David Dick Foote was born on October 26, 1879, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Foote was forced to give up Vicksburg as his home in 1918 when he was, in his words, "exiled" from the town by a KKK-like group known as the "Vigilantes." [For the particulars of his encounter in Vicksburg, see "Mississippi: Then As Now," in The Crisis, March 1965, page 187.] As a result, Foote settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he ran his own dental practice for forty-nine years. He was a lifelong member of the NAACP. Foote died in Chicago on February 8, 1967.