1929
THE UNITED STATES
*President Hoover in his inaugural address stated that he would be President of all the people. On law and order, he said, "The most malign of all dangers today is disregard and disobedience of law. ... Our whole system of self-government will crumble if officials elect what laws they will enforce or citizens elect what laws they will support. ... If citizens do not like a law their duty as honest men and women is to discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal." Herbert Hoover did not appoint any Southerners to his Cabinet.
April 15
*Oscar DePriest, the Republican Representative from Chicago's First District was sworn in. DePriest was the first African American elected to Congress from a Northern state and he blazed the trail for the return of African Americans to Congress in the 20th century.
June 9
*Johnny Ace, a rhythm and blues singer, was born in Memphis, Tennessee.
June 21
*Largely through the efforts of Congressman DePriest, the Washington Auditorium was opened to African American organizations.
August 14
*Lorez Alexandria, a jazz and gospel singer, was born in Chicago, Illinois.
August 29
*Algia Mae Hinton, a blues guitarist and vocalist, was born (August 29).
*Representative Oscar DePriest (a Republican Congressman representing Chicago, Illinois) addressed a Harlem rally of 2,500 at the Abyssinian Baptist Church: "You will never be able to get what you want politically unless you elect leaders who will fight for your interest.... White people, as a rule, elect Negroes that they can control. Negroes will never get a square deal unless you elect your own leaders.... Don't complain about racial discrimination. Change it by practical politics. Remember that no one can really lead you but one who has been Jim Crowed as you have." Lieutenant Colonel Fillmore of the 365th New York Infantry, an African American candidate for district leader, said at this meeting that "90% of the population of the district is made up of Negroes. We feel that the time has come when we must have our leader, one of our own race, and that the emoluments of office belong to us. This is a fight to determine whether the 10% white population shall control the district in which more than 300,000 Negroes live."
December 19
*Blind Lemon Jefferson, one of the great African American country blues singers, was found frozen to death in a Chicago snowstorm.
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*The Urban League organized a "Jobs for Negroes" movement to boycott merchants whose customers were African Americans but who did not hire African Americans. Boycotts took place in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland and other Midwestern cities. The campaign had limited success.
*In Princess Anne, Maryland, a fight between a European American man and an African American over the right of African Americans to congregate in European American business communities on Saturday night resulted in a riot. Three hundred African Americans were driven from town.
*In Lincoln, Nebraska, a mob of European Americans drove two hundred African Americans from town after a European American policeman was shot. Governor Weaver ordered that those persons driven out must be permitted to return, and that if any further difficulties ensued, martial law would be instituted.
*In a detailed and comprehensive study of mental disease among African Americans in New York State, conducted by Dr. Benjamin Maltzburg in this year and completed in 1931, it was found that the African American rate of first admissions to state hospitals was 151 per hundred thousand, compared to 74 for European Americans. However, of persons born in the state, European Americans had a rate of 45 as compared to 40 for African Americans. Among persons born out of New York State, the rate was 186 for African Americans, 151 for European Americans. This indicated that there was a discrepancy between African Americans and European Americans in the overall figures, and a major reason for mental disease among African Americans was the migration from the South and the conditions which caused the migration.
*Albon Holsey of the National Negro Business League organized the Colored Merchants Association in New York. The group planned to establish stores and to buy their merchandise cooperatively. Blacks were urged to make their purchases from these merchants as a means of providing jobs for members of the race. The Depression forced the stores out of business within two years. By 1931, the "Jobs-for-Negroes" movement began in earnest in St. Louis, Missouri. The St. Louis chapter of the National Urban League (NUL) launched a boycott against a white chain store whose trade was almost exclusively black but employed very few Negroes. This movement spread to Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Pittsburgh, and other major cities. New York became the center of the intensive, sometimes bitter campaign. The Citizens League for Fair Play launched a drive in 1933 to persuade white merchants to employ black sales clerks. They adopted as their motto: "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work." The campaign led to the employment of hundreds of blacks in Harlem stores and with public utility companies.
*Albon Holsey of the National Negro Business League organized the Colored Merchants Association in New York. The group planned to establish stores and to buy their merchandise cooperatively. Blacks were urged to make their purchases from these merchants as a means of providing jobs for members of the race. The Depression forced the stores out of business within two years. By 1931, the "Jobs-for-Negroes" movement began in earnest in St. Louis, Missouri. The St. Louis chapter of the National Urban League (NUL) launched a boycott against a white chain store whose trade was almost exclusively black but employed very few Negroes. This movement spread to Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Pittsburgh, and other major cities. New York became the center of the intensive, sometimes bitter campaign. The Citizens League for Fair Play launched a drive in 1933 to persuade white merchants to employ black sales clerks. They adopted as their motto: "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work." The campaign led to the employment of hundreds of blacks in Harlem stores and with public utility companies.
*Francis E. Rivers became the first African American admitted to the New York Bar Association.
*The New York City Board of Education issued a directive that the word "Negro" should be spelled with a capital "N".
Awards
* Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, the president of Howard University, received the Spingarn Medal "for his successful administration as the first Negro president of the leading Negro university in America, and especially for his leadership in securing, during the past year, legal authority for appropriations to Howard University by the government of the United States" (July 2).
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson (January 4, 1890 – September 10, 1976) was an American educator. He served as the first black president of Howard University, from 1926 until 1960.
Johnson was born in Paris, Tennessee, the son of former slaves, Reverend Wyatt J. Johnson and Carolyn Freeman.
Johnson received his bachelor of arts degree (B.A.) from Morehouse College in 1911, and second bachelor of arts degree from the University of Chicago two years later. He studied at several other institutions of higher education, including the Rochester Theological Seminary, Harvard University, Howard University, and the Gammon Theological Seminary.
Johnson was born on January 12, 1890, in Paris, Tennessee. His father, Wyatt Johnson, was a preacher and mill worker. His mother was a domestic worker for one of the prominent families in town. He married Anna Ethelyn Gardner on December 25, 1916. They had five children: Carolyn Elizabeth Johnson, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Jr., Archer Clement Johnson, William Howard Johnson, and Anna Faith Johnson.
Following a brief stint as secretary of the western region of the Student Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), in 1917 he became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Charleston, West Virginia. He later founded a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
On June 26, 1926, at the age of 36, Johnson was unanimously elected the eleventh President of Howard University, becoming the first African American to serve as the permanent head of that institution. He served until 1960. Prior to his appointment Johnson had served as Professor of Economics and History at Morehouse. He had also served as Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Charleston, West Virginia. In 1929, the NAACP awarded Johnson the Spingarn Medal (its highest honor at that time), for Johnson's ability to secure annual federal funds to support the university's financial future. During his tenure, Johnson appointed Charles Hamilton Houston as dean of the law school. Johnson raised millions of dollars for new buildings and for upgrading all of the schools. National honor societies, including Phi Beta Kappa, were established on the campus of Howard. During his administration, it was said that Howard had the greatest collection of African American scholars to be found anywhere. Notable scholars at Howard included: Alain Locke, a philosopher and a Rhodes Scholar from Harvard University; Ralph Bunche, professor of political science and later a Nobel Laureate, Charles Drew, who perfected the use of blood plasma; Percy Julian, a noted chemist; and Sterling Brown, professor of English and noted Harlem Renaissance poet.
Enrollment at Howard University increased from 2,000 in 1926 to more than 10,000 in 1960. After 34 years of service and bringing the university into national prominence, Johnson retired from the presidency of Howard University in 1960.
Johnson was an annual speaker for the Education Night at the National Baptist Convention, and a speaker at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston. He traveled 25,000 miles a year throughout the country speaking principally on topics such as racism, segregation, and discrimination. In 1951, he was a member of the American delegation to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that met in London.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson died on September 10, 1976, at the age of 86, in Washington, D.C.
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The Spingarn Medal is awarded annually by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for outstanding achievement by an African American.
The award, which consists of a gold medal, was created in 1914 by Joel Elias Spingarn, Chairman of the Board of the NAACP. It was first awarded to biologist Ernest E. Just in 1915, and has been given most years thereafter.
Well-known recipients of the award include: W. E. B. Du Bois, Colonel Charles Young, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Sammy Davis, Jr., Alex Haley, Andrew Young, Rosa Parks, Coleman Young, Lena Horne, Bill Cosby, Jr., Jesse Jackson, Colin Powell, Earl Graves, Alvin Ailey and Maya Angelou.
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Civil Rights
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Civil Rights
*Marching to the tune of "John Brown's Body", and jazz tunes, 300 tenants and scores of children marched in the streets of Harlem to protest the expiration of rent control laws. The parade of marchers was led by the Harlem Tenants' League, the Council of Working Class Women, the American Negro Labor Congress, and groups from the Communist Party.
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The Labor Movement
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*The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters held its annual labor conference in Chicago. Members were told that "in order to fit in the scheme of organized industry today, [members] must mobilize their economic power to compete with that of the employing class." Addresses were made concerning crime, juvenile delinquency, housing and health conditions of workers.
*The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters received a charter from the AFL (February 23). Members of the Brotherhood attended and spoke at the AFL convention in October.
*William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, inaugurated a series of speeches in New York and Chicago designed to underscore the support of the AFL for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Green's speeches were to help recruit 10,000 members for the Brotherhood by September 1. Green said the AFL would resist any attempt by the Pullman Company to impose a company union on the porters.
The Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by George Pullman, manufactured railroad cars in the mid-to-late 19th century through the early decades of the 20th century, during the boom of railroads in the United States. Its workers initially lived in a planned worker community (or "company town") named Pullman. Pullman developed the sleeping car which carried his name into the 1980s. Pullman did not just manufacture the cars: it also operated them on most of the railroads in the United States, paying the railroads to attach the cars to trains. The labor union associated with the company, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which was organized by Pullman porters, was one of the most powerful African-American political entities of the 20th century. The company also built thousands of streetcars and trolley buses for use in cities.
After spending the night sleeping in his seat on a train trip from Buffalo to Westfield, New York, George Pullman was inspired to design an improved passenger railcar that contained sleeper berths for all its passengers. During the day, the upper berth was folded up somewhat like a modern airliner's overhead luggage compartment. At night the upper berth folded down and the two facing seats below it folded over to provide a relatively comfortable bunk for the night. Although this was somewhat spartan accommodation by today's standards, it was a great improvement on the previous layout. Curtains provided privacy, and there were washrooms at each end of the car for men and women.
Pullman established his company in 1862 and built luxury sleeping cars which featured carpeting, draperies, upholstered chairs, libraries and card tables and an unparalleled level of customer service. Once a household name due to their large market share, the Pullman Company is also known for the bitter Pullman Strike staged by their workers and union leaders in 1894. During an economic downturn, Pullman reduced hours and wages but not rents, precipitating the strike. Workers joined the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs.
After George Pullman's death in 1897, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, became company president. The company closed its factory in the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago in 1955. Pullman purchased the Standard Steel Car Company in 1930 amid the Great Depression, and the merged entity was known as Pullman-Standard Car M-anufacturing Company. The company ceased production after the Amtrak Superliner cars in 1982 and its remaining designs were purchased in 1987 when it was absorbed by Bombardier.
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*The International Ladies Garment Workers Union announced that it would organize the 4,000 African American workers in dress shops in New York City.
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first United States unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s. The union, generally referred to as the "ILGWU" or the "ILG," merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1995 to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. The two unions that formed UNITE in 1995 represented only 250,000 workers between them, down from the ILGWU's peak membership of 450,000 in 1969.
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*The integrated National Textile Workers Union struck against the textile mills in Gastonia, North Carolina. The strikers claimed that they were attacked by the police chief and a detachment of deputized civilians. The police chief and three deputies were killed, and 71 workers were beaten and thrown in jail. The International Labor Defense of New York City undertook the defense of fifteen union members charged with murder.
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The International Labor Defense (ILD) was a legal defense organization in the United States, founded by James P. Cannon and headed by William L. Patterson after Cannon's expulsion from the Communist Party. It was the United States section of the International Red Aid organization, and was associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and anti-lynching movements, and participated in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. It was formed in 1925, and in 1946 merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress.
Max Shachtman was an editor of the ILD's magazine, the Labor Defender, during the 1920s. Whittaker Chambers and Jacob Burck were contributing editors during the early 1930s.
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*By November, according to the National Urban League column in The Chicago Defender, unemployment had affected African American workers all over the nation.
In just three years from 1919–1922, the Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.
The Editor and founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott played a major role in influencing the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North by means of strong, moralistic rhetoric in his editorials and political cartoons, the promotion of Chicago as a destination, and the advertisement of successful black individuals as inspiration for blacks in the South. The rhetoric and art exhibited in the Defender unmistakably demanded equality of the races and the promotion of a northern migration. The first step Abbott took to achieve this end was to create a necessary sense of oppression and discontentment in southern life, accomplished through the exposés of southern crimes against blacks. The Defender consistently published articles describing lynchings in the south with vivid descriptions of gore and the victims’ deaths. These stories were accompanied by unrestrained blame of the mobs of whites typically involved, forcing readers to accept that these crimes were “systematic and unremitting”. The newspaper’s intense focus on these injustices implicitly laid the groundwork upon which Abbott would build his explicit critiques of society.
The art in the Defender, particularly its political cartoons, also explicitly addressed race issues and advocated northern migration of blacks.
After the movement of southern blacks northward was a quantifiable phenomenon, the Defender took a particular interest in sensationalizing migratory stories, often portraying them as the focus of the front page. Abbott positioned his paper as a primary influence of these movements even before historians would, for he used the Defender to initiate and advertise a “Great Northern Drive” day, set for May 15, 1917.
The promotion of Chicago as an attractive destination for the migration of southern blacks was a main function of the Defender. Abbott presented Chicago as a promised-land with abundant jobs, as he included advertisements "clearly aimed at southerners" that called for massive numbers of wanted workers in factory positions. The Defender was littered with advertisements for desirable commodities, beauty products and technological devices. Interestingly, Abbott’s paper was the first black newspaper to incorporate a full entertainment section, which allowed for the culture of Chicago to be intricately elaborated upon. Chicago was portrayed as a lively city where blacks commonly went to the theaters, ate out at fancy restaurants, attended sports events, including "cheering for the American Black Giants, black America’s favorite baseball team", and could dance all night in the hottest night clubs.
The Defender featured letters and poetry sent in from successful recent migrants; these writings "served as representative anecdotes, supplying readers with prototype examples … that characterized the migration campaign". To supplement these first-person accounts, Abbott often published small features on successful blacks in Chicago.
In 1923, founding publisher Robert Sengstacke Abbott and editor Lucius Harper created the Bud Billiken Club and later organized parades to promote healthy activity among black children in Chicago. In 1929 the organization began the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, which is still held annually in Chicago in early August. In the 1950s, under Abbott's direction, the Bud Billiken Parade expanded and emerged as the largest single event in Chicago. Today, it attracts more than one million attendance with more than 25 million television viewers,` making it one of the largest parades in the country.
Abbott's nephew, John H. Sengstacke, took over the Defender in 1940. In 1948, he encouraged President Harry S. Truman to integrate the armed services, which he did soon after. Sengstacke served as a member of Truman's appointed committee to assure that the military implemented this plan.
Sengstacke also brought together for the first time major black newspaper publishers and created the National Negro Publishers Association, later renamed the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). Today the NNPA consists of over 200 member black newspapers. Two days following the publishers' first meeting in Chicago, Abbott died.
One of Sengstacke's most striking accomplishments occurred on February 6, 1956, when the Defender became a daily newspaper and changed its name to the Chicago Daily Defender, the nation's second black daily newspaper. It published as a daily until 2003, when new owners converted the Defender back to a weekly. The Defender was one of only three African-American dailies in the United States; the other two are the Atlanta Daily World, the first black newspaper founded as a daily in 1928, and the New York Daily Challenge, founded in 1971.
Control of the Chicago Defender and her sister publications was transferred to a new ownership group named Real Times Inc. in January 2003. Real Times, Inc. was organized and led by Thom Picou, and Robert (Bobby) Sengstacke, John H. Sengstacke's surviving child and father of the beneficiaries of the Sengstacke Trust. In effect, Picou, then chairman and CEO of Real Times, Inc., led what was then labeled a "Sengstacke family-led" deal to facilitate trust beneficiaries and other Sengstacke family shareholders to agree to the sale of the company. Picou recruited Sam Logan, former publisher of the Michigan Chronicle, who then recruited O'Neil Swanson, Bill Pickard, Ron Hall and Gordon Follmer, black businessman from Detroit, Michigan (the "Detroit Group"), as investors in Real Times. Chicago investors included Picou, Bobby Sengstacke, David M. Milliner (who served as publisher of the Chicago Defender from 2003 to 2004), Kurt Cherry and James Carr.
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Literature and Journalism
*Jessie Fauset published Plum Bun.
Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 – April 30, 1961) was an editor, poet, essayist and novelist. Fauset was the editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. She also was the editor and co-author for the African American children's magazine Brownies' Book. She studied the teachings and beliefs of W. E. B. DuBois and considered him to be her mentor. Fauset was known as one of the most intelligent women novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, earning her the name "the midwife". In her lifetime she wrote four novels as well as poetry and short fiction.
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Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral is one of the four novels written by Jessie Redmon Fauset. First published in 1929, it is often seen as an important contribution to the movement that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance,
Overtly conventional through its employment of elements and techniques of traditional genres such as the romance or the fairy tale, Plum Bun at the same time transgresses these genres by its depiction, and critique, of racism, sexism, and capitalism. The heroine, a young, light-skinned African American woman named Angela Murray, leaves behind her past and passes for white in order to be able to attain fulfillment in life. Only after she has lived among white Americans does she find out that crossing the racial barrier is not enough for a woman like herself to realize her full potential. The detailed description of her coming of age makes Plum Bun a classic bildungsroman -- a classic coming of age story.
Plum Bun, Fauset’s second novel, sold 100,000 copies within 90 days of its publication, thus giving it the status of a best-seller in its time. The title, Plum Bun, illustrates some of the forces which drive the novel’s main character Angela Murray. The novel’s epigraph quotes the nursery rhyme from which the title is taken: "To market, to market / to buy a plum bun / Home again, home again / Market is done." A plum bun itself, which may be similar to the English Chelsea Roll and the American Cinnamon Roll, is a sweet pastry made of white flour, in which deeply colored currents, raisins, or prunes (plums) are baked. The use of the term "plum bun" is also a sexual innuendo as a plum bun can also be read as "an attractive piece" -- "an attractive woman".
Angela must come to grips with her colored and white racial heritage, as well as with her femininity (stereotypically seen as sweetness), before she achieves psychological wholeness. Although African-American women were typed in popular song as “a little brown sugar" or a “jellyroll,” Angela had to cease thinking of herself as a purveyor of feminine sweetness for sale, and instead step into new roles with inherent value.
The novel’s plot and characters include many autobiographical elements. When Fauset’s mother died, her father remarried a white woman. In Fauset’s actual family, as in the novel, some members of the family could roam at will throughout Philadelphia, while others were prohibited from public places such as hospitals, restaurants, and stores by widely accepted Jim Crow policies. Other autobiographical elements include growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, being the only African-American student in a white school, and discovering Philadelphia’s racist policies for hiring public school teachers (a black teacher could not teach white students). Fauset, like her main characters, moved to Harlem during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance (in 1919) and heard W. E. B. Du Bois (in the novel he is named Van Meier) speak.
The novel’s plot concerns two sisters, Virginia and Angela Murray, who grow up in Philadelphia in a home rich with African American culture. Angela, like her mother Mattie, is light skinned and able to “pass” in white society, while Virginia and her father Junius’s darker complexion places them on the other side of the color line. Virginia grows up refusing to bow to racist pressures; rather she accepts who she is. Angela, on the other hand, tries repeatedly to gain acceptance by assuming a white mask, but each time it seems that success and friendship are hers, her ethnicity is exposed and she is stripped of everything she cares about.
The deaths of her parents and the racism of Philadelphia society cause Angela to leave for New York City, where she decides to fully hide her African-American heritage. She gains acceptance in an elite artistic circle perhaps inspired by the 1920s Greenwich Village avant-garde. She begins a romantic relationship with Roger, a young white man who seems to move among New York’s Four Hundred -- the City's social elite. Their relationship, however, is based in several deceptions. In one of the novel’s most important scenes, Angela’s sister is newly arrived at Pennsylvania Station from Philadelphia. Angela, who has come to the station to meet her sister, sees her lover. Aware that his racism will cause him to reject her, she brushes by her darker-complected sister, leaving her standing alone in the crowd. Angela’s and Roger’s deceptions of each other and of themselves lie also in their use of each other for personal gain: Angela seeks Roger’s financial comfort; Roger seeks the convenience of sex without having to introduce his new find to his father, whose deep concern is for his future daughter-in-law’s pedigree. Roger’s abandonment of Angela, the unmasking, to Angela, of his solely sexual intentions, and the mistreatment of Miss Powell, a young artist of African-American heritage, lead Angela to reveal her racial heritage and lose her standing with several of her acquaintances. However, true friends and her sister urge her to travel to Paris to become an artist, and Anthony, a fellow art school classmate of mixed heritage who watched his father die under the hands of a racist mob in the South, declares his love for Angela. It seems at the end, Anthony and Angela may come to terms with America’s racist past and their own brighter future.
The subtitle of the book, A Novel without a Moral, can be understood as follows: once Angela leaves Philadelphia for New York and a traditional African-American home for life on her own, her morality is no longer clearly defined for her. The “moral to the story” is slowly created for the reader and for the main characters as Angela learns and understands the life lessons that New York affords her.
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*Nella Larsen published Passing.
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen, born Nellie Walker (April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964), was an American novelist who was most prominent during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. First working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels -- Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)-- and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
Nella Larsen's second novel Passing appeared at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. Many of its characeters and occasions resemble other novels written during that era. Indeed, the working title of Passing, "Nig," alludes to Nigger Heaven, the novel by Larsen's friend and mentor Carl Van Vechten.
However, Passing is more complex and ambitious than many of its predecessors and this may account for the title change and for earning its author the distinction of being one of the first Africnn American women to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for literature.
The central characters of Passing are Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two African Americans who look like European Americans. These two women had been girlhood friends but separated for years before they accidentally meet when Clare is seated next to Irene in an expensive Chicago restaurant that only serves European Americans.
Although both women are exploiting their appearance and passing for white, for Irene this is an occasional indulgence. She has established an identity as the doting mother of two sons, the wife of a prominent African American physician, and a supporter of appropriately conservative and uplifting community affairs.
Clare on the other hand has married a successful European American but also deeply dislikes African American people.
From this accidental reunion, the two women's lives become entangled as Clare increasingly seeks opportunities to socialize with (and Irene reluctantly sponsors Clare's entree into) the African American middle class. Clare's recklessness worries Irene because it threatens Clare's carefully constructed "white" identity. However, Irene also finds Clare's choices and the danger they entail both frightening and fascinating until she discovers that Clare is having an affair with her husband. This plot twist creates a climate of tension which climaxes when Clare's enraged husband rushes into one of these African American social gatherings, startling Clare and causing her to fall to her death. An air of ambiguity is added by the fact that, as Clare falls Irene is seen reaching towards her. In the context of the story, Irene's culpability is unclear. It is unclear whether Irene sought to reach Clare to save her or was partly responsible for the fall with a push.
Passing explores the relationships between appearance and reality, deception and unmasking, manipulation and imaginative management, aggression and self-defense. The novel's epigraph from Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage" encourages one to read Passing as another in the genre that explores the ambiguity and conflicts inherent in prevailing constructions of race. When it was first published, many reviewers referred to the novel as a "tragedy," alluding to both its shocking ending and to its obvious similarities to the tragic COTW genre exemplified by works such as William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853). Larsen's examination of passing, however, is more in the tradition of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Minnie's Sacrifice (1868) or James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) because it focuses more upon the psychological dimensions than upon the physical acts that the tragic COTW novels portrayed.
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*Claude McKay published Banjo.
Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay (September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote four novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), and in 1941 a manuscript called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem that has not yet been published. McKay also authored collections of poetry; a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously); and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953.
McKay was attracted to Communism in his early life, but he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist Party. However, some scholars dispute the claim that he was not a Communist at that time, noting his close ties to active members, his attendance at Communist-led events, and his months-long stay in the Soviet Union in 1922-1923 during which he wrote about Communism very favorably. He gradually became disillusioned with Communism, however, and by the mid-1930s, he had begun to write negatively about it.
McKay was attracted to Communism in his early life, but he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist Party. However, some scholars dispute the claim that he was not a Communist at that time, noting his close ties to active members, his attendance at Communist-led events, and his months-long stay in the Soviet Union in 1922-1923 during which he wrote about Communism very favorably. He gradually became disillusioned with Communism, however, and by the mid-1930s, he had begun to write negatively about it.
Banjo was McKay's second novel. Banjo is a commentary on colonialism that focuses on the lives of an international cast of drifters living on the Marseilles waterfront. Banjo was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan African colonies, as the novel centers on black seamen in Marseilles. Aimé Césaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice".
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*Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry was published.
Wallace Henry Thurman (b. August 16, 1902, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. - d. December 22, 1934, New York, New York), 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.
Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license.
Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California, in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.
Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree.
While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.
In 1925, Thurman moved to Harlem. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor, as well as writing novels, plays, and articles. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal addressed to blacks. There he was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett.
He was able to publish only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior.
Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives.
During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content.
In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Afterward, Thurman became a reader for a major New York publishing company, the first African American to work in such a position.
Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had one child together.
Thurman died in 1934 at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.
Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.
Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his first novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored.
Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored The Interne (1932), a final novel written with Abraham L. Furman, a white man.
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The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) is a novel by the American author Wallace Thurman, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was considered ground breaking for its exploration of colorism and racial discrimination within the black community, where lighter skin was often favored, especially for women.
The novel tells the story of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. It begins in Boise, Idaho and follows Morgan in her journey to college at UCLA, and a move to Harlem, New York City for work. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel explores Morgan's experiences with colorism, discrimination by lighter-skinned African Americans due to her dark skin. She learns to come to terms with her skin color in order to find satisfaction in her life.
- ***
Among the mundane settings of Harlem tenement buildings, employment agencies, public dance halls, rent parties, cabarets, and movie houses, Emma Lou has numerous opportunities to overcome her obsession with color and class consciousness. She is, indeed, discriminated against by both African Americans and European Americans, but not to the degree that she believes.
In a crowded one-room apartment filled with liquor gorging intellectuals resembling Langston Hughes (Tony Crews), Zora Neale Hurston (Cora Thurston), and Richard Bruce Nugent (Paul), and Thurman himself (Truman) explains intra-racial discrimination by examining the parasitic nature of humankind. He argues that "people have to feel superior to something ... [other than] domestic animals or steel machines. ...It is much more pleasing to pick some individual or group ... on the same plane.' Thus, Thurman suggests that COTWs who ostracize darker skinned African Americans merely follow a hierarchy of discrimination set by materially powerful European American people. Truman's anatomy of racism, however, is ignored by Emma Lou.
The Blacker the Berry received reviews that, while mixed, praised Thurman for his ironic depiction of original settings, characters, and themes then considered off limits for African American literary examination. Many others also criticize Thurman for emphasizing the seamier side of Harlem life.
However, Thurman was never pleased with The Blacker the Berry, and his caricature of the female protagonist, Emma Lou, shows why. Emma Lou behaves unlike traditional African American females who tend to revise rather than accept the values of both African American and European American men. After she is repeatedly degraded by light skinned Alva, Emma Lou's spiritual liberation begins only when she acknowledges the Thurmanian and Emersonian ideal that salvation rests with the individual, first expressed (in the book) by the European American Campbell Kitchen (Carl Van Vechten). In a literary context, Thurman becomes trapped in the alien body of Emma Lou and does not have the creative imagination to break her racial fixation by summoning up a female perspective. Instead, Emma Lou trades an obsession with skin color for one that is viewed by a patriarchal society as being even more perverse.
*****
*Walter White published Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch.
Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.
In 1918, he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.
White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.
Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.
White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.
***
With regards to Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, in 1926, Walter White, assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, broke the story of a horrific lynching in Aiken, South Carolina, in which three African Americans were murdered while more than one thousand spectators watched. Because of his light complexion, blonde hair, and blue eyes, White, an African American, was able to investigate first-hand more than forty lynchings and eight race riots.
Following the lynchings in Aiken, White took a leave of absence from the NAACP and, with help from a Guggenheim grant, spent a year in France writing Rope and Faggot. Ironically subtitled “A Biography of Judge Lynch,” Rope and Faggot is a compelling example of partisan scholarship and is based on White’s first-hand investigations. It was first published in 1929.
Rope and Faggot debunked the “big lie” that lynching punished black men for raping white women and it provided White with an opportunity to deliver a penetrating critique of the southern culture that nourished this form of blood sport. White marshaled statistics demonstrating that accusations of rape or attempted rape accounted for less than 30 percent of all lynchings. Despite the emphasis on sexual issues in instances of lynching, White insisted that the fury and sadism with which white mobs attacked their victims stemmed primarily from a desire to keep blacks in their place and control the black labor force. Some of the strongest sections of Rope and Faggot deal with White’s analysis of the economic and cultural foundations of lynching.
*****
*Countee Cullen published The Black Christ, a book of poems.
Countee Cullen (May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. (He pronounced his name "Coun-tay," not "Coun-tee.")
Countee Cullen was possibly born on May 30, although due to conflicting accounts of his early life, a general application of the year of his birth as 1903 is reasonable. He was either born in New York, Baltimore, Louisville, or Lexington, Kentucky, with his widow being convinced he was born in Lexington. Cullen was possibly abandoned by his mother, and reared by a woman named Mrs. Porter, who was probably his paternal grandmother. Mrs. Porter brought young Countee to Harlem when he was nine. She died in 1918. No known reliable information exists of his childhood until 1918 when he was taken in, or adopted, by Reverend and Mrs Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem, New York City. The Reverend was the local minister, and founder, of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.
Sometime before 1918, Cullen was adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen. It is impossible to state with certainty how old Cullen was when he was adopted or how long he knew the Cullens before he was adopted. Apparently he went by the name of Countee Porter until 1918. By 1921 he became Countee P. Cullen and eventually just Countee Cullen. According to Harold Jackman, Cullen's adoption was never “official.” That is to say it was never consummated through proper state-agency channels. Indeed, it is difficult to know if Cullen was ever legally an orphan at any stage in his childhood.
Frederick Cullen was a pioneer black activist minister. He established his Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in a storefront mission upon his arrival in New York City in 1902, and in 1924 moved the Church to the site of a former white church in Harlem where he could boast of a membership of more than twenty-five hundred. Countee Cullen himself stated in Caroling Dusk (1927) that he was “reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage,” and it is clear that his foster father was a particularly strong influence. The two men were very close, often traveling abroad together. But as Cullen evidences a decided unease in his poetry over his strong and conservative Christian training and the attraction of his pagan inclinations, his feelings about his father may have been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, Frederick Cullen was a puritanical Christian patriarch, and Cullen was never remotely that in his life. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Frederick Cullen was also something of an effeminate man. (He was dressed in girl's clothing by his poverty-stricken mother well beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestism.) That Cullen was homosexual or of a decidedly ambiguous sexual nature may also be attributable to his foster father's contrary influence as both fire-breathing Christian and latent homosexual.
At some point, Cullen entered the DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx. He excelled academically at the school while emphasizing his skills at poetry and in oratorical contest. While in high school Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Life”, a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger's “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”. At DeWitt, he was elected into the honor society, editor of the weekly newspaper, and elected vice-president of his graduating class. In January 1922, he graduated with honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French.
"Yet I do marvel"
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
“
”
"Yet I do marvel" (1925)
After graduating high school, Cullen entered New York University (NYU). In 1923, he won second prize in the Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry contest, which was sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, with a poem entitled The Ballad of the Brown Girl. At about this time, some of his poetry was promulgated in the national periodicals Harper's, Crisis, Opportunity, The Bookman, and Poetry. The ensuing year he again placed second in the contest. He finally won it in 1925.
At New York University (1921–1925), Cullen wrote most of the poems for his first three volumes: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927).
Cullen competed in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity. and came in second with To One Who Say Me Nay, while losing to Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues. Sometime thereafter, Cullen graduated from NYU as one of eleven students selected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Cullen entered Harvard in 1925, to pursue a masters in English, about the same time his first collection of poems, Color, was published. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The book included "Heritage" and "Incident", probably his most famous poems. "Yet Do I Marvel", about racial identity and injustice, showed the influence of the literary expression of William Wordsworth and William Blake, but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there is God, and "God is good, well-meaning, kind", but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society: he is black and a poet. Cullen's Color was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
“
”
From "Heritage"
This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans. However, Cullen considered poetry raceless. {Although his 1929 poem "The Black Christ" took a racial theme, the lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit.)
The Harlem Renaissance movement was centered in the cosmopolitan community of Harlem, in New York City. During the 1920s, a fresh generation of writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Other leading figures included Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan, 1930), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934), Wallace Thurman (Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923) and Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1935). The movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten.
If any event signaled the coming of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of Countee Cullen. This rather shy black youth, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure. Here was a black man with considerable academic training who could, in effect, write “white” verse—ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the like—much in the manner of Keats and the British Romantics (albeit, on more than one occasion, tinged with racial concerns) with genuine skill and compelling power. He was certainly not the first African American to attempt to write such verse but he was first to do so with such extensive education and with such a complete understanding of himself as a poet. Only two other black American poets before Cullen could be taken so seriously as self-consciously considered and proficient poets: Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. If the aim of the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, the reinvention of the native-born African American as a being who can be assimilated while decidedly retaining something called “a racial self-consciousness,” then Cullen fit the bill. If “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” was the opening salvo in the making of Cullen's literary reputation, then the 1924 publication of “Shroud of Color” in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury confirmed the advent of the black boy wonder as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene.
Cullen graduated from Harvard University with a masters degree in 1926. He then began work as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, "The Dark Tower", increased his literary reputation. Indeed, between high school and his graduation from Harvard, Cullen was the most popular black poet and virtually the most popular black literary figure in America. One of Cullen's poems and his popular column in Opportunity inspired A'Leila Walker—heiress of Madame C. J. Walker's hair-care products fortune and owner of a salon where the black and white literati gathered in the late 1920s—to name her salon “The Dark Tower”.
Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry contest in 1925, Poetry magazine's John Reed Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, second prize in Opportunity magazine's first poetry contest, and second prize in the poetry contest of Palms. In addition, he was the second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Cullen's poetry collections The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and Copper Sun (1927) explored similar themes as Color, but they were not so well received. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad. He met Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual. At that time Yolande was involved romantically with a popular band leader. Between the years 1928 and 1934, Cullen traveled back and forth between France and the United States.
Countee Cullen was very secretive about his life. His real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Cullen was placed at the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance: On April 9, 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, the only child of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history. This wedding was to symbolize the union of the grand black intellectual patriarch and the new breed of younger black intellectuals who were responsible for much of the excitement of the Renaissance. It was an apt meshing of personalities as Cullen and Du Bois were both conservative by nature and ardent traditionalists. That the marriage turned out so disastrously and ended so quickly (they divorced in 1930) probably adversely affected Cullen, who would not remarry until 1940.
It is rumored that Cullen was a homosexual, and his relationship with Harold Jackman ("the handsomest man in Harlem"), was a significant factor in the divorce. The young, dashing Jackman was a school teacher and, thanks to his noted beauty, a prominent figure among Harlem's gay elite. Van Vechten had used him as a character model in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926).
It is very possible that the conflicted Cullen was in love with the homosexual Jackman, but Thomas Wirth, author of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, says there is no concrete proof that they ever were lovers, despite newspaper stories and gossip suggesting the contrary.
Jackman's diaries, letters, and outstanding collections of memorabilia are held in various depositories across the country, such as the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans and Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia. At Cullen's death, Jackman requested that the name of the Georgia accumulation be changed from the Harold Jackman Collection to the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection in honor of his friend. When Jackman, himself, succumbed to cancer in 1961, the collection was renamed the Cullen-Jackman Collection to honor them both.
By 1929 Cullen had published four volumes of poetry. The title poem of The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery - Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to the crucifixion of Jesus. Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems to less than his accustomed glowing reviews. He was bitterly disappointed that The Black Christ, his longest and in many respects most complicated poem, was considered by most critics and reviewers to be his weakest and least distinguished.
As well as writing books himself, Cullen promoted the work of other black writers. But by 1930 Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. In 1932, appeared his only novel, One Way to Heaven, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City. From 1934 until the end of his life, he taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City. (His most famous student at Frederick Douglass Junior High School was James Baldwin.) During this period, he also wrote two works for young readers: The Lost Zoo (1940), poems about the animals who perished in the Flood, and My Lives and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat. In the last years of his life, Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre. He worked with Arna Bontemps to adapt his 1931 novel God Sends Sunday into St. Louis Woman (1946, published 1971) for the musical stage. Its score was composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, both white. The Broadway musical, set in a poor black neighborhood in St. Louis, was criticized by black intellectuals for creating a negative image of black Americans. Cullen also translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides, which was published in 1935 as The Medea and Some Poems with a collection of sonnets and short lyrics.
In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Robertson, whom he had known for ten years.
Cullen died from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946.
*****
*Concert singer Taylor Gordon published his autobiography, Born to Be.
Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (April 29, 1893 – May 5, 1971) was a singer and vaudeville performer associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1920s. He was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana and moved to New York City at the age of 17. His career faded after the 1920s, and in 1959 he retired to White Sulphur Springs, where he died in 1971. In addition to his singing career, Gordon is remembered today for his 1929 autobiography, Born to Be, which recounts his youth as an Afro-American in small-town Montana, and his experiences in 1920s Harlem.
*To help insure federal funds for African American education in the South, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) pressed President Hoover to appoint African Americans to the National Advisory Committee on Education. Hoover appointed Mordecai Brown, president of Howard University; Robert Moton, president of Tuskegee, and John Davis, president of West Virginia State College.
Lorez Alexandria (b. Dolorez Alexandria Turner, August 14, 1929 in Chicago, Illinois – d. May 22, 2001 in Los Angeles, California) was an American jazz and gospel singer.
She began as a singer in churches in her teens, and spent 11 years as part of an a cappella choir. Turning to jazz, she worked the local Chicago club scene before moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to further her career.
She remains best known for her album Alexandria the Great (Impulse! Records, 1964), which featured her in a variety of contexts ranging from big bands to small groups, including several tracks with the Wynton Kelly Trio.
Other musicians she recorded with included King Fleming, Ramsey Lewis, Howard McGhee, Gildo Mahone and Houston Person.
Notable Deaths
*****
Politics
*Archibald Motley's portraits, My Grandmother and Old Snuff Dipper, won the Harmon Gold Medal, and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for two years' study in Paris.
Archibald John Motley, Jr. (b. October 7, 1891, New Orleans, Louisiana – d. January 16, 1981, Chicago, Illinois) was an African-American painter. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. He is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America. He specialized in portraiture and saw it “as a means of affirming racial respect and race pride.”
Unlike many other Harlem Renaissance artists, Archibald Motley, Jr. never lived in Harlem. He was born in New Orleans and spent the majority of his life in Chicago. He graduated from Englewood High School in Chicago. He was offered a scholarship to study architecture by one of his father's friends, which he turned down in order to study art. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he received classical training but his modernist-realist works were out of step with the school's then-conservative bent. During his time at the Art Institute, Motley was mentored by painters Earl Beuhr and John W. Norton, and he did well enough to cause his father's friend to pay his tuition. While he was a student, in 1913, other students at the Institute "rioted" against the modernism on display at the Armory Show (a collection of the best new modern art). Motley graduated in 1918 but kept his modern, jazz-influenced paintings secret for some years thereafter.
Motley experienced success early in his career. In 1927, his piece Mending Socks was voted the most popular exhibit at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. He was awarded the Harmon Foundation award in 1928, and then became the first African-American to have a one-man exhibit in New York City. He sold twenty-two out of the twenty-six exhibited paintings.
In 1927, he had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and was denied, but he reapplied and won the fellowship in 1929. He studied in France for a year, and chose not to extend his fellowship another six months. While many contemporary artists looked back to Africa for inspiration, Motley was inspired by the great Renaissance masters whose work was displayed at the Louvre. He found in the artwork there a formal sophistication and maturity that could give depth to his own work, particularly in the Dutch painters and the genre paintings of Delacroix, Hals, and Rembrandt. Motley’s portraits take the conventions of the Western tradition and update them—allowing for black bodies, specifically black female bodies, a space in a history that had traditionally excluded them.
During the 1930s, Motley was employed by the federal Works Progress Administration to depict scenes from African-American history in a series of murals, some of which can be found at Nichols Middle School in Evanston, Illinois. After his wife’s death in 1948 and difficult financial times, Motley was forced to seek work painting shower curtains for the Styletone Corporation. In the 1950s, he made several visits to Mexico and began painting Mexican life and landscapes.
Motley’s family lived in a quiet neighborhood on Chicago’s south side in an environment that was racially tolerant. Motley did not spend much of his time growing up around other blacks. It was this disconnection with the African American community around him that established Motley as an outsider. Motley himself was light skinned and of mixed racial makeup, being African, First American and European. Motley wrestled all his life with his own racial identity. He was unable to fully associate with one or the other, neither black nor white. Rather than focusing his energy on establishing his own racial identity, Motley turned his talents to uncovering the secrets of racial identity across the spectrum of skin color. As Motley struggled with his own racial identity, he used distinctions in skin color and physical features to give meaning to each individual shade of African American. Motley was fascinated with skin color and what it meant in the context of racial identity. He realized that in American society, different statuses were attributed to each gradation of skin tone.
In the 1920s and 1930s, during the New Negro Renaissance, Motley dedicated a series of portraits to types of Negroes. He focused mostly on women of mixed racial ancestry, and did numerous portraits documenting women of varying African-blood quantities ("octoroon," "quadroon," "mulatto"). These portraits celebrate skin tone as something diverse, inclusive, and pluralistic. They also demonstrate an understanding that these categorizations become synonymous with public identity and influence one's opportunities in life. It is often difficult if not impossible to tell what kind of racial mixture the subject has without referring to the title. These physical markers of blackness, then, are unstable and unreliable, and Motley exposed that difference.
Motley spoke to a wide audience of both whites and blacks in his portraits, aiming to educate them on the politics of skin tone, if in different ways. He hoped to prove to blacks through art that their own racial identity was something to be appreciated. For white audiences he hoped to bring an end to black stereotypes and racism by displaying the beauty and achievements of African Americans. Motley’s fascination with painting the different types of African Americans stemmed from a desire to give each African American his or her own character and personality. This is consistent with Motley’s aims of portraying an absolutely accurate and transparent representation of African Americans; his commitment to differentiating between skin types shows his meticulous efforts to specify even the slightest differences between individuals.
His night scenes and crowd scenes, heavily influenced by jazz culture, are perhaps his most popular and most prolific. He depicted a vivid, urban black culture that bore little resemblance to the conventional and marginalizing rustic images of black Southerners so popular in the cultural eye. It is important to note, however, that it was not his community he was representing—he was among the affluent and elite black community of Chicago. He married a white woman and lived in a white neighborhood, and was not a part of that urban experience in the same way his subjects were.
Motley married his high school sweetheart Edith Granzo in 1924. Granzo had German immigrant parents who were opposed to her interracial relationship and disowned Edith for her marriage to Motley. Edith died in 1948.
His nephew (raised as his brother), Willard Motley, was an acclaimed writer known for his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door.
Motley's early artistic endeavors include Old Snuff Dipper, a realistic portrait a working class southerner that won Motley a Harmon Foundation award.
One of his most famous works showing the urban black community is Bronzeville at Night, showing African Americans as actively engaged, urban peoples who identify with the city streets. In the work, Motley provides a central image of the lively street scene and portrays the scene as a distant observer, capturing the many individual interactions but paying attention to the big picture at the same time.
In Stomp, Motley painted a busy cabaret scene which again documents the vivid urban black culture. The excitement in the painting is very much palpable. One can observe a woman in a white dress throwing her hands up to the sound of the music, a couple embracing—hand in hand—in the back of the cabaret, the lively pianist watching the dancers. Interestingly, both black and white couples dance and hobnob with each other in the foreground. For example, on the right of the painting, an African American man wearing a black tuxedo dances with a woman whom Motley gives a much lighter tone. By doing this, he hoped to counteract perceptions of segregation.
The Octoroon Girl features a woman who is one-eighth black. In the image a graceful young woman with dark hair, dark eyes and light skin sits on a sofa while leaning against a warm red wall. She wears a black velvet dress with red satin trim, a dark brown hat and a small gold chain with a pendant. In her right hand, she holds a pair of leather gloves. The woman stares directly at the viewer with a soft, but composed gaze. Her face is serene. Motley balances the painting with a picture frame and the rest of the couch on the left side of the painting.
Motley developed a reusable and recognizable language in his artwork, which included contrasting light and dark colors, skewed perspectives, strong patterns and the dominance of a single hue. He also created a set of characters who appeared repeatedly in his paintings with distinctive postures, gestures, expressions and habits. These figures were often depicted standing very close together, if not touching or overlapping one another. Nightlife depicts a bustling night club with people dancing in the background, sitting at tables on the right and drinking at a bar on the left. The entire image is flushed with a burgundy light that emanates from the floor and walls, creating a warm, rich atmosphere for the club-goers. The rhythm of the music can be felt in the flailing arms of the dancers, who appear to be performing the popular Lindy hop.
*Aaron Douglas illustrated the jacket cover of Wallace Thurman's novel, The Blacker the Berry.
Aaron Douglas (b. May 26, 1898, Topeka, Kansas – d. February 3, 1979, Nashville, Tennessee) was an African-American painter and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, to Aaron and Elizabeth Douglas. He developed an interest in art during his childhood and was encouraged in his pursuits by his mother. Douglas graduated from Topeka High School in 1917. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922. In 1925, Douglas moved to New York City, settling in Harlem. Just a few months after his arrival he began to produce illustrations for both The Crisis and Opportunity, the two most important magazines associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He also began studying with Winold Reiss, a German artist who had been hired by Alain Locke to illustrate The New Negro. Reiss's teaching helped Douglas develop the modernist style he would employ for the next decade. Douglas’s engagement with African and Egyptian design brought him to the attention of W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Locke, who were pressing for young African American artists to express their African heritage and African American folk culture in their art.
Douglas was heavily influenced by the African culture. His natural talent plus his newly acquired inspiration allowed Douglas to be considered the "Father of African American Arts." That title led him to say," Do not call me the Father of African American Arts, for I am just a son of Africa, and paint for what inspires me."
For the next several years, Douglas was an important part of the circle of artists and writers we now call the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to his magazine illustrations for the two most important African-American magazines of the period, he illustrated books, painted canvases and murals, and tried to start a new magazine showcasing the work of younger artists and writers. It was during the early 1930s that Douglas completed the most important works of his career, his murals at Fisk University and at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture).
Throughout his early career, Douglas looked for opportunities to increase his knowledge about art. In 1928–29, Douglas studied African and Modern European art at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania on a grant from the foundation. In 1931, he traveled to Paris, where he spent a year studying more traditional French painting and drawing techniques at the Academie Scandinave.
In 1939, Douglas moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he founded the Art Department at Fisk University and taught for 27 years. Coinciding with this move was a shift to a more traditional painting style, including portraits and landscapes.
Aaron Douglas has been called the father of African American art. His striking illustrations, murals, and paintings of the life and history of people of color depict an emerging black American individuality in a powerfully personal way. Working primarily from the 1920s through the 1940s, Douglas linked black Americans with their African past and proudly showed black contributions to society decades before the dawn of the civil rights movement. His work made a lasting impression on future generations of black artists.
Best represented by black-and-white drawings with black silhouetted figures, as well as by portraits, landscapes, and murals, Douglas's art fused modernism with ancestral African images, including fetish motifs, masks, and artifacts. His work celebrates African American versatility and adaptability, depicting people in a variety of settings—from rural and urban scenes to churches to nightclubs. His illustrations in books by leading black writers established him as the black artist of the period. Later in his career, Douglas founded the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Beginning in the 1920s, Douglas's illustrations appeared in books by James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and other prominent black writers, activists, and intellectuals. They were also featured in such magazines as The Crisis, Opportunity, Harper's, and Vanity Fair. From the late 1920s through the 1940s, his art was shown across the United States at universities, galleries, hotels, and museums, including the Harmon Foundation in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Dallas, Howard University's Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and New York's Gallery of Modern Art. In addition, selected works by Douglas were assembled for a landmark traveling show of Harlem Renaissance artworks sponsored by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1988.
Douglas received a B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska in 1922 and a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Kansas the next year. Commenting on his days at the University of Nebraska, where he won a prize for drawing, he recalled: "I was the only black student there. Because I was sturdy and friendly, I became popular with both faculty and students." His ability to get along notwithstanding, Douglas longed to draw from an undraped model and felt constrained by the "Victorian attitudes" that prevented the school from using nudes in the classroom.
The style Aaron Douglas developed in the 1920s synthesized aspects of modern European, ancient Egyptian, and West African art. His best-known paintings are semi-abstract, and feature flat forms, hard edges, and repetitive geometric shapes. Bands of color radiate from the important objects in each painting, and where these bands intersect with other bands or other objects, the color changes.
*Aaron Douglas illustrated Paul Morand's book of short stories, Black Magic.
Paul Morand (March 13, 1888 – July 24, 1976) was a French author whose short stories and novellas were lauded for their style, wit and descriptive power. His most productive literary period was the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s. He was much admired by the upper echelons of society and the artistic avant-garde who made him a cult favorite. He has been categorized as an early Modernist, and Imagist.
Morand was a graduate of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, preparing him for a diplomatic career, and also attended Oxford University. A member of the upper class and married into wealth, he held various diplomatic posts and traveled widely. His was typical of those in his social group who enjoyed lives of privilege and entitlement, adhering to the inevitability and desirability of class distinction.
Morand espoused a reflexive adherence to racial, ethnic and anti-Semitic ideologies. His intellectual influences included the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and the author of a treatise on the superiority of the white race, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. During World War II, he pledged allegiance to the French Vichy regime, and became a government functionary, and Nazi collaborator. He served as Vichy ambassador in Romania and Switzerland during World War II.
Morand was a patron and inspirational figure for the Hussards literary movement, which opposed Existentialism.
Morand made four bids for admission to the prestigious Académie française and was finally accepted in 1968, over the protest of Charles de Gaulle.
*William H. Johnson returned to New York after living and painting in France for three years. Within months of his return, Johnson won the Harmon Foundation's gold award in fine arts. Johnson's work was widely reviewed. (Johnson briefly visited friends and family members in his native South Carolina before leaving the United States again, this time for Denmark.)
William Henry Johnson (March 18, 1901–1970) was an African-American painter born in Florence, South Carolina. He became a student at the National Academy of Design in New York. His style evolved from realism to expressionism to a powerful folk style (for which he is best known).
Johnson moved from Florence, South Carolina, to New York City at the age of 17. Working a variety of jobs, he saved enough money to pay for classes at the prestigious National Academy of Design. He worked with the painter Charles Hawthorne, who raised funds that allowed Johnson to go abroad to study. He spent the late 1920s in France, where he learned about modernism. During this time, he met the Danish textile artist Holcha Krake in Cagnes-sur-Mer and they married in 1930. Johnson and his wife spent most of the 1930s in Scandinavia, where his interest in folk art influenced his painting. They returned to the United States in 1938, where Johnson immersed himself in African-American culture and traditions, producing paintings that were characterized by their folk art simplicity.
Johnson enjoyed a degree of success as an artist during the 1940s and 1950s, but he was never able to achieve financial stability. In 1944 his wife Holcha died from breast cancer. To deal with his grief, he took work in a Navy Yard, and in 1946 left for Denmark to be with his wife's family. Johnson soon fell ill himself, from the effects of advanced syphilis, and returned to New York in 1947 to enter the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, where he spent the last twenty-three years of his life. He stopped painting in 1956 and died on January 1, 1970.
After his death, his entire life's work was almost disposed of to save storage fees, but it was rescued by friends at the last moment. The Harmon Foundation gave more than 1,000 paintings, watercolors, and prints by Johnson to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (then the National Museum of American Art) in 1967. In 1991, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized and circulated a major exhibition of his artwork, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, and in 2006, they organized and circulated William H. Johnson's World on Paper. An expanded version of this exhibition traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (February 3 - April 8, 2007),the Philadelphia Museum of Art (May 20 - August 12, 2007), and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama (September 15 - November 18, 2007).
In 2012, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in Johnson's honor, recognizing him as one of the nation’s foremost African-American artists and a major figure in 20th-century American art. The stamp, the 11th in the American Treasures series, showcases his painting Flowers (1939-1940), which depicts brightly colored blooms on a small red table.
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The NAACP
*To help insure federal funds for African American education in the South, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) pressed President Hoover to appoint African Americans to the National Advisory Committee on Education. Hoover appointed Mordecai Brown, president of Howard University; Robert Moton, president of Tuskegee, and John Davis, president of West Virginia State College.
*In Chicago, the NAACP started a campaign against bus companies that practiced segregation.
*In its struggle for Haitian liberation, the NAACP drew up a series of charges of incompetence against American administration. Nevertheless, United States troops would not be withdrawn from Haiti until 1934.
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Notable Births
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*Johnny Ace, a rhythm and blues singer, was born in Memphis, Tennessee (June 9).
Johnny Ace (June 9, 1929 – December 25, 1954), born John Marshall Alexander, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, was an American rhythm and blues singer. He scored a string of hit singles in the mid-1950s before dying of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Johnny Ace (June 9, 1929 – December 25, 1954), born John Marshall Alexander, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, was an American rhythm and blues singer. He scored a string of hit singles in the mid-1950s before dying of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Alexander's father was a preacher in Tennessee. After serving in the Navy during the Korean War, Alexander joined Adolph Duncan's Band as a pianist. He then joined the B. B. King band. Soon King departed for Los Angeles and vocalist Bobby Bland joined the Army. Alexander took over vocal duties and renamed the band The Beale Streeters, also taking over King's WDIA radio show.
Becoming "Johnny Ace", Alexander signed with Duke Records (originally a Memphis label associated with WDIA) in 1952. Urbane 'heart-ballad' "My Song," his first recording, topped the R&B charts for nine weeks in September of 1952. ("My Song" was covered in 1968 by Aretha Franklin, on the flipside of "See Saw".)
Johnny Ace began heavy touring, often with Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton. In the next two years, he had eight hits in a row, including "Cross My Heart," "Please Forgive Me," "The Clock," "Yes, Baby," "Saving My Love for You," and "Never Let Me Go." In December, 1954, Johnny Ace was named the Most Programmed Artist of 1954 after a national DJ poll organized by U.S. trade weekly Cash Box.
Ace's recordings sold very well for those times. Early in 1955, Duke Records announced that the three 1954 Johnny Ace recordings, along with Thornton's "Hound Dog", had sold more than 1,750,000 records.
After touring for a year, Ace had been performing at the City Auditorium in Houston, Texas on Christmas Day 1954. During a break between sets, he was playing with a .22 caliber revolver. Members of his band said he did this often, sometimes shooting at roadside signs from their car.
It was widely reported that Ace killed himself playing Russian roulette. Big Mama Thornton's bass player Curtis Tillman, however, who witnessed the event, said, "I will tell you exactly what happened! Johnny Ace had been drinking and he had this little pistol he was waving around the table and someone said ‘Be careful with that thing…’ and he said ‘It’s okay! Gun’s not loaded…see?’ and pointed it at himself with a smile on his face and ‘Bang!’ – sad, sad thing. Big Mama ran outta that dressing room yelling ‘Johnny Ace just killed himself!"
Thornton said in a written statement (included in the book The Late Great Johnny Ace) that Ace had been playing with the gun, but not playing Russian roulette. According to Thornton, Ace pointed the gun at his girlfriend and another woman who were sitting nearby, but did not fire. He then pointed the gun toward himself, bragging that he knew which chamber was loaded. The gun went off, shooting him in the side of the head.
According to Nick Tosches, Ace actually shot himself with a .32 pistol, not a .22, and it happened little more than an hour after he had bought a brand new 1955 Oldsmobile.
Ace's funeral was on January 9, 1955, at Memphis' Clayborn Temple AME church. It was attended by an estimated 5000 people.
"Pledging My Love" became a posthumous R&B #1 hit for ten weeks beginning February 12, 1955. As Billboard bluntly put it, Ace's death "created one of the biggest demands for a record that has occurred since the death of Hank Williams just over two years ago." His single sides were compiled and released as The Johnny Ace Memorial Album.
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*Lorez Alexandria, a jazz and gospel singer, was born in Chicago, Illinois (August 14).
Lorez Alexandria (b. Dolorez Alexandria Turner, August 14, 1929 in Chicago, Illinois – d. May 22, 2001 in Los Angeles, California) was an American jazz and gospel singer.
She began as a singer in churches in her teens, and spent 11 years as part of an a cappella choir. Turning to jazz, she worked the local Chicago club scene before moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to further her career.
She remains best known for her album Alexandria the Great (Impulse! Records, 1964), which featured her in a variety of contexts ranging from big bands to small groups, including several tracks with the Wynton Kelly Trio.
Other musicians she recorded with included King Fleming, Ramsey Lewis, Howard McGhee, Gildo Mahone and Houston Person.
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*Algia Mae Hinton, a blues guitarist and vocalist, was born (August 29).
Algia Mae Hinton (b. August 29, 1929) is an African-American blues guitarist and vocalist based in Johnson County, North Carolina.
She was the youngest child of Alexander and Ollie O'Neal and grew up in an area known as the O'Neal Township, named after the slave-holders who originally owned the land. Her father had been a tenant farmer and eventually earned enough to buy a home and some land in the township. At age nine, Algia Mae learned the guitar from her mother, who was a singer and a guitar expert in the Piedmont finger-picking style, and who often played at family gatherings, house parties, and services at the local congregation. From her father, who was a dancer, Algia Mae learned buckdancing and the two-step.
In 1950, Algia Mae married Miller R. Hinton. They subsequently moved to Raleigh, where they had seven children. The marriage lasted until 1965, when Miller Hinton was killed. At this point, Algia Mae moved with her children back to the O'Neal township and earned income as a field laborer. In the meantime, she played at house parties in Johnson County, North Carolina and for her children.
In 1978, Hinton met folklorist Glenn Hinson, who arranged for her performance at the 1978 North Carolina Folklife Festival. She subsequently performed at the National Folk Festival, the Chicago University Folk Festival, and in 1985 at an event called "Southern Roots" at Carnegie Hall that featured Delta and Piedmont blues artists. She became known for her guitar playing and her buckdancing, often playing her guitar behind her head as she danced.
In 1992, she received a North Carolina Heritage Award from the North Carolina Arts Council.
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Ethel D. Allen (May 8, 1929 – December 16, 1981) was an African American Republican politician and physician who served in the Pennsylvania state cabinet as Secretary of the Commonwealth.
Allen was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She studied at West Virginia State College, where she majored in chemistry and biology with a minor in mathematics, and went on to earn her Doctor of Osteopathy from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1963.
While her parents were active in local Democratic politics, Allen eventually became a Republican volunteer, working for a variety of campaigns, including that of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. She would jokingly describe herself as a "B.F.R. - a black, female Republican, an entity as rare as a black elephant and just as smart."
As a self-described "ghetto practitioner," Allen worked in difficult and often dangerous circumstances in some of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. At one point, she was lured to a false house call and found herself the target of a robbery. Four men had surrounded her, hoping to get drugs from her medical bag, but she escaped safely after wielding her gun and sending the would-be robbers running.
Allen decided that the best way for her to combat the crime she saw as a practicing physician was to become more involved in politics. In 1971, she ran for Philadelphia City Council. That year, buoyed by a series of strong debate performances, she unseated incumbent Democratic Councilman Thomas McIntosh in the Fifth District. With her election, she became the first African-American woman to serve on city council.
In 1975, Allen decided to seek re-election to Council, but this time ran for one of the Council's at-large seats. She won one of the two seats allotted for the minority Republican Party, taking over the seat vacated by Tom Foglietta, who was the party's nominee for Mayor in that year's election. While on the Council, Allen was known as a tough, outspoken politician, often clashing with Mayor Frank Rizzo and Council President George Schwartz. As her local profile rose, so too did her national presence rise. At the 1976 Republican National Convention, Allen gave the seconding speech in support of President Gerald Ford's nomination.
In January 1979, incoming Governor Dick Thornburgh named Allen his choice for Secretary of the Commonwealth. Allen had reportedly told city Republican leaders that she would turn-down Thornburgh's offer if they assured her that she would have an unobstructed path to the party's nomination for that year's Mayoral election. When she did not receive such assurances, she accepted Thornburgh's offer.
In October of that year, Thornburgh's cabinet was rocked by several resignations. Two officials–the Secretary of Health and the Secretary of Labor -- resigned due to discomfort in government and an inability to work effectively with their colleagues. As a result of the increased scrutiny put on his cabinet, Thornburgh met with Allen to discuss allegations of absenteeism and impropriety that had been made against her. Allen was reportedly absent from her Harrisburg office for more than half of a 40-day period earlier that year, and had allegedly received honorariums for speeches that had been prepared by state employees. For her part, Allen asserted that her absences were necessary to effectively carry-out her duties, and that she had only used a state worker to merely help write two speeches for which she had earned a total of $1,000. These speeches, she asserted, represented only a small percentage of the number of speeches she had given since taking office. Thornburgh, however asked Allen to resign, and when she refused to do so, he fired her. Two years earlier, Governor Milton Shapp had fired C. Delores Tucker, who was also serving as Secretary of the Commonwealth, for using public employees to assist in the preparation of speeches for which a fee was received.
Allen's firing brought a significant backlash against Thornburgh from the African-American community and various civil rights groups. Some asserted that Allen was held to a different standard because of her skin color, gender, or both; others charged that the Governor's actions were politically motivated.
Allen's dismissal from Thornburgh's cabinet brought an end to her political career. She would serve for just over one year as the Philadelphia School District's clinician with management responsibilities. In December 1981, she died due to complications from double-bypass heart surgery. While Allen never married and had no children, her legacy as a trailblazer survived her. She often encouraged African-Americans and women to seek political office. Indeed, her friend Augusta Clark would later become the second African-American woman to serve on the Philadelphia City Council, eventually becoming the Democratic Majority Whip. The Philadelphia School District later renamed one of its elementary schools in her honor.
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Raymond Gilmore Allen (b. March 5, 1929) is an American actor best known for his appearances on television in the 1970s. He had recurring roles as Ned the Wino on the series Good Times, as Aunt Esther's long-suffering, prone to drink husband, Uncle Woody on the NBC-TV sitcom series Sanford and Son, and as mechanic Merle the Earl on Starsky and Hutch. He reprised his role of Uncle Woody Anderson in the Sanford and Son spin-off, The Sanford Arms. Allen also made guest appearances on The Jeffersons, What's Happening!!, The Love Boat and the film Wattstax.
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Curtis Amy (October 11, 1929 – June 5, 2002) was an American West Coast jazz musician known for his work on tenor saxophone. He also explored many mediums, including soul jazz and hard bop.
Amy was born in Houston, Texas. He learned how to play clarinet before joining the Army, and during his time in service, picked up the tenor saxophone. After his discharge, he attended and graduated from Kentucky State College. He worked as an educator in Tennessee while playing in midwestern jazz clubs. In the mid-1950s he relocated to Los Angeles and signed with Pacific Jazz Records, often playing with organist Paul Bryant. In the mid-60s he spent three years as musical director of Ray Charles' orchestra, together with his wife, Merry Clayton and Steve Huffsteter.
As well as leading his own bands and recording albums under his own name, Amy also did session work and played the solos on several recordings, including The Doors song "Touch Me", Carole King's Tapestry, and Lou Rawls' first albums, Black and Blue and Tobacco Road, coinciding with Dexter Gordon in the Onzy Matthews big band, as well as working with Marvin Gaye, Tammy Terrell and Smokey Robinson.
Up until his death he was married to singer and recording artist Merry Clayton, the featured performer in the acclaimed documentary, Twenty Feet From Stardom.
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Fred Anderson (March 22, 1929 – June 24, 2010) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist who was based in Chicago, Illinois. With a distinctive forward-bent playing posture, Anderson's playing was rooted in the swing music and hard bop idioms, but also incorporated innovations from free jazz, rendering him a seminal figure among Chicago musicians in the 1960s.
Anderson was born Monroe, Louisiana. He grew up in the Southern United States and learned to play the saxophone by himself when he was a teenager. Anderson moved his family to Evanston, Illinois, in the 1940s. He studied music formally at the Roy Knapp Conservatory in Chicago, and had a private teacher for a short time. Fred worked installing carpet for decades to sustain his music and his family, before opening up a succession of important Chicago nightclubs. Despite Anderson's prominence as an avant-garde musician, his guiding inspiration was Charlie Parker, portraits of whom were prominently displayed at Anderson's club, the Velvet Lounge.
Anderson was one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and an important member of the music of the musical collective. His partner for many years was the Chicago jazz trumpeter Billy Brimfield.
Anderson appeared on several notable avant garde albums in the 1960s, notably the seminal Delmark recordings of saxophonist Joseph Jarman,, As If It Were The Seasons (1968), and Song For (1966), which includes Anderson's composition "Little Fox Run."
In 1983, Fred Anderson took over ownership of the Velvet Lounge in Chicago, which quickly became a center for the city's jazz and experimental music scenes. The club expanded and relocated in the summer of 2006. Before that, Anderson's eclectic Beehive bar in west Chicago was a draw where musicians from around the world drank beer and played, mostly for each other.
Though he remained an active performer, Anderson recorded rarely for about a decade beginning in the mid-1980s. By the 1990s, however, he resumed a more active recording schedule, both as a solo artist, and in collaboration with younger performers, notably drummer Hamid Drake.
Anderson acted as mentor to young musicians who went on to prominent careers in music, either by featuring them in his groups or as performers at the Velvet Lounge.
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Notable Deaths
*Lynchings were reported to be declining in the United States, ten were recorded for the year of 1929.
*Blind Lemon Jefferson, one of the great African American country blues singers, was found frozen to death in a Chicago snowstorm (December 19).
"Blind" Lemon Jefferson (born Lemon Henry Jefferson) (b. September 24, 1893, Coutchman, Texas – d. December 19, 1929, Chicago, Illinois) was an American blues and gospel singer, guitarist, and songwriter from Texas. He was one of the most popular blues singers of the 1920s, and has been called "Father of the Texas Blues."
Jefferson's performances were distinctive as a result of his high-pitched voice and the originality on his guitar playing. Although his recordings sold well, he was not so influential on some younger blues singers of his generation, who could not imitate him as easily as they could other commercially successful artists. Later blues and rock and roll musicians, however, did attempt to imitate both his songs and his musical style.
Today, Jefferson is widely recognized as a profound influence upon the development of the Texas blues tradition and the growth of American popular music. His significance has been acknowledged by blues, jazz, and rock musicians, from Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and T-Bone Walker to Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Carl Perkins, Jefferson Airplane, and the Beatles.
Among Jefferson's most well-known songs are "Matchbox Blues," "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "That Black Snake Moan," "Mosquito Blues," "One Dime Blues," "Tin Cup Blues," "Hangman's Blues," "'Lectric Chair Blues," and "Black Horse Blues."
Today, Jefferson is widely recognized as a profound influence upon the development of the Texas blues tradition and the growth of American popular music. His significance has been acknowledged by blues, jazz, and rock musicians, from Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, and T-Bone Walker to Bessie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Carl Perkins, Jefferson Airplane, and the Beatles.
Among Jefferson's most well-known songs are "Matchbox Blues," "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "That Black Snake Moan," "Mosquito Blues," "One Dime Blues," "Tin Cup Blues," "Hangman's Blues," "'Lectric Chair Blues," and "Black Horse Blues."
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Politics
*Representative Fiorello H. LaGuardia of New York, a candidate for Mayor of the City of New York, delivered a speech against some Jim Crow judges in New York City. He criticized the practice of appointing Southern judges to Federal benches in New York and, as an example, referred to Judge John E. Martineau of Arkansas, who discharged a jury for having found an African American not guilty. The jury was berated and abused by him in the courtroom.
*The United Colored Socialists of America was established in Harlem, as a propaganda organization for socialism. Directed by African American socialists, its purpose was "the unification and education of that large mass of intelligently discontented Negroes who recognize the fact that both Republican and Democratic parties stand actively alike as two peas in a single pod on the pressing problem of the Race."
*New York Socialists chose an African American, Frank R. Crosswaith, as their candidate to fill the unexpired term of the late Royal M. Weller, Democrat of the 21st Congressional District, which included Harlem. Crosswaith, formerly an organizer for A. Philip Randolph's union, had been elected in June to the national executive committee of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, and was committed to the creation of an American Labor Party.
*An effort by Representative George H. Tinkham of Massachusetts and Senator A. H. Vandenberg of Michigan to amend the Congressional reapportionment bill, to reduce the representation of states which denied the vote to African Americans, was defeated by Southern Congressmen.
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The Visual Arts
*Archibald Motley's portraits, My Grandmother and Old Snuff Dipper, won the Harmon Gold Medal, and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for two years' study in Paris.
Archibald John Motley, Jr. (b. October 7, 1891, New Orleans, Louisiana – d. January 16, 1981, Chicago, Illinois) was an African-American painter. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. He is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America. He specialized in portraiture and saw it “as a means of affirming racial respect and race pride.”
Unlike many other Harlem Renaissance artists, Archibald Motley, Jr. never lived in Harlem. He was born in New Orleans and spent the majority of his life in Chicago. He graduated from Englewood High School in Chicago. He was offered a scholarship to study architecture by one of his father's friends, which he turned down in order to study art. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he received classical training but his modernist-realist works were out of step with the school's then-conservative bent. During his time at the Art Institute, Motley was mentored by painters Earl Beuhr and John W. Norton, and he did well enough to cause his father's friend to pay his tuition. While he was a student, in 1913, other students at the Institute "rioted" against the modernism on display at the Armory Show (a collection of the best new modern art). Motley graduated in 1918 but kept his modern, jazz-influenced paintings secret for some years thereafter.
Motley experienced success early in his career. In 1927, his piece Mending Socks was voted the most popular exhibit at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. He was awarded the Harmon Foundation award in 1928, and then became the first African-American to have a one-man exhibit in New York City. He sold twenty-two out of the twenty-six exhibited paintings.
In 1927, he had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and was denied, but he reapplied and won the fellowship in 1929. He studied in France for a year, and chose not to extend his fellowship another six months. While many contemporary artists looked back to Africa for inspiration, Motley was inspired by the great Renaissance masters whose work was displayed at the Louvre. He found in the artwork there a formal sophistication and maturity that could give depth to his own work, particularly in the Dutch painters and the genre paintings of Delacroix, Hals, and Rembrandt. Motley’s portraits take the conventions of the Western tradition and update them—allowing for black bodies, specifically black female bodies, a space in a history that had traditionally excluded them.
During the 1930s, Motley was employed by the federal Works Progress Administration to depict scenes from African-American history in a series of murals, some of which can be found at Nichols Middle School in Evanston, Illinois. After his wife’s death in 1948 and difficult financial times, Motley was forced to seek work painting shower curtains for the Styletone Corporation. In the 1950s, he made several visits to Mexico and began painting Mexican life and landscapes.
Motley’s family lived in a quiet neighborhood on Chicago’s south side in an environment that was racially tolerant. Motley did not spend much of his time growing up around other blacks. It was this disconnection with the African American community around him that established Motley as an outsider. Motley himself was light skinned and of mixed racial makeup, being African, First American and European. Motley wrestled all his life with his own racial identity. He was unable to fully associate with one or the other, neither black nor white. Rather than focusing his energy on establishing his own racial identity, Motley turned his talents to uncovering the secrets of racial identity across the spectrum of skin color. As Motley struggled with his own racial identity, he used distinctions in skin color and physical features to give meaning to each individual shade of African American. Motley was fascinated with skin color and what it meant in the context of racial identity. He realized that in American society, different statuses were attributed to each gradation of skin tone.
In the 1920s and 1930s, during the New Negro Renaissance, Motley dedicated a series of portraits to types of Negroes. He focused mostly on women of mixed racial ancestry, and did numerous portraits documenting women of varying African-blood quantities ("octoroon," "quadroon," "mulatto"). These portraits celebrate skin tone as something diverse, inclusive, and pluralistic. They also demonstrate an understanding that these categorizations become synonymous with public identity and influence one's opportunities in life. It is often difficult if not impossible to tell what kind of racial mixture the subject has without referring to the title. These physical markers of blackness, then, are unstable and unreliable, and Motley exposed that difference.
Motley spoke to a wide audience of both whites and blacks in his portraits, aiming to educate them on the politics of skin tone, if in different ways. He hoped to prove to blacks through art that their own racial identity was something to be appreciated. For white audiences he hoped to bring an end to black stereotypes and racism by displaying the beauty and achievements of African Americans. Motley’s fascination with painting the different types of African Americans stemmed from a desire to give each African American his or her own character and personality. This is consistent with Motley’s aims of portraying an absolutely accurate and transparent representation of African Americans; his commitment to differentiating between skin types shows his meticulous efforts to specify even the slightest differences between individuals.
His night scenes and crowd scenes, heavily influenced by jazz culture, are perhaps his most popular and most prolific. He depicted a vivid, urban black culture that bore little resemblance to the conventional and marginalizing rustic images of black Southerners so popular in the cultural eye. It is important to note, however, that it was not his community he was representing—he was among the affluent and elite black community of Chicago. He married a white woman and lived in a white neighborhood, and was not a part of that urban experience in the same way his subjects were.
Motley married his high school sweetheart Edith Granzo in 1924. Granzo had German immigrant parents who were opposed to her interracial relationship and disowned Edith for her marriage to Motley. Edith died in 1948.
His nephew (raised as his brother), Willard Motley, was an acclaimed writer known for his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door.
Motley's early artistic endeavors include Old Snuff Dipper, a realistic portrait a working class southerner that won Motley a Harmon Foundation award.
One of his most famous works showing the urban black community is Bronzeville at Night, showing African Americans as actively engaged, urban peoples who identify with the city streets. In the work, Motley provides a central image of the lively street scene and portrays the scene as a distant observer, capturing the many individual interactions but paying attention to the big picture at the same time.
In Stomp, Motley painted a busy cabaret scene which again documents the vivid urban black culture. The excitement in the painting is very much palpable. One can observe a woman in a white dress throwing her hands up to the sound of the music, a couple embracing—hand in hand—in the back of the cabaret, the lively pianist watching the dancers. Interestingly, both black and white couples dance and hobnob with each other in the foreground. For example, on the right of the painting, an African American man wearing a black tuxedo dances with a woman whom Motley gives a much lighter tone. By doing this, he hoped to counteract perceptions of segregation.
The Octoroon Girl features a woman who is one-eighth black. In the image a graceful young woman with dark hair, dark eyes and light skin sits on a sofa while leaning against a warm red wall. She wears a black velvet dress with red satin trim, a dark brown hat and a small gold chain with a pendant. In her right hand, she holds a pair of leather gloves. The woman stares directly at the viewer with a soft, but composed gaze. Her face is serene. Motley balances the painting with a picture frame and the rest of the couch on the left side of the painting.
Motley developed a reusable and recognizable language in his artwork, which included contrasting light and dark colors, skewed perspectives, strong patterns and the dominance of a single hue. He also created a set of characters who appeared repeatedly in his paintings with distinctive postures, gestures, expressions and habits. These figures were often depicted standing very close together, if not touching or overlapping one another. Nightlife depicts a bustling night club with people dancing in the background, sitting at tables on the right and drinking at a bar on the left. The entire image is flushed with a burgundy light that emanates from the floor and walls, creating a warm, rich atmosphere for the club-goers. The rhythm of the music can be felt in the flailing arms of the dancers, who appear to be performing the popular Lindy hop.
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*Aaron Douglas illustrated the jacket cover of Wallace Thurman's novel, The Blacker the Berry.
Aaron Douglas (b. May 26, 1898, Topeka, Kansas – d. February 3, 1979, Nashville, Tennessee) was an African-American painter and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, to Aaron and Elizabeth Douglas. He developed an interest in art during his childhood and was encouraged in his pursuits by his mother. Douglas graduated from Topeka High School in 1917. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922. In 1925, Douglas moved to New York City, settling in Harlem. Just a few months after his arrival he began to produce illustrations for both The Crisis and Opportunity, the two most important magazines associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He also began studying with Winold Reiss, a German artist who had been hired by Alain Locke to illustrate The New Negro. Reiss's teaching helped Douglas develop the modernist style he would employ for the next decade. Douglas’s engagement with African and Egyptian design brought him to the attention of W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Locke, who were pressing for young African American artists to express their African heritage and African American folk culture in their art.
Douglas was heavily influenced by the African culture. His natural talent plus his newly acquired inspiration allowed Douglas to be considered the "Father of African American Arts." That title led him to say," Do not call me the Father of African American Arts, for I am just a son of Africa, and paint for what inspires me."
For the next several years, Douglas was an important part of the circle of artists and writers we now call the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to his magazine illustrations for the two most important African-American magazines of the period, he illustrated books, painted canvases and murals, and tried to start a new magazine showcasing the work of younger artists and writers. It was during the early 1930s that Douglas completed the most important works of his career, his murals at Fisk University and at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture).
Throughout his early career, Douglas looked for opportunities to increase his knowledge about art. In 1928–29, Douglas studied African and Modern European art at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania on a grant from the foundation. In 1931, he traveled to Paris, where he spent a year studying more traditional French painting and drawing techniques at the Academie Scandinave.
In 1939, Douglas moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he founded the Art Department at Fisk University and taught for 27 years. Coinciding with this move was a shift to a more traditional painting style, including portraits and landscapes.
Aaron Douglas has been called the father of African American art. His striking illustrations, murals, and paintings of the life and history of people of color depict an emerging black American individuality in a powerfully personal way. Working primarily from the 1920s through the 1940s, Douglas linked black Americans with their African past and proudly showed black contributions to society decades before the dawn of the civil rights movement. His work made a lasting impression on future generations of black artists.
Best represented by black-and-white drawings with black silhouetted figures, as well as by portraits, landscapes, and murals, Douglas's art fused modernism with ancestral African images, including fetish motifs, masks, and artifacts. His work celebrates African American versatility and adaptability, depicting people in a variety of settings—from rural and urban scenes to churches to nightclubs. His illustrations in books by leading black writers established him as the black artist of the period. Later in his career, Douglas founded the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Beginning in the 1920s, Douglas's illustrations appeared in books by James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and other prominent black writers, activists, and intellectuals. They were also featured in such magazines as The Crisis, Opportunity, Harper's, and Vanity Fair. From the late 1920s through the 1940s, his art was shown across the United States at universities, galleries, hotels, and museums, including the Harmon Foundation in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Dallas, Howard University's Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and New York's Gallery of Modern Art. In addition, selected works by Douglas were assembled for a landmark traveling show of Harlem Renaissance artworks sponsored by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1988.
Douglas received a B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska in 1922 and a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Kansas the next year. Commenting on his days at the University of Nebraska, where he won a prize for drawing, he recalled: "I was the only black student there. Because I was sturdy and friendly, I became popular with both faculty and students." His ability to get along notwithstanding, Douglas longed to draw from an undraped model and felt constrained by the "Victorian attitudes" that prevented the school from using nudes in the classroom.
The style Aaron Douglas developed in the 1920s synthesized aspects of modern European, ancient Egyptian, and West African art. His best-known paintings are semi-abstract, and feature flat forms, hard edges, and repetitive geometric shapes. Bands of color radiate from the important objects in each painting, and where these bands intersect with other bands or other objects, the color changes.
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*Aaron Douglas illustrated Paul Morand's book of short stories, Black Magic.
Paul Morand (March 13, 1888 – July 24, 1976) was a French author whose short stories and novellas were lauded for their style, wit and descriptive power. His most productive literary period was the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s. He was much admired by the upper echelons of society and the artistic avant-garde who made him a cult favorite. He has been categorized as an early Modernist, and Imagist.
Morand was a graduate of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, preparing him for a diplomatic career, and also attended Oxford University. A member of the upper class and married into wealth, he held various diplomatic posts and traveled widely. His was typical of those in his social group who enjoyed lives of privilege and entitlement, adhering to the inevitability and desirability of class distinction.
Morand espoused a reflexive adherence to racial, ethnic and anti-Semitic ideologies. His intellectual influences included the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and the author of a treatise on the superiority of the white race, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. During World War II, he pledged allegiance to the French Vichy regime, and became a government functionary, and Nazi collaborator. He served as Vichy ambassador in Romania and Switzerland during World War II.
Morand was a patron and inspirational figure for the Hussards literary movement, which opposed Existentialism.
Morand made four bids for admission to the prestigious Académie française and was finally accepted in 1968, over the protest of Charles de Gaulle.
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*William H. Johnson returned to New York after living and painting in France for three years. Within months of his return, Johnson won the Harmon Foundation's gold award in fine arts. Johnson's work was widely reviewed. (Johnson briefly visited friends and family members in his native South Carolina before leaving the United States again, this time for Denmark.)
William Henry Johnson (March 18, 1901–1970) was an African-American painter born in Florence, South Carolina. He became a student at the National Academy of Design in New York. His style evolved from realism to expressionism to a powerful folk style (for which he is best known).
Johnson moved from Florence, South Carolina, to New York City at the age of 17. Working a variety of jobs, he saved enough money to pay for classes at the prestigious National Academy of Design. He worked with the painter Charles Hawthorne, who raised funds that allowed Johnson to go abroad to study. He spent the late 1920s in France, where he learned about modernism. During this time, he met the Danish textile artist Holcha Krake in Cagnes-sur-Mer and they married in 1930. Johnson and his wife spent most of the 1930s in Scandinavia, where his interest in folk art influenced his painting. They returned to the United States in 1938, where Johnson immersed himself in African-American culture and traditions, producing paintings that were characterized by their folk art simplicity.
Johnson enjoyed a degree of success as an artist during the 1940s and 1950s, but he was never able to achieve financial stability. In 1944 his wife Holcha died from breast cancer. To deal with his grief, he took work in a Navy Yard, and in 1946 left for Denmark to be with his wife's family. Johnson soon fell ill himself, from the effects of advanced syphilis, and returned to New York in 1947 to enter the Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island, where he spent the last twenty-three years of his life. He stopped painting in 1956 and died on January 1, 1970.
After his death, his entire life's work was almost disposed of to save storage fees, but it was rescued by friends at the last moment. The Harmon Foundation gave more than 1,000 paintings, watercolors, and prints by Johnson to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (then the National Museum of American Art) in 1967. In 1991, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized and circulated a major exhibition of his artwork, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, and in 2006, they organized and circulated William H. Johnson's World on Paper. An expanded version of this exhibition traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (February 3 - April 8, 2007),the Philadelphia Museum of Art (May 20 - August 12, 2007), and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama (September 15 - November 18, 2007).
In 2012, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in Johnson's honor, recognizing him as one of the nation’s foremost African-American artists and a major figure in 20th-century American art. The stamp, the 11th in the American Treasures series, showcases his painting Flowers (1939-1940), which depicts brightly colored blooms on a small red table.
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The Americas
Brazil
Brazil
Alfredo José da Silva (May 19, 1929 – March 4, 2010), popularly known as Johnny Alf, was a Brazilian musician, sometimes known as the "Father of Bossa Nova".
Alf was born in Vila Isabel, Rio de Janeiro, and began playing piano at age 9. His father died when he was 3 and he was raised by his mother who worked as a maid to raise him. He attended Colégio Pedro II, receiving support from his mother's employers. He played in nightclubs in the Copacabana neighborhood of Rio, where he was noticed by later bossa nova pioneers. His first single was "Falsetto" and was released in 1952, with a debut album following in 1961.
Over his career, he recorded nine albums and appeared on nearly fifty others. He died in 2010, aged 80, from prostate cancer.
Jamaica
In September 1929, Marcus Garvey founded the People's Political Party (PPP), Jamaica's first modern political party, which focused on workers' rights, education, and aid to the poor. Also in 1929, Garvey was elected councilor for the Allman Town Division of the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC). In July 1929, the Jamaican property of the UNIA was seized on the orders of the Chief Justice. Garvey and his solicitor attempted to persuade people not to bid for the confiscated goods, claiming the sale was illegal and Garvey made a political speech in which he referred to corrupt judges. As a result, he was cited for contempt of court and again appeared before the Chief Justice. He received a prison sentence, as a consequence of which he lost his seat. However, in 1930, Garvey was re-elected, unopposed, along with two other PPP candidates.
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Joseph Abiodun Adetiloye (Odo-Owa, Ekiki State, December 25, 1929 - Odo-Owa, Ekiki State, December 14, 2012) was the former Primate of the Church of Nigeria. He was married briefly for 11 months, until his wife's death in 1968. They had a son.
Joseph lost his father, who was a devout Christian, when Joseph was 3 years old. Joseph and his siblings were raised by his mother. He entered school in 1937 and it was reported that "he was always neat in school each day despite the fact that he had only one uniform". Joseph decided to become an Anglican priest at a very young age.
Joseph passed with distinction his first school leaving examination in 1944 and was a teacher for 6 years. He was the acting church agent at St. Paul's Church in Ara-Yero, now called Araromi at his 6th year.
Joseph decided to attend Melville Hall, in Kudeti, Ibadan, in 1949, to become a priest. He was further educated in England at King's College London (BD), and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. He was ordained a deacon at the end of 1953 at the Cathedral Church of Lagos, by the first Archbishop of West Africa, Leslie Vining. In 1954, he became a curate at St. Peter's Church, in Ake, Abeokuta, and later was a chaplain to Archbishop Vining and afterwards to Archbishop Howells. This enabled him to move to Wycliffe Hall, to continue his studies. He was involved in some parish ministries at St. George in Leeds and was a curate at St. Mary's Church in Plaistow. Returning to Nigeria, the Reverend Adetiloye became a teacher at the Immanuel College of Theology in Ibadan, for four years and three months. On August 10, 1966, he became vicar and provost at the Cathedral Church of St. James, in Ibadan. In August 1970, he was elected and nominated bishop of the Diocese of Ekiti, later being transferred to the Diocese of Lagos, of which he was bishop from 1985 to 1999.
Adetiloye was enthroned as the second Primate of the Church of Nigeria on December 26, 1986, at the Cathedral Church of Lagos, by his predecessor, Archbishop Timothy O. Olufosoye. He retired on December 1999, after 13 years in office. During his tenure, the Church of Nigeria became a fast growing church, expanding from 27 dioceses in 1986 to 76 in 1999. In 1997, the growth of the Church of Nigeria led to a division into three ecclesiastical provinces. Archbishop Adetiloye headed the Province One, consisting of the dioceses in the West, while remaining Primate of All Nigeria.
Joseph Adetiloye died in his home city of Odo-Owa, on December 14, 2012. His passing was mourned as a great national loss.
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Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi, commonly known as J. F. Ade Ajayi, (born May 26, 1929) is a Nigerian historian and a member of the Ibadan school, a group of scholars interested in introducing African perspectives to African history and focusing on the internal historical forces that shaped African lives. Ade Ajayi favors the use of historical continuity more often than focusing on events only as powerful agents of change that can move the basic foundations of cultures and mold them into new ones. Instead, he sees many critical events in African life, sometimes as weathering episodes which still leave some parts of the core of Africans intact. He also employs a less passionate style in his works, especially in his early writings, utilizing subtle criticism of controversial issues of the times.
Ajayi was born in Ikole-Ekiti, his father was a personal assistant of the Oba of Ikole during the era of Native Authorities. He started education at St Paul's School, Ikole, at the age of five. He then proceeded to Ekiti Central School for preparation as a pupil teacher. However, after hearing from a friend about Igbobi College in Lagos, he decided to try his luck and applied. Thereafter, he gained admission into the college, and equipped with a scholarship from the Ikole Ekiti Native authority, he went to Lagos for secondary education. After completing his studies at Igbobi, he gained admission to the University of Ibadan, where he was to pick between History, Latin or English for his degree. He chose History. In 1952, he traveled abroad and studied at Leicester University, under the tutelage of Professor Jack Simmons, a brilliant Oxford-trained historian. After graduation, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London from 1957-1958. He later returned to Nigeria and joined the history department of the University of Ibadan.
In 1964, Ajayi was made Dean of Arts at the University and later promoted a deputy Vice Chancellor. After his stint as deputy Vice Chancellor, he was made the Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos in 1972. The twilight of his career as Vice Chancellor was a controversial one, the then Obasanjo regime had introduced some student fees to the dismay of the students, who demanded free education. Students then decided to riot, a situation which was termed Ali must go. During the protest and riots, a student named Akintunde Ojo was shot by the police. At the time his mother was rumored to be a mistress of Obasanjo. The ensuing protest by students against the killing led opportunists to seize the situation and cause mayhem. In 1978, Ajayi was arbitrarily relieved of his position and returned to Ibadan, where he continued his effort in historical scholarship.
In 1993, Ajayi was awarded the "Distinguished Africanist Award" by the African Studies Association.
As an early writer of Nigerian and African history, though not a pioneer like Kenneth Dike, Ajayi brought considerable respect to the Ibadan School and African research. He is known for the arduous research and rigorous effort he put into his work. By extensive use of oral sources in some of his works such as pre-twentieth century Yoruba history, he was able to weigh, balance and assay each and all of his sources, uncovering a pathway towards facts in the period which was scarce in written and non prejudiced forms. Ajayi also tried to be dispassionate in his writings, especially when writing about controversial or passionate subjects in African history. In an article on the history of Yoruba writing, he was able to appraise critically and with resignation, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a hero to Ade Ajayi. His style of rigorous research presented new pathways in African historiography and augmented awareness among scholarly circles outside the continent to African methodologies and perceptions. By weighing sources both written and oral, he was able to find new issues of interest that formed the basis of the British colonization of Lagos, balancing official British documentation of the event with additional material.
Another theme in many of his works is nationalism. Ajayi sees religious currents as setting the foundation for modern Nigerian nationalism. The Fulani Jihad of the early twentieth century set a basis for a common front, while Christian missionaries such as CMS had laid the foundation for a movement towards unity in the south. The missionaries also established schools that created a new educated class who later broke with the Europeans and fought for a new social and political order. However, the new order embraced European contemporary social, political and economic structures as ideals of the new society.
Ajayi, however, with gradation expressed a much more critical stance on the need to embrace Pan-Africanism as the foundation of nationalism.
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Naima Akef (October 7, 1929 - April 23, 1966) was a famous Egyptian belly dancer during the Egyptian cinema's golden age and starred in many films of the time. Naima Akef was born in Tanta on the Nile Delta. Her parents were acrobats in the Akef Circus (run by Naima’s grandfather), which was one of the best known circuses at the time. She started performing in the circus at the age of four, and quickly became one of the most popular acts with her acrobatic skills. Her family was based in the Bab el Khalq district of Cairo, but they traveled far and wide in order to perform.
The circus disbanded when Naima was 14, but this was only the beginning of her career. Her grandfather had many connections in the performance world of Cairo and he introduced her to his friends. When Naima’s parents divorced, she formed an acrobatic and clown act that performed in many clubs throughout Cairo. She then got the chance to work in Badeia Masabny's famous nightclub, where she became a star and was one of the very few who danced and sang. Her time with Badeia, however, was short-lived, as Badeia favored her, which made the other performers jealous. One day they ganged up on her and attempted to beat her up, but she proved to be stronger and more agile and won the fight. This caused her to be fired, so she started performing elsewhere.
The Kit Kat club was another famous venue in Cairo, and this is where Naima was introduced to film director Abbas Kemal. His brother Hussein Fawzy, also a film director, was very interested in having Naima star in one of his musical films. The first of such films was “Al-Eïch wal malh” (Bread and Salt). Her costar was singer Saad Abdel Wahab, the nephew of the legendary singer and composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab. The film premiered on the 17th of January 1949, and was an instant success, bringing recognition also to Nahhas Film studios. Naima quit acting in 1964 to take care of her only child, a son from her second marriage to accountant Salaheldeen Abdel Aleem. She died two years later from cancer, on April 23, 1966, at the age of 36.
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Ambrose Folorunsho Alli (September 22, 1929 – September 22, 1989) was a Nigerian medical professor who served as Executive Governor of Bendel State between 1979 and 1983.
Ambrose Folorunsho Alli was born in Idoani, Ondo state on September 22, 1929. In his childhood, he moved between Oka-Odo, Ekpoma, Owo, Efon-Alaye, Benin City and Asaba, where he completed his secondary education in 1948. He attended the School of Agriculture Ibadan (1948) and the School of Medical Technology, Adeoyo Hospital Ibadan (1953–1960) where he gained an MBBS. He served as a house officer at the Adeoyo hospital from 1960 to 1961. He went to the United Kingdom for a post-graduate course in neuropathology at the University of London (1961–1966), gaining a D.C. Pathology degree. Later he studied at the University of Birmingham from 1971 to 1974.
He was a lecturer at the University of Ibadan (1966–1969) and was senior lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University (1969–1974). From 1974 to 1979, Professor Alli was head of the department of pathology at the University of Benin, Benin City.
Ambrose Alli was a member of the constituent assembly that drafted the 1978 Nigeria constitution. He joined the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) and ran successfully as UPN candidate in the Bendel State governorship election of 1979. His main thrust as governor was to increase educational opportunities. He established over 600 new secondary schools, and abolished secondary school fees. He also established four teachers training colleges to supply staff to the new schools, as well as several other higher educational institutions. In 1981, he laid the foundation of the Bendel State University, which is now named the Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma. Other reforms included abolishing charges for services and drugs at state-owned hospitals and eliminating the flat-rate tax. His administration carried out massive construction of roads to open up the rural areas.
As Governor, Ambrose Alli always wore sandals, joking that he was so busy working in Government House that he never had time to buy shoes for himself.
When Ambrose Alli left office in 1983, he retired to his family house. After the military government of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari took power, he was sentenced to 100 years in prison by a military tribunal for allegedly misappropriating N983,000 in funds for a road project. He was later freed when the Esama of Benin, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, paid a fine to the government.
Ambrose Folorunsho Alli died on his birthday on September 22, 1989, at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital in Lagos. An annual Distinguished Leadership Lecture was later established in his honor.
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Erifasi Otema Allimadi (February 11, 1929 – August 5, 2001) was the Foreign Minister (1979 – 1980) and Prime Minister of Uganda (1980 – 1985).
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Abdelkader Alloula (Arabic: عبد القادر علولة) (b. 1929 in Ghazaouet, Algeria - d. March 10, 1994 in Oran, Algeria) was an Algerian playwright. He was assassinated by Islamists.
Alloula was born in Ghazaouet in western Algeria, and studied drama in France. He joined the Algerian National Theatre upon its creation in 1963 following independence.
He was working on an Arabic version of Tartuffe when he was assassinated by two members of FIDA (Islamic Front for Armed Jihad) during Ramadan on March 10, 1994, as he left his house in Oran. His widow, Radja Alloula, and friends set up the Abdelkader Alloula Foundation in his memory.
He was working on an Arabic version of Tartuffe when he was assassinated by two members of FIDA (Islamic Front for Armed Jihad) during Ramadan on March 10, 1994, as he left his house in Oran. His widow, Radja Alloula, and friends set up the Abdelkader Alloula Foundation in his memory.
His brother, Malek Alloula, was also a noted Algerian writer.
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Samuel Anderson (September 25, 1929 – August 18, 2012) was a Cuban hurdler who competed in the 1952 Summer Olympics.
Anderson was born in Havana, Cuba. He was an active member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. He was a member of the 1952 Olympic Cuban Team, and competed in the 110-High Hurdles. Anderson was nicknamed "The Cuban Comet". He graduated from the National Institute of Physical Education in Cuba and received a Scholarship from the University of Illinois, where he was a member of the track and field team. He also competed in the 1954 Pan American Games, where he won Gold. He was also drafted by the Chicago White Sox. He retired after a long career as a receiving clerk. He was survived by his wife, Maria; a daughter; two sons; a sister; two daughters-in-law; and six grandchildren.
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Bert Andrews (March 21, 1929–January 25, 1993) was an American photographer, who chronicled black theatre in New York City. In a career that spanned over three decades he photographed many of the leading African American actors of the stage and screen including James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Diana Sands, Louis Gossett, Jr., Billy Dee Williams, Morgan Freeman, Alfre Woodard, Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson.
Bert J. Andrews was born in Chicago on March 21, 1929, the son of John and Frieda Andrews. At a young age, he moved to Harlem, where he grew up. His career began in the entertainment industry as a songwriter, singer and a dancer. In the early 1950s, while serving in the army, Andrews began studying photography.
In 1953, soon after his discharge from the army, Andrews began his work as an apprentice for Chuck Stewart, who was well known for his photography of jazz musicians. He served in that capacity until 1957, when he branched out on his own, photographing among other things, stills for black theatre productions in New York City.
One of his first assignments as a freelance photographer was the 1957 production of the play, Dark of the Moon, which was produced by the YMCA Drama Guild at the Little Theatre. This production was staged by Vinnette Carroll and featured among the cast Cicely Tyson, Roscoe Lee Browne and Clarence Williams III.
Throughout his long career, Andrews would photograph numerous productions of important plays including The Blacks (1961), The Blood Knot (1964),To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969), The River Niger (1972), Bubbling Brown Sugar (1976), A Soldier's Play (1982) and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984).
His photographs have also appeared in numerous major publications, such as Time, Life, Ebony, Newsweek and the New York Times.
On January 29, 1985, a fire destroyed his studio at 750 Eighth Avenue at the corner of 46th Street in New York City. Somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 images were lost, spanning roughly thirty years of work. However, through the help of various theatre companies, Andrews was able to obtain prints of a significant number of his photographs including approximately 2,000 from the Negro Ensemble Company.
In 1988, the Bert Andrews Photographic Collection of Blacks in the Theatre was established at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The following year, a collection of these photographs were published in the book In the Shadow of the Great White Way: Images from the Black Theatre (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989).
Andrews died of cancer at the Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan on January 25, 1993 at the age of 63.
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Inez Andrews (April 14, 1929 – December 19, 2012) was an American gospel singer, songwriter and recording artist. Her soaring, wide-ranging voice — from contralto croon to soul-wrenching wail — made her a pillar of gospel music. The Chicago Tribune stated that "Andrews' throaty contralto made her low notes thunder, while the enormous range of her instrument enabled her to reach stratospheric pitches without falsetto" and that "her dramatic delivery made her a charismatic presence in church and on stage."
Andrews started singing in the church as a child and performed gospel music on the road in various gospel groups from the 1940s before joining The Caravans in 1957. Fellow member from The Caravans in the 1950s, Shirley Caesar, once dubbed Andrews “The High Priestess” for her ability to hit high notes, and, in 2013, stated, "there never was and never will be another voice like Inez Andrews." Another early member of the The Caravans, Albertina Walker often said, "nothing ever worked for the Caravans until Inez started whistling” — hitting the high notes. She sang lead on The Caravans first breakthrough hit, "Mary Don't You Weep", and also had hits as a solo artist with crossover recordings such as "Lord Don't Move That Mountain." She was referred to in 2012 by the New York Times as "the last great female vocalist of gospel’s golden age,” ranking among the likes of other music legends from the "Golden Era" of Black Gospel (1945-1960) - Mahalia Jackson, Marion Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Clara Ward.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 14, 1929, Andrews traveled a tough road to gospel stardom. She began singing as a child in church and began songwriting as a young mother in Birmingham. Andrews was working six days a week, ten hours a day for eighteen dollars a week, while "washing, ironing, cooking, keep up with the kids." With her busy life in her youth, she felt that life had to have more to offer her. As she pondered that prayerfully, she picked up "a pencil and a brown paper bag" and began to write. Thus began her songwriting career. Andrews began her singing career in the 1940s with two groups in Birmingham, Alabama; Carter’s Choral Ensemble and the Original Gospel Harmonettes. By the mid-1950s, the Harmonettes were one of the nation’s top gospel groups, with Andrews the understudy for the group’s lead singer, Dorothy Love Coates. Coates recommended Andrews to the Caravans, and she eventually moved north to Chicago to became widely known as that group's first successful singer, leading them to the high of their popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the 1960s, Andrews solo work and songwriting further ensconced her in the gospel pantheon. Her songs were recorded by many artists, including The Mighty Clouds of Joy and Aretha Franklin. Andrews became one of the major stars of gospel's golden age, The Caravans songs such as "Lord Keep Me Day By Day", "Remember Me", "I Won't Be Back" and several other hits in which Andrews was lead vocalist, including "Mary Don't You Weep", "I'm Not Tired Yet", "Make It In", "He Won't Deny Me" and "I'm Willing".
In 2006, she released a reunion album with The Caravans, Albertina Walker, Dorothy Norwood, and original soprano Delores Washington, entitled Paved the Way.
After a stellar career with the Caravans, she left the group in 1962 and had huge success with her crossover hit, "Lord Don't Move the Mountain". Andrews recorded on many labels after the 1950s and had many albums and hit songs to her credit, some of which she composed herself.
Andrews was a dedicated Christian and family person and raised seven children during her career in gospel music. She died on December19, 2012 at the age of 83.She had been diagnosed with cancer months earlier. Andrews is survived by seven children, 19 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren.
In 2002, Andrews was inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame. It was announced prior to her death that Andrews would be honored with the Ambassador Dr. Bobby Jones Legend Award at the 2013 Stellar Awards. The award ended up being presented posthumously.
In 2002, Andrews was inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame. It was announced prior to her death that Andrews would be honored with the Ambassador Dr. Bobby Jones Legend Award at the 2013 Stellar Awards. The award ended up being presented posthumously.
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Ahmed Fouad Negm (Arabic: احمد فؤاد نجم) (b. May 22, 1929 – d. December 3, 2013), popularly known as el-Fagommi (الفاجومي), was an Egyptian vernacular poet. Negm is well known for his work with Egyptian composer Sheikh Imam, as well as his patriotic and revolutionary Egyptian Arabic poetry. Negm has been regarded as "a bit of a folk hero in Egypt."
Ahmed Fouad Negm was born in Sharqia, Egypt, to a family of fellahin. His mother, Hanem Morsi Negm, was a housewife, and his father Mohammed Ezat Negm, a police officer. Negm was one of seventeen brothers. Like many poets and writers of his generation, he received his education at the religious Kutaab schools managed by El-Azhar.
When his father died, Ahmed went to live with his uncle Hussein in Zagazig, but was placed in an orphanage in 1936 where he first met the famous singer Abdel Halim Hafez. In 1945, at the age of 17, he left the orphanage and returned to his village to work as a shepherd. Later, he moved to Cairo to live with his brother who eventually kicked him out only to return to his village again to work in one of the English camps while helping with guerilla operations.
After the agreement between Egypt and Britain, the Egyptian National Workers’ Movement asked everyone in the English camps to quit their job. Negm was then appointed by the Egyptian government as a laborer in mechanical workshops. He was imprisoned for 3 years for counterfeiting form, during which he participated and won first place in a writing competition organized by the Supreme Council for the Arts. He then published his first collection “Pictures from Life and Prison” in vernacular Egyptian Arabic and became famous after Suhair El-Alamawi introduced his book while he was still in prison. After he was released, he was appointed as a clerk in the organization for Asian and African peoples. He also became a regular poet on Egyptian radio.
Negm lived in a small room on the rooftop of a house in the Boulaq el-Dakror neighborhood. When he met singer and composer Sheikh Imam in the Khosh Adam neighborhood, they became roommates and formed a famous signing duet. Negm was also imprisoned several times due to his political views, particularly his harsh criticism of Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.
The residence of Ahmed Fouad Negm in the poorest neighborhoods of Cairo, Egypt, exposed him to the most talented professionals such as Sheikh Imam Issa, and impoverished poets and artists. It was Sheikh Imam in particular who compensated Negm for the earlier rejection by his orphanage-mate Abdel Halim Hafez.
In 1962, Negm was introduced to Sheikh Imam by a friend who believed that the two, poet Negm and composer Imam, could make a perfect duo. On the first occasion, Negm noticed that Imam took over an hour to tweak the strings of the Oud before starting his first demonstration to the new guest. Negm shouted "Allah" upon listening to Imam's singing and playing the Oud. The blind Sheikh was equally longing for inspiring words of the sort Negm had. That was the spark that lasted 30 years of concerted writing by Negm, composing by Imam, and singing by the two combined.
Negm was quick enough to sense that the blind Sheikh was a hidden treasure of Islamic literacy and music talent, and with his physical handicap, he could use the help of Negm's eyes and words. Hence, Negm proposed to stay in Imam's residence. As he recounted, his other rented room had property worth 6 Egyptian pounds, thus if he threw away the key for his other room, the landlord was required to take three months before breaking into the room and possessing its contents. Negm took the risk, abandoned his rented room with its contents and stuck with Sheikh Imam from 1962 throughout 1995.
In the early hours of 3 December 2013, Negm died at the age of 84 in Cairo.
In 2007, Negm was chosen by the United Nations Poverty Action as Ambassador of the poor.
Ahmed Fouad Negm won the 2013 Prince Claus Award for ‘Unwavering Integrity’.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta (January 15). King's parents were members of the city's "black establishment," his father being one of the city's leading Negro ministers and his mother the daughter of a prominent preacher. King was educated at Morehouse College, Crozier Theological Seminary, and Boston University. He began his ministerial career as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954.
The New York stock market crashed, signaling the beginning of the Great Depression (October 29). During the Depression blacks complained that they were "the last to be hired and the first to be fired."
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Politics
*President Hoover appointed a fact-finding commission to study the problem of law enforcement in the United States. No African Americans were included on the commission and one member, George Wickersham, had been president of the American Bar Association when it refused membership to African Americans.
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