William W. Layton, 92; worked behind scenes for equal rights
WASHINGTON - 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 a black youth who had grown up near Richmond, Va., 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."
The day proved memorable for another reason, as well, because on that trip the teenager 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, he wrote letters to Phoebe. They were married in 1941, at the beginning of Mr. Layton's distinguished career as a quiet advocate of racial equality, and were together until Sept. 12, when he died at 92 from complications of Parkinson's disease.
Mr. Layton spent 17 years with the Urban League in Ohio and Michigan, working 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, Mr. Layton had a way of bringing people together from all backgrounds.
"He was the epitome of a people person," said his daughter Mary Layton, former assistant postmaster general.
As he traveled throughout the world, from Senegal to Russia to Israel, Mr. Layton seldom encountered discrimination, except in the one place where he felt the wound most acutely: his home state of Virginia. "I know firsthand what it is like to be excluded, deliberately passed over, discriminated against, even insulted because of my racial identity," Mr. 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 Mr. Layton's other daughter, Andree Layton Roaf, a retired judge who was the first black woman to serve on the Arkansas Supreme Court.
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, Mr. 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 Mr. Layton's.
