William S. Peters

My great uncle Bill was truly a versatile man, a lawyer, educator and civic leader at a time when African-Americans were, for the most part, limited to menial jobs as sharecroppers, cooks and maids-“hewers of wood drawers of water.” He was a hero in every sense of the word, and he gave his life for the civil rights of Negroes and Indians. Over the course of sixty years, I researched in Bill’s birthplace of Haynesville, Louisiana, Magnolia and Pine Bluff, Arkansas where he attended high school and college, respectively, Nashville, Tennessee where he attended law school, and Boley and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where he practiced law. Bill’s accomplishments may not seem so special today, but then he managed without the benefit of full citizenship, facing discrimination at every turn. His is the remarkable story of a black man who earned a law degree in 1903, was active in politics and the development of his community, and was assassinated in Boley in 1936 because of his activism. James S. Peters, PhD, Storrs, Connecticut