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The APEX OF KNOWLEDGE.com serves as a learning tool which links ancient and contemporary African wisdom to modern technology. AOK.com will revive and increase the desire for the quest of self-knowledge. It will also serve as a means to decrease the technological divide, which separates those who march into the future from those who say trapped in the past. This interactive, digital, historical anthology will unlock the future potential and greatness residing in not only Black youth but of all peoples of the world seeking cultural, spiritual awareness and knowledge.

We intend to inspire a thirst for information. Once someone starts on the journey to self-education they are known to search for more and more information. But one of our main concerns is the affect that the lack of self-knowledge and understanding has on young minds especially in this day and age. So this site will lend toward facilitating a space where children can easily learn about their rich history. When a child learns that they are the builders of the pyramids, that their ancient ancestors charted the first celestial maps, that they are the inventors of the stoplight, heart transplants, and the developers of plasma it heightens their level of self-awareness and brings about confidence. This site is used to dispel the stereotypical myths feed to our children (i.e.We have only been slaves. Africa is a jungle. Africans are poor, hungry, and diseased.) that formulates an image of Black people as an inferior race. Once a child knows about the significance of Timbuktu, the master architect behind the pyramids and our connections with other civilizations all over the world his/her mind becomes enveloped with a vision of him/herself as a great and successful individual. As the heroes and sheroes of our ancestry are exposed to a child their minds develop and expand. The child’s goal then becomes to develop and cultivate the APEX of their potential.

This is the APEX OF KNOWLEDGE. Come along with us and discover your past and connect with inspirational websites, organizations, museums, and schools who join in the quest of emancipating minds through increasing their knowledge base.

Miles Davis

Flo Jo

Florence Griffith-Joyner (born Florence Delorez Griffith), also known as Flo-Jo (December 21, 1959 – September 21, 1998) was an American track and field athlete.

Life

Griffith was born in Los Angeles and raised in the Jordan Downs public housing complex. During the late 1980s she became a popular figure in international track and field due to her record-setting performances and flashy personal style. However, her career was also dogged by allegations of drug use, which was speculated to have caused her premature death until the autopsy determined that it was due to a congenital defect. She holds the world records in the 100 meters and 200 meters races. She was the wife of triple jumper Al Joyner and the sister-in-law of heptathlete and long jumper Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Griffith finished fourth in the 200 m at the inaugural World Championship in 1983. The following year she gained much more attention, though mostly because of her extremely long and colorful fingernails rather than her silver medal in the Los Angeles Olympics 200 m. In 1985, she won the final of the Grand Prix with 11.00 seconds. After these Olympics she spent less time running, and married the 1984 Olympic triple jump champion Al Joyner in 1987.

Returning at the 1987 World Championships, she finished again second in the 200 m. She stunned the world when — known as a 200 m runner — she ran a 100 m World Record of 10.49 in the quarter-finals of the US Olympic Trials. Several sources indicate that this time was very likely wind-assisted. Although at the time of the race the wind meter at the event measured 0.0, indicating no wind, observers noted evidence of significant wind, and wind speeds up to 7 meters/second were noted at other times during the event. Since 1997 the International Athletics Annual of the Association of Track and Field Statisticians has listed this performance as “probably strongly wind assisted, but recognised as a world record”. Griffith-Joyner’s coach later stated that he believed the 10.49 run had been aided by wind. Outside this race, Griffith-Joyner’s fastest time without wind assistance was 10.61 seconds, which would give her the world record anyway.

By now known to the world as “Flo-Jo”, Griffith-Joyner was the big favorite for the titles in the sprint events at the 1988 Summer Olympics. In the 100 m final, she ran a wind-assisted 10.54, beating her nearest rival Evelyn Ashford by 0.3 seconds. In the 200 m quarter-final, she set a world record and then broke that record again winning the final by 0.4 seconds with a time of 21.34. She also ran in the 4 x 100 m and 4 x 400 m relay teams. She won a gold medal in the former event, and a silver in the latter, her first international 4 x 400 m relay. Her effort in the 100 m was ranked 98th in British TV Channel 4′s 100 Greatest Sporting Moments in 2002. She was the 1988 recipient of the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States. Griffith-Joyner retired from competitive sports shortly afterwards.

Among the things she did away from the track was design the basketball uniforms for the Indiana Pacers in 1989.

Flo Jo at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

Death

On September 21, 1998, Griffith-Joyner died in her sleep. On October 22, the sheriff-coroner’s office (required to investigate unexpected deaths) announced the cause of death as: “1) positional asphyxia 2) epileptiform seizure 3) cavernous angioma, left orbital frontal cerebrum”. In layman’s terms, this means she died by suffocating in her pillow during a severe epileptic seizure. She was exactly three months away from her 39th birthday.

“Cavernous angioma” referred to a congenital (i.e., from birth) brain abnormality discovered during the autopsy that made Joyner subject to seizures. According to a family attorney, she had suffered a grand mal seizure in 1990, and had also been treated for seizures in 1993 and 1994.

Jack Johnson

John Arthur (“Jack”) Johnson (March 31, 1878 – June 10, 1946), nicknamed the “Galveston Giant”, was an American boxer, the first black world heavyweight boxing champion (1908-1915).

Early life

Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, the third child and first son of Henry and Tina “Tiny” Johnson, former slaves who worked at blue-collar jobs to raise six children and taught them how to read and write. Jack Johnson had just five years of formal schooling. Johnson’s father was born a slave in Tennessee. He dropped out of school after five or six years of education, to get a job as a dock worker in Galveston.

Professional boxing career

Johnson’s boxing style was very distinctive. He developed a more patient approach than was customary in that day: playing defensively, waiting for a mistake, and then capitalizing on it. Johnson always began a bout cautiously, slowly building up over the rounds into a more aggressive fighter. He often fought to punish his opponents rather than knock them out, endlessly avoiding their blows and striking with swift counters. He always gave the impression of having much more to offer and, if pushed, he could punch powerfully.

Johnson’s style was very effective, but it was criticized in the press as being cowardly and devious. By contrast, World Heavyweight Champion “Gentleman” Jim Corbett, who was white, had used many of the same techniques a decade earlier, and was praised by the press as “the cleverest man in boxing”.

By 1902, Johnson had won at least 50 fights against both white and black opponents. Johnson won his first title on February 3, 1903, beating “Denver” Ed Martin over 20 rounds for the World Colored Heavyweight Championship. His efforts to win the full title were thwarted, as world heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries refused to face him then. Black and white boxers could meet in other competitions, but the world heavyweight championship was off limits to them. However, Johnson did fight former champion Bob Fitzsimmons in July 1907, and knocked him out in two rounds.

Johnson finally won the world heavyweight title on December 26, 1908, when he fought the Canadian world champion Tommy Burns in Sydney, after stalking Burns around the world for two years and taunting him in the press for a match. The fight lasted fourteen rounds before being stopped by the police in front of over 20,000 spectators. The title was awarded to Johnson on a referee’s decision as a T.K.O, but he had clearly beaten the champion.

After Johnson’s victory over Burns, racial animosity among whites ran so deep that Jack London called out for a “Great White Hope” to take the title away from Johnson. As title holder, Johnson thus had to face a series of fighters billed by boxing promoters as “great white hopes”, often in exhibition matches. In 1909, he beat Frank Moran, Tony Ross, Al Kaufman, and the middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel. The match with Ketchel was keenly fought by both men until the 12th and last round, when Ketchel threw a right to Johnson’s head, knocking him down. Slowly regaining his feet, Johnson threw a straight to Ketchel’s jaw, knocking him out, along with some of his teeth, several of which “supposedly” were embedded in Johnson’s glove. His fight with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien was a disappointing one for Johnson: though weighing 205 pounds (93 kg) to O’Brien’s 161 pounds (73 kg), he could only achieve a six-round draw with the great middleweight.

The “Fight of the Century”

Johnson’s fight against Jeffries, 1910.

In 1910, former undefeated heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries came out of retirement and said, “I feel obligated to the sporting public at least to make an effort to reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race. . . . I should step into the ring again and demonstrate that a white man is king of them all.” Jeffries had not fought in six years and had to lose weight to get back to his championship fighting weight.

The fight took place on July 4, 1910 in front of 20,000 people, at a ring built just for the occasion in downtown Reno, Nevada. Johnson proved stronger and more nimble than Jeffries. In the 15th round, after Jeffries had been knocked down twice for the first time in his career, his people called it quits to prevent Johnson from knocking him out.

The “Fight of the Century” earned Johnson $65,000 and silenced the critics, who had belittled Johnson’s previous victory over Tommy Burns as “empty,” claiming that Burns was a false champion since Jeffries had retired undefeated.

Riots and aftermath

The outcome of the fight triggered race riots that evening — the Fourth of July — all across the United States, from Texas and Colorado to New York and Washington, D.C. Johnson’s victory over Jeffries had dashed white dreams of finding a “great white hope” to defeat him. Many whites felt humiliated by the defeat of Jeffries.

Blacks, on the other hand, were jubilant, and celebrated Johnson’s great victory as a victory for racial advancement. Black poet William Waring Cuney later highlighted the black reaction to the fight in his poem “My Lord, What a Morning”. Around the country, blacks held spontaneous parades and gathered in prayer meetings.

Some “riots” were simply blacks celebrating in the streets. In certain cities, like Chicago, the police did not disturb the celebrations. But in other cities, the police and angry white citizens tried to subdue the revelers. Police interrupted several attempted lynchings. In all, “riots” occurred in more than 25 states and 50 cities. About 23 blacks and two whites died in the riots, and hundreds more were injured.

Film of the bout

A number of leading American film companies joined forces to shoot footage of the Jeffries-Johnson fight and turn it into a feature-length documentary film, at the cost of $250,000. The film was distributed widely in the U.S. and was exhibited internationally as well. As a result, Congress banned prizefight films from being distributed across state lines in 1912; the ban was lifted in 1940. In 2005, the film of the Jeffries-Johnson “Fight of the Century” was entered into the United States National Film Registry as being worthy of preservation.

In the United States, many states and cities banned the exhibition of the Johnson-Jeffries film. The movement to censor Johnson’s black supremacy took over the country within three days after the fight. It was a spontaneous movement, mobilized by the Christian lobby and police forces, and endorsed by former President Theodore Roosevelt.

Loss of the title

On April 5, 1915, Johnson lost his title to Jess Willard, a working cowboy from Kansas who did not start boxing until he was almost thirty years old. With a crowd of 25,000 at Oriental Park Racetrack in Havana, Cuba, Johnson was K.O.’d in the 26th round of the scheduled 45-round fight, which was co-promoted by Roderick James “Jess” McMahon and a partner. Johnson found that he could not knock out the giant Willard, who fought as a counterpuncher, making Johnson do all the leading. Johnson, aged 37, although having won almost every round, began to tire after the 20th round, and was visibly hurt by heavy body punches from Willard in rounds preceding the 26th round knockout. Johnson is said by many to have spread rumors that he took a dive, but Willard is widely regarded as having won the fight outright. Willard said, “If he was going to throw the fight, I wish he’d done it sooner. It was hotter than hell out there”.

In a famous photo showing Johnson lying on the mat after being knocked down and during the ten count, he can be seen shielding his eyes from the glare of the tropical sun with his glove.

Legacy

Johnson was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954, and is on the roster of both the International Boxing Hall of Fame and the World Boxing Hall of Fame. In 2005, the United States National Film Preservation Board deemed the film of the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight “historically significant” and put it in the National Film Registry.

Johnson’s skill as a fighter and the money that it brought made it impossible for him to be ignored by the establishment. In the short term, the boxing world reacted against Johnson’s legacy. But Johnson foreshadowed, in many ways, perhaps one of the most famous boxers of all time, Muhammad Ali. In fact, Ali often spoke of how he was influenced by Jack Johnson. Ali identified with Johnson because he felt America ostracized him in the same manner because of his opposition to the Vietnam War and affiliation with the Nation of Islam. In his autobiography, Ali relates how he and Joe Frazier agreed that Johnson and Joe Louis were the greatest boxers of all.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Jack Johnson on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In September, 2008, 62 years after Johnson’s death, the United States Congress passed a resolution to recommend that the President grant a pardon for his 1913 conviction, in acknowledgment of its racist overtones, and in order to exonerate Johnson and recognize his contribution to boxing. In April 2009, John McCain of Arizona joined Representative Peter T. King of New York in a call for a posthumous pardon for the boxing legend by President Barack Obama.

In connection with his conviction on charges of violating the Mann Act, it has been pointed out that “[i]f Johnson did not violate the actual letter of the law, he certainly violated its spirit repeatedly as he openly consorted with prostitutes and, in one insistence, bankrolled a former madam, who had been one of his personal favorites, when she was seeking start up capital to open her own fully furnished brothel.”

Popular culture

Johnson’s story is the basis of the play and subsequent 1970 movie The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones as Johnson (known as Jack Jefferson in the movie), and Jane Alexander as his love interest. In 2005, filmmaker Ken Burns produced a 2-part documentary about Johnson’s life, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, based on the 2004 nonfiction book of the same name by Geoffrey C. Ward.

Folksinger and blues musician Leadbelly references Johnson in a song about the Titanic: “Jack Johnson wanna get on board, Captain said I ain’t hauling no coal. Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well. When Jack Johnson heard that mighty shock, mighta seen the man do the Eagle rock. Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well” (The Eagle Rock was a popular dance at the time). In 1969, American folk singer Jamie Brockett reworked the Leadbelly song into a satirical talking blues called “The Legend of the U.S.S. Titanic”. It should be noted there is no convincing evidence that Johnson was in fact refused passage on the Titanic because of his race, as these songs allege.

Miles Davis‘s 1970 (see 1970 in music) album A Tribute to Jack Johnson was inspired by Johnson. The end of the record features the actor Brock Peters (as Johnson) saying:

“

I’m Jack Johnson. Heavyweight champion of the world. I’m black. They never let me forget it. I’m black all right! I’ll never let them forget it!

”

Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis both have done soundtracks for documentaries about Johnson. Several hip-hop activists have also reflected on Johnson’s legacy, most notably in the album The New Danger, by Mos Def, in which songs like “Zimzallabim” and “Blue Black Jack” are devoted to the artist’s pugilistic hero. Additionally, both Southern punk rock band This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb and alternative country performer Tom Russell have songs dedicated to Johnson. Russell’s piece is both a tribute and a biting indictment of the racism Johnson faced: “here comes Jack Johnson, like he owns the town, there’s a lot of white Americans like to see a man go down… like to see a black man drown.”

Johnson was referenced in the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and he is mentioned in the 1940 book Native Son by author Richard Wright. Furthermore, 41st street in Galveston is named Jack Johnson Blvd.

Jack Johnson, the American singer, was named after this guy.

Wal-Mart created a controversy in 2006 when DVD shoppers were directed from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes to the “similar item” Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

Ray Emery of the Philadelphia Flyers of the NHL sported a mask with a picture of Johnson on it as a tribute to his love for boxing.

In the trenches of World War One Johnson’s name was used by British troops to describe German 15cm heavy artillery shells that produced a lot of black smoke: a “Jack Johnson” was big and black and knocked you to the ground.

In Joe R. Lansdale’s short story The Big Blow, Johnson is featured fighting a white boxer brought in by Galveston, Texas’s boxing fans to defeat the African American fighter during the 1900 Galveston Hurricane. The story won a Bram Stoker Award and was expanded into a novel.

Johnson is the subject of the biographical comic book The Original Johnson, by writer/artist Trevor Von Eeden.

Michael Jordan

Also known as: Michael Jeffrey Jordan, Air Jordan

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Tar Heel Roots. Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born 17 February 1963 in Brooklyn, New York, but he attended high school in Wilmington, North Carolina. His high school coach did not recognize Jordan as a budding basketball star, however, and he was cut from the team as a sophomore. Despite this shaky start, he was recruited by the University of North Carolina, leading them to the national championship as a freshman in 1982. Two years later he was named College Player of the Year (1984), winning both the Naismith and Wooden awards. After his junior season, he was drafted by the Chicago Bulls, the third overall pick in 1984.

Air Jordan. There was something transcendent about Jordan’s movements on the court, and he inspired commentary, even from jaded sports reporters, that bordered on adulation. After Jordan set a National Basketball Association (NBA) playoff record for most points scored in a game (63), Boston Celtic forward Larry Bird said, “That was God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Having conquered every challenge available on the basketball court, including NBA Rookie of the Year (1985), three MVP awards (1988, 1991, 1992), Olympic gold medals (1984 and 1992), and three NBA Championships (1991-1993), Jordan shocked the world by retiring from basketball on 6 October 1993, at the peak of his career. The death of Jordan’s father, during a 1993 robbery attempt, may have helped push the basketball star to other pursuits. Success did not, however, always follow him off the court.

Basketball to Baseball, and Back Again. His venture into professional baseball was, in many ways, no different than that of thousands of other middle-age men in a mid-life crisis who paid good money to attend fantasy baseball camps for the opportunity to see how they might do in competition with former big leaguers. Because he was the most famous–and perhaps wealthiest–athlete of the decade, he got a chance not normally accorded men of his age. Playing with the Birmingham (Alabama) Barons in AA minor league ball, he batted .204, proof that he was mortal. When Jordan once again picked up a basketball, all questions about his incomparable domination of the sport were forgotten. One news report said that when speculation arose that Jordan would return to the Chicago Bulls after his year in baseball, the stocks of five companies whose products he endorsed climbed $2.3 billion dollars in three days. Returning on 19 March 1995, after a hiatus of one-and-a-half seasons, Jordan and the Bulls managed to reach only the second round of the playoffs, but then proceeded to win three more consecutive NBA titles (1996, 1997, and 1998). Jordan also captured MVP honors in 1996 and 1998. Each year the Bulls won the title, before and after his aborted retirement, Jordan won the MVP award for the Finals. He scored more points (5,987) than anyone else in the history of the NBA playoffs. His per-game average during the post season (179 games) was also the highest (33.4); Jordan was the only player, appearing in a minimum of twenty-five playoff contests, to top thirty points per game. His regular season stats were equally impressive. He averaged 31.5 points per game, 6.5 rebounds and 5.3 assists during his career. He led the league in scoring (1988-1993, 1996-1999). He was an NBA All-Star twelve times and Defensive Player of the Year in 1998. Jordan has been on the cover of Sports Illustrated forty-seven times, more than any other athlete. Jordan re-retired on 13 January 1999. Darryl Howerton, in a Sport magazine article, designating Jordan one of the five best athletes of the century, referred to Jordan as omnipresent. Even in other sports, people said of up-and-coming stars, “This could be the Michael Jordan of (fill in the blank).”

This retirement, too, was destined to be short-lived. Jordan bought an ownership stake in the Washington Wizards in 2000, intending to work in their front office as president. However, he decided to return to the court in the 2001-2002 season, in an attempt to whip the poorly-performing Wizards into shape as mentor, teacher, and inspirer. He played for the Wizards for two seasons, and although they did not make the playoffs either time, their performance did improve. Jordan also accounted himself well, proving wrong the critics who said that he was too old and his knees were too bad for the rough-and-tumble of NBA play. His knees did force him to cut back on his playing time and even to sit out several games, but he often racked up over twenty points per game when he did play, and in December 2001 he even became the oldest player ever to score over fifty points in one game. Jordan retired again, for the third and final time, at the end of the 2002-2003 season.

Jordan returned to the NBA, in a front-office position, in June of 2006, when he bought the second largest share of the Charlotte Bobcats. He became president of the team, with decision-making authority for the ownership group and input into moves such as trades and free agent signings. Despite the comeback, 2006 ended on a different note for Jordan: on December 29, he and his wife Juanita announced that they were divorcing amicably after 17 years of marriage.

Business Interests. Basketball was not the only field in which Jordan excelled. He was featured in an animated movie feature, Space Jam (1996), with costar Bugs Bunny, a character hardly more ethereal than Jordan. In addition to his athletic prowess and entertainment appeal, Jordan had a strong influence in the business world. He opened a restaurant in Chicago, had a cologne named for him, and graced the cover of Wheaties cereal boxes. Jordan’s “star” quality was clearly indicated by his endless television and media endorsements, for products ranging from basketball shoes to hamburgers to long-distance telephone services.

UPDATES
April 6, 2009: Jordan was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Source: Chicago Tribune, <http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-michael-jordan-hall-of-fame-090306,0,7097516.story>, April 6, 2009.

July 1, 2009: The 1992 Dream Team on which Jordan played was chosen for the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. Source: Associated Press, <http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gWaOwCNYeP98V_nQ5FkYc_5f3r6QD995CBFO0>, June 30, 2009.

March 17, 2010: Jordan’s bid to buy a majority interest in the Charlotte Bobcats was approved by the NBA’s Board of Governors. Source: Los Angeles Times, <http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/17/sports/la-sp-nba-report-20100318>, March 18, 2010.

FURTHER READINGS

* Chicago Tribune, June 16, 2006, sec. Sports, p. 1; December 30, 2006, sec. News, p. 27.

* Bob Greene, Rebound: The Odyssey of Michael Jordan (New York: Viking, 1995).

* Darryl Howerton, “Michael Jordan,” Sport, 90 (December 1999): 42-43.

* “Jordan Not Returning to Wizards as President; Thanks Fans for Support,” Jet, 103 (May 26, 2003): 50.

* Lisa Kulman, “Wounded by His Knee,” U.S. News & World Report (April 15, 2002): 10.

* NBA.com, Internet website.

* L. Jon Wertheim and David Sabino, “Three’s a Charm: In His Third Incarnation, Michael Jordan Is Showing That He Can Still Perform Feats of Magic–Like Turning the Wizards into Winners,” Sports Illustrated, 96 (January 14, 2002): 48.

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.