Emma Hamilton Dancing

William Pickens was born on January 15, 1881 in Anderson County, South Carolina to formerly enslaved parents. He showed impressive academic achievement, graduating as valedictorian of Union High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1899 and going on to graduate from Talladega College in Alabama in 1902 before receiving a second bachelor's degree from Yale. He graduated in 1904 in the honors society Phi Beta Kappa and won prizes for his excellent oratory. He would later also go on to receive a master’s degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1908, a PhD in literature from Selma University in Alabama in 1915, and an LLD from Wiley University in Marshall, Texas in 1918, all while simultaneously pursuing a career in academia.

Pickens married Minnie Cooper McAlpine of Meridian, Mississippi in 1905, with whom he would have three children. His first post-graduate job was as a professor at Talladega College for ten years, and he subsequently worked as dean of Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1915 to 1920. During this time he also began his prolific writing career, publishing a two-part autobiography under the titles of The Heir of Slaves (1911) and Bursting Bonds (1923), reflecting on his upbringing, education, and participation in the Harlem Renaissance. Pickens was an active participant in the ongoing conversation in the 1910s and 1920s surrounding Black civil rights and the “New Negro” movement, publishing a collection of essays under the title The New Negro: His Political, Civil, and Mental Status in 1916.

After leaving academia in 1920, Pickens spent the next twenty years working for the NAACP, which he had been involved in since its founding in 1910. He helped establish the organization’s Louisville branch and worked as a field secretary, becoming an influential public speaker and writer who massively grew the organization’s membership. After leaving the NAACP in 1942 he worked for the US Treasury Department, supporting the sale of savings bonds during WWII. He retired in 1951 and died while on a cruise in Jamaica on April 6, 1954.