Lincoln Ragsdale
Lincoln Ragsdale | |
---|---|
Civil Rights Movement | |
Spouse | Eleanor Ragsdale |
Lincoln Johnson Ragsdale Sr. (July 27, 1926 – June 9, 1995) was an influential leader in the
Early life
Ragsdale was born on July 27, 1926, to mortician Hartwell Ragsdale and schoolteacher Onlia Violet Ragsdale (
Onlia Ragsdale, the first person in her family to earn a college degree, was the president of the
Military career
I wanted to be a pilot because I wanted to prove something. The papers said that blacks could not do it. I wanted to prove that we could do it. We were very segregated. The army was segregated. The navy was segregated. We couldn't use any of the facilities. We were treated as second-class citizens, but the only way to change something is to prove that you can do something.
Lincoln Ragsdale, 1990[4]
When Lincoln Ragsdale graduated high school in 1944, the new
In Alabama, Ragsdale experienced racially motivated violence firsthand, narrowly escaping a lynching at the hands of local police at the age of 19. As he tells it, Ragsdale, less deferential than normal because of his recent graduation and because he was accustomed to giving orders, had drawn the ire of a white gas station attendant, who alerted the police to his behavior. He was followed out of the station by a police car, and, after pulling over, brutally beaten by three officers with shotguns; one suggested killing him, but another objected because he was wearing a military uniform.[2]
Ragsdale was transferred to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for gunnery training, becoming one of the first black soldiers involved in the base's integration. Ragsdale later remarked upon his surprise at discovering the extent to which Phoenix was plagued by racism similar to the South's.
In November 1945, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps.[5]
Phoenix and entrepreneurship
After the war, he went on to settle in Phoenix in 1946, where he and brother Hartwell Ragsdale started a mortuary business, which was a traditional Ragsdale family profession. Ragsdale was initially unable to secure a loan, being rejected by all of the banks in town, until a stranger agreed to make a personal loan of $35,000 to start the business after hearing his story.[6][7] This made Lincoln Ragsdale Phoenix's first black funeral home owner in Arizona in 1948.[8] He would later graduate from the Arizona State University, and also received a doctorate in business administration from Union Graduate School. In 1949, he married Eleanor Ragsdale, a local schoolteacher at Dunbar Elementary School who became an important activist in her own right.[9]
Phoenix was just like Mississippi. People were just as bigoted. They had segregation. They had signs in many places 'Mexicans and Negroes not welcome.'
Lincoln Ragsdale[10]
Ragsdale's many business holdings over the years included the mortuary business, a real estate agency, a construction business, a restaurant and nightclub, various insurance companies in several states, an ambulance service, and a flower shop.[11] During his years of activism, Ragsdale nevertheless became wealthy in his many business dealings. Ragsdale's original business model subverted Phoenix's discriminatory practices to his own economic gain. Because blacks and Hispanics were not permitted to patronize white establishments, he expected to be able to corner the market in his industry among those underserved groups—and while Hispanics were not major customers, his business with the small black community boomed.[12]
However, Ragsdale, somewhat controversially for the time, began to specifically cater to white and Hispanic clientele in the 1960s, putting him at odds with the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association, Inc., a black trade association. He employed white workers and took his name out of the business', renaming from "Ragsdale Mortuary" to "Universal Memorial Center."[13] Ragsdale saw this business decision as part of his broader activism for racial integration: "I was almost bankrupt in 1965. There just wasn't enough business to support me, so I decided to go after the white business. We talk about integration but too often continue to work in all-black situations."[14]
Civil Rights-era activism
Early work
The Ragsdales were founding members of the
In April 1951, Ragsdale was elected to the GPCCU board of directors.
In 1952, the Ragsdales, the GPCCU, and the NAACP funded a lawsuit against the white-only
Fighting housing discrimination
The Ragsdales made history in 1953 by moving into a home on West Thomas Road in the exclusive Encanto area north of the red line which separated the segregated white and black neighborhoods in Phoenix.[21] In that era, blacks were excluded from home ownership in north of the neighborhoods along Van Buren Street by banks who refused them loans for such houses and real estate agents who refused to show the houses to blacks. Eleanor was a licensed real estate agent with knowledge of the market and also fair-skinned enough to pass for white, both of which allowed her to find a suitable home in a white neighborhood without arousing suspicion; Lincoln viewed the home at night, being driven through an alley behind the house. The Ragsdales, unable to buy the house themselves, asked a white friend of Eleanor to purchase the house in his own name and then transfer the title to them.
Enduring threats from neighbors, harassment from local police who stopped them while driving in their own neighborhood, and graffiti with racial epithets on their home, despite never being fully accepted in their own neighborhood the couple lived in the home for 17 years and raised their four children there. They became a local symbol of resistance to housing discrimination.[21][22] The model the Ragsdales had established for circumventing the controls on black home ownership was repeated by other blacks, often aided by Eleanor, to move into other homes in the all-white area.[23]
I looked suspicious. And all you have to do to look suspicious is to be driving a Cadillac and be black.
Lincoln Ragsdale, 1992[21]
NAACP and public accommodations
By the 1960s, Ragsdale and Rev.
Ragsdale participated in the creation of the Action Citizens Committee and ran for Phoenix City Council in 1963 along with the Committee's slate of other candidates. While ultimately narrowly unsuccessful, the campaign drew attention to the lack of minorities and South Phoenix residents in government and led to the registration of many new African-American and Latino voters.[27] In 1964 Ragsdale successfully lobbied the Phoenix City Council for passage of a public accommodations law, and nearly a year later Arizona passed a statewide civil rights law, both similar in nature to the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.[28] 1964 also saw Martin Luther King Jr. give a speech at the Arizona State University at Ragsdale's invitation, after which the Ragsdales hosted him in their home.[24][29]
Work with the Hispanic community
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the black population of Phoenix remained under 5% of the city's total and Hispanics outnumbered blacks 3-to-1, necessitating more multicultural organizing than occurred elsewhere in the Civil Rights Movement.[30][31]
Later life
As a pilot, Ragsdale served on the Phoenix Municipal Aeronautics Advisory Board in the 1970s. Ragsdale later became involved in the intense fight to create a statewide
The executive terminal at Phoenix's
References
Notes
- ^ Melcher 1992, p. 198
- ^ a b Baker 1993, p. 96
- ^ Whitaker 2007, pp. 29–44
- ^ Whitaker 2007, p. 44
- ^ a b c New York Times 1995
- ^ a b Baker 1993, p. 97
- ^ Whitaker 2003, p. 167
- ^ Holloway 2002, p. 40
- ^ Luckingham 1994, p. 165
- ^ Sheridan 1995, p. 283
- ^ Whitaker 2007, p. 278
- ^ Whitaker 2003, p. 96
- ^ Holloway 2002, pp. 40–41, 46
- ^ Black Enterprise 1977, p. 57
- ^ Finn 1998, pp. 26–27
- ^ Luckingham 1994, p. 164
- ^ Holloway 2002, pp. 202
- ^ Whitaker 2007, p. 120
- ^ Melcher 1992, p. 201
- ^ Whitaker 2007, pp. 120–121
- ^ a b c Melcher 1992, p. 203
- ^ Baker 1993, pp. 97–98
- ^ Whitaker 2003, pp. 169–170
- ^ a b Baker 1993, p. 98
- ^ Whitaker 2003, p. 174
- ^ Melcher 1992, pp. 206–207
- ^ Whitaker 2003, p. 166
- ^ Melcher 1992, p. 207
- ^ Whitaker 2003, pp. 186–187
- ^ Luckingham 1994, p. 2
- ^ Whitaker 2009, p. 85
- ^ "The Links, Incorporated". The Links, Incorporated. Archived from the original on 9 January 2014. Retrieved 27 March 2012.
Bibliography
- Baker, Lori K. (January 1993). "The Man who Refused to be Invisible". Phoenix: 96–99. ISSN 1074-1429.
- "The Business Side of Bereavement". Black Enterprise. 8 (4): 55–61. November 1977.
- Luckingham, Bradford (1994). Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860–1992. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-1457-7.
- Dean, David R.; Reynolds, Jean A.; Athenaeum Public History Group (October 2004). African American Historic Property Survey (PDF). City of Phoenix.
- Emerson, Frank E. (June 1980). "Seeking New Horizons in Life Insurance". Black Enterprise. 10 (11): 164–168.
- Finn, Elizabeth (July 1998). "The Struggle for Civil Rights in Arizona". Arizona Attorney. 34 (24). State Bar of Arizona: 24–28. ISSN 1040-4090. Archived from the originalon 2016-03-04.
- Holloway, Karla FC (2002). Passed on: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-3245-9.
- Melcher, Mary (1992). "Blacks and Whites Together: Interracial Leadership in the Phoenix Civil Rights Movement". Journal of Arizona History. 32 (2): 195–216.
- ISBN 0-8165-1515-8.
- Staff (1995-06-16). "Lincoln J. Ragsdale, 69, a Pilot Who Broke Many Color Barriers". New York Times.
- Whitaker, Matthew C. (2009). "Great Expectations: African American and Latino relations in Phonix since World War II". In Kusmer, Kenneth L.; Trotter, Joe William (eds.). African American Urban History since World War II. University of Chicago Press. pp. 83–97. ISBN 978-0-226-46510-4.
- Whitaker, Matthew (2003-07-01). "'Creative Conflict': Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale, Collaboration, and Community Activism in Phoenix, 1953–1965". The Western Historical Quarterly. 34 (2): 165–190. JSTOR 25047255.
- Whitaker, Matthew C. (2007). Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-6027-6.