By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 21, 2007
On March 4, 1933, William Wendell Layton came to Washington with his family to watch the inauguration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
As a student of history, he recognized the importance of Roosevelt's presidency, which had arrived in the midst of the worst financial crisis of the century. And as an African American who had grown up near Richmond in a rigidly segregated society, the 17-year-old Layton saw hope in Roosevelt's message of uniting all Americans.
In a 1996 self-published memoir, "Layton Looks at Life," he described the scene as Roosevelt rode past in an open touring car, with the man he defeated, President Herbert Hoover, beside him in the back seat:
"I had a good position in front of the standing crowd as the car passed along Pennsylvania Avenue, and I remember that Hoover looked rather glum but that Roosevelt was all smiles, waving to the crowd.
"Many in the crowd, which was several rows deep . . . had periscopes to see over the heads of those in front of them."
The day proved memorable for another reason, as well, because on that trip Layton met a bright-eyed 15-year-old from Norfolk named Phoebe Anderson.
For the next eight years, while he was attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and completing his master's degree in sociology at Fisk University in Nashville, Layton wrote letters to Phoebe. They were married in 1941, at the beginning of Layton's distinguished career as a quiet advocate of racial equality, and were together until Sept. 12, when Layton died at 92 from complications of Parkinson's disease.
Layton spent 17 years with the Urban League in Ohio and Michigan, working behind the scenes to open doors of opportunity. He served on the Michigan Civil Rights Commission before coming to Washington in 1965, and eventually directed the affirmative action program of the Federal Reserve system before retiring in 1977.
Wherever he went, Layton had a way of bringing people together from all backgrounds and races.
"He was the epitome of a people person," said his daughter Mary Layton, director of public relations for the Girl Scout Council of the Nation's Capital and a former assistant postmaster general.
As he traveled throughout the world, from Senegal to Russia to Israel, Layton seldom encountered discrimination, except in the one place where he felt the wound most acutely: his home state of Virginia.
"I know first-hand what it is like to be excluded, deliberately passed over, discriminated against, even insulted because of my racial identity," Layton wrote in his memoirs.
His family had been freedmen since early in the 18th century, and many of his forebears were well-educated ministers and teachers. His father, who was superintendent of what was called Negro Reformatory of Virginia, was "kind of a black version of a patrician," said Layton's other surviving daughter, Andree Layton Roaf, a retired judge who was the first African American woman to serve on the Arkansas state Supreme Court.
Layton's father won national black tennis titles and, according to family lore, once played the seven-time white U.S. champion Bill Tilden to a tie in an exhibition match. (The athletic talent was passed on to William Layton's grandson, Willie Roaf, who retired in 2006 after 13 years as an offensive tackle in the National Football League.)
After seeing so much of the world, William Layton kept returning to Virginia and to an ancestral home in the Clarke County town of Millwood. Fascinated by local history, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionist movement, Layton became a respected independent scholar and collector of historical artifacts.
He had documents signed by Lincoln and his Cabinet, plus items autographed by Jack Johnson, Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes and Rosa Parks, who was a friend of Layton's.
He gave lectures on history and civil rights and, in recent years, helped lead a successful effort to preserve Fort Collier, an earthen Confederate fortification near Winchester, Va. He donated historical documents and books to Shenandoah University in Winchester and to a proposed Fort Collier museum.
But his most lasting legacy might be the old house at Millwood, built on land that has been in the Layton family since 1871. It became his summer retreat and, as Mary Layton put it, "That little piece of land was always our home."
The house is being restored and next spring will become daughter Andree Roaf's retirement home. William Layton's grandchildren and the generations to come will have the chance to learn why he loved the place so much, why the joy he felt in Virginia outlasted the pain.
