Black History

Hallie Quinn Brown   Hallie Quinn Brown was a educator, writer and activist. She was dean of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina from 1885 to 1887 and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from 1892 to 1893 under Frederick Douglass. She became a professor at Wilberforce in 1893, and was a frequent lecturer on [...]

Alice Walker   Alice Malsenior Walker is an author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was the fisrt African-American woman to be awarded the [...]

Jean Toomer   Jean Toomer a poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane is considered by many as his most significant. Toomer’s papers and unpublished manuscripts are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Some of Toomer’s works are Cane, The Flavor of Man, The Collected [...]

Rita Dove   Rita Frances Dove is a poet and author. From 1993-1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now popularly known as “United States Poet Laureate”. She was the first, and to date only, African-American to be appointed since the position was created by an [...]

Frederick Douglass   Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was a social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to [...]

Paul Laurence Dunbar   Paul Laurence Dunbar was a poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of his popular work in his lifetime used a Negro dialect, which helped him become one of the first nationally-accepted African American writers. Much of his writing, however, does not use dialect; these [...]

SK enlists @MsWise & Like Nast for this new track off “The Progression“  Album which you can download HERE . Also download the “Smoking Mirrors” mixtape HERE [...]

Nikki Giovanni   Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni is a poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Her primary focus is on the individual and the power one has to make a difference in oneself and in the lives of others. Giovanni’s poetry expresses strong racial pride, respect for family, and her own experiences as a daughter, [...]

John Langston Gwaltney   John Langston Gwaltney was a writer and anthropologist focused on African American culture, best known for his book Drylongso: A Self Portrait of Black America. He was a professor of anthropology at the University of Syracuse in New York. Drylongso is a collection of Gwaltney’s transcriptions of oral interviews with who [...]

Marcus Garvey   Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He founded the Black Star Line, part of the Back-to-Africa movement, which promoted [...]

Margaret Walker   Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was a poet and writer. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she wrote as Margaret Walker. Walker was a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University (1949 to 1979). In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the [...]

Audre Lorde   Audrey Geraldine Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist. Lorde’s poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes‘ 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Some [...]