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William Pickens was an African-American educator and government administrator.
Background
He was born on January 15, 1881 in Anderson County, South Carolina, United States, the son of Jacob and Fannie Porter Pickens, both of whom had been born slaves. His father worked as a tenant farmer, railroader, and in various political capacities as liaison between whites and blacks, and the family had moved more than two dozen times by the time Pickens was eighteen.
Education
He was eleven before he attended a school. Pickens completed high school near Little Rock, Arkansas, and in 1902 received the A. B. from Talladega College, Alabama.
Through the influence of Talladega officials, he was admitted to Yale, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa (he was the first black member), and received the B. A. in 1904.
He received the M. A. from Fisk University in 1908.
Career
Although a private bureau offered him an American and European lecture tour, he returned to Talladega, first as instructor, and later as professor, of Latin, Greek, and German (1904 - 1914).
He taught Greek and sociology at Wiley College, Marshall, Texas, in 1914-1915 and then was dean and, later, vice-president of Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland. Pickens was a member of the original Committee of 100 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), established in 1910 to perfect the organization. In 1920 he succeeded James Weldon Johnson as field director.
Between the wars Pickens became perhaps the most popular and effective platform speaker on behalf of blacks, illustrating his message with humorous stories; some of these tales are included in his American Aesop. As field director of the NAACP (1920 - 1940), Pickens became involved with virtually all of the political and personality conflicts that beset the NAACP, frequently clashing with Du Bois.
He joined Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, after Garvey's 1922 meeting with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan led him to narrow and personalize his views on racial caste. With the increasing centralization of control in the organization by 1941, Pickens found his position untenable and left to become chief of the Inter-racial Section of the Savings Bond Division of the Treasury. He soon became controversial when he was charged with having Communist affiliation by Martin Dies, who urged the House of Representatives to withhold his salary. Pickens survived this attack partly because of his strenuous efforts on behalf of the savings bond sales program.
He retired in 1952. Two years later, while on a cruise, he died and was buried at sea near Kingston, Jamaica.
Quotations:
Pickens once said, “Color had been made the mark of enslavement and was taken to be also the mark of inferiority; for prejudice does not reason, or it would not be prejudice… If prejudice could reason, it would dispel itself. ”
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Langston Hughes saw him as "a genial, very dark South Carolinian 'man of the people' with a powerful voice, a jolly face and a smile like a lighthouse in the sea"; Mary White Ovington compared him to Henry Ward Beecher, whom she had heard as a child: "He is deeply sincere with an almost Shakespearean vocabulary and a keen sense of humor. "
Connections
Pickens married Minnie Cooper McAlpine on August 10, 1905; they had three children.