Lincoln Ragsdale

In 1921, Hartwell's mortuary was located in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, the site of the violent Tulsa race riot, which he narrowly escaped; the business was burned down by a mob along with most other businesses in that black community.

Hartwell's oldest brother, William Ragsdale Jr., was a taxi driver who served whites and blacks and was the first of the six brothers, who started the family legacy of funeral service by opening the nation's first African-American funeral business still owned by the same family.

Lincoln has said that he grew up hearing about it.

Onlia Ragsdale, the first person in her family to earn a college degree, was the president of the National Association of Colored Women's Oklahoma chapter.

Hartwell's mortuary business, relocated to Ardmore, became a success and the Ragsdales lived more comfortably than most black families during the Great Depression.

Lincoln Johnson Ragsdale Sr. (July 27, 1926 – June 9, 1995) was an influential leader in the Phoenix-area Civil Rights Movement.

Known for his outspokenness, Ragsdale was instrumental in various reform efforts in the Valley, including voting rights and the desegregation of schools, neighborhoods, and public accommodations.

Ragsdale was born on July 27, 1926, to mortician Hartwell Ragsdale and schoolteacher Onlia Violet Ragsdale (née Perkins) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and subsequently grew up in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

Theodore "Ted" Ragsdale, a cousin of Lincoln, followed in William Jr.'s footsteps to become Oklahoma NAACP president in the 1930s despite the earlier death of his brother.

Lincoln's parents instilled in him the value of education.

He attended the segregated Douglass High School in Ardmore, and around this time began to develop both his love for flying and his entrepreneurial acumen by earning his own money to pay a local pilot to take him up in his plane regularly.

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.

When Lincoln Ragsdale graduated high school in 1944, the new Tuskegee Airmen, a corps of black military pilots in World War II, appealed to both his interest in flying and in racial equality.

He later remarked that he enlisted to refute the popular notion that blacks could not successfully fly planes.

Trained at Tuskegee Army Air Corps Field in Alabama in 1945, he became part of the US Army's early integration effort.

In Alabama, Ragsdale experienced racially motivated violence firsthand, narrowly escaping a lynching at the hands of local police at the age of 19.

As he tells it, Ragsdale, less deferential than normal because of his recent graduation and because he was accustomed to giving orders, had drawn the ire of a white gas station attendant, who alerted the police to his behavior.

He was followed out of the station by a police car, and, after pulling over, brutally beaten by three officers with shotguns; one suggested killing him, but another objected because he was wearing a military uniform.

Ragsdale was transferred to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for gunnery training, becoming one of the first black soldiers involved in the base's integration.

Ragsdale later remarked upon his surprise at discovering the extent to which Phoenix was plagued by racism similar to the South's.

In November 1945, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps.

After the war, he went on to settle in Phoenix in 1946, where he and brother Hartwell Ragsdale started a mortuary business, which was a traditional Ragsdale family profession.

Ragsdale was initially unable to secure a loan, being rejected by all of the banks in town, until a stranger agreed to make a personal loan of $35,000 to start the business after hearing his story.

This made Lincoln Ragsdale Phoenix's first black funeral home owner in Arizona in 1948.

He would later graduate from the Arizona State University, and also received a doctorate in business administration from Union Graduate School.

In 1949, he married Eleanor Ragsdale, a local schoolteacher at Dunbar Elementary School who became an important activist in her own right.

Ragsdale's many business holdings over the years included the mortuary business, a real estate agency, a construction business, a restaurant and nightclub, various insurance companies in several states, an ambulance service, and a flower shop.

During his years of activism, Ragsdale nevertheless became wealthy in his many business dealings.

Ragsdale's original business model subverted Phoenix's discriminatory practices to his own economic gain.

Because blacks and Hispanics were not permitted to patronize white establishments, he expected to be able to corner the market in his industry among those underserved groups—and while Hispanics were not major customers, his business with the small black community boomed.

In April 1951, Ragsdale was elected to the GPCCU board of directors.

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.

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.

However, Ragsdale, somewhat controversially for the time, began to specifically cater to white and Hispanic clientele in the 1960s, putting him at odds with the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association, Inc., a black trade association.

He employed white workers and took his name out of the business', renaming from "Ragsdale Mortuary" to "Universal Memorial Center."

Ragsdale saw this business decision as part of his broader activism for racial integration: "I was almost bankrupt in 1965. There just wasn't enough business to support me, so I decided to go after the white business. We talk about integration but too often continue to work in all-black situations."