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Article

Albert Batista, Celsa Altagracia  

Marlene Daut

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 28 July 1942 to Charles Albert and Rosa Batista on a batey (sugarcane worker community) in Guaymate, La Romana Province, Dominican Republic. Albert’s father was from St. Kitts and Nevis, while her mother was a Dominican from Santiago de los Caballeros who later moved to La Romana, where they met and married. Charles Albert was a member of the so-called cocolo community, a somewhat pejorative term for blacks from the English-speaking Caribbean who settled in the Dominican Republic.

Born, raised, and educated on a batey, where living conditions were often deplorable and educational opportunities were limited and often difficult to obtain, Albert overcame many challenges and completed her primary and secondary education. Upon the death of her father in 1958 she the eldest child had to work to help support her family while attending school Her first professional job was as an elementary school teacher ...

Article

Anthony, Michael  

Desha Osborne

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 10 February 1932 in Lagon Mahoe, Mayaro, in southeastern Trinidad to Nathaniel and Eva Anthony. In 1936 Anthony’s family moved to Post Office Hill, also in Mayaro. In 1942 Nathaniel died from heart disease, and a year later Anthony was sent to live and attend school in San Fernando, where he lived for one year. In 1944 he returned to San Fernando to study at the Junior Technical School. These early experiences with the declining health and eventual death of his father, and a year spent in San Fernando, would serve as the inspiration for various plot elements found in his first three novels. In 1946 he apprenticed at Trinidad Leaseholds Ltd., which later became part of Texaco Inc., where he trained as a molder, subsequently finding employment in an iron foundry at the Pointe-à-Pierre oil refinery. Starting in 1952 Anthony began submitting poetry to the ...

Article

Ardouin, Charles Nicolas Céligny  

Lesley S. Curtis

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

from a prominent Haitian family of both European and African ancestry. Céligny’s date of birth is listed as 1801 on a birth certificate filed in 1805, which has created some confusion as to his real age. His father was Alexis Antoine Ardouin and his mother was Lolotte Félix Galez. Birth certificates of his younger siblings reveal that he grew up in close contact with his father, his father’s wife, Suzanne Léger Ardouin, and their seven children, including the famous historian Beaubrun Ardouin and the poet Corolian Ardouin. Céligny married Marie Angélique Liautaud in 1823 and had six children.

Céligny’s most significant work, Essais sur l’histoire d’Haïti (Essays on the History of Haiti) was written and published in sections in the late 1830s. It appeared as a revised collection in 1841, but was only published in its entirety in 1865 sixteen years after the author s death Beaubrun ...

Article

Bâ, Amadou Hampaté  

Christopher Wise

Article

Publication History:

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

Malian diplomat, ethnographer, devout Muslim, and defender of traditional African culture, was born in 1901 in Bandiagara, Mali, capital of the Toucouleur Empire of the Macina Fulani, which was founded by the Tidjaniya jihadist al-Hajj ʿUmar Tal. At the time of Bâ’s birth, the French had been in control of Bandiagara for nearly a decade. His father, Hampâté, a Fulani militant from Fakala, died two years after Bâ was born. His mother, Kadidja Pâté, was the daughter of Pâté Poullou, a close personal companion of al-Hajj ʿUmar Tal. After her husband’s death, Kadidja remarried Tidjani Amadou Ali Thiam, a Toucouleur Fulani and Louta chief, who became Bâ’s adoptive father. At an early age, Bâ became intimate with Tierno Bokar Tall, the renowned “sage of Bandiagara,” who was his lifelong teacher, spiritual guide, and personal mentor. In 1912 Bâ was enrolled in the French colonialist School of the Hostages remaining ...

Article

Bâ, Amadou Hampâté  

Kenneth Harrow

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
27 April 2010
Published online:
30 September 2012

Amadou Hampâté Bâ once wrote that every time an elderly man dies in Africa it is as if a library has burned down. Bâ was the most effective advocate, spokesperson, and writer of what we have come to associate with traditional Africa; that is, the Africa whose texts were oral creations, whose authors were performers of epics as well as tales, whose heroes were both rulers and tricksters, and whose religions encompassed both Islam and those of the Bambara or Mande, Fulbe, Soninke, and other West African communities.

Born in Mali around 1900 Bâ was raised in the region of Bandiagara where the influence of El Hadj Omar s conquests were still being felt having marked much of the Sahel with a strong Islamic character El Hadj Omar was the major figure of resistance to the French during the period of early colonialism in the second half of the ...

Article

Bâ, Amadou Hampaté  

Richard Watts

Article

Publication History:

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

Amadou Hampaté Bâ was born in the town of Bandiagara, approximately 500 km (300 mi) northeast of Bamako, Mali, and belonged to an important family of Marabouts (Muslim religious leaders). Bâ’s father died when he was two years old, and he was adopted and raised by a chief in the region. Educated at French schools in Bandiagara and Djenné, about 200 km (124 mi) from Bandiagara, Bâ nonetheless managed to continue his traditional Islamic education with famed Islamic teacher Tierno Bokar, a man whose wisdom Bâ later immortalized in Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar (The Life and Teachings of Tierno Bokar, 1980 It was also at this time that Bâ encountered Kullel a storyteller and traditional educator who gave Bâ his first lessons in the African oral tradition Bâ later earned the nickname Amkullel Little Kullel and he honored his teacher by titling the first volume ...

Article

Barbosa, Pilar  

Carmen Rosario

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 4 July 1897 in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, one of twelve children of José Celso Barbosa, among the most prominent Puerto Rican politicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Belen Sanchez. Pilar received her primary and secondary education in her hometown, where early on she was immersed in politics. Her father, a black man who graduated first in his class at the University of Michigan, was a leader of the autonomist movement that demanded autonomy for Puerto Rico from the Spanish government at the end of the nineteenth century as well as the founder of the Partido Republicano (Republican Party) in 1899, which advocated statehood for Puerto Rico following the American invasion of the island the prior year. After graduating from high school, Pilar attended the University of Puerto Rico. While still an undergraduate, in 1921 she became the first woman and certainly ...

Article

Barboza, Anthony  

crystal am nelson

Article

Publication History:

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

photographer, writer, and historian, was born Anthony Barboza in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to Lillian Barboza, a homemaker, and Anthony Barboza Sr., a Fuller Brush salesman. Anthony Jr. was one of eight sons, one of whom was also an award-winning photographer and two of whom were well-known journalists. Barboza began his career in 1964, when he studied under Roy DeCarava in New York City at the Kamoinge Workshop, cofounded in 1963 as a response to the negative and biased representation of African Americans in mainstream media, with DeCarava serving as Kamoinge's first director. The group, which continued into the twenty-first century as Kamoinge, Inc., used photography to document and celebrate African American experiences.

Between 1965 and 1968 Barboza served as a photojournalist in the United States Navy Upon opening his commercial photo studio in New York City a year after being discharged he began shooting ...

Article

Beasley, Delilah Isontium  

Lisa Clayton Robinson

Article

Publication History:

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

Delilah Isontium Beasley was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Margaret and Daniel Beasley. She began her career in journalism by writing for the Cleveland Gazette at age twelve; by age fifteen she had a regular column in the Sunday Cincinnati Enquirer. Following the death of her parents while she was still a teenager, Beasley looked for another full-time job to support herself, and she pursued a career as a trained masseuse. But when she followed a client to California in 1910, she resumed her original interest in journalism.

Beasley wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Oakland Tribune called “Activities Among Negroes” for the next twenty years. She spoke out against Racial Stereotypes and discrimination throughout her career. One of her most significant contributions to journalism was her campaign to stop the use of derogatory terms, such as darky and nigger to refer to African ...

Article

Beasley, Delilah Leontium  

Kristal Brent Zook

Article

Publication History:

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

journalist and historian of the early West, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the eldest of five children of Daniel Beasley, an engineer, and Margaret (Heines) Beasley, a homemaker. Although little is known about her childhood, at the age of twelve Beasley published her first writings in the black-owned newspaper, the Cleveland Gazette. By the time she was fifteen she was working as a columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, becoming the first African American woman to write for a mainstream newspaper on a regular basis.

Beasley lost both parents as a teenager and was forced to take a full-time job working as a domestic laborer for the family of a white judge named Hagan. Her career then took several unusual turns as Beasley, who was described by biographer Lorraine Crouchett as short well proportioned and speaking in a shrill light voice perhaps because of a chronic hearing ...

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

Bolden, Frank E.  

Michelle K. Massie

Article

Publication History:

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

journalist and historian, was born Franklin Eugene Bolden Jr. in Washington County, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three sons of Franklin Eugene Bolden Sr., the first black mail carrier in the city of Washington, Pennsylvania, and Mary Woods Bolden. Frank Bolden's parents instilled in him the importance of education and achievement at an early age. His father often told him, “When you're average, you are just as far from the bottom as you are from the top” (Rouvalis, Post‐Gazette). With that mentality, Bolden's life was anything but average.

Bolden attended the Washington public school system and graduated from high school in 1930 He went on to attend the University of Pittsburgh where he was the first African American to play in the university s varsity marching and concert bands He said in a documentary film about his life that his audition for the band was ...

Article

Bolivar, William Carl  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

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

book collector, historian, and journalist, was born in Philadelphia to George Bolivar, and Elizabeth LeCount Proctor Bolivar. There is some uncertainty about his precise year of birth, with historians suggesting 1844 (Silcox) or 1849 (Welborn), while census data inclines toward an 1847 date. His father was employed as a sailmaker by James Forten, a local businessman and founder of the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons.

The family numbered themselves among the “O.P.”—Old Philadelphians—of the African American community. George Bolivar had been born in Philadelphia, to a Pennsylvania-born mother and a father from North Carolina. Elizabeth Bolivar was born in Pennsylvania to parents born in Maryland (1850 census). In 1850George Bolivar owned real estate valued at $8,000, while a North Carolina–born cousin, Nicholas Bolivar, lived with the family, working as a tailor. Throughout Bolivar s life there were relatives or ...

Article

Bonnet, Guy-Joseph  

Jeremy D. Popkin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

an ambitious free man of color in the French colony of Saint-Domingue at the time of the Haitian Revolution, played a role in that group’s revolt against white rule in the 1790s, and was involved in all the major episodes of Haitian politics in the country’s first decades of independence. According to the memoirs published by his son Edmond Bonnet in France in 1864, Bonnet was born in Léogane, a few miles west of the present day capital, Port-au-Prince in 1775; other sources put his birth in 1772 or 1773. His paternal grandfather was a merchant from Nantes; his mother, who was responsible for his education, was a négresse libre. Employed as a clerk in a French merchant’s office, he followed the events of the French Revolution in the newspapers that reached the colony and was inspired by the ideals of liberty and equality.

Bonnet joined ...

Article

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau  

Evan Mwangi

Article

Publication History:

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

Caribbean poet, historian, dramatist, and cultural theorist, was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite to Hilton Brathwaite, a warehouse clerk, and Beryl Gill on 11 May 1930 in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados. He was later given the name “Kamau,” a common name in central Kenya, by the writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s mother, when Brathwaite visited Kenya as a guest of the University of Nairobi in the 1970s. For his early education, Braithwaite attended the Harrison College, an elite school in Barbados, beginning in 1945. He started writing poetry at an early age, publishing some of it in the school magazine, The Harrisonian, which he cofounded, and later in the audacious magazine Bim, edited by Frank Collymore, an eminent man of letters in the British Caribbean. Some of this early poetry was later collected in Brathwaite’s Other Exiles (1975).

In 1949 Brathwaite won the Barbados Scholarship to attend ...

Article

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau  

Balthazar Becker

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown, Barbados, to Beryl Brathwaite (née Gill) and Hilton Edward Brathwaite, a warehouse clerk, on 11 May 1930. He was born the same year as the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott, to whom he has consistently been compared. Growing up in a middle-class environment, Brathwaite published his first poems in a school journal he cofounded while he studied, from 1945 to 1949, at the renowned Harrison College in Bridgetown.

An excellent student, Brathwaite earned himself the competitive Barbados Island Scholarship to enroll at Cambridge University’s Pembroke College in 1950, where he studied English and history, receiving a B.A. in history in 1953 and a diploma in education in 1954. During this time, Brathwaite began publishing poetry, short stories, and criticism in Bim a West Indian literary journal edited by Frank Collymore and based in Barbados to which he continued ...

Article

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau  

Lisa Clayton Robinson

Article

Publication History:

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

Many critics in the English-speaking Caribbean consider Edward Kamau Brathwaite the most important West Indian poet. Although Brathwaite is also a scholar and educator, he is best known for his poetry, which makes use of West Indian dialect and asks questions about roots and inheritance, matters of concern to Africans across the diaspora. (As Brathwaite puts it in one well-known line, “where is the nigger's home?”) Ghanaian author Kofi Awoonor has called Brathwaite “a poet of the total African consciousness.”

Brathwaite was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1930. He attended Harrison College, where he published his earliest work in the school paper that he and several friends cofounded. In 1949 Brathwaite won the prestigious Barbados Island Scholarship to Cambridge University in England, where he received a B.A. degree in history in 1953 and a certificate in education in 1955.

While at Cambridge Brathwaite published ...

Article

Brathwaite, Kamau  

Elaine Savory

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
27 April 2010
Published online:
30 September 2012

Kamau Brathwaite, born Edward Lawson in Barbados in 1930, has had a very distinguished career as a poet, historian, and cultural theorist. His historical work contributed greatly to the understanding of creolization as a process and his term “nation language” has been enormously important in the recognition of the wide range of Creole languages in the Caribbean. But he has also been a critical intellectual and creative force in bringing subordinated African cultural elements to the fore in Caribbean culture. His own adoption of an African name is a powerful symbol of his conscious affiliation with Africa.

Although the majority of the population of Barbados is of African descent African thought and culture were only present in subordinated cultural practices after the systematic erasure of ancestral memories of African slaves by the plantation system and British colonial education Educated at Cambridge in history Brathwaite then worked in the ...

Article

Brodber, Erna  

Andrea A. Davis

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born on 20 April 1940 in the rural Jamaican village of Woodside, St. Mary. Her parents, Ernest Brodber, a farmer, and Lucy Brodber, a teacher, provided important models for her later development as a scholar and academic firmly rooted in the values of community. Brodber credits her maternal grandmother, Eva Harris, however, as her most important early influence. Harris raised seven children on her own after her husband died, earning a living as a cane farmer and using the sugar produced from her farm to make baked goods for sale. An entrepreneur before her time, she was the symbol of black women’s strength and creativity that Brodber later came to value and embody. Brodber attended Excelsior High School in Jamaica and earned a B.A. in history, with honors, from the University College of the West Indies in 1963, and an M.Sc. in sociology (1968 and Ph ...

Article

Bruce, John E.  

John C. Gruesser

Article

Publication History:

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

Born a slave in Maryland, John Edward Bruce grew up in Washington, D.C. Developing an interest in journalism, he worked as a general helper in the office of the Washington correspondent for the New York Times in 1874. By the time Bruce was twenty he was writing for newspapers, using the pen name “Rising Sun”, and in 1879 he started his own paper, the Argus, in Washington, D.C. In 1884 Bruce began writing under the name “Bruce Grit” in the Cleveland Gazette and the New York Age, eventually becoming one of the most widely read and influential African American journalists of his era. In his writings and speeches, Bruce decried mixed-race marriages, denounced Euro-American imperialism, aggressively promoted race pride and solidarity, championed self-help, and advocated the study of black history to combat the anti-Negro rhetoric of the post-Reconstruction period.

Bruce served as a conduit linking people ...