Black Family Images

Portrait of an African American family identified as the Laffertys. Photographed circa 1907 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of two African American women identified as sisters, Florence Ann Bell and Grace E. Bell. Photographed circa 1908 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas The two women are sisters Florence Ann Bell and Grace E. Bell. Florence married Lloyd William Henson Hardin in 1893 at the age of nineteen. They had a total of five kids. Her husband -was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. He passed in 1950; Florence passed in 1976 at the ripe old age of 102. Florence's sister Grace, taught music in the Kansas City school system until she married John Muse and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota and later to Chicago. After her husband passed, she returned to Kansas City where she sang in the Allen AME Church Choir and taught music until she died six months shy of her 100th birthday in 1978.

Beautiful portrait of an African American couple and their child identified as the C.E. Wilson family. Photographed circa 1912 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Portrait of an African American family identified as the Bohmer Family. Photographed circa 1912 by Joseph J Pennell in Junction City, Kansas. Pennell Photography Collection/Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

The Stone sisters became the proprietors of the first black owned beauty parlor in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. Their business was on the corner of Sixth Avenue, North, and Union Street near the present site of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center. The sisters catered to a clientele of wealthy white women, and they introduced the first permanent-wave machine, which they learned to use at Frederick's in New York City. They sold hair pieces and wigs from France and used hair-weaving equipment, hair dryers, and hair-cutting tools, among other innovations. The sisters developed "Stone-White," a skin bleach lotion, and sold it at their beauty parlor. The Stone sisters resided at 1613 Jefferson Street, immediately across the street from Fisk University's Jubilee Hall. Lee Stone (1879-1954), Sallie K. Stone (1881-1954), and Nannie Stone (1885-1975) began working in the early 1900s as apprentices at McIntyre Beauty Parlor, after arriving in Nashville from their birthplace in Maury County, Tennessee. The three sisters were joined by another sister, Emma Stone (1889-1934), who completed the pharmacy program at Meharry Medical College in 1907 and operated the Campus Drug Store at 1712 Jefferson Street. In 1915, the sisters bought the McIntyre Beauty Parlor from its white owner, May McIntyre, for the sum of $500. The sisters operated the lucrative business until the 1930s. Two other sisters were not involved in the beauty parlor business: Augusta (1876-1917) and Hortense (1883-1959). Augusta married Jefferson D. Fowler, a physician and teacher at Meharry. Hortense married George Richardson White, a former dental student at Meharry. The mother of the Stone sisters, Sallie Brooks Stone (1858-1923), was born a slave. The father of the girls, John Secrest, was a prosperous white Jewish planter in Maury County. The Stone sisters held membership at the Gay Street Christian Church. Lee, Nannie, and Emma sang in the church's choir. The Stone family was compassionate and sensitive to the issue of racial oppression. The mother often visited the sick and gave money and food to the poor. The sisters unsuccessfully used money and influence to gain the release of a black Knoxville man accused of killing a white woman in 1919. The Stone sisters, except for Nannie, are buried in Nashville's Greenwood Cemetery. Nannie was buried in California with her husband, dentist Thomas H. Grantham. Source: Tennessee State Education, Emma White Bragg

When Adele Logan Alexander was doing research for her doctorate at Howard University, she stumbled on a remarkable and largely forgotten power couple who were born nearly 150 years ago: William Henry Hunt and Ida Alexander Gibbs. Hunt was the first African American to enjoy a full-fledged career in the U.S. State Department; he served as consul in Madagascar, in eastern France and Guadeloupe. His wife was one of the early black female internationalists, helping W.E.B. Du Bois organize the Pan-African conferences that crystallized many important intellectual and political concepts. Their accomplishments would be notable even today; they were practically miraculous in their time. The Gibbs-Hunts, as they were called, have come to light because of a wave of new research in black history that is focused less on the grand figures of history and more on individuals who made their mark despite the huge obstacles they faced. This new focus reflects a broader trend toward a history of ordinary people and the insights they provide into daily life. William Hunt's mother was probably sired by a vice president of the United States who traced his own roots to the Jamestown colony—and fathered a number of children with his slave women. Ida's father was the second son of a black Presbyterian minister. The life of Mifflin Wistar Gibbs could nourish a dozen film plots. M.W. Gibbs was born in Philadelphia in 1823, joined the California gold rush in 1850, and started a newspaper to challenge racial injustice in 1856. He led a migration of some 900 blacks from California to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1858 when California seriously considered banning all blacks from living there. Once settled in British Columbia, he was elected to a council seat in Vancouver. He became wealthy through real-estate investments, returned to the United States in 1869, and in 1873 won election in Arkansas as the first black judge elected anywhere in the United States. Decades later, in 1897, President William McKinley rewarded this loyal Republican with a consular post in Madagascar. Ida, raised in comfort and privilege, graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and earned a master's degree at a time when very few white women went to college. Her future husband's early years were a lot more difficult. William Henry Hunt was born into slavery in 1863, and his early life after Emancipation was marked by hardship and labor. His desire for an education was initially thwarted at age 10 by the need to help his illiterate mother support their family. Yet he later managed to find a sponsor to a New England prep school, then went on to Williams College, although he dropped out after a year. He met Ida in 1889, possibly at a concert given by her sister, a graduate of Oberlin's music conservatory. In 1897, with the support of Ida, he was able to snag a job as deputy to M.W. Gibbs at his Madagascar posting and later succeeded him as consul. When he married Ida in 1904, even Washington, D.C.'s white newspapers reported on the wedding. Alexander was intrigued enough by the Gibbs-Hunts' power-couple profile to write a full-fledged biography (Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin, University of Virginia Press, 2010). "You have this couple in a balance of power," says Alexander, who is a professor of history at George Washington University. Ida Alexander Gibbs, no relation to the historian or her husband, former Army Secretary Clifford Alexander, was a contemporary and friend of Mary Church Terrell, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and of Anna Julia Cooper, one of the first black women to earn a Ph.D. "She was a major intellectual. I wasn't writing about a man with a little woman at home," says Alexander. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis praises the book. "This is a work of sui generis scholarship—family history as world history," he says. Hunt and Gibbs lived on the precarious edge of racial prejudice. As light-skinned blacks in a relatively tolerant Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, they had respite from the daily indignities back home. But Hunt's career was also limited by race. Somehow he managed to survive President Woodrow Wilson's broad purge of African Americans from federal service from 1918 to 1920 and maintained his career for decades despite his wife's growing activism in radical black politics. When he could no longer escape the attention of his bosses, he was transferred to Guadeloupe, his first "black" posting in his 30 years of service. He finished out his career in the Azores and Liberia and retired in 1932. Both died peacefully in Washington, D.C.—Hunt in 1951, Gibbs in 1957. Gibbs and Hunt led atypical lives, traveling the world, consorting with many important intellectuals, black and white, around the world, relatively sheltered from the hardships that most other African Americans endured. Although they were often frustrated by the racial limits, they managed to eke out exceptional lives, a feat we should not fail to commemorate. In every generation, there are exceptional African Americans who transcend the barriers that are designed to limit their ambition and achievement. In our time, Barack Obama is the most visible example, a black man who rose to the presidency of the United States at a time when conventional wisdom said it was impossible. But there are many others who never make headlines, and whose achievements are celebrated only via their obituaries or the truncated tropes of Black History Month. Many African Americans worry that success in the wider world has been acquired at a high moral cost, involving collaboration, compromise or surrender of some part of blackness. Alexander cites a different reason that many blacks are uncomfortable with any focus on the fabulous exceptions. "I've been asked, 'Are you, by looking at the exception, denying the experience of the majority?'" she says. "I long ago decided that adding complexity to what we know about the African-American family was something I wanted to do." Sources: Oberlin Archives; The Root; Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin by Adele L. Alexander; A Black Power Couple in Early 20th Century, written by Joel Dreyfuss, Managing Editor of The Root (May 2010)

Gorgeous family portrait of siblings John Wesley Dobbs and his sister Willie Dobbs. John Wesley Dobbs Family Papers Later John Dobbs (would become a civic leader, and both a political and civil rights activist. He's also the father of famous soprano, Mattiwilda Dobbs, who was one of the first African American singers to enjoy a major international career in opera and to be offered a long term contract by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York. His sister later Willie Dobbs Blackburn, graduated at the top of her class from Spelman College (1931) and received her master’s degree from Atlanta University (1934). She moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where she served as chairman of the language division of Jackson State University. The Willie Dobbs Blackburn Language Arts Building on Jackson State University’s campus is named in her honor.

Wedding portrait of John Hartford Armstrong and his wife Lille Belle Armstrong. Photographed circa 1900 in Lynchburg, Virginia at Corbitt's Cute Studio. Source: South Carolina Digital Archives

Zoe Trodd, compiler and editor of Picturing Frederick Douglass, found the above image in an archive in Louisiana of Annie Douglass, the youngest of Frederick and Anna Douglass's children. Anna Murray Douglass and her daughter Annie Douglass were honored with headstones at a ceremony at Mt. Hope Cemetery on September 3, 2022. Erica Mock, executive director of The Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, said the mother and daughter were buried at Mount Hope in the 19th century, but never had individual memorials to mark their burial place. Instead, they’ve shared a monument with famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who lived in Rochester for about 25 years. Mock said Anna Murray Douglass was Frederick Douglass’ first wife --- they were married for more than 44 years and she was a freedom fighter in her own right. And their daughter, Annie, who died at the age of 10, was also a devoted student of the abolitionist movement. “Wanting to make sure that Anna and Annie get the most respect that they’ve unfortunately not gotten at Mount Hope, they’ve been a little overshadowed by Frederick’s grave,” Mock said. “And while we know how fantastic Frederick Douglass is and was, the light of his life was his family.” She noted that one of Rochester’s schools, School 12, is named after Anna Murray Douglass. “We’ve actually developed curriculum that the Rochester City School District has allowed us to develop at the Anna Murray Douglass Academy, where K through 8 is being taught about Douglass and the family, with the instruction and the guidance of the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and the descendants,” Mock said. The effort to enhance the Mount Hope Cemetery gravesites for Frederick Douglass’ wife and daughter was aided by a $15,000 grant from the Community Foundation. The memorials also provided a tribute to The Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery for their stewardship of the gravesite for more than 30 years and to Rochester educator and activist David Anderson for his efforts in retelling the Douglass story. Sources: Southern University and A&M College. Unknown photographer, circa 1854; WXXI News article by Randy Gorbman (Feb. 2022); Leigh Fought Blogspot (2019)

Union Army Private Moses Keepson, of Company F, Kentucky 108th Infantry, along with his wife. This portrait comes from The Loewentheil Collection of African American Photographs a collection of photographs that date from the 1860s to the 1960s, an era when African Americans were emerging from the horrors of slavery and beginning to claim some of the freedoms white Americans have. Stephan and Beth Loewentheil, who donated the archive, are collectors of rare books and photography. They own two branches of the 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop – one in Baltimore and one in New York.

William Henry Johnson and Nannie Brewer Johnson in their 1889 wedding portrait. William Henry Johnson was the son of Henry Johnson, who had been enslaved on Fleet Plantation. Mrs. Nannie Brewer Johnson was enslaved in Petersburg, Virginia in 1865. Although William Henry Johnson was a graduate of Hampton Institute he and his wife both took courses at the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute now Virginia State University. Sources: HBCU Library Alliance; Special Collections/ University Archives Department, Virginia State University

Willa Brown and Cornelius Coffey in front of a J-3 Cub. Willa Brown would go on to set many firsts for African-American women in aviation, including becoming the first Black woman to earn a Commercial Pilot’s License (1939). Along with Coffey, she co-founded the National Airmen’s Association (NAA), an advocacy organization whose mission was to increase the number of Black pilots across the country. In the late 1930s, with the threat of a second World War looming, President Franklin Roosevelt sought $10 million in funding from congress to train civilian pilots who could quickly transition to the US Army Air Corps should America find itself in urgent need of qualified military aviators. Cornelius Coffey, Willa Brown, and the other board members of the National Airmen’s Association feared that Black pilots would be racially excluded from military air service just as they had been during the First World War two decades earlier. Not wanting to be left out again, they devised a publicity stunt: the NAA would sponsor a crew of Black aviators to fly to Washington to personally petition politicians for African-American inclusion in the pilot training program. The NAA selected pilots Chauncey Spencer and Dale White for the job. In May of 1939, Spencer and White took off from Harlem Airport in a 90-horsepower biplane. After flying over 500 miles to Washington, the pair had a chance encounter while waiting for a DC subway train. Harry Truman, at the time a senator from Missouri, introduced himself to Spencer and White and was captivated by the NAA’s story. Later that day, Senator Truman arranged for a personal tour of their aircraft. Upon seeing the rickety, underpowered biplane, the future president remarked to Spencer and White, “If you guys had the guts to fly this thing to Washington, I’ve got guts enough to see that you get what you’re asking for.” After the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) was approved by Congress, among the flying schools selected to receive federal funding were seven run by and for African-American aviators, the most famous being at Tuskegee University. Of those seven, the only one not affiliated with a college was Cornelius Coffey’s flying school at Harlem Airport in Illinois, which he renamed the Coffey School of Aeronautics. When the United States entered WWII in 1941, Willa Brown attempted to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), but she was rejected due to her race. She would instead find other ways to serve her country during the war. Now married to Coffey, the pair ran his flying school together, with Cornelius responsible for flight instruction and aircraft maintenance and Willa serving as the school’s administrator and ground school instructor. Together, they trained over 200 future Tuskegee Airmen. Brown also joined 613 Squadron of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and became the first African-American CAP officer. During the war, her unit flew US-based anti-submarine and border patrol flights, freeing up other military pilots for service on the front lines in Europe and the Pacific. Unfortunately, Brown and Coffey’s marriage would not last. The pair divorced in 1948, the same year President Truman ordered an end to racial segregation in the US military in large part due to the wartime success of the Tuskegee Airmen. Both Cornelius and Willa continued to have careers in aviation. Willa Brown taught aeronautics and served on the FAA’s Women’s Advisory Committee, the first Black woman to do so. In 1955, Brown, married Rev. J.H. Chappell, the minister of the West Side Community Church in Chicago. In 1972, in recognition of her contributions to aviation in the United States as a pilot, an instructor, and an activist, Ms. Brown-Chappell was appointed to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Women’s Advisory Board. Willa B. Brown-Chappell died on July 18, 1992 at the age of 86 in Chicago. Cornelius Coffey continued to fly until he was 89 years old, just two years before his death in 1994. Today, IFR pilots flying along the Victor airway into Chicago Midway International Airport (KMDW) use a waypoint known as the “Coffey Fix” (COFEY) named by the FAA to honor Cornelius Coffey’s contributions to American aviation. Also, the Cornelius R. Coffey Aviation Education Foundation was established at the American Airlines Maintenance Academy in Chicago in his honor to train young pilots. Sources: Flight Simulator article Pioneers of Flight written by Microsoft Flight Simulator Team (Feb. 2022); Aviation Heritage Park; National Air & Space Museum

The hidden story of two African American women looking out from the pages of a 19th-century book Discovered by two historians whose work focuses on American art and on how African Americans have shaped the story of American democracy. Two subject areas converged when one had a question, and the other helped research the answer. Kate Clark Lemay was in the midst of organizing the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence,” commemorating the more than 80-year movement for women to obtain the right to vote. The exhibition was part of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story. While doing research, Kate encountered a character in history whose story she didn’t know, but who she anticipated would be important to the history the museum wanted to tell. Who was Mary E. Harper? That’s the question Kate set out to answer. In curating the exhibit on the history of women’s voting, it became clear to Kate that the task at hand was not only to celebrate voting, its history and the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but to expand the ways in which women are written into American history as major players, not as footnotes. But how could we show that history? Objects. That’s what we use in museums to shed light on people’s lives. Photographic portraits, and genre paintings depicting scenes of everyday life, as well as items from history like posters, drawings and maps, help us learn about and understand the stories of the countless women who lobbied to include women’s voting rights in their state constitutions. These women, along with those who organized and led the lobbying of states to ratify the 19th Amendment, which established women’s right to vote, have been left largely outside of American historical accounts. So Kate worked to make sure “Votes for Women” included portraits of women whose biographies are less well known. And in her search for objects that would represent their lives, she came across a few surprises. She was looking for portraits that were made from life – so a product of a personal meeting – and from the specific period of the suffragist’s life. Kate very much wanted to feature the African American lecturer, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), because of her activism in the American Equal Rights Association, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and other women’s groups affiliated with churches. One quote of hers provides a glimpse of her ideals: “We are all bound up in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse of its own soul.” Newspaper clippings from 1871 praising Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s public speaking. It was the perfect object to represent Ms. Watkins in the collections of Emory University. It was a first edition of “Atlanta Offering,” a book of Harper’s poetry published in 1895 in Philadelphia. Books like these often have a frontispiece, a picture or portrait of the author or the book’s subject in the opening pages, usually facing the title page of the book. This book featured a frontispiece of Harper wearing a suit – a floor-length skirt and a sleeveless bodice with covered buttons down its front. Underneath the bodice, her velvet shirtwaist ends in cuffs with ruffles around her wrists, and at her neck is tied a ribbon. A bit of white ruffle at her neck suggests a shirtwaist worn under the velvet, These details in clothing signify a refined woman, while Harper’s gaze looking directly at the camera suggests great confidence. When the book arrived and opened the front page to display Harper, Kate saw something unusual. There was not just one portrait at the front of the volume – there were two. Kate was surprised to see this second frontispiece because she had been looking at a digital version of the book and hadn’t been able to see both pages at once. The second portrait was a woman named Mary E. Harper. Who was this second woman? The historian could see by examining the details of her dress that Mary was as dignified as Frances. But why would her portrait be featured so prominently in this work of poetry, and what meaning can we take away from this publication choice? To answer my questions, I consulted with Martha S. Jones, an expert on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Martha was intrigued when she saw that the Frances Ellen Watkins Harper volume, “Atlanta Offering,” included not one but two portraits. Her intrigue ran deep because I am familiar with this particular portrait of Frances; it circulates widely and even illustrates my first book, “All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture,” the title of which borrows from one of her speeches. Overlooking Mary E. Harper’s portrait is an apt metaphor for how she has been overlooked in historical studies. When searching archival material it was discovered that Mary is Frances’ daughter. She is largely absent from an extensive body of scholarship on her mother, who was a talented public speaker and prolific writer. Still, there is one thing that scholars agree on: Frances was devoted to Mary. Mary was just an infant when her father, Fenton Harper, died, leaving their Ohio household destitute. The widowed Frances left Fenton’s three children from a prior marriage in the custody of relatives, but she kept Mary with her and headed back east to rebuild her life and her career. We know little about Mary’s early education. It is likely she attended schools in Baltimore and Philadelphia. By the 1880s, in her teens, Mary followed in her mother’s path and enrolled in Philadelphia’s National School of Elocution and Oratory. Graduating in 1884, Mary was poised to begin a career that turned on her capacity to deliver eloquent, polished and entertaining readings. Her first performances were in Philadelphia’s private parlors and a home for the elderly. But Mary was ambitious, and she set out to build a reputation that would win her audiences across the country. Mary’s career did not merely mirror that of her mother, Frances, who had built her style and reputation on the demanding and unorthodox terrain of the anti-slavery lecture circuit. Mary’s presentations featured poetry and literature, and to a lesser degree temperance, not politics. Sometimes she performed with musical troupes. Throughout, she carefully built a repertoire that maintained her appeal to respectable, middle-class and Christian audiences. By the late 1880s, she had broken through. Newspapers report her traversing the country on tours that took her west to Ohio, Missouri and Wisconsin, north to Massachusetts, and south to Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The precise end of Mary’s life has eluded the researchers. We know that she died in 1908, three years before her mother. The two are buried side by side in a Delaware County, Pennsylvania cemetery. Frances would be pleased, I am certain, to know that her small tribute to a beloved and gifted daughter has inspired us to recover some of Mary’s remarkable life. The Conversation: Academic rigor, journalistic flair, The hidden story of two African-American women looking out from the pages of a 19th-century book, (Sept. 2019) authors: Kate Clarke Lemay Historian, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University

The lives of Virginia Craft and Joshua Rose tell a story of the Black experience in America that many Americans have not heard. Nearly 170 years ago, a fair-skinned enslaved woman named Ellen Craft dressed in drag as an aristocratic Southern white man. Her dark-skinned husband, William, also enslaved, posed as “his” manservant. Then they scammed their way from slavery in Georgia to freedom in Pennsylvania. Ellen wore a tall hat, fine clothes, cool sunglasses. She put her arm in a sling so she wouldn’t have to write — she didn’t know how. And she put a bandage across her chin as though she had a toothache so she wouldn’t have to speak and betray her identity. Ellen adopted the persona of a sickly male patrician traveling north to find good health care, unable to write and barely able to speak, accompanied by one of his slaves. Ellen and William Craft first tasted freedom in Philadelphia on Christmas Day, 1848. Two years later, however, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress, which meant they could be captured and returned to bondage. So they fled to London, bore five children there and returned to the United States in 1869, after slavery was prohibited by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The Crafts and most of their children settled in South Carolina. Fast forward through Pittsburgh’s Hill District during the jazz-era of the 1920s and ‘30s to today. The Heinz History Center published “Heart and Soul: The Remarkable Courtship and Marriage of Josh and Virginia Craft Rose” written by journalist Mary Ellen Butler. Virginia was the great-granddaughter of Ellen and William Craft, and Joshua was the man she married. They had met at the Hill District’s “colored” YMCA. Josh Rose was brimming with idealism when he started college at the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 1929. He wanted not only to improve his own circumstances, but also to lift up other African-Americans. He kept fit at the Centre Avenue YMCA, near his Brackenridge Street home in the Hill. Fall semester was a reality check. Josh’s stepfather had left the family and the Great Depression set in. He had to work and care for his sister and sickly mother. And, over the next five years, he courted Virginia Craft. Upon meeting Virginia, Josh immediately sought to marry her. This was a monumental mountain to climb. Virgina was only 16 and he was seven years older. An even more daunting obstacle was that Josh was working class and Virginia was part of the Hill District aristocracy. She was the daughter of the universally respected leader of the Centre Avenue Y, the formidable Henry Kinloch Craft. By that time, Josh had started working at the Y, so Mr. Craft was his boss, too. A member of the pedigreed black elite, Henry Craft had arrived in Pittsburgh to lead the renowned Hill District Negro YMCA. He was a Harvard University engineering graduate and the son of Charles Craft, whose mother and father were the celebrated Ellen and William Craft. The Crafts’ elevated status ran deep on Virginia’s mother’s side of the family as well. Her mother was Bessie Trotter Craft, an alumna of the New England Conservatory of Music and the daughter of James Monroe Trotter. Mr. Trotter had been a Civil War officer in the famous “colored” Massachusetts 55th Volunteers Infantry Regiment. He also had married a black Jewish woman who was descended from Mary Hemings, oldest sister of Sally Hemings, President Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved concubine. Bessie Trotter Craft’s brother was the wealthy, fiery Boston Guardian publisher William Monroe Trotter. This Mr. Trotter had once challenged President Woodrow Wilson’s racist policies toward black civil servants so ardently that he — also a Harvard graduate and the nation’s first black member of Phi Beta Kappa — was forcibly removed from the Oval Office. The story of Virginia Craft and Josh Rose is an inspiring narrative of how a woman and man from opposite ends of the black socioeconomic spectrum were able to navigate matters of family and love; to graduate from college at a time when black students were rare, indeed and to help other African-Americans in their community and beyond. “Heart and Soul” also describes in fascinating detail five years of the couple’s Hill District-Oakland world — from when coed Virginia met working man Josh in 1929 until shortly after their wedding in 1934. It digs deeper than a review of clips from the Pittsburgh Courier and rebuts the outsider view that all urban blacks were destitute during the Depression. There is a reason for this. The author, Ms. Butler, is the daughter of Virginia and Josh Rose and had access to 153 letters found in her mother’s flowered pillowcase that had been exchanged between Virginia and Josh during their courtship. After they married, Virginia and Josh Rose settled in the other Oakland, in Northern California, where Josh built the African-American YMCA, became a member of the Boule — an exclusive black men’s national professional society — remained active in his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and became the first black member of the Oakland City Council in 1964. Upper middle-class Virginia collaborated with the Black Panther Party in support of children, became a leader in early childhood education and development, and remained active in her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. The Craft/​Rose union produced three upstanding children. Virginia Craft and Josh Rose came from two different worlds and created their own, a world of meaning and purpose. And those touched by their world, in particular their fellow African-Americans, were much the better for it. Robert Hill is a Pittsburgh-based communications consultant. He edited “Heart and Soul.” Sources: Post Gazette (Apr. 2018) article by Robert Hill; Heinz History Center; Heart and Soul: The Remarkable Courtship and Marriage of Josh and Virginia Craft Rose by Mary Ellen Butler (Apr. 2018)

Lillian Walker was a civil rights activist in the Bremerton, Washington area. Raised in rural Illinois, Walker went on to Chicago to pursue nursing, and moved to Bremerton in 1941 with her husband James Walker, a navy shipyard worker. The Walkers established the local NAACP branch and took part in numerous protests to desegregate Kitsap County. Walker was also a founding board member of the YWCA in Bremerton. She remained active in the community and in the Democratic Party until her death at age 98. Lillian (Allen) Walker was born in a run down shack in rural Carrier Mills, Illinois, on October 2, 1913. Her parents, Moses and Hazel Allen, were both of mixed race. The 20-acre farm the Allens lived on provided most of Moses' living as a farmer, although he worked as a coal miner occasionally. The Allens had 11 children, only five of whom lived past a young age. Lillian's parents' backgrounds are a bit hazy, but the family lore that Lillian recalled is fascinating. Her paternal grandmother, Elvira Allen, was supposedly the granddaughter of a Tennessee slave-owner, a product of mixed long-term union of the plantation owner's daughter and a Portuguese man who worked on the plantation. (As John C. Hughes notes in his oral history of Lillian Walker, calling the man "Portuguese" could've been an attempt to sanitize the stigma of a white woman carrying on a relationship with any non-white man.) The slave-owner, the story goes, threatened to sell his daughter's mixed-race children into slavery, upon which the couple fled with their family to Illinois. Life on the farm was predictably difficult. With no electricity or running water, Lillian and her siblings were responsible for chopping firewood, taking care of the farm animals, and working in the fields. But her parents were also insistent that she trudge barefoot to school every day. "We didn't play hooky," Walker recalled of her parents' insistence on a rigorous education. "And in my family if you got a whipping at school, you got a whipping at home." The two-room school house held grades 1 through 8. Walker excelled in school, and was called "exceptional" by her teachers. Her mother Hazel, who had been left illiterate at a young age by a head injury, encouraged her daughter's academic achievement. At night, Lillian would read aloud to her mother as she bustled around the kitchen. After Walker graduated from Carrier Mills High School, the Depression was in full swing and college was out of the question. Because she had dreamed of becoming a doctor, she decided to pursue a nursing career. She started working at a sanatorium in Harrisburg, Illinois, after graduation and took correspondence classes in nursing. In 1937, Walker moved to Chicago to live with her aunt. She met James Walker, a musician. Lillian was not, however, interested in the swinging lifestyle a saxophonist on the road would provide. "I'm not going to marry a musician, I'll starve to death," Lillian recalled saying to James as they got serious. He assured he was looking for more stable work, and found some in the Northwest. His mother was living in Seattle, and in 1940 he scraped together work laboring at an Army storage depot and joined the Merchant Marines. Lillian came not long after, and worked as domestic help. The Walkers were married on June 20, 1941, and soon James had found steady employment working in the Bremerton Navy shipyard. Lillian remembered Bremerton at the time was a "white supremacist town," vastly different from the tolerant and equitable atmosphere of Illinois. Reports of black men being denied service, insulted, or assaulted were widespread. Not long after James and Lillian arrived, James was told by a barber that he would cut Walker's hair only after closing time, with the shades drawn. Lillian, livid, found herself in the role of barber for James from that moment on, refusing to keep their presence in the community a secret. Lillian and James were not quiet in the face of this kind of bullying, and joined the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to protect their rights and fight for others. James became the second president of the Bremerton branch, and Lillian became secretary. Lillian was instrumental in several of the NAACP's protests in the Bremerton area during the 1940s. Walker was having lunch with a white friend in a cafe one day when the waitress served her friend and ignored her. When Walker demanded the waitress's boss, the woman called the police and claimed she had a "race riot" on her hands. Bremerton police chief Art Morken was roundly approved of in the black community, and when he got to the scene he saw that Lillian Walker wasn't a threat to cause a mob. After a meeting with church leaders, NAACP members, and the owner of the restaurant, the "Whites Only" sign was removed from the cafe's window. After the war, Bremerton's population plunged as 22,000 people left when navy contracts dried up. The Walkers decided to stay on, as they were committed to the community. In 1947, Lillian and several of her friends become founding board members of the YWCA, which opened a year later. But the civil rights battles were not yet over. In 1954, James Walker attempted to buy a cup of coffee from a drug store in Bremerton. The owner took a look at him and said, "I didn't serve niggers in Texas, and I'll go to hell before I serve them here." The Walkers and their NAACP chapter were not amused. After conferring with Philip Burton (1915-1995), a prominent civil rights attorney in Seattle, James and another black man went back again, asking to be served. When they were refused, Burton filed a complaint that Walker's civil rights were violated. Although they received threatening phone calls and were harassed, the Walkers refused to drop the case until the druggist settled and agreed to serve all. The Walkers, held part-time janitorial jobs at the bank and theater to make ends meet, and they also worked part-time as business managers with the Northwest Enterprise, the black-owned newspaper in Seattle. They were in the PTA, volunteered for Boy Scouts with their son and Campfire Girls with their daughter, and were devoted to their church, Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal. "I was the secretary of the Sunday School. I've been on the Trustees' Board, and I've been on the Steward Board, and I've been the president of the Missionary Society," Walker recounted. She may well have been correct when she said she'd been everything but the minister. She remained active as she grew older. She was an officer in the Bremerton Garden Club, and extremely active in the Kitsap County Democratic Party. She was a founding board member of the Carver Civic Club, a local chapter of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. She was appointed to the Regional Library Board, and served on the Kitsap County Area Agency on Aging Advisory Council. In 1997, Kitsap County's Martin Luther King Memorial Scholarship Fund Committee named James and Lillian Walker "MLK Citizens of the Century," in honor of their combined 100 years of community service. She has been given a Founder's Award by the YWCA, a Golden Acorn by the PTA, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Democratic Party. She also received the Liberty Bell Award from the Kitsap County Bar Association, an award presented by the state Attorney General. James Walker died in 2000, at the age of 89. They were married for 59 years, and Lillian didn't regret a minute: "If I had searched the world over I couldn't have found a better mate." Lillian Walker continued to live and remain active in Bremerton until her death at the age of 98 in January 2012. Sources: Courtesy Legacy Project, Washington Secretary of State ; "Lillian Walker: Civil Rights Pioneer," by John C Hughes

A very rare African American family portrait of two brothers posing in their uniforms w/ weaponry along with their mom before going off to war. Names unknown. Judging by the uniforms and weaponry it appears these men were members of the the United States Colored Troops (USCT). RailSplitter The United States Colored Troops (USCT) was the embodiment of Frederick Douglass’s belief that “he who would be free must himself strike the blow." Approximately 180,000 men -- many former slaves -- volunteered to fight in the Union army; nearly 40,000 gave their lives for the cause. With every engagement they fought in, African-Americans time and again proved their mettle. At Port Hudson in Louisiana, Fort Wagner in South Carolina, Chaffin's Farm in Virginia, and elsewhere, USCT units displayed courage under fire and won glory on the field of battle. By the end of the war, African-Americans accounted for 10% of the Union Army. The USCT was a watershed in African-American history, and one of the first major strides towards equal civil rights. civilwar.org

Tintype of William O. Goodridge, his wife Gertrude and their children William Jr., and John. William was a member of the famous Goodridge Brothers. Businesses were difficult to start and maintain in nineteenth century Michigan, especially if you were black. No matter the barriers, William and Wallace Goodridge thrived under the pressure and created the state’s first minority owned photography business. Their journey began in 1847 in York, Pennsylvania. The oldest of the Goodridge brothers, Glenalvin, became the first in the family to start in the fledgling trade. Photography as a commercial industry was nascent to say the least. The first wide-spread photographic process, the daguerreotype, had only been perfected by Louis Daguerre in Paris that same decade. Glenalvin soon developed a reputation for prizewinning ambrotypes. Unfortunately, an extortion scheme left him falsely accused of a crime. Glenalvin died during his unjust prison sentence. The two younger brothers, Wallace and William, re-established the studio in Saginaw, MI in 1863. They made a wonderful team. Wallace specialized in studio portraiture and William took the trade into the woods. Under contract to area railways, William photographed lumber camps on stereographic cards. William’s work reached critical acclaim when in 1890 (the year of his death), the Dept. of Agriculture sent his lumber views to be displayed as an American representative at the Centennial Exhibition in Paris. Wallace continued the studio business in Saginaw until his death in 1922. It remains as an example of one of the most important minority-owned establishments in early photographic history. Source: John V. Jezierski, "Enterprising Images: The Goodridge Brothers," African American Photographers 1847-1922

Beautiful portrait of an unknown African American family. Virginia Historical Society, Courtesy of William Biggars