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Article

Acholonu, Catherine Obianuju  

Marie Umeh

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Nigerian writer, also known as Catherine Obianuju Acholonu-Olumba, was born on 26 October 1951 in Orlu of Igbo parentage. The daughter of Chief Lazarus Emejuru Olumba and Josephine Olumba of Umuokwara Village in the town of Orlu in Imo State, southeastern Nigeria, she obtained her early education at local primary and secondary schools in Orlu. At age seventeen, in an arranged marriage, she became the wife of Douglas Acholonu, a surgeon then living in Germany, by whom she had four children: Ifunanya, Nneka, Chidozie, and Kelechi. In 1974 she registered as a student of English and American language and literature and Germanic linguistics at the University of Dusseldorf and earned a master’s degree in her chosen field in 1977.

Upon returning to Nigeria in 1980, she accepted a teaching appointment at Alvan Ikoku College of Education in Owerri. While teaching, Acholonu was also writing her PhD dissertation. In 1982 ...

Article

Aptheker, Herbert  

Charles Orson Cook

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

one of the most prolific white scholars of African American history in the twentieth century. Herbert Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1915 and was educated at Columbia University in the 1930s, where he took an undergraduate degree in geology and an MA and a PhD in history. His first important publication, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), was based on his doctoral dissertation and challenged the prevailing wisdom that slaves were largely passive victims of white masters. In part an outgrowth of Aptheker's master's thesis on Nat Turner, American Negro Slave Revolts immediately became a controversial work and has remained so since. He was befriended by the influential African American historian Carter G. Woodson and the legendary black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, both of whom encouraged his interest in Negro history. Aptheker's other writings include a seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People ...

Article

Bellegarde, Dantès  

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Dantès Bellegarde was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1877. His family had long been at the center of Haitian politics. Bellegarde's mother was Marie Boisson and his father Jean-Louis Bellegarde. His maternal great-grandfather, Jacques Ignace Fresnel, was named judge by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a leader of the Haitian Revolution, who became the first leader of the independent state in 1804 and soon proclaimed himself Emperor Jean-Jacques I. This same great-grandfather was later minister of justice under President Jean-Pierre Boyer, who ruled all of Haiti from 1820 to 1843. Bellegarde's paternal grandfather, Jean-Louis de Bellegarde, was a duke and marshal in Haiti's second empire during the rule of Faustin Soulouque, who declared himself emperor and ruled from 1847 to 1859. Bellegarde's aunt, Argentine Bellegarde (1842–1901), was a noted educator and an early feminist. Bellegarde married Cécile Savain (1875–1965 ...

Article

Bogle, Donald E.  

Jody Benjamin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

film and television historian, was born in Philadelphia to Roslyn, a homemaker and arts advocate, and John Dudley Bogle, vice president and advertising director of the Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest continually published black newspaper in the country. Bogle's father was educated at the Virginia Theological Seminary where his maternal grandfather, Robert Clisson Woods, had also been president. His father had studied history and was a charismatic speaker on behalf of African Americans' civil rights. Bogle's mother decided against college and eloped with John Bogle when she was a teenager. Because of her upbringing in a highly educated family, however, she had developed a deep knowledge and appreciation for the arts and culture, which she passed on to her children.

While Bogle was still an infant his large family moved to a suburb of Philadelphia and he grew up in a predominately white middle class community Bogle ...

Article

Bontemps, Arna  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Arna Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, to parents of Creole descent who eventually converted to the Seventh-Day Adventist faith. While Arna was young, the Bontemps family moved to Los Angeles, California. The childhood loss of his mother and the stern upbringing by his pragmatic father affected him deeply. His father hoped, mistakenly, that his son would make the family trade of masonry his life's work. Educated at Seventh-Day Adventist institutions, Bontemps graduated from Pacific Union College in 1923. In 1924 he took a teaching job at the Harlem Academy in New York City.

Literary notice and success came early to Bontemps. His creativity and social conscience were excited by the cultural vitality he found in New York in the 1920s. By 1926 his poetry had appeared in two of the most important journals of the period, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ...

Article

Bontemps, Arna Wendell  

Robert E. Fleming

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

writer, was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of Paul Bismark Bontemps, a bricklayer, and Maria Carolina Pembroke, a schoolteacher. He was reared in Los Angeles, where his family moved when he was three. He graduated from Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, in 1923.Bontemps then moved to Harlem, New York, where the Harlem Renaissance had already attracted the attention of West Coast intellectuals. He found a teaching job at the Harlem Academy in 1924 and began to publish poetry. He won the Alexander Pushkin Prize from Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League, in 1926 and 1927 and The Crisis (official journal of the NAACP) Poetry Prize in 1926. His career soon intersected that of the poet Langston Hughes, with whom he became a close friend and sometime collaborator. In Harlem, Bontemps also came to know Countée Cullen, W ...

Article

Brown, Claude  

David L. Dudley

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 February 2001
Published online:
01 December 2006

Claude Brown was born in New York City on 23 February 1937 to Henry Lee and Ossie Brock Brown, South Carolinians who had come north in 1935 looking for economic opportunities unavailable in the South. Growing up in Harlem involved Claude Brown in crime and violence early in his life. By the time he was ten, he had joined the stealing division of a notorious street gang and had a history of truancy and expulsion from school. At eleven, Brown was sent to the Wiltwyck school for delinquent boys, where he came under the supervision of Dr. Ernest Papanek, whose positive influence in his life Brown would later acknowledge.

Back on the streets after two years at Wiltwyck at age thirteen Brown was shot during an attempted robbery A year later he was sent to the Warwick school for boys where he completed three terms before his final ...

Article

Brown, Claude  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Claude Brown was born in New York City, the son of Ossie Brock Brown, a domestic worker, and Henry Lee, a railroad worker. In 1963 Brown began writing Manchild in the Promised Land; it was published in 1965. The book tells of his troubled childhood in Harlem, New York, where he ran with a gang and was in and out of reform schools.

Brown abandoned street life, resumed his education, and was awarded a grant to study government at Howard University. He graduated from Howard in 1965, studied law at Stanford University, and then studied at Rutgers University, which he left in 1968 without a degree. In 1976 he published The Children of Ham about struggling young blacks in Harlem Brown was working on a third book about the traumatic impact of violence on the young when he died of lung ...

Article

Bryant, Ira Babington, Jr.  

Teresa Tomkins-Walsh

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2014

teacher, historian, author, and lecturer, son of Ellen and Ira B. Bryant Sr., was born in Crockett, Texas, on 18 October 1904. Both Ira Sr. and Ellen were educators. When the family moved to Houston in 1920, Bryant Jr. entered Colored High School (later Booker T. Washington High School). Ira Bryant graduated in January 1924, and then worked aboard a ship to save money for college and travel. Bryant attended Fisk University in Tennessee from 1924 to 1928, graduating with a bachelor's degree. He finished his master's degree at the University of Kansas in 1934 and his Doctorate in Education from the University of Southern California in 1948.

In 1929 Bryant began teaching social science at Phillis Wheatley High School in Houston. Working as a teacher, Bryant wrote and published The Development of the Houston Negro Schools (1936 During ...

Article

Bryant, Thelma Scott  

Teresa Tomkins-Walsh

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2014

author, historian, teacher, and pianist, was born Olga Thelma Scott on 26 September 1905 in Houston's Third Ward, the only child of Ella and Walter Scott. Ella Scott, the daughter of slaves, was a full-time wife and mother; she was an excellent seamstress who sewed for her family but also taught neighbors to sew clothes, make quilts, and embroider. Walter Scott worked in a tobacco shop. Later, he followed in his father's footsteps to become a mail carrier, delivering mail to the homes of elite white families in the Second Ward.

Encouraged by the example of her paternal uncle, Emmett J. Scott, Bryant studied hard. She spoke as salutatorian at her Douglass Elementary School graduation in 1918 presenting her essay America s Share Is Our Share Bryant s family expected her to attend college and she expected to study out of state Although there ...

Article

Burch, Charles Eaton  

Florence M. Coleman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

educator, literary scholar, and biographer of the English novelist Daniel Defoe, was one of five sons born to Helena Burch in Saint George's, Bermuda. Nothing is known of his father. Charles Burch was educated in the elementary and secondary schools of Bermuda. Burch met and married Willa Carter Mayer, who at one time served as a professor of education at Miner Teacher's College in Washington, D.C. She also served as a supervisory official of the public schools of the District of Columbia and authored Clinical Practices in Public School Education (1944). Whether or not they had children is not known.

Burch attended Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, from which he was awarded a BA in 1914. Four years later, he earned a MA from Columbia University. Fifteen years later in 1933 he was awarded a PhD in English from Ohio State University He taught ...

Article

Burch, Charles Eaton  

Charlotte Crawford Watkins

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Charles Eaton Burch was born on July 14, 1891, in Bermuda. His early education was in the elementary and secondary schools of Bermuda, and his advanced training was in the United States, at Wilberforce University (B.A., 1914), Columbia University (M.A., 1918), and Ohio State University (Ph.D., 1933). He taught in the academic department of Tuskegee Institute in 1916 and 1917, and from 1918 to 1921 he taught at Wilberforce as an instructor in English. In 1921 he was appointed to the faculty of Howard University, where he served, successively, as assistant professor (1921–1924), associate professor (1924–1936), and professor of English, and as acting head and (from 1933) head of the Department of English until his death on March 23, 1948 In addition to his work as a scholar Burch made two major contributions to Howard University In ...

Article

Cadornega, António de Oliveira  

Orquídea Ribeiro

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Portuguese soldier, chronicler, and historian, was born in Vila Viçosa, Portugal, the son of the New Christian family of António de Cadornega e Oliveira and Antónia Simões Correia (“New Christian” referring to Iberian Jews who had converted to Catholicism). His mother and sister, Violante de Azevedo, were accused of continuing to practice Judaism, however, and incarcerated during the Spanish Inquisition.

Cadornega and his brother Manuel studied Latin and Portuguese with the Friars of St. Augustine in Vila Viçosa. In 1639 when the boys were of age to enter university their father wanted them to pursue further studies Instead they decided to go to Angola and volunteered for the military They asked the Duke of Braganza the future king John IV to write a letter of recommendation to be presented to the newly appointed Governor General Pedro César de Menezes The brothers boarded the same ship as the Governor General ...

Article

Carbonell, Walterio  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Article

Cromwell, John Wesley  

Stephen Gilroy Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

lawyer and historian, was born a slave in Portsmouth, Virginia, the son of Willis Hodges Cromwell, a ferry operator, and Elizabeth Carney. In 1851Cromwell's father purchased the family's freedom and moved to West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Cromwell attended public school. In 1856 he was admitted to the Preparatory Department of the Institute of Colored Youth. Graduating in 1864, he embarked on a teaching career. He taught in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and in 1865 opened a private school in Portsmouth, Virginia. Cromwell left teaching temporarily after an assault in which he was shot at and his school burned down. He returned to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was employed by the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Intellectual Improvement of Colored People. Then he served as an agent for the American Missionary Association and went back to Virginia. In 1867 he became active in local politics serving as a ...

Article

Dance, Daryl Cumber  

Tiffany Adams

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

folklorist, writer, and educator, was born Daryl Cumber in Richmond, Virginia, the only child of Allen Whitfield Cumber, a proprietor of a restaurant and tavern, and Veronica Bell, a teacher. Raised in Charles City, Virginia, she earned her B.A. degree in English in 1957 from Virginia State College (now known as Virginia State University), a historically black institution located just outside of Richmond in Petersburg, Virginia. In 1958 she married Warren Dance and had three children, two sons and one daughter. She continued to pursue her English studies at Virginia State College and earned her M.A. in English there in 1963.

Dance taught at both Virginia Union and Armstrong High School of Richmond before earning her Ph.D. in English in 1971 at the University of Virginia which was by then an integrated institution Although Dance and her family had deep roots in Virginia ...

Article

Dash, Leon Decosta, Jr.  

Joshunda Sanders

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, was born Leon DeCosta Dash Jr. in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the son of Leon Dash Sr. and Ruth Dash. His father worked as a postal clerk (and eventually a supervisor) and his mother was employed as an administrator for New York City's Health Department. Dash was raised in the Bronx and Harlem, New York, and originally aspired to become a lawyer. His interest shifted to journalism while he worked as an editor of the school newspaper at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. He studied at Lincoln for two and a half years before transferring to Howard University in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s. He found work steam-cleaning building exteriors, but in winter the work was too challenging for him, so in 1965 he started working indoors at the Washington Post as a copy person He worked the lobster shift ...

Article

Davis, Charles Twitchell  

Dorsia Smith Silva

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2015

educator and writer, was born in Hampton, Virginia and raised in a middle-class family. After receiving his bachelor's degree in American literature from Dartmouth College in 1939, Davis attended the University of Chicago and became a great enthusiast of the Harlem Renaissance. His master's thesis on the Harlem Renaissance was acclaimed by his professors and marked the beginning of his reputation as a dedicated scholar. Davis graduated with a master's degree in American Studies in 1942 and then entered the army to serve his country in World War II. While he steadily rose to the rank of a captain, he decided to return to academia as an instructor in American Civilizations and doctoral student in American literature at New York University in 1948 Being in a new academic setting inspired Davis to pursue a variety of literary interests such as the historical and cultural influences of poetry ...

Article

Deschamps Chapeaux, Pedro  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux was born in Havana, Cuba. His notable works include: El negro en el periodismo cubano en el siglo XIX (The Black in Nineteenth Century Cuban Journalism; 1963); El negro en la economía habanera del siglo XIX (The Black in the Nineteenth Century Havana Economy; 1970 ...

Article

Desdunes, Rodolphe Lucien  

Dorothea Olga McCants

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Rodolphe Desdunes was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 15, 1849, the oldest of several children of Jeremiah and Henrietta Desdunes. His mother was a Cuban; his father was a Haitian whose forbears came to New Orleans, presumably during the 1791 revolution in Saint Domingue. Rodolphe Desdunes's education was most probably provided by his parents, friends, colleagues such as Armand Lanusse and Joanni Questy, and attendance at the Bernard Couvent Institute of New Orleans. Both Rodolphe and his brother, poet Pierre A. Desdunes, served as directors of this institute. Desdunes married Mathilde Chaval of Point Coupee Parish and New Orleans. Of this union were born six children, two boys and four girls: Wendell, Daniel, Cortiza, Agens, Lucille, and Jeanne. Their home was at 928 Marais Street, New Orleans.

Desdunes was not inclined toward working on the family s tobacco plantation or in the family ...