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Uncovering the people, stories, achievements & struggles that shaped Black history.

09/11/2026

Clara Brown offered the $10,000 she had saved for news of one daughter. She was a formerly enslaved woman living in Colorado, and she put the money up after the Civil War. By then she had not seen the girl in thirty years. Did all that money ever bring her daughter home?

The answer started with a letter that reached Denver in February 1882. It came from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and it named a woman called Eliza Jane Brewer.

The Denver Republican reported that Aunt Clara Brown was "almost overwhelmed with joy" when it arrived. A telegram went out to Mrs. Brewer within days, promising there was no mistake.

Clara Brown was close to eighty years old. Eliza Jane had been a little girl in Kentucky the last time the two of them were together.

That was 1835, the year a Logan County farmer named Ambrose Smith died owning all of them.

To settle his estate, Clara, her husband Richard and their children were sold separately at auction. They went to different owners in different places, and Clara never saw her husband again.

There had been four children once, but Eliza Jane's twin, Paulina Ann, drowned when she was eight. Richard Jr., Margaret and Eliza Jane were the ones the sale scattered.

A Kentucky man named George Brown bought Clara, and his name became hers.

For about twenty years she raised the Brown family's children instead of her own. Those are the years a mother never gets back, and nobody paid her for a single one of them.

George Brown died in the late 1850s, and Clara came out of it free at fifty-six. The record splits on how. Some accounts say his will freed her, and the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains says the family helped her buy her freedom.

Freedom came with a condition, because Kentucky law required a freed person to leave the state. She had heard a rumor that Eliza Jane had gone west, so west is where she went.

Three years of searching through Kentucky, Missouri and Kansas turned up nothing. By the spring of 1859 she was in Leavenworth, Kansas, where wagon trains were forming for the gold strike at Pikes Peak.

That April a Colonel Benjamin Wadsworth hired her to cook for twenty-six men on the road to Denver. Her pay was a place in the wagons for her laundry pots.

The pots rode in the wagon, and Clara walked most of the 700 miles beside it.

The trip took eight weeks, and one Southern man on the train complained about traveling with a Black woman. She fed that whole crew all the way to Colorado.

The wagons reached Denver in June 1859. She found no word of Eliza Jane there, so she followed the miners up into the mountains to Gregory Gulch.

That camp became Central City, and she opened the first laundry in Gilpin County to wash what the miners wore. She also delivered babies, cooked, and nursed the sick and the hurt. Between them, those jobs earned her a real living.

She put her earnings into mining claims and land. Within a few years she reportedly owned lots in Denver, seven houses in Central City, and property near Boulder, Georgetown and Idaho Springs.

Her house held Methodist services and a Sunday school before the camp had a church of its own. One early history called her home "a hospital, a home, a general refuge for those who were sick or in poverty."

The camp called her Aunt Clara, the name the South gave older Black women. It stayed with her for life.

Then, in May 1864, a flood tore through Denver. The papers proving what Clara Brown owned there were lost in it.

That was land a laundress had paid for one shirt at a time, and the flood took the only proof of it.

The war ended the next spring, and for the first time Clara Brown could travel back south freely. She sold off her holdings and went to Logan County, Kentucky, then on to Sumner County, Tennessee.

Friends who could write had been sending letters for her for years. Now she asked in person, and the answers came back hard.

Her husband Richard was dead, and so was their daughter Margaret.

Richard Jr. had been sold so many times that nobody could trace him. No one she found could tell her where Eliza Jane was.

She did not come back to Colorado alone. She paid the way west for sixteen or more people, relatives and other freed people, and helped them find work once they arrived.

Frank Young, a Central City pioneer who wrote down those early years, said more Black families followed "whether aided by her efforts or stimulated by her example." He named the Poynters, the Lees and the Nelsons.

In January 1873, fire ran through Central City. It took her home and several of her other buildings.

She kept giving what she had left. In 1879, in her late seventies, she went to Kansas for Governor Frederick Pitkin. Her job was helping the Exodusters, Black families who had fled the South with almost nothing, resettle in Colorado.

By about 1880 the money was gone. The search, her gifts to churches and charities, the fire and the real estate agents who cheated her had taken nearly all of it.

The thin mountain air had grown too hard on her, so she moved down to Denver and lived in a home a friend provided. The woman who had opened her door to a whole mining camp now slept behind someone else's.

That is where the letter from Council Bluffs found her. Her friends raised the fare to Iowa, and she rode east across the plains she had once walked. The Council Bluffs Nonpareil described her on March 4, 1882, as "still strong, vigorous, tall, her hair thickly streaked with gray, her face kind."

Eliza Jane Brewer was her daughter.

Forty-seven years of letters, newspaper notices and questions to strangers ended in Council Bluffs. Eliza Jane had a daughter of her own, a granddaughter Clara had never known.

Clara Brown came home to Denver with that granddaughter, and Eliza Jane came to see her there in the years she had left.

The Society of Colorado Pioneers took her in as its first woman member. When she died in late October 1885, the governor and the mayor of Denver came to her funeral, and the pioneers called her "the kind old friend whose heart always responded to the cry of distress."

Her marker in Riverside Cemetery says she was born in Kentucky. She was born in Virginia, and Kentucky is only where she was taken as a child.

The laundry pots she brought to Denver in 1859 paid for church services, sickbeds, and train fare west for at least sixteen people. Nothing in her story says anyone ever paid her for the Denver land she lost with those papers.

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09/11/2026

A lawyer sold Mammoth Cave at double his price, with Stephen Bishop included. Stephen was an enslaved Kentucky teenager, and the lawyer, Franklin Gorin, had put him underground with a lamp to guide paying tourists. Gorin paid $5,000 for the cave in 1838, then took $10,000 from a Louisville doctor in 1839. The doctor got a cave and the best guide in it, so what did Stephen ever get?

The first thing Stephen got, he took for himself, and he took it off a ceiling. Visitors in those years held their torches up to the roof and wrote their names on it in black smoke.

Stephen asked them how to spell what they wrote, and years later he explained it to a writer from New York. He learned, he said, by seeing "the gentlemen paint their names with the smoke of the torches on the walls, and then asking how they spelled them."

They paid for a cave tour, and he came out of it with an alphabet.

That lesson is still overhead. Rangers at Mammoth Cave point out an early Stephen signature in stiff block letters, and later ones in a smooth cursive hand.

Underground, he was doing more than copying names, and in his first year he and a visitor laid a ladder across the Bottomless Pit. Before that crossing, no one had gotten past it.

Miles of new cave opened on the far side. A magazine story printed some sixty years later had him crossing on a cedar sapling, but the earlier accounts say it was a ladder.

So who got paid for opening all that cave? Jeanne Schmitzer, writing in a history journal in 1993, laid out how the arrangement worked. The owner profited from each tour, she wrote, and had no wages to pay.

The doctor who bought the cave was John Croghan. In 1842 he called Stephen up to Locust Grove, the Croghan family estate, and Stephen stayed two weeks drawing the cave from memory.

By one modern count, his map showed about ten miles of passages, and he had found roughly half of them himself. A guidebook printed it in 1845 with his name on it.

That was his name in ink, on his own work, while another man still owned him.

It was not a surveyor's drawing, and researchers note that he built partly on an older survey from 1835. The distances run loose, but the way the branches join is right.

Guides used it into the 1880s. One thin line on it marked a side passage off Echo River, one of the cave's underground rivers.

In 1972, cavers coming in from a neighboring cave system finally joined it to Mammoth. That link is a big part of why Mammoth is the longest known cave in the world. The passage they came through was already on Stephen's map.

He drew the door, and nobody walked through it for 130 years.

At Locust Grove that same year, Stephen met Charlotte Brown. She was enslaved there too, working in the Croghan household, and the two were married at the estate.

Their son, Thomas, was born in 1843, and like his parents, he was born owned.

Stephen brought Charlotte down into the cave. On a boulder in a passage now called Pensacola Avenue, he wrote a line for her that is still there: "Charlotte Brown, the flower of Mammoth Cave."

He named a chamber of gypsum flowers for her too, and it is still Charlotte's Grotto. One caver who traced her signatures found her name beside his in far parts of the cave, places he doubted tours ever went.

A man who got his letters from strangers used them to write his wife's name underground.

Up on the surface, other people were writing his name down too. Croghan kept an account book for the cave from May 1846 to June 1848, and it surfaced at an auction in 2021.

A museum inside the park now holds it, and Stephen is in it. An entry dated June 2, 1847, reads "extracting & cleaning Stephen's Teeth," with $2.00 written beside it.

His teeth went into the books at two dollars, as an expense of the property.

The same pages track materials for building the cave's hotel. A researcher from Locust Grove who studied the book called those medical entries an owner protecting his investment.

In that book, the man whose name was in print counted as upkeep.

Stephen guarded the cave like it was his. Visitors liked to snap off crystals as souvenirs, and one visiting writer recorded Stephen speaking out against it. The same writer admitted that a protest from Stephen counted for little, in his words "a slave's remonstrance would not be much."

So Stephen found another way to say no. As Schmitzer reads an 1849 account, he pointed visitors to specimens beyond their reach. Then he named prices so steep that even the richest declined.

A man whose word counted for little found a price that said no for him.

When Croghan died of tuberculosis in January 1849, his will freed the 28 people he held, but only seven years after his death. For Stephen, that meant seven more years of guiding on a dead man's schedule.

Stephen planned for the day it ran out. A British traveler, Amelia Murray, wrote that he meant to take his wife and family to Liberia.

Liberia was the West African republic settled largely by Black Americans. Murray added, "He would not wish to be free in this country."

Another visiting writer found him studying Blackstone, the standard law book of the day, so he could practice law there. He was reading law for a country he had never seen.

The freedom came in 1856. On July 13, 1857, Stephen and Charlotte sold land they owned near the cave, and the deed went on file at the county courthouse. No paper freeing him has been found, Schmitzer notes, but she reads that deed as the act of a free man.

Within months, Stephen Bishop was dead.

He was in his middle thirties. No record gives the cause, and he never saw Liberia.

Nineteen years underground making other men money, and about one year that belonged to him.

He was buried without a marker on the hill above the cave. In 1878 a rich visitor from Pittsburgh came through and met Charlotte, who was running the hotel dining room by then.

She walked him to the grave, where a cedar tree was the only marker. He promised a headstone. Three years later, one arrived.

It was secondhand, carved for a Civil War soldier whose family never paid for it. The carver ground off the soldier's name and cut Stephen's in its place.

The soldier's sword and flag are still carved at the top. Below them, it calls Stephen "First Guide & Explorer of the Mammoth Cave" and says he died June 15, 1859, two years after he did.

He was not even the first guide. Two earlier guides had taught him the routes when he arrived.

So his grave has his date wrong and his title wrong, on a slab bought for somebody else.

The name he wrote for himself, in smoke, on the ceiling, is spelled right. That signature and the line he left for Charlotte are records he made himself. Most of the rest was written by men who owned him, sold him, or got his dates wrong.

Stephen Bishop opened miles of that cave for the men who owned him. What he is owed now is simple: his name, his dates and his work, set down right.

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09/11/2026

Five Southern senators stood against federal money for Black freedom's fiftieth birthday. The celebration was being built in Chicago, with Archibald J. Carey, an AME preacher, at its center. Senator J. Hamilton Lewis said those five men were "not normal upon any question pertaining to the Negro." So where did the money come from, and what did it cost Carey?

The money came from Springfield first, and it came with a string tied to it. Illinois passed the law on June 29, 1915. It said the state would release its $25,000 only to match cash the organizers raised themselves by August 15.

That left them about seven weeks to find the cash.

On July 24, taggers carrying collection bags were posted in every part of Chicago. The bags were sewn from twenty-five yards of donated cloth, and the day's take came to $709.74.

Archibald J. Carey had been building toward that summer for four years. He was pastor of the Institutional AME Church, and the whole thing had started with an exhibit inside a church.

Back in the fall of 1911, at Carey's suggestion, Bethel AME Church in Chicago staged what its organizers called a "Miniature Exposition." It showed off Black achievement in arts and crafts, and Carey served as its president.

The governor of Illinois at the time, Charles S. Deneen, came to see it.

The official report written afterward says that small show gave birth to the idea of a state exposition. Carey then carried resolutions to his church's Chicago Annual Conference. They asked the legislature to help pay for the Emancipation Proclamation's fiftieth anniversary.

In June 1913, the legislature passed House Bill 919, and Governor Edward F. Dunne named Carey first on the commission to run it. The bill said the commissioners would serve without pay.

The commission elected Bishop Samuel Fallows as its president, so Carey did not run the show alone. The report still credits the beginning to him.

So Carey had no salary, money that would not move until the organizers moved first, and a celebration already two years late.

The commissioners went out and found the rest themselves. The final report says each one traveled two thousand miles or more, sometimes away from his own work for a week or longer.

Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin sent state money. Kansas lawmakers said no, so Kansans raised their own by private subscription.

In Indiana, the federation of Black women's clubs brought a full exhibit to Chicago on only what its members could volunteer themselves.

The Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue opened its doors on August 22, 1915. Roughly twenty thousand items filled it, from Elijah McCoy's lubricator to a box the report says carried freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad.

John Brown's daughter brought a lock of her father's hair. Fifty years of freedom, and some of the proof fit inside a lock of hair and a box.

Carey ran the Sundays at the Coliseum, and the report says his programs leaned toward worship. Instead of an admission fee, he asked for a silver offering.

On his days, there was no ticket at the door, only the offering.

His family worked the same hall. His daughter Annabel served as the exposition's assistant secretary. On September 14, his wife presided over an international, in*******al women's meeting in the Coliseum annex.

By closing day, September 16, the report counted nearly a quarter of a million visitors.

That same year, Carey helped put William Hale Thompson in the mayor's office. Thompson paid it back in jobs, and he made Carey the city's chief examiner of claims.

Five years later, on May 13, 1920, the AME Church elected Carey its forty-third bishop. He was sent first to oversee Kentucky and Tennessee, and he also sat as a delegate to Illinois's constitutional convention.

Thompson later put him on the city's civil service commission, the board that ran hiring for city jobs. One index of officeholders dates his term there to 1927 through 1929.

From that seat, Carey pushed the police department to hire Black officers. Reference works on his life say he also saw that officers who abused Black prisoners were punished. That put a bishop's hand on who wore a Chicago police badge.

Thompson's opponents noticed how many Black appointees were working in City Hall. They gave the building a racist nickname borrowed from a novel about slavery.

The historian Dennis C. Dickerson, who wrote the book on Carey and his son, says those gains came at a price. Thompson backed Carey, Dickerson writes, but did not champion Black rights in other areas.

Dickerson also says Carey was accused of punishing AME pastors who would not back his political alliances.

In 1928, the bishop took his youngest child and namesake, then twenty, to Washington. He wanted the young man to see the Capitol.

In a line Dickerson quotes, Carey described his own life this way: "I seem not to have time for the enterprises in which I am engaged, but they are all important and I do the best I can."

A year after the Washington trip, in 1929, Carey was indicted on charges of taking bribes from people seeking city jobs. The case never came to trial.

The publisher's summary of Dickerson's book calls it alleged impropriety in selling jobs. It says the charge marred his time on the commission. Nobody can honestly tell you now whether it was true.

Carey died of heart disease at Billings Memorial Hospital in Chicago on March 23, 1931, at the age of sixty-two.

His funeral overflowed Quinn Chapel, the church that had first brought him to Chicago in 1898. He was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island.

One online index of American politicians, the Political Graveyard, lists him on its page of officeholders in trouble or disgrace for bribery. The same entry says he was born in slavery, in Georgia, on August 25, 1868. Georgia's own vote on December 6, 1865, was the one that made the Thirteenth Amendment law.

He was born free, and he spent his life building places where Black work could be seen and Black men could be hired.

On his Sundays at the Coliseum, he asked for silver. What he is owed is small and exact: his birth told right, and that hall remembered in the same breath as the indictment.

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09/11/2026

Black merchants carried flowers to a Japanese American store's first day in Bronzeville. The Rev. Harold M. Kingsley, a Black minister from Chicago, had helped start the committee keeping the peace in Bronzeville, the wartime Black neighborhood of Los Angeles. It had been Little Tokyo until the camps emptied it, and those flowers came from people whose leases the returning families could cost. Two years later, Kingsley's center faced that same kind of choice about its own building.

In November 1947, two church bodies in Los Angeles voted to hand that building back. It was the old Japanese Union Church at 120 North San Pedro Street, built in 1923 for three Japanese congregations.

Through most of the war it had housed Pilgrim House, the social service center Kingsley ran for Black war workers and their children. Pilgrim House did not fight the vote, and it got word to the Black newspapers that it was not being forced out.

It went back to the people who built it.

Giving up a roof is no small thing in a city that would rent to Black families almost nowhere else. Kingsley's road to that choice started in Alabama sixty years earlier.

Kingsley was born in Mobile on March 1, 1887. His BlackPast biography says his father was a wealthy white man and his mother a poor Black woman.

The family raised him Baptist. They also sent him to an Episcopal church, because they tied it to a good education. Kingsley later gave the credit to his grandmother on his mother's side, who pushed him hard toward school.

He finished Talladega College in Alabama in 1908 and went north to Yale Divinity School, planning to teach Greek. At Yale he met people he called "genuinely interested in religion," and he decided to preach.

Yale's library lists him as a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha during his years there. The fraternity itself began at Cornell in 1906, so that most likely means its chapter at Yale.

In 1911 a poor woman's son from Mobile walked out of Yale with a divinity degree.

He was twenty-four, and for the next sixteen years he kept moving. He took pulpits in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Cleveland, and ran mission work in six states from Oklahoma to Florida.

In 1927 he took the pulpit at the Church of the Good Shepherd, a Congregational church on Chicago's South Side. Black families kept arriving from the South, and many needed birth certificates to land the best jobs.

Good Shepherd helped them get those papers. Newcomers could walk into a hiring office with their own names in hand.

That was what a church was for, the way Kingsley ran one.

From the pulpit, he preached about money. He warned against economic starvation, bad investments and the unfair laws that made Black life harder.

He boiled it down to nine words: "More business in religion and more religion in business." The historian Wallace Best quotes the line in his history of Black Chicago's churches.

Researchers from the federal writers' project who studied his church said he came across more like a sharp businessman than a minister.

In 1930 he laid out his case in a book, The Negro in Chicago: A Spiritual Interpretation of an Economic Problem. Congressman Oscar De Priest of Chicago, the first Black man elected to Congress in the twentieth century, belonged to his church.

In 1940 Good Shepherd's community center bought the old Chicago Orphan Asylum building on South Parkway. As Parkway Community House, run by the sociologist Horace Cayton, it held a theater, an art gallery and social work under one roof. Best names Kingsley as one of its founders.

For most preachers, that is a whole life's work. Kingsley was fifty-six, and he was about to start over.

In the middle of the war, he left Chicago for Los Angeles.

The neighborhood waiting for him had been cleared by Executive Order 9066. In the spring of 1942, Japanese Americans in Los Angeles, citizens and immigrants alike, were taken from their homes.

Before they went, families left household goods and family heirlooms at the Japanese Union Church, hoping to get them back someday. Nobody could tell them when.

Black workers came west into those streets for shipyard and aircraft jobs. By mid-1943, about 5,500 were arriving in Los Angeles every month, according to the historian Hillary Jenks.

Most of the city was closed to them. Restrictive covenants, clauses in a deed that barred Black buyers or tenants, covered about 90 percent of its housing. A paycheck from the shipyard could not buy a way past them.

The city built 51,000 new homes between Pearl Harbor and the start of 1945. The Los Angeles Sentinel counted 942 that Black families could get into.

That is fewer than two homes in every hundred.

Families slept in old storefronts, temples and garages. It was common to find sixteen people in one room and forty sharing one bathroom.

The term "hot beds" came into use, because one sleeper climbed in as soon as another got up. How many people lived there is still argued, with one county estimate near 80,000 and Jenks putting the 1944 count closer to 30,000.

Kingsley took charge of Pilgrim House in early 1944. A Black minister was now looking after Black newcomers in rooms whose own congregation could not come home.

Working mothers left their children at the nursery school. Boys joined Scout Troop 731, children borrowed toys through a loan program, and the city health department gave free shots.

For families sleeping in shifts, that old sanctuary was the one big room in the neighborhood kept for them.

Kingsley spoke out against the camps themselves, according to his Yale and BlackPast biographies. That put him across from his own city's mayor.

The exclusion order lifted in January 1945. As the historian Scott Kurashige has documented, the mayor still warned Japanese Americans not to come back to Los Angeles.

On January 19, Bronzeville's Black businessmen hosted a welcome reception for the families coming home. That was Bronzeville answering its own mayor.

Pilgrim House kept serving the Black families who stayed. Then the war jobs dried up, and laid-off mothers were home again. By 1947 fewer children came to the nursery school.

After the handover, Pilgrim House moved on September 1, 1948, to a building on North Los Angeles Street. Within a year a notice came: that building would be torn down for a new police headquarters.

The headquarters became Parker Center. Nearly 3,000 people were evicted from the block it took.

More than 2,500 of them were Black.

Many had landed in Little Tokyo because no other part of Los Angeles would take them. Now the city was taking that, too.

Pilgrim House closed on October 16, 1950, at its last address on East First Street.

Kingsley stayed in Los Angeles and kept working for peace among Black, white, Mexican American and Japanese American neighbors. He pastored two more congregations there and died in Los Angeles in 1970.

Kingsley is easy to lose in the record. One online honor roll of people who stood by Japanese Americans in those years does include the man who ran Pilgrim House.

It calls him Reverend Charles Kingsley. His name was Harold Merrybright Kingsley.

In Chicago, he spent years helping strangers get papers with their right names on them. The least he is owed is his own.

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09/11/2026

Several hundred Black women crowded a federal job office shouting, "This is our war!" They had been organized by the Negro Victory Committee of Clayton Russell, a Los Angeles preacher. That summer, the city's big defense plants had asked the office for women workers and said they did not want Black ones. So what did the office do next?

It backed down. After the protest, the federal employment service stopped steering Black women only into janitorial and service jobs at the defense plants.

That was the difference between sweeping the floor of an aircraft plant and building the airplane. It was also the difference between cleaning up after the war and building it.

Clayton Russell had a committee, a congregation and a microphone.

Russell was born in 1910 and grew up in Boyle Heights, just east of downtown Los Angeles. He was preaching by the age of seven. He finished Jefferson High School in 1928 and was ordained a year later at the People's Independent Church of Christ.

In 1935 the church's founder, the Reverend N. P. Greggs, died, and Russell took over the pulpit at twenty-five.

It was one of the largest congregations in Los Angeles, and its membership would eventually peak at 4,000 people.

He took his sermons onto the radio, on a Los Angeles station called KFOX, where he would stay on the air for years. The National Religious Broadcasters lists him as the first Black religious broadcaster.

In the Depression, his church ran job relief and cooperative markets out of its own building. Plenty of Black pastors thought that was not a preacher's business. Russell answered them plainly.

"I consider it a sin to stand up in the pulpit and preach to hungry people and not help them to get a job or to get some food."

That sentence has nothing in it about anybody's soul, and it was not meant to. It is about a job and some food, for people sitting in his pews.

Then the defense money came to Los Angeles. On June 25, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which banned hiring discrimination in the defense industries.

Some plants simply ignored it. So that year Russell and Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle newspaper, built a local coalition and called it the Negro Victory Committee.

It was one of the country's Double V groups, named for two victories, one over fascism abroad and one over racism at home.

The committee pushed for defense training centers in Watts and against bias in the unions and the Navy. Then it went after the Los Angeles Railway, which ran the city's streetcars and had no Black motormen.

The railway had an answer ready for the committee. It said publicly that hiring Black motormen and conductors would cause "race riots."

So who exactly was going to riot?

On a Sunday evening in December 1942, 1,500 Black and white Angelenos packed First AME Church. The California Eagle listed Russell there as chairman of the Negro Victory Committee. When a march on the railway's headquarters was proposed, in case the company did not change its policy, the crowd roared its approval.

The railway had warned of riots. What it got was a church full of people asking for jobs.

It took about a month of that pressure. In January 1943, the Los Angeles Railway gave Russell its commitment that Black workers would get motorman jobs.

A promise is not a paycheck.

The first Black operator did not take the controls until August 1944. She was Arcola Philpott, a former Chicago welfare worker whom Metro's transit archive calls the first "motormanette." She drove the F line from 116th Street up Vermont Avenue toward Union Station, and within weeks the company hired its first Black motormen.

Twenty months after the company's warning, a Black woman had her hand on the controls of a Los Angeles streetcar.

In those years Russell's church also ran a chain of cooperative grocery stores called the Victory Markets. The Black population of Los Angeles more than doubled between 1940 and 1944, and the stores served the newcomers. In 1943 his church sent a delegation to stand with the Mexican American young men convicted in the Sleepy Lagoon murder case.

"We cannot have Victory abroad without the fullest support from the people at home," Russell wrote in the Eagle at the time.

By the end of the war the committee had faded. Russell lost a race for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in the mid-1940s. BlackPast's history of the committee says his popular appeal waned after that loss.

By 1950 he still had a Sunday half hour called News and Comments by Rev. Clayton Russell, on KOWL in Santa Monica. That October the station manager, Arthur Croghan, took him off the air. The reason given was his alleged "association with Red front organizations."

Red front meant a group said to be a cover for the Communist Party. In 1950 that label alone was enough to cost Russell his microphone. He denied the charge, Broadcasting magazine reported.

Russell was about forty years old when it happened. Eight years after facing down a streetcar company, he was being judged by the company he supposedly kept.

Three years later he lost the pulpit too. In 1953, members of his congregation accused him of financial improprieties, and Russell resigned after eighteen years as pastor. The record gives the accusation, not a finding.

He started over right away with a new church, the Temple of Divine Guidance, later renamed the Church of Divine Guidance. He led it until he died in 1981.

Late in his life, historians from Cal State Long Beach recorded one long interview with him. It was for a project called Rosie the Riveter Revisited, about the women who worked in the war plants.

The archive's notes on that tape say his organizing is what led to the hiring of Black women at the aircraft plants.

Everybody knows the name Rosie. Hardly anybody knows the name of the man whose committee made a federal office stop sending Black women to mop floors.

His name was Clayton Russell, and that credit has been owed to him for more than eighty years.

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