William Roberson (c. 1836-1878) was an American barber, proprietor of a bathing and shaving saloon with a Victorian Turkish bath, and civil rights activist in St. Louis, Missouri. He advocated to have African-American teachers. He was a Republican.
Before the American Civil War, he and his brother Francis Jefferson Roberson established a barber shop at the Barnum's St. Louis Hotel. He married Lucy Jefferson, a relative of Thomas Jefferson. He established a branch of the Prince Hall masons (Prince Hall Freemasonry), [1] named for Prince Hall.
His establishment at 410 Market Street [2] was luxurious. [3] Léon A. Clamorgan worked for him. [4] William Taggert also worked for him. [5]
In 1867 Frederick Douglass stayed with him, after being refused hotel accommodations in St. Louis, when Douglass was in the city for his speech at the St. Louis Turn Halle. [6] [7] Roberson helped support James A. Johnson's St. Louis Blue Stockings baseball team. [8] [9]
A St. Louis periodical published an image of his brother cutting hair. [10] Francis Jefferson Roberson's son Francis Rassieur Roberson (1898-1979) became an architect. [11]
His son Frank Roberson studied at Oberlin and the University of Karlsruhe. He became an art teacher. [12]
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
John Brown was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Blanche Kelso Bruce was an American politician who represented Mississippi as a Republican in the United States Senate from 1875 to 1881. Born into slavery in Prince Edward County, Virginia, he went on to become the first elected African-American senator to serve a full term.
Lincoln University is a public, historically black, land-grant university in Jefferson City, Missouri. Founded in 1866 by African-American veterans of the American Civil War, it is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. This was the first black university in the state. In the fall 2023, the university enrolled 1,799 students.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Shields Green, who also referred to himself as "Emperor", was, according to Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave from Charleston, South Carolina, and a leader in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, in October 1859. He had lived for almost two years in the house of Douglass, in Rochester, New York, and Douglass introduced him there to Brown.
Sumner High School is a St. Louis public high school that was the first high school for African-American students west of the Mississippi River in the United States. Together with Vashon High School, Sumner was one of only two public high schools in St. Louis City for African-American students and was segregated. Established in 1875 only after extensive lobbying by some of St. Louis' African-American residents, Sumner moved to its current location in 1908. It has historically also been known as Charles H. Sumner High School, and Sumner Stone High School.
Anti-literacy laws in many slave states before and during the American Civil War affected slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color. Some laws arose from concerns that literate slaves could forge the documents required to escape to a free state. According to William M. Banks, "Many slaves who learned to write did indeed achieve freedom by this method. The wanted posters for runaways often mentioned whether the escapee could write." Anti-literacy laws also arose from fears of slave insurrection, particularly around the time of abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion, and Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831.
Douglass High School was a segregated high school in North Webster Groves, Missouri from 1926 until 1956. Named after abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the school served the area of North Webster, which had been settled by many black families after the Civil War.
William Gustavus Allen was an African-American academic, intellectual, and lecturer. For a time he co-edited The National Watchman, an abolitionist newspaper. While studying law in Boston he lectured widely on abolition, equality, and integration. He was then appointed a professor of rhetoric and Greek at New-York Central College, the second African-American college professor in the United States. He saw himself as an academic and intellectual.
Victoria Clay Haley, later Victoria Clay Roland, was an American suffragist, clubwoman, bank executive, and fundraiser based in St. Louis, Missouri and later in Chicago.
The Frederick Douglass Film Company was an early American film production company in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was established in 1916, soon after the pioneering Lincoln Motion Picture Company, by prominent African-American business and professional men from New Jersey. The intent of the founders was to counter anti-African-American films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and to improve race relations. It was named after the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Eric Ledell Smith was an American historian and author. He served as Commissioner for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. He was part of a presentation on Frederick Douglass aired on C-SPAN.
Benjamin Franklin Bowles (1869–1928), commonly written as B. F. Bowles, was an African American civil rights leader, teacher, high school principal, and the founder and president of Douglass University, a 20th-century college for African Americans in segregated St. Louis, Missouri.
Douglass University was a university established for African Americans in 1926 in located in St. Louis, Missouri. It was the second university in the state of Missouri to admit African American students; and it was the second U.S. law school that admitted African Americans for a full law degree. The university moved locations many times within the same city; as well as remained active off-and-on for decades after its founding.
Clement Richardson was an American professor, college president, and author. An African American, he served as president of Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri from 1918 until 1922. He edited The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race which includes a profile on him.
William Augustus Hazel (1854–1929) was an American architect, stained glass artist, educator, academic administrator, and civil rights activist. He was the first dean of the Howard University School of Architecture in 1919. He is considered an important figure in the architectural history of the Twin Cities in Minnesota; and was one of the first Black stained glass artists in the United States.
Julie Winch is a history professor and author in the United States. She was born in London. She wrote a book about Philadelphia's black elite and edited, introduced, and footnoted Joseph Wilson's account of the city's elite before the Civil War. She also wrote a book about James Forten and the prominent family of Jacques Clamorgan in St. Louis and the Clamorgan family.
U.S. Grant Tayes, was an American painter and watercolorist, active in Missouri from the 1930s through 1950s. His artwork was centered around documenting his Black community in Missouri. He was a self-taught visual artist, who benefited from professional mentorship in his later life. Tayes also worked as a teacher, a barber, and a columnist. Other names used include Ulysses S. Grant Tayes, Ulysses Grant Tayes, and Ulysses Tayes.