Businessman, alderman and crusader for equal rights. Born into slavery, his family migrated north after the Civil War. He found work as a water and freight tender for the C&O Railroad and then as a member of a barge crew on the C&O Canal between Cumberland, MD and Georgetown, DC. He moved with his mother to Annapolis, MD, where he worked cleaning oysters, catching and selling crabs and in various other trades. Eventually, he opened a grocery store on Cathedral Street, which he operated until he retired from the business in 1912. He was elected an Alderman on the city council in 1897, where he was a strong proponent of racial fairness and parity. Among other measures, he worked to ensure that black teacher salaries were increased when pay was increased for white teachers, and he offered a resolution condemning the lynching of Wright Smith, a black man dragged from the city jail and shot by an angry white mob. The resolution failed when only one other member of the city council voted. He lost his office after passage in 1908 of the infamous Maryland "Grandfather Law," which provided that only those whose ancestors were eligible to vote in 1868 could vote in Annapolis elections. Because the Maryland Constitution of 1867 provided that only white male citizens could vote, the Grandfather Law disenfranchised blacks. The law was finally overturned by the United States Supreme Court in 1915 and Bates then regained his seat as an Alderman. In 1917, Bates spurred the expansion of Stanton Elementary School to include Annapolis' first public black high school. Bates, who was a self-taught man, later donated $500 to purchase land in Annapolis on which to build a high school for blacks; in recognition of this, as well as his constant promotion of black education, the school, which opened in 1933, was named the Wiley H. Bates High School. It served as the only high school for blacks for all of Anne Arundel County until the end of segregation in the county in the mid-1960s, more than a decade after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It not only provided an education which propelled many of its students into productive and prosperous lives; it was a special area institution which helped to create and strengthen an entire community.