Existing comment:
First Secretary William Pickens
William Pickens (1881-1954), a founding member of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, was the son of South Carolina sharecroppers. Bright and ambitious, he excelled at Talladega College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1904. For sixteen years he worked as a professor and academic administrator. While teaching at Morgan College, he helped Joel Spingarn organize the Louisville branch of the NAACP and prepare the case Buchannan v. Warley, which concerned residential segregation. |