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He was “colored.”
Wyatt grew up in Charlottesville, in a society that didn’t allow him to sit in the front seat of the local street car or sip a soda at the drug-store fountain. “Negroes just took for granted that they were not welcome” in the “vast majority of first-class places,” he wrote in “A Different Story,” Ruth Coder Fitzgerald’s book about local black history.
Wyatt helped change those practices as a local activist and a member of the national board of the NAACP.
When city black students wanted a marching band, he helped them buy uniforms—and get a teacher. He pressed city officials to improve the black high school. He counseled young black students in the early 1960s, when they held sit-ins at local lunch counters.
Wyatt succeeded as a dentist, but those who knew him said he didn’t just make a living. He worked to make a life.
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by clicking on the names below. |
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• Gabriel Prosser, inspired by the Bible |
• John J. Wright devoted leader, reader |
• Urbane Bass, city doctor |
• Sadie Combs, first teacher at Snell
• Philip Wyatt,
• Palmer Hayden,
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• Venus Jones, First black graduate of MWC |
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petitioning for change |
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Sources: "A Different Story" by Ruth Coder Fitzgerald; HistoryPoint.org of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library; The Free Lance-Star archives; State of Michigan Web site; African Within; The Kennedy Center; We Were Always Free By T.O. Madden Jr.; The Richmond Times-Dispatch; Life Magazine; Westmoreland County, Virginia. |
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