Author Stephanie Burke, She Who Illuminates...

John Morton Finney was a Buffalo soldier who fought in World War 1, earned 11 degrees and practiced law until he was 106 years old. He was believed to be the longest practicing attorney in the United States. —John Morton-Finney (June 25, 1889 January 28, 1998) was an American civil rights activist, lawyer, and educator who earned 11 academic degrees, including 5 law degrees. —He spent most of his career as an educator and lawyer after serving from 1911 to 1914 in the U.S. Army as a member of the 24th Infantry Regiment, better known as the Buffalo soldiers, and with the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I. —Morton-Finney taught languages at Fisk University in Tennessee and at Lincoln University in Missouri, before moving to Indianapolis, Indiana, where he taught in the Indianapolis Public Schools for forty-seven years. —Morton-Finney was a member of the original faculty at Indianapolis's Crisps Attucks High School when it opened in 1927 and later became head of its foreign language department. He also taught at Shortridge High School and at other IPS schools. —Morton-Finney was admitted as a member of the Bar of the Indiana Supreme Court in 1935, as a member of the Bar of the U.S. District Court in 1941, and was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972.

Willis Winn, who told photographer Russell Lee that he was 116 years old when the photograph was taken in 1939, is pictured holding a horn with which plantation owners called slaves to work. Winn said his master told him that his birthday was March 10, 1822 When interviewed by Lee, Willis was living alone in a one-room log house in the rear of the Howard Vestal home on the Powder Mill Road, north of Marshall, and was supported by an $11.00 per month old-age pension. He recalled; “Massa Bob’s house faced the quarters where he could hear us holler when he blowed the big horn for us to git up. All the houses were made of logs and we slept on shuck and grass mattresses what was allus full of chinches. I still sleep on a grass mattress, ’cause I can’t rest on cotton and feather beds.” Willis’ interview in 1939 showed how little things had changed for many people in the United States decades on from the abolition of slavery. “They is plenty niggers in Louisiana that is still slaves. A spell back I made a trip to where I was raised, to see my old missy ‘fore she died, and there was niggers in twelve or fourteen miles of that place that they didn’t know they is free. They is plenty niggers round here what is same as slaves, and has worked for white folks twenty and twenty-five years and ain’t drawed a five cent piece, jus’ old clothes and somethin’ to eat. That’s the way we was in slavery.”