Education
Born in Philadelphia and raised in Boston,
Greener attended Oberlin and Phillips Academy
before entering Harvard University, where he
became the first African-American graduate in 1870.
After his graduation, he taught high school in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and in 1873 accepted the chair of mental and moral philosophy, sacred literature, and evidences of Christianity at the University of South Carolina. As a teacher of philosophy, Latin, Greek, and law, and in the University?s preparatory school, Greener was a student favorite. He was active on campus and in state politics as well. Greener also served as the University?s librarian, being credited with restoring order to the library, which had been in disarray since the war. When the University was closed by South Carolina?s conservative government in 1877, Greener left USC for the position of dean of the School of Law at Howard University. After that law school closed, he embarked on a law career in Washington, D.C., served as secretary of the Grant Monument Association in New York, and later served as U.S. consul to Vladivostok. He died in 1922
The Arts
(b. March 1, 1914, Oklahoma City, Okla., U.S.–d. April 16, 1994, New York, N.Y.), American teacher and writer who won eminence with his first and only novel, Invisible Man (1952).
Ellison left Tuskegee Institute (Alabama) in 1936 after three years’ study of music and joined the Federal Writers’ Project in New York City. In 1939 he began contributing short stories, reviews, and essays to various periodicals. Following service in World War II, he produced Invisible Man, which won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction. The story tells of a naive and idealistic Southern black youth who goes to Harlem, joins the fight against white oppression, and ends up ignored by his fellow blacks as well as by whites. After his novel appeared, Ellison published only two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).
He lectured widely on black culture, folklore, and creative writing and taught at various American colleges and universities. He left a second novel unfinished at his death. Flying Home and Other Stories was published posthumously in 1996.
The Arts
Born in 1915, Muddy Waters was the king of Postwar Chicago Blues. One of 10 children and the son of a sharecropper, he got his nickname because he loved to play down by a muddy creek as a child. He learned to sing out in the cotton fields he worked in and started playing the guitar when he was 17. Inspired by Son House and Robert Johnson, he began to build his style. Waters left his mark on untold numbers of bluesmen and blues rockers, both American and British. He was responsible for the melding of the Mississippi Delta Blues and the urban Chicago Blues. To many blues fans, he IS the blues. His first recording was in 1941. Muddy Waters died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1983.
Politics
b. 1926
Born in Cedros, Trinidad, Mervyn Dymally emigrated to the United States in 1946 to study at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in education from California State University in 1954 and began teaching school in Los Angeles.
Subsequently, he began a political career and became the first black elected to the California senate, the only black to serve as lieutenant governor of the state (1975), and the first foreign-born black to serve in Congress (1980). Dymally defeated four other candidates to win the primary in California’s Thirty-First Congressional District.
From 1987 to 1989, he was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Today, Dymally heads an international consulting firm in Los Angeles.
Politics
(b. July 2, 1925, Decatur, Miss., U.S.–d. June 12, 1963, Philadelphia, Miss.), American black civil-rights activist, whose murder received national attention and made him a martyr to the cause of the Civil Rights Movement.
Evers served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Afterward he and his elder brother, Charles Evers, both graduated from Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University, Lorman, Miss.) in 1950. They settled in Philadelphia, Miss., and engaged in various business pursuits–Medgar was an insurance salesman, and Charles operated a restaurant, a gas station, and other enterprises–and at the same time began organizing local affiliates of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They worked quietly at first, slowly building a base of support; in 1954 Medgar moved to Jackson to become the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. He traveled throughout the state recruiting members and organizing voter-registration drives and economic boycotts.
During the early 1960s the increased tempo of civil-rights activities in the South created high and constant tensions, and in Mississippi conditions were often at the breaking point. On June 12, 1963, a few hours after President John F. Kennedy had made an extraordinary broadcast to the nation on the subject of civil rights, Medgar Evers was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his home. The murder made Evers, until then a hardworking and effective but relatively obscure figure outside Mississippi, a nationally known figure. He was buried with full military honours in Arlington National Cemetery and awarded the 1963 Spingarn Medal of the NAACP.
Charles Evers immediately requested and was granted appointment by the NAACP to his brother’s position in Mississippi, and afterward he became a major political figure in the state.
Byron de La Beckwith, a white segregationist, was charged with the murder. He was set free in 1964 after two trials resulted in hung juries but was convicted in a third trial held in 1994.
