A00009 - Albon Holsey, Business Leader

Albon Holsey (May 31, 1883, Athens, Georgia - January 16, 1950, Tuskegee, Alabama) was an African American business leader.

According to Albon L. Holsey, slavery deprived blacks of the opportunity to learn the art of business. Through his efforts with the National Negro Business League, the Colored Merchant’s Association, and writings about black business topics, Holsey attempted to assist African Americans in competing and succeeding in the world of commerce.

Holsey was the son of Albon Chase Holsey and Sallie Thomas Holsey. As a boy, he attended Knox Institute in Athens, Georgia, and later he matriculated at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Holsey joined the staff of Tuskegee Institute in 1914, during the time that the famous educator, Booker T Washington, headed the institution. He was hired as an assistant to Washington’s secretary, Emmett J. Scott. During his tenure, Holsey worked as secretary to president Robert R. Morton and assistant to president Frederick D. Patterson, served as associate editor of the Tuskegee Student and possibly acted as director of public relations. Between 1938 and 1944, Holsey was also on loan to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. While working for the government, he was involved in projects related to black farmers. Holsey worked at Tuskegee for thirty-six years.

A brief chronology of the Holsey's life reads as follows:

1883

Born in Athens, Georgia on May 31

1906

Marries Basiline Boyd on October 3

1914

Joins staff of Tuskegee Institute

1929

Expands Colored Merchants’ Association nationally

1930

Receives Harmon Foundation Award for achievements in business

1950

Dies in Tuskegee, Alabama on January 16

Holsey wrote numerous articles, most related to business topics, including the article “Learning How to be Black,” in which Holsey described the experiences of African American children that triggered their consciousness of color and the “deadly toll” on the manhood of the race. In “Public Relations Intuitions of Booker T. Washington,” Holsey described Washington’s common sense approach to keeping good relationships with various constituencies involved with Tuskegee Institute. The Public Opinion Quarterly published Holsey’s lengthy review of a book on the subject of black newspapers in 1948. Holsey, in a chapter in The Progress of a Race , recapitulated the first twenty-five years of the NNBL. He was business manager ofCrisis , the official publication of the NAACP, during the time that W. E. B. Du Bois edited the periodical.

Holsey was a member of the Masons and Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. The 1928–29 edition of Who’s Who in Colored America lists his political and religious affiliations as Republican and as African Methodist Episcopal.

After a brief illness, Holsey died on January 16, 1950, in John Andrews Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, at 67 years of age. Funeral services were held on January 26 in the Tuskegee Institute chapel. His wife, Basiline Boyd Holsey, whom he married on October 3, 1906, survived him. A sister, Annie Holsey of Baltimore, and brothers, Augustus J. Holsey and Crosby Holsey of Baltimore and Cleveland, respectively, also survived him. He was buried in Tuskegee.

A00008 - Juanita Moore, "Imitation of Life" Star

Juanita Moore (October 19, 1914 – January 1, 2014) was an American film, television, and stage actress. She was the fifth African American to be nominated for an Academy Award in any category, and the third in the Supporting Actress category at a time when only a single African American had won an Oscar. Her most famous role was as Annie Johnson in the movie Imitation of Life (1959).

Born in Los Angeles in 1914, Moore was a chorus girl at the Cotton Club before becoming a film extra while working in theater. After making her film debut in Pinky (1949), she had a number of bit parts and supporting roles in motion pictures through the 1950s and 1960s. However, her role in Imitation of Life (1959), a remake, as housekeeper Annie Johnson, whose daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) passes for white, won her a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.  She was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for the role. When the two versions of Imitation of Life were released together on DVD, the earlier film was released in 1934,  one of the bonus features was a new interview with Juanita Moore.

Moore continued to perform in front of the camera, with a role in the movie Disney's The Kid (2000) and guest-starring roles on television shows Dragnet, Marcus Welby, M.D., ER and Judging Amy. 

On April 23, 2010, a new print of Imitation of Life (1959) was screened at the TCM Film Festival in Los Angeles, to which Moore and co-star Kohner were invited. After the screening, the two women appeared on stage for a question-and-answer session hosted by TCM's Robert Osborne. Moore and Kohner received standing ovations.

Moore was married for 50 years to Charles Burris.  He died in 2001.  He was a Los Angeles bus driver and, although she was a frequent passenger, she had stepped out in front of his approaching bus to cross the street to a local bar, hoping to find someone to study for the Inès Serrano role in the play No Exit -- Serrano was a lesbian, and Moore was unfamiliar with the lifestyle. She and Burris married a few weeks later.

Her grandson is actor/producer Kirk Kelley-Kahn, who is CEO/President of "Cambridge Players - Next Generation", a theatre troupe whose founding members included Moore, Esther Rolle, Helen Martin, Lynn Hamilton and Royce Wallace.  

Moore died at her home in Los Angeles on January 1, 2014, from natural causes. She was 99 years old.

A00007 - William Henry Johnson, Artist

William Henry Johnson (March 18, 1901–1970) was an African-American painter born in Florence, South Carolina. He became a student at the National Academy of Design in New York. His style evolved from realism to expressionism to a powerful folk style (for which he is best known).

Johnson moved from Florence, South Carolina, to New York City at the age of 17. Working a variety of jobs, he saved enough money to pay for classes at the prestigious National Academy of Design. He worked with the painter Charles Hawthorne, who raised funds that allowed Johnson to go abroad to study. He spent the late 1920s in France, where he learned about modernism. During this time, he met the Danish textile artist Holcha Krake in Cagnes-sur-Mer and they married in 1930. Johnson and his wife spent most of the 1930s in Scandinavia, where his interest in folk art influenced his painting. They returned to the United States in 1938, where Johnson immersed himself in African-American culture and traditions, producing paintings that were characterized by their folk art simplicity.

Johnson enjoyed a degree of success as an artist during the 1940s and 1950s, but he was never able to achieve financial stability. In 1944 his wife Holcha died from breast cancer. To deal with his grief, he took work in a Navy Yard, and in 1946 left for Denmark to be with his wife's family. Johnson soon fell ill himself, from the effects of advanced syphilis, and returned to New York in 1947 to enter the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, where he spent the last twenty-three years of his life. He stopped painting in 1956 and died on January 1, 1970.

After his death, his entire life's work was almost disposed of to save storage fees, but it was rescued by friends at the last moment. The Harmon Foundation gave more than 1,000 paintings, watercolors, and prints by Johnson to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (then the National Museum of American Art) in 1967. In 1991, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized and circulated a major exhibition of his artwork, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, and in 2006, they organized and circulated William H. Johnson's World on Paper. An expanded version of this exhibition traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (February 3 - April 8, 2007),the Philadelphia Museum of Art (May 20 - August 12, 2007), and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama (September 15 - November 18, 2007).

In 2012, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in Johnson's honor, recognizing him as one of the nation’s foremost African-American artists and a major figure in 20th-century American art. The stamp, the 11th in the American Treasures series, showcases his painting Flowers (1939-1940), which depicts brightly colored blooms on a small red table.