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Robert
Lee "Rob" Penny
(August
6, 1941-March 16, 2003)
Prized
Playwright, Poet, Professor, and Pan-Africanist activist
By
Brentin Mock
City
Paper, Pittsburgh
Rob Penny, the Hill District’s prized
playwright, poet, professor and activist, died last weekend from
a heart attack at the age of 62. No one among his family,
friends and colleagues say they saw it coming.
“We were just joking and having fun
this past Friday,” says Marcia Spidell, longtime friend of
Penny’s and administrative assistant in the University of
Pittsburgh’s Africana Studies Department, where Penny served
as a professor since the program’s inception in 1969. “He
was excited about a new printer that [the department] had just
purchased for him.” The hundreds of poems, plays and short
stories Penny wrote in his lifetime probably put his old printer
out of service.
Penny was born in Opelika, Ala., and
moved to Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1949. His father had
already moved there years before, during the Great Migration
that brought droves of blacks up north from the brutally
oppressive South. At the time, the Hill District was a sparkling
place -- some-parts Motown, some-parts Harlem Renaissance -- for
western Pennsylvania, attracting jazz artists and other
entertainers from all over the nation. This environment prepared
Penny to help form the Black Horizon Theatre in 1968 and the
Kuntu Writer’s Workshop in 1976. With the help of good friend
Vernell Lillie’s Kuntu Repertory Theatre, these enterprises
gave birth to playwrights such as Marta Effinger, Javon Johnson
and nationally acclaimed writer August Wilson, who was once
Penny’s protégé. During the late 70s Black Arts
Movement, Penny wrote and performed alongside Amiri Baraka, Haki
Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez.
Though his plays have been performed
nationally, garnering heavy followings in New York City and
Chicago, Penny never captured the mainstream attention of peers
such as Wilson and Baraka -- by choice. According to his wife of
43 years, Betty, Penny once turned down the offer of a group of
local white theater owners who promised Broadway and millions of
dollars if he made a few changes to his script Good Black
Don’t Crack. Betty says Rob responded, “I don’t want to go
to Broadway, I want it to go to my people.” The play since has
become one of his most traveled and popular.
His immovable and unbreakable
dedication to the black community and an Afrocentric worldview
further underscored his reputation across the city. In 1969, he
fought to create the Africana Studies department at the
University of Pittsburgh. His class, “Black Consciousness,”
has long been considered essential for any black student at
Pitt. Penny fiercely advocated pan-African schools of thought.
Many of his close friends throughout the department and the
community called him Oba, which is a Yoruba term for “king.”
“The University [of Pittsburgh]
probably doesn’t recognize what a gem they had in Rob Penny,
who was one of the guiding lights of our department,” says
Lillie, who will be working to create a Rob Penny reader. Kuntu
Theatre will also proceed with Penny’s last play, Difficult
Days Ahead in a Blaze, this summer.
Close friends and family say Penny, who
had suffered a heart attack years ago, was big on healthy diets
and exercise and in good health in his final days. His wife,
with him in his last moments, says she believes he was
nonetheless prepared for this attack. He was listening to jazz
in his room when he began to call for her. “By the time I got
upstairs he was already going, telling me he didn’t think he
was gonna make this one,” she says. Penny called her Timamu,
Swahili for “she who completes me and makes my life whole.”
Penny is also survived by his three
sons: Johnny, Robert Lee Jr. and Kadumu. A whole league of
up-and-coming writers -- his “new printers” -- will continue
his legacy.
Visitation: March 20, 7-9 p.m., White
Memorial Chapel, Point Breeze. Wake: March 21, St. Benedict the
Moor Church, Hill District, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Funeral: March 22,
St. Benedict the Moor Church, 11 a.m.
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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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
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1980
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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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 /
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 5 December
2011
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