Early Life and Career
Wilder was born in Richmond, the seventh of eight children of Robert and Beulah (Richards) Wilder. The grandson of American slaves, he was named after the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He attended George Mason Elementary School and Armstrong High School, then racially segregated. He did his undergraduate work at Virginia Union University, where he graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1951. Wilder is a prominent life member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity.
Wilder served in the Korean War, earning a Bronze Star for heroism at Pork Chop Hill. He rose to leadership in his first experience in an integrated organization, as President Truman had desegregated the military in 1948. After his service, Wilder earned a J.D. degree at Howard University School of Law under the G.I. Bill. Virginia university law schools did not then admit African Americans. He graduated in 1959 and returned to Richmond to co-found the law firm of Wilder, Gregory, and Associates.
Read more about this topic: Douglas Wilder
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“Poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)