Race and Ethnicity: African American - Starting with V

Ellis Valentine was a major league baseball player whose charismatic personality made him a fan favorite while his strong throwing arm made him a force in the outfield. Valentine’s career spanned ten seasons in the major leagues, most of it with the Montreal Expos. Ellis Clarence Valentine was born on July 30, 1954, in Helena (Phillips County) to Ellis Valentine Jr. and Bertie Valentine. The family moved to Los Angeles, California, when Ellis was three. There, his father worked in the city’s sanitation department, while his mother ran a beauty salon out of their home. After becoming a high school pitching star, Valentine suffered a broken leg the summer before his senior year and thus played first base as a …

The desegregation of Van Buren (Crawford County) schools produced several national headlines and is one of Arkansas’s most intriguing episodes of compliance with—and defiance against—the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas school desegregation decision. In 1954, the Van Buren School District had 2,634 white students and eighty-seven African-American students. Black students attended a segregated elementary school, and after graduation they were bussed over the Arkansas River to the segregated Lincoln High School of Fort Smith (Sebastian County). After Brown, with assistance from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), nineteen parents sued for the entry of twenty-four black students into Van Buren’s white high school, the first case of its kind …

African American frontiersman Aaron Anderson “Rock” Van Winkle was recognized throughout northwestern Arkansas as a skilled lumberman, builder, farmer, businessman, and principal agent of Peter Van Winkle, owner of the preeminent sawmill business of the region that supplied lumber throughout the Ozarks for over forty years in the latter half of the nineteenth century. His life spanned seventy-five years during times of turbulence and change in the nation and in Arkansas—from slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the unprecedented industrial and technological development that was the Gilded Age. Aaron Anderson was born enslaved in Alabama in 1829 and brought as a child to Arkansas by slave-holding farmer Hugh Anderson, on whose Benton County farm he came of age. After Hugh …

Elliott van Zandt was a pioneering figure in international athletics. A physical education instructor, he served in the U.S. Army in World War II. Afterward, he remained in Europe, and at a time when the national athletic landscape in the United States was still hampered by segregation, van Zandt (who was African American) became a critical figure in the development of national programs for a number of different sports, especially basketball, in countries across the European continent. He coached a number of different teams and sports, serving as the Olympic coach for multiple national teams while also teaching both players and coaches around the world. Elliott C. van Zandt was born in 1915 in Hot Springs (Garland County) to Una …

Arkansas native Thomas Franklin Vaughns served in both World War II and the Korean War as an enlisted aircraft mechanic. His service during World War II was with the Tuskegee Airmen, and he returned home to Arkansas after his service where he spent a long career working with veterans and agricultural programs. Born on July 7, 1920, in Lee County to Harrison and Dessie Vaughns, Thomas Vaughns grew up in Felton (Lee County) on the family farm. At the time of the 1930 federal census, he lived at home with his parents and four siblings. The family owned a fifty-acre farm purchased by Vaughns’s great-grandfather in 1872. His father also worked as a carpenter. Vaughns walked more than three miles …

In 1926, M. E. Patterson of Little Rock (Pulaski County) incorporated Velvatex College of Beauty Culture, then known as Velvatex Beauty College, which was the state’s only approved beauty school for people of color. (A history produced by the school, however, lists its beginning operation year as 1929.) The school was founded after Patterson, who had often done hairdressing in her home kitchen, chose to teach others the skills of the trade in a more formal educational setting—and to help men and women become entrepreneurs. Patterson dubbed the school “Velvatex” because she believed African-American hair emulated the feel of velvet. By the height of the Great Depression, many black-owned industries had taken a hit, but beauty salons were plentiful throughout …