Abolition
John Brown was an American abolitionist, born in Connecticut and raised in Ohio. He felt passionately and violently that he must personally fight to end slavery. In 1856, in retaliation for the sack of Lawrence, he led the murder of five proslavery men on the banks of the Pottawatomie River. He stated that he was an instrument in the hand of God.
Brown did not end there. On Oct. 16, 1859, Brown and 21 followers captured the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Brown planned the takeover as the first step in his liberation of the slaves, but it was taken the next morning by Robert E. Lee.
Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859. He became a martyr for many because of the dignity and sincerity that he displayed during his popular trial.
Publishing
A former slave named John Henry Murphy Sr. founded one of the most important African-American newspapers on the Atlantic coast when he combined his Sunday School Helper with two other church papers: The Ledger and The Afro-American. As the paper’s readership increased, it transformed from a one page weekly to a widely read African-American newspaper. John Murphy had five sons who took over the management of The Afro-American after his death. Under the editorial control of John Murphy’s son, Carl Murphy, The Afro-American’s circulation grew to a national scale. Carl Murphy used his editorial powers to fight for the rights of African-Americans. Murphy fought to get African-American’s jobs in Law Enforcement and Legislature, while petitioning in Maryland for a state funded African-American college. The Afro-American was also credited with starting The Clean Block, a yearly event dedicated to improving life in inner city neighborhoods.
During the World War II era, The Afro American gave its readers a first hand account of the fighting by sending several correspondents, including Carl Murphy’s daughter, into combat zones. As The Afro-American grew, Carl Murphy continued his father’s mission by collaborating with the NAACP to fight for equal rights for African-Americans. The Afro-American employed several high-profile black journalists similar to the Chicago Defender. Sports coverage was hadled by Lillian Johnson and Nell Dodson, the first female sports writers hired by a black paper, and Sam Lacy , who still writes a weekly sports column at age 94. The paper also featured artwork from Romare Bearden, the Social Realist painter. When Carl Murphy died in 1967, his daughter, Frances L. Murphy II, became chairman and publisher. She was replaced in 1974 by Carl Murphy’s nephew, John Murphy III. The paper is still maintained by Murphy family members to this day.
The Arts
Born in 1920, John Lee Hooker owns one of the most distinctive voices in blues. Known as the father of the boogie, his sound is deep, sexy and layered with innuendo. His sounds inspired an entire generation of blues-rockers like the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and the Animals. Unlike many other Blues musicians, Hooker made his mark in Detroit. He was from Clarksdale, Mississippi but left at the age of 15 for Memphis where he worked as an usher in a theater and played his guitar on the corner for spare change. Later, he made his way to Detroit where he worked as a janitor, playing in clubs and house parties in his spare time. His recording career began in 1948 and hasn’t let up since. He remains one of the seminal ambassadors of the Blues.
Firsts
The only African American of the 19th century that was more prominent and influential than John Mercer Langston was Frederick Douglass. John Mercer Langston was the first Black American elected to public office in the United States and was twice suggested as a candidate for vice-president of the United States on the republican ticket. During his lifetime, Langston’s career would involve education, law and politics.
John Mercer Langston was born free in 1829 and was an orphan by his fifth birthday. As an orphan, Langston was raised in both black and white households. By the age of fourteen, Langston began study at Oberlin College where he obtained both a Bachelors and Master of Arts degree. By his eighteenth birthday he was a speaker at the first national black convention in 1848 on the subject of aid to fugitive slaves.
Langston was elected town clerk and allied himself with the Republican Party as was common among Blacks in the 19th century. He said that “if the republican party is not anti-slavery enough, take hold of it and make it so.” Langston is given credit for shaping the character of the Republican party in the 19th century in terms of its then progressive relationship to African Americans. He was responsible for organizing black political clubs across the country. As a result of his political contacts Langston was chosen to lead the western recruitment of black soldiers to fight in the Civil War. He also actively worked for the fair and equal treatment of black soldiers in the Union Army. After the Civil War, Langston worked both independently and with the Republican Party for the redistribution of wealth and power in the country. Both before and after the Civil War along with many others, he struggled for black voting rights.
Langston spent six and a half years at Howard University where he served as a Law professor, Dean of the Law Department, vice-president and acting president. The white conservative trustee board of Howard University had problems with his progressive views and were troubled with Langston’s desire to expand the Law Department. Langston knew that the life of the Blacks in this country could be changed if laws were changed. The trustees forced him out of Howard, but the entire Law Department resigned in protest of the actions of the board of trustees.
Langston was appointed to the diplomatic corps and served in Haiti for eight years. He left in protest when the new democratic administration reduced his salary by 30%. Langston ran for Congress in the state of Virginia and won. He fought an eighteen month battle to be seated in congress because of attempts to rig the polls on election day. After serving in Congress for only three months (because of the attempt to steal his seat) Langston spent the rest of his life in Washington where he continued to fight for justice for African Americans.
Government
(b. March 15, 1809, Petersburg, Va., U.S.–d. Feb. 24, 1876, Monrovia, Liberia), American-born, first president of Liberia (1848-56).
A native of Virginia, Roberts was the son of free “blacks” whose heritage was more than seven-eighths white. At the age of 20 he immigrated to Liberia with his mother and younger brothers, became a merchant, and also became an unofficial aide to the white governor of the colony, Thomas H. Buchanan, a member of the American Colonization Society, which sought the return of American freedmen to Africa. On Buchanan’s death in 1842, Roberts was appointed the first black governor of the colony.
In efforts to establish the political and economic stability of the colony, Roberts and other colonists sought treaties with native tribes and recognition from foreign powers. In 1847 they proclaimed the new republic of Liberia; Roberts was elected the first president. In 1849, during a visit to England, he secured British recognition of Liberia as a sovereign nation; and in 1852, in another trip to continental Europe, he acquired recognition from other powers.
The Arts
African-American poet, playwright, novelist, and journalist. Because his father emigrated to Mexico and his mother was often away, Hughes was reared in Lawrence, Kansas, by his grandmother Mary Langston. Mary’s first husband had died at Harpers Ferry fighting under John Brown and her second husband (Hughes’s grandfather) had also been a fierce abolitionist. She helped inspire in Hughes a devotion to the cause of social justice.
A lonely child, Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems while in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921, after a failed reunion with his father, he entered Columbia University, but left after an unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate on ships to Africa and Europe, a busboy, and a dishwasher, his verse appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis (NAACP) and Opportunity (National Urban League). As a poet, Hughes was a pioneer in the fusion of traditional verse with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz.
Hughes was a leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties, publishing two verse collections, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), as well as a novel Not Without Laughter (1930) and an embittered short-story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934). Mainly because of the depression and disillusionment with a wealthy patron, Hughes became a socialist in the 1930s. He never joined the Communist party, but he published radical verse and essays in magazines like New Masses and International Literature and spent a year (1932-1933) in the Soviet Union. Several of his plays also appeared in this decade, the most successful, Mulatto, a tragedy about miscegenation, reaching Broadway in 1935.
Around 1939, Hughes moved away from the political Left, as the apolitical tone of his autobiography The Big Sea (1940) suggests. During the war he supported the Allies with patriotic songs and sketches and published a verse collection, Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). He vigorously attacked segregation, especially in his column in the black weekly Chicago Defender, where he created a comic but incisive black urban Everyman, Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple.” Simple’s popularity over 20 years resulted in five published collections.
In 1947, as lyricist with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice on the Broadway opera Street Scene, Hughes achieved a major critical success. After buying a house in Harlem, he lived there the rest of his life, although, as his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) revealed, he feared for the future of urban blacks. His output became prodigious and included another book of verse, almost a dozen children’s books, several opera libretti, four books translated from French and Spanish, two collections of stories, another novel, a history of the NAACP and another volume of autobiography, I Wonder As I Wander (1956). He also continued his work in the theater, pioneering in the gospel musical play.
By the time of his death, Hughes was widely recognized as the most representative of African-American writers and perhaps the most original of black poets. What set him apart was the deliberate saturation of his work in the primary expressive forms of black mass culture as well as in the typical life experiences of the mass of African Americans, whom he viewed with near-total love and devotion. Despite his humane interest in other cultures and peoples, he saw blacks as his primary audience. As a result, his vast body of work, uneven in quality as it is, nevertheless rings with almost unrivaled authority and authenticity as an inspired portrait of black American culture and consciousness.
