Dillard University

Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader. The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King helped lead... the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Mrs. King's most prominent role may have been in the years after her husband's 1968 assassination when she took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality herself and became active in the Women's Movement. Coretta Scott King was the third of four children born to Obadiah "Obe" Scott and Bernice McMurray Scott in Marion, Alabama. She had an older sister named Edythe Scott Bagley an older sister named Eunice who did not survive childhood, and a younger brother named Obadiah Leonard, born in 1930. The Scott family had owned a farm since the American Civil War, but were not particularly wealthy. During the Great Depression the Scott children picked cotton to help earn money. Obe was the first black person in their neighborhood to own a truck. He had a barber shop in their home. He also owned a lumber mill, which was burned down by white neighbors.
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John Hope Franklin was a United States historian and past president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American... Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma to attorney, B. C. Franklin and his wife Mollie, and named after John Hope. He graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He graduated from Fisk University in 1935 and gained a doctorate in history in 1941 from Harvard University. Franklin met and courted Aurelia Whittington at Fisk. They married on June 11, 1940 at her parents' home in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Their only child, John Whittington Franklin, was born August 24, 1952. Aurelia was a librarian. Their marriage lasted 59 years, until January 27, 1999, when she succumbed to a long illness.
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Beah Richards was an American actress of stage, screen and television. She was a poet, playwright and author. Born Beulah Richardson in Vicksburg,... Mississippi, her mother was a seamstress and PTA advocate and her father was a Baptist minister. In 1948, she graduated from Dillard University in New Orleans and two years later moved to New York City. Her career started to take off in 1955 when she portrayed an eighty-four-year-old-grandmother in the off-Broadway show Take a Giant Step. She often played the role of a mother or grandmother, and continued acting her entire life. She appeared in the original Broadway productions of Purlie Victorious, The Miracle Worker, and A Raisin in the Sun. Richards was nominated for a Tony award for her 1965 performance in James Baldwin's The Amen Corner. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Sidney Poitier's mother in the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Other notable movie performances include Hurry Sundown, The Great White Hope, Beloved and In the Heat of the Night.
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Brenda Marie Osbey is an American poet. She graduated from Dillard University, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, and from the University... of Kentucky, with an M.A. She has taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, Loyola University New Orleans, and at Dillard University. She was Visiting Writer-in-residence at Tulane University and Scholar-in-residence at Southern University. She teaches at Louisiana State University. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Obsidian, Essence, Southern Exposure, Southern Review, Epoch, The American Voice, and The American Poetry Review.
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