Lincoln Johnson Ragsdale Sr. (July 27, 1926 – June 9, 1995) was an influential leader in the Phoenix-area Civil Rights Movement.

Known for his outspokenness, Ragsdale was instrumental in various reform efforts in the Valley, including voting rights and the desegregation of schools, neighborhoods, and public accommodations.

[1][2] Onlia Ragsdale, the first person in her family to earn a college degree, was the president of the National Association of Colored Women's Oklahoma chapter.

Hartwell's mortuary business, relocated to Ardmore, became a success and the Ragsdales lived more comfortably than most black families during the Great Depression.

Theodore "Ted" Ragsdale, a cousin of Lincoln, followed in William Jr.'s footsteps to become Oklahoma NAACP president in the 1930s despite the earlier death of his brother.

He attended the segregated Douglass High School in Ardmore, and around this time began to develop both his love for flying and his entrepreneurial acumen by earning his own money to pay a local pilot to take him up in his plane regularly.

When Lincoln Ragsdale graduated high school in 1944, the new Tuskegee Airmen, a corps of black military pilots in World War II, appealed to both his interest in flying and in racial equality.

[5] In Alabama, Ragsdale experienced racially motivated violence firsthand, narrowly escaping a lynching at the hands of local police at the age of 19.

As he tells it, Ragsdale, less deferential than normal because of his recent graduation and because he was accustomed to giving orders, had drawn the ire of a white gas station attendant, who alerted the police to his behavior.

He was followed out of the station by a police car, and, after pulling over, brutally beaten by three officers with shotguns; one suggested killing him, but another objected because he was wearing a military uniform.

[9] In 1949, he married Eleanor Ragsdale, a local schoolteacher at Dunbar Elementary School who became an important activist in her own right.

He employed white workers and took his name out of the business', renaming from "Ragsdale Mortuary" to "Universal Memorial Center.

Ragsdale worked with the GPCCU to publicize the controversy in the media both locally and nationally, getting a fellow activist, Thomasena Grigsby, to publish an editorial in the Chicago Defender.

[21] The Ragsdales made history in 1953 by moving into a home on West Thomas Road in the exclusive Encanto area north of the red line which separated the segregated white and black neighborhoods in Phoenix.

George B. Brooks, respectively vice-president and president of the Maricopa County NAACP chapter, were organizing protests and meeting with local business leaders to end workplace discrimination that barred blacks from skilled jobs.

While ultimately narrowly unsuccessful, the campaign drew attention to the lack of minorities and South Phoenix residents in government and led to the registration of many new African-American and Latino voters.

Ragsdale later became involved in the intense fight to create a statewide Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona, which finally passed after a voter-approved ballot measure in 1992.