Dr. Ivory A. Toldson
When Dr. Ivory A. Toldson was recently tapped for a leadership role at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he remembered a June 30, 1963 letter from his grandfather to the civil rights organization’s executive director.
“This is to inform you that while I was attending a vote meeting Friday night week, my wife and daughter were harassed,” read the first sentence to Roy Wilkins written by the Reverend John H. Scott, Toldson’s grandfather, who had been a civil rights activist and scholar.
The letter detailed atrocities the Black community had been facing in northern Louisiana that month.
“Things are bad here,” Scott wrote, explaining how the Ku Klux Klan had burned down churches, issued death threats to his family, and threatened to rape Black women. For support, Scott turned to the nation's oldest civil rights organization.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the issues around Black people getting fair treatment under the rights of the law continue today,” said Toldson, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Negro Education.
Now, he is the NAACP’s new director of education innovation and research, a post that he is excited about after serving for many years as the president of Quality Education for Minorities (QEM)
