David Walker
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There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against the oppressive and unjust slavery. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future black leaders and activists.
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Nelson George
Nelson George is an author, filmmaker, television producer, and critic with a long career in analyzing and presenting the diverse elements of African-American culture.
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Queen Latifah won the Golden Globe for playing the lead in his directorial debut, the HBO movie 'Life Support'. The critically acclaimed drama looked at the effects of HIV on a troubled black family in his native Brooklyn, New York. He recently co-edited, with Alan Leeds, 'The James Brown Reader (Plume)', a collection of previously published articles about the Godfather of Soul that date as far back the late '50s. Plume published the book in May '08.
He is an executive producer on two returning cable shows: the third season of BET's American Gangster and the fifth airing of VH1 -
Solomon Northup
Solomon Northup was a free-born African American from Saratoga Springs, New York. He is noted for having been kidnapped in 1841 when enticed with a job offer. When he accompanied his supposed employers to Washington, DC, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. From Washington, DC, he was transported to New Orleans where he was sold to a plantation owner from Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After 12 years in bondage, he regained his freedom in January 1853; he was one of very few to do so in such cases. Held in the Red River region of Louisiana by several different owners, he got news to his family, who contacted friends and enlisted the New York governor in his cause. New York state had passed a law in 1840 to recover African-American reside
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Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (1797–November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843, of Isabella Baumfree, an American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York. Her best-known speech, "Ain't I a Woman?," was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
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Elaine Brown
Elaine Brown (born March 2, 1943) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a founder of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice.
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When Newton fled to Cuba in 1974 in the face of murder charges, he appointed Brown to lead the Party. The first woman to do so, Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 until 1977. In her 1992 memoir A Taste of Power, she wrote about the experience:
"A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, -
William C. Kashatus
William C. Kashatus is an historian, educator and author. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Earlham College, he earned an MA in history at Brown University and a PhD in history education at the University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches history at Luzerne County Community College in northeastern Pennsylvania.
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Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
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She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership -
Chancellor Williams
Dr. Chancellor Williams was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina. He received his undergraduate degree in Education and Master of Arts degree in history from Howard University. He studied abroad serving as a visiting research scholar at the Unversity of Oxford in England and at the University of London.
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Chancellor Williams began field research in African History in Ghana (University College) in 1956. His primary focus was on African achievments and autonomous civilizations before Asian and European influences. His last study in 1964 covered an astounding 26 countries and more than 100 language groups. His best known work is "The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D." For this effort, Dr. Willi -
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A widely published writer, he is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press, 2003). It was named outstanding book of the year by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. He also has recently completed In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge, which is forthcoming from the University of California Press. His next book, Who Hears Here?: Essays on Black Music History and Society, a mid-career collection of his essays is also forthcoming. He was recipient of the Lowens Award from the Society for American Music for best article on an Am
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James Walvin
James Walvin taught for many years at the University of York where he is now Professor of History Emeritus. He also held visiting positions in the Caribbean, the U.S.A. and Australia. He won the prestigious Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for his book Black and White, and has published widely on the history of slavery and the slave trade. His book The People's Game was a pioneering study of the history of football and remains in print thirty years after its first publication.
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Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated Black poets. She also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position. She was the poet laureate for the state of Illinois for over thirty years, a National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works include We Are Shining, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.
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George S. Schuyler
(1895–1977), satirist, critic, and journalist. George Samuel Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Eliza Jane Fischer and George S. Schuyler. He grew up in a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, where he attended public schools until he enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen. He spent seven years (1912–1919) with the black 25th U.S. Infantry and was discharged as a first lieutenant.
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From early on, Schuyler possessed a high level of confidence and boasted of his family having been free as far back as the Revolutionary War. In 1921, Schuyler joined the Socialist Party of America, through which he connected with A. Philip Randolph, who hired him in 1923 as assistant editor for the Messenger; in that -
Sam Greenlee
Elder Sam Greenlee is an African American writer of novels, screeplays, stage plays, and poems. He has been a social activist since the age of 15.
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His first well known and most controversal novel was The Spook Who Sat by the Door published in 1968. He also co-wrote the screeplay adaption of the novel. The film was released in 1973. In 1990 Greenlee was the Illinois poet laureate. -
Coleman Hughes
"My name is Coleman Hughes. I’m a writer, podcast host, and musician.
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I’ve written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, the Spectator, and the City Journal. Currently, I’m a contributing writer at the Free Press." -
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
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He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
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Wallace Thurman
Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
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Robert Whitaker
There is more than one author in the Goodreads catalog with this name. This entry is for Robert {2^} Whitaker, medical and science writer.
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Robert Whitaker, a journalist, writes primarily about medicine and science. He is the author of four books: Mad in America, The Mapmaker's Wife, On the Laps of Gods and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
His newspaper and magazine articles on the mentally ill and the pharmaceutical industry have garnered several national awards, including a George Polk Award for medical writing and a National Association of Science Writers Award for best magazine article.
A series he cowrote for the Boston Globe on the abuse of mental patients in research settings was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. -
Cameron McWhirter
Cameron McWhirter is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He was awarded a Nieman Foundation Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard in 2007. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. "
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William A. Darity Jr.
William A. "Sandy" Darity, Jr. is an American economist and researcher. He is currently the Arts and Sciences Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School at Duke University and was the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of North Carolina. Darity was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors in 1984, and from 1989 to 1990 was a fellow at the National Humanities Center. He is a former President of the Southern Economic Association.
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His varied research interests have included economic stratification, the African diaspora, the economics of black reparations, group-based post traumatic stress disorder, and social and economic policy as they relate to race and ethnicity. [wikipedia] -
John G. Jackson
John Glover Jackson (April 1, 1907 – October 13, 1993) was an educator, lecturer, author, and man of principle. He was born on April 1, 1907, into a family of Methodists. In old age, he averred he had been an atheist since he became old enough to think. The family minister once asked him when he was small, "Who made you?" After some thought he replied from his own realization, "I don't know."
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He lived for nearly fifty years in New York City, lecturing at the "Ingersoll Forum" of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (1930–1955). During a parallel period he wrote articles for the Truth Seeker magazine. From 1932 to 1972 he was a writer and associate of the Rationalist Press Association in London, England. A pioneer in the fi -
Andrew K. Diemer
ANDREW DIEMER is an associate professor at Towson University. He earned his PhD from Temple University and is author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. He lives in Philadelphia.
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Robin D.G. Kelley
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.
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Michael C. Reed
I'm a foundational black american. My grandparents on both sides of my family came from Tennessee. I grew up on the south side of Chicago. My heart still resides there. My body has moved to Bloomington, IL. I grew up a blerd reading comic books and devouring science fiction. I was one of those kids who hung out at the library when life got too rough for me. I could always lose myself in a book. I was also a big fan of sports and music. My sports hero was the late great Walter Payton.
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I've always had a love affair with the written word. I worked in independent bookstores for 15 years of my life. I worked in my college library before that. No matter what else I did I always found my way back to literature. At some point I stopped fighting myse -
Zaretta Lynn Hammond
Zaretta Hammond is a former classroom English teacher who has been doing instructional design, school coaching, and professional development around the issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive teaching for the past 18 years. She teaches as a lecturer at St. Mary’s College’s Kalmanovitz School of in Moraga, California.
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In addition to consulting and professional development, she has been on staff at national education reform organizations, including the National Equity Project and the former Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC). She has trained instructional coaches in reading development, especially targeted at students of color and English learners. She has also designed national seminars such as the three-day Teaching w -
Philip Dray
Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award.
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Lives in Brooklyn, New York. -
James Allen
James Allen is an American antique collector, known in particular for his collection of 145 photographs of lynchings in America, published in 2000 with Jon Lewis as Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. The collection includes images of the lynching in 1911 of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma, and of Leo Frank in 1915 near Marietta, Georgia.
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James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.
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J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur (December 31, 1735 – November 12, 1813), naturalized in New York as John Hector Saint John, was a French-American writer. He was born in Caen, Normandy, France, to the comte and comtesse de Crèvecœur.
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Bobby Seale
Robert George Seale is an American political activist. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton.
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Eldridge Cleaver
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, better known as Eldridge Cleaver, was a writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party.
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In 1958 he was put in jail for rape. There he was given a copy of The Communist Manifesto. When he got released he joined the Black Panther Party. He then joined the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, serving as Minister of Information, or spokesperson.
His book Soul On Ice is a collection of essays. In the most controversial part of the book, Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto "for practice" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired.
Later in life he converted to Morm -
Langston Hughes
Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).
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People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto... -
Arna Bontemps
Works of poetry, history, and fiction, such as God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936), established American writer Arna Wendell Bontemps as a leading figure of the renaissance of Harlem.
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People note Arnaud Wendell Bontemps, an African novelist and librarian, as a member.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arna_Bo... -
Greg Tate
Greg Tate is a music and popular culture critic and journalist whose work has appeared in many publications, including the Village Voice, Vibe, Spin, The Wire, and Downbeat. He is the author of Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience, and the editor of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. Tate, via guitar and baton, also leads the Conducted Improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber who tour internationally.
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.
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Shirley Graham du Bois
One of six children, and the only daughter among them, of an African Methodist Episcopal minister. She moved around often, graduating from Lewis and Clark HS in Spokane, WA in 1915, studied music composition at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1920s and received her BA at Oberlin College in the 1930s. She had two husbands, including author and activist W.E.B. du Bois. She and du Bois emigrated to Ghana in the 1960s but, after his death, a military coup forced her to move to Cairo, Egypt. In addition to her literature, she also composed a number of musical scores including an opera that premiered in Cleveland, OH, attracting 10,000 people on its opening night.
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Married to W.E.B. Du Bois -
Dempsey J. Travis
Dempsey J. Travis was an entrepreneur, historian and self-made multi-millionaire. He was the president of Travis Realty Company®, which has been listed among the Largest 100 Black Business in America by Black Enterprise Magazine. Mr. Travis was also listed for seven years in Ebony Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Black Americans and as Black Businessman of the Year by Dollar and Sense Magazine.
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Mr. Travis authored 25 best selling books including An Autobiography of Black Chicago, An Autobiography of Black Politics, Real Estate is the Gold in Your Future, and, Harold: The People’s Mayor, to name a few titles. His last book before his death was "Obama's Race to the White House." An autobiography was in process at the time of his de -
Charles Gordone
Charles Gordone was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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Mary Prince
Mary Prince (c. 1788-after 1833) was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince (1831), was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom.
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Belonging to the genre of slave narratives, this first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It went through three printings in the first year. Prince had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. She had gone to London with her master and his fam -
William L. Andrews
William Leake Andrews (1948-) is an American Professor Emeritus of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a scholar of early African-American literature. Wikipedia
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Alain LeRoy Locke
American educator and writer Alain LeRoy Locke, whose include Four Negro Poets (1927) and Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), championed the Harlem renaissance.
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People best remember this philosopher as the chief interpreter. Harvard University in 1907 graduated Locke, a Phi Beta Kappa and the first black Rhodes scholar. He studied at Oxford and the University of Berlin and then received a Philosophiae Doctor in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. Aesthetics strongly concerned this humanist. His philosophy, cultural pluralism, emphasized the determining of values, most especially the respect for the uniqueness of each personality, to guide human conduct and interrelationships.
Locke taught at Howard University in District of Columbia for -
Joan Didion
Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
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Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United Stat -
Nelson George
Nelson George is an author, filmmaker, television producer, and critic with a long career in analyzing and presenting the diverse elements of African-American culture.
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Queen Latifah won the Golden Globe for playing the lead in his directorial debut, the HBO movie 'Life Support'. The critically acclaimed drama looked at the effects of HIV on a troubled black family in his native Brooklyn, New York. He recently co-edited, with Alan Leeds, 'The James Brown Reader (Plume)', a collection of previously published articles about the Godfather of Soul that date as far back the late '50s. Plume published the book in May '08.
He is an executive producer on two returning cable shows: the third season of BET's American Gangster and the fifth airing of VH1 -
W.E.B. Du Bois
In 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced 'doo-boyz') was born in Massachusetts. He attended Fisk College in Nashville, then earned his BA in 1890 and his MS in 1891 from Harvard. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin, then earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1894. He taught economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897-1910. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) made his name, in which he urged black Americans to stand up for their educational and economic rights. Du Bois was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and edited the NAACP's official journal, "Crisis," from 1910 to 1934. Du Bois turned "Crisis" into the foremost black literary journal. The black nationalist ex
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Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (né Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) was born a slave in the state of Maryland in 1818. After his escape from slavery, Douglass became a renowned abolitionist, editor and feminist. Having escaped from slavery at age 20, he took the name Frederick Douglass for himself and became an advocate of abolition. Douglass traveled widely, and often perilously, to lecture against slavery.
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His first of three autobiographies, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, was published in 1845. In 1847 he moved to Rochester, New York, and started working with fellow abolitionist Martin R. Delany to publish a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, North Star. Douglass was the only man to speak in favor of Elizabeth C -
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
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He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
(from Wikipedia) -
Toni Cade Bambara
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 – December 9, 1995) was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
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Toni Cade Bambara was born in New York City to parents Walter and Helen (Henderson) Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant (Brooklyn), Queens and New Jersey. In 1970 she changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group, Bambara.
Bambara graduated from Queens College with a B.A. in Theater Arts/English Literature in 1959, then studied mime at the Ecole de Mime Etienne Decroux in Paris, France. She also became interested in dance before completing her master's degree in American studies at City College, New York (from 1962), while serving as pro -
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.
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Langston Hughes
Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).
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People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto... -
Eldridge Cleaver
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, better known as Eldridge Cleaver, was a writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party.
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In 1958 he was put in jail for rape. There he was given a copy of The Communist Manifesto. When he got released he joined the Black Panther Party. He then joined the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, serving as Minister of Information, or spokesperson.
His book Soul On Ice is a collection of essays. In the most controversial part of the book, Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto "for practice" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired.
Later in life he converted to Morm -
Samuel R. Delany
Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis:
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Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, orator, author and the dominant leader of the African-American community nationwide from the 1890s to his death. Born to slavery and freed by the Civil War in 1865, as a young man, became head of the new Tuskegee Institute, then a teachers' college for blacks. It became his base of operations. His "Atlanta Exposition" speech of 1895 appealed to middle class whites across the South, asking them to give blacks a chance to work and develop separately, while implicitly promising not to demand the vote. White leaders across the North, from politicians to industrialists, from philanthropists to churchmen, enthusiastically supported Washington, as did most middle class blacks. He was the organ
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Solomon Northup
Solomon Northup was a free-born African American from Saratoga Springs, New York. He is noted for having been kidnapped in 1841 when enticed with a job offer. When he accompanied his supposed employers to Washington, DC, they drugged him and sold him into slavery. From Washington, DC, he was transported to New Orleans where he was sold to a plantation owner from Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After 12 years in bondage, he regained his freedom in January 1853; he was one of very few to do so in such cases. Held in the Red River region of Louisiana by several different owners, he got news to his family, who contacted friends and enlisted the New York governor in his cause. New York state had passed a law in 1840 to recover African-American reside
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William L. Andrews
William Leake Andrews (1948-) is an American Professor Emeritus of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a scholar of early African-American literature. Wikipedia
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Wallace Thurman
Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
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(from Wikipedia) -
Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British movement of the abolition for the slave trade. Although enslaved as a young man, he purchased his freedom and worked as an author, merchant, and explorer in South America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, and the United Kingdom.
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Carter G. Woodson
Convinced that the role of his own people in American history and in the history of other cultures was being ignored or misrepresented among scholars, Woodson realized the need for research into the neglected past of African Americans. Along with William D. Hartgrove, George Cleveland Hall, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History on September 9, 1915, in Chicago. That was the year Woodson published The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861. His other books followed: A Century of Negro Migration (1918) and The History of the Negro Church (1927). His work The Negro in Our History has been reprinted in numerous editions and was revised by Charles H. Wesley after Woodson's dea
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Mary Prince
Mary Prince (c. 1788-after 1833) was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince (1831), was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom.
Buy books on Amazon
Belonging to the genre of slave narratives, this first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement. It went through three printings in the first year. Prince had her account transcribed while living and working in England at the home of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. She had gone to London with her master and his fam -
George S. Schuyler
(1895–1977), satirist, critic, and journalist. George Samuel Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Eliza Jane Fischer and George S. Schuyler. He grew up in a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, where he attended public schools until he enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen. He spent seven years (1912–1919) with the black 25th U.S. Infantry and was discharged as a first lieutenant.
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From early on, Schuyler possessed a high level of confidence and boasted of his family having been free as far back as the Revolutionary War. In 1921, Schuyler joined the Socialist Party of America, through which he connected with A. Philip Randolph, who hired him in 1923 as assistant editor for the Messenger; in that -
Harriet Ann Jacobs
Harriet Ann Jacobs, usually wrote under the name Harriet Jacobs but also used the pseudonym Linda Brent.
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Harriet was born in Edenton, North Carolina to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Her father was a mulatto carpenter and slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Her mother was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet inherited the status of both her parents as a slave by birth. She was raised by Delilah until the latter died around 1819. She then was raised by her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her how to sew, read, and write.
In 1823, Margaret Horniblow died, and Harriet was willed to Horniblow's niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, whose father, Dr. James Norcom, became her new master. She and her brother John went to -
Wes Moore
Westley Watende Omari Moore (born October 15, 1978) is an American politician, investment banker, author, television producer, and nonprofit executive serving as the 63rd governor of Maryland since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he is the first Black governor of the state, the third Black person elected as governor of any U.S. state, and as of 2023, the only incumbent black governor of any U.S. state.
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Born in Maryland and raised largely in New York, Moore graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received a master's degree from Wolfson College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After several years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, Moore became an investment banker in New York. Between 2010 and 2015, Moore published five books, includin -
Issa Rae
With her own unique flare and infectious sense of humor, Issa Rae’s content has garnered over 20 million views and close to 160,000 subscribers on YouTube. In addition to making the Forbes 30 Under 30 list twice and winning the 2012 Shorty Award for Best Web Show for her hit series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” Issa Rae has worked on web content for Pharrell Williams, Tracey Edmonds and numerous others. She developed a TV series with Shonda Rhimes for ABC and is currently developing a half-hour comedy for HBO with Larry Wilmore. Rae is also slated to release a book of essays with Simon & Schuster in 2015.
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Issa Rae is signed with UTA and 3 Arts Entertainment. -
Arna Bontemps
Works of poetry, history, and fiction, such as God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936), established American writer Arna Wendell Bontemps as a leading figure of the renaissance of Harlem.
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People note Arnaud Wendell Bontemps, an African novelist and librarian, as a member.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arna_Bo... -
Emmanuel Acho
Emmanuel Chinedum Acho is a Nigerian-American former linebacker who played in the National Football League and is currently working as an analyst for Fox Sports 1. He played college football at Texas before being drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the sixth round of the 2012 NFL Draft.
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Coleman Hughes
"My name is Coleman Hughes. I’m a writer, podcast host, and musician.
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I’ve written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, the Spectator, and the City Journal. Currently, I’m a contributing writer at the Free Press." -
Walter E. Williams
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dr. Walter E. Williams holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, Los Angeles, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from UCLA. He also holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Virginia Union University and Grove City College, Doctor of Laws from Washington and Jefferson College and Doctor Honoris Causa en Ciencias Sociales from Universidad Francisco Marroquin, in Guatemala, where he is also Professor Honorario.
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Dr. Williams has served on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980; from 1995 to 2001, he served as department chairman. He has also served on the faculties of Los Angeles City College, California -
Rita Dove
Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and musician, lives in Charlottesville, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
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Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist and, with her husband, newspaper owner Ferdinand L. Barnett, an early leader in the civil rights movement. She documented lynching in the United States, showing how it was often a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites, often under the guise of rape charges. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician, and traveled internationally on lecture tours.
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(from Wikipedia) -
Timuel D. Black Jr.
Timuel Dixon Black Jr. was an American educator, civil rights activist, historian and author. A native of Alabama, Black was raised in Chicago, Illinois and studied the city's African American history.
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Grif Stockley
Stockley is the author of several books, including Race Relations in the Natural State; Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas, winner of the Ragsdale Award from the Arkansas Historical Association and the Arkansiana Award from the Arkansas Library Association and Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919, winner of the Booker Worthen Prize from the Central Arkansas Library System and recipient of a Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. An attorney who has worked with the Center for Arkansas Legal Services, the Disability Rights Center, and the Arkansas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, Stockley completed Ruled by Race while serving as a historian and curric
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Robert Hayden
Robert Hayden was an American poet, essayist, educator. He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976.
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Hayden was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975. From 1976 - 1978, Hayden was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the first African American holder of that post), the position which in 1985 became the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hayden's most famous and most anthologized poem is Those Winter Sundays[citation needed], which deals with the memory of fatherly love and loneliness.
Other famed poems include The Whipping (which is about a small boy being severely punished for some undetermined offense), Middle Passage (inspired by the events surrounding the Unit