Frank Horne was a Harlem Renaissance poet and a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) “Black Cabinet.” Throughout his public career, including his years with the U.S. Housing Authority, Horne was an outspoken opponent of racial segregation in public and private housing. Horne was … Read MoreFrank Smith Horne (1899-1974)
James Arthur Baldwin, fiction writer, essayist, dramatist, and poet, was born on August 2, 1924 in Harlem, New York during the Harlem Renaissance. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1942, he began his formal career as a writer. Baldwin was … Read MoreJames Baldwin (1924-1987)
Harlem Renaissance writer Festus Claudius McKay was born on September 15, 1889, in Sunny Ville, in the Clarendon Hills of Jamaica, to peasant farmers Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards and Thomas Frank McKay. Young Claude was tutored by his elder schoolmaster brother, Uriah Theodore McKay, who introduced … Read MoreClaude McKay (1889-1948)
The author of the first known work of African American literature (the poem “Bars Fight”), Lucy Terry Prince was kidnapped in Africa as an infant and sold into slavery in Rhode Island. At the age of five, she became the property of Captain Ebenezer Wells … Read MoreLucy Terry Prince (c. 1732-1821)
