[Eoscstudents] Black History Awareness

[Levenia Carey]

Hello:

As February comes to a close so does Black History Month - but awareness 
and opportunity to explore and learn more about a population that has 
and continues to  impact our nation - never ceases.  We will be 
providing several biographies and updates today.  Here are the first three.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

QUICK FACTS

 

DID YOU KNOW?

 

In 1977 * Alex Haley (Alexander Murray Palmer Haley) (1921-1992) became 
the first black to win a Pulitzer Prize for Roots. When he was six weeks 
old, Haley and his mother moved to Henning, Tennessee, where they lived 
at her family home.  In 1939, after two years of college, he volunteered 
in the United States Coast Guard.  Haley devoted much of his free time 
to reading, writing letters, and writing adventure stories.  The Coast 
Guard created the position of chief journalist for him in 1949, and he 
retired ten years later to become a full-time writer.  In 1962 Playboy 
magazine retained Hailey to write a series of interviews, including an 
interview with Malcolm X, which in 1964 led him to write The 
Autobiography of Malcolm X, a bestseller that outsold Roots.  Haley 
launched upon a twelve-year venture to track the ancestry of his 
mother's family. His search eventually took him to Gambia in West 
Africa, where his fourth great-grandfather, Kunte Kinte, had been born. 
Blending fiction with fact, Haley wrote Roots:  The Saga of an American 
Family.  Published in the fall of 1976, the work brought him prompt 
renown.  Haley received in Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and 
numerous other honors.  The book was translated into thirty languages.  
The ABC television network telecast of "Roots" in an eight-episode 
miniseries was one of the most watched television events ever. 

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) gained fame for writing "A Raisin in the 
Sun."    Lorraine Hansberry was the first black to win the New York 
Drama Critics Award, for "A Raisin in the Sun," in May 1959.  The play 
was the first on Broadway written by a black woman, and the first 
serious black drama to impact the dominant culture.  In 1973 the musical 
Raisin, a revival of her play, won the Tony Award for best musical.   
Born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, she studied at the University of 
Wisconsin and the Art Institute in Chicago.  In addition to plays, 
Hansberry's works included poems, articles, and books.  Lloyd Richards, 
who directed Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun," was the first 
black director of a straight play on Broadway.  He was dean of the Yale 
School of Drama from 1979 to 1991.  "A Raisin in the Sun" is the story 
of a black family living I a white neighborhood.  Lorraine Hansberry 
based the play on her experiences as a child growing up in Chicago. 
 Those experiences also led her to write and give speeches about civil 
rights.  Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer at the age of 34.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), was a writer of poems, books, plays and 
songs.  Everything he wrote was about African-Americans...about their 
joys, their sorrows, their achievement and their losses.  Most were done 
with warmth and humor.  Mullato was the first play by a black author to 
be a long-run Broadway hit.  It opened at the Vanderbilt theatre on 
October 24, 1935, and played continuously until December 9, 1937.  The 
poet and author was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, 
Missouri, and graduated from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania.  He 
published ten volumes of poetry; more than sixty short stories; a number 
of dramas, operas, and anthologies; as well as two autobiographies, The 
Big Seas (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander (1956).  Hughes created the 
black folk character Jesse B. Simple, and wrote about him in
Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), and Simple Stakes a Claim (1957). 

 

At the age of 19, he published his first work, "The Negro Speaks of 
Rivers" and it appeared in the "Crisis," the NAACP magazine.  Langston 
won the Harmon Award for Literature for his first novel --- "Not Without 
Laughter." 

 

In his lifetime he published 10 volumes of poetry, numerous short 
stories and anthologies, children's books, song lyrics and plays.  As an 
established writer, he created theater groups in Harlem, Los Angeles and 
Chicago and wrote plays to be performed there.

 

In 1960, the NAACP presented him with the Spingarn Medal and declared 
him the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race." 


More articles and information to come.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.onenet.net/pipermail/eoscstudents/attachments/20070228/56a84b56/attachment-0001.html