Go There To Know There

                                  photo from  this site. The Poet He sang of life, serenely sweet, With, now and then, a deeper note. From some high peak, nigh yet remote, He voiced the world's absorbing beat. He sang of love when the earth was young And Love, itself, was in his lays But ah, the world, it turned to praise A jingle in a broken tongue Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who at the time, were newly freed slaves. Dunbar expressed a prodigious ability for poetry at the tender age of six. He grew up to excel in secondary school, becoming class president and editing the school newspaper. Later, he began publishing with the help of high school classmates, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who later helped to fund Dunbar's own press, The Dayton Tattler ( 1 ). Dunbar's first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy , publishe...

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) enjoyed a long and multifaceted career as essayist, critic, songwriter, poet, diplomat, attorney, educator and politician. In each of these capacities, Johnson dedicated his energies and passions toward the advancement of African Americans. Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida to parents of humble, yet noble vocations: his father worked as a headwaiter at the opulent St. James hotel; and his mother was the first female and black teacher at an elementary school in Florida. It was his mother who taught her son her love for music of the European tradition and English Literature ( 1 ). At the age of sixteen, Johnson became a student at Atlanta University. He graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1894, and later received an honorary MA from that institution. Johnson began a career in education with a teaching post at a rural, backwater Georgia school in which he taught the children of freed slaves. Later he continued at Stanton Preparatory Coll...