Go There To Know There

"They were trying to blow me into heaven, but God wanted me on Earth." (*usatoday.com/news) Fred Shuttlesworth, the intrepid Civil Rights activist fought alongside the Reverends Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. Pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, he was well-known for his firebrand style of preaching, and for his devotion to human rights. After a long and eventful life, Shuttleworth passed away from a stroke Wednesday, October 5th. He was 89 years old. During the Civil Rights Struggle, Shuttlesworth gained renown for his undaunted courage and staunch commitment to the Movement. He survived two attempted bombings--one of which destroyed the parsonage alongside the church where he preached. On another occasion in Birmingham, he and his wife were mauled by members of the Ku Klux Klan, where he was viciously beaten with brass knuckles, baseball bats and bicycle chains when the couple attempted to enroll their da...

Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson was born in New Orleans in 1875 to Patricia and Joseph Moore and raised in the Creole culture of the Crescent City. Her childhood in New Orleans is described by scholars as humble; however the precocious and fair-skinned daughter of a former slave rose to become one of the most important figures of the Harlem Renaissance (Gates 936). From early on in her life, she exhibited varied interests and aptitudes at the cello, mandolin, and violin; as well as writing and acting (Gates et al. 936). In 1892 she graduated from Straight University (now Dillard) and began a career as a teacher in the school system of New Orleans. By 1895 she had published her first volume of short stories and poems entitled Violets and Other Tales . She achieved local recognition for her poetry, which garnered her the affectionate attentions of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. It was the common subject of poetry that precipitated an ongoing correspondence between Alice Moore and the accomp...

Among one of the most prolific artists of the Harlem Renaissance was Wallace Thurman. Author, novelist, publisher, editor, dramatist and all-around intellectual, his colleague and friend, Langston Hughes said of Thurman that he was a "strangely brilliant black boy who had read everything, and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read" (1). Thurman would become one of the principal contributors to and sponsors of the Harlem Renaissance creative energy. Among the first to initiate a 'salon' of artists who included Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McCay, Arna Bontemps, and Bruce Nugent, Thurman tried twice to create a literary publication that would capture the energetic zeitgeist of the time. He was asked to edit a literary magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life--which lasted only two issues; and Fire!! with Hughes and Hurston, but the magazine unfortunately ended after one issue was published. Scholars have reflected that the short lif...

Students, I hope this post finds you well--and that you were able to find it . For today's discussion, you were to have read selections from Marcus Garvey, and "The Criteria of Negro Art" by W.E.B. Dubois.  The post that follows this one contains some information and a video concerning Garvey. It is entitled "Marcus Garvey: Pan-Africanism and the Rise of the New Negro Movement." You can follow the link to the right to reach it. I hope you will read and enjoy. Choose one of the items below to answer in a comment to this post. Give some thought to what you write, and be sure to answer thoroughly the question you choose: 1. Explain what the speaker here means by his comment, "We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot"? Think about his positioning as a philosopher, writer, and leader of African American arts. "What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it was phrased last night it had a certain truth: We wa...

Carter G. Woodson 1875-1950 Often referred to as "the father of black history," writer, journalist, and historian Carter G. Woodson was one of the first African American intellects to study black history and to challenge the widely held assumption that African Americans had no history. It is to Woodson we owe the tradition of African American History Month.  Born to former slaves in New Canton, Virginia, Woodson was self-taught, having mastered a rudimentary education by the age of seventeen. At the age of twenty, Woodson earned a high school diploma in the span of two years at Fayette High School (1) . According to the website, African American History Month: Profiles, Carter G. Woodson, "In 1915, Woodson and Jesse E. Moorland co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). The organization was the platform that launched Woodson's mission to raise awareness and recognize the importance of Black history. He believed that pub...

As we have discussed so far in African American Literature, one of the chief concerns of African American writers of the Renaissance was the positioning of the folk within the literary heritage. That is, whether one should consider dialect poetry and the acknowledgment of the folk aesthetic as part of an evolving African American art form. Gates points out that during the Harlem Renaissance, that critics relegated dialect poetry to the "expression of humor and pathos" . Poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar, to relative effect, insisted dialect verse as a vital art form, and elevated the spoken word of African American 'folk' as a recognized and legitimate artistic expression. Perhaps to even greater extent, poet Sterling A. Brown, has been heralded as the master of dialect poetry--particularly in the estimation of James Weldon Johnson(1248). Howard University's website informs us that "Professor Brown devoted his life to the development of...

Ida B. Wells Symposium @ Rhodes Posted on September 24, 2012 by midsouthstudies To celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Ida B. Wells’ birth, Rhodes College is holding a symposium to celebrate her activism in Memphis. Wells (1862-1931) came of age in Memphis, moving to the city in 1880. She was forced to flee Memphis for her anti-lynching journalism in 1892. Monday, October 29 ■Memphis Center Public Christening 5:00 pm Memphis Center ■Paula Giddings, keynote lecture, “A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching,” BCLC 6:30 pm Tuesday, October 30 ■Amy Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle: Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Activism, and the Use of Photography as Testimony” 4:00 pm in Blount Auditorium ■Reception in Buckman Hall Lobby ■Theatrical Performance of Iola: A One-act Reflection on Wells’ Memphis Years, 6:00 pm in Hardie Auditorium. Co-written by Dave Mason and Rychetta Watkins