Thomas Wyatt Turner | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Born | |
Died | April 21, 1978 101) | (aged
Nationality | American |
Education | Howard University (BS, MA) Cornell University (PhD) |
Occupation(s) | College professor, botanist |
Known for | Founding member of NAACP; founding member and president of Federated Colored Catholics |
Spouse(s) | Laura Miller Louise Wright (m. 1936) |
Parent(s) | Eli Turner and Linnie Gross (Turner) |
Thomas Wyatt Turner (March 16, 1877 – April 21, 1978) was an American civil rights activist, biologist, and educator. He was the first Black American to receive a Ph.D. in botany, and helped found both the NAACP and the Federated Colored Catholics.
Turner was born in Hughesville, Maryland. [1] His parents, Eli and Linnie (née Gross), were sharecroppers and he was the fifth of their nine children. [2] When he was eight, his father died and he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle, James Henry and Rose Turner. Turner worked in the fields but also attended Episcopal local schools from 1892 onwards after Catholic schools refused to admit him because of his race. From 1895 to 1897, he attended the Howard University Preparatory School. [1]
He studied at Howard University gaining B. S. (1901) and M. A. (1905) degrees. [2] In 1901, he attended the Catholic University of America briefly to further improve his scientific knowledge but had to leave because it was too expensive. [1] In 1921, he obtained a PhD in botany from Cornell University—becoming the first Black person to gain a doctorate from Cornell and the first to receive a doctorate in that field at any institution. His dissertation was entitled The physiological effects of salts in altering the ratio of top to root growth and came from work done with Otis Freeman Curtis during summer leaves-of-absence from his post as Dean at Howard University. [2]
After graduation, Turner headed to the Tuskegee Institute, Alabama at the request of Booker T. Washington, where he taught academics in biology for a year. [1] From 1902 he gave service to various public schools in Baltimore, Maryland for a decade, except for a year (1910–1911) at the St Louis High School in St Louis, Missouri.
In 1909, he became a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) [2] as the first secretary of the Baltimore branch, and was also active in promoting the right of Blacks to vote. He continued this activism after his appointment to Howard University. In 1915 he organized a city–wide membership drive for the Washington NAACP. [1] He was eventually honored with a lifetime membership in the NAACP.
From 1914 to 1924, he served as a Professor of Botany at Howard University in Washington, D.C., which had provided courses in botany since 1867. [1] [2] He was the founding head when the Department of Botany was established in 1922. [3] He also served from 1914 to 1920 as Acting Dean at the Howard's School of Education. As well as biology he felt that the mentorship provided by teachers and faculty had a vital impact on student's careers. [1] Turner was initiated as a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity in 1915.
In 1915, he began lobbying the Catholic University of America to admit Black students and for the Catholic church to provide high school education for Black Catholic children—as well as a route to the priesthood for young Black men who had a vocation (specifically via the Josephites). [1] He would later become one of the Committee of Fifteen, which targeted such issues.
While working at Cornell University in 1918, Turner worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Maine, where he examined potato fields. The American government consulted Turner throughout his career about agricultural problems. Under the auspices of the US Secretary of Agriculture, Turner worked as a collaborator on Virginia's plant diseases.
In 1924, Turner became a professor of botany and the department head at the Hampton Institute. [2] [4]
On December 29, 1924, [1] Turner founded (and was elected president of) the Federated Colored Catholics, an organization that he said was "composed of Catholic Negroes who placed their services at the disposal of the Church for whatever good they were able to effect in the solution of the problems facing the group in Church and country". [5] The FCC, founded to be a haven for Black Catholics and their goals/rights, would later disband due to two White co-leaders (and Jesuits) who sought a more interracial bent for the organization—against Turner's will.
In 1931, Turner organized the Virginia Conference of College Science Teachers in 1931, and served as president of that group for two terms. Turner also was an active member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Society for Horticultural Science.
He retired in 1945 due to glaucoma. [4]
In 1976, aged 99, Turner was awarded an honorary doctorate by The Catholic University of America. [1]
He died in 1978, 36 days after turning 101. [1]
His first wife was Laura Miller. In 1936, he married Louise Wright. [2]
Turner was active in Catholic organizations and in societies for the advancement of African-Americans. He remained a loyal member of the Church despite suffering discrimination; he wrote of being asked to move to the back of the church when attending Mass in St. Louis in 1926.[ citation needed ]
His papers and unpublished autobiography were among the Turner Papers at the Moorland–Spingarn Research Center as of 1988. [1] His memoir was published independently in 2018.
In 1976, the National Office for Black Catholics (NOBC) began awarding the annual Dr. Thomas Wyatt Turner Award for work towards equal rights. [1]
In 1978, the Hampton Institute named its new natural sciences building Turner Hall. [1]
The Cornell Graduate School created the Turner Kittrell Medal of Honor for alumni who have made significant national or international contributions to the advancement of diversity, inclusion and equity in academia, industry or the public sector. [4] The first award was in 2017.
The Catholic University of America (CUA) is a private Catholic research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It is the only pontifical university of the Catholic Church in the United States and the only institution of higher education founded by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Established in 1887 as a graduate and research center following approval by Pope Leo XIII, the university began offering undergraduate education in 1904. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson was an American educator and pastor. He served as the first African-American president of Howard University, from 1926 until 1960. Johnson has been considered one of the three leading African-American preachers of the early 20th-century, along with Vernon Johns and Howard Thurman.
Benjamin Lawson Hooks was an American civil rights leader and government official. A Baptist minister and practicing attorney, he served as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1977 to 1992.
Wyatt Tee Walker was an African-American pastor, national civil rights leader, theologian, and cultural historian. He was a chief of staff for Martin Luther King Jr., and in 1958 became an early board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He helped found a Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) chapter in 1958. As executive director of the SCLC from 1960 to 1964, Walker helped to bring the group to national prominence. Walker sat at the feet of his mentor, BG Crawley, who was a Baptist Minister in Brooklyn, NY and New York State Judge.
Rayford Whittingham Logan was an African-American historian and Pan-African activist. He was best known for his study of post-Reconstruction America, a period he termed "the nadir of American race relations". In the late 1940s he was the chief advisor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on international affairs. He was professor emeritus of history at Howard University.
Elbert Frank Cox was an American mathematician. He was the first African American to receive a PhD in mathematics, which he earned at Cornell University in 1925.
Archibald Henry Grimké was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. chapter.
Edward Alexander Bouchet was an American physicist and educator and was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale University in 1876. On the basis of his academic record he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1874, he became one of the first African Americans to graduate from Yale College.
Edwin Bancroft Henderson, was an American educator and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pioneer. The "Father of Black Basketball", introduced basketball to African Americans in Washington, D.C., in 1904, and was Washington's first male African American physical education teacher. From 1926 until his retirement in 1954, Henderson served as director of health and physical education for Washington, D.C.'s black schools. An athlete and team player rather than a star, Henderson both taught physical education to African Americans and organized athletic activities in Washington, D.C., and Fairfax County, Virginia, where his grandmother lived and where he returned with his wife in 1910 to raise their family. A prolific letter writer both to newspapers in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and Alabama, Henderson also helped organize the Fairfax County branch of the NAACP and twice served as President of the Virginia NAACP in the 1950s.
Ernest Everett Just was a pioneering biologist, academic and science writer. Just's primary legacy is his recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. In his work within marine biology, cytology and parthenogenesis, he advocated the study of whole cells under normal conditions, rather than simply breaking them apart in a laboratory setting.
Flemmie Pansy Kittrell was the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition. Her research focused on such topics as the levels of protein requirements in adults, the proper feeding of black infants, and the importance of preschool enrichment experiences for children.
William Montague Cobb (1904–1990) was an American board-certified physician and a physical anthropologist. As the first African-American Ph.D in anthropology, and the only one until after the Korean War, his main focus in the anthropological discipline was studying the idea of race and its negative impact on communities of color. He was also the first African-American President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His career both as a physician and a professor at Howard University was dedicated to the advancement of African-American researchers and he was heavily involved in civil rights activism. Cobb wrote prolifically and contributed both popular and scholarly articles during the course of his career. His work has been noted as a significant contribution to the development of the sub-discipline of biocultural anthropology during the first half of the 20th century. Cobb was also an accomplished educator and taught over 5000 students in the social and health sciences during his lifetime.
The Federated Colored Catholics (FCC), originally the Committee against the Extension of Race Prejudice in the Church, then the Committee for the Advancement of Colored Catholics, was a Black Catholic organization founded in 1925 by Thomas Wyatt Turner. It was a kind of spiritual successor to Daniel Rudd's Colored Catholic Congress movement (1889-1904), providing an organized voice in an era of nearly unchecked anti-Blackness and systemic racism. After a hostile takeover, it folded in the 1950s.
William Robert Ming Jr. was an American lawyer, attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and law professor at University of Chicago Law School and Howard University School of Law. He presided over the Freeman Field mutiny courts-martial involving the Tuskegee Airmen. He is best remembered for being a member of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation team and for working on a number of the important cases leading to Brown, the decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled de jure racial segregation a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
D. Augustus Straker was an American teacher, lawyer, and jurist. He won elections to the South Carolina legislature but was denied his seat on multiple occasions.
Marguerite Thomas Williams was an American geologist. She was the first African American to earn a doctorate in geology in the United States and dedicated most of her career to teaching geography and social sciences. Williams is a pioneer among geoscientists in recognizing how human activity and landscape management impact erosional processes and the risks of natural flooding.
Otis Freeman Curtis was an American botanist and plant physiologist, at the State Agricultural Experimental Station, and professor of botany at Cornell University. He made important contributions to the study of translocation.
Beta Kappa Chi (ΒΚΧ) is an American collegiate honor society that recognizes academic achievement in the fields of natural science and mathematics. It was established in 1923 at Lincoln University, an historically Black university near Oxford, Pennsylvania.
Xuemei Chen is a Chinese-American molecular biologist. She is the Furuta Chair Professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. She was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
Franklin v. South Carolina, 218 U.S. 161 (1910) appealed the conviction of Pink Franklin for the murder of South Carolina Constable Henry H. Valentine in 1907. Franklin was a sharecropper who wished to leave his employer although his employer had advanced Franklin wages under a contract based on the so-called "peonage laws". A warrant was obtained and when Valentine came to the house, a shootout occurred, killing Valentine and injuring Franklin, his wife Patsy, and another constable who was there. The defense included claims that Franklin acted in self-defense and that the peonage laws were unjust. In appeal, the defense claimed that the make-up of the jury, all white based on the requirement that the jury be based on those who were eligible to vote, was based on unconstitutional racism in election laws stemming from the 1895 South Carolina constitution. Franklin's conviction was upheld in all appeals, including the appeal before the United States Supreme Court heard in April 1910.