Simmons, Roscoe Conkling, 1881-1951

Dates

• Existence: 1878 - 1951

Biographical note

Roscoe Conkling Simmons (born 1878 or 1881, died 1951) was an African-American orator, civic leader, journalist and politician. He graduated from Tuskegee Institute in 1899. He served as head of the Colored Division of the Speakers' Bureau of the Republican National Committee in 1920, 1924, and 1928. He was an advisor to three American presidents. He worked for the Chicago Defender from 1916 through the mid-1930s, and for the Chicago Tribune from the late 1940's until his death in 1951.

Footnote on birth date

The date of his birth is uncertain. Obituaries state his age in 1951 as anywhere between Simmons' own assertion that he was sixty-three and his oldest friends' statements that place his age nearer to seventy-five. A birth date of June 20,1878 in Greenview Mississippi is listed in the earliest inventories of his papers produced by the Harvard University Archives. A passport appliction holds a 1918 certification of birth signed by his parents that state the year and place of his birth as 1881 in Macon, Mississippi. See Kaye, Andrew M. Roscoe Conkling Simmons and the Mechanics of Black Leaderhisp, 1899-1951 (Thesis, doctoral--University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2002), p. 23 for a full note on the evidence for various dates and places of birth.

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