[1][2] Dunjee was a leader in Oklahoma City, using his newspaper to advance racial integration in housing, university admission, education, transportation and other public accommodations.
[3][4] Roscoe Dunjee was born June 21, 1883, in Harpers Ferry, Jefferson County, West Virginia.
His family moved several times from one college to another, due to John William Dunjee's love for education.
His father went all over Oklahoma building fine schools and churches, in his role as a representative of the Baptist Home Missionary Society.
Roscoe's father was obsessed with building as many high-quality schools and churches as he could, and was seldom at home for more than a few days.
While there, Roscoe learned to set type by working after hours in the print shop of The Langston Herald, a small community paper.
[5] The responsibility he had taken on to help provide for his mother and siblings made it impossible for Roscoe to complete his course work at Langston.
Young Dunjee decided to enlarge the operation and become a truck farmer, selling directly to the public.
Interested in the growing movement of black fraternalism, Dunjee joined the Pythian Grand Lodge and began lecturing in its behalf throughout the state.
When Dunjee was traveling throughout Oklahoma, he could see the difficult conditions of black migrant sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
Not only was the Negro unable to earn a living wage, the state had passed discriminatory laws related to segregation of transportation and other public accommodations.
In 1915, when he was 32 years of age,[7] he had a chance to purchase a job printing plant from Oliva J. Abby, an instructor in the Oklahoma City public schools, whose printer husband had become ill.
In 1916 the state passed a grandfather clause that enabled white voters to escape certain restrictions related to literacy.
In this period the US Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley (1917) that racially discriminatory state and local ordinances for housing were unconstitutional.
On May 31, 1921, after the Klan had been agitating in Oklahoma for only a few months, a group of Caucasian men set fire to the Greenwood District of Tulsa which was Black owned, burning 3,500 people out of their homes and destroying many lucrative businesses.
Roscoe Dunjee felt that something was severely wrong with his health, so he turned the Black Dispatch over to trusted cohorts in 1954.
When Roscoe's health made it impossible for him to continue to operate the newspaper, he turned it over to trusted allies and friends, including Dr. Gravelly Finley.
Dr. Finley's medical office had been located in Deep Deuce (a part of Oklahoma City famous for its jazz music) for many years.