Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928) is an American autobiographer and poet who has been called “America’s most visible black female autobiographer” by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adulthood experiences. The first, best-known, and most highly acclaimed, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), focuses on the first seventeen years of her life, brought her international recognition, and was nominated for a National Book Award. Angelou has been highly honored for her body of work, including being awarded over 30 honorary degrees and the nomination of a Pulitzer Prize for her 1971 volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie.

Angelou was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s, was active in the Civil Rights movement, and served as Northern Coordinator of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Since 1991, Angelou has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as recipient of the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit. In 1993, she recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. In 1995, she was recognized for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was heralded as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for black people and women. Angelou’s work is often characterized as autobiographical fiction. Angelou has, however, made a deliberate attempt through her work to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books, centered on themes such as identity, family, and racism, are often used as set texts in schools and universities internationally. Some of her more controversial work has been challenged or banned in US schools and libraries.

Angelou’s Work

Main article: Works of Maya Angelou

Although Angelou wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, without the intention of writing a series, she went on to write five additional volumes. They are distinct in style and narration. The volumes “stretch over time and place”, from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US. They take place from the beginnings of World War II to King’s assassination. As author Lyman B. Hagen states, Angelou has “opened her life to public scrutiny through her works”. Like Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but do not follow a strict chronology. Later books in the series include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up To Heaven (2002). Angelou’s book of essays, Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now (1993), contains materials that are autobiographical in content. Critics have tended to judge Angelou’s subsequent autobiographies “in light of the first”, with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise. Angelou has used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House, who has been called “one of publishing’s hall of fame editors.” Angelou has said regarding Loomis: “We have a relationship that’s kind of famous among publishers”.

All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated”. –Maya Angelou

Angelou’s long and extensive career also includes poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public speaking. She is a prolific writer of poetry; her volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by President Bill Clinton to recite her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” during his inauguration in 1993.

Angelou has had a successful career as a playwright and actress. In 1977, she appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a black woman to be produced. At the age of seventy, Angelou was the first African American woman to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998. In 2006 she had a cameo in Madea’s Family Reunion as “May”. In 2008, Angelou wrote poetry for and narrated the M. K. Asante, Jr. film The Black Candle.

Awards and honors

Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Maya Angelou

Angelou is one of the most honored writers of her generation. She has been honored by universities, literary organizations, government agencies, and special interest groups. Her honors include a National Book Award nomination for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book of poetry, Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie, a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play Look Away, and three Grammys for her spoken word albums. In 1995, Angelou’s publishing company, Bantam Books, recognized her for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List. In 1998, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She has served on two presidential committees, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008. Musician Ben Harper has honored Angelou with his song “I’ll Rise”, which includes words from her poem, “And Still I Rise.” She has been awarded over thirty honorary degrees.

Ida B. Wells Barnett

Also known as: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Ida Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell Wells, Iola, Ida B. Wells

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), an African American journalist, was an active crusader against lynching and a champion of social and political justice for African Americans. Ida B. Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation freed all of the slaves in the Confederate states. Her father, James, was a carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth, a cook. James Wells was a hardworking, opinionated man who was actively interested in politics and in helping to provide educational opportunities for the liberated slaves and for his own eight children. He was on the board of trustees of Rust College, a freedmen’s school, where his daughter Ida received a basic education. Elizabeth Wells supervised her children’s religious training by escorting them to church services and by insisting that the only book that they could read on Sunday was the Bible. Young Wells was an avid reader and stated that as a result of this rule she had read through the Bible many times.

Tragedy struck the Wells family when she was about 16 years old. Her parents and some of her brothers and sisters died in a yellow fever epidemic while Wells was in another town visiting relatives. With a small legacy left by her parents, she was determined to assume the role of mothering her younger brothers and sisters. By arranging her hair in an adult style and donning a long dress, Wells was able to obtain a teaching position by convincing local school officials that she was 18 years old. A few years later, after placing the older children as apprentices, she moved to Memphis with some of the younger children to live with a relative. She was eventually able to earn a teaching position there by obtaining further education at Fisk University.

In 1884, while she was travelling by train from school, Wells was forcibly thrown out of a first-class car by the conductor because she refused to ride in the car set aside for African Americans which was nicknamed the “Jim Crow” car. She had purchased a first-class ticket and was determined not to move from her seat, but she was not able to defend herself against the conductor, who literally dragged her from her seat while some of the white passengers applauded. However, Wells, who was determined to fight for justice, sued the railroad and won her case. When the decision was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, Wells just became more determined to fight against racial injustice wherever she found it.

When Wells joined a literary society in Memphis, she discovered that one of their primary activities was to write essays on various subjects and read them before the members. Wells’ essays on social conditions for African Americans were so well received that the society members began to encourage her to write for church publications. When she was offered a regular reporting position and part ownership of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1887 she eagerly accepted. The name of the newspaper was later shortened to the Free Speech, and Wells eventually became its sole owner. She was not afraid to speak out against what she perceived to be injustices against African Americans, especially in the school system where she worked. She believed that the facilities and supplies available to African American children were always inferior to those offered to whites. As a consequence of her editorials about the schools, Wells lost her teaching position in 1891.

One year later, in 1892, three of Wells’ friends, who were successful businessmen in Memphis, were killed and their businesses destroyed by whites who Wells accused of being jealous of their success. The Free Speech ran a scathing editorial about the murders in which Wells harshly rebuked the white community. It was probably not coincidental that she was out of town by the time local whites read her paper. An angry mob of whites broke into her newspaper office, broke up her presses, and vowed to kill her if she returned to Tennessee.

Wells became a journalist “in exile,” writing under the pen name “Iola” for the New York Age and other weekly newspapers serving the African American population. She systematically attacked lynching and other violent crimes perpetrated against African Americans. She went on speaking tours in the northeastern states and England to encourage people to speak out against lynching. She wrote well-documented pamphlets with titles such as On Lynchings, Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans.

In 1895 Wells moved to Chicago, where she married a widower named Frederick Barnett. She remained active after she was married and carried nursing children with her during her crusades. She and her husband owned a newspaper for a while and she continued to write articles for other journals. She actively participated in efforts to gain the vote for women and simultaneously campaigned against racial bigotry within the women’s movement. In 1909 she attended the organizational meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and continued to work with the organization’s founders during its formative years, although her association with the organization was not always peaceful. Wells-Barnett did agree with one of the major thrusts of the organization, however, and that was their desire to see the enactment of federal anti-lynching legislation. She found a settlement house in Chicago for young African American men and women, regularly taught a Bible class at the house, and also worked as a probation officer there. After her death in 1931 her contributions to the city of Chicago were acknowledged when a public housing project was named after her.

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the “Harlem Renaissance” because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: “Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a `first book’ that marks the opening of a career well worth watching.”

Despite Heyward’s statement, much of Hughes’s early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, Hughes commented: “Fine Clothes to the Jew was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES’ BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES–THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as `the poet low-rate of Harlem.’ Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. . . . The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot–and only that foot.”

An example of the type of criticism of which Hughes was writing is Estace Gay’s comments on Fine Clothes to the Jew. “It does not matter to me whether every poem in the book is true to life,” Gay wrote. “Why should it be paraded before the American public by a Negro author as being typical or representative of the Negro? Bad enough to have white authors holding up our imperfections to public gaze. Our aim ought to be [to] present to the general public, already misinformed both by well meaning and malicious writers, our higher aims and aspirations, and our better selves.” Commenting on reviewers like Gay, Hughes wrote: “I sympathized deeply with those critics and those intellectuals, and I saw clearly the need for some of the kinds of books they wanted. But I did not see how they could expect every Negro author to write such books. Certainly, I personally knew very few people anywhere who were wholly beautiful and wholly good. Besides I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and the ability to work up to a master’s degree at a Northern college. Anyway, I didn’t know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren’t people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too.”

Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes “chose to identify with plain black people–not because it required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father–who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet’s reaction to his father’s flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor.” (Langston Hughes’s parents separated shortly after his birth and his father moved to Mexico. The elder Hughes came to feel a deep dislike and revulsion for other American blacks.) In Hughes’s own words, his poetry is about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago–people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter–and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”

In fact, the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people. Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes’s assistant, believed that Hughes was “critically, the most abused poet in America. . . . Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes’ poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes’ tragedy was double-edged: he was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was demode, and he didn’t go much beyond one of his earliest themes, black is beautiful. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll.

Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations.” Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for Black World noted in 1970: “Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank of writers have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gauge then Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black people. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that `we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,’ and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people. He used his poetry and prose to illustrate that `there is no lack within the Negro people of beauty, strength and power,’ and he chose to do so on their own level, on their own terms.”

Hughes brought a varied and colorful background to his writing. Before he was twelve years old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes: “On the whole, Hughes’ creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso’s, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if `different views engage’ us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it’s over. . . . Hughes’ [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do.”

Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. “White folks,” Simple once commented, “is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life.” Simple’s musings first appeared in 1942 in “From Here to Yonder,” a column Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender and later for the New York Post. According to a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, their original intent was “to convince black Americans to support the U.S. war effort.” They were later published in several volumes.

A more recent collection, 1994′s The Return of Simple, contains previously unpublished material but remains current in its themes, according to a Publishers Weekly critic who noted Simple’s addressing of such issues as political correctness, children’s rights, and the racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C. Dickinson wrote in his Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes that the “charm of Simple lies in his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. . . . Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won’t allow him to brood over a failure very long. . . . Simple is a well-developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun. This does not mean that Simple is in any way dull. He injects the ordinary with his own special insights. . . . Simple is a natural, unsophisticated man who never abandons his hope in tomorrow.” A reviewer for Black World commented on the popularity of Simple: “The people responded. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears–and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives. It was not that ideas and events and places and people beyond the limits of Harlem–all of the Harlems–did not concern him; these things, indeed, were a part of his consciousness; but Simple’s rock-solid commonsense enabled him to deal with them with balance and intelligence. . . . Simple knows who he is and what he is, and he knows that the status of expatriate offers no solution, no balm. The struggle is here, and it can only be won here, and no constructive end is served through fantasies and illusions and false efforts at disguising a basic sense of inadequacy. Simple also knows that the strength, the tenacity, the commitment which are necessary to win the struggle also exist within the Black community.” Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, “the key to Langston Hughes . . . was the poet’s deceptive and profound simplicity. Profound because it was both willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colors and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God.”

It was Hughes’s belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that “most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.” Reviewing The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times in Poetry, Laurence Lieberman recognized that Hughes’s “sensibility [had] kept pace with the times,” but he criticized his lack of a personal political stance. “Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race,” Lieberman commented. “A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival–and mutually hostile–views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes’ politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically.”

Despite some recent criticism, Hughes’s position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is “the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. . . . His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson’s or Robinson Jeffers’. . . . By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own.”

The Block and The Sweet and Sour Animal Book are posthumously published collections of Hughes’s poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art. The Block pairs Hughes’s poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bears the book’s title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the New York Times Book Review, “reflect Hughes’s childlike wonder as well as his sense of humor.” Chambers also commented on the rhythms of Hughes’s words, noting that “children love a good rhyme” and that Hughes gave them “just a simple but seductive taste of the blues.” Hughes’s poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music.

Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays that Hughes “has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously–though always seriously–to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.”

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Family: Born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, MO; died May 22, 1967, of congestive heart failure in New York, NY; son of James Nathaniel (in business, and a lawyer and rancher) and Carrie Mercer (a teacher; maiden name, Langston) Hughes. Education: Attended Columbia University, 1921-22; Lincoln University, A.B., 1929. Memberships: Authors Guild, Dramatists Guild, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, PEN, National Institute of Arts and Letters, Omega Psi Phi.

AWARDS
Opportunity magazine literary contest, first prize in poetry, 1925; Amy Spingarn Contest, Crisis magazine, poetry and essay prizes, 1925; Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry prize contests, first prize, 1926; Palms magazine Intercollegiate Poetry Award, 1927; Harmon Gold Medal for Literature, 1931; Guggenheim fellowship for creative work, 1935; Rosenwald fellowship, 1941; Litt.D., Lincoln University, 1943, Howard University, 1960, Western Reserve University, 1964; National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, 1947; Anisfeld-Wolfe Award for best book on racial relations, 1954; Spingarn Medal, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1960.

CAREER
Poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, song lyricist, radio writer, translator, author of juvenile books, and lecturer. In early years worked as assistant cook, launderer, busboy, and at other odd jobs; worked as seaman on voyages to Africa and Europe. Lived at various times in Mexico, France, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union. Madrid correspondent for Baltimore Afro-American, 1937; visiting professor in creative writing, Atlanta University, 1947; poet in residence, Laboratory School, University of Chicago, 1949.

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
POETRY; PUBLISHED BY KNOPF, EXCEPT AS INDICATED

* The Weary Blues, 1926.

* Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927.

* The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, Golden Stair Press, 1931.

* Dear Lovely Death, Troutbeck Press, 1931.

* The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, 1932.

* Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play, Golden Stair Press, 1932.

* A New Song, International Workers Order, 1938.

* (With Robert Glenn) Shakespeare in Harlem, 1942.

* Jim Crow’s Last Stand, Negro Publication Society of America, 1943.

* Freedom’s Plow, Musette Publishers, 1943.

* Lament for Dark Peoples and Other Poems, Holland, 1944.

* Fields of Wonder, 1947.

* One-Way Ticket, 1949.

* Montage of a Dream Deferred, Holt, 1951.

* Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz, 1961.

* The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967, reprinted, Vintage Books, 1992.

* The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

* The Block: Poems, Viking (New York, NY), 1995.

* Carol of the Brown King: Poems, Atheneum Books (New York, NY), 1997.

* The Pastebaord Bandit, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

NOVELS

* Not Without Laughter, Knopf, 1930.

* Tambourines to Glory, John Day, 1958.

SHORT STORIES

* The Ways of White Folks, Knopf, 1934.

* Simple Speaks His Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1950.

* Laughing to Keep from Crying, Holt, 1952.

* Simple Takes a Wife, Simon &Schuster, 1953.

* Simple Stakes a Claim, Rinehart, 1957.

* Something in Common and Other Stories, Hill &Wang, 1963.

* Simple’s Uncle Sam, Hill & Wang, 1965.

* The Return of Simple Hill & Wang, 1994.

* Short Stories of Langston Hughes, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1996.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

* The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Knopf, 1940.

* I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, Rinehart, 1956.

NONFICTION

* A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934.

* (With Roy De Carava) The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1955.

* (With Milton Meltzer) A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, Crown, 1956, 4th edition published as A Pictorial History of Black Americans, 1973, 6th edition published as A Pictorial History of African Americans, 1995.

* Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP, Norton, 1962.

* (With Meltzer) Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, Prentice-Hall, 1967.

* Black Misery, Paul S. Erickson, 1969.

JUVENILE

* (With Arna Bontemps) Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, Macmillan, 1932.

* The First Book of Negroes, F. Watts, 1952.

* The First Book of Rhythms, F. Watts, 1954, also published as The Book of Rhythms, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

* Famous American Negroes, Dodd, 1954.

* Famous Negro Music Makers, Dodd, 1955.

* The First Book of Jazz, F. Watts, 1955, revised edition, 1976.

* The First Book of the West Indies, F. Watts, 1956 (published in England as The First Book of the Caribbean, E. Ward, 1965).

* Famous Negro Heroes of America, Dodd, 1958.

* The First Book of Africa, F. Watts, 1960, revised edition, 1964.

* The Sweet and Sour Animal Book, Oxford University Press (New York City), 1994.

EDITOR

* Four Lincoln University Poets, Lincoln University, 1930.

* (With Bontemps) The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, Doubleday, 1949, revised edition published as The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970, 1970.

* (With Waring Cuney and Bruce M. Wright) Lincoln University Poets, Fine Editions, 1954.

* (With Bontemps) The Book of Negro Folklore, Dodd, 1958.

* An African Treasury: Articles, Essays, Stories, Poems by Black Africans, Crown, 1960.

* Poems from Black Africa, Indiana University Press, 1963.

* New Negro Poets: U.S., foreword by Gwendolyn Brooks, Indiana University Press, 1964.

* The Book of Negro Humor, Dodd, 1966.

* The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present, Little, Brown, 1967.

TRANSLATOR

* (With Mercer Cook) Jacques Roumain, Masters of Dew, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947, second edition, Liberty Book Club, 1957.

* (With Frederic Carruthers) Nicolas Guillen, Cuba Libre, Ward Ritchie, 1948.

* Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, Indiana University Press, 1957.

OMNIBUS VOLUMES

* Selected Poems, Knopf, 1959.

* The Best of Simple, Hill & Wang, 1961.

* Five Plays by Langston Hughes, edited by Webster Smalley, Indiana University Press, 1963.

* The Langston Hughes Reader, Braziller, 1968.

* Don’t You Turn Back (poems), edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins, Knopf, 1969.

* Good Morning Revolution: The Uncollected Social Protest Writing of Langston Hughes, edited by Faith Berry, Lawrence Hill, 1973.

* The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, 1994.

* The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (18 volumes), University of Missouri Press, 2001, 2002.

OTHER

* (With Bontemps) Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters: 1925-1967, edited by Charles H. Nichols, Dodd, 1980.

* (With Zora Neale Hurston) Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (play), HarperCollins, 1991.

* Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62, edited by Christopher C. De Santis, University of Illinois Press, 1995.

* Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964, edited by Emily Bernard, Knopf, 2001.

Author of numerous plays (most have been produced), including Little Ham, 1935, Mulatto, 1935, Emperor of Haiti, 1936, Troubled Island, 1936, When the Jack Hollers, 1936, Front Porch, 1937, Joy to My Soul, 1937, Soul Gone Home, 1937, Little Eva’s End, 1938, Limitations of Life, 1938, The Em-Fuehrer Jones, 1938, Don’t You Want to Be Free, 1938, The Organizer,1939, The Sun Do Move, 1942, For This We Fight, 1943, The Barrier, 1950, The Glory round His Head, 1953, Simply Heavenly, 1957, Esther, 1957, The Ballad of the Brown King, 1960, Black Nativity, 1961, Gospel Glow, 1962, Jericho-Jim Crow, 1963, Tambourines to Glory, 1963, The Prodigal Son, 1965, Soul Yesterday and Today, Angelo Herndon Jones, Mother and Child, Trouble with the Angels, and Outshines the Sun.

Also author of screenplay, Way Down South, 1942. Author of libretto for operas, The Barrier, 1950, and Troubled Island. Lyricist for Just around the Corner, and for Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, 1948. Columnist for Chicago Defender and New York Post. Poetry, short stories, criticism, and plays have been included in numerous anthologies. Contributor to periodicals, including Nation, African Forum, Black Drama, Players Magazine, Negro Digest, Black World, Freedomways, Harlem Quarterly, Phylon, Challenge, Negro Quarterly, and Negro Story.

Some of Hughes’s letters, manuscripts, lecture notes, periodical clippings, and pamphlets are included in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Additional materials are in the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library, the library of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and the Fisk University library.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
Little Ham was adapted as a musical by Judd Woldin and Richard Engquist. The production, directed by Eric Riley, opens off-Broadway at the John Houseman Theater, 2002.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
BOOKS

* Baker, Houston A., Jr., Black Literature in America, McGraw, 1971.

* Berry, Faith, Langston Hughes, before and beyond Harlem, Wings Books (New York, NY), 1995.

* Berry, S. L., Langston Hughes, Creative Education (Mankato, MN), 1994.

* Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.

* Bone, Robert A., The Negro Novel in America, Yale University Press, 1965.

* Bonner, Pat E., Sassy Jazz and Slo’ Draggin’ Blues: Music in the Poetry of Langston Hughes, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1996.

* Children’s Literature Review, Volume 17, Gale, 1989.

* Concise Dictionary of Literary Biography: The Age of Maturity, 1929-1941, Gale, 1989.

* Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 35, 1985, Volume 44, 1987.

* Cooper, Floyd, Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes, Philomel Books (New York, NY), 1994.

* (Dace, Tish, editor) Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

* Davis, Arthur P., and Saunders Redding, editors, Cavalcade, Houghton, 1971.

* Dekle, Bernard, Profiles of Modern American Authors, Charles E. Tuttle, 1969.

* Dickinson, Donald C., A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902-1967, Archon Books, 1967.

* Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, 1980, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 48: American Poets, 1880-1945, Second Series, 1986, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, 1987.

* Dunham, Montrew, Langston Hughes: Young Black Poet, Aladdin (New York City), 1995.

* Emanuel, James, Langston Hughes, Twayne, 1967.

* Gibson, Donald B., editor, Five Black Writers, New York University Press, 1970.

* Gibson, Donald B., editor and author of introduction, Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1973.

* Harper, Donna Sullivan, Not So Simple: The “Simple” Stories by Langston Hughes, University of Missouri Press (Columbia), 1995.

* Hart, W., editor, American Writers’ Congress, International, 1935.

* Hill, Christine, H., Langston Hughes: Poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Hanslow Pub. (Springfield, NJ), 1997.

* Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea: An Autobiography, Knopf, 1940.

* Hughes, Langston, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey,Rinehart, 1956.

* Jackson, Blyden, and Louis D. Rubin Jr., Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, Louisiana State University, 1974.

* Jahn, Janheinz, A Bibliography of Neo-African Literature from Africa, America and the Caribbean, Praeger, 1965.

* Littlejohn, David, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, Viking, 1966.

* McLaren, Joseph, Langston Hughes, Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921-1943, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1996.

* Meltzer, Milton, Langston Hughes: A Biography, Crowell, 1968.

* Myers, Elizabeth P., Langston Hughes: Poet of His People, Garrard, 1970.

* Nazel, Joseph, Langston Hughes, Melrose Square (Los Angeles), 1994.

* Neilson, Kenneth, To Langston Hughes, with Love, All Seasons Art (Hollis, NY), 1996.

* O’Daniel, Thermon B., editor, Langston Hughes: Black Genius, a Critical Evaluation, Morrow, 1971.

* Osofsky, Audrey, Free to Dream: The Making of a Poet, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books (New York, NY), 1996.

* Rollins, Charlamae H., Black Troubador: Langston Hughes, Rand McNally, 1970.

* Trotman, C. James, Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence, Garland (New York, NY), 1995.

* Walker, Alice, Langston Hughes, American Poet, HarperCollins (New York City), 1988.

PERIODICALS

* African American Review, fall, 1994, p. 333.

* American Mercury, January, 1959.

* Black Scholar, June, 1971; July, 1976.

* Black World, June, 1970; September, 1972; September, 1973.

* Booklist, November 15, 1976; January 1, 1991, p. 889.

* Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, January, 1995, p. 168; January, 1996, p. 162.

* CLA Journal, June, 1972.

* Choice, February 1996, p. 951.

* Crisis, August-September, 1960; June, 1967; February, 1969.

* Ebony, October, 1946.

* Emerge, May, 1995, p. 58.

* English Journal, March, 1977.

* Horn Book, September-October, 1994, p. 603; January-February, 1996, p. 86.

* Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1994, p. 578.

* Library Journal, February 1, 1991, p. 78.

* Life, February 4, 1966.

* Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 26, 1995, p. 1.

* Nation, December 4, 1967.

* Negro American Literature Forum, winter, 1971.

* Negro Digest, September, 1967; November, 1967; April, 1969.

* New Leader, April 10, 1967.

* New Republic, January 14, 1974; March 6, 1995, p. 37.

* New Yorker, December 30, 1967.

* New York Herald Tribune, August 1, 1926.

* New York Herald Tribune Books, November 26, 1961.

* New York Times, May 24, 1967; June 1, 1968; June 29, 1969; December 13, 1970; February 8, 1995, p. C17.

* New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1968; December 25, 1994, p. 15; February 12, 1995, p. 18; November 12, 1995, p. 38.

* Philadelphia Tribune, February 5, 1927.

* Poetry, August, 1968.

* Publishers Weekly, May 9, 1994, p. 62; October 3, 1994, p. 30; October 31, 1994, p.54; November 13, 1995, p. 60.

* San Francisco Chronicle, April 5, 1959.

* Saturday Review, November 22, 1958; September 29, 1962.

* School Library Journal, February, 1995, p. 92.

* Smithsonian, August, 1994, p. 49.

* Tribune Book’s (Chicago), April 13, 1980.

* Washington Post, November 13, 1978.

* Washington Post Book World, February 2, 1969; December 8, 1985.*

Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie G. Johnson (born October 6, 1949) is best known as the inventor of the Super Soaker water gun. The Super Soaker was the top selling toy in the United States in 1991 and 1992.

Lonnie G. Johnson is president and founder of Johnson Research and Development Co., Inc., a technology development company, and its spin off companies, Excellatron Solid State, LLC; Johnson Electro-Mechanical Systems, LLC; and Johnson Real Estate Investments, LLC.

Articles on Lonnie Johnson have appeared in numerous publications including Time Magazine, the New York Times, and Inventor’s Digest. Johnson serves on the Board of Directors of the Georgia Alliance for Children, an organization which informed and influential voice to protect the rights and interests of Georgia’s less fortunate children. He is a Board member of the Hank Aaron Chasing the Dream Foundation, and had served on the board of directors of the Commonwealth National Bank.

In Marietta, Georgia, February 25, 1994 was declared “Lonnie Johnson G. Day” in his honor.

Upon his graduation from Tuskegee University, he worked as a research engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and then joined the U. S. Air Force, serving as Acting Chief of the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In 1979, he left the Air Force to accept a position as Senior Systems Engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he worked on the Galileo (spacecraft)|Galileo mission to Jupiter. Johnson’s company just came out with a new Nerf ball toy gun. Returning to the Air Force in 1982, he served as an Advanced Space Systems Requirements Officer at Strategic Air Command(SAC) headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, and as Chief of the Data Management Branch, SAC Test and Evaluation Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was awarded the Air Force Achievement Medal and the[Air Force Commendation Medal on two different occasions.

In 1987, he returned to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he worked on the Mars Observer project and was the fault protection engineer during the early stages of the Cassini-Huygens|Cassini (Saturn) project. He was responsible for ensuring that single point spacecraft failures would not result in loss of the mission. During his nine year career with JPL, he received multiple achievement awards from NASA for his work in spacecraft system design.

Engineering Firms

In 1989, Lonnie G. Johnson formed his own engineering firm and licensed his most famous invention, the Super Soaker water gun, to Larami Corporation. Two years later, the Super Soaker generated over $200 million in retail sales, and became the number one selling toy in America. Larami Corporation was eventually purchased by Hasbro, the second largest toy manufacturer in the world. Over the years, Super Soaker sales have totaled close to one billion dollars. Currently, Lonnie Johnson holds over 80 patents, with over 20 more pending, and is the author of several publications on spacecraft power systems.

Energy Technology

Two of Johnson’s companies, Excellatron Solid State and Johnson Electro-Mechanical Systems (JEMS), are developing energy technology.

Excellatron

Excellatron is introducing thin film batteries, a new generation of rechargeable battery technology which has significantly better abilities than the current industry leader Li-ion.

JEMS has developed the Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter System (JTEC), which was listed by Popular Mechanics as one of the top 10 inventions of 2008, and has potential applications including solar power plants and ocean thermal power generation. It converts thermal energy to electrical energy using a non-steam process which works by pushing hydrogen ions through two membranes, with significant advantages over alternative systems, and is claimed to be highly scalable.

Madame C.J. Walker

Madam C.J. Walker (December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919) was an African-American businesswoman, hair care entrepreneur and philanthropist. She made her fortune by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women under the company she founded, Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.

The Guinness Book of Records cites Walker as the first female who became a millionaire by her own achievements.

Biography

Madam C.J Walker was born Sarah Breedlove, on December 23, 1867 in Delta, Louisiana to Owen and Minerva Breedlove. One of six children; she had a sister Louvenia and 4 brothers: Alexander, James, Solomon, and Owen Jr. Her parents were slaves to a parish farm owner Robert W. Burney. Although some sources claim her parents died during a yellow fever epidemic, that information is inaccurate. Her mother died first, possibly due to a cholera outbreak in 1872. Her father remarried and died shortly afterward when she was seven years old.

Madam Walker and unnamed passengers in her automobile.

Sarah moved in with her older sister, Louvenia, and brother-in-law, Willie Powell. She later said she married Moses McWilliams when she was 14 years old to get a home of her own to escape Powell’s cruel abuse. Three years later her daughter, Lelia McWilliams was born. When Sarah was 20, McWilliams died. Shortly afterward she moved to St. Louis where three of her brothers were barbers. She joined St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she sang in the choir and where she was greatly influenced by women members like Jessie Batts Robinson, a school teacher and wife of newspaper publisher, Christopher Robinson.

During this period Sarah married again on August 11, 1894 to a man by the name of John Davis. That marriage ended around 1903. She married for a third time in January 1906 to a newspaper sales agent by the name of Charles Joseph Walker. They divorced in 1912.

Like many women of her era, Sarah experienced hair loss. Because most Americans lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity, they bathed and washed their hair infrequently. The result was severe scalp disease. Sarah experimented with home remedies and products already on the market until she finally developed her own shampoo and an ointment that contained sulfur to make her scalp a healthier environment for hair growth.

Soon Sarah–now known as Madam C. J. Walker–was selling her products throughout the United States. While her daughter Lelia ran a mail order business from Denver, Madam Walker and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern states. They settled in Pittsburgh in 1908 and opened Lelia College train “hair culturists.” In 1910 Walker moved to Indianapolis, Indiana where she established her headquarters and built a factory.

She became an inspiration to many black women all over the world. When she fully recognized her power and wealth she began to lecture other black women and help them gain confidence in building their own businesses. She also gave other lectures on black issues at conventions which were sponsored by powerful black institutions. After the East St. Louis Race Riot, she joined leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in their efforts to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime. In 1918 at the biennial convention of the National Association Of Colored Woman (NACW) she was acknowledged for making the largest contribution to save the Anacostia (Washington, DC) home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. She continued to donate money throughout her career to the NACCP, the YMCA, and to black schools, organizations, individuals, orphanages, and retirement homes. In May 1918 she moved to her Irvington-on-Hudson, New York estate Villa Lewaro which had been designed by Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black architect in New York State and a founding member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Among her neighbors were Jay Gould and industrialist John D. Rockefeller. Madam C.J. Walker died at Villa Lewaro at the age of 51 on Sunday May 25, 1919 from complications of hypertension. At her death she was considered to be the wealthiest African-American woman in America and known to be the first Africa-American millionaire. Her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, became the president of the C.J Walker Manufacturing Company.

Madam Walker was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1992 and in 2002, Molefi Kete Asante listed Madam C. J. Walker on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. She also has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the National Cosmetology Hall of Fame and the National Direct Sales Hall of Fame. On 28 January 1998 the USPS, as part of its Black Heritage Series, issued the Madam C.J. Walker Commemorative stamp. On 16 March 2010, Congressman Charles Rangel introduced HJ81, a Congressional House Joint Resolution, honoring Madam C. J. Walker. That legislation currently awaits a vote.

Granville T. Woods

Birth: April 23, 1856 in Australia
Death: January 30, 1910 in New York, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: inventor
Source: Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, Vol. 28. Gale, 2008.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Australian-born American inventor Granville T. Woods (1856-1910), dubbed “the black Edison,” contributed key inventions to several of the technologies that defined the modern era, including railroad braking, electric railroad systems, and telephony and telegraphy.

During his own life, Woods had to struggle not just for recognition but for financial solvency. He came from modest origins, worked independently, and had no way to market his inventions on his own. For most of his life he had to seek out associates and allies in order to try to realize financial gains from his work. Those allies, well aware of the value of Woods’s inventions, used a variety of subterfuges to try to wrest his intellectual property from him, but through a series of lengthy court struggles he resisted their efforts. Woods’s story offers many insights into the conditions faced by African-American inventors–and into the roles played by inventors in general during an age when the solo inventor was being supplanted by a different kind of figure, the engineer, employed by a large corporation.

Born in Australia

Many details of Woods’s early life have been obscured by contradictory stories told about him, sometimes by Woods himself. His birthplace has often been given as Columbus, Ohio, but his biographer, Rayvon Fouché, relying on census records, Woods’s death certificate, and detailed journalistic accounts of Woods’s life published in the 1890s, has concluded that he was born in Australia on April 23, 1856. He was of a mixed ethnic background that probably included Australian Aboriginal, Malay, and African elements. As a foreign-born black person, Woods, like other black immigrants, likely found American racial prejudice especially difficult to take. Fouché noted that his “combative spirit, the forthright manner in which he interacted with whites, and his fearless public challenges to white authority–all of which, because of the severe consequences, most African Americans avoided well into the 20th century–indicate that he did not consider himself an American Negro.”

It is not known exactly when Woods came to the United States, nor what kind of formal education he received. He apparently spent some time in Columbus. Earlier biographies of Woods have reported that he left school at age ten to learn the trades of machinist and blacksmith, continuing to supplement his education by persuading white friends to check out textbooks from libraries that barred him from entering because of his skin color. In later testimony, however, he said that he began working as a machinist at age 15. He is said to have gone west to work on a railroad, perhaps the Iron Mountain Railroad in Missouri, to have worked in a mill in Springfield, Illinois, and to have attended an engineering college in the eastern United States. One magazine stated that Woods claimed to be a graduate of the electrical department of Stern’s Institute of Technology; another article, quoted by Fouché, stated that “Mr. Woods has a first-class English education, and is an experienced mechanic, having received special training in mechanical engineering.” In the year 1878 Woods is variously reported to have served as an engineer on a British ship called the Ironsides and to have worked for the Pomeroy Railroad Company in southwestern Ohio.

Reliable records of Woods’s activities from the late 1870s onward are available in the form of court testimony he later gave about his creative work as an inventor, largely unearthed by Fouché’s research. He apparently moved from the Pomeroy Railroad to the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad around 1879, working there for 13 months and being entrusted with shifting cars in a rail yard in the town of Washington Court House, Ohio, northeast of Cincinnati. He stated that a friendly telegraph operator there instructed him in the scientific fundamentals of telegraphy, but the inventions that he was soon to devise suggested that, however fast he may have been as a learner, he had at some point received more training as an electrical engineer than could be gleaned from a few sessions in a telegraph operator’s booth. What seems certain is that Woods obtained a strong working knowledge of the two hottest technologies of the 1880s, railroads and electronic communications. His technical expertise probably explained the relative prestige of the railroad jobs he held as a young man; most African Americans in southern Ohio, a region that reflected the attitudes of points farther south, were relegated to sheer manual labor at the time.

In 1880 Woods experienced the first instance of a problem that would plague him throughout most of his working life: he left the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad after the company failed to pay him the salary he had earned. They issued scrip that local merchants either refused to accept or devalued with huge surcharges. That year, Woods settled in Cincinnati and, possibly working with a brother, Lyates, started a small firm called the Woods Electrical Company. He began to explore the phenomenon of induction, the process of causing an electrical current in a conductor by generating or varying a nearby electromagnetic field . One of his earliest experiments produced an induction-based elevator signaling system, and he began showing drawings of the system to well-heeled Cincinnatians whom he saw as potential investors.

Suffered from Smallpox

Woods’s career was soon interrupted, however: in the summer of 1881 he contracted smallpox, which was in its last years as a major threat in the United States. Often fatal, the disease sidelined Woods for most of a year and left him with chronic kidney and liver disease that may have been factors in his early death. Apparently Woods was married at this point; he spoke of having to take extreme measures in order to support his family. Unable to do sustained creative work, he found employers unwilling to hire him in his weakened condition. The only job he could find was at the Queen City Facing Mills, and that company, too, refused to pay him the salary it had agreed on. Woods launched a lengthy court action that recovered only $20 in the end.

By late 1882 and 1883 Woods was once again at work on new inventions. The first patent he received, in 1884, was for an improved type of steam boiler, and he also registered patents on a new telephone signal transmitter and an ingenious process combining features of a telephone and a telegraph machine that he called telegraphony. Rights to that invention were later acquired by Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone company. Despite the flow of creative ideas he was experiencing, Woods lacked even the $15 fee necessary to file patents on these inventions. In cases where he did succeed, it was because Cincinnati investors and attorneys, who were becoming aware of his talents and alert to the possibility of a big payoff, fronted him the money.

Woods forged ahead, and by 1885 he had fleshed out his ideas for a true breakthrough invention called the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph. The system used induction to transmit telegraph messages from moving trains to wires running beside the tracks, thus enabling railroad personnel to monitor the locations of trains in the system–the previous impossibility of which had been the cause of numerous collisions. Woods and another inventor, Lucius J. Phelps, apparently conceived of such a system independently. Woods read of Phelps’s work in Scientific American magazine and refined his own invention into a system with a wider scope. Using a borrowed battery at the headquarters of the Cincinnati Medicated Mud Bath Company, he constructed a working model, and once again he attracted the attention of well-heeled investors.

The railway telegraph was patented in 1887, but not before Woods had become embroiled in an expensive patent interference proceeding–an attempt by the U.S. Patent Office to determine priority among competing claims–in which Phelps asserted his rights to the invention. The process further sapped Woods’s meager financial resources but did bring him a measure of publicity. A Catholic Tribune article quoted by Fouché even called him “the greatest inventor in the history of his race, and equal, if not superior to, any inventor in the country.” That led two investors, John Gano and Ralph Peters, to back a second Woods Electric Company, this one located across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Meanwhile, Woods had received feelers from the Westinghouse Corporation about a railroad air brake he had developed.

Relationship with Investors Deteriorated

Woods’s relationship with Gano and Peters quickly deteriorated, as Woods alleged that they failed to pay him his agreed-upon salary of $50 a month, plus stock options, and did not reimburse him for trips to New York undertaken to promote his inventions. That led to a second set of lawsuits, complicated by the fact that two entities, one in Ohio and one in Kentucky, bore the name Woods Electric Company. By 1890 Woods had managed to sever his ties from Gano and Peters, but he was once again almost penniless.

Woods decided he had to move to New York, the center of American electronics engineering. Over the next ten years, the pattern of his life in Cincinnati repeated itself. Working first as an elevated railway porter for $1.20 a day, and sending most of that money to an ailing sister, Woods shopped his ideas to investors. The key idea Woods worked on in the 1890s was an electric train system. The ancestor of both overhead-powered trams and the “third rail” trains of today, the system Woods had in mind carried enormous potential benefits for investors. Others worked on similar ideas, and Fouché has disputed the often-repeated statement that Woods was the inventor of the third-rail power system. However, with the help of partners in his newly formed American Engineering Company, Woods devised key components of an electric street railway that was built on New York’s Coney Island.

Unfortunately, Woods once again found himself in the hands of less-than-honest partners who conspired to cheat him of profits due. His relationship with the American Engineering Company devolved into a violent scene in which Woods confronted company executive James Zerbe over the theft of some of his drawings and ended up in a physical altercation with Zerbe and his son. After a more lengthy court proceeding involving a libel suit filed by Zerbe against Woods–Woods was once again vindicated but drained his savings in defending himself–the partnership was dissolved. The only silver lining was that the court proceedings once again brought Woods a measure of favorable publicity. He succeeded in registering a few more patents, including one in 1900 for a large-scale chicken egg incubator.

The degree to which racism played a part in Woods’s troubles remains an open question. Given the fact that the 1890s marked a low point in post-Civil War race relations, he clearly suffered the effects of racial prejudice, and his precarious financial standing resulted from his inability to call upon the sources of capital that would have been available to white inventors. However, the problems Woods faced were shared to some extent by white inventors, including Thomas Edison, and all over the United States and the world freelance inventors like Woods were losing ground to large corporations that had the legal and financial muscle to see the work of engineers through to financial profits.

Woods, in fact, first began to prosper after he worked out a closer arrangement with two of those large corporations, General Electric and Westinghouse, in the last years of his life. Working primarily through an intermediary, H. Ward Leonard, Woods registered 20 patents between 1900 and 1907, most of them for electronic train-control devices. Most of these patents were assigned to General Electric and Westinghouse. Woods was able to purchase a farm in Monsey, New York. He may have married again, with unhappy results. A news account cited by C.R. Gibbs in Black Inventors: From Africa to America stated that Woods had filed suit against a Poughkeepsie estate owner, the employer of a maid named Elizabeth who claimed to be married to Woods but said that he had abused her and that she wanted to stay on in her job. Just as Woods began to realize proper remuneration for his life’s work, he suffered a stroke on January 28, 1910. He died at Harlem Hospital in New York two days later.

AWARDS
Elementary Public School No. 335, Brooklyn, NY, was dedicated in Woods’s name, 1969; Governor John J. Gilligan of Ohio issued a proclamation recognizing Woods’s achievements in science and invention, October 11, 1974.

FURTHER READINGS

* Fouché, Rayvon, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, Johns Hopkins, 2003.

* Gibbs, C.R., Black Inventors: From Africa to America, Three Dimensions, 1995.

* James, Portia P., The Real McCoy: African-American Invention and Innovation, 1619-1930, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

* Notable Black American Men, Gale, 1998.

* Simmons, William, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, Rewell, 1887.

* Jet, June 5, 1995.

* Journal of Black Studies, March 1989.

* New York Times, December 26, 2004.

* “Granville T. Woods: Inventor,” The Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences, <https://webfiles.uci.edu/mcbrown/display/woods.html> (December 28, 2007).

* “Granville T. Woods: The Multiplex Telegraph,” Inventor of the Week, <http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/woods.html> (December 28, 2007).

Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American jazz and Western classical trumpeter and composer. He is Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has promoted the appreciation of Classical and Jazz music, often focusing on young audiences.

As a Jazz performer and composer he has made display of his extensive knowledge about jazz and jazz history and for being a classical virtuoso. As of 2006, he has made sixteen classical and more than thirty jazz recordings, has been awarded nine Grammys in both genres, and was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for a jazz recording.

Life and career

Marsalis was born to Dolores (née Ferdinand) and Ellis Marsalis, Jr., a New Orleans-based music teacher and pianist. He is the second of six sons: Branford (1960), Wynton (1961), Ellis III (1964), Delfeayo (1965), Mboya Kinyatta (1971), and Jason (1977). Branford, Delfeayo, and Jason are also jazz musicians. Ellis is a poet, photographer and network engineer based in Baltimore. Mboya was born with autism.

Marsalis demonstrated an aptitude and interest for music as a youth. Al Hirt gave a six-year-old Marsalis his first trumpet. At age eight he performed traditional New Orleans music in the Fairview Baptist Church band led by banjoist, Danny Barker. At fourteen he was invited to perform with the New Orleans Philharmonic. During his high school years attending De La Salle High School, Marsalis was a member of the New Orleans Symphony Brass Quintet, New Orleans Community Concert Band, under the direction of Peter Dombourian, New Orleans Youth Orchestra, New Orleans Symphony and on weekends he performed in a jazz band as well as in the popular local funk band, the Creators.

Marsalis moved to New York City to attend the Juilliard School of Music in 1978. Two years later in 1980, he joined the Jazz Messengers to study under drummer and bandleader, Art Blakey, during which time Marsalis gleaned from Blakey how to lead a band and how to perform with intensity and consistency. In 1981, Marsalis toured with the Herbie Hancock quartet throughout the USA and Japan, as well as performing at the Newport Jazz Festival with Herbie. During his career Marsalis has played with Jazz artists including, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Edison, Clark Terry, and Sonny Rollins.

Marsalis assembled bands and performed over 120 concerts for ten consecutive years. But as audiences for Jazz concerts aged and shrank, Marsalis has given lectures and music workshops. Collaborators and students at Marsalis’s workshops include James Carter, Christian McBride, Roy Hargrove, Harry Connick, Jr. (Marsalis plays on Connick’s album 30, and Your Songs), Nicholas Payton, Eric Reed and Eric Lewis. Marsalis has been commissioned to compose for dance companies including Garth Fagan Dance, Peter Martins at the New York City Ballet, Twyla Tharp for the American Ballet Theatre, and also for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.

Marsalis collaborated with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1995 to compose the string quartet, At The Octoroon Balls, and again in 1998 to create a response to the Stravinsky: A Soldier’s Tale with his composition, A Fiddler’s Tale.

In 1997 his epic oratorio on slavery, Blood on the Fields, became the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize in music.

In 2006, Marsalis’s US$833,686 annual salary as Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center drew negative attention in an article published by Reader’s Digest magazine regarding overspending by non-profit organizations. Marsalis is a bachelor with sons by Candace Stanley and another son with actress Victoria Rowell.

Musical accomplishments

Marsalis compositions and playing is represented on a quartet of Sony Classical releases, At the Octoroon Balls: String Quartet No. 1, A Fiddler’s Tale, Reel Time and Sweet Release and Ghost Story: Two More Ballets by Wynton Marsalis. All are volumes of an eight-CD series, titled Swinging Into The 21st, a set of albums released in 1999-2000 featuring original compositions and standards, from jazz to classical to ballet, including Jelly Roll Morton, Igor Stravinsky and Thelonious Monk along with Marsalis.

At the Octoroon Balls contains Marsalis’s first string quartet, performed by the Orion Quartet, a work commissioned by the Lincoln Center, and premiered in 1995 in conjunction with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The composition has been recorded by the Harlem Quartet. A Fiddler’s Tale, also commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for Marsalis/Stravinsky, a joint project of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Jazz At Lincoln Center, a narrated work about a musician who sells her soul to a record producer. It premiered on April 23, 1998, at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A version without narration was appeared on the album At the Octoroon Balls: String Quartet No. 1. Reeltime is Marsalis’s score for John Singleton’s film Rosewood. This original music, featuring vocals by Cassandra Wilson and Shirley Caesar, was never used in the film. Marsalis also provided the score for the 1990 film Tune in Tomorrow, in which he also makes a cameo appearance as a New Orleans trumpeter with his band. Sweet Release and Ghost Story was premiered in New York city by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Zhong Mei Dance Company.

On Sony Classical, Marsalis has won critical acclaim for the recording In Gabriel’s Garden (SK/ST 66244), featuring Baroque music for trumpet and orchestra. It includes performances of the Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 and Mouret: Rondeau, a video of which has been adopted as the new theme for PBS Masterpiece Theatre. The San Francisco Examiner wrote, “Marsalis continues to define great music making…[the pieces] are all articulated with dazzling clarity and enthusiasm.” The album features the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Anthony Newman, and was produced by Steven Epstein.

Awards and recognition

Statue dedicated to W. Marsalis in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

Marsalis has been awarded the 2005 National Medal of Arts of the United States, the Grand Prix du Disque of the Charles Cros Academy and the Edison Award of the Netherlands, and was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in Britain. He has received several honorary doctoral degrees, and a variety of other recognitions from Brandeis University, Brown University, Columbia University, Denison University, Harvard University, Haverford College, Johns Hopkins University, the Manhattan School of Music, New York University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, the University of Miami, Southern Methodist University(SMU) and Yale University.

Marsalis has toured 30 countries on every continent except Antarctica, and nearly five million copies of his recordings have been sold worldwide.

Accolades

• Johns Hopkins University – George Peabody Medal
• Northwestern University – Honorary Doctor of Arts
• Royal Academy of Music – Honorary Member
• Harvard University – Doctor of Music
• Teachers College, Columbia University – Medal for Distinguished Service
• Southern Methodist University(SMU) – Algur H. Meadows Award For Excellence in the Arts

Music Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Music

• 1997 Blood on the Fields, oratorio

Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group

• 1985 Black Codes From the Underground
• 1985 J Mood
• 1985 Marsalis Standard Time – Volume I

Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with orchestra)

• 1983 Raymond Leppard (conductor), Wynton Marsalis & the National Philharmonic Orchestra for Haydn: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat/L. Mozart: Trumpet Concerto In D/Hummel: Trumpet Concerto in E Flat
• 1984 Raymond Leppard (conductor), Wynton Marsalis & the English Chamber Orchestra for Wynton Marsalis, Edita Gruberova: Handel, Purcell, Torelli, Fasch, Molter

Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo

• 1983 Think of One
• 1984 Hot House Flowers
• 1985 Black Codes From the Underground

Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children

• 2000 Listen to the Storyteller

Discography

With Art Blakey: 1981 Album of the Year 1981 Straight Ahead With Chico Freeman: 1981 Destiny’s Dance With Herbie Hancock: 1981 Quartet With Joe Henderson: 1992 “Lush Life: The Music of Billy Stayhorn” As Leader: 1981 Wynton Marsalis 1982 Fathers and Sons Columbia Records #FC 37972. 1983 Trumpet Concertos (Haydn, Mozart, Hummel) 1983 Think of One 1984 Haydn: Three Favorite Concertos (with Yo-Yo Ma and Cho-Liang Lin) 1984 Baroque Music for Trumpet (Purcell, Handel, Torelli, etc.) 1984 Hot House Flowers 1985 Black Codes (From the Underground) 1985 J Mood 1986 Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. I 1986 Live at Blues Alley 1986 Tomasi: Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra (Tomasi, Jolivet) 1987 Carnaval 1989 The Majesty of the Blues 1989 Best of Wynton Marsalis 1989 Copland/Vaughan Williams/Hindemith (Eastman Wind Ensemble) 1989 Portrait of Wynton Marsalis 1989 Crescent City Christmas Card 1989 The Majesty of the Blues 1989 Baroque Music for Trumpets 1990 Tune In Tomorrow… The Original Soundtrack 1990 Standard Time Vol. 3: The Resolution of Romance 1991 Thick In The South: Soul Gestures In Southern Blue, Vol. 1 1991 Uptown Ruler: Soul Gestures In Southern Blue, Vol. 2 1991 Levee Low Moan: Soul Gestures In Southern Blue, Vol. 3 1991 Standard Time Vol. 2: Intimacy Calling 1992 Concert for Planet Earth Blue Interlude 1992 Baroque Duet – A film by Susan Froemke * Peter Gelb * Albert Maysles * Pat Jaffe 1992 Baroque Duet – with Kathleen Battle 1992 Citi Movement 1993 On the Twentieth Century…: Hindemith, Poulenc, Bernstein, Ravel 1994 In This House, On This Morning 1994 Greatest Hits: Handel

1995 Why Toes Tap: Marsalis on Rhythm 1995 Listening for Clues: Marsalis on Form 1995 Tackling the Monster: Marsalis on Practice (VHS) 1995 Sousa to Satchmo: Marsalis on the Jazz Band 1995 Greatest Hits: Baroque 1995 Joe Cool’s Blues (with Ellis Marsalis) 1996 In Gabriel’s Garden 1997 Liberty! 1997 Jump Start and Jazz 1997 Blood on the Fields 1998 Classic Wynton 1998 The Midnight Blues: Standard Time, Vol. 5 1999 Reeltime 1999 Mr. Jelly Lord: Standard Time, Vol. 6 1999 Listen to the Storyteller 1999 Sweet Release and Ghost Story: Two More Ballets by Wynton Marsalis 1999 Los Elefantes (with Arturo Sandoval), 1999 At the Octoroon Balls – String Quartet No. 1; A Fiddler’s Tale Suite, Franz Joseph Haydn 1999 Big Train (The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra) 1999 Marsalis Plays Monk: Standard Time, Vol. 4 2000 The London Concert 2000 The Marciac Suite 2001 Classical Hits, 2001 Popular Songs: The Best Of Wynton Marsalis 2002 All Rise 2002 Trumpet Concertos 2002 Classic Kathleen Battle: A Portrait 2003 Half Past Autumn Suite Irvin Mayfield, Basin Street Records 2003 Mark O’Connor‘s Hot Swing Trio: In Full Swing 2004 The Magic Hour 2004 Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson 2005 Live at the House of Tribes 2007 From the Plantation to the Penitentiary 2007 Here…Now (Internet-Only Album) 2008 Standards & Ballads (compilation: 1983-1999) 2008 Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis: Two Men With The Blues 2009 He And She 2009 Christmas Jazz Jam

Ray Charles

Ray Charles (September 23, 1930 – June 10, 2004) was an American musician. Charles was a pioneer in the genre of soul music during the 1950s by fusing rhythm & blues, gospel, and blues styles into his early recordings for Atlantic Records. He also helped racially integrate country and pop music during the 1960s with his crossover success on ABC Records, most notably with his Modern Sounds albums. During his tenure with ABC, Charles became one of the first African-American musicians to be given artistic control by a mainstream record company.

Rolling Stone ranked Charles number 10 on their list of “100 Greatest Artists of All Time” in 2004, and voted him number two on their November 2008 list of “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.

Hall of Fame and other honors

Statue in Ray Charles Plaza in Albany, Georgia

In 1979, he was one of the first honorees of the Georgia State Music Hall of Fame being recognized for being a musician born in the state. Ray’s version of “Georgia On My Mind” was made into the official state song for Georgia. In 1981, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was one of the first inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural ceremony in 1986. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1986.

In 1987, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1991, he was inducted to the Rhythm & Blues Foundation. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1998 he was awarded the Polar Music Prize together with Ravi Shankar in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2004 he was inducted to the Jazz Hall of Fame, and inducted to the National Black Sports & Entertainment Hall of Fame. The Grammy Awards of 2005 were dedicated to Charles.

On December 7, 2007, Ray Charles Plaza was opened in Albany, Georgia, with a revolving, lighted bronze sculpture of Charles seated at a piano. Later that month, on December 26, 2007, Ray Charles was inducted into the Hit Parade Hall of Fame. He was also presented with the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, during the 1991 UCLA Spring Sing.

Ray Charles Post Office Building

On Tuesday, July 12, 2005, President George Bush signed into law a bill (PL 109-25), sponsored by Congresswoman Diane E. Watson (CA-33rd), designating the U.S. postal facility located at 4960 W. Washington Blvd. in Los Angeles, California, as the Ray Charles Post Office Building. On August 24, 2005, the United States Congress honored Charles by dedicating and renaming the former West Adams Station post office in Los Angeles the “Ray Charles Station”.

Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer.

Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz fusion. Many well-known musicians rose to prominence as members of Davis’ ensembles, including saxophonists Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, George Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Dave Liebman, Branford Marsalis and Kenny Garrett; trombonist J. J. Johnson; pianists Horace Silver, Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett; guitarists John McLaughlin, John Scofield and Mike Stern; bassists Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, Dave Holland, Marcus Miller and Darryl Jones ; and drummers Philly Joe Jones, Tony Williams, Billy Cobham, Jack DeJohnette, and Al Foster.

On October 7, 2008, his album Kind of Blue, released in 1959, received its fourth platinum certification from the RIAA, signifying sales of 4 million copies. Miles Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. Davis was noted as “one of the key figures in the history of jazz”.

On November 5, 2009, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan sponsored a measure in the US House of Representatives to recognize and commemorate the album Kind of Blue on its 50th anniversary. The measure also affirms jazz as a national treasure and “encourages the United States government to preserve and advance the art form of jazz music.” It passed, unanimously, with a vote of 409–0 on December 15, 2009.

Awards

• Winner; Down Beat Reader’s Poll Best Trumpet Player 1955
• Winner; Down Beat Reader’s Poll Best Trumpet Player 1957
• Winner; Down Beat Reader’s Poll Best Trumpet Player 1961
• Grammy Award for Best Jazz Composition Of More Than Five Minutes Duration for Sketches of Spain (1960)
• Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance, Large Group Or Soloist With Large Group for Bitches Brew (1970)
• Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for We Want Miles (1982)
• Sonning Award for Lifetime Achievement In Music (1984; Copenhagen, Denmark)
• Doctor of Music, honoris causa (1986; New England Conservatory)
• Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Tutu (1986)
• Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist for Aura (1989)
• Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band for Aura (1989)
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1990)
• Australian Film Institute Award for Best Original Music Score for Dingo, shared with Michel Legrand (1991)
• Knighted into the Legion of Honor (July 16, 1991; Paris)
• Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental Performance for Doo-Bop (1992)
• Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance for Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux (1993)
• Hollywood Walk of Fame Star (February 19, 1998)
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction (March 13, 2006)
• Hollywood’s Rockwalk Induction (September 28, 2006)
• RIAA Quadruple Platinum for Kind of Blue
• St. Louis Walk of Fame

Discography

Main article: Miles Davis discography

Sidemen

Rhythm Section

• 1950: Pianist John Lewis, bassist Al McKibbon, drummer Max Roach
• 1951: Pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., bassist Tommy Potter, drummer Art Blakey
• 1956: Pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Art Taylor
• 1955–58: Pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones
• 1959–63: Pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb
• 1963–68: Pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Tony Williams
• 1971: Pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Jack DeJohnette, percussionist Airto Moreira
• 1969–72: Pianists Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Larry Young, Harold Williams, Hermeto Pascoal, Lonnie Liston Smith, Cedric Lawson
• 1970s: Guitarists John McLaughlin, Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey, David Creamer, Dominique Gaumont, Cornell Dupree

John Lewis

John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation. Lewis, a member of the Democratic Party, has represented Georgia’s 5th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives since 1987. The district encompasses almost all of Atlanta.

Early life and activism

Born in Troy, Alabama, the son of Meline Thas, Lewis was educated at the American Baptist Theological Seminary and at Fisk University, both in Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the local sit-in movement. He participated in the Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a national leader in the struggle for civil rights.

Lewis was instrumental in organizing student sit-ins, bus boycotts and non-violent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality. He endured brutal beatings by angry mobs and suffered a fractured skull at the hands of Alabama State police as he led a march of 600 people in Selma, Ala. in 1965.

Lewis became nationally known during his prominent role in the Selma to Montgomery marches. During the first march police attacked the peaceful demonstrators and beat Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963, Lewis, a representative of [SNCC], the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the youngest speaker.

Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, was prepared to ask the right question: ‘Which side is the federal government on?’ That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence.”

“John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but did nothing itself, except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a ‘cooling-off period,’ a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

In February 2009, forty-eight years after he had been bloodied by the Ku Klux Klan during civil rights marches, Lewis received an apology on national television from a white southerner, former Klansman Elwin Wilson.

“I’m so sorry about what happened back then,” Wilson said breathlessly. “It’s OK. I forgive you,” Lewis responded. (On national television, both men recalled the incident.) “[I remember] going directly to the Greyhound bus station,” Lewis said. “We tried to enter a so-called ‘white’ waiting room and the moment we started through the door, a group of young men attacked us.” Wilson was in the group, but said he “did more than help.” He said he was the main attacker. The outburst, Wilson said, was just part of a life of hate he led for years. “I had a black baby doll in this house, and I had a little rope, and I tied it to a limb and let it hang here,” he said.

After leaving SNCC in 1966, Lewis worked with community organizations and was named community affairs director for the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta.

Lewis has cited former Florida Senator and Congressman Claude Pepper, a staunch supporter of the New Deal and an outspoken liberal during his half-century in politics, as being the colleague that he has most admired.

Political career

Lewis first ran for elective office in 1977, when a vacancy occurred in Georgia’s 5th District. A special election was called after President Jimmy Carter appointed incumbent Congressman Andrew Young to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Lewis lost the race to Atlanta City Councilman and future Senator Wyche Fowler.

After his unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1977, Lewis was without a job and in debt from his campaign. He accepted a position with the Carter administration as associate director of ACTION, responsible for running the VISTA program, the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, and the Foster Grandparent Program. He held that job for two and a half years, resigning as the 1980 election approached. In 1981, Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council.

In 1986, when Fowler ran for the United States Senate, Lewis defeated fellow civil rights leader Julian Bond in the Democratic primary to succeed Fowler in the 5th District. This win was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic, majority-black 5th District. Lewis was the second African-American to represent Georgia in Congress since Reconstruction. Young was the first. Lewis has been re-elected ten times without serious opposition, often with over 70 percent of the vote. He has been unopposed for reelection since 2002 but faced two primary opponents in 2008.

Since 1991, Lewis has been senior chief deputy whip in the Democratic caucus. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was an influential aide for the Clinton Cabinet, and had regular meetings with the administration.

Lewis is, according to the Associated Press, “the first major House figure to suggest impeaching George W. Bush,” arguing that the president “deliberately, systematically violated the law” in authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps without a warrant. Lewis said, “He is not King, he is president.”

Lewis, an outspoken liberal and staunch opponent of the Iraq War, endorsed Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate in 2006, despite Lieberman’s loss to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary.

He was one of 31 House members who voted not to count the electoral votes from Ohio in the 2004 presidential election.

Lewis delivered the Commencement Address at the University of Massachusetts Lowell on Sunday June 3, 2007 at Edward A. LeLacheur Park.

In September 2007, Lewis was awarded the Dole Leadership Prize from the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.

On October 1, 2007 Lewis paid tribute to James Meredith at the dedication of The University of Mississippi’s James Meredith Monument. The speech and the monument commemorated civil rights pioneer James H. Meredith, who enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962, forcing its integration, and later led the 1966 James Meredith March Against Fear. After Meredith was wounded in an assassination attempt, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael continued the march that started the chant “Black Power!”

On October 21, 2007, Lewis helped to welcome the Dalai Lama of Tibet to Atlanta and Emory University.

A December 2009 report on privately financed Congressional travel by The New York Times found Lewis to be recipient of the most trips since 2007, with a total of 40.

Lewis is a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.

Congressional committee assignments

• Committee on Ways and Means
  • Subcommittee on Oversight (Chairman)
  • Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support

Caucus membership

• Congressional Black Caucus
• Co-chair of the Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Caucus
• Bipartisan Taskforce on Nonproliferation
• Congressional Progressive Caucus
• Congressional Caucus on Global Road Safety