Published in December 1925 by the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, her first essay, “Being Young - A Woman - And Colored” spoke to the discrimination and marginalization faced by Black women, urging young Black women to call on their inner strength to cope with the situation. In 1943, Graham went to work as a writer for the NAACP under the direction of W.E.B. After this time, finding as my mother said, I had none in the world to look to but God, I betook myself to prayer, and in every lonely place I found an altar. Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 - April 30, 1961) was a Black American editor, poet, and novelist. The poems of Nikki Giovanni helped to define the African American voice of the 1960s, '70s and beyond. In her Harlem apartment, Anderson often hosted meetings of Black American writers, singers, and actors who launched the Harlem Renaissance. In New York, she wrote for Paul Robeson’s activist Black newspaper, Freedom, from 1950 to 1953. As the literary editor for 'The Crisis,' Jessie Fauset supported many new voices during the Harlem Renaissance. As one of the few northern Black American teachers to recount her experiences during the Civil War, her highly acclaimed collection of journals, “Life on the Sea Islands,” was published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1864. As a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s, Fauset’s writing vividly portrayed Black American life and history. After graduating from Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892, Dunbar-Nelson taught in the New Orleans public school system. Portrait of American journalist, teacher, playwright, and poet Angelina Weld Grimke (1880 - 1958). Published in Toronto, the Provincial Freemen’s slogan was “Devoted to antislavery, temperance and general literature.” During 1855 and 1856, she traveled across the United States delivering stirring anti-slavery speeches demanding total racial integration and equal justice for Black people. From 1957 to 1964, she taught at Howard. After graduating from Radcliffe, Bonner taught at Bluefield State University in Bluefield, West Virginia, and later at all-Black Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C. Performed by an all-black cast, Rachel portrays a young Black American woman living in the North during the early 1900s, who vows never to bring children into a land ruined by racism. Daisy Lee Bates, president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP, with Black students barred from the Little Rock Central High School, 1957. In 1852, Shadd Cary wrote articles encouraging other Black Americans to seek freedom in Canada. National Archives and Records Administration. She was educated at Rust University’s high school for formerly enslaved persons, and later at Fisk University. The curiosity to hear new voices has always been there. She received a B.A. After tragically becoming orphaned at age three, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins. Mary Ann Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 - June 5, 1893) was an American writer, anti-slavery activist, educator, lawyer, and the first Black woman to edit and publish a newspaper in North America. In 1993, became the first Black American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Beloved. "It’s impossible not to admire the ambition and scope of 'Homegoing,' and … In her books such as Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), and Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000), hooks conveys her belief that a woman’s true sense of value is determined by a combination of her race, political beliefs, and economic worth to society. The only child of her free Black American parents, Frances Harper was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland. After the Civil War, Shadd Cary worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the women's suffrage movement. Robert Hayden was an African American poet and professor who is best known as the author of poems, including “Those Winter Sundays” and “The Middle Passage.”. Shortly after earning B.A. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an attempt to help the inmates escape from a California courtroom. My novel Queenie has shown how a south London girl’s story can be loved in the UK and in the States (and it took until 2019 for a story like hers to reach the mainstream). Published in London in 1773, Wheatley’s anthology Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—in which she declares that her love of freedom had come from having been a slave—brought her fame in England and colonial America and was praised by prominent Americans including George Washington. Born an enslaved person near Waco, Texas, Parsons’ involvement in the labor movement began following her marriage to radical white Republican newspaper editor Albert R. Parsons. Alice Dunbar-Nelson (July 19, 1875 - September 18, 1935) was a poet, journalist, and political activist. bell hooks, the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, (born September 25, 1952) is an American author, activist, and scholar whose writing explores the relationships between race, gender, and social class, often from the perspective of Black women. Davis has also authored several books on classism, feminism, racism, and injustices within the U.S. prison system, including Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture and Politics, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Abolition Democracy, and The Meaning of Freedom. Born into enslavement in North Carolina, Jacobs was sexually abused by her enslavers for years. For her works and her influence on many other writers, Hurston is considered one of the most important female writers of the 20th century. In 1957, she joined the lesbian and LGBTQ civil rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis as a writer for their magazine, The Ladder. Her father, a janitor, and her mother, a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist, supported her passion for writing. Zora Neale Hurston (January 15, 1891 - January 28, 1960) was a famous Black writer and anthropologist whose novels, short stories, and plays portrayed the struggles of Black Americans in the South. Among her most popular poems are “The Eyes of My Regret,” “At April,” and “The Closing Door.”, Grimké’s best-known play Rachel was produced in 1920. From 1965 to 1984, she worked as a fiction editor at Random House Books. In 1856, she joined the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society and received her instruction in teaching at Salem Normal School. So who has really been ignoring these writers, and these stories, up until now? ', Author Octavia E. Butler is known for blending science fiction with African American spiritualism. Editors trust them to deliver books and authors that adhere to their (sometimes limited) taste. Her classic 1937 book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, broke with literary norms by focusing on the experiences of a black woman. Stewart’s writings reveal her deeply held concern for the plight of Black Americans. After college, she worked as a teacher in Baltimore and Washington, D. C. Fauset’s literary career began in 1912 writing poems, essays, and reviews for the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was a Black American playwright and activist, best known for her classic 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, and for becoming the first Black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award. In 1853, Shadd Cary founded The Provincial Freemen, a weekly newspaper for Black Americans, especially escaped enslaved people. As one of the first plays dealing with racism written by a Black author, the NAACP said called it, "The first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relating to the lamentable condition of ten million Colored citizens in this free republic.”. Du Bois in forming the Krigwa Players, a troupe of Black actors performing plays by Black playwrights. Following the Black Lives Matter protests across the world, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, one agent at Curtis Brown tweeted: “Maybe, there will now be a desire to read new voices and listen to the unheard and buy the books by those who – up to now – have been ignored by the mainstream.” But who is the mainstream, if not an agency as large and commanding of the literary space as Curtis Brown? In 1924, Anderson joined W.E.B. Born to a working-class family in the small, segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks wrote her first book, Ain’t I a Woman at age 19. After the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act, she became the just the second Black American woman to earn a law degree, graduating from Howard University School of Law in 1883 at age 60. Bates’ work for school integration brought her national fame. In 1910, she helped co-found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The masthead of weekly abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, 1850. During the Civil War, Jacobs used her notoriety as an author to raise money to help Black refugees. Wilmore has been … After Union troops occupied parts of the coastal Carolinas in 1861, she taught newly emancipated Black Americans on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. And that place is understanding the role that the industry has been playing, up until now, in ignoring and suppressing black voices. Wells, was a Black journalist, activist, teacher, and early civil rights leader who fought to end racism, sexism, and violence. White Teeth by Zadie Smith was published to critical acclaim and commercial success in 2000. A rough place on the chin of complacency.”. Determined to regain her strength and self-identity, she adopted her African name: Ntozake, “she who comes with her own things” and Shange, “who walks like a lion.”. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to mixed-race parents, her Black, White, Indigenous, and Creole heritage endowed her with the deep understanding of race, gender, and ethnicity she expressed in her writing. Her neighborhood was called “Dynamite Hill” due to the number of homes bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1905, Parsons was the only woman asked to address the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and in 1931, she spoke in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black American men accused of raping two white women on a train stopped in Paint Rock, Alabama. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection. Born in Gambia or Senegal, West Africa, she was seized by slave traders at age seven and transported to Boston aboard a slave ship called The Phillis. In 1961, they immigrated to Ghana where they gained citizenship. In 1842, she fled to the North, first to Philadelphia, then to New York City where she gained her freedom and became active in the abolitionist movement organized by Frederick Douglass. A strong supporter of prison reform, Davis took up the cause of three Black inmates. From 1968 to 1971, Walker wrote as writer-in-residence at Jackson State University and Tougaloo College. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. She started her career as a librarian in the New York Public Library System. Her term for this strategy, “Lifting as we climb,” became the motto of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the group she helped found in 1896. Gwendolyn Brooks, 1967, 50th birthday party. Shirley Graham Du Bois, by Carl Van Vechten. While teaching English at John Jay College and Hunter College in the 1990s, Lorde served as poet laureate of New York. Born to a Black American family in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis was exposed to racism as a child. Her first book, Violets and Other Tales was published in 1895 when she was just 20. Last modified on Fri 12 Jun 2020 07.13 EDT. Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison majoring in writing, but withdrew after two years and moved to New York City. She poignantly described the mental trauma of the resulting scar tissue in her 1983 essay “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.” As valedictorian of her class, Walker received a scholarship to Spelman, a college for Black women in Atlanta. In her writings, Shadd Cary urged Black Americans to “do more and talk less” about the atrocities of slavery and their need for justice. Her novels include 'Patternmaster,' 'Kindred,' 'Dawn' and 'Parable of the Sower. After Albert was executed in 1887, Lucy Parsons founded and wrote for The Freedom, a newspaper addressing issues such as workers’ rights, lynching, and Black convict leasing in the South. At 4th Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, I started the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story prize (still going strong, five years later). She was also friends with the young Black girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963. Ntozake Shange (October 18, 1948 - October 27, 2018) was an American playwright, poet, and Black feminist whose work is recognized for frankly addressing race, gender, and Black power. James Weldon Johnson was an early civil rights activist, a leader of the NAACP, and a leading figure in the creation and development of the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois was indicted for “un-American" activities.” Though he was acquitted, the couple was upset by the incident and frustrated by the civil rights movement’s the lack of progress in the United States. 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