Go There To Know There

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, 1899-1974: Band leader, composer, pianist, and perhaps one of the best-known and beloved figures of his time. Ellington was responsible for over one thousand compositions that surpassed the generic boundaries of blues, pop, and jazz. He is credited with having been instrumental in elevating jazz to an art form. "Gladys Bentley [1907-1960] was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of American George L. Bentley and his wife, a Trinidadian, Mary Mote. She appeared at Harry Hansberry's "Clam House" on 133rd Street, one of New York City's most notorious gay speakeasies , in the 1920s, and headlined in the early thirties at Harlem's Ubangi Club, where she was backed up by a chorus line of drag queens. She dressed in men's clothes (including a signature tuxedo and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting outrag...

William Wells Brown was born into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky in 1814. His mother, known only as "Elizabeth," was the slave of a prominent physician there named Dr. Young. Elizabeth had a total of seven children: Elizabeth, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Solomon, Milford, and William. Bought and sold several times before the age of twenty, William Wells Brown spent much of his young adulthood in St. Louis, where he was forced into work in the slave trade along the Missouri River. Finally in 1834, Brown escaped slavery and headed North. After gaining his freedom, Brown married Elizabeth Schooner and the couple had three children. Between 1834 and 1845, Brown relocated to Buffalo, New York where he served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He worked as a steam boatman on Lake Erie, where he would ferry escaped slaves to Canada ( 1 ). By 1849, Brown traveled abroad to England, where he became a prominent speaker on the issue of Prohibition, and later, abolition. ...

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was perhaps one of the most prolific of the Harlem Renaissance writers, but she was also the most polarizing. To some of her contemporaries she was 'disconcerting'; to others, 'eccentric,' and even boastful and outrageous. As if a subtle critique, author Wallace Thurman cast her as  "Sweetie Mae Carr," an effete, egotistical would-be artiste in  Thurman's satiric novel, Infants of the Spring . To others, however, Hurston was a trail-blazer, an iconoclast, and later for Alice Walker, a 'spiritual mother.'  No matter her reputation among Harlem Literati, she was one of the earliest African American female scholars to venture into post-Occupation Haiti to gather invaluable cultural material for her compilation, Tell My Horse . Later she would expose African American folklife to U.S. audiences in Mules and Men. Hurston was an intrepid and rigorous preserver and conveyer of Africana folklife and folk culture. Born i...

Richard Wright (1908-1960) "Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people. For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks" ( Blueprint for Negro Writing: The Role of Negro Writing... 1403). When Richard Wright penned these words, he embarked on two distinct, yet interrelated projects: first, the writing of "the past" to which he refers here was clearly an indictment of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their widespread dependency on white patrons. Second, Wright's call for a new theory of African American writing was germinating: it was a theor...

Nella Larsen (1893-1964). Born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Nella Larsen didn't begin her professional life as a writer: instead, she attended the Nurse Training School at Tuskegee, and then headed north to work for the New York Health Department. In 1921, Larsen left the nursing profession to work at the New York Library. By this time, she had already become a fixture in the Harlem literary scene, appearing at events, and publishing short fiction pieces, essays, and magazine reviews (Gates, et al., 1079). Referred to as "Madame X" for the scarcity of details about her personal life, Larsen's fiction tells volumes about life as a woman navigating the boundaries of race in the modern world. However varied her professional life may have been, it was her parentage, one surmises, that had the greatest influence on her writing. While many writers shrink at the notion that their work might have some autobiographical nuance, it seems clear that Larsen...

"I cannot read a book but I can read the people." Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), was born a slave in Hurley, Ulster County, New York to James and Elizabeth, slaves owned by the wealthy Dutch landowner and patron, Johannes Hardenbergh, Jr. Her narrative, penned by amanuensis Olive Wilson, relates her early trials as she was separated from her parents and subject to numerous beatings and mistreatment by subsequent owners. She was sold from the Hardenbergh family into a second Dutch family who were vexed by her inability to speak English. Known as "Isabella," Sojourner changed hands several times and came of age in the household of John I. Dumont, where she was often burdened with the chores of two people. It has been said that she was strong, tall, and stout, and able to outwork most men. One slaveholder commented that she was "better than a man--for she will do a good family's washing in the night, and be ready in the morning to go into the field, wher...

"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity" (Harper). Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was born in Baltimore, MD, a slave state at the time of her birth. Harper, like her parents, was free. Orphaned at the age of three, she went to live with her mother's sister and her husband, William Watkins, an early civil rights activist. It was alongside her uncle that Harper commenced her devotion to civil rights causes by aiding him as a conductor on the Underground Railroad--thus defying the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Watkins was a minister and ran a school for African American youth. There, young Frances received an "uncommonly thorough education...she showed promise in writing and elocution, a strong interest in radical politics and religion, and a special sense of responsibility and devotion to lofty ideals" (Gates, et al. 491). By the age of twenty, Harper had published her first volume of poetry. Though she gained popularity and h...

By the 1940s, the once bustling metropolis of African American creative energy that had been Harlem had been harshly impacted by a series of events that followed its cultural heyday. A second wave of the Great Migration brought migrants from other areas of the United States and the Caribbean, which led to overcrowding and racial tension among Harlemites; and the economic depression rendered Harlem largely a ghettoized area that rife with crime and racial injustice. The Harlem Race Riot of 1943 increased the growing tension in Harlem. The event signaled a growing assertiveness among blacks in Harlem to challenge white authority and to interrogate the systems of white power structures. Described as "graceful and articulate" Ann Petry was born in October 1911 and raised in Old Saybrook, Connecticut ( 1 ). She attended Pharmacy school there, perhaps following the example of her father, who owned a drugstore. In the 1930s she traveled to Harlem where she was an apprentice w...

Commonwealth Magazine One of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay was not originally from the United States. He was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica. Known for his nostalgic poetic remembrances of his home in Jamaica, McKay's work evolved to include poetry that challenged the racism he encountered in the United States. Such poems as "If We Must Die" came as a direct outcry against the bloodshed from a series of race riots known as the Red Summer of 1919 (McBryde). If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,  While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot.  If we must die, O let us nobly die,  So that our precious blood may not be shed  In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor use though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,  And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though...

Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934) is considered one of the most admired intellects and beloved figures of the Harlem Renaissance. A 'renaissance man' in the fullest sense of the term, Fisher's complex and varied talents enabled him to excel as a writer, musician, and medical doctor. Born in Washington, D.C., Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island where he attended Classical High School. From there he attended Brown University, where he majored in both English and Biology. In his address to his graduating class at Brown, Fisher's words conveyed the young man's ability to integrate matters belonging to both the spiritual world and the world of science. Brown University's website quotes its alumnus as having deftly observed the twin purposes and development of science and faith. He noted that "As thinking Christians, we strive not to bring men to heaven, but to bring heaven to men, and with that the aim of science is identical. It is this oneness of purpose t...