Albert Danforth Dinkins (3 December 1900–28 August 1999), promoter of community theater and Baptist lay leader, was born in Norfolk and was the son of William Everett Dinkins, a railroad brakeman, and Addie L. Branch Dinkins, a seamstress. He attended Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he studied English and worked as agent for the Norfolk Journal and Guide. He also developed a lifelong love of the theater in which he soon became immersed. Dinkins left school in the mid-1920s and returned to Norfolk, where he worked as a laborer and at a laundry business until a workplace accident resulted in a severe injury. Later he joined the United States Postal Service, which provided him with financial stability and a place in Norfolk's middle class.

On 17 August 1922 Dinkins married Elizabeth Saunders, who worked as a seamstress. Before her death on 11 April 1924 from pleurisy, they had one son. On 4 June 1927 Dinkins married Corinne Mitchell, a South Carolina native who was a clerk in the Journal and Guide office and who died on 17 September 1985. On 5 April 1987 Dinkins married Viola Lee Ferguson, of Greensboro, North Carolina, who had been married previously. She died on 5 August 1995. Neither his second nor his third marriages produced children.

By May 1928 Dinkins had become the artistic and theater critic for the Journal and Guide. He also joined the new Norfolk Players Guild. Late in the 1920s the group staged three-act plays in the auditorium of Booker T. Washington High School, but by the 1930s a variety of venues, including the Attucks Theater, hosted the performances, and many of Norfolk's prominent citizens lent their talents to the productions. In 1949 Dinkins spent five weeks at the Plymouth Drama Festival in Massachusetts, where he studied with such giants in the field as Diana Barrymore, Cedric Hardwicke, and Basil Rathbone. His performances garnered him the festival's best actor award.

In 1950 Columbia University rewarded Dinkins for his community theater work with a Drinkwater Fellowship, which allowed him to study acting in twelve European countries. While in London, he took lessons in Shakespearean techniques. Dinkins won several other scholarships, including an award that funded travel to the National Community Theater Center at the University of Wisconsin. By 1964, Dinkins had performed in more than fifty productions and directed more than seventy-five plays.

In 1945 Dinkins helped establish Norfolk's Little Theater, one of the first such venues for blacks in a southern city. Throughout the 1940s he convinced many young people and older middle-class professionals to participate in performances. Dinkins spearheaded an effort in 1948 to form the Virginia Federation of Community Theaters for the purpose of encouraging local support for the performing arts. He promoted the organization of community theaters throughout the state. As a district representative of the National Association of Community Theaters in 1953, Dinkins was charged with overseeing theater organizational work in Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina (and later the District of Columbia). Two years later the United Nations appointed Dinkins as Virginia director of International Theater Month, an annual event featuring plays about international brotherhood. Dinkins served as director of operations for the Virginia Theatre Conference, founded in 1972, and later was elected president. He was the first black associate editor of Players Magazine, a journal for college theater groups.

Dinkins's commitment to local theater drew him into other community involvement. In 1948 he sat on the advisory committee for a community center that organized recreational programs for African Americans in Norfolk. Dinkins sat on the district committee of the local Boy Scouts organization and also began working with the theater program at the Hunton Young Men's Christian Association. In 1961, following his retirement from a thirty-eight-year career with the post office, he became executive director of the YMCA. For twelve years he expanded its services, particularly by building athletic facilities and instituting drama classes.

Dinkins served as Sunday school superintendent of Mount Olive Baptist Church and later of First Baptist Church, where he worked as the administrator of the aged. He conducted leadership classes at churches and led religious workshops at local colleges, including Hampton University and Norfolk State University. At various times Dinkins studied religious education at the McCormick Theological Seminary, Princeton University, and the Virginia Seminary and College (later Virginia University of Lynchburg). For thirty-five years he was dean of the religious studies program of the Baptist Sunday School Congress of Virginia, the state branch of a national African American organization representing thousands of Sunday schools. In 1991 the study program was renamed the Albert D. Dinkins Christian Education Institute.

Dinkins prided himself on owning more than 3,000 books and 800 classical recordings. At the age of eighty he continued to direct Norfolk Players Guild productions. The Journal and Guide named him its Man of the Year in Fine Arts, in 1983 the Hunton YMCA named him its Man of the Year, and in 1994 a theater association in Virginia Beach recognized his career with a lifetime achievement award. Albert Danforth Dinkins died on 28 August 1999 at a Norfolk nursing home and was buried in the city's Calvary Cemetery. In 2000 the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution celebrating the "exceptionally talented and versatile" Albert D. Dinkins, recapping his life achievements and noting the "high regard in which his memory is held."

Sources Consulted:
Birth date in Social Security application, Social Security Administration, Office of Earnings Operations, Baltimore, Md.; Marriage Register, Norfolk City (1922, 1927), Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Norfolk Journal and Guide, 25 June 1927, 29 Dec. 1962 (home edition), 17 Mar. 1973 (national and peninsula edition), 10 Nov. 1973 (metro edition with portrait), 19, 26 Oct. 1983, 22–28 Apr. 1987, 7–13 Aug. 1991; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 14 June 1964, 9 Oct. 1980; obituaries in Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 1, 2 Sept. 1999; memorial in Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 2000 regular session, 3:3972 (quotations).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander.

How to cite this page:
Cassandra L. Newby-Alexanderauthor, "Albert Danforth Dinkins (1900–1999)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dinkins_Albert_Danforth, accessed [today's date]).

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