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Books by Tom Dent
Southern
Journey /
Blue Lights and River Songs /
The Free Southern Theater
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Tom
Covington Dent
(1932-1998)
New Orleans Writer & Cultural Activist
Thomas Covington Dent
(1932-1998), poet,
essayist, oral historian, dramatist, and cultural
activist,
was born on 20 March 1932
at Flint Goodridge Hospital in New Orleans, LA. He was the oldest of three sons,
including Benjamin and Walter born, to
Dr. Albert Walter Dent and Ernestine Jessie Covington
Dent. Tom
and his brothers grew
up in a prominent socially aware southern family.
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Tom's
father Albert Dent was president of Dillard University and Tom was
groomed to become a major figure in the Black
professional world. In 1947 Tom graduated from
Gilbert Academy, a college preparatory school for Black
students located on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans.
He then attended and graduated from Morehouse (B.A., Political Science, 1952). At Morehouse, Tom was editor of literary journal Maroon
Tiger. He did graduate
work at Syracuse University's School of International
Studies (Maxwell School of Citizenship 1952-56) where he
completed all of his course work leading to a
doctorate.
(photo right )
Albert Dent
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After
two-years in the United States Army (1957-59), Tom Dent
moved to New York and resided there from 1959 to 1965. He worked
as a reporter for a Harlem newspaper, the New York Age (1959-60).
From 1960-1961 he worked as social worker for New York Welfare Department,
and then as a press attaché and public information director for
the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (1961-63), assisting Thurgood
Marshall.
During
his years in New York, Tom was active as both a
political and cultural activist. In addition to his
NAACP work, he was active around demonstrations at the
UN and in other Civil Rights and anti-Colonial
struggles. As a cultural activist in 1962, Tom was one of the
founders of the New York based Umbra Writer's Workshop,
the first major post-sixties organization of Black
writers. More than forty books have been published by
Umbra Workshop members who include Ishmael Reed, Calvin Hernton and David Henderson.
(photo left:
Jesse C. Dent) |
According to Kalamu
ya Salaam, "Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based
in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers
Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin
C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael,
Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M.
Touré (Roland Snellings, also a visual artist), Brenda
Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp." The Umbra
group split up in 1964.
In
1965, Tom returned to New Orleans for a short visit decided
to help out with the Free Southern Theater
(FST), an activist community theater project. Tom
became associate director of the Free Southern Theater
(1966-70), organized performances throughout the South.
Tom also
founded the FST
Writing Workshop, which eventually became BLKARTSOUTH.
According
to Kalamu ya Salaam, BLKARTSOUTH
(co-led by Kalamu) "was
an outgrowth of the Free Southern Theatre in New Orleans and was
instrumental in encouraging Black theater development across the
South from the Theatre of Afro Arts in Miami, Florida, to Sudan
Arts Southwest in Houston, Texas, through an organization called
the Southern Black Cultural Alliance."
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Between 1968 and 1973, the FST Writing Workshop also
published Nkombo, a literary journal. In collaboration
with Richard Schechner and Free Southern Theater
co-founder Gilbert Moses, Tom Dent edited the 1969 book
The Free Southern Theater by The Free Southern Theater.
Additionally, Tom was instrumental in founding the
Southern Black Cultural Alliance (SBCA), in an effort to
coordinate the activities of writers, thespians, and
artists from through out the South. After leaving FST,
Tom Dent would go on to found the New Orleans-based
Congo Square Writer's Union and edit its journal, The
Black River Journal.
( Photo left, Tom and poet
David Henderson)
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From 1968 to
1970, Dent commuted to and taught at
Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi. In 1969 along with Dr. Jerry Ward and Charles Rowell, Tom
Dent founded Callaloo, A Quarterly Journal of African
and African American Arts and Letters. In the early
seventies Tom Dent contributed articles and plays to the then
fledgling Black Collegian Magazine. Tom Dent
served as public relations director for New Orleans antipoverty
agency (1971-74); awarded an MFA in creative writing from
Goddard University in 1974 and in 1974 he was awarded a Whitney Young
Fellowship. From 1979 to 1981, Tom was the Marcus
Christian Lecturer in Afro-American Literature at the University
of New Orleans.
Tom
Dent produced two books of poetry, Magnolia Street (1976)
Blue
Lights and River Songs (1982). Additionally, Tom wrote
a number of plays Negro Study No. 34A (1970), Snapshot
(1970), Ritual Murder (1976), which is now considered a classic of New Orleans
theater. Although written in the seventies, the play's theme and
commentary continues to be relevant and productions remain
popular in the nineties.
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As an indefatigable chronicler and
oral historian, Tom between 1978 and 1985, conducted oral
histories of Mississippi Civil Rights workers, and in
1984 conducted an oral history of New Orleans and
Acadian musicians. The tapes from both collections are
now housed at the Amistad Research Center in New
Orleans.
From 1984 to 1986 Tom worked as a writer on
Andrew Young's autobiography, An Easy Burden. In the
nineties, Tom worked with Dr. Ward on the Mississippi
Oral History Project focusing on local Mississippi
participation in the Civil Rights movement. (Left,
Louis
Edwards, Tom Dent, Jason Berry, Eric Ellie Tom Piazza)
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From
1987 to 1990, Tom Dent served as the Executive Director of the
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, which presents the
annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. During the
1990s Tom traveled in the Caribbean and in Africa
investigating cultural connections between the African-heritage
cultures of the Diaspora and Africa. At the time of his death,
Tom Dent was working on two journals, a collection of
reflections on New Orleans and a series of personal essays on
the connections and disruptions between Africa and African
Americans.
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Tom
Dent had a lifelong commitment to the goals and
objectives of the Civil Rights movement. In the midst of
all of his literary activity, along with Richard and
Oretha Castle Haley, and Florence Borders, Tom Dent
founded Voices of the New Orleans Movement, a group
dedicated to commemorating the history of the civil
rights movement in New Orleans. The culmination of Tom's
Civil Rights documentation was the 1996 publication of
his last and most important book,
Southern
Journey,
which was his findings resulting from revisiting towns
and cities which were major sites of Civil Rights
activity and interviewing with former participants and
their descendants. Southern Journey is the most eloquent
and informative assessment of the victories and failures
of the Civil Rights movement thus far produced.
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Although he could have had a successful academic
career, like many of his peers who came of age during the Civil
Rights movement, Tom Dent chose to dedicate his life to the
fulfillment of social goals and group aspirations. Tom Dent
literally lived and worked to document and accurately tell the
story of his people's struggles, dreams, and achievements. Tom
Dent's life serves as a sterling example of the socially
committed cultural worker.
Tom
died of
complications from a heart attack on 6 June 1998 at Charity
Hospital in New Orleans. *
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Tom Dent Bio-Sketch
Personal
Family Born 20 March 1932 in New Orleans,
LA; son of Albert (a university president) and Jesse (a teacher
and concert pianist; maiden name Covington) Dent
Education
Morehouse College, B.A., 1952 Goddard College,
M.A., 1974 Military/Wartime Service
U.S. Army, 1957-59 Memberships
African Literature Association Modern Language
Association Awards
Whitney Young Fellow, 1973-74
Career
Executive Director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage
Foundation,
1987 to 1990
Marcus
Christian Lecturer in Afro-American Literature at the University
of New Orleans, 1979 to 1981
Co-Founder of Callaloo (literary journal), 1978
Editor of Black River Journal, 1976
Founder of Congo Square Writers Union, New Orleans, 1974
Public Relations Officer of Total Community Action, 1971-73
Co-Editor of Nkombo, 1968-74
Instructor at Mary Holmes College, 1968-70
Associate Director of Free Southern Theater, 1966-70
Public Information Worker for Legal Defense Fund (NAACP),
1961-63
Co-founder of Umbra Workshop (NYC) and Co-Publisher of Umbra
(poetry magazine), 1962
Co-Publisher of On Guard for Freedom (political
newspaper), 1960 Reporter for New York Age,
1959 Writings & Publications Southern
Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement (University of
Georgia Press, 2001)
Magnolia
Street (privately printed, 1976 and 1987)
Blue Lights and River Songs: Poems (Lotus Press, 1982)
The Free Southern Theater (by Free Southern Theater;
Editor with Richard Schechner and Gilbert Moses, Bobbs-Merrill,
1969 Plays
Song of Survival: One Act-Play (with Val Ferdinand, n.d.)
Ritual Murder: One Act Play (first produced New Orleans
Ethiopian Theater, 1976)
Snapshot: One Act Play (first produced New Orleans Free
Southern Theater, 1970) Negro Study, No.
34A: One Act Play (first produced in New Orleans Free
Southern Theater, 1970) Anthologies
Anthology of the American Negro in Theatre
Black Culture
An Introduction to Black Literature in America
New Black Voices Poetry, Short
Stories, Drama
Callaloo
Nkombo
Pacific Moana Quarterly Umbra
Articles and Critical Reviews
Black American Literature Forum
Black Creation
Black River Journal
Black World
Crisis
Freedomways
Jackson Advocate
Negro Digest Obsidian
Further Readings about the Author
Books
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 38:
Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers,
Gale 1985 Who's Who Among African Americans,
Marquis, 1998-99 Periodicals
Callaloo, November 4, 1978
Drama Review, fall, 1987
New York Times, June 11, 1998, p, B12
Washington Post, June 11, 1998, p. D8
World Literature Today, autumn, 1982
Xavier Review, Volume 6, No. 1, 1986
Source:
black-collegian.com
reportingcivilrights.org
www.ishmaelreedpub.com
books.dillard.edu* * *
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I wrote a few
articles for the newspaper [The East Village Other],
one of which was a blast at the owner of The Metro,
who’d hired some plainclothes thugs to monitor blacks
who attended poetry readings there. He’d previously
threatened musician Archie Shepp and his “Goldwater for
President” sign in the window was meant to be a red flag
for blacks. One night, one of them attacked Tom Dent,
the leader of our magazine Umbra (one of the most
important literary magazines to be published, though it
gets ignored because the media, when covering the Lower
East Side of the 1960s, bond with those who resembled
their journalists and their tokens.) It was at Umbra
workshops where the
revolution in Black Arts began.
I went to Tom Dent’s aid and was
punched. Penny and I left the Le Metro Café and halfway home I turned
and went back. Poet Walter Lowenfels was reading. I told Walter that if
he continued reading I would never speak to him again. The café emptied
out and that was the end of the readings there. William Burroughs, who
was scheduled to read the following week, cancelled. After a weekend of
searching for other places, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, where
readings might be held, Paul Blackburn and I asked the then rector,
Michael J. C. Allen, whether we could hold readings at St. Mark’s
Church.
That was the beginning of the
St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Joel Oppenheimer ran the poetry workshop;
I ran the fiction workshop. If you check out the St. Mark’s Poetry
website, none of this is mentioned, another example of how the black
participation in the counterculture gets expunged from the record.—Ishmael
Reed,
EastVillage
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Marcus Bruce
Christian
Selected Diary Notes
/ Selected Poems
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Selected Letters
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Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
The Katrina Papers, by Jerry W.
Ward, Jr. $18.95 /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
American Uprising
The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave
Revolt
By
Daniel Rasmussen
In
January 1811, a group of around 500 enslaved
men, dressed in military uniforms and armed
with guns, cane knives, and axes, rose up
from the slave plantations around New
Orleans and set out to conquer the city.
They decided that they would die before they
would work another day of back—breaking
labor in the hot Louisiana sun. Ethnically
diverse, politically astute, and highly
organized, this slave army challenged not
only the economic system of plantation
agriculture but also American expansion.
Their march represented the largest act of
armed resistance against slavery in the
history of the United States—and one of the
defining moments in the history of New
Orleans and the nation.American Uprising is the riveting and
long—neglected story of this elaborate plot, the rebel
army’s dramatic march on the city and its shocking
conclusion. No North American slave revolt—not Gabriel
Prosser, not Denmark Vesey, not Nat Turner—has rivaled
the scale of this rebellion either in terms of the number of the slaves
involved or in terms of the number who were killed.
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Southern Journey
A Return to the Civil Rights Movement
By
Tom Dent
A black
youth reared in segregated New Orleans, Dent
went to Mississippi for the civil rights
movement, and that experience stuck with
him. So in 1991, he decided to work his way
south from Greensboro, N.C., to Mississippi,
skirting both large cities and important
officials, to talk to (mostly) black folk
and to assess the movement's legacy. At
times, Dent's meandering approach lacks
depth and is unwieldy, but his personal
connection to his inquiry informs his story
with commitment. In Greensboro, the
unresolved gap between blacks and whites,
exemplified in an anniversary celebration of
the city's historic sit-ins, remind Dent "of
the strained interracial meetings of the
1950s." |
In Orangeburg, S.C., a black academic
tells him ruefully that many social-work students go
into "criminal justice" lacking the broader awareness of
the politics behind the new programs. In Albany, Ga.,
Dent discerns signs of material progress but deep
divisions not only between the races but also within the
black community. In Mississippi, where he sees black
political victories as having had a relatively small
payoff, he becomes convinced that a new black
organization is needed to supplant the NAACP to address
national political issues of special concern to blacks
(education, unemployment) and to monitor cases of police
and official abuse and discrimination. Though not quite
a complete plan, it's a constructive response to Dent's
conclusion that the civil rights movement opened up
doors, but "once inside, well, there was hardly anything
there."—Publishers
Weekly
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Weep Not, Child
By
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
This is
a powerful, moving story that details the
effects of the infamous Mau Mau war, the
African nationalist revolt against colonial
oppression in Kenya, on the lives of
ordinary men and women, and on one family in
particular. Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau,
stand on a rubbish heap and look into their
futures. Njoroge is excited; his family has
decided that he will attend school, while
Kamau will train to be a carpenter. Together
they will serve their country—the
teacher and the craftsman. But this is Kenya
and the times are against them. In the
forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against
the white government, and the two brothers
and their family need to decide where their
loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau the
choice is simple, but for Njoroge the
scholar, the dream of progress through
learning is a hard one to give up.—Penguin
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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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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
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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