In 1961, Margaret Burroughs and her husband, Charles Burroughs founded the Ebony Museum of Chicago, later called the DuSable Museum of African American History. The DuSable is the oldest museum of its type in the United States. Margaret Burroughs was born Margaret Taylor on November … Read MoreMargaret Burroughs (1917-2010)
Alberry Allson Whitman was a romantic poet and a clergyman of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Whitman was born enslaved in Hart County, Kentucky. He became a freedman in 1863, but his family was unable to enjoy their freedom for long as his parents … Read MoreAlberry Allson Whitman (1851-1901)
Camille Thierry was a prolific Francophone poet, born to a French father and octoroon mother in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1814. Thierry’s family had significant holdings as wholesale liquor merchants. This wealth provided Thierry with advantages in education and the opportunity to pursue his own … Read MoreCamille Thierry (1814-1875)
Ignatius Sancho was an African composer and author who grew up as a house slave in England. We do not know how Sancho left domestic servitude but according to historians by the time he was an adult he was an emancipated employee of the Duke … Read MoreIgnatius Sancho (1729-1780)
Born in Michigan in 1869, James David Corrothers became an important literary figure in the 1890s. Corrothers grew up in South Haven, a southern Michigan town established by abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and free blacks during the years before the civil war. For a time he … Read MoreJames David Corrothers (1869-1917)
American poet laureate Rita Frances Dove was born August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio. Rita’s father, Ray Dove, was the first African American chemist in the tire industry. Rita Dove excelled in school and in 1970 she received the Presidential Scholar Award. Dove completed a … Read MoreRita Dove (1952- )
“There’s no life in safety,” said three-time National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award winner Nikki Giovanni who began her own life on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee. She moved with her mother and sister to a small black suburb … Read MoreYolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni (1943- )
Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama. After her mother’s death in 1935 she lived with her grandmother. Her grandmother taught her to read at age four and write at age six. When her grandmother passed away in 1943 she moved to … Read MoreSonia Sanchez (1934- )
A poet and essayist, Frances Ellen Watkins was born free in Baltimore, Maryland on September 24, 1825. Orphaned at the age of three, Watkins went to live with her aunt and uncle, Harriet and William Watkins. Unlike most free blacks, Frances grew up in comfortable … Read MoreFrances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)
Zora Neale Hurston, known for her audacious spirit and sharp wit, was a talented and prolific writer and a skilled anthropologist from the Harlem (New York) Renaissance to the Civil Rights Era. Born on January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, she grew up in the … Read MoreZora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
