Harold Cecil Aldridge, Jr. was born in San Francisco, California, where his father Harold C. Aldridge, Sr. was stationed prior to deployment in the South Pacific during World War II, and reared in the historic, all-Black town of Taft, Oklahoma. The younger Aldridge and his mother Captoria (Wells) Aldridge returned home to Taft when he was 6 months old and he entered a segregated school system at age 5. Aldridge Sr was the first coach in Oklahoma after desegregation to win 3 consecutive high school state championships in 1960 to 62. Under the leadership of his championship winning father and the guidance of his schoolteacher mother, Aldridge became an All-State high school basketball player and participated in several athletic programs, including Oklahoma State University, Bacone Junior College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where he became a JUCO All-American in 1964, and Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, from where he received the B.A. degree in Biology in 1967. Aldridge earned the Master’s in Biology Education from NSU in Tahlequah, Oklahoma 1969, and the Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Oklahoma, Norman in 1979. Aldridge was one of the first African American educators to break the color barrier in Oklahoma, teaching at Memorial Senior High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1968 and 69, and later at Northeastern State University, where he taught for 27 years from 1970 to 97, acting as Chairperson of the university’s Black Heritage Committee. He continued to break color barriers, officiating basketball in high school and collegiate arenas throughout Oklahoma. Aldridge also officiated basketball throughout the nation in the NJCAA, NAIA, NCAA, D1 and D2, and served as a professional referee in professional basketball in the ABA. Dr. Aldridge has a third-degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do martial arts, and breeds, trains and shows Tennessee Walking Horses. He has written numerous articles and two manuscripts on Black History and is a sought-after speaker in a variety of local and regional settings. More recently, Dr. Aldridge has been an emissary, historian, and entertainer of Blues Music, and was inducted into the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame in 2014, where he was appointed to the Board of Directors. Aldridge serves also on the Board of the Directors of the Oklahoma Historical Society and the Oklahoma African American Educators Hall of Fame. Aldridge’s parents, Harold Sr and Captoria Wells Aldridge, were both inducted to the prestigious body.
