we are the ship by Kadir Nelson

bessie and her son richard by Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks’s compelling photograph of Bessie Fontenelle and her youngest son Richard, Jr., was published by Life magazine on March 8, 1968, as part of a special feature on blacks and poverty called A Harlem Family (or At the Poverty Board). Parks’s essay and twenty-five photographs vividly depict the hardships of a Harlem family living under deplorable conditions. Taken shortly after Bessie violently retaliated against her husband’s abuse, this image, which appears on the opening spread, captures both her love for her son and her deep frustration and exhaustion—the dichotomy of a life torn between hope and despair. Her sadness is tempered by her child’s wide-eyed innocence. The article begins with this admonition: “What I want/What I am/What you force me to be/is what you are,” suggesting that we are all part of one global family. Sadly, only young Richard survived the family’s hardships and grew up to escape poverty.

by Indiana University Art Museum

my life in search of africa by John Henrik Clarke

harlem newsboy by Gordon Parks

charles fuller

Charles was born on March 5, 1939 to parents Charles H. Sr. and Lillian Anderson Fuller of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Fuller was the oldest of three children, but would see his parents welcome some twenty foster children into their home over the years.  Fuller attended Philadelphia’s Roman Catholic High School and graduated in 1956.  During his high school years, Fuller spent countless hours in the school library, and competed with a friend, Larry Neal, to become the first to read every book in the school’s collection.  This experience helped spawn Fuller’s dream of becoming a writer.   

After graduation from high school, Fuller attended Villanova University in Pennsylvania between 1956 and 1958.  He then enlisted in the U. S. Army and spent the next four years stationed in Japan and Korea.  Fuller returned to civilian life in 1962 and in August of that year he married Miriam A. Nesbitt.  

Charles Fuller began his writing career in Philadelphia during the 1960s, writing mostly poetry, short stories, and essays in his spare time while working various jobs throughout Philadelphia.  In 1965, Fuller decided to continue his education and enrolled in La Salle College (now La Salle University) which he attended until 1968.  During his time at La Salle, Fuller began writing short plays for a theatre group in Philadelphia that became the Afro-American Theatre of Philadelphia.  He helped found this theatre, and served as co-director until he moved to New York in 1970. Fuller’s first critical acclaim as a playwright came with the production of his play, The Village: A Party in 1968.  The Village was first produced by Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, and later it ran off-Broadway in New York where it was re-titled The Perfect Party. 

It was on the heels of this success that Fuller decided to move to New York and devote 
himself to writing full-time. During the 1970s, he wrote many plays that were produced off-Broadway.  He was supported in New York by a number of prestigious grants which included a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1975, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977-1978.  In 1976, Fuller penned the first of his three most famous plays, The Brownsville Raid, a play based on true events which occurred near an Army base in Texas in 1906.  The second of his most successful plays, Zooman and the Sign was first produced in 1980.  Fuller won two Obie Awards (an award given for off-Broadway productions), in 1980 for Zooman.   

In 1981, Fuller suffered a great loss when his childhood friend, Larry Neal, who also became a playwright, died of a heart attack.  Fuller decided to honor his friend by writing what became his most celebrated work, A Soldier’s Play.  This play ran off-Broadway for more than a year and earned the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Charles Fuller became the second African American to win the Pulitzer (the first being Charles Gordone in 1970). A Soldier’s Play also won the 1982 New York Drama Critic’s Award for Best American Play, as well as the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Mystery.  Fuller was also rewarded for his effort with a movie contract from Columbia Pictures.  He wrote the screenplay himself, and changed the name to A Soldier’s Story.  The film was released in 1984 and received two Academy Award (Oscar) nominations in 1985.  

Since his success with A Soldier’s Story, Fuller has continued to write both for the theater and for film.  His screenplays have appeared on PBS, CBS, and TNT, and include an adaptation of Zooman and the Sign which was produced by the Showtime Network in 1985.  Fuller continues to live and work in New York City.

by Thadius M. Davis

pine tree in spring (for Leon Damas)
 
Pine tree
flag-bearer
of green memory
across the breach of a desolate hour
 
Loyal tree
that stood guard
alone in austere emeraldry
over Nature’s recumbent standard
 
Pine tree
lost now in the shade
of traitors decked out flamboyantly
marching back unabashed to the colors
they betrayed
 
Fine tree
erect and trustworthy
can’t you bestow on me
your silent, stubborn constancy?

by chinua achebe

Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinualumgu Achebe best known as Chinua Achebe is, without doubt, one of Africa’s most successful writers of all time. Born in 1930 in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe hails from the Igbo community. A renowned critic, poet and novelist, Achebe has had an influence on African writing, extending far beyond his own personal success. For many years, he edited the African Writers Series, a project that contributed immensely to the development of post-colonial African writing. His first published novel was “Things Fall Apart” which came out in 1958.
 
Achebe was educated at Government College Umuahia, and University College, Ibadan in Nigeria. He later joined government service, where he rose to become Director of External Broadcasting at the Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation. For much of his life, he has lived and worked in the USA, more so after 1990, following an accident that left him partially paralyzed.
He has lectured at various universities in the US, including the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Connecticut, Dartmouth College, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
 
He has received numerous honors including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as honorary doctorates from more than 30 colleges and universities. He is also the recipient of Nigeria’s highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.

-by Daniel Musitwa 

Things Fall Apart by chinua achebe

a Real Good Read!
Though he’s been around for a long time I’m new to this brother. But I’m making up for lost time.

-WHB2

Real good read!

percival everett

One of the best authors you may have never heard of. Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of nearly twenty novels, three collections of short fiction, and two volumes of poetry.

He is also the recipient of the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the Academy Award from an American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, The Believer Book Award, The Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize, the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, and a New American Writing Award.

But most important of all this brutha is smooth, down to earth and can write his ass off.

John Henrik Clarke  (1915 - 1998)

Was a intellectual mentor to Malcolm X, a teacher, historian, poet and writer and expert on African and African American history.

He was born New Years Day 1915 in Union Springs, Alabama. He was born the eldest of nine as John Henry Clarke and changed his name to Henrik in reference to the playwright Henrik Ibsen, author of A Doll’s House and father to modern theater. Clarke’s mother died when he was young. He was the first in his family to learn to read and began teaching sunday school at around 10 years old.

He writes in his essay In Search of Identity, his quest for African history began by reading the Bible.

“Reading the description of Christ as swarthy and with hair like sheep’s wool, I wondered why the church depicted him as blond and blue-eyed. Where was the hair like sheep’s wool? Where was the swarthy complexion? I looked at the map of Africa and I knew Moses had been born in Africa. How did Moses become so white? If he went down to Ethiopia to marry Zeporah, why was Zeporah so white? Who painted the world white? Then I began to search for the definition of myself and my people in relationship to world history, and I began to wonder how we had become lost from the commentary of world history.”

In spite of his brilliance as a young man, he was forced to drop out of school to help support his family. At age 17 he hopped a train to Harlem, New York– drawn there by hearing about the burgeoning literary scene and his frustrations living in the segregated south. For example, the libraries were Jim Crow (or operating under understood racial laws) and wouldn’t allow blacks. Once in New York he devoured the collection of African scholar Arthur Schomberg. He studied at both Columbia and New York University but didn’t earn degrees from either institutions.

He began his teaching career in the 1940’s at community centers in Harlem. By the late 1950’s he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and eventually traveled to West Africa delivering lectures on African history in several institutions.

He earned his teaching license in the 1960’s in Long Island and, after teaching for 20 years, finally received his first classroom assignment in both Harlem and New York’s Head Start training program.

Clarke was brilliant and a hell raiser amongst scholars. In African People in World History he wrote Most of the world’s major religions and nearly every textbook have made serious efforts to interpret history without Africans playing a major role… The fact that civilization started with African people has been ignored, and the contributions that African people are now making to the world are minimized. In 1969, he joined the staff at Hunter College and helped establish a Black Studies program there, then later at Cornell.

Clarke authored six scholarly books, a grip of articles, he edited several anthologies of Black literature including Black American Short stories . He was co-founder of theHarlem Quarterly and was associate editor of Freedomways magazine. He married twice, having three children with his first wife. In 1998, he died of a heart attack at age 83.