Tag: William Yardley

  • “He [Herb Jeffries] told me he had to make this decision about whether he should try to pass as white,” the jazz critic Gary Giddins recalled in an interview for this obituary. “He said: ‘I just knew that my life would be more interesting as a black guy. If I’d chosen to live my life…

  • Herb Jeffries, a.k.a. ‘Bronze Buckaroo’ of Song and Screen, Dies at 100 (or So) The New York Times 2014-05-26 William Yardley Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Herb Jeffries, who sang with Duke Ellington and starred in early black westerns as a singing cowboy known as “the Bronze Buckaroo” — a nickname that evoked his malleable racial…

  • William F. Yardley The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (Version 2.0) 2009-12-25 Lewis L. Laska Tennessee State University William F. Yardley, an influential and powerful advocate for the legal rights of blacks, was the first African American to run for governor of Tennessee. Yardley was born in 1844, the child of a white mother…

  • Leo Branton Jr., Activists’ Lawyer, Dies at 91 The New York Times 2013-04-27 William Yardley Associated Press Leo Branton Jr. with Angela Davis during her 1972 trial on murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges. She was acquitted. Leo Branton Jr., a California lawyer whose moving closing argument in a racially and politically charged murder trial in…