Above, baseball and ostriches. Below, the Rev. G.W. Woodbey, an African American minister described in The Times as a rabid radical, is convicted of speaking on a street corner without a license.
Woodbey sounds like an interesting fellow and he appears in The Times on several occasions, but only in brief references that describe his troubles with the law and say nothing about his religious or social beliefs … Many streets in South Los Angeles are renamed as part of a council ordinance, producing mass confusion among residents … City Hall is overrun with rats … A former Hearst cashier is on trial on charges embezzling from the Examiner.
Quote of the Day: “One day I got tired of my husband’s threats to kill me and said I didn’t think much of men anyway, so he made me get on my knees, while he held a loaded gun at my head, and apologize for my poor opinion of his sex.” –Evaline Hobach, testifying in divorce court
ladailymirror.com 
Rev. George Washington Woodbey was indeed “an interesting fellow.” He was a Baptist preacher, born enslaved in northeast Tennessee, who was formerly a leading member of the Prohibition Party of Nebraska where he also was active along with his first wife in the Afro-American League in the early 1890s. He joined the Socialist Party of America in August 1901, and moved to San Diego a year later where he reunited with his mother, Rachel Wagner-Woodbey.
Most famous for his writings on socialism and for his work as the SP’s first Black national organizer, he helped founded San Diego’s first chartered branch of the NAACP and would join the UNIA in the 1920s, serving as a chaplain. He died in 1937 in Los Angeles at his son’s home and was eulogized in the pages of the Los Angeles California Eagle.
That’s just an overview of random details off the top of my head, but I know quite about about the “interesting fellow.”
Ended up here when this post popped up in a web search. If you wish to read more about Rev. Woodbey, I’ve dropped the link to a post about coverage of him in the Black Press, beginning in the 1890s.
Cheers!
https://open.substack.com/pub/charlesholm/p/the-black-press-and-rev-george-washington
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Hey, thanks! This was item from 2008 that I reposted.
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My pleasure, and I’m glad you did. Great blog!
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