| Summary: | Baseball player, civil rights activist, and newspaper publishing executive William Blair, Sr. was born on October 17, 1921, in Dallas, Texas. Blair attended Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas, and attended Prairie View A&M University. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and became the youngest black first sergeant in the Army during World War II. Blair pitched for the Indianapolis Clowns and other Negro League baseball teams from 1946 to 1951, and became a Negro League Baseball Museum inductee. Blair founded both the Highlight News and Southwest Sports News, renamed The Elite News in 1960. In 1986, Blair launched the first Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parade, which became fixture of the city of Dallas. He also founded the Religious Hall of Fame to honor African American ministers in 2004. Blair published two books of his pictorial history series, The Dallas I Know, in 1990 and 1991. William Blair, Sr. passed away on April 20, 2014.
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