000030 - Leslie Lee, Playwright

Leslie Lee (b. November 6, 1930, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania - d. January 20, 2014, New York City)was a Tony Award-nominated playwright.

Leslie Lee was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania on November 6, 1930. He was Executive Director of the Negro Ensemble Company and a founding artist of La Mama E.T.C.  He was also Signature Theatre's Playwright-in-Residence during the 2008-2009 Season celebrating the Historic Negro Ensemble Company. His plays have been produced both on and off Broadway, and he wrote extensively for film and television.

After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology and English from The University of Pennsylvania, Lee worked for several years in cancer research at Wyeth Laboratories in Villanova, Pennsylvania. He earned his Master of Arts degree in Theatre from Villanova University.

 

Lee taught for The Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing Program at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, MiddleSex Community College, Hunter College, Wesleyan College, Rutgers University, The New School University, Goddard College, The Negro Ensemble Company, and The Frederick Douglas Playwriting Workshop. In 2008, the U.S. Department of State sent Lee as a Cultural Envoy to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to teach Playwriting at the Intwasa Arts Festival.

 

Lee's acclaimed play The First Breeze of Summer, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and starring Leslie Uggams, enjoyed a successful revival in 2008 at Signature Theatre, winning nine Audelco Awards. The First Breeze of Summer was originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company and went on to win an Obie Award for Best New American Play as well as an Outer Critics Circle Award. Subsequently, the play moved to the Palace Theatre on Broadway, where it received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. Many of his plays have been produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, the Black Rep in St. Louis, and Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey. His plays include The War Party, Colored People's Time, Blues in a Broken Tongue, The Rabbit's Foot, Black Eagles, Elegy to a Down Queen, Cops and Robbers, Hannah Davis, The Ninth Wave, The Book of Lambert, Mina, Sundown Names and Night-Gone Things and the musicals Golden Boy with songs by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, and Phillis with Micki Grant. His new musical Before The Dream, written with Charles Strouse, had a recent reading in New York.

 

Lee's television and film work includes The Vernon Johns Story, with James Earl Jones and Mary Alice; Two Mothers, Two Sons; The Killing Floor, with Alfre Woodard and Moses Gunn; and adaptations of Richard Wright's short story Almos' A Man, with LeVar Burton, and The First Breeze of Summer. His documentary work includes Langston Hughes, the Dreamkeeper; The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment; Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey; and Culture Shock: Huckleberry Finn.

Leslie Lee passed away at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City due to complications from congestive heart failure on January 20, 2014, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as he was making final revisions to his musical about King (written in collaboration with Charles Strouse).

000029 - Albon Holsey, Business Leader

Albon Holsey (May 31, 1883, Athens, Georgia - January 16, 1950, Tuskegee, Alabama) was an African American business leader.

According to Albon L. Holsey, slavery deprived blacks of the opportunity to learn the art of business. Through his efforts with the National Negro Business League, the Colored Merchant’s Association, and writings about black business topics, Holsey attempted to assist African Americans in competing and succeeding in the world of commerce.

Holsey was the son of Albon Chase Holsey and Sallie Thomas Holsey. As a boy, he attended Knox Institute in Athens, Georgia, and later he matriculated at Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Holsey joined the staff of Tuskegee Institute in 1914, during the time that the famous educator, Booker T Washington, headed the institution. He was hired as an assistant to Washington’s secretary, Emmett J. Scott. During his tenure, Holsey worked as secretary to president Robert R. Morton and assistant to president Frederick D. Patterson, served as associate editor of the Tuskegee Student and possibly acted as director of public relations. Between 1938 and 1944, Holsey was also on loan to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. While working for the government, he was involved in projects related to black farmers. Holsey worked at Tuskegee for thirty-six years.

A brief chronology of the Holsey's life reads as follows:

1883

Born in Athens, Georgia on May 31

1906

Marries Basiline Boyd on October 3

1914

Joins staff of Tuskegee Institute

1929

Expands Colored Merchants’ Association nationally

1930

Receives Harmon Foundation Award for achievements in business

1950

Dies in Tuskegee, Alabama on January 16

Holsey wrote numerous articles, most related to business topics, including the article “Learning How to be Black,” in which Holsey described the experiences of African American children that triggered their consciousness of color and the “deadly toll” on the manhood of the race. In “Public Relations Intuitions of Booker T. Washington,” Holsey described Washington’s common sense approach to keeping good relationships with various constituencies involved with Tuskegee Institute. The Public Opinion Quarterly published Holsey’s lengthy review of a book on the subject of black newspapers in 1948. Holsey, in a chapter in The Progress of a Race , recapitulated the first twenty-five years of the NNBL. He was business manager ofCrisis , the official publication of the NAACP, during the time that W. E. B. Du Bois edited the periodical.

Holsey was a member of the Masons and Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. The 1928–29 edition of Who’s Who in Colored America lists his political and religious affiliations as Republican and as African Methodist Episcopal.

After a brief illness, Holsey died on January 16, 1950, in John Andrews Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama, at 67 years of age. Funeral services were held on January 26 in the Tuskegee Institute chapel. His wife, Basiline Boyd Holsey, whom he married on October 3, 1906, survived him. A sister, Annie Holsey of Baltimore, and brothers, Augustus J. Holsey and Crosby Holsey of Baltimore and Cleveland, respectively, also survived him. He was buried in Tuskegee.

000028 - Arnold Pinkney, Jesse Jackson Campaign Manager

Arnold Pinkney (January 6, 1931, Youngstown, Ohio - January 13, 2014, Cleveland, Ohio) was a political strategist and civil rights activist who helped elect Ohio's first black congressman and managed Jesse Jackson's unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign.  

Pinkney was born in Youngstown, Ohio, on January 6, 1931. His father died three months before he finished high school, so he worked in steel mills to help his family make ends meet. 

Pinkney graduated from Albion College in Michigan, where he won letters in football, track, baseball and basketball. During a stint in the Army, he played baseball with major leaguers. Paul O’Dea, a scout for the Cleveland Indians, told him that he had a shot at making the big leagues by his late 20s, but advised him to go to law school instead. “Your race needs more lawyers than baseball players,” Mr. Pinkney recalled Mr. O’Dea saying.  

Pinkney took the advice and attended what is now Case Western Reserve University School of Law, but he dropped out for financial reasons. He then became one of the first black agents hired by the Prudential Insurance Company of America and later opened a successful insurance agency. As a civil rights activist, he led a membership drive for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) and joined the picketing of a Cleveland supermarket that had refused to hire blacks.

Pinkney began his political career by helping out on local campaigns for judges, then volunteered for Carl Stokes’s mayoral campaign. Louis Stokes tapped him to be his paid campaign manager in 1968.  Pinkney was later president of the Cleveland Board of Education and twice sought the city’s mayoralty, losing in a three-man race in 1971 and again in 1975. After the second defeat, he moved to Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb.  

Mr. Jackson said he had chosen Mr. Pinkney to run his 1984 campaign because he was experienced in national campaigns as a “voice of pragmatism.” 

Arnold Pinkney had a long career in Democratic political campaigns including the 1968 campaign of Louis Stokes, who became Ohio's first black member of Congress. He also advised Jackson, Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes and Gov. Richard Celeste.

He was special adviser to the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus and was co-founder of Pinkney-Perry Insurance Agency, Ohio's oldest and largest minority-owned insurance company.

000027 - William Henry Johnson, Artist

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.

000026 - James Avery, "Fresh Prince" Actor

James LaRue Avery (November 27, 1945 – December 31, 2013) was an American actor, best known for his portrayal of the patriarch and attorney (later judge) Philip Banks, Will Smith's character's uncle, in the TV sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.  This character was ranked #34 in TV Guide's "50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time." He also provided the voice of Shredder in the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series, as well as War Machine in the animated series Iron Man and Junkyard Dog in Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling.  He also played Michael Kelso's commanding officer at the police academy late in the series run of That '70s Show. 

Avery was born in 1945 in Pughsville, Hampton Roads, Virginia and raised in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  He served in theVietnam War as a member of the United States Navy from 1968–1969, after graduating high school. Later on, he moved to San Diego, California, where he began to write poetry and TV scripts.

In addition to his fame in sitcoms,  he did voice acting for many animated series, most notably the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (as the voice of The Shredder) and James Rhodes in the 1990s Iron Man series.

^{He married Barbara in 1988.  He had no biological children of his own, but was a stepfather to his wife's son, Kevin Waters. As well as his wife and stepson, he is survived by his mother Florence Avery.}

^{On December 31, 2013, Avery died at the age of 68 from complications following open heart surgery in a Los Angeles suburb hospital, Glendale Adventist Medical Center.} 

A00025 - Amiri Baraka, Polarizing Poet and Playwright

Amiri Baraka, also called Imamu Amiri Baraka, original name (until 1968) (Everett) LeRoi Jones     (b. October 7, 1934, Newark, New Jersey — d. January 9, 2014, Newark, New Jersey), was an African American writer who presented the experiences and anger of black Americans with an affirmation of black life.

Jones graduated from Howard University (B.A., 1953) and served in the United States Air Force. After military duty, he joined the Beat movement, attended graduate school, and, in 1961, published his first major collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, a collection of Jones' early poetry with little regard to race.

Jones was the editor of Yugen, a prominent Beat poetry magazine, from 1960 to 1965.  He organized and ran the Black Arts Theater in Harlem from 1964 to 1965 as part of HARYOUAct.  In 1966, he moved to Newark, New Jersey, to run Spirit House, an African American workshop in the arts.  In 1967, he was arrested in connection with the Newark riots in July of that year; convicted in a very controversial trial the following March, he was sentenced to two and half years.  He later organized the United Brotherhood Party and became very active in local politics.  

In 1963, Jones published The Moderns, an anthology of contemporary short stories edited by Jones.  Also in 1963, Jones published Blues People, a long prose socio-historical study tracing the development of African American blues music and how it reflects the African American experience in the United States. 

In 1964, his play Dutchman appeared off-Broadway to critical acclaim. In its depiction of an encounter between a European American woman and an African American intellectual, it exposes the suppressed anger and hostility of African Americans toward the dominant European American culture.  Jones followed this with several other one-act plays.  The Slave, The Toilet, The Baptism, all of which became increasingly vitriolic in their anti-white feelings.  The Dead Lecturer, Jones' second collection of poems, was also published in 1964.  The poetry of this volume and subsequent ones reflect the development of Jones' increasingly anti-white, anti-Semitic philosophy.  

After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Jones left his wife (who was Jewish) and their two children began to espouse black nationalism.

In 1965, Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem. He published much during this period, including Black Art (1966) and Black Magic (1969). In addition to poetry and drama, Baraka wrote several collections of essays, an autobiographical novel (The System of Dante’s Hell [1965]), and short stories. 

In 1967, Baraka (still Leroi Jones) visited Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles and became an advocate of his philosophy of Kawaida, a multifaceted, categorized activist philosophy that produced the "Nguzo Saba," Kwanzaa, and an emphasis on African names. It was at this time that he adopted the name Imamu Amear Baraka. Imamu is a Swahili title for "spiritual leader", derived from the Arabic word Imam (إمام).  Baraka later dropped the honorific Imamu and eventually changed Amear (which means "Prince") to Amiri. Baraka means "blessing, in the sense of divine favor."

In the mid-1970s Baraka became a Marxist, though his goals remained similar. “I [still] see art as a weapon and a weapon of revolution,” he said. “It’s just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms.” In addition to writing,  Baraka taught at several American universities. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984.

The works of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka include:

Poetry

• 1961: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
• 1964: The Dead Lecturer: Poems
• 1969: Black Magic
• 1970: It's Nation Time
• 1970: Slave Ship
• 1975: Hard Facts
• 1980: New Music, New Poetry (India Navigation)
• 1995: Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
• 1995: Wise, Why’s Y’s
• 1996: Funk Lore: New Poems
• 2003: Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems
• 2005: The Book of Monk

Drama

• 1964: Dutchman
• 1964: The Slave
• 1967: The Baptism and The Toilet
• 1966: A Black Mass
• 1969: Four Black Revolutionary Plays
• 1978: The Motion of History and Other Plays

Fiction

• 1965: The System of Dante's Hell
• 1967: Tales
• 2006: Tales of the Out & the Gone

Non-fiction

• 1963: Blues People: Negro Music in White America
• 1965: Home: Social Essays
• 1968: Black Music
• 1971: Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965
• 1979: Poetry for the Advanced
• 1981: reggae or not!
• 1984: Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974–1979
• 1984: The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
• 1987: The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues
• 2003: The Essence of Reparations

Edited works

• 1968: Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (co-editor, with Larry Neal)
• 1969: Four Black Revolutionary Plays
• 1983: Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (edited with Amina Baraka)
• 1999: The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader
• 2000: The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
• 2008: Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2 (Audio CD)

Filmography

• One P.M. (1972)
• Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) .... Himself
• Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) .... Himself
• Poetry in Motion (1982)
• Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960–95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) .... Himself
• Through Many Dangers: The Story of Gospel Music (1996)
• Bulworth (1998) .... Rastaman
• Pinero (2001) .... Himself
• Strange Fruit (2002) .... Himself
• Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) .... Himself
• Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) .... Himself
• Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) .... Himself
• Hubert Selby Jr : It'll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) .... Himself
• 500 Years Later (2005) (voice) .... Himself
• The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) .... Himself
• The Pact (2006) .... Himself
• Retour à Gorée (2007) .... Himself
• Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)
• Revolution '67 (2007) .... Himself
• Turn Me On (2007) (TV) .... Himself
• Oscene (2007) .... Himself
• Corso: The Last Beat (2008)
• The Black Candle (2008)
• Ferlinghetti: A City Light (2008) .... Himself
• W.A.R. Stories: Walter Anthony Rodney (2009) .... Himself
• Motherland (2010)