Go There To Know There

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (July 18, 1918-December 5, 2013)

"Born April 20, 1940 in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica, Erna Brodber grew up the daughter of a family acitve in the community affairs of their small town. She immersed herself in academia perhaps more than most other Caribbean authors, gaining a B.A. from the University College of the West Indies (now simply University of the West Indies) and ultimately attaining an M.Sc and Ph.D. She pursued many other professions before focusing on writing, including the posts of civil servant, teacher, sociology lecturer, and fellow/staff member of the Institute for Social and Economic Research in Mona, Jamaica. While at the ISER Brodber worked to collect the oral histories of elders in rural Jamaica, a project that would later inspire her novel Louisiana .  "While studying as a young woman in the United States, Brodber encountered two powerful forces she had not previously been exposed to: the Black Power and Women's Liberation movements. Coupled with her ...

"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...