Tuesday, March 5, 2013

1946

Notable Births
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skipjen2865@aol.com 
From:skipjen2865@aol.com
To:apierre100@yahoo.com,snkeith@comcast.net,siphob@aol.com,acoombs10@gmail.com,freddiebryant@yahoo.com
Thu, Sep 12 at 12:20 AM

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Frankie Beverly, the lead singer for Maze


For many years now, I have enjoyed going out to tend my garden in the twilight hours.  As the sun sets, I have a meditative time when I honor the sunset with the classic Maze song "Golden Time of Day"


After giving praise to the day and the evening and the beauty of being in the garden, I like to follow up with the Maze song "Happy Feelin's"


and then I end my meditation with the Maze song "We Are One"
 

Frankie Beverly may be gone, but every day that I go out into my garden, I feel his presence still.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins







----- Forwarded Message -----
From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>
To: Everett Jenkins <skipjen2865@aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2024 at 11:35:23 PM PDT
Subject: Frankie Beverly, R.I.P.

Frankie Beverly, Frontman of the Soul Group Maze, Is Dead at 77

A consistent hitmaker on the R&B charts for almost 50 years, he had announced just this year that he would be retiring.

Listen to this article · 5:41 min Learn more
Frankie Beverly, dressed all in white and wearing a white cap, stands on a stage with both arms extended and a microphone in his right hand.
Frankie Beverly in performance in 2012. He led his group, Maze, to success on the R&B charts and Black radio, but the group never had a lot of crossover pop success.Credit...Mychal Watts/WireImage, via Getty Images
Sept. 11, 2024

Frankie Beverly, the lead singer and songwriter of the soul and funk band Maze, whose songs, including “Golden Time of Day,” “Joy and Pain” and “Happy Feelin’s,” provided the soundtrack to countless summer cookouts and family reunions for more than five decades, died on Tuesday. He was 77.






His death was announced in a statement by his family on his Instagram account. The statement did not say where he died or cite a cause.

“He lived his life with pure soul, as one would say, and for us, no one did it better,” the statement said. “He lived for his music, family and friends.”


Mr. Beverly had announced a farewell tour this year with a handful of dates. He had said that he would retire after going on the road one last time.

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Mr. Beverly, dressed much as he was in the previous photo, stands onstage holding a microphone and looking at the crowd with a drummer and a guitarist behind him. There are neon lights pointed at them.
Mr. Beverly with Maze in 2023. He announced this year that he would retire after a brief tour.Credit...Gary Miller/Getty Images

“Thank you so much for the support given to me for over 50 years as I pass on the lead vocalist torch to Tony Lindsay,” Mr. Beverly said in a statement to Billboard at the time. “The band will continue on as Maze Honoring Frankie Beverly. It’s been a great ride through the decades. Let the music of my legacy continue.”

With his smooth baritone, Mr. Beverly led Maze to success on the R&B charts and Black radio. But the band did not have a lot of crossover pop success.

“Frankie Beverly may be the biggest R&B star you never heard of,” J.D. Considine, the Baltimore Sun music critic, wrote in 1994.

That did not seem to bother him much.

“Yeah, I wish more people did know who I was,” he told Mr. Considine, “but if it’s at the expense of me giving up this thing we have, then I just have to wait until they find out. ’Cause whatever we have, whatever this thing is that we seem to have a part of, it’s a cult kind of thing.”

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Mr. Beverly, again all in all white and holding a microphone, stands onstage leaning into it. Other musicians are playing behind him, and purplish neon lights are shining down.
Mr. Beverly and Maze in concert at Newark Symphony Hall in 2009.Credit...Jemal Countess/Getty Images

It would be difficult to count the number of artists who have cited Mr. Beverly’s music as inspiration or sampled from his ever-expanding playbook of infectious melodies and harmonies. Many have covered his work, some with more fanfare than others. His 1978 song “I Need You” was sampled in “Hustler’s Ambition” by 50 Cent, “Talk to Em” by Young Jeezy and “I Need U” by Lil Boosie and Webbie.

And Mr. Beverly’s song “Before I Let Go,” though not a big hit, was covered by Beyoncé on her live album “Homecoming” in 2019. In the New York Times podcast “Still Processing,” with Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, the song was described in 2021 as having “a unique ability to gather and galvanize,” becoming “a unifying Black anthem and an unfailing source of joy.”

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A black-and-white photo of a younger Mr. Beverly, wearing a leather jacket and a cap. He looked into the camera and smiles.
Mr. Beverly in 1985. His 1981 song “Before I Let Go” was described in 2021 as “a unifying Black anthem and an unfailing source of joy.”Credit...David Corio, via Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

Howard Stanley Beverly was born on Dec. 6, 1946, in Philadelphia. His father was a truck driver, and his mother ran the household.

He was influenced as a child by the music he heard in church, by R&B singers like Sam Cooke and Lloyd Price, and by the doo-wop group Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.

“I was so blown away by Frankie that I changed my own name — my birth name is Howard!” he was quoted as saying in an online biography. “But after I heard Frankie and the guys, I was totally bitten.”

As a 12-year-old, he said, he toured the East Coast for about a year with the Silhouettes (who had a No. 1 hit with “Get a Job” in 1958) after they heard he could sing like Mr. Lymon. He then formed a few doo-wop groups of his own and recorded for one of the early record labels of the songwriter and producer Kenneth Gamble — who, with his partner, Leon Huff, would help create the sound known as Philly Soul.

Mr. Beverly transformed his group Butlers from a traditional vocal harmony ensemble into Raw Soul, which bore the influence of Sly and the Family Stone’s adventurous fusion of soul, rock and funk.

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A black-and-white publicity photo of Mr. Beverly and six other men, standing in a row wiith their around around one another.
An early lineup of Maze, with Mr. Beverly at the far left. The group’s first album was released in 1977.Credit...Gems/Redferns, via Getty Images

He and the other members of Raw Soul moved to San Francisco in 1972, but they initially had trouble finding success.

“We were going through hell,” Mr. Beverly told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch n 1978. “San Francisco was no Disneyland. It was real, with real hurts and heartaches. We didn’t have any bread and we were out in the street.”

They did manage to get booked at a few small clubs; at one of them, Marvin Gaye’s sister-in-law saw them perform and alerted Mr. Gaye to their talent. He took them out on tour in 1976 as an opening act and helped them get a deal with Capitol Records.

“He loved me like a little brother,” Mr. Beverly said of Mr. Gaye in the online biography, “and certainly working with him helped bring our demos back to life.”

Raw Soul changed its name before its first album, “Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly,” was released in 1977. It was the first of nine albums by the group to be certified gold, including the two-disc “Anthology” (1996).

Information about survivors was not immediately available.

In 2009, when they closed the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans for the 15th straight year, Ben Ratliff of The Times described the experience of listening to Maze:






“The band’s shows are rehearsed rituals, working up to a rare and special audience feeling: deep, sentient serenity, not the usual kind of lose-yourself pop catharsis. It’s done by repetitive funk in slow to medium tempos, without a lot of instrumental flexing; moderation is everywhere.”

As for Mr. Beverly, he added: “His voice was half-scorched, and some of the usual traces of Donny Hathaway and Sam Cooke weren’t coming through. But he managed by keeping it in the middle register and by adding small vocal gestures to the rhythm cycles — percussive uh-uhs and dibba-dibbas, gospel grunts.

“His lyrics are about joy and desire, but he works realism, as well as a horror of hurting anyone, into his euphoria.”

88888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888Lynn Huntley, aka Mary Lynn Jones, (b. January 24, 1946, Petersburg, Virginia - d. August 30, 2015, Atlanta, Georgia) was a prominent civil rights lawyer.  She was born on January 24, 1946, in Petersburg, Virginia. Her father, the Reverend Lawrence Jones, was active in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, when he was associated with Fisk University in Nashville. He was dean of Howard University’s divinity school in Washington from 1975 to 1991 and died in 2009. Her mother, Mary Ellen, died in 2003.

Ms. Huntley attended Fisk University as an early entrant, received an A.B. in Sociology with honors from Barnard College, and J.D. degree with honors from Columbia University Law School, where she was a member of The Columbia Law Review. She worked as law clerk for a federal judge, Judge Constance Baker Motley; and as staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she focused on cases involving the abolition of the death penalty, prisoner rights and education. She served as general counsel to the New York City Commission on Human Rights and as section chief and deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she directed a trial section to vindicate the rights of institutionalized persons, and exercised oversight of sections concerned with legislative affairs, employment, housing, federal regulatory and budgetary matters.

During her tenure at the Ford Foundation from l982-1994, where she advanced from program officer to director of Ford Foundation’s Rights and Social Justice Program, Ms. Huntley was responsible for grant making related to minority and women’s rights, refugee and migration issues, legal services for the poor, minorities and media, and coordination of field office activities related to the foregoing.  In l995, Ms. Huntley joined the staff of the Southern Education Foundation as a program director, where she conceived and directed the Comparative Human Relations Initiative, an examination of race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa and the United States and strategies to reduce inequality. She is the author of several reports resultant from this effort, and served, with others, as editor of two related books, Tirando a Mascara (Removing the Mask, 2000) and Race and Inequality in South Africa, Brazil and the United States (2001). She retired from the Southern Education Foundation in 2010, having doubled the endowment and raised over $44 million from diverse donors.

Ms. Huntley has received many honors, including the Thurgood Marshall Award of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University, honorary doctorates from Cambridge College in Boston, Mass., and Allen University in Columbia, SC, and the Lucy Terry Prince Award of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.  She also received the National Bar Association outstanding achievement award, the Unsung Heroine Award from the Atlanta Coalition of 100 Black Women, and was the Association of Black Foundation Executives’ James A. Joseph Lecturer in 2004.   She served as a member of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, and on the Boards of the American Constitution Society, the Association of Black Foundation Executives (where she was counsel) Grantmakers for Education, CARE USA (where she was vice chair), the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Marguerite E. Casey Foundation,  and the Interdenominational Theological Center. She was recently elected vice chair of the Board of Trustees of the Jesse Ball DuPont Fund in Jacksonville, Florida. 
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James Milton "Jim" "the Dragon" Kelly (May 5, 1946 – June 29, 2013) was an American athlete, actor, and martial artist who rose to fame in the early 1970s. He was best known from his performance as Williams in the 1973 film Enter the Dragon.
Kelly was born in Paris, Kentucky. He began his athletic career in high school, competing in basketball, football, and track and field. He attended the University of Louisville where he played football, but left during his freshman year to begin studying Shorin-ryu karate. Additionally, he trained in Okinawan karate under the direction of Masters, Parker Shelton and Gordon Doversola. During the early 1970's, Jim Kelly became one of the most decorated world karate champions in the sport. In 1971, Kelly won four prestigious championships that same year, most notably, the World Middleweight Karate title at the 1971 Long Beach International Karate Championships. He opened his own dojo which was frequented by numerous Hollywood celebrities. He taught karate to actor Calvin Lockhart for a role in a thriller feature film Melinda. Kelly ended up playing a martial arts instructor in the movie.
As an actor, Kelly became the first Black martial arts film star. Jim Kelly co-starred alongside Bruce Lee in the block buster, Enter the Dragon. The role was originally supposed to go to actor Rockne Tarkington, who unexpectedly dropped out days before shooting in Hong Kong. Producer Fred Weintraub had heard about Jim Kelly's karate studio in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, and went there to see him and was immediately impressed. Kelly's role as Williams, an inner-city karate instructor who is harassed by white police officers, made a good impression upon directors and African-American males with his cool-cat demeanor and formidable physical skills.
This appearance led to starring roles in a string of martial arts-themed blaxploitation films, among them Melinda and Black Belt Jones. Most of Kelly's film roles played up the novelty of an African-American martial arts master.
Kelly earned a three-film contract with Warner Brothers and made Three the Hard Way with Jim Brown and Fred Williamson, and Hot Potato, a movie in which he rescues a diplomat's daughter from the jungles of Thailand. After his contract ended with Warner Brothers, he starred in low-budget films Black Samurai, Death Dimension, and Tattoo Connection.
After his appearance in 1982's One Down, Two to Go, Kelly appeared in movies only rarely.
A deleted scene from the film "Undercover Brother", included on the DVD extra features, shows him in a cameo appearance with Eddie Griffin.
Kelly was a professional tennis player on the USTA Senior Men's Circuit. He often played tennis recreationally in the 1970s at Los Angeles' Plummer Park in West Hollwood.
In 2004, Kelly appeared with NBA star LeBron James in the Nike commercial "Chamber of Fear", a similarity of the Bruce Lee film Game of Death.
Kelly resided in Southern California and worked as a professional tennis coach. He was still a popular draw at conventions such as the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con International.
He considered Bruce Lee as "the greatest martial artist, who ever lived".
Jim Kelly died of cancer on June 29 2013, at his home in San Diego, California.
The filmography of, and television credits for, Jim Kelly read as follows:
Filmography
  • Melinda (1972)
  • Enter the Dragon (1973) as Williams
  • Black Belt Jones (1974) as Black Belt Jones
  • Three the Hard Way (1974) as Mister Keyes
  • Golden Needles (1974)
  • Take a Hard Ride (1975) as Kashtok
  • Hot Potato (1976) as Jones
  • Black Samurai (1977) as Robert Sand
  • The Tattoo Connection (a.k.a. E yu tou hei sha xing, Black Belt Jones 2) (1978)
  • Death Dimension (1978)
  • The Amazing Mr. No Legs (1981)
  • One Down, Two To Go (1982)
  • Stranglehold (1994)
  • Macked, Hammered, Slaughtered and Shafted (2004)
  • Afro Ninja Destiny (2009)
  • Afro Ninja (2009)

Television
  • Highway To Heaven (1985/1986) (2 episodes)
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Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, Expert in Sickle Cell Disease, Dies at 76

When his baby boy was diagnosed with the illness, he made it his mission to combat it. He later took his expertise back to his native Ghana.

Dr. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, a global expert in sickle cell disease, in an undated photo. He found that the disease could result in blockages in blood vessels in the brain, leading to a high rate of strokes in children with sickle cell.
Credit...Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Dr. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, a global expert in sickle cell disease, in an undated photo. He found that the disease could result in blockages in blood vessels in the brain, leading to a high rate of strokes in children with sickle cell.

Soon after his first child, Kwame, was born on May 13, 1972, Dr. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong discovered that the boy had a fatal genetic disease.

“I was holding Kwame, and he came upstairs with tears in his eyes,” Dr. Ohene-Frempong’s wife, Janet Ohene-Frempong, said in an interview, recalling the moment her husband broke the news. “He said, ‘Our son, Kwame, has sickle cell disease.’ He knew what that meant.” Sickle cell can result in searing pain, organ damage, strokes, susceptibility to infections and premature death.

Dr. Ohene-Frempong, a medical student at Yale at the time, then called his mother at their family home in Ghana. “God is telling you something,” she told him. The message, she said, was to use his medical training to help combat the disease. And that is what he did “until he drew his last breath,” Ms. Ohene-Frempong said.

“The most important thing that happened to us is Kwame’s birth,” she added. “It changed the trajectory of our lives and of hundreds and hundreds of people around the world. All the work he did — every bit of it — he did because of Kwame.”

Dr. Ohene-Frempong, familiarly known by his initials, Kof (pronounced cough), died on May 7 in Philadelphia. He was 76. His wife said the cause was metastatic lung cancer.

Dr. Ohene-Frempong worked for decades at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an affiliate of the University of Pennsylvania. At CHOP, as it is known, he established the hospital’s Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center.

Dr. Alexis Thompson, a colleague and sickle cell expert there, said in an interview: “I relied on his wisdom at almost every turn in my career. Part of it was watching with this tremendous awe what his vision was and the things he thought to do to move this field forward.”

Dr. Ohene-Frempong was a leader of a large federally funded study, the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease, that helped answer an important question: What is the natural course of the disease?

Analyzing the study’s data, he found that the disease could result in blockages in blood vessels in the brain, leading to a high rate of strokes in children with sickle cell. That led other researchers to be able to predict which children were most at risk, and to discover that regular transfusions could prevent most strokes in those children.

In his native Ghana, Dr. Ohene-Frempong established a pilot program to provide screening for sickle cell disease among newborns in the southern city of Kumasi. It was the first such program in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to identifying children with the illness, the program referred them to specialized clinics that provided treatments like antibiotics to prevent infections, routine immunizations and a drug, hydroxyurea, that can reduce the risk of complications from sickle cell.

Kwaku Ohene-Frempong was born on March 13, 1946, in Kukurantumi, in eastern Ghana, to Kwasi Adde Ohene and Adwoa Odi Boafo. His father was a cocoa farmer and a prominent member of a royal family.

Kwaku attended a boarding school, Prempeh College, then went to Yale University, where he majored in biology and was captain of the track and field team, setting indoor and outdoor records in the high hurdles. While a student, he met Janet Williams, who was attending Cornell University. They married on June 6, 1970, one week after they had both graduated.

Dr. Ohene-Frempong said in an interview in 2019 that he first found out about sickle cell when he and some friends attended a lecture about the disease at Yale. As he sat listening, he said, he suddenly recognized the disease: It was in his family but had gone undiagnosed. One of his cousins had the symptoms and died at 14.

“He was in pain,” he said of his cousin. “His eyes were very yellow, and he was very skinny.”

Dr. Ohene-Frempong continued on to medical school at Yale, then went to New York Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan for his residency. He studied pediatric hematology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia before moving to the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, where he was associate professor of pediatrics.

In his six years at Tulane, he established the Tulane Sickle Cell Center of Southern Louisiana, a medical care facility, and helped the state health department develop a newborn-screening program for the disease.

Dr. Ohene-Frempong returned to Children’s Hospital in 1986 and remained there for 30 years before leaving to work full time in Ghana, at the Kumasi Center for Sickle Cell Disease, a research and treatment center. He was still based there when he returned to Philadelphia for cancer treatment.

“He was very, very aware of the limitations of working in Africa,” Ms. Ohene-Frempong said. “His goal was to raise the standards of care. He said, ‘It can be done in America, and that is our goal here.’”

As part of that mission, Dr. Ohene-Frempong became president of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana and the national coordinator for the American Society of Hematology’s Consortium on Newborn Screening in Africa.

His honors and accolades were many, including, from Ghana, the Order of the Volta in 2010 and the Millennium Excellence Award in Medicine in 2015. In the United States in 2020, he received the Assistant Secretary of Health Exceptional Service Medal, the highest civilian award given by the Public Health Service, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The American Society for Hematology honored him in 2021 with its Stratton Award for Translational and Clinical Science.

But despite the progress that Dr. Ohene-Frempong and others had made in caring for people with sickle cell disease, his son, Kwame, did not survive it: He died in 2013 at age 40, the father of two young children.

In addition to his wife, Dr. Ohene-Frempong is survived by his daughter, Afia Ohene-Frempong; three brothers, Kwabena Ohene-Dokyi, Kwasi Ohene-Owusu and Reynolds Twumasi; a sister, Ama Ohene-Agyeiwaa Boateng; a grandson; and a granddaughter.

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NOTABLE DEATHS


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!
"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.

The works of Countee Cullen include:

Poetry collections:
  • Color Harper & brothers, 1925; [includes the poems "Incident," "Near White," "Heritage," and others], illustrations by Charles Cullen
  • Tableau 1925
  • Harlem Wine 1926
  • Copper Sun, Harper & brothers, 1927
  • The Ballad of the Brown Girl Harper & Brothers, 1927, illustrations by Charles Cullen
  • The Black Christ and Other Poems, Harper & brothers, 1929, illustrations by Charles Cullen
  • One way to heaven, Harper & brothers, 1932
  • Any Human to Another (1934)
  • The Medea and Some Other Poems (1935)
  • On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947
  • Gerald Lyn Early (ed). My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen Doubleday, 1991
  • Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, Library of America, 2013
Prose:
  • One Way to Heaven (1931)
  • The Lost Zoo, Harper & Brothers, 1940; Modern Curriculum Press, 1991
  • My Lives and How I Lost Them, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942
Drama:
  • St. Louis Woman (1946)
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Father Divine

After his first wife died, Father Divine married a white Canadian woman named Edna Rose Ritchings in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 1946. The ceremony was kept secret even from most members until Ritching's visa expired. Critics of the movement believed that Father Divine's seemingly scandalous marriage to 21-year-old Ritchings would destroy the movement. Instead, most followers rejoiced, and the marriage date became a celebrated anniversary in the movement. To prove that he and Ritchings adhered to his doctrine on sexual abstinence, Father Divine assigned a black female follower to be her constant companion.

Father Divine claimed that Ritchings, later called "Mother S. A. Divine", was the reincarnation of Penninah. Reincarnation was not previously part of Father Divine's doctrine and did not become a fixture of his theology. Followers believed that Penninah was an exceptional case and viewed her "return" as a miracle. 

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