Lincoln Ragsdale

The Ragsdales were founding members of the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity (GPCCU) in the late 1940s. One of Ragsdale's first forays into civil rights action was in a case that touched both his military and mortuary careers. In 1952, Ragsdale's business received the body of Pfc. Thomas Reed, a black soldier killed in the Korean War. While the family wanted to have him buried in the military veterans' plot at the Greenwood Memorial Park cemetery in Phoenix, cemeteries were segregated and the veterans' plot was all-white. Ragsdale worked with the GPCCU to publicize the controversy in the media both locally and nationally, getting a fellow activist, Thomasena Grigsby, to publish an editorial in the Chicago Defender.^[16][17] After a three-month standoff in which the body was left unburied by Ragsdale in a mortuary vault, the funeral directors gave in and voted to integrate the cemetery; Ragsdale went on to work for the integration of other cemeteries.^[18]

In April 1951, Ragsdale was elected to the GPCCU board of directors.^[19] He and the GPCCU advocated in the Arizona Legislature for a law to desegregate Arizona's schools. The effort was also backed by some white leaders, notably Barry Goldwater. The law which passed only went so far as to allow school boards to voluntarily desegregate. While many districts, including Tucson's, did desegregate voluntarily, Phoenix schools did not. The GPCCU then campaigned for a local ballot initiative to desegregate Phoenix's schools, but it failed by a 2-to-1 margin.^[20]

In 1952, the Ragsdales, the GPCCU, and the NAACP funded a lawsuit against the white-only Phoenix Union High School on behalf of three black children against school segregation; Ragsdale helped raise the GPCCU's $5,000 contribution for the lawsuit.^[6] The suit challenged the legality of the law's segregation option, in effect contesting the law they had just lobbied for. The case, decided by Judge Fred C. Struckmeyer in the Maricopa County Superior Court, became the nation's first court decision declaring school segregation laws illegal, over a year prior to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. Another case that year brought by the same lawyers against an elementary school agreed with Struckmeyer's decision.^[21]

The Ragsdales made history in 1953 by moving into a home on West Thomas Road in the exclusive Encanto area north of the red line which separated the segregated white and black neighborhoods in Phoenix.^[22] In that era, blacks were excluded from home ownership in north of the neighborhoods along Van Buren Street by banks who refused them loans for such houses and real estate agents who refused to show the houses to blacks. Eleanor was a licensed real estate agent with knowledge of the market and also fair-skinned enough to pass for white, both of which allowed her to find a suitable home in a white neighborhood without arousing suspicion; Lincoln viewed the home at night, being driven through an alley behind the house. The Ragsdales, unable to buy the house themselves, asked a white friend of Eleanor to purchase the house in his own name and then transfer the title to them.

Enduring threats from neighbors, harassment from local police who stopped them while driving in their own neighborhood, and graffiti with racial epithets on their home, despite never being fully accepted in their own neighborhood the couple lived in the home for 17 years and raised their four children there. They became a local symbol of resistance to housing discrimination.^[22][23] The model the Ragsdales had established for circumventing the controls on black home ownership was repeated by other blacks, often aided by Eleanor, to move into other homes in the all-white area.^[24]

By the 1960s, Ragsdale and Rev. George B. Brooks, respectively vice-president and president of the Maricopa County NAACP chapter, were organizing protests and meeting with local business leaders to end workplace discrimination that barred blacks from skilled jobs.^[25] Ragsdale also began to target segregation in public accommodations and facilities, and in 1962, echoing the 1960 Greensboro Woolworth's sit-ins, Lincoln and Eleanor organized protests at the local Phoenix Woolworth's stores.^[26][27]

Ragsdale participated in the creation of the Action Citizens Committee and ran for Phoenix City Council in 1963 along with the Committee's slate of other candidates. While ultimately narrowly unsuccessful, the campaign drew attention to the lack of minorities and South Phoenix residents in government and led to the registration of many new African-American and Latino voters.^[28] In 1964 Ragsdale successfully lobbied the Phoenix City Council for passage of a public accommodations law, and nearly a year later Arizona passed a statewide civil rights law, both similar in nature to the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.^[29] 1964 also saw Martin Luther King Jr. give a speech at Arizona State University at Ragsdale's invitation, after which the Ragsdales hosted him in their home.^[25][30]

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the black population of Phoenix remained under 5% of the city's total and Hispanics outnumbered blacks 3-to-1, necessitating more multicultural organizing than occurred elsewhere in the Civil Rights Movement.^[31][32]

As a pilot, Ragsdale served on the Phoenix Municipal Aeronautics Advisory Board in the 1970s. Ragsdale later became involved in the intense fight to create a statewide Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona, which finally passed after a voter-approved ballot measure in 1992. Ragsdale died on June 9, 1995, of colon cancer in his Paradise Valley, Arizona, home.^[5] His crypt is located in the Serenity Mausoleum of Phoenix's Greenwood/Memory Lawn Mortuary & Cemetery.

The executive terminal at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport was renamed the Lincoln J. Ragsdale Executive Terminal in his honor. The Links, Incorporated Phoenix Chapter, of which the Ragsdales were active members, contribute to the Arizona State University Dr. Lincoln J. Ragsdale Memorial Scholarship, named in his honor.^[33]

Notes

Bibliography

• Baker, Lori K. (January 1993). "The Man who Refused to be Invisible". Phoenix: 96–99. ISSN 1074-1429.
• "The Business Side of Bereavement". Black Enterprise. 8 (4): 55–61. November 1977.
• Luckingham, Bradford (1994). Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860–1992. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-1457-7.
• Dean, David R.; Reynolds, Jean A.; Athenaeum Public History Group (October 2004). African American Historic Property Survey (PDF). City of Phoenix.
• Emerson, Frank E. (June 1980). "Seeking New Horizons in Life Insurance". Black Enterprise. 10 (11): 164–168.
• Finn, Elizabeth (July 1998). "The Struggle for Civil Rights in Arizona". Arizona Attorney. 34 (24). State Bar of Arizona: 24–28. ISSN 1040-4090. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04.
• Holloway, Karla FC (2002). Passed on: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-3245-9.
• Melcher, Mary (1992). "Blacks and Whites Together: Interracial Leadership in the Phoenix Civil Rights Movement". Journal of Arizona History. 32 (2): 195–216.
• Sheridan, Thomas E. (1995). Arizona: A History. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-1515-8.
• Staff (1995-06-16). "Lincoln J. Ragsdale, 69, a Pilot Who Broke Many Color Barriers". New York Times.
• Whitaker, Matthew C. (2009). "Great Expectations: African American and Latino relations in Phonix since World War II". In Kusmer, Kenneth L.; Trotter, Joe William (eds.). African American Urban History since World War II. University of Chicago Press. pp. 83–97. ISBN 978-0-226-46510-4.
• Whitaker, Matthew (2003-07-01). "'Creative Conflict': Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale, Collaboration, and Community Activism in Phoenix, 1953–1965". The Western Historical Quarterly. 34 (2): 165–190. doi:10.2307/25047255. ISSN 0043-3810. JSTOR 25047255.
• Whitaker, Matthew C. (2007). Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-6027-6.