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In 1948, Killens moved to New York and attended writing classes at Columbia

University and New York University. He met such influential figures

as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

 

 

Books by and about John Oliver Killens

 

Youngblood  /  And Then We Heard the Thunder  /  The Cotillion  /  The Great Black Russian

A Man-Aint-Nothin But A Man Adventures of John Henry  /  Slaves  / Sippi A Novel Black-SouthernVoices: An Anthology 

Great-Gittin-Up-Morning: A Biography of Denmark Vesey

Keith Gilyard, Liberation Memories: The Rhetoric and Poetics of John Oliver Killens (2003)

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John Oliver Killens (1916-1987)

Novelist, Harlem Guild Writer

 

Published originally on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, Youngblood marked the beginning of a new era in African American literature, for it broke starkly with the Wright school and opened a path for those novelists, poets, and playwrights who comprised the Neo-Black Arts Movement--a movement that recognized John Oliver Killens as its spiritual father."

--Toni Cade Bambara

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John Oliver Killens's landmark novel of social protest of a Georgia family from the turn of the century to the Great Depression chronicles the lives of the Youngblood family and their friends in Crossroads, Georgia, from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. Its large cast of powerfully affecting characters includes Joe Youngblood, a tragic figure of heroic physical strength; Laurie Lee, his beautiful and strong-willed wife; Richard Myles, a young high school teacher from New York; and Robby, the Youngbloods' son, who takes the large risk of becoming involved in the labor movement.

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John Oliver Killens (January 14,1916–October 27, 1987), born in Macon, Georgia, to Charles Myles, Sr., and Willie Lee (Coleman) Killens. John Killens credits his relatives with fostering in him cultural pride and literary values. His father Charles encouraged him to read a weekly column by Langston Hughes; his mother Willie Lee, president of the Dunbar Literary Club, introduced him to poetry; and his great-grandmother filled his boyhood with the hardships and tales of slavery.

These early exposures to criticism, art, and folklore are evident in Killens' fiction, which depicts accurately social classes, engaging narratives, and successful layering of African-American history, legends, songs, and jokes.

Killens planned to be a lawyer. He attended Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida (1934-1935) and Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia (1935-1936). He moved to Washington, D.C. and became a staff member of the National labor Relations Board (NLRB) and completed his B.A. through evening classes at Howard University. He studied at the Robert Terrel Law School from 1939 until 1942, but he completed only two-thirds of the program before he joined the army. 

His second novel And Then We Heard the Thunder  (1963), which concerned racism in the military and the growth of racial identity and consciousness, was based on his service in the South Pacific. This novel, which deals also with a race riot, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1946, Killens returned briefly to his job at the NLRB. In 1947-1948, he organized black and white workers for the Congress of industrial Organization (CIO) and was an active member of the Progressive Party. He soon became convinced that leading intellectuals, the white working class, and the U.S. government were not committed to an inclusive society.

In 1948, Killens moved to New York and attended writing classes at Columbia University and New York University. He met such influential figures as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. Du Bois. While working on his fiction, he wrote regular articles for the leftist newspaper Freedom (1951-1955). During this period Killens developed definitive views on the purpose of the novel. He thus attacked Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a "decadent mixture . . . a vicious distortion of Negro life." Killens believed that literature should be created to improve society. "Art is functional. A Black work of art helps the liberation or hinders it."

Killens found other young writers with a similar perspective. With Rosa Guy, John Henrik Clarke, and Walter Christmas, Killens founded the Harlem Writers Guild in the early 1950s. Youngblood (1954) was the fist novel published by a guild member. The novels treats the struggles of a southern black family in early twentieth-century Georgia. With critical praise of the work, Killens toured to speak on subjects concerning African Americans. Some of the better known members and alumnae of the Guild include Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis, Audrey Lorde, Terry McMillan, Lon Elder III, Paule Marshal and Walter Dean Myers.

In 1955, Killens went to Alabama to research for a screenplay on the Montgomery bus Boycott and to visit with the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also became close friends close friends with Malcolm X and with him in 1964 founded the organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU). Black Man's Burden (1965), a collection of political essays, documents his combination of socialist and nationalist sentiments. 

Below: John Oliver Killens with poet and critic Sterling Brown
   

Killens' major subject is the violence and racism of American society, how it hinders manhood and family. 'Sippi (1967) is about a struggle over voting rights.  The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, published in 1971 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, satirizes middle-class African-American values, and was the basis for Cotillion, a play produced 1975 in New York City. Killens' other plays include Ballad of the Winter Soldiers (1964), with Loften Mitchell) and Lower Than the Angels (1965). he wrote two screenplays, Odds Against Tomorrow (1959, with Nelson Gidding) and Slaves (1969, with Herbert J. Biberman and Alida Sherman). He also edited The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (1972) and A man Ain't Nothing but a man: The Adventures of John Henry (1975).

By the mid-1960s, Killens had already started a string of positions as a writer-in-residence: at Fisk University (1965-1968), Columbia University (1970-1973), Howard University (1971-1972), Bronx Community College (1979-1981), and Medgar Evers College in the City University of New York (1981-1987). Other awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980) and a lifetime Achievement Award from the before Columbus Foundation (1986). Until his death, Killens continued continued to contribute articles to leading magazines such as Ebony, Black World, The Black Aesthetic, and African Forum. The Great Black Russian: a Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin was published posthumously in 1988

Source: Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (Vol. 3)

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Zippety Doo Dah, Zippety-Ay: How Satisfactch'll Is Education Today? Toward a New Song of the South

Dr. Joyce E. King on Black Education and New Paradigms

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music website > http://www.kalamu.com/bol/
writing website > http://wordup.posterous.com/
daily blog > http://kalamu.posterous.com
twitter > http://twitter.com/neogriot
facebook > http://www.facebook.com/kalamu.salaam

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Men We Love, Men We Hate
SAC writings from Douglass, McDonogh 35, and McMain high schools in New Orleans.

An anthology on the topic of men and relationships with men

Ways of Laughing
An Anthology of Young Black Voices
Photographed & Edited by
Kalamu ya Salaam

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The State of African Education (April 200)

Attack On Africans Writing Their Own History Part 1 of 7

Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on Africans writing and accounting for their own history.

Dr Hilliard is A teacher, psychologist, and historian.

Part 2 of 7  /  Part 3 of 7  / Part 4 of 7  / Part 5 of 7 / Part 6 of 7  /  Part 7 of 7

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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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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Basil Davidson obituary—By Victoria Brittain—9 July 2010—Davidson [(9 November 1914 – 9 July 2010) a British historian, writer and Africanist] was enthused early on by the end of British colonialism and the prospects of pan-Africanism in the 1960s, and he wrote copiously and with warmth about newly independent Ghana and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He went to work for a year at the University of Accra in 1964. Later he threw himself into the reporting of the African liberation wars in the Portuguese colonies, particularly in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. . . . In the 1980s, with most of the African liberation wars now won—except for South Africa's— Davidson turned much of his attention to more theoretical questions about the future of the nation state in Africa. He remained a passionate advocate of pan-Africanism. In 1988 he made a long and dangerous journey into Eritrea, writing a persuasive defence of the nationalists' right to independence from Ethiopia, and an equally eloquent attack on the revolutionary leader Colonel Mengistu and the regime that had overthrown Haile Selassie. Guardian

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Basil Davidson's  "Africa Series"

 Different But Equal  /  Mastering A Continent  /  Caravans of Gold  / The King and the City / The Bible and The Gun

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West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850

By Basil Davidson

This book is excellent as an introduction to West African history. It begins with a brief overview of region's history from earliest times but the focus of the book is on the thousand years between the 9th and the 19th centuries A.D.

Comprehensive overviews of the political histories of both well and little known West African states and cities are recounted. These include the histories of the empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Kanem-Bornu, Oyo, Benin, Dahomey and Asante. Accounts of several other smaller states are also detailed such as the Hausa city states, the Wollof kingdom, the Bambara states, the Niger Delta trading states, the Fulani states of Futa Jallon and Futa Toro, the important cities of Timbuktu, Jenne and Gao and several others.

Apart from these political histories, Davidson also provides an insight into the social fabric of West Africa, especially at the dawn of the 17th century. He describes economic features (like trade items, routes, currencies etc), religion, arts and learning in the region, social stratification and dominant trends. These provide the reader with a real "feel" of the society at that time. Like all of Davidson's writings on this subject matter, this book dispels the myth that Africa had no history or civilization before contact with Europe. It is clear, concise and very easy to read. D. E. Chukwumerije

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African Slave Trade: Precolonial History, 1450-1850

By Basil Davidson

The best general acount of the Atlantic slave trade. It is the story of one of the most enormous crimes in all human history. Basil Davidson states that by examining three important areas of Africa in the history of slavery 'against a general background of their time and circumstance' he was taking 'a fresh look at the oversea slave trade, the steady year-by-year export of African laborr to the West Indies and the Americas that marked the greatest and most fateful migration—forced migration—in the history of man. This book is about the course and consequences of this long African-European connection that endured from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth. It makes an answer to three vital questions: What kind of contact was this with Europe and  America? How did the experience affect Africa? Why did it end in colonial invasion and conquest?

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John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk

This video chronicles the life and times of the noted African-American historian, scholar and Pan-African activist John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke himself and an overview of 5,000 years of African history, the film offers a provocative look at the past through the eyes of a leading proponent of an Afrocentric view of history. From ancient Egypt and Africa’s other great empires, Clarke moves through Mediterranean borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization, the development of the Pan-African movement, and present-day African-American history.

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Ancient African Nations

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updated 12 June 2008

 

 

Home John Oliver Killens Table 

Related files:  Lest We Forget Killens (by Rivera) Killens, Fort Bliss, & Korea  by Kalamu Ya Salaam  Coal, Charcoal, and Chocolate Comedy  by Keenan Norris

Killens and the Black Man's Burden  DownSouth, UpSouth   Globalizing the South  Reviews     Interview with Keith Gilyard   Killens Literary Heroes