American journalist
Wendell Phillips Dabney (4 November 1865, in Richmond, Virginia – 3 June 1952, in Cincinnati) was an influential civil rights organizer, author, and musician as well as a newspaper editor and publisher in Cincinnati, Ohio.[1][2][3]
Career
Dabney was born in Richmond, Virginia, five months after the end of the American Civil War to former slaves John Marchall Dabney (1824–1900) and Elizabeth Foster (maiden; 1834–1907).[2]
Formal education
Wendell Dabney was a talented musician and graduated from Richmond High School in the first integrated graduation ceremony at Richmond High School.[2] In 1883, Dabney, was enrolled in the preparatory department at Oberlin College. While there, he was first violinist at the Oberlin Opera House and was a member of the Cademian Literary Society.[1][4]
Post college career
He worked as a waiter and teacher before moving to Boston where he opened a music studio. He taught in Richmond schools from 1886 until 1892.[5]
Dabney traveled to Cincinnati in 1894 and met Nellie Foster Jackson, a widow who had two sons, in Indiana. They married in 1897 and settled in Cincinnati where he opened a music studio, became involved in politics, was city paymaster, became the first president of the local chapter of the NAACP, and started the Ohio Enterprise newspaper in 1902. It eventually became The Union which he published until 1952, the year of his death.
He wrote several books and pamphlets including one about leading African Americans in Cincinnati, a biography of his close friend Maggie L. Walker (the first woman to charter a bank in the U.S.), and published a collection of his newspaper writings.[1] Walker hired Dabney to write her biography.[6] He also composed songs.[1]
He objected to laws restricting marriage between African Americans and whites.[7]
The Dabney Building was at 420 McAllister Street.[5]
Family
Wendell Dabney was an uncle and music teacher of ragtime pianist, songwriter, and composer Ford Dabney (1883–1958).[8]
Wendell Dabney's father, John Marshall Dabney, was, in November 2015, posthumously honored in Richmond, Virginia, at the Quirk Hotel as a famed caterer and bartender[9] – known, among other things, as the world's greatest mint julep-maker.[10] The event was attended by notable community members and one of his great-great granddaughters, Jennifer Hardy (née Jennifer Dehaven Jackson). Jennifer's mother (great-granddaughter-in-law of John Marshall Dabney), Mary Hinkson (1925–2014), was an internationally celebrated modern dancer.[11][1]
One of Wendell Dabney's brothers, John Milton Dabney (1867–1967), had been a player in the Negro leagues, including the Cuban Giants.[12] Buck Spottswood, as manager, and J. Milton Dabney as team captain, reorganized, in 1895, the Manhattan Baseball Club of Richmond, Virginia.
Another family member is filmmaker Richard Jackson.
