A00068 - Darwin Turner, Literary Critic

Darwin Theodore Troy Turner (b. May 7, 1931, Cincinnati, Ohio - d. February 11, 1991, Iowa City, Iowa) was an African American literature critic, a poet, and an English professor who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 7, 1931.  His grandfather, Charles H. Turner, was the first African American psychologist; his father, Darwin Romanes Turner, was a pharmacist; and his mother, Laura Knight, was a school teacher.  Considered a boy genius, Turner enrolled into the University of Cincinnati at the age of 13 and received his undergraduate degree within three years with Phi Beta Kappa honors as the youngest student ever to graduate from the school.  In 1949, at the age of 18, he received his Masters degree in English and American Drama from the University of Cincinnati.  By the time he was twenty-five years old, he received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago. 

In 1949, the same year Turner earned his Master's degree, he married Edna Bonner and started his teaching career at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia teaching English.  He then accepted an assistant professorship position at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland in 1952, balancing both a teaching career and earning his doctorate degree.  A year after receiving his PhD, he held various administration positions at various colleges.  From 1957 to 1959 he was the chair of the English department at Florida A&M.  From 1959 to 1966 he worked at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and then accepted the Dean position at their Graduate School from 1966 to 1970 until he left for a position at the University of Michigan. During that time, he divorced Bonner in 1961 and remarried in 1968. His new wife was Maggie Jean Lewis, a school teacher. 

Turner became the chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Iowa in 1972 and was a professor there for nearly two decades.  In 1981, he was made the University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professor of English. 

Turner edited more than a dozen works of African American literature and published his own writing, including a collection of his poems in Katharsis in 1964, a book on American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter in 1967, and a literary critique, In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity in 1971.  In a Minor Chord was an analysis on the writings of Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.  Turner edited The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer in 1980, co-edited The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory in 1982, and wrote for Haki R Madhubuti's Earthquakes and Sun Rise Missions in 1982.  His other major edited anthologies include Black Dramas in America and Black American Literature. Turner wrote dozens of articles for academic journals and anthologies as a literary critic of African American literature.

Darwin Turner died from a heart attack at the age of 59 on February 11, 1991 at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa.

A00067 - Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Recipient for Literature

Toni Morrison, original name Chloe Anthony Wofford (b. February 18, 1931, Lorain, Ohio), was a writer noted for her examination of African American experience (particularly the African American female experience) within the African American community.  She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Morrison grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture.  Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood.  She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955).  After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964.  In 1965, she became a fiction editor.  From 1984, she taught writing at the State University of New York at Albany, leaving in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University.

Morrison's first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes.  In 1973, a second novel, Sula, was published.  It examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community.  Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex. The critically acclaimed Beloved (1987), which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery.  Jazz (1992) is a story of violence and passion set in New York City’s Harlem during the 1920s. Subsequent novels are Paradise (1998), a richly detailed portrait of a black utopian community in Oklahoma, and Love (2003), an intricate family story that reveals the myriad facets of love and its ostensible opposite. A Mercy (2008) deals with slavery in 17th-century America. In the redemptive Home (2012), a traumatized Korean War veteran encounters racism after returning home and later overcomes apathy to rescue his sister.

A work of criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was published in 1992. Many of her essays and speeches were collected in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (edited by Carolyn C. Denard), published in 2008. Additionally, Morrison released several children’s books, including Who’s Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper? and Who’s Got Game?: The Lion or the Mouse?, both written with her son and published in 2003. Remember (2004) chronicles the hardships of black students during the integration of the American public school system; aimed at children, it uses archival photographs juxtaposed with captions speculating on the thoughts of their subjects. She also wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner (2005), an opera about the same story that inspired Beloved. 

The central theme of Morrison’s novels is the black American experience; in an unjust society her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture.

In 2010 Morrison was made an officer of the French Legion of Honour.  Two years later she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

A00066 - A'Lelia Walker, Daughter of Madame C. J. Walker

A'Lelia Walker, original name Lelia McWilliams   (b. June 6, 1885, Vicksburg, Mississippi —d. August 16, 1931, Long Branch, New Jersey),  was a businesswoman associated with the Harlem Renaissance as a patron of the arts who provided an intellectual forum for the African American literati of New York City during the 1920s.

Walker grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Knoxville College in Tennessee before going to work for her mother, Madame C.J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove Walker), who had made a fortune in the hair-care business. When her mother died in 1919, Walker inherited the business and the lavish family estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington, NewYork. In the 1920s, Walker entertained writers and artists at Villa Lewaro and at her apartment and her town house in New York City. Her regular guests at the town house -- which she named The Dark Tower after Countee Cullen's column by that name --included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and other writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance.  

A00065 - Comer Cottrell, Founder of Pro Line Corporation

Comer Joseph Cottrell (b. December 7, 1931, Mobile, Alabama - d. October 3, 2014, Dallas, Texas) was the founder of Pro-Line Corporationand philanthropist Comer Joseph Cottrell was born December 7, 1931 in Mobile, Alabama. His parents, Comer J., Sr. and Helen Smith Cottrell were Catholics. As a youngster, Cottrell and his brother, Jimmy, turned a pair of bunnies into a business, including selling their progeny as Easter bunnies, meat and fur. Cottrell attended Heart of Mary Elementary and Secondary Schools. At age seventeen, Cottrell joined the United States Air Force where he attained the rank of First Sergeant and managed an Air Force PX in Okinawa. Cottrell attended the University of Detroit before leaving the service in 1954. He joined Sears Roebuck in 1964 and rose to the position of division manager in Los Angeles, California.

In 1968, with an initial investment of $600.00, Cottrell and a friend got into the black hair care business. Then, with his brother, Jimmy, Cottrell manufactured strawberry scented oil sheen for Afro hairstyles and founded Pro-Line Corporation in 1970. By 1973, he made his first million dollars in sales. In 1979, Cottrell took the $200.00 “Jerry Curl” out of the beauty shop and into black homes with his $8.00 Pro-Line “Curly Kit”, which increased his sales from one million dollars a year to ten million dollars in the first six months. Shortly thereafter Cottrell moved Pro-Line to Dallas, Texas. At the top of the ethnic hair care business, Cottrell became a part owner, with George W. Bush of the Texas Rangers professional baseball team in 1989; turning a $3 million dollar profit on a $500,000.00 investment. He recently founded FCC Investment Corporation.

In 1990, he purchased and restored the 131-acre, HBCU, Bishop College campus for $1.5 million and transferred it to A.M.E. Paul Quinn College. Cottrell is a trustee of Northwood University and a member of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, the North Texas Commission, and the Dallas Citizens Council. He is the former chairman of the Texas Cosmetology Commission and vice chair of the Texas Youth Commission. He has been a board member or officer of NAACP, National Urban League, YMCA, Dallas Family Hospital, Better Business Bureau, Compton College Foundation, Paul Quinn College and Baylor University Foundation. Cottrell was former vice chair of the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce. Recipient of scores of awards, Cottrell hosted a yearly “Taste of Cottrell” event in Dallas.

A00064 - William Lacy Clay, Missouri Congressman

William Lacy "Bill" Clay, Sr. (b. April 30, 1931) was a politician from Missouri.  As a Congressman from Missouri's First District, he represented portions of St. Louis in the United States House of Representatives for 32 years.

Clay was born in St. Louis, Missouri,  the son of Luella S. (Hyatt) and Irving Charles Clay. He graduated from Saint Louis University.  Clay served in the United States Army from 1953 to 1955, and he was a St. Louis alderman from 1959 to 1964. Clay served 105 days in jail for participating in a civil rights demonstration in 1963. Prior to entering Congress, Clay held jobs first as a real estate broker and later as a labor coordinator. He worked for the union of St. Louis city employees from 1961 to 1964 and then with a Steamfitters Union until 1967.

Clay was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1968. He became an advocate for environmentalism, labor issues, and social justice. In 1993, Clay helped to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act.

From 1991 until the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1995, Clay chaired the House Committee on the Post Office and Civil Service. In 2000, he retired from the House and his son William Lacy Clay, Jr. succeeded him.  

A00063 - Ida Wells Barnett, Journalist and Anti-Lynching Crusader

Ida B. Wells Barnett (also known as Ida Bell Wells) (b. July 16, 1862, Holly Springs, Mississippi - d. March 25, 1931, Chicago, Illinois) was and African American journalist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s.

Ida Wells was born into slavery.  She was educated at Rust University, a freedmen's school in her native Holly Springs, Mississippi, and at age 14 began teaching in a country school.  She continued to teach after moving to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1884 and attended Fisk University in Nashville during several summer sessions.  In 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court, reversing a Circuit Court decision, ruled against Wells in a suit she had brought against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for having been forcibly removed from her seat after she had refused to give it up for one in a "colored only" car.  Using the pen name Iola, Wells in 1891 also wrote some newspaper articles critical of the education available to African American children.  Her teaching contract was not renewed.  She thereupon turned to journalism, buying an interest in the Memphis Free Speech.  In 1892, after three friends of hers had been lynched by a mob.  Wells began an editorial campaign against lynching that quickly led to the sacking of her newspaper's office.  She continued her anti-lynching crusade, first as a staff writer for the New York Age and then as a lecturer and organizer of antilynching societies.  She traveled to speak in a number of major United States cities and twice visited Great Britain for the cause.  In 1895, she married Ferdinand L.Barnett, a Chicago lawyer, editor, and public official, and adopted the name Wells-Barnett.  From that time she restricted her travels, but she was very active in Chicago affairs.  Wells-Barnett contributed to the Chicago Conservator, her husband's newspaper, and to other local journals; published a detailed look at lynching in A Red Record (1895); and was active in organizing local African American women in various causes, from the anti-lynching campaign to the suffrage movement.  She founded what may have been the first black woman suffrage group, Chicago's Alpha Suffrage Club.

From 1898 to 1902, Wells-Barnett served as secretary of the National Afro-American Council, and in 1910 she founded and became the first president of the Negro Fellowship League, which aided newly arrived migrants from the South.  From 1913 to 1916 she served as a probation officer of the Chicago municipal court.  She was militant in her demand for justice for African Americans and in her insistence that it was to be won by their own efforts.  Although she took part in the 1909 meeting of the Niagara Movement, she would have nothing to do with the less radical National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that sprang from it.  Her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, was published posthumously in 1970.

A00062 - Faith Ringgold, Artist of Quilts

Faith Ringgold (b. October 8, 1930, New York, New York), was an artist and author who became famous for innovative, quilted marrations that communicate her political beliefs.

Ringgold grew up in New York City's Harlem, and while still in high school she decided to be an artist.  She attended City College of New York, where she received B. S. (1955) and M. A. (1959) degrees.  In the mid-1950s she began teaching art in New York public schools.  By the 1960s, her work had matured, reflecting her burgeoning political consciousness, study of African arts and history, and appreciation for the freedom of form used by her young students.

In 1963 Ringgold began a body of paintings called the American People series, which portrays the civil rights m ovement from a female perspective. In the 1970s she created African-style masks, painted political posters, lectured frequently at feminist art conferences, and actively sought the racial integration of the New York art world. She originated a demonstration against the Whitney Museum of American Art and helped win admission for black artists to the exhibit schedule at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1970 she cofounded, with one of her daughters, the advocacy group Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation.

Among Ringgold’s most renowned works, her “story quilts” were inspired by the Tibetan tankas (paintings framed in cloth) that she viewed on a visit to museums in Amsterdam. She painted these quilts with narrative images and original stories set in the context of African American history. Her mother frequently collaborated with her on these. Examples of this work includes Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?(1984), Sonny’s Quilt (1986), and Tar Beach (1988), which Ringgold adapted into a children’s book in 1991. The latter book, which was named Caldecott Honor Book in 1992, tells of a young black girl in New York City who dreams about flying. Ringgold’s later books for children include Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) and My Dream of Martin Luther King (1995). Her memoirs, We Flew over the Bridge, were published in 1995.