The Arts
(b. c. 1753, Senegal, West Africa–d. Dec. 5, 1784, Boston, Mass., U.S.), the first black woman poet of note in the United States.
She was sold from a slave ship in Boston in 1761 to work for the family of John Wheatley, a merchant. The Wheatleys soon recognized her talents and gave her privileges unusual for a slave, allowing her to learn to read and write. At the age of 14 she began to write poetry, and her first published work, “An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine . . . George Whitefield” (1770), attracted much attention. In 1773 her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in England under the sponsorship of the Countess of Huntingdon, and Wheatley’s reputation spread in Europe as well as in America. A poem published in 1776, dedicated to George Washington, brought her further acclaim.
The dissolution of the Wheatley family by death left Phillis Wheatley alone, and in April 1778 she married John Peters, a free black man who failed in business and apparently also failed to support Phillis and her children. At the end of her life she was working as a servant, and she died in poverty.
Wheatley’s poetry, largely concerned with morality and piety, was conventional for its time. Her significance stems from the attention that she drew to her successful education. Her poems were reissued in the 1830s by Abolitionists eager to prove the human potential of blacks.
The Arts
Born in 1930, Ornette Coleman started playing the alto sax at the age of 14. His first gigs were backing up musicians like Big Joe Turner and Pee Wee Crayton. His first LP was with Don Cherry in 1958 and he later signed with Atlantic Records. By 1959 and for the next five years, he toured clubs around the country. Unhappy with the money, he returned to New York and in 1971 he opened his own club, Artist House. He was the master of free jazz, which was more abstract and had fewer musical boundaries than any other form of avant garde jazz. It was not thought of in the beginning as a true art form and Ornette was one of the main shapers in its acceptance. It slowly made its way into the hearts of jazz fans and by 1959 it was an accepted art form.
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.
