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  • Before 1400: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds x
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Article

Allen, Geri Antoinette  

Ronald P. Dufour

Article

Publication History:

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

pianist and composer, was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Mount Vernell Allen Jr., a principal in the Detroit public school system, and Barbara Jean Allen, a defense contract administrator for the federal government. She began studying classical piano at age seven but was also exposed to jazz at an early age. She met the trumpeter Marcus Belgrave when he was an artist-in-residence at her high school, Cass Technical; she studied jazz piano with him, and he became an important mentor, appearing on several of her later recordings. Allen also studied at the Jazz Development Workshop, a community-based organization.

After graduating from high school, Allen attended Howard University, where she was captivated by the music of Thelonious Monk and studied with John Malachi. In 1979 she earned a BA in Jazz Studies and taught briefly at Howard before moving to New York City where she ...

Article

Jones, Rev. Thomas H.  

Steve Strimer

Article

Publication History:

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

Methodist minister, abolitionist lecturer, and self-emancipated slave, was born to slave parents, Grace and Tony Kirkwood, at the Hawes plantation in Hanover county near Wilmington, North Carolina. About 1815 he was sold to a storekeeper from whom he took his surname. After his escape to Massachusetts, Jones became a tireless speaker on the antislavery circuit in New England. The principal source of information for his early life is his widely circulated slave narrative, The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years. First published in 1850, his book went through at least nine printings.

Thomas succeeded in learning to read despite the disapproval of Mr. Jones, the storekeeper. Thomas was converted to Christianity around 1824. He attended services at a neighboring plantation against the objections of his irreligious owner. Upon Mr. Jones's death in 1829 Thomas began to ...

Article

Kebe, Lamine  

Allan D. Austin

Article

Publication History:

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

Muslim teacher who is variously known as Kibbe, Lamen Abd al-Amin, and Paul. Beyond two short notices in the African [Colonization Society's] Repository (1835) and a mention in a list of Liberian colonists, all that is known about Kebe was recorded by Theodore Dwight Jr., African Colonizationist and a founder and secretary of the American Ethnological Society.

Lamine Kebe was born into a prominent family of the influential Kaba, or Kebe, of the Jakhanke clan of the Soninke or Serahule people. These were the founders of ancient Ghana, according to some accounts, and, more conclusively, twelfth-century converts to Islam from an area near the bend of the Niger River in present-day Mali. A short history of his people by Kebe accurately but sketchily describes the migration of a pragmatic, dedicated Qāadirīya brotherhood of teachers of Islam toward Kebe's Futa Jallon (home of Bilali ...

Article

Stockton, Betsey  

Barbara Bennett Peterson

Article

Publication History:

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

educator and missionary, was born in slavery of unrecorded parentage. As a child Betsey was given by her owner, Robert Stockton, as a wedding gift to his daughter when she married the Reverend Ashbel Green, the president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Most of Betsey Stockton's early life was passed as a slave domestic in the Green home at Princeton, except for four years that she spent with Green's nephew Nathaniel Todd when she was an adolescent. At Todd's she underwent a period of training intended to instill more piety in her demeanor, which had not been developed in the affectionate, indulgent Green household. Stockton returned to the Green home in 1816 and was baptized in the Presbyterian church at Princeton in 1817 or 1818 having given evidence through speech and deportment of her conversion to Christian ways At the time of ...

Article

Twilight, Alexander Lucius  

Sholomo B. Levy

Article

Publication History:

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

educator, minister, and legislator, was born in Corinth, Vermont, the son of Ichabod Twilight, a free African American farmer who served with the Second New Hampshire Regiment during the Revolutionary War, and Mary Twilight (whose maiden name is now unknown). Some historians believe that the name “Twilight” might have been chosen as an apt description of Ichabod Twilight's racial identity, which was somewhere between white and black—although legally he was black. Mary was probably also of mixed race, but she could have been a white woman who was described as “colored” in Corinth town records because she was married to a black man. Ichabod and Mary had started their family in Plattsburgh, New York, before moving first to Bradford, Vermont, in 1792 and then to Corinth in 1795 where they became the first black settlers in the township Alexander was the third of their six ...

Article

Uncle Jack  

R. Iset Anuakan

Article

Publication History:

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

preacher, teacher, and ex-slave, was born in Africa. Kidnapped and brought to America at age seven, the man later referred to alternately as “Uncle Jack” and “the African Preacher” was sold into slavery and resided in Nottoway County, Virginia. Very little is known of his early life, family, and exact place of origin before 1753 when he was purchased on the docks of the James River by a man named Stewart. He grew into manhood in Nottoway County, performing various plantation labors. At the age of forty, he encountered several missionaries who traveled throughout Virginia. They introduced him to tenets of the Bible, coaxing him in what would become his greatest vocation and earn him the title of “African Preacher.” Christianity's essential ideas of grace, salvation, and the resurrected life inspired him out of the despair and bleak condition of slavery.

Jack hungered to learn more and ...

Article

Wansharisi, Ahmad al-  

David S. Powers

Article

Publication History:

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

Maliki scholar, jurist, and mufti, was born in Jabal Wansharis (Ouarsenis), a mountain massif in the Central Algerian Tell, 31 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Algiers. When Ahmad was five years old, his father moved the family to Tlemcen, where he studied the Qurʾan, Arabic language, and Maliki law and jurisprudence with distinguished scholars.

In 1469 at the age of forty al Wansharisi incurred the wrath of the Zayyanid sultan Muhammad IV who ordered that his house be ransacked and plundered Leaving everything behind al Wansharisi fled to Fez where he was welcomed by the scholarly community receiving food and shelter from the jurist Muhammad al Sughayyir He moved into a house near the Muʿallaq mosque in the Sharratin quarter of Fez al Qarawiyyin and was appointed professor of Maliki law at the Madrasa Misbahiyya His knowledge of the law was proverbial He who has not studied with al ...