Ivanhoe Donaldson

Ivanhoe Donaldson (October 17, 1941 – April 3, 2016) was an American civil rights activist and political advisor.

Biography Donaldson was born on October 17, 1941, in Harlem, and raised in the Bronx. Of Jamaican descent, his father was a police officer and his mother was a bookworm, who named him for Ivanhoe by Walter Scott. He advocated civil rights beginning during his attendance to Andrew Jackson High School. He studied engineering at Michigan State University. While attending, he ran track and field, wrote for the school's newspaper, and met Malcolm X at an event in his freshman year. In December 1962, he and his roommate brought food and medicine to sharecroppers in Clarksdale, Mississippi, after the Mississippi government refused to send them food. He opposed the March on Washington, saying it "didn't accomplish much". After Freedom Summer, which he also opposed, he moved to Columbus, Ohio. and was described as "boisterous"

Donaldson managed the campaign for Julian Bond in 1965, in his election to the Georgia House of Representatives. He participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 1965, and in 1968, he formed the company Afro-American Resources, which operated the Drum and Spear Bookstore. He lectured at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. Under Marion Barry, he was a deputy mayor of the Department of Employment Services and Economic Developemtn. He retired in 2006, dying on April 3, 2016, aged 74, in Washington, D.C., from cancer.