D'Army Bailey(1941-2015)
- Actor
A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Bailey enrolled in college at Southern
University, where he joined other students in protest demonstrations
against segregation in Baton Rouge. Consequently, he was expelled
because of his involvement and finished his undergraduate studies at
Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Upon completing his juris
doctor at Yale University in 1967, Bailey worked in New York as
National Director of the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, an
organization created to assist civil rights attorneys working in the
South. He then moved to the San Francisco area to practice law, and was
elected to the Berkeley City Council in 1971. While he was on the City
Council, Bailey's black nationalist politics was extremely
controversial, resulting in his expulsion in a recall election in 1973.
He returned to Memphis in 1974 and began a law practice with his
brother, working as an attorney until his election to the Circuit Court
of Tennessee at Memphis, where he still serves. Bailey is a founder of
the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the
site where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.