, no woman had served on the staff of the Jules Stein Eye Institute, headed a post-graduate training program in ophthalmology, or been elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center (an honor bestowed on her after her retirement). Before Bath, no black person had served as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University and no black woman had ever served on staff as a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center. Bath is the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose. The holder of four patents, she also founded the company of the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in Washington, D.C.

Dr.Bath is the daughter of Rupert and Gladys Bath. Her father, an immigrant from Trinidad, was a newspaper columnist, a merchant seaman and the first black man to work for the New York City Subway as a motorman. Her father inspired her love for culture and encouraged Bath to explore different cultures. Her mother descended from African slaves and Cherokee Native Americans. She decided to be a homemaker while her children were young, then later became a housekeeper to help fund for her children's educations. Raised in Harlem, Bath struggled with sexism, racism, and poverty though she was encouraged academically by her parents. It was evident by Bath's teachers that she was a gifted student and pushed her to explore her strengths in school. With the help of a microscope set she was given as a young child, Bath knew she had a love for math and science. Bath attended Charles Evans Hughes High School where she excelled at such a rapid pace causing her to get a diploma in just two and a half years.

Growing up,Dr.Bath always battled with sexism, racism and poverty. It was hard for her since there were no black physicians that she knew of while she was growing up. She grew up in a predominantly black community where blacks were not accepted into many medical schools. It was also not easy for her to go to medical school since her family did not have the funds for it.

Patricia Bath applied for and won a National Science Foundation Scholarship while attending high school; this led her to a research project at Yeshiva University and Harlem Hospital Center on connection between cancer, nutrition and stress which helped her interest in science shift to medicine. The head of the researched program realized the significance to her findings during the research and published them in a scientific paper that he later presented.  In 1960, still a teenager,Patricia Bath won the "Merit Award" of Mademoiselle magazine for her contribution to the project.

Dr.Bath received her Bachelor of Arts in chemistry from Manhattan's Hunter College in 1964.  She relocated to Washington, D.C. to attend Howard University College of Medicine, from which she received her doctoral degree in 1968. During her time at Howard, she was president of the Student National Medical Association and received fellowships from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Dr.Bath interned at Harlem Hospital Center, subsequently serving as a fellow at Columbia University.  Bath traveled to Yugoslavia in 1967 to study children's health which caused her to become aware that the practice of eye care was uneven among racial minorities and poor populations, with much higher incidence of blindness among her black and poor patients.  She determined that, as a physician, she would help address this issue. She persuaded her professors from Columbia to operate on blind patients at Harlem Hospital Center, which had not previously offered eye surgery, at no cost.  Bath pioneered the worldwide discipline of "community ophthalmology", a volunteer-based outreach to bring necessary eye care to underserved populations.

She served her residency in ophthalmology at New York University from 1970 to 1973, the first African American to do so in her field.

After completing her education, Bath served briefly as an assistant professor at Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science before becoming the first woman on faculty at the Eye Institute.  In 1978, Bath co-founded the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, for which she served as president. In 1983, she became the head of a residency in her field at Charles R. Drew, the first woman ever to head such a department. In 1993, she retired from UCLA, which subsequently elected her the first woman on its honorary staff.

She served as a professor of Ophthalmology at Howard University's School of Medicine and as a professor of Telemedicine and Ophthalmology at St. Georges University.  She was among the co-founders of the King-Drew Medical Center ophthalmology training program.

 Dr. Patricia Bath has lectured internationally and authored over 100 papers.

Dr.Bath holds four patents in the United States. In 1981, she conceived the Laserphaco Probe, a medical device that improves on the use of lasers to remove cataracts, and "for ablating and removing cataract lenses". The device was completed in 1986 after Bath conducted research on lasers in Berlin and patented in 1988, making her the first African-American female doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose.  The device — which quickly and nearly painlessly dissolves the cataract with a laser, irrigates and cleans the eye and permits the easy insertion of a new lens — is used internationally to treat the disease. Bath has continued to improve the device and has successfully restored vision to people who have been unable to see for decades.

Three of Dr.Bath's four patents relate to the Laserphaco Probe. In 2000, she was granted a patent for a method she devised for using ultrasound technology to treat cataracts.


    Women's History Month - Patricia Bath


    Dr. Bath Describes Laserphaco Invention at 1987 ASCRS Convention

Coretta Scott King

                                        Coretta Scott King
"As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder."

Coretta Scott King was more than just the wife of a legend, she was a singer, an organizer and an activist in her own right, pledging her support to nonviolence, tolerance and equality for all races, genders and classes. The widow of one of the most influential leaders in the world, Coretta Scott King provided Martin Luther King, Jr. with what he called the ‘‘love, sacrifices, and loyalty [without which] neither life nor work would bring fulfillment’’ (King, Stride 11). An activist in her own right, Coretta King made numerous contributions to the struggle for social justice and human rights throughout her life.

Coretta Scott was born on 27 April 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Her parents, Obadiah ‘‘Obie’’ Scott and Bernice McMurray Scott, were farm owners committed to ensuring that their children received the best education possible. Scott attended the private Lincoln High School in Marion, where she developed her interest in music. There she took formal vocal lessons, learned to read music, and played several instruments. By the age of 15, she had become the choir director and pianist of her church’s junior choir.  Growing up in rural Alabama, Coretta saw discrimination everywhere, from the segregated movie theaters to the school buses only white children could ride.

Like most families of the Depression Era, the Scotts struggled. Coretta, her brother and sister picked cotton to help with the finances. But her parents were resourceful. She told the Academy of Achievement, “My mother always told me that I was going to go to college, even if she didn’t have but one dress to put on.”

Coretta graduated first in her class at Lincoln High School.  Scott won a partial scholarship to Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the same university her sister Edythe had attended as the first African American student. While at Antioch, Scott studied voice and music education. She also became a member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as well as the Race Relations and Civil Liberties Committees. In an article, ‘‘Why I Came to College,’’ published in Opportunity in 1948, Scott wrote that college graduates, ‘‘had greater freedom of movement: they went on trips; they visited cities; they knew more about the world’’. She later credited Antioch with preparing her for her role in the civil rights movement, stating that ‘‘the college’s emphasis on service to mankind reinforced the Christian spirit of giving and sharing’’ and provided ‘‘a new self-assurance that encouraged me in competition with all people’’.

In 1951, Scott enrolled in Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music with a grant from the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. In early 1952, her friend Mary Powell introduced her to King, then a doctoral candidate at Boston University’s School of Theology. While initially wary of dating a Baptist minister, she was impressed by his sophistication and intellect and recalled King telling her: ‘‘You have everything I have ever wanted in a wife’’  King wooed her saying, “The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all.”

Having decided to become a concert singer, Scott was reluctant to give up her career to be a preacher’s wife, but King proposed. Six months later she accepted. When they married in 1953, the future Mrs. King asked King’s father, also a reverend, to strike the word “obey” from her vows; though taken aback, he conceded.The two were married at the Scott family home near Marion on 18 June 1953. After the wedding, they returned to Boston to complete their degrees. Coretta Scott King earned her bachelor of music degree in June 1954.

Although Coretta Scott King was focused on raising the couple’s four children
, she continued to play a critical role in many of the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, performing in freedom concerts that included poetry recitation, singing, and lectures related to the history of the civil rights movement. The proceeds from these concerts were donated to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

After Dr.King’s assassination on 4 April 1968, Coretta Scott King devoted much of her life to spreading her husband’s philosophy of nonviolence. Just days after his death, she led a march on behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Later that month, she stood in for her husband at an anti–Vietnam War rally in New York. In May 1968, she helped to launch the Poor People’s Campaign, and thereafter participated in numerous anti-poverty efforts.

With a deep commitment to preserving Dr.King’s legacy, almost immediately Coretta Scott King began mobilizing support for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. As founding president of the King Center, she guided its construction next to Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr.King had served as co-pastor with his father, Martin Luther King, Sr.

During the 1980’s, Coretta Scott King reaffirmed her long-standing opposition to South African apartheid, participating in a series of sit-in protests in Washington,DC that prompted nationwide demonstrations against South African racial policies. In 1986, she traveled to South Africa and met with Winnie Mandela. She also remained active in various women’s organizations, including the National Organization for Women, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and United Church Women.




        Coretta Scott King Sings - There Is A Balm In Gilead

Coretta Scott King Sings There Is A Balm In Gilead at The Funeral of The Four Little Girls Church Bombing in Birmingham AL

                      King Coretta Scott MasterEdit 1

Robert Frederick Smith

From Wikipedia

Robert Frederick Smith was born December 1, 1962, he is an American investor. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, an investment firm with over $26 billion in assets as of September 2016. Smith was ranked by Forbes in 2016 as the 274th richest person in America, the second wealthiest African American on the list after Oprah Winfrey.  He was #688 on Forbes 2016 list of the world's billionaires, with a net worth of US$2.5 billion.

Robert F. Smith was born to two parents with PhDs, who were school teachers. He grew up in a mostly African American, middle class neighborhood in Denver, and attended a newly-integrated school.

When he was an infant, his mother carried him at the March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

In high school, he applied for an internship at Bell Labs but was told the program was intended for college students. Smith persisted, calling every day. When a student from M.I.T. did not show up, he got the position, and that summer he developed a reliability test for semiconductors.

Smith trained as a chemical engineer at Cornell University, earning his B.S. in Chemical Engineering.  At Cornell he was a brother of Alpha Phi Alpha.

After working at Kraft General Foods, where he earned two United States and two European patents, he attended Columbia Business School. Smith graduated with honors. From 1994–2000, he joined Goldman Sachs in tech investment banking, first in New York and then in Silicon Valley. As Co-Head of Enterprise Systems and Storage, he executed and advised on over $50B in merger and acquisition activity with companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, eBay and Yahoo. He was the first person at Goldman Sachs to focus solely on Tech M&A and foreign countries .

In 2000, Smith founded Vista Equity Partners, of which he is the Founder, Chairman and CEO. Vista has exclusively focused on the enterprise software, data and technology enabled solutions sectors. Among Vista’s portfolio companies are Misys, TIBCO, Solera, Active Network, Bullhorn, Omnitracs, and Newscyle.

Robert F. Smith is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners.   As Vista’s Chairman and CEO, Mr. Smith directs Vista’s investment strategy and decisions, firm governance and investor relations.

Vista currently manages cumulative capital commitments of over $26 billion and oversees a portfolio of over 35 software companies that employ approximately 42,000 employees worldwide. Since Vista’s founding in 2000, Mr. Smith has overseen over 240 completed transactions by the firm.  During that time, Vista has managed capital for hundreds of limited partners, including many prominent public, private and corporate pension plans, endowments, family offices, and high net worth individuals.

Under Robert Smith’s leadership, Vista has exclusively focused on the enterprise software, data and technology enabled solutions sectors. Mr. Smith is a member of the investment committees of the Firm's funds and currently serves on, or participates on, the boards of many of the Vista Flagship and Foundation Funds' portfolio companies.

In January 2015, based on its performance over the last 10 years, Vista Equity Partners was named the world’s #1 performing private equity firm, according to the HEC-Dow Jones annual ranking conducted by professor Oliver Gottschalg. Preqin, a consulting firm that tracks the industry, reports that Vista’s third fund returned $2.46 for every dollar invested, better than every other big fund raised between 2006 and 2010, the boom years for private equity.

Mr. Smith’s business achievements and global philanthropic works have received recognition from numerous entities - including the Reginald F. Lewis Achievement Award, the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the Robert Toigo Foundation, the Ripple of Hope Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, the Award of Excellence from the National Association of Investment Companies, and the Columbia University BBSA Distinguished Alumni Award.

Mr. Smith is the Chairman of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, Member of the Cornell Engineering College Council, and a Trustee of the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Francisco. Mr. Smith is a Board Member of Carnegie Hall. He is also an avid fly fisherman.

In October 2014, Vista closed its Fund V at $5.8 billion, its largest fund to date.

In July 2015, Smith married Hope Dworaczyk, a former Playboy Playmate, model, healthy living advocate, and fashion editor.  He has five children, three from a previous marriage and two with Dworaczyk.  Their first child, Hendrix Robert Smith, was born in December 2014. Smith resides in Austin, Texas.

      Robert F Smith at Youth Symposium 2016 HD


      Robert Smith, Vista Equity Partners, at 2015 Color of Wealth Summit

Ophelia Devore

By Maureen McGavin,Bob Hufford,others:

In 1946 model and entrepreneur Ophelia Devore started Grace Del Marco, the first model agency in America to focus on ethnic talent. Devore identified and nurtured the careers of several household names, including Diahann Carroll, Richard Roundtree (Shaft), and Cicely Tyson.

Ophelia DeVore Mitchell, a model, businesswoman and pioneer in the "black is beautiful" movement, DeVore exemplified power, pride, presence and beauty in African American women. A former model and longtime business executive, she started one of the first modeling agencies for black models, which helped launch the early careers of actresses Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson, among other celebrities.

DeVore also opened a charm school for young black women to learn etiquette, self-presentation and confidence; launched a cosmetics company catering to African American women, and took over the Columbus Times, a daily newspaper for the African American community in Columbus, Ga..She was appointed by President Reagan to the John F. Kennedy Center Committee on the Arts in 1985 and has been involved in many community programs throughout her career.

One of the first mixed-race models in the United States, Emma Ophelia DeVore was born in Edgefield, S.C., in 1922, to parents of German, French, Native American and African American heritage. She was raised in coastal South Carolina and received training in dance, art, and music in addition to her basic education. In 1933, DeVore was sent to New York City to live with her aunt and complete her education. she graduated from Hunter College High School and earned a degree in mathematics and languages from New York University. She enrolled in the Vogue School of Modeling, and not until another black girl was rejected did she realize that the school management thought her a dark-skinned white.

Finding her opportunities limited in America, at least until "Ebony" magazine was founded in 1945, she journeyed to Europe where she received numerous assignments, especially in France, though again she sometimes 'passed' as Norwegian. Realizing that there were few avenues for her, and none at all for dark-skinned blacks

In 1946, she and four friends co-founded Grace del Marco Models; in addition to Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson, the agency represented such notable figures as Richard Roundtree ("Shaft"), Gail Fisher ("Mannix"); Trudy Haynes, one of the first African American female TV reporters; and Helen Williams, one of the first successful African American models. The agency sought to encourage the media to portray African Americans in non-stereotypical ways.

DeVore took on mainstream publications, advertisers and other agencies who avoided hiring African American models, and she was a tough businesswoman proud of her accomplishments. She once sued Life Magazine after it published a story in 1969 on black models for which she was interviewed; the resulting article cited white-owned agencies instead.

Over the years she hosted ABC's "Spotlight on Harlem", sponsored the first black beauty pageants, wrote columns for "The Pittsburgh Courrier" and for the National Newspaper Publisher's Association, and had her own "Ophelia DeVore Show" on cable television.

The Ophelia DeVore School of Charm, which opened in 1948, offered social training for African American young women. It provided lessons in etiquette, poise and posture, ballet, speech, and self-presentation (including grooming lessons in hair styling, applying makeup, and dressing in flattering clothes). Hip-hop artist Faith Evans, widow of the Notorious B.I.G., is one of many notable graduates.

The school, which closed in 2006, reached its peak between the 1960s and the 1990s, and at times graduated about 100 students in a class, says James D. Carter, DeVore's son, who took over the charm school for a number of years and ran other aspects of various DeVore businesses.

DeVore had five children with her first husband, Harold Carter, whom she married in 1941. She married her second husband, Columbus Times publisher Vernon Mitchell, in 1968. When he passed away in 1972, she took the newspaper's helm as its owner, with her daughter, Carol Gertjegerdes, as co-publisher and executive editor.

       Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell: A Modeling Career


        The Official Tony Brown's Journal -- Ophelia DeVore

The Real Lone Ranger

                  Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves

Over his 32-year career as a Deputy U.S. Marshal, Bass Reeves arrested 3,000 felons, killed 14 men, and was never shot himself. His reputation for persistence, his total fearlessness, his skills with a gun, and his ability to outsmart outlaws struck terror into lawbreakers in what we now call Oklahoma. Although other colorful characters made their way into our pop culture, Bass was the real badass of the Old West.

         Legends lies the real west Season 1 Episode 9 the real lone ranger bass reeves1


Bass Reeves was a former slave-turned-lawman who served with the US Marshals Service for 32 years at the turn of the 20th century in part of eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas known as Indian Territory. Though he was illiterate, Reeves became an expert tracker and detective – a man who, in Burton’s words, “walked in the valley of death every day for 35 years and brought in some of the worst outlaws from that period”.

Bass Reeves was born a slave in Arkansas in 1838. His slavemaster, William S. Reeves, moved the household to Texas in 1846. When the Civil War broke out, William Reeves' son George was made a colonel in the Confederate army and took Bass to war with him. At the most opportune moment, Reeves escaped while George was sleeping and took off out west for Indian Territory. Accounts vary on whether Bass beat up George as he left, and whether his immediate aim was freedom or to escape punishment over a card game dispute. In any case, Reeves went to live among the Creek and Seminole Indians. He learned their customs and languages and became a proficient territorial scout. Reeves eventually procured a homestead in Van Buren, Arkansas, where he was the first black settler. He married Nellie Jennie, built an eight-room house with his bare hands, and raised ten children—five girls and five boys. Life was good, but it was about to change for Bass Reeves.

For ten years, he was just a peaceful farmer with a wife and ten children.  (Five boys and five girls.)  But in 1875, Isaac C. Parker was appointed federal judge for the Indian Territory, and he appointed, in turn, James Fagin as head U.S, Marshal.  Fagin knew Reeves by reputation -- knew he was intimate with the Indian Territory and could speak a number of Indian languages -- and Bass Reeves became the first black Deputy U.S. Marshal west of the Mississippi.

Indian Territory was where the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw tribes who were forcibly removed from their homes were resettled following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. But they weren't the only citizens of Indian Territory. There were also former slaves of the tribes, freed and made tribal members after the Civil War, settlers from the East (both black and white) who sharecropped tribal property, and a good measure of outlaws fleeing from civilization. Indian territory was attractive to lawbreakers because of its peculiar judiciary arrangement: The tribal courts had jurisdiction only over tribal members. Non-Indians were under the jurisdiction of federal courts, but there were few marshals to supervise a very large area.

Reeves was 38 years old at the time, 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighed 180 pounds, and rode a large horse. He cut an imposing figure as he patrolled the 75,000 square miles of Indian Territory. He quickly gained a reputation as a tough and fearless lawman who managed to bring in outlaws thought to be invincible. Reeves traveled the long circuit with a wagon, cook, and often a posse. He carried chains to secure prisoners to the wagon, as he sometimes had a dozen or more by the time he returned to Ft. Smith, where Judge Parker held court.

Reeves was so quick with a pistol he was likened to a “Methodist preacher reaching for a platter of fried chicken during Sunday dinner at the deacon’s house.” Another story had Reeves using “superhuman strength” to free a steer that had become stuck in a bog, despite failed attempts by a group of cowboys to help the animal. One book about Reeves had it that his hat and clothes were riddled with bullets, his horses killed, his gunbelt shot off his body – but “miraculously, he was never wounded”.

Reeves approached the three murderous Brunter brothers and handed them a warrant for their arrest. The three outlaws laughed and read the warrant, and in the split second they all took their eyes off Reeves, he managed to draw his gun and kill two of them, and immediately disarmed and arrested the third.

In 1889, after Reeves was assigned to Paris, Texas, he went after the Tom Story gang for their long-term horse theft operation. He waited along the route Tom Story used, and surprised him with an arrest warrant. Story panicked and drew his gun, but Reeves drew and shot him dead before Story could fire. The rest of the gang disbanded and were never heard from again.

Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and Reeves' commission as marshal ended. He was 68 years old by then, but took on another position with the Muskogee Police Department, which he kept until his health began to fail. Reeves died of Bright's disease in 1910. In his 32 years as a Deputy U.S. Marshal, Reeves had seen bullets fly through his clothing and hat, but was never injured by an outlaw. His record of 3,000 arrests dwarfs the arrest records of better known Old West lawmen such as Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Wild Bill Hickok.

                                The life story of Bass Reeves


        Bass Reeves film - Lawless


       A Deputy US Marshal Must Arrest His Own Son


       Legends and Lies The Real West s01e09 Bass Reeves - TV show


       Marshal Bass Reeves

New Bern Freedom Fighter

                             New Bern Freedom Fighter

"But in the country of the Declaration of Independence, I was born a slave, for I was a black man. And because I was black it was believed I had no soul. I had no rights that anybody was bound to respect. For in the eyes of the law I was but a thing. I was bought and sold. I was whipped. Once I was whipped simply because it was thought I had opened a book. But I lived to see the institution of slavery into which I was born and of which I was for many years a victim pass away."
  — William Henry Singleton, former slave from New Bern, N.C

                         Boy Runaway


William Henry Singleton was born August 10, 1843 on a plantation near New Bern, North Carolina.His father was a white man, William Singleton of New Bern,His mother was a black slave named Lettice Nelson. As Singleton later wrote in his memoir, "My presence on the plantation was continually reminding them of something they wanted to forget." It caused a quarrel between the brothers.   Because John Singleton was embarrassed by his mixed-race slave nephew,  And when he is 4 years old, a man shows up, offers him a stick of candy, and then simply takes him south to Atlanta. His new owner, a widow, operates an entrepreneurial “slave farm” — buying child slaves, training them, and selling them for a profit. She had a "slave farm," where she trained slaves for domestic service . After one whipping too many for dawdling, he determines to run away home . Determined to rejoin his mother.

Fortunately, the first person he encounters on the streets of Atlanta, an elderly black gentleman, sets him on the road to New Bern. He admonishes Singleton, “But don’t tell anybody your name.”

The boy is clever and daring. When he spies a white woman holding a carpetbag, he politely takes the bag from her and carries it to the stagecoach. The driver assumes he is the woman’s servant, so he lets Singleton board. In this manner he makes it as far as Wilmington, the lady’s destination. She has figured out he is a runaway, but she doesn’t divulge his secret.

Singleton walks most of the 95 miles to New Bern, catching an occasional ride on a farmer’s wagon. Then he hikes 40 miles farther on dirt tracks to the Nelson plantation. He knocks on the first cabin door he comes to.

The woman who answers says, “What do you want, little boy?”

Singleton announces, “I am looking for my mother.”

Neither recognizes the other, until Singleton’s older brother Hardy appears and pronounces, “Mamma, that’s Henry.” His mother hid him for three years; he would hide under the floorboards to escape notice.

After the overseer Nelson discovered the boy, he sold William away from the plantation again. Singleton was held for a time by a Mrs. Wheeler, who he said was kindly. But, hearing that she intended to sell him, he escaped to New Bern and found work for a time as a bellhop at the Gaston House Hotel. Finally the boy returned to the Singleton plantation. His master (and paternal uncle) agreed to keep him and have him work in the fields.  Singleton's determination and resourcefulness in order to rejoin his mother were characteristics he drew from all his life.

Nelson’s nephew, Samuel Hyman, enlists in the 1st North Carolina Cavalry, and Singleton volunteers to accompany him as his manservant. Singleton is already keen to learn the ways of a soldier, for he has visions of fighting for his freedom. He becomes so adept at soldiering that he is often called upon to drill the Confederate company in his master’s stead.

After the Civil War broke out, at age 26, Singleton gained permission to drill with the First North Carolina Cavalry, recruited by Samuel Hyman of Craven County, a West Point graduate. The company was stationed at New Bern until March 14, 1862. The Union generals Ambrose Burnside and John G. Foster captured New Bern and drove the Confederates back to Kinston.

With the First North Carolina Cavalry in disarray, Singleton escaped and fled to New Bern. He secured an audience with General Burnside’s secretary and volunteered as a guide and informant. The Union victory attracted many escaped slaves to the city, and the Army set up a contraband camp nearby to house them. Some were joined by their families, stretching resources. The Union Army quickly organized to start schools for children and adults, and put the adults to work. In New Bern, Singleton helped raise a regiment of 1000 freed slaves, as many men wanted to fight for the Union.

Ten thousand slaves reached the town following the Union occupation. The Union established the Trent River contraband camp to house them and their families. The Army appointed Horace James (James City), a Congregational chaplain from Massachusetts, as the "Superintendent of Negro Affairs for the North Carolina District."  He directed operations at the contraband camp, setting up classes for former slaves as well as organizing work details. He also managed development at the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island.

Singleton helped organized the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers. He served as the group's unofficial colonel. Time and again, Singleton implores Gen. Ambrose Burnside, in command of the New Bern district, to allow his men to fight. Burnside has no authority to raise colored troops, he explains. But working at headquarters one day, Singleton has one of the most memorable encounters of his life. The adjutant indicates a man conferring with Burnside in the next room. “Do you know that man in there?”

“No,” Singleton replies.

“That is our President, Mr. Lincoln.”

When the president and Burnside emerge, the general points at Singleton and says, “This is the little fellow who got up a colored regiment.”

Lincoln shakes Singleton’s hand. “It is a good thing. What do you want?”

“I have a thousand men,” Singleton answers. “We want to help fight to free our race. We want to know if you will take us in the service?”

“You have got good pluck,” Lincoln says. “But I can’t take you now because you are contraband of war and not American citizens yet. But hold on to your society and there may be a chance for you.”

It’s the first and last time Singleton will ever lay eyes on the “tall, dark complexioned, raw boned man, with a pleasant face.”

When it came time for action, the unit was assigned white officers, as were all the colored units. The US Army trained and armed the men and shipped the regiment to South Carolina, where they participated in the siege of Charleston.

When President Abraham Lincoln approved the use of blacks as armed troops for the Union Army, Singleton’s recruits in February 1864 were designated part of the 35th United States Colored Troops (USCT). This unit included freedmen who had escaped from Virginia. Singleton was promoted to sergeant.

In 1864, the 35th USCT were sent to Florida as part of a campaign to be led by Brigadier General Truman Seymour. The 35th USCT participated in the Battle of Olustee on February 20, 1864. They were commanded by Lt. Colonel William Reed and Major Archibald Bogle. The Union forces gave way before a Confederate ambush, and the 35th USCT and 54th Massachusetts lost more than 200 men while helping defend the Union line of retreat. Seymour was severely criticized by the Northern press for his losses in the battle.

In April following this conflict and the Battle of Port Hudson, President Lincoln said,
   
     "There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the  black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & eternity for doing so." -         April19, 1864

Wounded at Olustee, Singleton was assigned to a 35th garrison in South Carolina. The state was occupied by Union troops through the remainder of the war. Others of the 35th USCT were assigned to Florida. He was honorably discharged on June 1, 1866.

African American Troops Organize in New Bern, NC 1863

        African American Troops Organize in New Bern, NC 1863

by Hari Jones,Richard Sauers,and others

After the fierce confrontation on March 14, 1862, the Union Army chose the North Carolina city of New Bern (or Newbern), first settled by Swiss and German immigrants in 1710, as its base of operations in the region. Thousands of escaped slaves congregated in New Bern and the surrounding area, making it a symbol of emancipation and key recruiting ground for the U.S. Colored Troops.

Just over 50 percent of the New Bern population of approximately 5,400 was African American, with just over 700 of those individuals being free persons of color. According to a census conducted by Vincent Colyer, who was appointed “superintendent of the poor” by General Burnside in March 1862, there were 10,000 African American refugees in the Department of North Carolina, with 7,500 in New Bern and its surrounding area. This number would continue to increase for the duration of the war.

Most whites fled the town as the Yankees moved in. Those who remained were loyalists or those who didn’t care one way or the other, and only wanted to maintain a living. Soon after the Federal occupation, hundreds of contraband slaves began to congregate in the area, changing the demographic composition of New Bern. In New Bern,General Burnside also found a very friendly African American community eager to provide information on Confederate activities. Also, one of the leading citizens of New Bern, Edward Stanly, was a Unionist who became the provisional governor of North Carolina in 1862.

One Union soldier referred to it as a “Mecca of freedom.” It also became a headquarters for covert activities being conducted by African American scouts, spies and spy handlers. After General Benjamin Butler gave “fugitives” refuge at Fortress Monroe in May 1861 and the influx of refugees on Roanoke Island in February 1862, Burnside was aware of the likelihood that he would get a substantial number of refugees, especially since he had the reputation of dealing with them fairly. He appointed Vincent Colyer to attend to such affairs soon after occupation began.

Newbern was a Mecca for escaped slaves. The Union command did not anticipate such heavy contraband escapees and was initially unprepared for it. Military governor Edward Stanly tried to enforce state law regarding slaves and came into conflict with abolitionist soldiers and officers, as well as a major conflict with Vincent Colyer, which caused a political uproar in Washington, D.C. Eventually, Union aid societies assisted the freedmen in learning to read and write, and created James City to house the freedmen.

The Union Army was able to hire a work force that performed critical combat service support tasks, such as building fortifications and unloading supplies from ships. African Americans who would become soldiers and laborers learned to read and write in New Bern’s Freedmen School, which was established in April 1862. Also, African American artisans were very successful in the city working privately and for the government. These African Americans combined with the free population that had lived and prospered in the city prior to occupation would make New Bern an important commercial and cultural center for free and freed persons of color in North Carolina.

Thousands of freedmen joined the Union Army and Navy. The 1st North Carolina Colored Infantry (35th U.S. Colored Infantry) was first organized in the spring of 1862 in New Bern by William H. Singleton, a runaway teenager from Craven County who had initially volunteered to be a manservant for a Confederate captain.Recruiting for the African Brigade is progressing lively and enthusiastically," wrote Corporal Z. T. Haines, of the Forty-fourth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, in late May 1863. "Quite a recruiting fever has seized the freedmen of Newbern. ...Four thousand colored soldiers are counted upon in this department."  At almost the same time another soldier, William P. Derby of the Twenty-seventh Massachusetts Volunteers, recorded the excitement within the city's black population. "One can hardly forget the enthusiasm amongst the negroes of this place, placards being posted around the city, calling for four thousand men for 'Wild's colored Brigade.' Street processions of the most motley character were the order of the day."

However, the regiment was not mustered into Federal service until June 1863. Singleton and other U.S. Colored soldiers recruited out of New Bern, like Furney Bryant, were outstanding guides, scouts and spies. The most successful Union generals would learn from the Union experience in North Carolina that African American soldiers with knowledge of the local terrain made outstanding guides, scouts, spies and raiders. General Grant would call the African American soldier a “powerful ally,” and a regiment credited to the state of North Carolina, the 36th USCI (originally the 2nd North Carolina Colored Infantry), was among the first Union troops to enter Richmond.

On June 30, 1863, the 35th United States Colored Troops regiment officially mustered in New Bern.

The organizing and recruiting of North Carolina’s African American troops had already been underway for nine months. In July 1862, Congress issued a Second Confiscation and Militia Act. The act allowed President Abraham Lincoln to use as many African Americans as he deemed necessary to suppress the South, and to use them in whatever way he thought best to accomplish that end.

The use and treatment of African Americans varied, and men were frequently assigned fatigue duty rather than combat. However, Lincoln did authorize African Americans to assume combat roles in the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

That May, General Orders No. 143 established a Bureau of Colored Troops and all future regiments would be designated as United States Colored Troops.

North Carolina units began organization under the Corps D’Afrique designations and as state-named regiments, but entered into service under United States Colored Troops designations.

Combined with the Trent River Settlement, renamed James City, the New Bern area remained an important symbol of emancipation and a model for rehabilitation and/or assimilation into a free society. Chaplain Horace James, for whom James City is named, assumed responsibility for the freedmen in the area in 1863 and became the superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in North Carolina. His experience in New Bern would influence his activities throughout the state. African American artisans and businessmen of New Bern became leading citizens beyond Reconstruction. The African American community in New Bern became very active in self-governance until the rise of the “white supremacist” movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. New Bern and the rest of North Carolina would subsequently fall victim to racial hatred and discrimination.

Edmonia Lewis

(Mary) Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis (1843-1911) stands out for her courage and willingness to live a life defined by her own sense of agency and independence. Despite her mixed racial/ethnic heritage, she is considered one of a few African-American artists to develop a fan base that crossed racial, ethnic and national boundaries

     The Life and Death of Edmonia Lewis, Spinster and Sculptor

By Talia Lavin

On the green, cross-studded grounds of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery, in London, grave C350 is covered with a moss-pocked slab of stone bare of any writing. The granite rectangle is nearly flush with the earth. Parish records confirm that underneath it lie the bones of Edmonia Lewis, American sculptor, who was buried there for a fee of five pounds and fifty-two pence in 1907.

Lewis in her lifetime was an enigmatic, singular figure, a maker of art in pristine marble. Though highly educated, she allowed the contemporary press to portray her as a naïf savant; though black and female, she succeeded in exhibiting her sculpture alongside the upper crust on both sides of the Atlantic.

“No matter what frame you put around her, she was unique and succeeded against the odds,” Karen Lemmey, curator of sculpture at the Smithsonian Museum, which owns several pieces of Lewis’s work, said. “But there’s this kind of vagueness to the details of her life.”

Born in obscurity in upstate New York, Lewis was celebrated for her work, and surrounded by a mythos partially of her own making, until fading back into obscurity. Tantalizing hints of her life, along with her tableaux in marble, survive her—and have inspired researchers to dedicate years to unearthing the mysteries that remain.

Perhaps chief among Lewis scholars is Marilyn Richardson, 72, a retired professor. Richardson began researching Lewis in the 1980s, and has pursued the elusive artist for half a lifetime – from Boston to Rome, London and beyond.

“She was supposedly raised in the wilds of upstate New York by a renegade band of Ojibwe Indians, but somehow ended up at Oberlin College,” Richardson told me. Lewis saw Robert Gould Shaw march with the all-black 54th Regiment during the Civil War on their way to the Carolinas. “Then she turned up in Florence, Italy, and was an overnight sensation in Rome in the 1860s.”

Little is available by way of documentation of Lewis’s early life, but the nineteenth-century press provides a gripping narrative of her early years. An early orphan, she was “reared among the Indians,” her mother’s relations, and given the name Wildfire. A brief stint in the abolitionist hotbed of McGrawville, in upstate New York, led her to another focal point of early American progressivism: Oberlin, Ohio, where she began studies at Oberlin College in 1859. While at Oberlin, Lewis found herself embroiled in a violent and titillating scandal that would presumably have derailed the nascent career of someone without her savvy. In her third year at the college, where she had begun to study art, she was accused of poisoning two white female classmates with cantharides, commonly known as Spanish fly. Cantharides, compounds derived from blister beetles, have been used as aphrodisiacs for centuries; though highly toxic, in small quantities they can induce itching and burning in the genitals, an effect that has long been (perhaps wishfully) mistaken for arousal.

On January 27, 1862, Lewis had served them mulled wine—which she had obtained, somewhat mysteriously, in a dry town, and while living in the house of a church deacon—before her classmates set out on a sleigh ride with two gentleman callers. On the disastrous ride out of Oberlin, the two girls became violently, uncontrollably nauseated; the blame was placed on Lewis. Before her trial, she was dragged to a field and beaten by a white mob. In court, she presented herself in crutches, her collarbone shattered. She was represented at trial by John Mercer Langston, who would go on to become the first African-American elected to public office in the United States and a founding dean of Howard Law School. Langston pointed out that the stomach contents of the girls had never been tested, and Lewis was acquitted. But scandal continued to dog her at the college, which did not allow her to re-register for courses in 1863. (Today, The Edmonia Lewis Center for Women and Transgender People at Oberlin espouses “anti-sexism, anti-classism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-heterosexism, and anti-transphobia”; on its website, the Center notes that Lewis left the school, “in part, due to harassment.”)

After the early termination of her studies, Lewis set off from Oberlin to Boston. While in Boston, she impressed her artistic aspirations on famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who arranged for her to be mentored by a local sculptor. Sales of a bust of Robert Gould Shaw she created in 1864 funded a one-way ticket to Rome. In Italy, she created a body of work circumscribed by an unusual artistic proclivity: unlike many other sculptors at the time, she did not use tradesmen to chisel her work according to instruction, carving instead by hand. (Lemmey explained that for this reason, fewer examples and duplicates of Lewis’s work survive than other sculptors of the period.) She created sculptures inspired by Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, by the experiences of freed slaves; in one sculpture, Hagar, the cast-off concubine of Abraham, clasps work-thickened hands to her half-bare breast. In Rome and its environs, Lewis moved in a circle of expatriate women sculptors of the era, drawn to Italy by the promise of abundant, expertly quarried marble. Henry James once dismissively described this circle as “the white marmorean flock.”

     Black Surreality - Edmonia Lewis - Death of Cleopatra


But it was Lewis’s nonwhite status that figured most prominently in her portrayal in the contemporary press: one 1866 interview lauded her talent while simultaneously noting how she “prattles like a child,” with her “crisp hair and thick lips.” Another account from the period describes her as a “curious and exceptional example of native artistic ability.” Despite her uncommonly advanced education at Oberlin, contemporary sources cite an origin myth in which Lewis, an untutored, “childlike” naïf, was so enraptured at the sight of a statue of Benjamin Franklin that she is quoted as saying, “I, too, can make a stone man.” Richardson suggests that this portrayal in the press was not incidental; not only did Lewis sometimes benefit from the exaggerated exoticism of her portrayal, the notion that she had emerged whole, like Aphrodite, from the sea of ignorance, allowed her to obscure any scandal in her past.

“She worked both sides of the street, depending on her audience and her patrons,” Richardson said. “She emphasized her blackness or her Native American origins. She was very savvy about how to keep her identity in play.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Lewis’s signature Neoclassical style had fallen out of favor in the artistic avant-garde, and the center of gravity of contemporary sculpture had shifted from Rome to Paris. By 1901, Lewis’s whereabouts were unknown to the public: in response to a query about Lewis, the editor of an art magazine noted, “There seems to be no trace of her in Rome.” In fact, she had left the city behind, and whether she ceased to court the press or the press ceased to court her, her prior fame faded almost completely.

No trace was known of her last years – in Rome or elsewhere — for over a century, and the place of her burial was unknown. Richardson, however, had never ceased looking, and the digitization of records worldwide enabled decades of research to bear fruit.

A 1901 census record revealed to Richardson that Edmonia Lewis had relocated from Rome to London, and subsequent research with the aid of U.K lawyer Scott Varland uncovered Lewis’s will and burial records. Lewis had died in Hammersmith Infirmary, in London, of Bright’s disease, a chronic and excruciating kidney ailment; from there, she had been taken to the cemetery at Harrow Road.

Richardson sees her research as part and parcel with the efforts of other black women scholars: after all, she noted, Alice Walker found Zora Neale Hurston’s grave, “out in the long grass.” “So I’ve become a cemetery sleuth,” she added wryly.

In her will, Lewis identified herself as a “Spinster and Sculptor.” She asked for a dark walnut coffin, and that a notice of her death be printed in the Tablet, a British Roman Catholic publication. The resulting announcement – a curt sentence fragment – made no mention of her accomplishments, and did not reach those who sought her across the sea, until, over a century later, it found Richardson.

This is not the first major discovery Richardson has made over the course of her research into Lewis’s life and work. In 1988, she was instrumental in restoring Lewis’s most famous work to the public eye.

In the 1980s, Richardson explained, scholars focused on two of Lewis’s works in particular: an 1867 group called “Forever Free,” housed at Howard University, which depicted a black man and woman, in marble, holding up their broken chains; and “The Death of Cleopatra,” a mammoth composition of Cleopatra’s last moments, which had featured in many contemporary accounts of the Philadelphia Exposition but whose whereabouts were unknown.

In 1988, Frank Orland, a dentist from the Forest Park neighborhood of Chicago, wrote in to the Metropolitan Museum, inquiring about the artist Edmonia Lewis. He had a piece of work by her, he said, and described it. An enterprising curator forwarded the letter to Richardson, who had put out a query in the New York Times Book Review asking after Lewis; when Orland dodged her repeated calls, she hopped on a plane to O’Hare.

When she tracked down the dentist at his home address – “I was willing to camp out on his front steps if he wasn’t going to cooperate,” Richardson told me; “Fortunately, his wife was home” – he agreed to lead her to the statue.

In the storage area of a nearby shopping mall, to which Orland had the key, Richardson saw the lost work for the first time.

“It was just standing there in the storage area, surrounded by holiday decorations and papier-mâché turkeys and Christmas lights and Christmas elves,” Richardson said. “I was shaking.”

Richardson teamed up with legendary librarian and bibliographer Dorothy Porter, and together they contacted the Smithsonian Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. After comprehensive restoration, the statue now stands in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center, where Cleopatra’s unblemished face turns up, perpetually, towards the vaulted ceiling.

Earlier this summer, Richardson said, she ran into a colleague familiar with her long search for the last years of Edmonia Lewis.

“Finally, I was able to say ‘I’ve buried her,’” she said.

Now all that’s missing is a plaque.

    ARTH 4117 19th Century 5: Edmonia Lewis

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