Black History, The Arts
Henry Ossawa Tanner
The son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Henry Ossawa Tanner was raised in an affluent, well educated African-American family. Although reluctant at first, Tanner’s parents eventually responded to their son’s unflagging desire to pursue an artistic career and encouraged his ambitions. In 1879, Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he joined Thomas Eakins’s coterie.
Tanner moved to Atlanta in 1889 in an unsuccessful attempt to support himself as an artist and instructor among prosperous middle class African-Americans. Bishop and Mrs. Joseph C. Hartzell arranged for Tanner’s first solo exhibition, the proceeds from which enabled the struggling artist to move to Paris in 1891. Illness brought him back to the United States in 1893, and it was at this point in his career that Tanner turned his attention to genre subjects of his own race. (more…)
Black History, The Arts
George Herriman
George Herriman III was born in New Orleans in 1880 to Creole parents. The family moved to Los Angeles a few years later and worked with his father as a barber and then a baker where he drove the family bread truck, but his pranksterish attitude frequently irritated his parents, and after baking a mouse into a loaf of bread his parents implored him to perform his pranks elsewhere, and relieved him of his position at the bakery.
In 1900, Herriman emigrated to New York City and in 1901, his first cartoons began to appear in Judge magazine. Shortly thereafter he landed a job at Joseph Pulitzer’s “New York World” and began creating Sunday & daily comic strips for the fledgling medium. In 1906 he left Pulitzer to do a strip for the McClure syndicate, went back to Pulitzer & finally left Pulitzer again to work for William Randolph Hearst at the “New York Journal American”. It would be here that Herriman created his most famous & popular characters, the animal residents of Coconino County, USA. (more…)
Black History, Music, The Arts
Quincy Jones
Quincy Jones has had several very successful careers, largely leaving jazz altogether by the early ’70s to make his money out of producing pop, R&B and even rap records. His earlier years were much more significant to improvised music. He grew up in Seattle and his first important job was playing trumpet and arranging for Lionel Hampton’s Orchestra (1951-53), sitting in a trumpet section with Clifford Brown and Art Farmer.
During the 1950s he started freelancing as an arranger, writing memorable charts for sessions led by Oscar Pettiford, Brown, Farmer, Gigi Gryce, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington among others. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band (1956), started recording as a leader for ABC-Paramount in 1956 and worked in Paris (1957-58) for the Barclay label as an arranger and producer. In 1959 Jones toured Europe with his all-star big band which was originally put together to play for Harold Arlen’s show Free and Easy. (more…)
Black History, The Arts
Richard Wright
(b. Sept. 4, 1908, near Natchez, Miss., U.S.–d. Nov. 28, 1960, Paris, France), novelist and short-story writer, who was among the first black American writers to protest white treatment of blacks, notably in his novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945). He inaugurated the tradition of protest explored by other black writers after World War II.
Wright’s grandparents had been slaves. His father left home when he was five, and the boy, who grew up in poverty, was often shifted from one relative to another. He worked at a number of jobs before joining the northward migration, first to Memphis, Tenn., and then to Chicago. (more…)
Black History, The Arts
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Poet and author Paul Lawrence Dunbar was so talented and versatile that he succeeded in two worlds. He was so adept at writing verse in Black dialect that he became known as the “poet of his people,” while also cultivating a white audience that appreciated the brilliance and value of his work.
Majors and Minors (1895), Dunbar’s second collection of verse, financed by several white friends, was a remarkable work containing some of his best poems in both Black dialect and standard English. Melodic and rhythmical, his lines in this and other works often sing and swing along gloriously. (more…)
Black History, The Arts
Lucy Terry
Married name LUCY PRINCE, also called BIJAH’S (ABIJAH’S) LUCE, or LUCE (LUCY) ABIJAH (b. 1730, West Africa–d. 1821, Vermont, U.S.), American poet, storyteller, and activist of the colonial and postcolonial period. Her only surviving work, the poem “Bars Fight” (1746), is the earliest existing poem by an African-American; it was transmitted orally for more than 100 years, first appearing in print in 1855. Consisting of 28 lines in irregular iambic tetrameter, the poem commemorates white settlers who were killed in an encounter with Indians in 1746.
Born in Africa, Terry was taken by slave traders to Rhode Island at a very young age. She was baptized a Christian at age five, with the approval of her owner, Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Mass.; she became a full church member in 1744. (more…)
