February is Black History Month. This annual recognition of the pivotal role of African Americans in U.S. history, came from the efforts of Carter G. Woodson, a son of former slaves, who earned his Ph D at Harvard, and his collaborator, the prominent African-American minister Jesse E. Moorland. Together they founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. In 1926, they chose the birth month of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as a time to promote the research and celebration of the role of blacks in American history and began a 50-year effort to gain its national recognition. By the time President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month, Woodson and Moorland were largely forgotten and its celebration was largely defined by Martin Luther King’s dream and assassination.
In this series of commentaries, I will return to Woodson and Moorland’s original vision and explore the lives of black Americans who shaped West Kentucky. There are so many, now forgotten, that I can only focus on a few. But how to choose? Should it be the businessmen and women? The inventors and scientists? The doctors and lawyers? Or the social and political activists like MLK whose stories we have come to expect? No matter; all their stories share one thing in common—the Black struggle to rise above the obstacles placed in their way.
Businessmen Henry E. Hall, of Henderson, attended the local “colored school” and worked at the local tobacco factory until he was admitted to Hampton Institute in Virginia. After graduation he returned to Henderson, teaching school and working in the tobacco factory when school was not in session. In 1911, seeing the need, he founded an insurance company, the National Benevolent Union of Kentucky, to serve Blacks. But he lacked a proper license and had to sell his company. Later he founded the Mammoth Life and Accident Insurance Company with Alabama lawyer, William H. Wright. When Kentucky would not license the company, Hall and Wright took their case to court, won and soon their company had offices serving a Black clientele in Lexington, Paducah, Bowling Green, and Hopkinsville.
After Wright died, Hall expanded into Ohio, Indiana and Arkansas making it into the largest Black-owned business in Kentucky.
Hall and Wright were exceptional, however. Many (if not most) African-Americans did not benefit from their innovation. Henry H. Urquhart’s experience was more typical. While a switchman for the Illinois Central Railroad, he filed 2 patents improving the safety, life and efficiency of railroad brake shoes. But when he could not find capital to manufacture he sold 1/10 interest in his invention to James Weille, the son of a French whole-sale grocer whose family did have capital. Weille opened the Urquhart Brake-Shoe and Brake-Head Company, Inc which eventually employed 150 molders in its foundry. But Urquhart had no position in the company that bore his name.
He continued to work as switchman for the Illinois Central Railroad and it is not known if he profited from his invention.
Of course, it would be wrong to neglect civil rights activist altogether. One of prominence was Theodore R. M. Howard who was born the son of tobacco factory workers in Pool Town, as the Black side of Murray was then known.
He rose through determination and hard work and managed to earn a medical degree the College of Medical Evangelists [now Loma Linda University] in Los Angeles, CA. In the late 1930s, Howard became medical director of the Riverside Sanitarium in California.
In 1942, he moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi to become chief surgeon at Taborian Hospital which became the state’s largest hospital for African Americans. He also became wealthy and politically active in the civil rights movement both which displeased the white establishment.
When, after the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the White Citizens Council placed a $1,000 hit contract on him, he moved to Chicago. But he remained active in the Mississippi civil rights movement and returned frequently. Indeed, in 1963, he delivered the eulogy at Medgar Evers' funeral.
