John S. Abbott learned the printing trade at the Hampton Institute (1892-1896). He later earned a law degree from Kent College of Law in Chicago (1898). Abbott founded the Chicago Defender (1905) and Abbott’s Monthly. He later became a Freemason.
1729-1780. Sancho was born on a slave ship shortly after it left what is today the West African nation of Guinea. After the ship reached the Caribbean port of Cartagena, in what is now Colombia, his mother died and his father committed suicide. The baby was baptized ?Ignatius.? After several years, Sancho was taken to Greenwich, England, where he was given to three unmarried women. They gave him the surname ?Sancho? because he reminded them of the squire in Don Quixote. He later ran away and became butler to the Duchess of Montagu. Sancho later ran a grocery shop in Westminster. Self educated, Sancho composed music, appeared on the stage, and wrote numerous letters, published in 1782, after his death.
After nearly dying from a stab wound, Bullins left high school in 1952 to join the navy. In 1964 he moved to San Francisco and began writing. He became a pioneer of the Black Arts Movement. In the mid-1960s, he served as minister of culture for the Black Panther Party and was cultural director of Black House, an African American theater group in Oakland, Calif. Maintaining that theater was an art form and not simply a means of political propaganda, Bullins left the group and moved to New York. He won a 1971 Obie Award for The Fabulous Miss Marie and In New England Winter, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Janie in 1975. Bullins received a BA from Antioch University/San Francisco in 1989 and an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University in 1994. A year later he was named theater professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
(b. June 7, 1917, Topeka, Kan., U.S.), American poet whose works deal with the everyday life of urban blacks. She was the first black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1968 she was named the poet laureate of Illinois.
Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. Her early verses appeared in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper written primarily for the black community of Chicago. Her first published collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), reveals her talent for making the ordinary life of her neighbours extraordinary. Annie Allen (1949), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, is a loosely connected series of poems related to a black girl’s growing up in Chicago. The same theme was used for Brooks’s novel Maud Martha (1953).
The Bean Eaters (1960) contains some of her best verse. Her Selected Poems (1963) was followed in 1968 by In the Mecca, half of which is a long narrative poem about people in the Mecca, a vast, fortresslike apartment building erected on the South Side of Chicago in 1891, which had long since deteriorated into a slum. The second half of the book contains individual poems, among which the most noteworthy are “Boy Breaking Glass” and “Malcolm X.” Brooks also wrote a book for children, Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956). The autobiographical Report from Part One (1972) was an assemblage of personal memoirs, interviews, and letters. Later works include Primer for Blacks (1980), Young Poets’ Primer (1980), and Blacks (1987), a collection of her published works.
In 1985-86 Brooks was Library of Congress consultant in poetry. In 1990 she became professor of English at Chicago State University.