"George Washington Lee" (January 4,1894-August 1,1976)

Was an African-American soldier,author,political leader,and corporate executive.Born in Heathman,Mississippi,George Spent most of his life in 

Memphis,Tennessee.He received numerous citations for his benevolence and civil initiatives.

His parents,the Reverend George & Hattie Lee Stringfellow,separated before 
his birth,George and his brother Abner were raised by their mama,who worked as a sharecropper.Hattie Lee moved the family to nearby Indianola,
Mississippi,as a child,George obtained summer employment at a grocery store in Indianola,was subsequently fired by the white owner who was pressured by white patrons to hire white staff.

George entered Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Loman,Mississippi,where he was recognized for his academic achievement.

In the summer of 1912,George moved to Memphis,Tennessee,where he found work as a bellhop at the Gayoso Hotel.When the hotel's manager died in 1916,
George demonstrated his skill at writing and composed a eulogy to his former boss which was published in a Memphis newspaper.

After the outbreak of World War I,he was determined to enter the Fort Des Moines Provisional Army Training School in Iowa.In the qualifying examinations,George excelled in both physical skill and intelligence,and at 
the age of twenty-three was selected to attend the camp.Lieutenant Lee's 920th Division provided their bravery while stationed in France,and George himself was awarded a French Croix de guerre medal for bravery.His division none-the-less received racist insults and innuendos from white soldiers.

Lieutenant Lee recived an honorable discharge in 1919,and returned to Memphis where he soon found employment as a salesman with with the black-owned Mississippi Life Insurance Company.Within weeks he was promoted to manager,and then to vice-president in 1920.

When white-owned Southern Life Insurance Company purchased Mississippi Life in 1923,the new owners requested George continue to work for them collecting premiums from the African-American clients,and offered him $7,000 per year and two percent of each premium.George refused,asserting 
that he did not want to enable the takeover of a black-0wned business.He went on to join the Atlanta Life Insurance Company,where he became a senior
vice-president,and continued to work until his death in a car wreck.

George was active in the Republican Party,and in the 1928 presidential election served as national directors of "Veterans for Hoover". In 1952,George
delivered one of the speeches at the Republican national convention in Chicago,where he seconded the nomination of  Senator Robert Taft.In the 1956 presidential election,George is credited with delivering Tennessee to Eisenhower.

In 1934,Robert authored Beale Street: Where the Blues Began;the first book by an African-American author advertised in the Book-of-Month Club news.
His second novel, River George,was published in 1937.George's stores were 
published in The Negro Digest,The World's Digest,and Southern Literacy Messenger,and  in 1942,an anthology of his short stories entitled Beale Street Sundown was published.

In 1951,The Chicago Defender named George one of ten "Most Useful Men" for his efforts at voter registration in Memphis.

George became Grand Commissioner of Education and the Civil Rights Department of the National Elks for the Memphis chapter of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks in 1952.

In 1956,George was the first African-American to have a US post office named 
after him,in Memphis.

As Memphis African-American leaders became more radical throughout the 
1940s and 1950s,George became increasingly more conservative.He opposed 
the violence of the Rap Brown "Black Power" movement,and during the 1960s 
he traveled around the country criticizing black power movements towards violence.He believered African-Americans should appeal to the white sense of
conscience to guilt rather than simply demand their own rights through violence.

A number of of George's speeches have been inserted into the Congressional Record,and in 1973 his portrait was hung in the Rotuunda  of the Tennessee State Capitol.

In 2006,construction began on George's Landing Retail,Entertainment and Parking," in the Beale Street district of Memphis.A street in the area is also named in his honor.

"Chester-Bomar-Himes" (July 29-1909-November 12 1984)

The youngest of three sons to professors Joseph Sandy Himes & Estelle Bomar. Chester believed that his surname derived from paternal ancestors who were skilled artisans owned by a Jewish slave holding family named Heinz.The Bomar family claimed descent from an Irish overseer.His daddy Joseph Himes was sent to Claflin College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he studied blacksmithing.Chester mama studied music at Scotia Seminary in Concord,North Carolina.After his parents married in 1901,

they held a joint appointment at Georgia State College and then taught at a number of other colleges in the South,including Tuskegee University in Macon County,in Alabama.Chester sensed that the tension in his parents'

marriage was reflection of the struggle between white and African-American 

manifested in his mama's light complexion and his daddy's dark one.These perceptions which were not shared by Chester's sibling's,provided the backdrop for his novel The Third Generation (1954),and the themes of race,sex,and power recur throughout both his life and work.

When Chester was twelve years old,his brother Joseph nearly blinded himself 
in a chemistry experiment gone awry and was refused medical treatment at 
the local white hospital.After graduating from Glenville High School in 1926,
Chester was working at a Cleveland hotel to earn money for college when he 
accidentally fell down an open elevator shaft,fracturing three vertebra es.He,
too, was denied entry to a white hospital.When he entered Ohio State University in the fall,still wearing a back brace,he was scarred physically 
and emotionally.He had gained admission to the university in part because a 
grade of fifty-six he had received in one course was mistakenly recorded on his transcript as eight-six; nevertheless,it was later found that he had the fourth-highest IQ any student entering that year.Chester was more interested in the illicit activities he found in the African-American underworld and in the superficial aspects of campus life than he was in his studies.
At the end of his semester,the highest he could muster was a C in English.The 
shady individuals he associated with later appeared as characters in his crime novels,in 1927,keeping such company merely helped to get him expelled.

Back on the streets of Cleveland,Chester's delinquent behavior came to including soliciting prostitutes,gambling,and forging checks. His parents,
who were going through a divorce,could stop his downwaed spiral-though his nearly blind brother was on his way to graduating magna cum laude from Oberlin College and earning a PhD. After two prior arrests in 1928 he was sentenced to twenty to twenty five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary for 
an armed robbery he committed against a white couple.In 1930 the prison was engulfed in a fire that killed more than three hundred inmates.Chester 
wrote a story about this tragedy called " To What Red Hell," which was published in Esquire in 1934. From then on Chester considered himself a writer.His novel Cast the First Stone (1954) draws heavily on his prison experience,exploring the problems of crime and punishment and exposing the realities of prison life.Run Man Run (1966) presents the absurdity of the "Negro" condition as he saw it-a state of being imprisoned and paralyzed within a racist society.

A year after his release from prison in 1936,Chester married Jean Lucinda Johnson.During the Depression he found work as a laborer with the Works Progress Administration Chester was soon assigned to the Ohio Writer's Project,where he worked on a history of Cleveland and wrote an unsigned column for the Cleveland Daily News.During this period he met and befriended Langston Hughes,who assisted his writing career.In 1940 Chester and Lucinda moved to Los Angeles to work as a butler and maid for the novelist Louis Bromfield,whom they hoped would help further Chester's career.When this did not happen,Chest found work in the shipyards and in war industry plants,while Lucinda found a position with slightly higher wages and status.His frustration with bigotry,liberals, union organizers, communists,and the African-Americans he encountered at the NAACP, as well 
as his low opinion of women,found fictional representation in his most ambitious novels, If he Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947).

A Rosenwald Fellowship allowed Chester to move to New York in 1944 to write full-time.His work received mixed reviews and sold so poorly that when the money ran out,Chester sometimes worked as a caretaker or bellhop to survive.He separated from Lucinda in 1952 and began a series of relationships with white women-including a violent with Vandi Haywood that became the basis for A Case of Rape (1984). first published in French in 1963.Chester wrote that "the very essence of any relationships with between a black man and a white woman in the United States is "sex (Muller,1965).This 
sentiment gave both The End of a Primitive (1955),which Chester considered 
to be his work,and the satirical Pinktoes (1961) a racial edge that was too 
unsettling for most Americans.

By the early 1950s Chester had become a disappoint with the United States that he went to Europe and became one of many Americans expatriate writers live in Paris.Right Wright helped Chester make his European transition,
assisting him professionally and introducing him to James Baldwin, though 
Chester considered Richard a rival as much as a friend and preferred to invite comparisons of his own work to William Faulkner's.He lived peripatetic existence in Europe,taking up with several women before meeting an English 
colomnist,Lesley Packard,in 1958;the two were married in 1965.His writing 
career entered a new and unexpected phase when the French editor and translator Marcel Duhamel suggested that Chester write commercial detective novels.In 1958 his first,attempt For Love of Imabelle, won the French Grand Prix for the year's best detective novel.

At first Chester considered his detective novels to be lucrative projects that he could churn out quickly in order to support his "serious" writing.He did not
expect that The Real Cool Killers (1959),The Crazy Kill (1959),The Big Gold Dream (1960),All Shot Up (1960), and Blind Man with a pisol (1969) would become popular as they did.Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) was made into a movie directed by Ossie Davis in 1970,and The Heat's On (1965) became the 
movie Come Back,Charleston,Blue in 1974.In Grave Digger Jones and his partner Coffin Ed Johnson, Chester created compelling characters who dispense their own brand of black justice and who had been been compared to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. With these books helped to pioneer a new genre of African-American mystery writing that continues with such writers as Walter Mosley and Nora Deloach.

He lived the last sixteen years of his life in Spain,where he struggled with a variety of geriatric illnesses.He rarely visited the United States, he never stayed anyplace in Europe long enough,or learned or to speak any of the languages well enough,to consider Europe his home. In his final years,often writing in great arthritic pain,he finished two autobiographies The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absuridity (1976).

"Martha-Settle-Putney" (November 9,1916-December 11,2008)

🔻🔻⦽😘Was an American educator and historian who chronicled the roles of African Americans in the armed forces.After serving as one of the first African Members of the Women's Army Corp during World War II,she devoted her life to researching and documenting the military service and achievements of African-Americans.

Following a period of employment with the War Manpower Commission after discharge from the army,she entered the academic world,earning    PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and pursuing a distinguished teaching career at Bowie State College ( now Bowie State University) in Maryland,where she chaired the history and geography department,and later at Howard University,her Alma mater, in Washington,D.C. Upon retiring from the faculty at Howard,she embarked on a writing  career that included three books and over 20 journal articles.At the time of her death at age 92 she was working on a fourth book portraying the contributions of
African Americans in combat dating back to the American Revolutionary War.

Martha was born to Oliver & Ida Settle of  Norristown,Pennsylvania,her daddy worked as a laborer to support his wife and eight children.

As a young woman, she helped garner African American voters for a candidate for Congress whom she had heard speak.The candidate won,with his help she got a scholarship to Howard University,where she receivFed a bachelor's degree (1939) and
master's degree in history (1940).

She remained in Washington where,despite her academic credentials,she was unable to get a teaching job.She settled instead for a statistical clerk postion with the War Manpower Commission.In 1943 she enlisted in the Women's Army Corps,which had been created the previous year.Interviewed years later,she explain,her decision this way: "The Corps, which was then less than a year old,promised an opportunity to become a commissioned officer.Though I had a master's degree in history,i refused to go and further south for a job,so the promise of a commission was the best option available.

Martha   was one of  40 African Americans women selected  for the Women's Army Corps (WAC) in 1943. She soon earned the rank  of  Lieutenant and was assigned  to a
basic training company at Fort Des Moines,Iowa.There,she was relegated to  menial duties such as leading drills and teaching calisthenics.She asked for, and was granted,permission to attend Adjutant General's School in San Antonio to train for an executive or administrative postion.This led an assignment as commanding officer of a WAC Hospital Company at the Gardiner General Hospital in Chicago,a position she held for the rest of  the war. 

Many years later, when asked in a T.V. interview by CNN correspondent Paula Zahn what "the whole world [should] understand about women's efforts in World War II, Dr.Putney replied: "They should understand...military occupational specialties as a man,except  carry a gun.Interviewed on another occasion,she said: "It is my thesis that military integration made the basis for the emergence and the expansion of the black middle class.

After the war,she returned to her job with the Manpower Commission,where she met
William M.Putney.They were married in 1948 and had one child,William,Jr.William Sr died in 1965.

Making use of  the G.I. Bill she enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of
Pennsylvania and in 1955 received her PhD in European History.After brief stints at
Morgan State University and Prairie View A&M University,she joined Bowie State College's history and geography department,which she chaired until 1974.She then returned to her Alma mater,Howard University,where she held the position of Senior Lecturer until 1983.

Interviewed by Tom Brokaw for his book The Greatest Generation,Howard Professor  Dr. Clifford Muse,Jr.,described Dr. Putney's approach to teaching: "She worked me to
death.I  really learned  from her.She tried to prepare you for discrimination in the sense you had to be very good to be accepted." Most of  the students at both Howard and Bowie were African-American,and former student  William Missouri noted  that  Dr.Putney would  as  unprepared students,"How can you be an African-American and not want  to  learn African-American history history?

After retiring from her teaching career,Dr.Putney turned to writing,focusing on the
achievement of  African-Americans in the military.Her first book,Black Sailors: Afro-American  Merchant  Seamen and Whale men Prior to the Civil War,published in 1987 by  Greenwood Press,was described by one reviewer as " A welcome contribution to what amounts to a new field  of  study,black history and the American maritime service.

Her second book,When the Nation was in Need: Blacks in the Women's Army Corps During World War II (Scarecrow Press, 1992) drew not only on the author's personal experience in the army but also from " archival records,manuscripts,documents,
contemporary newspaper accounts and interviews,statements, and the personal files
of  those who served." It received the 1993 Outstanding Book on Human Rights award for the  Gustav Myers Center for the Study of  Human Rights in American.

Dr.Putney was the editor of Blacks in the United States Army:Portraits through History (McFarland,2003),a pictorial collection whose paintings and sketches "depict black army personnel at war,as war  casualties,at prayer,in peacetime assignments,
in training,at play and at leisure,and as military muscians." Each illustration is accompanied by a narrative along with the artist's name,medium used,location of
the original,and  other information.

Dr.Putney published numerous articles in scholarly journals including the Maryland Historical Magazine,Journal of Negro History,Negro History Bulletin,and the Journal of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society.

She also was a frequent contributor to the Northeast News,a community newspaper.

Dr.Putney's chronicling of  the  military  exploits of  African Americans was not confined to the written word.She also conveyed these through the medium of public speaking.On July 17,1998,for example,she spoke at a National Park Service ceremony at  Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.,Occasioned by the inception earlier
that year of the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. She began her remarks with a
reference to the fatal attack on Fort Wagner,South Carolina,by the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment,noting that "numerous accounts and the film 'Glory' have pretty much brought this event to the attention of the general public." She then pointed out that this assault "was one of the many battlefield exploits of  African-Americans during the Civil War.Before the war ended,African American troops had been involved in hundreds of skirmishes and engagements including thirty five major battles." Dr.Putney went on to cite the statistics of the grim price paid by the African-Americans who served in the Union on land and sea: of
their  200,000 number,there were "Some 68,000 casualties; some 37,000 of these lost their lives.

Dr.Putney was a member of the NAACP and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History  (Now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History).She volunteered  at the Smithsonian Institution and was on the editorial board of the Journal of the Afro-American Historical Genealogical Society.

Dr.Martha died,at the Community Hospice in the District of  Columbia.The Cause of death was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.On February 10,2009,she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery

"Audre-Lord" (February 18 1934-November 17 1992)

Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde,was an African American writer,feminist,womanist,lesbian,and civil rights activist.As a poet,she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression,particularly in poems expressing anger and outrage at civil and social injustices  she observed throughout her life.Her poems and prose largely dealt with issues related to civil rights,
feminism,and the expoloration of  African American female identity.In relation to white feminist in the United States,Audre famously said "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

She was born in New York to Caribbean immigrants from Barbados and Carriacou,Frederick Byron Lorde (called Byron) and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde,who settled in Harlem.Audre's mama was of mixed ancestry but could pass for white,a source of  pride for family.Audrey's daddy was darker than the Belmar family liked,and they only allowed the couple to marry because of Byron charm,ambition,and persistence.Nearsighted to the point of being legally blind,and the youngest of three daughters (two oldest sisters,Phyllis & Helen),Audre grew up hearing her mama's stories about the West Indies.She learned to talk while she learned to read,at the age of  four,and her mama taught her to write around the same time.She wrote her first poem when she was in the eight grade.

She chose to drop the "y" from her first name while still a child,explaining in Zami: A New Spelling of  My Name that she was more interested in the artistic symmetry of the "e" - endings in
the two side-by-side names "Audre Lorde" than in her spelling her name the way her parents had
intended.

Audre relationship with her parents was difficult from young age.She was able to spend very little time with her parents,who were busy maintaining their real estate business in the tumultuous economy after the Great Depression,and when she did see them,they were often cold or emotionally distant.In particular,Audre's relationship with her mama,who was deeply suspicious of  people with darker skin than hers (which Audre was) and the outside world in general, was characterized by "tough love" and strict adherence to family rules.Audre difficult relationship with her mama would figure prominently in her poems,such as Coal's "Story Books on a Kitchen Table.

As a child,Audre who struggled with communication,came to appreciate the power of poetry as a form of expression.She memorized a great deal of poetry,and would use it to communicate,to the extent that,"If  asked how she was feeling,Audre reply by reciting a poem.Around the age of twelve,she began writing her own poetry and connecting with others at her school who were considered "outcasts" as she felt she was.

She attended Hunter College High School,secondary school for intellectually gifted students,and graduated in 1951.

In 1954,Audre spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of  Mexico,a period she described as a time of  affirmation and renewal,during which she confirmed her identity on personal  and artistic  levels as a lesbian and poet.On her return to New York,she attended Hunter College,graduating class of 1959.There,she worked as a librarian,continued writing and became an active participant in the gay culture of  Greenwhich village.Lorde furthered her education at
Columbia University,earning a master's degree in Library Science in 1961.She also worked during this time as a librarian Mount Vermon Public Library and married attorney Edwin Rollins;they divorced in 1970 after having two children,Elizabeth & Jonathan.In 1966,Audre became librarian at Town School Library in New York City,where she remained until 1968.

In 1968 Audre was write-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi,where she met Frances Clayton,a white professor of psychology,who was to be her romantic partner until 1989.

Audre's time at Tougaloo College,like her year at the National University of Mexico,was a formative experience for Audre as an artis.She led workshops with her young African American undergraduate students,many whom were eager to discuss the civil rights issues of that time.
Through her interactions with her students,Audre reaffirmed her desire not only to live out her
"crazy and queer" identity,but devoted new attention to the new formal aspects of craft as a poet.
Her book of poems Cables to Rage came out of her time and experience at Tougaloo.

From 1977-1978 Audre had a brief  affair with the sculptor and painter Mildred Thompson.The Two met in Nigeria in 1977 at the Second World Black and African Festival of  Arts and Culture
(FESTAC 77) Their affair ran its course during that time Mildred lived in Washington,D.C.

Audre battled cancer for fourteen years.She first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and underwent a mastectomy.Six years later,she was diagnosed with liver cancer.After her diagnosis,
she chose to become more focused on both her life and her writing.She wrote The Cancer Journals
which won the American Library Association Gay Caucus Book of of  the Year Award in 1981.
Audre featured as the subject of a documentary called a Litany for  Survival: The Life and Work of  Audre Lorde,which shows  her as an author,poet,human rights activist,feminist,lesbian,a teacher,a survivor,and a crusader against bigotry.Lorde is quoted in the film as saying: "What I leave behind has a life of its own.I've said this about poetry;I've said it about children.Well,in a sense I'm saying it about the very artifact of who I have been.

From 1991 until her her death,she was New York State Poet Laureate.In 1992,she received the Bill
Whitehead Award for lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle.In 2001,Publishing Triangle
instituted the Audre Lorde Award to honor works of  lesbian poetry.

Audre died of  liver cancer,in St.Croix,where she had been living with Gloria I Joseph.She was 58.
In African naming ceremony before her death,she took the name Gamba Adisa,which means "Warrior: She who Makes Her  Meaning Known.

"William-Allison-Sweeney"{July 27,1851-1921}

Was an American newspaper writer,editor,and owner,poet,and author of a history of Afro-American soldiers in World War I.

William was born in Superior,Washtenaw County,Michigan to William and Aurilla (Day) Sweeney.He was married twice.He was first married to Rene Clark,with whom he had children;and then to Roberta Lomax Erskine.

He was known primarily as newspaper man.His career began in 1879.
William contributed to both African American and to white newspaper;
an example of the latter is The Herald,in Indianapolis.William edited and published The People (Wheeling West Virginia,1885-6),The National People (Detriot,1886-7);was editor and manager of The Freeman (Indianapolis 1890-8); and editor and part owner,Chicago Leader (1905-6).At the Freeman,William was associated with Richard W.Thompson,who would later suggest to Booker T.Washington That George work at the Chicago Conservator receive a subsidy from Booker to support its continued publication.

As a poet,William was considered to be on of the "Chicago poets" and though to have written the first poem by an African American man employing the technique of free verse.

William is the first African American to serve on a jury in West Virginia (1885).

'

"Fenton-Johnson (May 71888-September 17 1958)

Was an American poet essayist,author of short stories,editor,and educator.

He was born Elijah & Jesse (Taylor) Johnson.His daddy,Elijah Johnson,was a railroad porter and his family was one the wealthiest African American in Chicago during this time.That is family owned the State Street building in which they lived provides evidence of such financial security.According to a biographical note by Arna Bontemps,Fenton is anecodotally described as being "a dapper boy drove his own electric automobile around Chicago.Growing up,Fenton recounts himself "having scribbed since the age of nine," even despite these indications of a literary inclination,Fenton did not initially plan to embark on a career in letters,and certainly not poetry specifically.
Rather,throughout this childhood,Fenton intended to pursue an office in
the clergy.

The entirirely of Fenton's childhood was spent in Chicago,and he received his secondary education at various secondary public schools in
the city,including Englewood High School and Wenddell Phillips High School.Fenton first began his undergraduate education at Northwestern
University,which he attended from 1908-1909.He went on to complete
his degree at the University of  Chicago.Fenton later received a degree from the Pulitzer School Journalism at Columbia University.

Following his graduation from the University of Chicago,Fenton worked
as a messenger and in the post office before he began to teach English at State University of Louisville,which was a private,black,Baptist-owned institution in Kentucky that would later become Simmons College.He on only taught at the State University of Louisville from 1910-1911,and returned to Chicago in 1911 to concentrate on his literary career.

In 1913,Fenton published his first volume of poetry,A Little Dreaming.
The collection was a self-published work,along with his next two collections,Visions of the Dusk(1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916).Between the release of his first and second collection of poetry,
Fenton moved to New York,where he completed his degree at the Pulitzer School of Journalism with the financial support of a benefactor.

Following the release of his third book of poetry,Fenton moved back to Chicago,where he became of the founding editors of The Champion in 1916.The Champion was formed in conjuction with Henry Bing Dismond,
his cousin,who was also an aspiring poet and popular athlete,one of the few African American college graduates chosen for officer training with
the Army's Eight Illinois Regiment at camp Des Moines in 1918.

The publication focused on African American achievements and was published monthly.Two years after founding The Champion,in 1918,Fenton went on to found The Favorite Magazine,subtitled The World's Greatest Monthly,with Henry.

The Favorite Magazine published a few of Fenton's poems,and around this time his short stories were also published in thr Chrisis.In addition
to the short stories published in the Chrisis,Fenton published his own collection of short stories entitled Tales of Darkness America in 1920.
In the same year,he published a book of essays entitled For the Highest
Good.During this period as well,from about 1912 and following through 1925,Fenton established connections in Chicago with the Harriet Monroe,and several of his poems were accepted for the poetry  magazine poetry.In addition to his work published in Poetry,Fenton also
found publication in the anthology formed by poet Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 called Others: A Magazine of the New Verse.One of his his most famous poems,"Tired," was published in 1919 in Others and it was also
published in The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922,among other poems of his.Fenton completed or nearly completed fourth collection of
poems entitled African Nights,he did not succeed in publishing the collection.

In addition to his poetry,editing and essay writing,Fenton worked as a playwright.By the age of of nineteen,Fenton plays had been "produced"
on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre,Chicago." In 1925,his play entitled
"The Cabaret Girl" was peformed at the Shadow Theatre in Chicago,the
only peformed play of his on record.

In the 1930s,Fenton for the Federal Writers' Project,which was part of Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Chicago.Directed by Arna Bontemps,the Federal Writers' Project focused on writing about the African American experience in in Illinois.Arna acted as Fenton's literary executor,additionally.

Fenton has had a consistent presence in anthologies beginning with the
Book of  American Negro Poetry,Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin's The New Poetry: Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse in English (1923) and Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927).

The poetry of Fenton Johnson has often been by critics to be characterized by great irony and a kind of hopelessness resulting from an embattled African American experience.In his introduction to Fenton in The Book of American Negro Poetry,James Weldon Johnson writes that in many of Fenton's poems,"there is nothing left to fight or even hope for." Yet James Weldon Johnson continues,"these poems of despair possess tremendous power and constitute Fenton Johnson's best work." Fenton Johnson is often seen as a poet who possesses a particularly fatalistic perspective branching from his experience as an African America,and this type of embittered poetry is what what is he known for.

Also in his introduction,James Weldon Johnson makes a few claims about Fenton's earlier works, finding that his first book of poetry, A Little Dreaming,"was without marked distinction.

James Weldon Johnson also indicates in his introduction to Fenton that it was during the war period that Fenton adopted free verse,and "broke
away from all traditions and ideas of Negro Poetry.This new found "formlessness,"Fenton found,"voiced the disillusionment and bitterness
of feeling the Negro race was then experiencing.For James Weldon Johnson,then,Fenton Johnson's poetry became associated with despair,
such was how Fenton became framed within the larger The Book of the American Negro Poetry project,and subsequently in other anthologies.
This "bitter" Fenton is particularly encapsulated in the lines of his poem
"tired." "I am tired of work.I am tired of building up somebody else's civilization," the poem reads.

Fenton has a particularly legacy within American Modernist poetry.He is
noted to have been a part of writers who would become the makers of a
"new poetry,which sought to "throw over the traditions of American Poetry," as James Weldon Johnson would describe it.These "new" poems appeared in Poetry,Others and later,The Liberator,and they marked a progressive from " commonplace traditionalism to the most revolutionary naturalism,from the rhymed,carefully scanned line to free
verse,from conventionalized Negro dialect to the brawny language of Sandberg's Chicago poems.

While "Tired" has been frequently anthologized,Fenton's earlier poems
were made in more "conventional modes," including dialect poetry,as found in first book,A Little Dreaming.The collection considered a wide range of topics,from a poem on Paul Laurence Dunbar,entitled "Dunbar," to medieval themes such as in "Lancelot's Defiance.Additionally,A Little Dreaming contains a customary Scottish poem,Irish poem,and even Yiddish poem,which points to a whole range
of poetic influences during the early part of his poetic career.In Visions of the Dusk and Songs of the Soil,Fenton begins incorporate "Negro spirituals," and here the transition into themes more heavily influenced by the African American experience might be observed.In Songs of the Soi,Fenton writes that " The Negro has a history,and and it is something
more than a peasant.Transitioning from here to the poem "Tired," we might find the "black revolutionary poet" that James Weldon Johnson proclaims Fenton Johnson to be and how many perceive him today.

Fenton was married to Cecilia Rhone.He was a member of the Authors League of America and of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

"Susan-Maria-Mckinney-Steward" {March 1847-March 17,1918}

Dr.Susan was the first African-American woman to earn a medical

doctorate (M.D.) in New York state and the third in the United States.
Dr.Susan was born to elite,Brooklyn parents,Ann Springstead &  Sylvanus smith.She  was of  mixed European,African,and Shinnecock Native-American heritage.Her early education was musical.Dr.Steward entered the New York Medical College for women in 1867.She earned her M.D. in 1870,graduating as valedictorian.The next year,1871,she married Rev.William G.Mckinney with whom she had two children.

Dr.Steward  professional accomplishments were numerous.She established her own-private practice in Brooklyn which she ran from 1870-1895.During this time she co-founded the Brooklyn Women's Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary which served the African-American community,completed  post-graduate education at the Long Island Medical College Hospital in Brooklyn (1887-1888),practiced at
the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People where she also served as a
board member (1892-1895),and practiced  at New York Medical College
and Hospital for  Women in Manhattan (1892-1896).Dr.McKinney specialized in prenatal care and childhood diseases and gave papers on
both topics.

William died in 1892 and in 1896 Dr.McKinney married Theophilus Gould
Stewart,an ordained minister and US Army chaplain.She traveled  with him for several years throughout the west earning medical licenses in
Montana and Wyoming.In 1898,Dr.McKinney was hired by Wilberforce
University in Ohio as resident physician and faculty member to teach health and nutrition.Rev.Steward joined the faculty shortly after to teach history.Dr.Mckinney remained at Wilberforce until her death 22 years later.

Dr.Smith McKinney activities included local missionary work and women's suffrage advocacy.She was president of the Brooklyn Women's Christian Temperance Union (No.6).She accomplished public speaker and in 1911 addressed the first Universal Race Congress at the University of London,UK.Her presentation was entitled "Colored Women in America."  In 1914,she gave a speech,"Women in Medicine," at the
National Association of Colored Women's Club Convention.

Dr. McKinney practiced medicine for 48 years.When she died in Brooklyn,W.E.B. Du Bois gave the eulogy at her funeral.Dr.Mckinney is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery,one of the first rural cemeteries in the U.S. and internationally known for its architecture,landscaping,and history.In 1974,Brooklyn Junior High School was renamed Dr.Susan Smith McKinney Junior High School in her honor.Two years later,African American women physicians in the New York, New Jersey,and Connecticut area named their society after her to honor her life and work.

"Anna-Tanneyhill"[January 19,1906-July 2001]

She was an administrator,writer and activist.Anna Elizabeth Tanneyhill.
(she preferred the name Ann) was from Boston.She was the daughter of
the daughter of  Alfred Grandison Weems Tanneyhill & Adelaide Grandison Tanneyhill.Ann graduated from Simmons College in 1928 and immediately joined the Springfield (Massachusetts) Urban League.A decade she would earn a master's degree vocational guidance and personnel administration from Teachers College,Columbia University;by then she was nearly a decade into a distinguished fifty-year career with the League.

Working out of  our national headquarters in New York,Ann tireless energy,superb organizational skills,and expertise helped guide the League to path-breaking achiievements in forging employment opportunities for African-Americans in the century's middle decades.In
the 1930s she organized  the League's nationwide annual vocational
opportunity campaigns to inspire  African-American youth to  pursue the schooling and training that would prepare them for  good  jobs. In the 1940s  she was instrumental in integrating the workforces of defense plants.

Her  commitment to African-American youth was extraordinary.In the late 1950s she played a pivotal role in carrying out the League's pioneering effort to persuade major corporations to recruit on Historic
Black College and University campuses.Ann wrote several articles including,From School to Job:Guidance for Minority Youth 1953,Program Aids,for the Vocational Opportunity Campaign and Whitney M.Young Jr.
"The Voice of the Voiceless."1977.

Ann who had lived for many years on her beloved Cape Cod,was known largely within the National Urban League Movement and a relatively small circle within African-American as one of the Twentieth century's
greatest civil rights heroes.

"Cyril-Lionel-Robert-James"(January 1 1901-May 1989)

aHe was an Afro Trinidadian journalist,socialist theorist,and writer.
He was born in Trinidad  and Tobago,then a British Crown Colony.The son of a schoolteacher from Tunapuna,Trinidad,he was strongly influenced by his mama who was an avid reader.

He was a gifted child who at age six won scholarship to Queens Royal College.After College,James worked a school teacher and as a cricket reporter.During this time he also wrote two novels,"La Divina Pastora"(1927) a "Triumph" (1929).With an interest in politics,he wrote a biography of  the Trinidadian labor leader, Arthur Cipriani,"The Life of Captain Cipriani," published in 1929.

In 1932,he immigrated to England where he reported cricket matches for the Manchester Guardian.Politically,James was a strong supporter of West Indian Independence.He wrote a pamphlet,"The Case for West Indian Self-Government," published in 1933.

James moved to London where he studied Karl Marx,Friedrich Engles,and Leon Trotsky.He initially joined the independent Labor Party (ILP) and became chairman of its Finchley branch. 
.He also wrote wrote for left-wing journals such as the New Leader and Controversy When James became a Marxist he left the ILP and formed the Revolutionary Socialist League.As a follower of  Trotsky,James was highly critical of Joseph Stalin and the British Community Party.



In 1936,he published "Minty Alley" a novel on his childhood in Trinidad.He also wrote a play about Toussaint L' ouverture,the leader of the Haitian revolution,and in 1936,Paul Robeson.
played the leading role in its production at the Westminster Theatre.

James published several books on politics including "Abyssinia and the Imperialists" (1936) and
"World Revolution 1917-1936" (1937).This historical account was highly critical of Stalin's 1924.
pronouncement,"Socialism in One Country," and provided support for the ideas Leon Trotsky.He
study of the Haitian revolution," "The Black Jacobins,"was published in 1938.

In that same year,he moved to America,where he lectured on political issues and continued to publish books about politics,including "Dialectical Materialism and the fate of Humanity" (1947),
"Notes on Dialectics"(1948)," "The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA"(1948), "State Capitalism and World Revolution" (1950),and "The Class Struggle" (1950).

James also wrote at length about the work of Walt Whitman & Herman Melville.In America,his Marxist writings caught the attention of Senator McCarthy and fellow right-wingers,in 1953,Under the threat of deportation  for having overstayed his visa by ten years.In his attempt to
remain in the USA,James,while being detained on Ellis Island,wrote a study of Herman Melville,
"Mariners,Renegades and Castaways:The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in," and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of  Senate.

James lived for a while in Africa but in 1958 returned to the West Indies.Influenced by the events
the Hungarian uprising in 1956,his book "Facing Reality" (1958) revealed  disillusionment with both Communsion and Trotskyism.Soon afterward he worked on a biography of George Padmore
and parts of the book appeared in the National journal.

In 1963 James published "Beyond Boundary," a combination autobiography and an analysis of  sports and politics.Other books by James include "Radical America" (1970) and "Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution" (1977),and "Radical America" (1970).

He moved back to London where he died.

"Hallie-Quinn-Brown"{March 10,1850-1949}

Teacher,writer and women's activist was born in Pitsburgh Pennsylvania,the of former slaves who in 1864 migrated to Ontario,Canada.The Brown family returned to the United States in 1870,settling in Wilberforce,Ohio.Hallie attended Wilberforce College and received a degree in 1873.she then taught in Freeman's schools in Mississippi before moving to COLUMBIA,South Carolina in 1875 where she served briefly as an instructor in the city's public schools.By September 1875 Hallie facility at Allen University.Hallie taught at Allen between 1875 and 1885 and then for the next two years (1885-1887) served as Dean of the University.Hallie also served as Dean of Women at Tuskegee University during the 1892-1893 school year before returning to Ohio where she taught in the Dayton public schools.

Hallie had since childhood held an interest in public speaking.In 1866 she graduated from the Chautauqua Lecture School.By the time she began working at Allen University she was already developing a reputation as a powerful orator for the causes of temperance Union women's suffrage and civil rights.In 1895 Hallie addressed an audience at the Women's Christian Temperance Union Conference in London.In 1899,while serving as one of the United States representatives,she spoke before the International Congress of Women meeting in London.She spoke before Queen Victoria.

Her involvement in the in the women's suffrage campaign led to her to help organize the Colored Women's League in Washington,D.C,one of the organizations that allied in 1896 to become the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).Hallie served as President of the Ohio State
Federation of Colored Women's Clubs between 1905 & 1912.She also served as president of the National Association of Colored Women for four years,from 1920-1924.Hallie also became active in the election campaign of Calvin Coolidge,working to deliver the vote of African American clubman to this former Massachusetts governor.

Hallie published four significant works during her lifetime.In 1880,Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations was published.Thirty years later,in 1910,Hallie published Elocution and Physical Culture.Her First Lessons in Public Speaking made its public debut in 1920.In 1926 her book Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction appeared.This work profiled the leading African American women of the era and became her most popular work.She died in Wilberforce Ohio.

"George-Moses-Horton" {March 25,1797-1883}

Born in Northampton  County, North Carolina;George was enslaved for most of  his life,the property of  Chatham County yeoman farmer  William Horton.George taught himself  to read using an old speller and a copy of the Methodist  hymnal,although he was grown before he learned to write.Especially  fascinated  with poetry,he composed  psalm-meter verses in his head.George was often sent to Chapel Hill by his then-master,to sell  produce.His unusually sophisticated
vocabulary caught the attention of the university students,who encouraged  his orations,and ultimately,the  recitations of his own verse.

His reputation  spread,and he began to sell poems for students to send to their sweethearts,charging extra for acrostics based on the young ladies' names.After several decades he
was able to purchase his freedom  from for twenty-five cents a day,and  later from his masters son
for fifty cents.George earned the admiration and support  of  Governor John Owen,University  presidents Joseph Caldwell,David L.Swain,newspapermen William Lloyd  Garrison and  Horace Greeley.A  professor's wife and novelist,Caroline Lee Hentz,encouraged George and arranged for
a collection,The Hope of Liberty.

The book,the first published in the south  by a Black man,did not sell  enough copies for George to
purchase his freedom,nor  did  two subsequent collections.He finally gained his freedom after the
Civil War,and moved north.He spent his final years in Philadelphia,writing Sunday school stories
and  working for old North Carolina who had  moved to the city.George did not enjoy the popularity there  that he had  known in Chapel Hill,and the details of his death are unknown.