A00029 - Hemsley Winfield, Founder of the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group

Hemsley Winfield (April 20, 1907 – January 15, 1934) was an African-American dancer who created the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group.

He was born Osborne Hemsley Winfield to a middle-class, African-American family in Yonkers, New York. Winfield struggled in Yonkers as jobs available to African-Americans remained menial. Contrary to the natural inclination of the residents of Yonkers at that time, Winfield pursued a career in the Arts, developing a strong background as an actor, director, stage technician, dancer and eventually a choreographer. With combination of Winfield's middle-class ambition as well as the growing cultural movement of the African-Americans at that time, Winfield was able to achieve acclaim by the Art world. Winfield first won his fame in the leading role of Oscar Wilde's Salome,  which he won acclaim to in 1929. Winfield came upon the role as Salome when the female lead of the company fell ill, causing Winfield to dress in drag as the show was staged at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, New York. Winfield, during this time, continued to attend concerts by the great trailblazers of modern dance, who later served as an influence and sponsor for his choreographic work.

As part of the “Little Theater movement” Winfield started and directed the Sekondi Players of Yonkers in 1925.  Taking words from the Negro’s African heritage Sekondi is the name of a city that is located on the south west coast of Ghana. In November of 1927 Winfield and the Sekondi Players were performing a children’s play, The Princess and the Cat, written by his mother, Jeroline Hemsley Winfield. This inaugural opening of children’s plays was under his direction of The New Negro Art Theater. This is the first reference to the New Negro Art Theater group that Winfield directed during the rest of his acting and dance career. On March 6, 1931, at the Saunders Trade School the dance company gave its first performance. Winfield served as the head organizer and director of the company. The first name of the dance company was The Bronze Ballet Plastique, which lasted only one performance. Edna Guy was trained by Ruth St. Denis of the Denis-Shawn School of Dance, and performed as a guest in at least two of Winfield's concerts which soon grew to draw massive crowds. Edna Guy was never a member of the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group, the leading female dancers of the company were Ollie Burgoyne, Drusela Drew, and Midgie Lane. Winfield's choreographic work during this time fused uniquely German Expressionism with African-American themes and spirituals. 

In 1933, the company appeared in the premier of Louis Gruenberg's opera The Emperor Jones at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Winfield took on the role of the Congo witch doctor in the piece. His first performance as the Witch Doctor was listed as January 7, 1933 and his last performance was March 18, 1933 Winfield also danced the role of the Witch Doctor in the performances in Philadelphia and Baltimore that year. Controversy around the work resulted from the Met's original request to blacken White dancers' faces rather than use Black dancers, but Tibbett threatened to quit, and the Met relented. His final performance of the 1933 season was reviewed as “a thrilling exhibition of savage dancing” and “his sinister and frantic caperings as the Witch Doctor made even the most sluggish, opera-infected blood run cold.”

On January 15, 1934, Hemsley Winfield died of pneumonia shortly before his 27th birthday, leaving with the final words, "We're building a foundation that will make people take black dance seriously". Hemsley Winfield was considered “the pioneer in Negro concert dancing."

Winfield choreographed and performed with his own company in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Louis Gruenberg's The Emperor Jones. This was a one-time exception to the rules - management did not list the dancers in the program.  The next African American dancer would not appear with the company until 1951. Winfield's mother was a playwright, and he made his debut in one of her plays, Wade in the Water (1926).  He became a dancer and a pioneer in African American concert dance, organizing the Negro Art Theater Dance Group. This group gave its first concert on April 29, 1931, and appeared in Hall Johnson's Run Little Chillun in 1933. 

A00028 - Everett Parker, Won Landmark Case Over Media Racial Bias

Everett Carlton Parker (b. January 17, 1913, Chicago, Illinois – September 17, 2015, White Plains, New York) was a media activist and reverend.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Parker attended the University of Chicago. Upon graduation in 1935, he spent a year with the Works Progress Administration, then another with the radio station WJBW. After returning to his hometown for a job as an advertiser, Parker enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary, earning a doctorate in 1943. He re-entered the media world with a stint at NBC in New York, then taught a Yale Divinity School from 1945 to 1957. He was the Director of the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ from 1954 to 1983.

He filed a successful petition to deny licensing renewal of television station WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s. The station had a poor record with regards to civil rights for African Americans. 

A00027 - Bill Pickett, Rodeo and Wild West Performer

Bill Pickett,  (b. December 5, 1870?, Williamson County, Texas — d. April 2, 1932, Tulsa, Oklahoma), American rodeo cowboy who introduced bulldogging, a modern rodeo event that involves wrestling a running steer to the ground.

Pickett was descended from American Indians (Cherokees) and African American slaves in the Southwest. He grew up in West Texas, learning to ride and rope as a boy, and became a ranch hand; he performed simple trick rides in town on the weekends. In 1900, he became a showman, sponsored by Lee Moore, a Texas rodeo entrepreneur. In 1907, Pickett signed with the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, becoming one of its star performers and assuming the status of a legendary figure for his masterful handling of both wild and domestic animals. For bulldogging, or steer wrestling, he perfected a technique of jumping from his horse, grabbing the steer around the neck or horns, sinking his teeth into the animal’s lip, and pulling it to the ground. Pickett’s most-grueling performance came in 1908 in a bullring in Mexico City. He there wrestled and rode a Mexican fighting bull for seven minutes before a riotous audience enraged at this original interpretation of the Mexican national pastime of bullfighting.

Pickett performed until about 1916, working as a cowhand and rancher thereafter. He later appeared in the silent films The Bull-Dogger (1921) and The Crimson Skull (1922). He died after being kicked by a horse in April 1932.

A00026 - Marcus Garvey, Charismatic African Jamaican Leader

Marcus Garvey, in full Marcus Moziah Garvey   (b. August 17, 1887, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica —d. June 10, 1940, London, England), was a charismatic African Jamaican leader who organized the first important American black nationalist movement (1919–26), based in New York City’s Harlem. 

Largely self-taught, Garvey attended school in Jamaica until he was 14. After traveling in Central America and living in London from 1912 to 1914, he returned to Jamaica, where, with a group of friends, he founded, on August 1, 1914, the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, usually called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which sought, among other things, to build in Africa a black-governed nation.

Failing to attract a following in Jamaica, Garvey went to the United States in 1916 and soon established branches of the UNIA in Harlem and the other principal urban areas of the North. By 1919, the rising “Black Moses” claimed a following of about 2,000,000, although the exact number of association members was never clear. From the platform of the Association’s Liberty Hall in Harlem, Garvey spoke of a “new Negro,” proud of being black. His newspaper, Negro World, told of the exploits of heroes of the race and of the splendors of African culture. Garvey taught that blacks would be respected only when they were economically strong, and he preached an independent black economy within the framework of white capitalism. To forward these ends, he established the Negro Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line (1919), as well as a chain of restaurants and grocery stores, laundries, a hotel, and a printing press.

Garvey reached the height of his power in 1920, when he presided at an international convention in Liberty Hall, with delegates present from 25 countries. The affair was climaxed by a parade of 50,000 through the streets of Harlem, led by Garvey in flamboyant array. His slipshod business methods, however, and his doctrine of racial purity and separatism (he even approved of the white racist Ku Klux Klan because it sought to separate the races) brought him bitter enemies among established African American leaders, including labor leader A. Philip Randolph and W. E. B. Du Bois, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Garvey’s influence declined rapidly when he and other UNIA members were indicted for mail fraud in 1922 in connection with the sale of stock for the Black Star Line. He served two years of a five-year prison term, but in 1927 his sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge, and he was deported as an undesirable alien. He was never able to revive the movement abroad, and he died in virtual obscurity.

A00025 - W. E. B. Du Bois, NAACP Founder, Author and Sociologist

W. E. B. Du Bois, in full William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (b. February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts — d. August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana), American sociologist, was the most important African American leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. Late in life he became identified with communist causes.

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, an African American institution at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of African Americans. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of African Americans, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914  at Atlanta (Georgia) University, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro; A Social Study (1899), the first case study of an African American community in the United States.

Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential African American leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged African Americans to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of the European Americans. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington’s strategy, rather than freeing the African American from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many African American intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the African American community into two wings—the “conservative” supporters of Washington and his “radical” critics.

Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington’s opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association’s director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the black protest from 1910 until 1934.

Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of African Americans:

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.…He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Du Bois’s black nationalism took several forms—the most influential being his pioneering advocacy of Pan-Africanism. the belief that all people of African descent had common interests and should work together in the struggle for their freedom. Du Bois was a leader of the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the architect of four Pan-African Congresses held between 1919 and 1927. Second, he articulated a cultural nationalism.  As the editor of The Crisis, he encouraged the development of African American literature and art and urged his readers to see “Beauty in Black.” Third, Du Bois’s black nationalism is seen in his belief that African Americans should develop a separate “group economy” of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives as a weapon for fighting economic discrimination and African American poverty. This doctrine became especially important during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s and precipitated an ideological struggle within the NAACP.

He resigned from the editorship of The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, yielding his influence as a race leader and charging that the organization was dedicated to the interests of the black bourgeoisie and ignored the problems of the masses. Du Bois' interest in cooperatives was a part of his nationalism that developed out of his Marxist leanings. At the turn of the century, he had been an advocate of African American capitalism and African American support of African American business, but by about 1905 he had been drawn toward socialist doctrines. Although he joined the Socialist Party only briefly in 1912, he remained sympathetic with Marxist ideas throughout the rest of his life.

Upon leaving the NAACP, he returned to Atlanta University, where he devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, Atlanta University’s “Review of Race and Culture.” In 1945 he published the “Preparatory Volume” of a projected encyclopaedia of people of African descent, for which he had been appointed editor in chief. He also produced two major books during this period. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935) was an important Marxist interpretation of the Reconstruction era (the period following the American Civil War during which the seceded Southern states were reorganized according to the wishes of Congress), and, more significantly, it provided the first synthesis of existing knowledge of the role of African Americans in that critical period of American history. In 1940 appeared Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom, viewing his career as an ideological case study illuminating the complexity of the black-white conflict.

Following this fruitful decade at Atlanta University, he returned once more to a research position at the NAACP (1944–48). This brief connection ended in a second bitter quarrel, and thereafter Du Bois moved steadily leftward politically. Identified with pro-Russian causes, he was indicted in 1951 as an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although a federal judge directed his acquittal, Du Bois had become completely disillusioned with the United States. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party and, moving to Ghana, renounced his American citizenship more than a year later. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in 1968.

A00024 - James Douglas, African Canadian Governor of Vancouver Island

James Douglas,  (b. August 15, 1803, Demerara, British Guiana — d. August 2, 1877, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada), Canadian statesman known as “the father of British Columbia.” He became its first governor when it was a newly formed wilderness colony.

James Douglas was born in 1803 in Demerara (later part of British Guiana, now Guyana) to John Douglas, a Scottish planter and merchant from Glasgow, who was in business with three of his brothers. His mother was Martha Ann Telfer, also known as "a Miss Richie." She was a Creole of mixed race from Barbados. The couple had three children together: Alexander, born 1801 or 1802; James, born 1803, and Cecilia, born 1812, but never formally married. Telfer was classified as free coloured, which in that time and place meant a free person of mixed African and European ancestry. James Douglas and his siblings thus were all mixed race. However, James appeared majority European. In 1812 John Douglas returned to Scotland with his children, putting James into school at Lanark to be schooled. He married Jessie Hamilton in Scotland in 1819, and had more children with her, making a second family. James went to school or was tutored by a French Huguenot in Chester, England, where he learned to speak and write in fluent French, which helped him in North America.

Douglas joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821 and rose to become senior member of the board, in charge of operations west of the Rocky Mountains. After the establishment of the southwestern boundary with the United States,he moved the company’s headquarters from Oregon to Vancouver Island in 1849. As governor (1851–64) of Vancouver Island when gold was discovered on the Fraser River in 1858, he extended his authority to the mainland in order to preserve Britain’s foothold on the Pacific in the face of an influx of settlers from the United States. His action was approved by the British government, which then created the colony of British Columbia. Douglas became its governor in 1858 after severing his connection with the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was knighted in 1863 and retired in 1864.

A00023 - Elbert Williams, Civil Rights Activist

Elbert Williams is the first known member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to be murdered for his civil rights activities.  Williams was born on October 15, 1908 in rural Haywood County, Tennessee, the son of farmer Albert Williams and wife Mary Green Williams.

In 1929, Williams married Annie Mitchell. After trying farming, the couple moved in the early 1930s to Brownsville, the county seat, where they worked for a laundry until Williams’ murder in 1940.

In 1939, the Williamses became charter members of Brownsville’s NAACP Branch.

On May 6, 1940, five members of Brownsville’s NAACP Branch unsuccessfully attempted to register to vote. No African American had been allowed to register to vote in Haywood County during the 20^th Century. The next day, the threats began.

Early on the morning of June 16, would-be registrant Elisha Davis was abducted from home by a white mob led by Brownsville policemen Tip Hunter and Charles Read, taken to a nearby swamp, surrounded, and threatened with death unless he named members of the Brownsville NAACP. After naming some, Davis was forced to immediately leave the county, under threat of death should he ever return. Many African American families fled. The Williamses did not.

Late on the night of June 20, policemen Hunter and Read, and a third man, Ed Lee, manager of the local Coca-Cola bottling company, took Williams from his home and jailed him.  There they questioned him about an NAACP meeting he was suspected of planning. Hunter claimed that he released Williams who never returned home, and was never again seen alive.

Three days later, Williams’ corpse was found floating in the nearby Hatchie River.  Annie Williams identified her husband’s body, and saw two bullet-like holes in his chest. The Coroner ordered no medical examination, and held his inquest on the riverbank that same morning.  The Coroner’s jury’s verdict was "Cause of death:   unknown." The Coroner ordered an immediate burial and Williams was buried the same day in an unmarked grave.

A local grand jury found that Williams’ death was caused by “foul violence at the hands of parties unknown.”

Under pressure from the NAACP National Office, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate, and promised a broad inquiry.

NAACP Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall, later a United States Supreme Court Justice, monitored the DOJ/FBI investigation, and travelled to Brownsville to collect evidence.

The DOJ ordered the United States Attorney in Memphis to present the case to a Federal Grand Jury, but then reversed its decision and closed the case, citing insufficient evidence. Thurgood Marshall was livid, but unable to get the case reopened.

Elbert Williams’ murderer was never prosecuted.