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first African AmericanPatent Examiner, a lawyer, and author of The Colored Inventor: A Record of Fifty Years (Crisis Publishing Co., 1913) and other works on black inventors and scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, was born in Columbus, Mississippi. Little is known of his parents or his early life in Columbus, except that he attended public schools and the Columbus Union Academy. Toward the end of Reconstruction, in June 1874, he was selected to attend the Annapolis, Maryland, naval academy by white Congressman Henry W. Barry R Mississippi who had commanded black troops for the union Army during the Civil War Despite government and naval policies during this period directing the military to integrate the first two African American cadets failed to survive intense hazing taunting assaults and social isolation from classmates and left before graduation Still Congressman Barry originally from New ...

poet, playwright, educator, and activist, was born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, the eldest of two children to Coyette Leroy Jones, a postal supervisor, and Anna Lois Russ, a social worker. Jones's lineage included teachers, preachers, and shop owners who elevated his family into Newark's modest, though ambitious, black middle class. His own neighborhood was black, but the Newark of Jones's youth was mostly white and largely Italian. He felt isolated and embattled at McKinley Junior High and Barringer High School, yet he excelled in his studies, played the trumpet, ran track, and wrote comic strips.

Graduating from high school with honors at age fifteen, Jones entered the Newark branch of Rutgers University on a science scholarship. In 1952 after his first year he transferred to Howard University hoping to find a sense of purpose at a black college that had ...

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the leading agent of change and promoter of a new “relevant” black literature of the 1960s, influenced the development of contemporary black letters. Amiri Baraka is the author of twenty plays, three jazz operas, seven books of nonfiction, and thirteen volumes of poetry. Born Everett Jones in Newark, New Jersey, he is the son of Coyette Jones, a postal worker and elevator operator, and Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker. Baraka graduated with honors from Newark’s Barringer High School in 1951 at the age of fifteen and received a scholarship to Rutgers University in Newark. A year later, “LeRoi” transferred to Howard University, where he remained briefly before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1954. Stationed at Ramsey Field, Puerto Rico, for two years, he read extensively, wrote poetry, and traveled to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

In 1957 ...

Amiri Baraka was a highly productive writer who has written poetry, drama, novels, Jazz operas, and nonfiction. He also played a crucial role as an organizer, editor, and promoter of the avant-garde literary movements of the 1950s and early 1960s and the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Often controversial, Baraka became the center of a political firestorm in his home state of New Jersey in 2003 when a poem he had written was criticized as anti-Semitic.

Born Everett Leroy (later LeRoi) Jones in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka attended Newark public schools and studied chemistry at Howard University in Washington, D.C., before turning to literature and philosophy. In 1954 he left Howard and joined the United States Air Force. He became increasingly interested in literature, immersing himself in the work of American poet Ezra Pound, Irish novelist James Joyce and other modern ...

One of the most influential and prolific African American writers of the twentieth century, Amiri Baraka first came to the attention of readers and critics as LeRoi Jones. He was born Everett LeRoy Jones on 7 October 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. His solidly middle-class upbringing figures prominently in his creative work and must be considered one of the major distinguishing features in any comparative treatment of Baraka and other seminal African American literary artists. The son of postal employee Coyt LeRoy Jones and social worker Anna Lois (Russ) Jones, Baraka articulates the angst of the African American middle class with unsurpassed effect in works from every phase of his artistic development. This concern is most apparent in such relatively early works as the Beat-inspired Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961), the theatrical triumph Dutchman (1964), the barometric essays collected in Home Social ...

playwright, poet, writer, and one of the leaders of the black revolt of the 1960s. Imamu Amiri Baraka was born Everett Leroy Jones during the Great Depression in Newark, New Jersey. He is credited as one of the most outspoken advocates of a black cultural and political revival in the 1960s. He attended Barringer High School and Rutgers University, where he pursued philosophy and religious studies, before enrolling in Howard University in Washington, D.C. It was then that he changed his name to LeRoi Jones. Baraka graduated from Howard University in 1953, and in 1954 he joined the U S Air Force in which he served for three years When an anonymous tipster suggested that he was a communist sympathizer Baraka s belongings were searched for subversive literature Because some of his books were deemed socialist Baraka was discharged from the military Shortly thereafter he ...

writer, educator, and activist, was born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans to Joseph Moore, a seaman, and Patricia Wright, a former slave and seamstress. Moore completed a teachers' training program at Straight College (now Dillard University) and taught in New Orleans from 1892 to 1896, then in Brooklyn, New York, from 1897 to 1898. Demonstrating a commitment to the education of African American girls and women that would continue throughout her life, Moore helped found the White Rose Home for Girls in Harlem in 1898.

Moore's primary ambition, however, was literary, and she published her first book at the age of twenty, Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of poetry in a classical lyric style, essays, and finely observed short stories. The publication of Moore's poetry and photograph in a Boston magazine inspired the famed poet Paul Laurence ...

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (19 July 1875–18 September 1935), poet, journalist, and political activist, was born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of Joseph Moore, a seaman, and Patricia Wright, a seamstress. Dunbar-Nelson graduated from Straight College (now Dillard University) and began her teaching career at a New Orleans elementary school in 1892.

Her precocious literary talent resulted in the publication of Violets and Other Tales in 1895. Publicity surrounding this volume led to an epistolary courtship with the relatively famous African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom she married in 1898. She had great personal ambitions but was frequently disappointed because she was only esteemed as Paul Dunbar’s wife.

Because married women were not allowed to teach Dunbar Nelson was forced to pursue her literary career full time The major theme in her short stories was women s limited options She was essentially a colorful ...

short fiction writer, poet, diarist, journalist, and public speaker. Known mostly for her local-color short stories of New Orleans Creole life and romantic poems in conventional verse forms, Alice Dunbar-Nelson also worked as a teacher, journalist, editor, political campaigner, and clubwoman. Dunbar-Nelson struggled throughout her life with opposing forces: racial uplift expectations about the proper behavior and ambitions for a light-skinned, well-bred woman; the lure of urbanity; and recognition of the inadequacy of current strategies for civil rights. She believed that literary writing should remain separate from race work, but in her journalism, her diary, and some of her fiction and plays, one finds both pathos about being stuck between white and black worlds and frank reflections on the personal and ideological conflicts in the political and social organizations with which she worked.

She was born Alice Moore in 1875 in New Orleans where ...

Alice Nelson was born into a mixed Creole, African American, and Native American family in New Orleans, Louisiana. She graduated from the two-year teacher training program at Straight College (now Dillard University) in 1892 and taught school at various times throughout her life. Dunbar-Nelson published her first book, a collection of poetry, short stories, essays, and reviews called Violets and Other Tales in 1895. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the well-known poet, began to correspond with her after admiring her poetry (as well as her picture) in a Boston, Massachusetts, magazine. They married on March 8, 1898.

The Dunbars moved to Washington, D.C., where they were lionized as a literary celebrity couple. Dunbar-Nelson's second collection of short fiction, The Goodness of St. Rocque, was published in 1899 as a companion to her husband's Poems of Cabin and Field While Dunbar was known for his ...

Born in New Orleans, of mixed African American, Native American, and European American background, Alice Moore graduated from Straight College with a teaching degree in 1892. She published her first book, Violets and Other Tales, in 1895, a multigenre collection, including short stories, poetry, and essays. The volume anticipates much of Dunbar-Nelson's later work, reflecting her interest in a range of literary forms, attraction to romantic themes and language, attention to class differences, and ambivalence about women's roles. Notable, too, is a characteristic absence of racial designation, perhaps a consequence of Dunbar-Nelson's complex and occasionally conflicting attitudes toward the intersecting lines of class and color shaping her Creole heritage.

After a courtship begun in correspondence, Moore married the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898. The marriage, complicated by Dunbar's extensive travel and poor health, ended in 1902 and Dunbar Nelson resumed her teaching career Although ...

If Alice Ruth Moore had not married Paul Laurence Dunbar she probably would not have attracted quite as much historical attention. However, with a life spanning the postbellum South to the Great Depression North, her story is uniquely representative of black women in the United States during this pivotal time. Moreover, she commands consideration for her many-faceted racial activism, club woman endeavors, passionate sexuality, vibrant and contradictory personality, and her achievements as a multigenre author whose work helped to maintain and extend the tradition of African American women’s writing.

Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her mother, Patricia Moore, was a former slave turned seamstress and was of black and American Indian ancestry. Her father, Joseph Moore who never lived with the family was a seaman from whom she received some Caucasian blood Alice s reddish auburn hair and light skin helped her in ...