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John Oliver Killens
(1916-1987)
Novelist (Youngblood, And Then There Was the Thunder,
Cotillion, and other novels), a founder of the Harlem Guild Writers.
Marcus
Bruce Christian (1900-1976)
Marcus Bruce
Christian was a New Orleans-base writer and a historian of blacks in
Louisiana. In addition he was an exceptional poet on race
and other
social topics and semi-autobiographical topics.
Christian's
BioBibliographical Record
Jan
Carew (Born 1925)
Educated in British Guiana,
at Howard University (1945-46), University of Western Reserve
(1946-47, Charles University (Prague, Czechoslovakia; 1949-50).
Plays broadcast on the BBC. Publications include Black Midas
(a novel, 1958), The Last Barbarian (a novel, 1961),
Moscow
Is Not My Mecca (nonfiction, 1964).
Part V of
West Indian Narrative
Kalamu
ya Salaam (Born 1947)
Mr.
Salaam is a professional editor/writer, filmmaker,
producer and arts administrator. His latest books are the anthologies
From a Bend
in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets (Runagate Press 1998)
and 360 Degrees: A Revolution of Black Poets (BlackWords
Press 1998).
Mr. Salaam latest spoken word CD is My Story, My
Song (AFO
Records). Kalamu Table
Yusef
Komunyakaa (Born 1947)
Pulitzer prize-winning poet (1994) Yusef Komunyakaa is a
unique figure in American poetry and the author of eleven poetry
volumes.
Komunyakaa's poetry is celebrated for its short lines,
its simple vernacular, its jazzy feel, and its rootedness in the
poet's experience
as a black of the American South, and as a
decorated veteran of the Vietnam War.
Louis
Reyes Rivera
Known
as the Janitor of History, poet/essayist Louis Reyes Rivera has been
studying his craft since 1960 and teaching it since 1969.
(compulsion
strikes the witness) John Oliver
Killens: Lest We Forget
Margaret
Walker (1915-1998)
Walker
began her writing career as a poet in the
late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight
in 1966 when her
novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial
acclaim.
Juanita E. Jackson
(1913-1992)
Over the years, Mitchell fought
discrimination in the courts. She served as counsel in suits to
eliminate segregation in municipal recreation facilities,
restaurants and public schools in Baltimore City and other
jurisdictions in Maryland, namely, the desegregation
of the Fort
Smallwood Municipal Park Beach and the swimming pools in
Baltimore. Youth
and the Lynching Evil Lynching Index
Cliff
Chandler (Born 1930s)
Like
most artists he has worked as a taxi driver, Hospital Aide,
Paramedic, Professional Photographer Germain School of
Photography, Jazz Musician, T
he New Muse, Brooklyn,
NY, and editorial writer for a local newspaper.
Devastated
Amiri Baraka
(Born 1934)
Amiri Baraka is today a beloved
poet, an elder statesman of the African-American community.
Presently, politicians in New Jersey
are using legislation to
remove him from the appointed position of Poet Laureate of New
Jersey. "Somebody
Blew Up America"
Eldridge
Cleaver (1935-1998)
Published in 1968 at the end
of a vibrant decade of intense civil rights struggle in the
South and and flamboyant racial rhetoric in the North, Eldridge
Cleaver's Soul on Ice was an immediate sensation among
white liberals and the New Left.
Monroe
Nathan Work (1866-1945)
In 1921 the Carnegie
Coporation of New York made a grant to the Department of
Records and Research of the Tuskegee Institute which enabled the
writer to begin in a large way to compile "A Bibliography of
the Negro."
Monroe
Work Bibliography
Scipio
Africanus Jones (1863-1943)
Judge Jones, appointed to the
bench in 1915, was primarily noted for his defense of twelve black men who in
1919 were convicted of murder after race related violence in Philips
County, Arkansas. He successfully appealed on behalf of these twelve black men who had been
convicted of murder following the Elaine Race Riot. This case brought Jones national
recognition.
Thurgood
Marshall (1908-1993)
Marshall was nominated by President John F. Kennedy for
appointment to the Second Supreme Court of Appeals (New York,
Connecticut, and Vermont) September 23, 1961. The appointment
was confirmed by the Senate. President Lyndon B. Johnson
nominated Judge Marshall to become an Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court.
Marshall on
Labor
Anna
Julia Cooper (1859?-1964)
In 1884, Anna received her undergraduate degree and
then secured a position at Wilberforce University and during the
summer sessions earned an A.M. in mathematics from Oberlin. To
be near her mother and family, Anna in 1885 returned for a year
to St. Augustine. In 1887 she was employed to teach math and
Latin at Washington High School.
Lucy Craft
Laney (1854-1933)
Before her death from nephritis and
hypertension in October 1933, Lucy Craft Laney started the first black kindergarten in Augusta, Georgia
and the first black nursing school in the city, the Lamar School of
Nursing.
Amanda Berry
Smith (1837-1915)
Smith rose
from slavery and poverty to become a world famous
Methodist evangelist. A black washerwoman, she
witnessed the Spirit like Christian women
throughout the centuries who have been used by God.
Haki
Madhubuti (Born 1942)
Among his honors and awards are an American Book Award (1991) and
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a professor of English and
Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University.
Romare
Bearden (1921-1988)
Romare Bearden has been called by American art
critics Myron Schwarzman “the foremost American artist who
portrayed
the African American experience through the language
of narrative and metaphor.”
Chester
Himes (1909-1984)
Many movie buffs
probably know indirectly Himes work from the movies Cotton
Comes to Harlem and A
Rage Up in Harlem, which featured Himes' black detectives
Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. Like most things that
Hollywood gets its hands on, Himes’ work was desecrated by
filmmakers only out to make a fast buck.
Negro Martyrs Are Needed
Robert
Lee "Rob" Penny (1941-2003)
The phenomenal Rob Penny also
co-founded the Black Horizon Theatre with the dynamic August
Wilson in 1968. Their love for words and the powerful effect
they can have on and in ones life have given them life long
positive careers that show true craftsmanship and diligent
effort.
Larry Neal
(1937-1981)
Neal's reorientation of critical focus--his stress on the importance of
racial and political consciousness in the forging of a uniquely
Afro-American ethos, or "black aesthetic"--is rooted in the
change of sensibility (from what Harold Cruse has termed an "assimilationist"
to a "Nationalist" perspective) occurring in the early sixties
among Afro-American thinkers.
Countee
Cullen (1903-1946)
When Cullen began to write, he was a great admirer of
Tennyson. later he was influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Housman, Robinson, and, most of all, Keats. He is essentially an
emotional and lyrical poet. His only present tendency towards
free verse is limited to experimental attempts and he finds
himself more and more inclined towards rigid forms.
Sonia
Sanchez (Born 1934)
Sonia Sanchez has lectured at more than five hundred
universities and colleges in the United States and traveled
extensively, reading her poetry, in Africa, Cuba, England, the
Caribbean, Australia, Nicaragua, the People's Republic of China,
Norway, and Canada
Robert
"Kaki" McQueen (Born 1946)
Kaki also finds his subject material or motifs in African
sculpture, political heroes (such as Martin, Malcolm, and
Marcus), jazz musicians (such as Coltrane, Dolphy, and Miles), R
& B stars (such as James Brown, the Temptations, and Marvin
Gaye), and in religious themes.
Claudia Tate (1947-2002)
Tate's first book, titled "Black Women Writers at Work,"
was published in the United States in 1983 and subsequently released in
Great Britain, Mexico and Japan. "Her probing, provocative and
insightful questions (in the book) set a new standard for the interview
as a genre," said Valerie Smith, professor of English and
African-American studies at Princeton.
Carrie Mae
Weems (Born 1953)
Weems' first major body of work, and a key precedent for the work presented
in this exhibition, was the series Family Pictures and Stories, begun in
1978 and completed in 1983, which combined casual images of her relatives in
their daily lives with audiotaped interviews and printed commentary.
Amilcar Cabral
(1924-1973)
Cabral theorized on the
condition of the Cape Verdean man, the result of the
miscegenation of the archipelago’s first inhabitants, black
and white. He knows that the number of mestiços (people of
mixed races) was already six times that of the whites and three
times that of the Negroes.
Michael S. Harper
For Harper, history and mythology are related.
The mythologies of white supremacy, for instance, is marred by the
history it engenders, rigidly encasing humanity in static
categories. Harper's writings manipulate old European and American myths
and create new ones.
Bob
Moore (Born 1944)
Asked
what he envisioned for labor and Baltimore, Bob Moore expressed
his hopes and desires. “I want to grow our union at a faster
rate. To do so we must have an industry wide approach. We must
leverage employers so that they do not wage hostile campaigns. In
this effort, politics play a role. Health care has much to do with
electoral politics because of tax dollars. . . . "
Walter
H. Lively (1942-1976)
Walter's mind was massive and his energy
boundless and had a thousand things going on at once. He needed a
trusted administrative assistant to manage his papers and his
affairs. But no such person was available. At his death, uncashed
checks were found under stacks of paper. Money was always a means
for him rather than an end in itself.
William
Washington Browne (1849-1897
In 1881, Browne founded The United Order of True
Reformers. This
organization was most influential not only in the small rural
community of Sussex, but also it ascended to national
prominence. In 1885 the Order organized and put in
operation the Rosebud Department which addressed the
great need for reform among children in teaching them the higher and nobler purpose
of assisting each other in sickness, sorrow, and
afflictions.
H. Rap
Brown (Born 1943)
Struggling with black Americans who
were ready, if necessary, to give up their lives for the
cause of freedom and the brutal response to that effort by
conservative and liberal whites alike began to have a
profound impact on Rap's thinking. He began to see
"integration" as "impractical."
Reginald
Lewis (1942-1993)
Reginald
Francis Lewis was special. On this, the 58th Anniversary of his
birth, most will remember his one billion dollar leverage buy
out of Beatrice International, one of the top five food
companies in the world. For those of us who knew Reggie, up
close and personal, we thank God for his presence in our lives.
Elijah
Muhammad (1897-1975)
Under his rigidly centralized authority, the
Black Muslims developed hundreds of small businesses around the
country – restaurants, dry cleaning establishments, beauty
shops, grocery stores and bakeries. An estimated 25,000 acres of
land, mostly in the south, is owned by the sect. The total
assets of the Nation of Islam have been valued at $80 million
– no mean achievement for the former laborer who had only a
fourth-grade education.
George
Schuyler (1895-1977)
Schuyler eventually became associate editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier. He supplied the weekly paper with a regular
column and was one of its chief editorial writers. On one
assignment he took the Jim Crow tour of the Southern states.
books written by Schuyler include The Negro Art Hokum
(1926), Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia (1930) and Black
No More (1931).
Thomas Wyatt
Turner (1877-1978)
Dr. Turner was active in Catholic
organizations and in societies for the advancement of the Negro.
He founded in 1925 the Federated Colored Catholics (FCC), an
organization, national in scope, composed of catholic Negroes
who placed their services at the disposal of the Church for
whatever good they were able to effect in the solution of the
problems facing the group in Church and country.
Robinson
Robert Taylor (1868-1942)
Taylor entered MIT in 1888 and seemingly the
first black student to enroll in MIT. His master's thesis was
the design of a retirement home for Civil war veterans. After
graduation he was recruited by Booker T. Washington. In his
lifetime, Taylor was well-respected.
Dr.
Robert Russa Moton (1867-1940)
The principal
and president (1915-1935) of Tuskegee Institute, Moton was
viewed as "the sanest force seeking social and economic
progress for his race." Moton also
published Finding a Way Out: An
Autobiography (1921).
Arna
Bontemps (1902-1973)
In the decade of the thirties, Bontemps wrote three acclaimed novels God
Sends Sunday (1931); Black Thunder (1936); and Drums at
Dusk (1939). Frustrated in his ability to reach his own generation
Bontemps to literature for children and young graders. In 1937 he
published the Sad-Faced Boy; and others for young audience
included We Have Tomorrow (1945) Slappy Hopper (1946) and Story
of the Negro (1948).
W.C.
Handy (1876-1958)
In his later years, even after
the gradual, devastating loss of his eyesight, Handy continued to write,
perform, arrange and publish secular and sacred numbers that are now
considered cornerstones of pure American music. He also wrote or
compiled three books related to the blues - "Blues Anthology"
(1926), "Treasury of the Blues" (1949) and his autobiography,
"Father of the Blues" (1941).
Sterling
Brown (1901-1989
In
his book, The Negro in American Fiction (1937), Brown shows parallels of
how treatment of an oppressed group in literature reflects
its treatment in
life. His pioneering work brought recognition to African-American literature and
folklore.
Christian-Brown
Letter Charles
Mingus (1922-1979)
Both
New York City and Washington, D.C. honored him
posthumously with a "Charles Mingus Day."
The
National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a Mingus foundation called "Let My Children Hear
Music," which catalogued all of Mingus' works.
John William
Coltrane (1926-1967)
The influence of Coltrane's very
passionate approach appears in unlikely places, like in an
occasional near scream
from cool saxophonist Stan Getz. Coltrane
said that Sidney Bechet was an important influence on his own
playing.
Mahalia
Jackson (1911-1972)
Moving easily
among people from both worlds, Mahalia embodied the truth of James
Cone's contention (expressed in his The
Spirituals and the Blues) that both secular blues and
sacred spirituals "flow from the same bedrock of
experience," though the blues deal only with the
existential while the spirituals look to the supernatural. Funeralizing Mahalia Muddy
Waters (1915-1983)
PBS’s I
Can’t Be Satisfied is a magnificent rendering of the life
of Muddy Waters, perhaps the second most important figure in
Blues history.
Only the legendary Robert Johnson has made a
greater impact than Muddy has on the music.
Babatunde
Olatunji (1927-2003)
Olatunji's first
album Drums of Passion, released by Columbia
Records, was the first album to bring genuine
African music
to Western ears. It became an unprecedented, worldwide smash hit, selling over five million copies and
remains a popular recording.
Nina
Simone (1933-2003)
Nina's
voice sometimes changes from dark and raw to soft and
sweet -- pauses, shouts, repeats, whispers and moans. She
used her voice with its remarkable timbre and her careful piano
playing as means to achieve her artistic aim, expressing
alternately love, hate, sorrow, joy, loneliness - the whole
range of human emotions -- through music, in a direct way. At
times piano, voice, and gestures seem to be separate elements,
then, at once, they meet. Her audience became captivated by her
spell. Nina Simone was a unique artist, the High Priestess of
Soul.
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 2 December 2011
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