Search Results

Sign in Modify your search

Narrow Your Choices

Format

Type

Articles containing

Life event

Date

Subject

Occupation

Era

Availability

 1-4 of 4 Results  for:

  • Political Figure x
  • Arts and Leisure x
  • Art and Architecture x
  • Government and Politics x
  • Government and Politics x
Clear all

Article

Gantt, Harvey  

Robin Brabham

Article

Publication History:

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

architect, politician, and community leader, was born Harvey Bernard Gantt in Charleston, South Carolina, the first of five children of Wilhelmenia Gordon and Christopher C. Gantt. His father was a skilled mechanic at the Charleston Naval Shipyard and an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he encouraged his son to speak out against the segregated society in which they lived. Gantt graduated in 1960 from Burke High School, where he was salutatorian of his class and captain of the football team. Only a month before graduation, he helped twenty-two other student leaders from the all-black school stage a sit-in demonstration at the S. H. Kress lunch counter. In Gantt's later assessment, the action “started a change in the minds of the whole [city]” and “ultimately ended up in a movement that spread throughout all of Charleston” (Haessly, 47).

Gantt ...

Article

Imhotep  

Joyce Tyldesley

Article

Publication History:

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

ancient Egyptian architect and administrator, lived during the earlier part of Egypt’s third dynasty (c. 2686–2613 BCE). A high-ranking courtier, he held numerous important positions; but he is best known today as the architect of Egypt’s first stone building, the Sakkara Step Pyramid, built for King Djoser (Netjerikhet). After death, Imhotep became one of the few nonroyal Egyptians to be worshipped as a nationally recognized god.

Imhotep built Djoser s mortuary complex in the Sakkara cemetery close to the city of white walls Memphis The complex included Egypt s first pyramid Imhotep s original design was for an unusual square solid stone structure with corners oriented to the flow of the Nile and the rising and setting of the sun This was then extended to form a two stepped structure cased in fine white limestone A third extension converted the square tomb to an oblong this then became the bottom ...

Article

Langston, John Mercer  

Gregory Eiselein

Article

Publication History:

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

In his third-person autobiography, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (1894), John Mercer Langston recounts his career as one of the most influential African American leaders of the nineteenth century. Born in Virginia and educated at Oberlin, Langston became in 1854 the first African American admitted to the Ohio bar and in 1855 the first elected to public office in the United States (town clerk of Brownhelm, Ohio). Throughout the 1850s he worked within antislavery and civil rights movements, advocating a nationalist, pro-emigration position before becoming a Republican party activist. Heading recruitment of African American soldiers in the West during the Civil War, he rose to national prominence after the war as the president of the National Equal Rights League (a forerunner of the NAACP), an educational inspector for the Freedmen's Bureau, and a Republican party organizer. In 1868 he accepted a professorship at Howard ...

Article

Nascimento, Abdias do  

Aaron Myers

Article

Publication History:

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

Abdias do Nascimento grew up in Franca, São Paulo, Brazil, where his father was a shoemaker and his mother worked as a sweetmaker, cook, and seamstress. Very early he distinguished himself as an excellent student, and by the age of thirteen he was teaching primary school and working as an accountant for local farmers. Nascimento served in the army from 1930 to 1936, during the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas. At this time Nascimento began his career as a black activist by joining the Frente Negra Brasileira (United Black Front). In 1937, when Vargas established the Estado Novo dictatorship, the Frente Negra was shut down, along with all other political organizations.

Nascimento's first major Afro-Brazilian project was the theater group Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), which he founded in 1944 For the next twenty four years he worked as its director and as a playwright Nascimento created ...