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Philip Wyatt: Soft-spoken activist
Date published: 2/16/2005 When Philip Wyatt came to Fredericksburg in 1933 to open a dental practice, a lawyer who rented him space told him he’d never make it for one reason. He was “colored.” Wyatt grew up in Charlottesville, in a society that didn’t allow him to sit in the front seat of the local street car or sip a soda at the drug-store fountain. “Negroes just took for granted that they were not welcome” in the “vast majority of first-class places,” he wrote in “A Different Story,” Ruth Coder Fitzgerald’s book about local black history. Wyatt helped change those practices as a local activist and a member of the national board of the NAACP. When city black students wanted a marching band, he helped them buy uniforms—and get a teacher. He pressed city officials to improve the black high school. He counseled young black students in the early 1960s, when they held sit-ins at local lunch counters. Wyatt succeeded as a dentist, but those who knew him said he didn’t just make a living. He worked to make a life.
Date published: 2/16/2005
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