She was born Isabell Arch on January 9 1913 in Oklahoma City, the daughter of a half-German, half African-American businessman, and graduated from Langston University, Oklahoma, with a degree in Education. She then embarked on a career as a schoolteacher, a profession which over the years took her from Pasadena and Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Kansas City and Syracuse in New York state.
Her marriage to Alfred Masters — who in the Second World War became one of the first African-Americans to serve with the US Marines — broke down in the late 1940s, and despite having six children to bring up on her own, she managed to complete a Master’s degree in Higher Education at the University of California Los Angeles; in her late sixties she would also take a PhD at the University of Oklahoma. To augment her income as a single parent, Isabell Masters from time to time turned her hand to property dealing.
Isabell Masters was disillusioned by the state of politics in America. Essentially a conservative and an integrationist, she believed that economic policies — not race — were the real source of inequality in the United States.
Jo Freeman — in her book We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States — wrote that Isabell Masters’s political views “defy classification”. “[She] has made a career out of running for President,” Freeman said, adding that in 1981 a “divine revelation [told her] to seek the presidency”.
Isabell Masters declared herself a candidate in 1984, but did not succeed in getting on a ballot. In 1992, as head of her own Looking Back Party, her vice-presidential running mate was one of her sons, Walter Ray Masters (she received 327 votes from Arkansas and 12 from California).
In 1996 she ran with her daughter Shirley Jean, gathering 749 votes from Arkansas, two from California and one from Maryland. In 2000 she got 752 votes, running alongside another of her daughters, Alfreda Dean Masters. A woman of great tenacity, she made a final unsuccessful attempt in 2004, when she was 90.
At least five African-American women have had their names on the general election ballot for President: Charlene Mitchell, for the Communist Party, in 1968; Margaret Wright, for the People’s Party, in 1976; Lenora Fulani, for the New Alliance Party, in 1988 and 1992; and Monica Moorehead, for the Workers World Party, in 1996 and 2000.
Isabell Masters, who died in a nursing home in Florida, had four daughters and two sons. One of her daughters, Cora, a political scientist, became the fourth wife, in 1994, of the former mayor of Washington, DC, Marion Barry.
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