1. Lincoln Ragsdale 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.
Lincoln Ragsdale later remarked that he enlisted to refute the popular notion that blacks could not successfully fly planes.
Lincoln Ragsdale 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.
Lincoln Ragsdale was transferred to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for gunnery training, becoming one of the first black soldiers involved in the base's integration.
Lincoln Ragsdale later remarked upon his surprise at discovering the extent to which Phoenix was plagued by racism similar to the South's.
Lincoln Ragsdale was initially unable to secure a loan, being rejected by all of the banks in town, until a stranger agreed to make a personal loan of $35,000 to start the business after hearing his story.
Lincoln 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.
Eleanor was a licensed real estate agent with knowledge of the market and fair-skinned enough to pass for white, both of which allowed her to find a suitable home in a white neighborhood without arousing suspicion; Lincoln Ragsdale viewed the home at night, being driven through an alley behind the house.
Lincoln Ragsdale participated in the creation of the Action Citizens Committee and ran for Phoenix City Council in 1963 along with the Committee's slate of other candidates.
In 1964 Lincoln Ragsdale successfully lobbied the Phoenix City Council for passage of a public accommodations law, and nearly a year later Arizona passed a statewide civil rights law, both similar in nature to the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Lincoln Ragsdale later became involved in the intense fight to create a statewide Martin Luther King Jr.
Lincoln Ragsdale died on June 9,1995, of colon cancer in his Paradise Valley, Arizona, home.