Introduction to Daisy Lampkin, Part I

Despite the fact that at least one historian has described organizer, activist, and community builder Daisy Lampkin as “legendary,” not much is known about her. No full-scale biography has been published, though there have been two abortive attempts by contemporaries of Lampkin. Their unfinished manuscripts now lay untouched in archives. Several short biographical chapters have been published in various places, but these are often under sourced, elide large sections of her career, and get details wrong. I’ll be sharing elements of Lampkin’s life, along with my own research journey, here on this blog. I hope readers will become as fascinated by this admirable and endlessly energetic lady as I am.

​Lampkin was born Daisy Elizabeth Adams in Washington, DC, in 1882, 1883, or 1884. No birth certificate exists, and census records offer various dates, so we cannot be sure. Her grave marker lists 1883, so that seems as worthy a date as any. She was an only child, and her parents split when she was an infant. Daisy moved with her mother to Reading, Pa., just outside Philadelphia. She seems to have stayed in touch with her father, a part-time AME minister, and later lived with him as she completed several years of high school back in Washington. He died in her home in Pittsburgh in 1919.
 
Her mother, Rose (or Rosa) Proctor, remarried very soon after arriving in Reading, to a John Temple. John had a brother known as N. D. Temple who would go on to make a name for himself within the AME hierarchy in Pennsylvania, first in the Philadelphia area, and then later in Pittsburgh. Through this step-family Daisy would gain entrée into greater Philadelphia African American society, one of the nation’s vibrant centers of black political and intellectual life since before the Civil War. Daisy would continue to draw on, and exploit, these early networks long into her career as an activist.

The Rev. N. D. Temple, AME minister, step-uncle of Daisy Lampkin, and an important early influence in her life.

​Though she never attended college, Daisy developed a knack for public speaking and confidence in her abilities from an early age. Evidently a precociously talented orator, she won prizes and was asked to declaim in school and in church from a young age. African American newspapers regularly reported on the young Daisy’s orations for holidays and other festivities.
 
Sometime before 1909, the Rev. N. D. Temple had been reassigned to western Pennsylvania to plant churches there, a talent which he had already demonstrated in the eastern portions of the state. In 1909 Rose Proctor Temple died. Daisy left Philadelphia to live with her step aunt and uncle in Pittsburgh. There she met a young chauffer from Rome, Georgia, William Lampkin. The couple married in 1912 when Daisy was at the relatively advanced age of 28. Daisy and William never had children, but they formed a partnership upon which would be built one of the great civil rights careers of the century.
 
Many of the details are currently fuzzy, but Daisy’s career as an activist commenced immediately after her marriage. Daisy and William moved to a house on Webster Avenue in the area known as the Hill district, an increasingly segregated community just east of the downtown area. The community would soon become one of the country’s thriving centers of black culture, and the house on Webster Ave., where Daisy and William lived the rest of their lives, would become its most vital social center.

Daisy and William's house on Webster Avenue in Pittsburgh's Hill district still stands. A state historical marker adorns the location now.

​Daisy plunged into suffrage work, giving speeches and organizing for the right of Pennsylvania women to vote. The Pennsylvania suffrage movement was lively and engaged. It appears also to have been at least somewhat interracial, though the precise contours of black and white cooperation remain to be seen. Daisy became active within a group called the Lucy Stone League, named after a well-known women’s rights activist from a previous generation. Within a few years Daisy rose to the presidency of the Lucy Stone League, a position she would hold for the next forty years.
 
Daisy’s organizing talents quickly showed themselves. While she was leading the call for votes for women, Daisy also was managing record-shattering fundraising drives for Liberty Bonds as well as recruitment drives for the Red Cross. She regularly joined committees organizing parades and tributes to returning troops. She readily transferred this patriotic voluntarism to civic politics and in 1922 helped Republican William Magee get elected mayor of Pittsburgh. She made many speeches on his behalf, mobilizing Pittsburgh’s black community behind Magee. This brought her to the attention of the Pennsylvania Republican party, and she became friendly with Governor Gifford Pinchot, who appears to have nominated her, or named her, an alternate delegate to the 1924 GOP presidential convention. She was thus apparently the first African American women to be so honored. Daisy would never be a political drone, however, and in the early 1930s broke with the Republicans over the party’s failure to address black economic needs during the depression. In the 1950s, she would break with the Democrats over their failure to effectively repudiate southern racists in the party.
 
The political influence Daisy was cultivating in the 1920s, however, was secondary to her growing work with African American women’s clubs. The black women’s club movement had developed since the nineteenth century. Clubs worked tirelessly on a host of issues, notably to promote education and other civic reforms, and in support of community service organizations and fundraising for institutions such as orphanages, hospitals, and homes for the aged. They filled an important gap in black community life created by Jim Crow segregation. One of the leading Pennsylvania club women was a Philadelphia-area activist named Ruth Bennett. Through Bennett, Daisy became involved in the Pennsylvania State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs.
 
Typical of her career, Daisy’s talents were recognized early and already by 1918 she was working as state organizer for the PSFNWC. She travelled throughout the state helping to initiate local chapters. Through this work she became acquainted with Mary McLeod Bethune with whom she enjoyed a lifelong friendship and an ongoing partnership. She also remained active with the Lucy Stone League, which was transitioning to other sorts of activism after the Nineteenth Amendment. In the same period she was also instrumental in establishing a chapter of the Urban League in Pittsburgh, helping to attend to the needs of wave after wave of African American migrant to the city.

And yet all of that was mere prelude to Daisy Lampkin’s most enduring contribution, her work with the Pittsburgh Courier and the NAACP. . . . More tomorrow.

​--David J. Snyder

A festive Daisy, second from left, and a stoic-appearing Mary McLeod Bethune, far right.