Claude McKay
Claude McKay
Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on 15th September, 1890. He began writing poetry as a schoolboy. He worked as a policeman in Spanish Town and when he was twenty-two had his first volume of poems, Songs of Jamaica (1912) published.In 1912 McKay moved to the United States where he attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Kansas State University. He continued to write poetry and in 1918 his work was praised by both Frank Harris and Max Eastman. The following year, his poem, If We Must Die, was published in Eastman’s journal, The Liberator.
Frank Harris encouraged McKay to obtain writing experience in England. In 1919 McKay travelled to England where he met George Bernard Shaw who introduced him to influential left-wing figures in journalism. This included Sylvia Pankhurst, who recruited him to write for her trade union journal, Workers’ Dreadnought. While in London McKay read the works of Karl Marx and becomes a committed socialist. Continue reading
First Pan-African Congress
Speakers at The Pan African Congress,. Brussels, Belgium,1921
In 1919, the first Pan-African Congress was organized by W. E. B. Du Bois. There were 57 delegates representing 15 countries, a smaller number than originally intended because British and American governments refused to issue passports ro their citizens who planned on attending.[1] Their main task was petitioning the Versailles Peace Conference which was held in Paris at that time. Among their demands were that:
- The Allies should be in charge of the administration of former territories in Africa as a Condominium on behalf of the Africans who were living there.
- Africa be granted home rule and Africans should take part in governing their countries as fast as their development permits until at some specified time in the future.
The problem was that colonist offered no end in sight. Hence, the resistance and war pursued.
Charles Edward Anderson
Charles Edward Anderson
Charles Edward Anderson was born on a farm in University City, near St. Louis, Missouri on August 13, 1919. He graduated as valedictorian from Sumner High School in 1937. He received a Bachelor of Science from Lincoln University, Jefferson City, Missouri in 1941. He was Certified in Meteorology (master’s degree) from the University of Chicago in 1943. Charles Anderson also earned a Master of Science inChemistry in 1948 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York. In 1960, Mr. Anderson earned a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts.
William Alexander Scott II
William Alexander Scott II
Lena Horne
Lena Horne