At this point in his career, Baker stated in an interview, "Nobody tells me what to write or how to draw. Only an idiot would dare tell Kyle Baker how to make a good cartoon. Hollywood and the magazine world are full of idiots. They water my stuff down and make it unfunny."


He is credited with writing and storyboarding on the "Phineas and Ferb" television episodes "Candace Loses Her Head" and "Are You My Mummy?".


Baker drew writer Robert Morales' Marvel Comics miniseries "" #1-7 (January–July 2003), a Captain America storyline with parallels to the Tuskegee experiment. He also wrote and drew all but two issues (#7 and #12) of the 20-issue comedic adventure series "Plastic Man" vol. 4 (February 2004 - March 2006), starring the Golden Age of Comic Books superhero created by Jack Cole for Quality Comics. Baker contributed to the Dark Horse Comics series "The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist", a spin-off of Michael Chabon's novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay".


In 2006, his company, Kyle Baker Publishing, serialized a four-part comic book series about Nat Turner, and published the series "The Bakers", based on his family life, in two anthologies, "Cartoonist" and "Cartoonist Vol. 2: Now with More Bakers". He has also continued to provide comics material sporadically to Marvel, DC and Image Comics through at least 2010. In 2007 and 2008, Image Comics published Baker's six-issue Image Comics miniseries "Special Forces", a teen-soldier military satire that criticizes the exhortation of felons and disabled Americans into military service. "The New York Times" reviewed the 2009 trade-paperback collection of the first four issues, calling it "the harshest, most serrated satire of the Iraq War yet published."


In 2008, Watson-Guptill published "How to Draw Stupid and Other Essentials of Cartooning", Baker's art instruction book. That same year, Baker hosted the comics industry's Harvey Awards. In 2010, he became regular artist on Marvel Comics' mature-audience MAX-imprint series, "Deadpool Max".


Anatole Paul Broyard (July 16, 1920 – October 11, 1990) was an American writer, literary critic, and editor from New Orleans who wrote for "The New York Times". In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, "Intoxicated by My Illness" (1992) and "Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir" (1993), were published after his death. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, with his family as a youth. His daughter Bliss Broyard wrote and was interviewed about the family.


Anatole Broyard was born in 1920 in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Black Louisiana Creole family, the son of Paul Anatole Broyard, a carpenter and construction worker, and his wife, Edna Miller, neither of whom had finished elementary school. Broyard was descended from ancestors who were established as free people of color before the Civil War. The first Broyard recorded in Louisiana was a French colonist in the mid-eighteenth century. Broyard was the second of three children; he and his sister Lorraine, two years older, were light-skinned with European features. Their younger sister, Shirley, who eventually married Franklin Williams, an attorney and civil rights leader, had darker skin and African features.


When Broyard was a child during the Depression, his family moved from New Orleans to New York City, as part of the Great Migration of African Americans to the northern industrial cities. His father thought there were more work opportunities in that city.


According to his daughter, Bliss Broyard, "My mother said that when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, where his family had moved when he was six, he'd been ostracized by both white and black kids alike. The black kids picked on him because he looked white, and the white kids rejected him because they knew his family was black. He'd come home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn't ask what happened. My mother said that he didn't tell us about his racial background because he wanted to spare his own children from going through what he did."


They lived in a working-class and racially diverse community in Brooklyn. Having grown up in the French Quarter's Creole community, Broyard felt he had little in common with the urban blacks of Brooklyn. He saw his parents "pass" as white to get work, as his father found the carpenters union to be racially discriminatory. By high school, the younger Broyard had become interested in artistic and cultural life; his sister Shirley said he was the only one in the family with such interests.


As writer and editor Brent Staples wrote in 2003, "Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer – and not just a 'Negro writer' consigned to the back of the literary bus." The historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote: "In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy."


Broyard had some stories accepted for publication in the 1940s. He began studying at Brooklyn College before the U.S. entered World War II. When he enlisted in the army, the armed services were segregated and no African Americans were officers. He was accepted as white at enlistment and he took that opportunity to enter and successfully complete officers school. During his service, Broyard was promoted to the rank of captain.


After the war, Broyard maintained his white identity. Staples later noted:


Those who had escaped the penalties of blackness in the military were often unwilling to go back to second-class citizenship after the war. One demographer estimated that more than 150,000 black people sailed away permanently into whiteness during the 1940s alone, marrying white spouses and most likely cutting off their black families.


Broyard used the GI Bill to study at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. He settled in Greenwich Village, where he became part of its bohemian artistic and literary life. With money saved during the war, Broyard owned a bookstore for a time. As he recounted in a 1979 column:


Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel... Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity.


Broyard did not identify with or champion black political causes. Because of his artistic ambition, in some circumstances he never acknowledged that he was partially black. On the other hand, Margaret Harrell has written that she and other acquaintances were casually told that he was a writer and black before meeting him, and not in the sense of having to keep it secret. That he was partially black was well known in the Greenwich Village literary and art community from the early 1960s.


During the 1940s, Broyard published stories in "Modern Writing", "Discovery", and "New World Writing", three leading pocket-book format "little magazines". He also contributed articles and essays to "Partisan Review", "Commentary", "Neurotica", and New Directions Publishing. Stories of his were included in two anthologies of fiction widely associated with the Beat writers, but Broyard did not identify with them.


He often was said to be working on a novel, but never published one. After the 1950s, Broyard taught creative writing at The New School, New York University, and Columbia University, in addition to his regular book reviewing. For nearly fifteen years, Broyard wrote daily book reviews for "The New York Times". The editor John Leonard was quoted as saying, "A good book review is an act of seduction, and when he [Broyard] did it there was no one better."


In the late 1970s, Broyard started publishing brief personal essays in the "Times", which many people considered among his best work. These were collected in "Men, Women and Anti-Climaxes", published in 1980. In 1984 Broyard was given a column in the "Book Review", for which he also worked as an editor. He was among those considered "gatekeepers" in the New York literary world, whose positive opinions were critical to a writer's success.


Broyard first married Aida Sanchez, a Puerto Rican woman, and they had a daughter, Gala. They divorced after Broyard returned from military service in World War II.


In 1961, at the age of 40, Broyard married again, to Alexandra (Sandy) Nelson, a modern dancer and younger woman of Norwegian-American ancestry. They had two children: son Todd, born in 1964, and daughter Bliss, born in 1966. The Broyards raised their children as white in suburban Connecticut. When they had grown to young adults, Sandy urged Broyard to tell them about his family (and theirs), but he never did.


Shortly before he died, Broyard wrote a statement that some people later took to represent his views. In explaining why he so missed his friend the writer Milton Klonsky, with whom he used to talk every day, he said that after Milton died, "No one talked to me as an equal." Although critics framed the issue of Broyard's identity as one of race, Broyard wanted personal equality and acceptance: he wanted neither to be talked down to nor to be looked up to, as he believed either masked the true human being.


Sandy told their children of their father's secret before his death. Broyard died in October 1990 of prostate cancer, which had been diagnosed in 1989. His first wife and child were not mentioned in his "The New York Times" obituary.


Novelist Chandler Brossard, who knew Broyard in the late 1940s, based a character on him in his first novel, "Who Walk in Darkness" (1952). After the manuscript was submitted to New Directions Publishing, poet Delmore Schwartz read it and informed Broyard that the character Henry Porter was based on him; Broyard threatened to sue unless the novel's opening line was changed. It originally had read "People said Henry Porter was a 'passed Negro,'" which Brossard reluctantly changed to "People said Henry Porter was an illegitimate." Brossard restored his original text for a 1972 paperback edition.


Novelist William Gaddis, who likewise knew Broyard in the late 1940s, modeled a character named "Max" on Broyard in his first novel, "The Recognitions" (1955).


Given Broyard's stature in the literary world and discussions about his life after his death, numerous literary critics, such as Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, Lorrie Moore, Charles Taylor, Touré, and Brent Staples, have made comparisons between the character Coleman Silk in Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" (2000) and Broyard.


Some speculated that Roth had been inspired by Broyard's life, and commented on the larger issues of race and identity in American society. Roth stated in a 2008 interview, however, that Broyard was not his source of inspiration. He explained that he had only learned about Broyard's black ancestry and choices from the Gates "New Yorker" article, published months after he had already started writing the novel. He, instead, said in the open letter that his inspiration was Melvin Tumin, a longtime friend.


In 1996, six years after Broyard's death, Henry Louis Gates criticized the writer, in a profile entitled "White Like Me" in "The New Yorker", for concealing his African-American ancestry. Gates expanded his essay in "The Passing of Anatole Broyard", a piece published the next year in his "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" (1997). Gates felt that Broyard had deceived friends and family by "passing" as white, but also understood his literary ambition. He wrote,


When those of mixed ancestry—and the majority of blacks are of mixed ancestry—disappear into the white majority, they are traditionally accused of running from their "blackness." Yet why isn't the alternative a matter of running to their "whiteness"?


In 2007, Broyard's daughter, Bliss, published a memoir, "One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets". (The title related to the "one-drop rule". Adopted into law in most southern states in the early twentieth century, it divided society into two groups, whites and blacks, classifying all persons with any known black ancestry as black.) Her book explored her psychological and physical journeys as she met members of her father's extended family in New York, New Orleans, and on the West Coast, and her developing ideas about her own identity and life.


John William Dunjee (also John Dungy or John Dungee) (1833 – 1903) was an American missionary, educator, Baptist minister, publisher, agent of Storer College and founder of Baptist churches across the United States.


Dunjee also played a particularly prominent role in supporting Storer College as an agent for the school, a Freewill Baptist College for African Americans in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. William Still, the abolitionist, who helped facilitate Dunjee's escape from slavery, also served as a trustee of Storer.


After his work at Storer, Dunjee next became a minister with the Baptist Home Missionary Society. He traveled throughout the country from New England to the South to the Midwest preaching and starting new Baptist churches for African Americans in mainly rural areas.


Dunjee was also an involved supporter of many other African-American educational institutions, such as Spelman College, Shaw College, Hampton College, and Langston University. His friends included such well-known figures as Frederick Douglass. Additionally, Dunjee founded the "Harper's Ferry Messenger" in 1882 and served as business manager. His children Drusilla Dunjee Houston, a historian, and Roscoe Dunjee later contributed to the "Messenger" and were editors of the "Black Dispatch" in Oklahoma.


John Dunjee died in Oklahoma City in 1903.


Joy DeGruy (née Leary) is an author, academic, and public speaker who previously served as assistant professor at the Portland State University School of Social Work. She is current president and CEO of DeGruy Publications, Inc. She is most known for her book "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome," originally published by UpTone Press in 2005. DeGruy and her research projects have featured in news and activist coverage of contemporary African-American social issues, in addition to public lectures and workshops on U.S. college campuses.


DeGruy's family background is from the American south. She grew up in South Central, Los Angeles where she graduated from Crenshaw High School. She recommends the book "The Warmth of Other Suns" as a source of insight into her family.


She holds a bachelor's of science in Communication, two master's degrees (in Social Work and Clinical Psychology), and a Ph.D. in Social Work and Social Research from Portland State University's Graduate School of Social Work. Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2001, studied predictive variables for African American Male Youth Violence using Sociocultural Theory, Social Learning Theory and Trauma Theory frameworks; she also employed the "new" theory of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, which would later become the subject of her 2005 book. Professor Eileen M. Brennan served as DeGruy's dissertation advisor.


DeGruy's theorization is based on qualitative and quantitative research conducted by the author in both America and Africa.


The New Republic described the theory as "original thinking" that "explains[s] the effects of unresolved trauma on the behaviors of blacks that is transmitted from generation to generation," and suggested that the theory can be historicized more broadly alongside "new emphasis" on trauma-informed care in social work writ large. The California Institute of Integral studies has said P.T.S.S. "lays the groundwork for understanding how the past has influenced the present, and opens up the discussion of how we can use the strengths we have gained to heal."


DeGruy's theory is not without controversy. P.T.S.S. has been criticized by scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi, who included it in his . P.T.S.S. has also come under fire by politically conservative advocacy group The National Association of Scholars. Among academics, critical engagement with P.T.S.S. formed the subject of subsequent doctoral dissertation work, which demonstrated that further research was needed to determine the theory's applicability. Critics have suggested that as an alternative to "pathologizing" African Americans, "future research should focus on the mental illness of African Americans' oppressors."


In addition to P.T.S.S. theory, DeGruy co-developed the African American Adolescent Respect Scale, to serve as a practical measure of prosocial attitudes held by male adolescents. Other published work by DeGruy includes a chapter in "Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations," edited by Raymond Winbush. She has participated in a wide array of public speaking engagements for non-profit organizations, colleges, and universities and has featured in publication lineups alongside the likes of Angela Davis. She is represented as a public speaker by the national organization Speak Out: The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture.


Valorie Burton is a life coach, author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. She is the founder of the Coaching and Positive Psychology Institute (CaPP).


Burton has been featured on the TODAY Show and the Dr. Oz Show and has made regular appearances on CNN and HLN. She has written for Oprah Magazine, Essence Magazine and many others. She was a columnist for BlackAmericaWeb.com and is a frequent guest on CNN's "Reclaim Your Career" segment.


Burton co-hosted the Emmy-award-winning television program Aspiring Women, which aired on the Total Living Network (TLN). She has also co-hosted the national television program The Potter’s Touch with T.D. Jakes which aired weekdays on the TBN and BET.


Burton is a former Miss Black Texas USA, Miss Black USA "top 10" finalist, and a runner-up to Miss Texas. Ms. Burton is a credentialed member of the International Coach Federation and a member of the National Speakers Association.


Burton graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a master's degree in applied positive psychology. She is also a graduate of Florida State University and has a master's degree in journalism from Florida A&M University.


Burton is author of several books including "Successful Women Think Differently", "What's Really Holding You Back", and "Happy Women Live Better", "Rich Minds Rich Rewards", "How Did I Get So Busy", "Listen to Your Life", "Why Not You? 28 Days to Authentic Confidence", "Start Here Start Now", "Get Unstuck, Be Unstoppable", and "Where Will You Go From Here?", and "Successful Women Speak Differently".


In "Rich Minds, Rich Rewards" (2001), she describes ways to focus "on what's truly important in life." In "What's Really Holding You Back?" (2005), Burton tackles fear, uncertainty and anxiety and how people can free themselves of fear. "Library Journal" calls "How Did I Get So Busy?" (2007) more than a "quick fix." Her book "Why Not You?" (2008), contains practical tips and a questionnaire for readers to "identify which four confidence levels they embody."


In 2020, Burton released her most recent book, "Life Coaching for Successful Women" and advice on New Year's resolution to loudly tell your goals and start with baby steps. Burton also gave decision-making advice, "Without understanding God deep in our hearts, there is no success".


Ashanti Omowali Alston (born 1954) is an anarchist activist, speaker, and writer, and former member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. From 1974-1985 he spent time in prison for bank robbery which caused him to become further engaged in politics. He is currently on the Steering Committee of the Jericho Movement to free what they refer to as “political prisoners” in the US. Alston resides in Providence, Rhode Island.


Both Malcolm X's assassination and the Newark riots influenced Alston's decision to join the Black Panther Party at age 17, as he believed the Panthers were "taking Malcolm's teachings to the next level". At this time, Alston attended Nation of Islam meetings despite not being a member himself. He also felt a strong disdain for white people; however, upon joining the Panthers he changed his views.


Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army, and prison.


Alston observed much sexism during his time in the Black Panther Party, despite the group's stated intention of gender equality, which he didn't fully realize until his stint in prison. However, he has acknowledged that some women still felt empowered by the Black Panther Party to fight sexism despite experiencing it within the party, recalling, "Sisters would tell you that because everybody had guns there were certain ways that they could tell a brother, 'you're not going to fuck with me, I'm not going to be your sexual object because I got a gun'."


In 1984, Alston married fellow BPP and BLA member Safiya Bukhari.


Jeannette Caines was an American author of children's books, most notably "Abby", "Chilly Stomach" and "Just Us Women", a "Reading Rainbow" book. She was born and raised in Harlem, New York and worked as a Manuscript Coordinator. In 1989, Jeannette retired and relocated to Charlottesville, VA. She was the recipient of the National Black Child Developmental Institute's Certificate of Merit and Appreciation and the Charlottesville Lifetime Achievement Award (2004). In addition to this, Jeannette was the owner/operator of a small book store located in Charlottesville named THE PURPLE ALLIGATOR. Later in 2004, she was diagnosed with cancer and died on July 11. She had two children Alexander (deceased 2015) and Abby who still resides in New York.


Augusta Braxton Baker (April 1, 1911 – February 23, 1998) was an American librarian and storyteller. She was known for her contributions to children’s literature, especially regarding the portrayal of black Americans in works for children.


Augusta Braxton Baker was born on April 1, 1911, in Baltimore, Maryland. Both of her parents were schoolteachers, who instilled in her a love of reading. During the day while her parents worked, her grandmother, Augusta Fax (from whom she received her name) cared for her and told her stories. Baker delighted in these stories, carrying her love for them throughout her life. She learned to read before starting elementary school, later enrolling in the (racially segregated) black high school where her father taught, and graduating at the age of 16. Baker then entered the University of Pittsburgh, where she both met and married James Baker by the end of her sophomore year.


After graduation, Baker taught for a few years, until she was hired in 1937 as the children's librarian at the New York Public Library's 135th Street Branch (now the Countee Cullen Regional Branch) in Harlem. Moore applied three times before the head of children’s services, Anne Carroll Moore, took a personal interest in her application. Moore later berated the director of the library for not passing along the application, as she was interested in anyone who showed an affinity for children's work


In 1939, the branch began an effort to find and collect children's literature that portrayed black people as something other than "servile buffoons," speaking in a rude dialect, and other such stereotypes. This collection, founded by Baker as the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Children's Books, led to the publication of the first of a number of bibliographies of books for and about black children. Baker furthered this project by encouraging authors, illustrators, and publishers to produce, as well as libraries to acquire, books depicting blacks in a favorable light.


In 1946, she published an extensive bibliography of titles relating to the black experience titled "Books about Negro Life for Children." In a 1943 article Baker stated her criteria for selection. The books included should be ones, “that give an unbiased, accurate, well rounded picture of Negro life in all parts of the world.” The lists and the standards were freely distributed from 135th Street Branch in Harlem. Many librarians, editors, and authors of the time used the lists in conjunction with their own work. In 1971, it was retitled "The Black Experience in Children's Books," and its criteria played an important part in bringing awareness about harmful stereotypes in Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo.


In 1974, Baker retired from the New York Public Library. However, in 1980, she returned to librarianship to assume the newly created Storyteller-in-Residence position at the University of South Carolina; this was also the first such position in any American university at the time. She remained there until her second retirement in 1994. During her time there, Baker cowrote a book entitled "Storytelling: Art and Technique" with colleague Ellin Green, which was published in 1987.


After a long illness, Baker died at the age of 86 on February 23, 1998. Her legacy has remained even today, particularly through the "Baker’s Dozen: A Celebration of Stories" annual storytelling festival. Sponsored by the University of South Carolina College of Information and Communications and the Richland County Public Library, this festival originated in 1987 during Baker’s time at the University, and is celebrated still to this day.


When asked: “What do you tell your students when you conduct your workshops?” Baker stated:


“I tell them what I’ve always said. Let the story tell itself, and if it is a good story and you have prepared it well, you do not need all the extras - the costumes, the histrionics, the high drama. Children of all ages do want to hear stories. Select well, prepare well, and then go forth, stand tall, and just tell”


Her legacy also continues through the Augusta Baker Collection of Children's Literature and Folklore at the University of South Carolina. The collection, donated by her son, James H. Baker III, contains over 1,600 children's books, including materials from her personal and working library, as well as papers, illustrations, and anthologies of folktales Baker used during her career.


From Janice M. Del Negro, former Editor of "The Bulletin for Children's Books":


Kevin Brown (born September 3, 1960) is a biographer, essayist and translator who has authored or contributed to three books.


Kevin Brown has published brief lives of Romare Bearden and Malcolm X. He was a contributing editor to "The New York Public Library African American Desk Reference"


Since 1978, many of Brown's essays, articles and reviews on the visual arts, cinema, dance, literature, music and politics have appeared in "Afterimage", the "American Book Review", "American Visions", the "Chicago Review", the "Kansas City Star", "Kirkus Reviews", the "Times Literary Supplement", "The Nation", "New York Newsday", the "Oakland Tribune", the "Threepenny Review". and the "Washington Post Bookworld", among others.


Brown's 2005 translation into Spanish of Virginia Woolf's little known essay "Reviewing" appeared in the Iowa University journal of literary translation "eXchanges". His profile of translator Gregory Rabassa was published in 2006 by the University of Delaware's "Review of Latin American Studies".


Brown's mother, Duan Nimmons, was born (1940) in New York City, where her family had been active in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s. His maternal great-grandmother was Ida Mae Roberson (later, Ida Cullen-Cooper), widow of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. Countee Cullen was a teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High school, where James Baldwin was among his students. Prior to his marriage to Ida Mae Roberson, Countee Cullen had briefly been the son-in-law of W.E.B. Du Bois.


From 1980 to 1984, in San Francisco, Brown studied Latin and Greek with a private tutor, reading widely in the works of the ancients and the French as well as contemporary post-war writers like Gore Vidal. He began publishing book reviews on writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Pepys and Virginia Woolf in newspapers such as the "Oakland Tribune" as well as longer essays on Spanish cinema and James Baldwin in the "Threepenny Review"


In 1986, Brown moved to New York, attending the Columbia University School of General Studies for one year before transferring to the City University of New York. There, he double-majored in Spanish as well as Translating & Interpreting, completing his undergraduate degree in the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, headquartered at the Graduate Center. He studied with literary translator Gregory Rabassa, among others.


Brown lived in New York for 22 years, from 1985 to 2007, during which time he married and had a son. His son has rose to notoriety for being the youngest person to ever simultaneously whip and nae-nae. Brown returned to California in 2007, and currently lives in San Diego.


In 1985, Brown worked as an editorial assistant in the publishing industry in New York, and contributed to the "London Times Literary Supplement". From 1987 to 1989, Brown was a regular contributor to "Kirkus Reviews", where he published book reviews on subjects as various as Africa, African-American writers, 20th century American poetry, Anglo-American common law, Australian-New Zealand writers, French history and literature, the Harlem Renaissance, music, photography, politics. During the 1990s, he traveled in Central America and Eastern Europe, contributed to the "American Book Review", "American Visions" and "New York Newsday", and contracted to begin work on a series of biographies on Romare Bearden, Malcolm X and Countee Cullen.


Commissioned in 1993, just after the release of Spike Lee's movie on the same subject, Brown's second book attempts to chronicle the rise and fall of Malcolm X as well as that of rival leader Martin Luther King against the backdrop of the civil rights and black nationalist movements.


At Queens College and other campuses throughout the 23-college CUNY system, Kevin Brown studied both literary as well as technical translation with Gregory Rabassa and other faculty from Spain and Latin America. His profile-interview of Rabassa appeared in the University of Delaware's "Review of Latin American Studies".


William Patrick Foster (August 25, 1919 – August 28, 2010), also known as The Law and The Maestro, was the director of the noted Florida A&M University Marching "100". He served as the band's director from 1946 to his retirement in 1998. His innovations revolutionized college marching band technique and the perceptions of the collegiate band. Foster was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, the National Association for Distinguished Band Conductors Hall of Fame, the Florida Music Educators Association Hall of Fame and the Afro-American Hall of Fame among others. He also served as the president of the American Bandmasters Association and was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Bill Clinton. Foster wrote the book titled "The Man Behind the Baton".


The original FAMU Band was organized in 1892 under the leadership of P.A. Van Weller. At that time, the school was still known as the State Normal and Industrial College for Colored Students. When Foster became the director of bands in 1946, the school was known as the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes. Foster brought over 30 new techniques to the band, which have now become standard procedure for high school and college bands nationwide.


Under his direction, the Marching "100" appeared in films, commercials, numerous magazine and newspaper articles, nationally televised performances. In 1989, the French chose Foster and his band as America's official representative in the Bastille Day Parade, celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. On January 27, 1996, the Marching "100" was the center-piece of the Opening Ceremonies of the Walt Disney Indy 200. The Band was also the featured attraction at the Fifteenth and Twenty-fifth Anniversary National Telecast of Walt Disney World in 1986 and 1996. In January 1993 and 1997, the band appeared in the Inaugural Parade of President Bill Clinton.


The collective style of the FAMU marching band evolved by happenstance during band practice in 1946. "Our first dance routine, I don't know how or why it came about," said Foster, in his book "Band Pageantry, A Guide for the Marching Band". Foster's break with tradition was a fanfare that trumpeted the changing of the guard in marching band style and forever changed the look, feel and emotion associated with halftime performances. The block, militaristic, corps style immediately became secondary to Foster's upbeat, high-energy shows and, by the '60s, bands such as Grambling, Southern and Tennessee State in addition to Florida A&M began to garner national attention.


Foster's innovations made for a quantum leap for a U.S. marching band scene, which had already witnessed lagging interest in live band concerts as the numbers of radio and vinyl-record fans began to soar. While educators saw bands as a way to teach music to large numbers of students, few college bands existed around the turn of the century. Those that did were usually either small and informal club-like organizations modeled on the community bands, or ROTC bands modeled on the music of the military.


"I don't know what possessed me to go to the dean's office, but I was there and he asked me what I wanted to do," recalled Foster in his book on marching band technique. "I told him I wanted to be a conductor, but he said, 'You should rethink that. There are no jobs for colored conductors.' And he was right! So I wanted to develop a band that would be better than any white band in the country."


At FAMU, Foster began redefining band pageantry with a showy style—rapid tempos, high-stepping, dancing, etc., which was eschewed by some band directors who continued to cling to more staid military tradition and its emphasis on correct carriage and marching precision.


Foster has been credited with developing at least 30 new marching band techniques, including the double-time marching step of 240 steps per minute or four steps per second, and the triple-time marching step of 360 steps per minute, the death-slow cadence of 20 steps per minute or one step every three seconds, and memorization of all music played in stands, parades, pre-game and halftime shows.


Foster authored 18 articles for professional journals, 4 published marching band shows, and the textbook, "Band Pageantry", considered "The Bible" for the marching band. He is the composer of "Marche Brillante", "National Honors March", "March Continental", and "Centennial Celebration".


Foster was the first recipient of the United States Achievement Academy Hall of Fame Award and the Outstanding Educator Award presented by the School of Education Society of the University of Kansas Alumni Association. In 1992, "Sports Illustrated" declared The 100 as the best marching band in the country. In 1998, Foster was inducted as a Great Floridian by the Museum of Florida History. He was also a director of the prestigious McDonald's All-American High School Band (1980–1992).


President Bill Clinton nominated and the United States Congress approved Foster as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Foster was a member of the Hall of Fame of the following organizations: Music Educators National Conference; the Florida Music Educators Association, Florida A&M University Sports, the National High School Band Directors, and the Afro-American Hall of Fame.


He was a Board member with G. Leblanc Corporation, John Philip Sousa Foundation, International Music Festival, Inc., and the Marching Musician. On December 17, 1998, the Board of Electors in Chicago, Illinois elected Foster to the National Band Association Hall of Fame of Distinguished Band Conductors, the most prestigious honor a bandmaster can receive.


On August 23, 2010, Foster, who had been a resident of Miracle Hill nursing home in Tallahassee, Florida, was admitted to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital's Intensive Care Unit. He died on August 28, 2010 at 12:01 AM. His funeral was held in Florida A&M University's Lee Hall on September 4, 2010. He was 91 years old.


John Henrik Clarke (born John Henry Clark; January 1, 1915 - July 16, 1998) was an American historian, professor, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.


He was born John Henry Clark on January 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, the youngest child of John Clark, a sharecropper, and Willie Ella Clark, a washer woman, who passed away in 1922. ). With the hopes of earning enough money to buy land rather than sharecrop, his family moved to the closest mill town in Columbus, Georgia.


Counter to his mother's wishes for him to become a farmer, Clarke left Georgia in 1933 by freight train and went to Harlem, New York as part of the Great Migration of rural blacks out of the South to northern cities. There he pursued scholarship and activism. He renamed himself as John Henrik (after rebel Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen) and added an "e" to his surname, spelling it as "Clarke". He also joined the U.S. Army during World War II.


Clarke was heavily influenced by Cheikh Anta Diop, which inspired his piece "The Historical Legacy of Cheikh Anta Diop: His Contributions to a New Concept of African History". Clarke believed that the credited Greek philosophers gained much of their theories and thoughts from contact with Africans, who influenced the early Western world.


Clarke was a professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York from 1969 to 1986, where he served as founding chairman of the department. He also was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. Additionally, in 1968 he founded the African Heritage Studies Association and the Black Caucus of the African Studies Association.


In its obituary of Clarke, "The New York Times" noted that the activist's ascension to professor emeritus at Hunter College was "unusual... without benefit of a high school diploma, let alone a Ph.D." It acknowledged that "nobody said Professor Clarke wasn't an academic original. " In 1994, Clarke earned a doctorate from the non-accredited Pacific Western University (now California Miramar University) in Los Angeles, having earned a bachelor's degree there in 1992.


By the 1920s, the Great Migration and demographic changes had led to a concentration of African Americans living in Harlem. A synergy developed among the artists, writers, and musicians and many figured in the Harlem Renaissance. They began to implement supporting structures of study groups and informal workshops to develop newcomers and young people.


Arriving in Harlem at the age of 18 in 1933, Clarke developed as a writer and lecturer during the Great Depression years. He joined study circles such as the Harlem History Club and the Harlem Writers' Workshop. He studied intermittently at New York University, Columbia University, Hunter College, the New School of Social Research and the League for Professional Writers. He was an autodidact whose mentors included the scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. From 1941 to 1945, Clarke served as a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army Air Forces, ultimately attaining the rank of master sergeant.


In the post-World War II era, there was new artistic development, with small presses and magazines being founded and surviving for brief times. Writers and publishers continued to start new enterprises: Clarke was co-founder of the "Harlem Quarterly" (1949–51), book review editor of the "Negro History Bulletin" (1948–52), associate editor of the magazine, "Freedomways," and a feature writer for the black-owned "Pittsburgh Courier".


Clarke taught at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1958. Traveling in West Africa in 1958–59, he met Kwame Nkrumah, whom he had mentored as a student in the US, and was offered a job working as a journalist for the "Ghana Evening News". He also lectured at the University of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, including in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan.


Besides teaching at Hunter College and Cornell University, Clarke founded professional associations to support the study of black culture. He was a founder with Leonard Jeffries and first president of the African Heritage Studies Association, which supported scholars in areas of history, culture, literature, and the arts. He was a founding member of other organizations to support work in black culture: the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and the African-American Scholars' Council.


Clarke's first marriage was to the mother of his daughter Lillie (who died before her father). They divorced.


In 1961, Clarke married Eugenia Evans in New York, and together they had a son and daughter: Nzingha Marie and Sonni Kojo. The marriage ended in divorce.


In 1997, John Henrik Clarke married his longtime companion, Sybil Williams. He died of a heart attack on July 16, 1998, at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City. He was buried in Green Acres Cemetery, Columbus, Georgia.


Henry Walton Bibb (May 10, 1815 in Shelby County, Kentucky – 1854) was an American author and abolitionist who was born a slave. After escaping from slavery to Canada, he founded an abolitionist newspaper, "The Voice of the Fugitive". He returned to the US and lectured against slavery.


Bibb was born to an enslaved woman, Milldred Jackson, on a Cantalonia, Kentucky, plantation on May 10, 1815. His people told him his white father was James Bibb, a Kentucky state senator, but Henry never knew him. As he was growing up, Bibb saw each of his six younger siblings, all boys, sold away. Bibb was also very attached to his original owner's dog, which he named Geels, but the dog passed away at only 5 years of age.


In 1833, Bibb married another enslaved mulatto, Malinda, who lived in Oldham County, Kentucky. They had a daughter, Mary Frances.


In 1842, he managed to flee to Detroit, from where he hoped to gain the freedom of his wife and daughter. After finding out that Malinda had been sold as a mistress to a white planter, Bibb focused on his career as an abolitionist. He traveled and lectured throughout the United States.


In 1849-50 he published his autobiography "Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself", which became one of the best known slave narratives of the antebellum years. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased the danger to Bibb and his second wife, Mary E. Miles. It required Northerners to cooperate in the capture of escaped slaves. To ensure their safety, the Bibbs migrated to Canada and settled in Sandwich, Upper Canada, now Windsor, Ontario.


In 1851, he set up the first black newspaper in Canada, "The Voice of the Fugitive". The paper helped develop a more sympathetic climate for blacks in Canada as well as helped new arrivals to adjust. Due to his fame as an author, Bibb was reunited with three of his brothers, who separately had also escaped from slavery to Canada. In 1852 he published their accounts in his newspaper.


He died on August 1, 1854, at Windsor, Canada West, at the age of 39.


When she was 13, Clarke crossed a picket line of African-American activists protesting segregation at Woolworth's on 14th Street, believing that this was a rebellious act. However, when she came home her mother, a staunch union member, told her never to cross a picket line again, educating her about the role of direct action politics in the civil rights movement. At 16, Clarke was allowed by her parents to attend the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom with them, despite their concerns that there might be violence. The day before the march, on the way downtown to acquire information about the route, she ran into Martin Luther King Jr., who would deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech the next day.


Clarke is the author of four collections of poetry: "Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women" (originally self-published in 1981 and distributed by in 1982); and for Firebrand Books "Living as a Lesbian" (1986), "Humid Pitch" (1989) and "Experimental Love" (1993).


She also published "After Mecca — Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement" (Rutgers University Press, 2005), the first study of its kind that made more visible the contributions of black women to a field that traditionally recognized black men, and "Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry, 1980–2005" (Carroll & Graf Publishing, 2006), a collection that represented 25 years of published writing.


Clarke has served on the editorial collective of "Conditions", an early lesbian publication, and has been published in numerous anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, including "Conditions 5, The Black Women's Issue" (1979), ' (1982), ' (1984), "The Black Scholar", "The Kenyon Review", "Feminist Review of Books", "Belles Lettres", "The Gay Community News". Clarke's iconic articles, "Lesbianism: an act of resistance" and "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community", published in "This Bridge" and "Home Girls", respectively, are often included in women studies, black studies, and English studies curricula.


Clarke's fifth book of poetry, "By My Precise Haircut" (2016), is published by The Word Works Books of Washington, D.C., a press committed to the publication of contemporary poetry.


“The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” (1983).


Clarke concludes that Black people must be committed to eliminating homophobia in the community by engaging in discussion with advocates for gay and lesbian liberation, educating ourselves about gay and lesbian politics, confronting homophobic attitudes within ourself and others, and understanding how these attitudes prevent us from being totally liberated.


Clarke has served on a number of boards and community organizations, including New York Women Against Rape (1985), New Jersey Women and AIDS Network, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Currently, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Newark Pride Alliance, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to LGBTQ advocacy and programming in the city of Newark, New Jersey. She lives and writes in Jersey City, New Jersey.


(Bishop) Yvette A. Flunder (born July 29, 1955) is an American womanist, preacher, pastor, activist, and singer from San Francisco, CA. She is the senior pastor of the City of Refuge United Church of Christ in Oakland, California and Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries.


Flunder was born in San Francisco, California and raised between the Bay Area and Mississippi. She graduated High School from Church of God in Christ’s Saints Academy in Lexington, Mississippi before returning to California. She was raised in the Church of God in Christ. In 1984 she began singing and recording with Walter Hawkins and the Love Center Choir, where she was the lead singer. She was later ordained by Hawkins.


Flunder earned an undergraduate degree from College of San Mateo. She then went on to receive a Certificate of Ministry Studies and a Master of Arts in 1997 from the Pacific School of Religion, before earning her Doctor of Ministry degree from the San Francisco Theological Seminary in 2001.


In 2000 she founded the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a trans-denominational coalition of Christian churches who "desire to celebrate and proclaim the radically inclusive love of Jesus Christ", and was appointed its Presiding Bishop in 2003.


Flunder identifies as a womanist and a reconciling liberation theologian. In 2005 she authored a book, "Where the Edge Gathers: Building a Community of Radical Inclusion". Carlton Pearson cites her among the first religious leaders to embrace and encourage him after he was declared a heretic due to coming out in support of universal reconciliation.


In 2013 she was named as a Distinguished Alumna of the Pacific School of Religion. On December 1, 2014, Flunder was a keynote speaker in the White House for World AIDS Day, where she described the harmful effects of stigma and homophobia on those living with HIV and on AIDS education in general.The following year she was a guest speaker at the American Baptist College's Garnett-Nabrit Lecture Series.


Since 2015 Flunder has been a member of the board of trustees of the Starr King School for the Ministry and also served as a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.


Flunder's spouse is Shirley Miller, the cousin of Walter Hawkins; they have been committed partners since the mid-1980s.


Bishop Flunder was raised in the "womb" of the church coming from church founding families in the Bay Area.


From a young age, Flunder's life reflected her beliefs to treat people with value and equality. In 1986, Flunder was moved to minister to people with HIV/AIDS in response to the epidemic of the 1980s. She founded several not-for-profit enterprises in the San Francisco Bay Area, providing services for people affected by HIV: Hazard-Ashley House, Walker House and Restoration House, through the Ark of Refuge, Inc., which later became the Y. A. Flunder Foundation, and is now City of Refuge.


In 1991, she founded the City of Refuge under the United Church of Christ, "in order to unite a gospel ministry with a social ministry". She describes the City of Refuge UCC as an effort to "create a spiritual community that will embrace our collective cultures, faith paths, gender expressions, and sexual/affectional orientations while simultaneously freeing us from oppressive theologies that subjugate women, denigrate the LGBT community, and disconnect us from justice issues locally and globally". The Transcendence Gospel Choir was a community choir affiliated with the City of Refuge and was the first all-transgender choir in the United States.


Flunder's work expands into digital spaces. In 2021 she was a panelist for "Fire and Desire" the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's Center for the Study of African American Religious Life as they discussed "Black Male Gospel Music Performance"


Flunder was portrayed by actress Phylicia Rashad for the final 3-part episode as part of the Dustin Lance Black mini-series "When We Rise" on March 3, 2017 on the major television network ABC. The Bishop's role in the show highlights the compassion of the church, the commitment of its leadership and the loving home the church provides to minister in the tough, primarily African-American community in San Francisco.


Flunder was also depicted by Joni Bovill in the Joshua Marston drama film "Come Sunday", which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was released on Netflix in April 2018.


Flunder is active on many social media platforms using her platforms to consistently advocate for black lives, queer lives, medical accessibility, and destigmatization of HIV+ lives.


in 2021, Flunder was featured in PBS's "The Black Church: This is our story, this is our song."


Birthing the Sermon: Women Preachers on the Creative Process


Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms


The Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal "FIRE!!" (which lasted for one issue in 1926), such as Richard Bruce Nugent (the associate editor of the journal), Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.


The African-American bourgeoisie tried to distance itself from the slavery of the past and sought social equality and racial integration. The Niggerati themselves appeared to be relatively comfortable with their diversity of gender, skin color, and background. After producing "FIRE!!", which failed because of a lack of funding, Thurman persuaded the Niggerati to produce another magazine, "Harlem". This, too, lasted only a single issue.


Whilst Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman were comfortable with the appellation, others were less so. Cullen, for example, found Carl Van Vechten's novel "Nigger Heaven" so offensive that he refused to talk to him for 14 years. Hurston, though, had no trouble with language that challenged the sensibilities of others. She dubbed the well-heeled white liberals who were involved in the Harlem Renaissance "Negrotarians" (c.f. rotarian).


In a final irony, the printer gave the entire print run of the magazine to the Niggerati, in the hope that they would sell better in quantity, only for several hundred copies to be lost in a fire in the basement in which they were stored. Hurston later commented "I suppose that 'Fire' has gone to ashes quite, but I still think the idea is good.".


The Niggerati sought to challenge borgeoise attitudes with "FIRE!!", and intended it (in Thurman's own words from his solicitation letters) to be "provocative ... to provide the shocks necessary to encourage new types of artistic interest and new types of artistic energy". However, their efforts failed. They were not taken very seriously. Most of the negative reactions were little stronger than slaps on the wrist. Locke criticized their "effete echoes of contemporary decadence" and yet praised their anti-Puritanism. The NAACP even handled some of the journal's prepublication publicity. Du Bois, editor of "Crisis", simply ignored them.


Like "FIRE!!", "Harlem" also failed, with the readership responding unfavourably. Nugent wrote to Peterson after the publication of the first issue, expressing his disappointment and blaming the failure on "Wally's" editorship. According to Nugent, neither Alexander nor Douglas had been able, nor had had the strength, to counteract Thurman. Nugent himself had been on tour, with the cast of "Porgy", whilst the issue was being edited. Nugent distanced himself from the magazine, and wanted it made clear to Van Vechten that he had not been "in any way responsible for the perpetration of "Harlem"". In December 1928, Thurman resigned from the magazine's editorial board.


Rich Benjamin is an American cultural critic, anthropologist, and author.


Benjamin is perhaps best known for the non-fiction book "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America". Benjamin's investigation of Whitopia was the subject of a TED Talk.


He is also a lecturer and a public intellectual, who has discussed issues on NPR, PBS, CNN and MSNBC. His writing has appeared in "The New York Times", "The New Yorker", "The Guardian" and the "Los Angeles Times."


Benjamin's work focuses on United States politics and culture, comparative world politics, money, class, Blacks, Whites, Latinos, public policy, global cultural transformation, and demographic change.


In 2017, Benjamin left his tenure as Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the think tank Demos.


Born in the small rural town of Dermott, Arkansas to Robert and Janie Alexander, Larry is the fourth of ten children and the second of the union of his parents. His father was a truck driver, and his mother was a beautician. Alexander began drawing at about the age of four. He never received any formal art training during any level of his schooling while growing up, as none was available in his small rural hometown. After graduating from Dermott High School in May 1971, Alexander moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he studied Architectural Residential Design at Pines Vocational Technical School, now Southeast Arkansas College. In later years he also attended Richland College in Dallas, Texas where he studied AutoCAD.


Today, six pieces of his work from his popular "Dermott Series", a series of paintings he painted about his childhood home of Dermott, are now a part of the permanent collection at the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Alexander's work is mostly influenced by his experiences in life, such as growing up in the rural south during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as his life in Detroit, Michigan during the 1970s and 1980s.


Alexander moved to Detroit, Michigan after two years of school in Pine Bluff to seek employment in his chosen field. However, he was unsuccessful in the short run, and instead, he ended up finding work in a Chrysler auto assembly plant and became fascinated with the innerworkings of cars. This led him to become a certified mechanic, a craft he worked at for the next seventeen years. He ultimately met and married his wife, Patricia while living in Detroit, and they moved their family to Irving, Texas where he opened his own auto repair shop and operated it until 1991.


Alexander is also a "realist painter" who works in a variety of other mediums including oils, acrylics, and watercolors. He is a self-taught artist who chooses mostly to do exhibits in venues that provide mainstream exposure to a large variety of people such as festivals, schools, malls, libraries, banks, art institutions, and even U.S. Post Office branches on occasion.


In early 1996 Alexander finished and released his popular "Dermott Series", a 20 piece collection of oil and acrylic paintings that offered a nostalgic look back at his childhood of growing up in rural southeast Arkansas. The paintings feature images of people, buildings, and sites of Dermott, Arkansas, such as a cotton gin, his childhood house, where he went to school, and other images. Alexander said at the time that, "I did the Dermott Series for many personal reasons, and I'm overwhelmed by the response this collection is creating here in Texas". The series includes, "Birthplace", "Where I grew up", "Picking Cotton", "Cotton Gin", "Hot Grits", "In the kitchen with mama", and the old Chicot County High School, among others.


In 1999 Alexander unveiled his "Detroit Series", a series of oil and acrylic paintings of various sites in Detroit, Michigan at the American Black Artist Institute on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. The nine piece series includes paintings on Belle Isle Park, the Detroit skyline, the Detroit River, Hitsville USA (the original home for Motown Records), Greektown Historic District, the old Tiger Stadium (Detroit), the old J.L. Hudson building, former mayor Coleman A. Young, and many more.


In May 1998 Alexander unveiled his "Delta Series, which was painted entirely with acrylics, during "the Arkansas Schools Tours". The tour was expanded that year to include stops in Greenville, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee. This series included paintings of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain region from Monroe, Louisiana, to Memphis. It includes a painting of Graceland, Elvis Presley's former home, the landmark Greenville Courthouse in Greenville, a perspective of Beale Street in Memphis, and his classic rendition of a "Cotton Farm", among other subjects. Another piece from the Delta Series, "Aunt Eira Mae", was donated to the permanent collection of the African American Museum (Dallas, Texas), in 2004.


Alexander has also donated work to art departments of schools and colleges. In October 1996 at halftime at the inaugural football game, billed as the "Mobil Gridiron Classic", at Texas Stadium in Irving, Texas, Alexander presented a piece from one of his series, "The series of P.A.T.R.I.C.E", to the president, and the chancellor, of the participating colleges, respectively, Texas Southern University and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.


Alexander's most popular Pen and Ink art series, "The Sixties Series" has been exhibited in schools, libraries, and art institutions in several places since it was completed in 1993. It consists of elaborate drawings of well known figures and events of the 1960s, such as the civil rights Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965, and portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Rosa Parks. This series also covers the Vietnam War.


The theme pieces in the collection are a piece called "Composite Sixties", and one called "Composite Protests", which make up a composite of people, places and events that were prominent in the 1960s. For example, they show images of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, the United States presidents who served during the sixties, also J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, an image of U.S. astronauts landing on the moon in 1969, and many of the American protests that took place during this turbulent decade, to name a few.


In 2001, Alexander finished his first book called "African-American History at a Glance", which also included several pen and ink drawings of African-Americans who have contributed substantially to the American success story. "There is a lack of input regarding African-Americans in the American history curriculum of schools all over America" Mr. Alexander says. "There are a lot of schools that offer it as a choice to students, but I think it should be a part of regular American history".


Alexander's book was used to help create a supplemental text, that was later put together by the Irving Independent School District to help improve the American history curriculum in the high schools of Irving, Texas in 2002. His book deliberately ignores the contributions of African-Americans in the areas of sports and entertainment, as he feels they are already too well known and over-emphasized in society. Alexander says in his book that, "By no means is this an attempt to downplay the prowess of these particular individuals, or to discourage other individuals who aspire to excel in those areas. This publication is intent on bringing to the forefront, some of the African-American contributions that have historically been largely ignored".


Alexander is a devout Christian who teaches Sunday school and has also served as a Church deacon. He has taught Sunday school for several years and he also teaches through his books, online "Weekly Sunday School Lesson" commentaries, which are based on the international Sunday school lesson system, his online Book by Book Bible Study, and, his national e-mail system.


He also has created a large body of artwork in Christian and biblical themes over the years, such as his paintings, "The Twenty-third Psalm Series", which are a visual depiction of the verses of Psalm 23 in the Holy Bible, "Memories of St. Paul", which is a depiction of his childhood church in Dermott, Arkansas, "Bible Stories", "The Fall of Man", a depiction of Adam and Eve after being evicted from the Garden of Eden, "Sunday Sermon", and many others.


Alexander lives in Texas with his wife Patricia. They have four children: Ken, Leandra, Kawanna, and Patrice.


Derrick Barnes is an American author. He is known for writing several popular series of children's books and is a former staff writer for Hallmark greeting cards. In 2018 Barnes received several awards that include the Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award for his 2017 book "".


Barnes' books celebrate African American culture and feature positive images of black children in everyday life.


Barnes began his writing career in 1999 as the first full-time black male copywriter for Hallmark. In 2003, he left Hallmark and moved to New Orleans, where he worked a variety of jobs before signing a multi-book deal with children's book publisher Scholastic.


In 2011, Barnes began working part-time in the Kansas City Public Library's outreach department. As part of the library's "Stories to Go" program, Barnes was hired to travel to sites such as schools, daycares, and churches reading to children, and share stories with them.


In 2004, Scholastic published his books "The Low-down, Bad-day Blues", and "Stop, Drop, and Chill". Barnes' first young adult book, "The Making of Dr. Truelove", was published in 2008. The story, about a 16-year-old boy and his pursuit of the girl of his dreams, revolves around relationships and sexuality, and the book was ranked as one of the top 100 books for teens by the New York Public Library.


"We Could Be Brothers", a hardcover novel written for young teenagers, tells the story of two middle-grade boys with two different upbringings who both attend the same school. The book explores coming-of-age themes, including race, self-respect, women, and what it means to grow up as a black kid in American society. It was published by Scholastic in 2010. Critics praised its story line and its focus on the themes of friendship and community.


"Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut".


Barnes' first picture book, "," illustrated by Gordon C. James, was published in 2017 to critical acclaim. The story is about a young black boy and his experience getting a haircut in a barbershop. It explores aspects of African American culture, and celebrates themes of self-confidence and pride. "Crown" was well received, featuring at the 2018 ALA Youth Media Awards and winning several awards including a 2018 Newbery Honor (for content), a Caldecott Honor (for illustrations), a Coretta Scott King Award (for both author and illustrator), the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award (writer and illustrator), and the $50,000 Kirkus Prize.


The picture book "The King of Kindergarten" illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton was released in July 2019.


Barnes' 2020 book, "I Am Every Good Thing", won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for young people's literature.


Barnes has identified Stevie Wonder and Langston Hughes as influences, saying that "Hughes and his Simple short-story series helped him learn about dialogue and character development, while the liner notes of Wonder's albums inspired Barnes to manipulate language the way the songsmith did to add rhythm to his writing style. He recounts reading the liner notes as a seven-year-old child, enthralled by the language."


In an interview with The Kansas City Star, Barnes explained that there aren't enough books about kids of color by people of color. "I want to leave behind a body of work my children can be proud of, but I also want to change how children see themselves in this world. I want to thwart those negative images and make sure they know they are loved."


Barnes grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, reading many picture books from a young age. Barnes graduated from Jackson State University with a degree in Marketing. Barnes, his wife Dr. Tinka Barnes, and their four sons currently reside in Charlotte, North Carolina.


Christian Cooper is an American science writer and editor, and also a comics writer and editor. He is based in New York City.


Cooper has written stories for "Marvel Comics Presents", which often feature characters such as "Ghost Rider" and "Vengeance". He has also edited a number of X-Men collections, and the final two issues of the "Marvel Swimsuit Special". Cooper is currently a senior biomedical editor at Health Science Communications.


Cooper was Marvel's first openly gay writer and editor. He introduced the first gay male character in "Star Trek", Yoshi Mishima, in the "" series, which was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in 1999. He also introduced the first openly lesbian character for Marvel, Victoria Montesi and created and authored "Queer Nation: The Online Gay Comic". Cooper was also an associate editor for "Alpha Flight" #106 in which the character Northstar came out as gay.


In the 1980s, he was president of the Harvard Ornithological Club, and is currently on the Board of Directors for NYC Audubon. Cooper has a long history of LGBT activism including being the co-chair of the board of directors of GLAAD in the 1980s.


On May 25, 2020, Cooper played a key role in the Central Park birdwatching incident, which led to the creation of Black Birders Week. The incident is also the basis for his online comic book about racism, illustrated by Alitha Martinez and published by DC Comics, called "It's a Bird".


Jordannah Elizabeth (born October 16, 1986 in Baltimore, MD) is an American journalist, lecturer, music critic, author and screenwriter.


Elizabeth started her professional writing career by earning bylines in Vice Magazine, Nerve.com and Bitch Media in March 2013. In October 2013, she was brought on as a regular contributing writer and entertainment reporter for New York Amsterdam News arts and entertainment section where she has conducted high-profile interviews with African American leaders of their fields like producer, Teddy Riley, Walter Williams of The O'Jays and Black Girls Code founder, Kimberly Bryant.


As a national journalist, Jordannah wrote for a number of Bay Area publications in 2014 such as San Francisco Bay Guardian, East Bay Express SF Weekly and worked as the associate editor of The Deli Magazine San Francisco from 2013 to 2017. Jordannah expanded her reach as a global journalist, writing for MTV Iggy, MTV's (now defunct) world music blog and covering global Women's and Girl's Rights for Ms. Magazine.


From 2015 through 2018, Jordannah's work became more focused on literature, jazz criticism and global feminist reporting. Elizabeth has shared panels with esteemed journalists like Greg Tate, Lara Pellegrinelli and Michelle Mercer.


Her bylines have expanded to Chicago Reader, DownBeat, LA Weekly, Hearst Magazines, NPR Music, Popsugar, Condé Nast and other publications. Elizabeth's writing ranges from interviews, music journalism, personal essays, articles on healing in relationships and trauma to literary journalism. Her broad voice has made her an active teacher and lecturer, teaching writing and journalism workshops at institutions like Maryland Institute College of Art and Center for New Music in San Francisco. She has lectured at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, De Montfort University in Leicester, England, and was invited as a guest journalist at Harvard University's Black Lives Matter: Music, Race, and Justice Conference in February 2017. She has also moderated panels on literature and film at Baltimore Book Festival and Creative Alliance in Baltimore, MD.


In 2020, her writing has appeared in Chamber Music Magazine, New York City Jazz Record, The ZORA Music Canon , Universal Music Group's branded content online publication, uDiscover Music and has written a COVID-19 arts & entertainment column for New York Amsterdam News entitled "Stealth Isolation". In August 2020, she was a participant in the inaugural Florence Price Festival as a panelist on the Race and Gender in Classical Music Criticism in panel.


Jordannah interviewed Emmy award winning filmmaker, Stanley Nelson Jr. for New York Amsterdam News in March of 2021. In April 2021, she was selected as a keynote speaker and panelist at the Columbia University's Music Scholarship Conference along with classical music critic, Anne Midgette and Emmy award winning video journalist, Estelle Caswell.


Her children's book, "She Raised Her Voice!: 50 Black Women Who Sang Their Way into Music History" published by Running Press Kids is due out in December 2021.


Jordannah's has shared commentary and made many guest appearances on radio shows and podcasts including CBC syndicated radio, BBC 2, WYPR and several podcast shows. She has appeared episodes of the Reelz Channel music docu-series, Breaking the Band and is slated to appear on the Reelz Channel/Viacom CBS International Studios music docu-series, The Story of the Song. She has also work on projects by Bert Marcus Productions and the UK production company, RAW TV.


Jordannah is a recipient of the Sundance Institutes' Press Inclusive Initiative grant and received scholarships to study television writing at Sundance Co//ab.


As a screenwriter, Jordannah has written an original pilot based on her novella series, "The Warmest Low" and wrote the script for an episode of the PBS Digital web series, Sound Field. She has been mentored by screenwriters and showrunners, Jessica Hinds, Diane Ruggiero, Krista Vernoff and Evette Vargas.


Lorraine Bethel is an African-American lesbian feminist poet and author.


She is a graduate of Yale University. Bethel has taught and lectured on black women's literature and black female culture at various institutions. She currently works as a freelance journalist in New York City.


She participated in the Combahee River Collective, an organization that was part of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The Combahee River Collective was a black feminist group founded in Boston in 1974. It fought against racial, sexual, heterosexual, racial stereotypes and class oppression.


In an issue of "off our backs", a feminist news journal, a participant recounts her experience in the 3rd World Lesbian Writers Conference on February 24, 1979 at New York City's Women's Center, in which Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith moderated one of the five workshops available. In their workshop, called "Third World Feminist Criticism", Bethel and Smith discussed various topics such as the definition of "criticism", criticism as a "creative" art, white feminism versus black feminism, intersectional feminism, and the unification of black lesbians.


Later that year, in November 1979, Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith guest-edited "The Black Women's Issue" of "Conditions: Five", a literary magazine primarily for black lesbian women. In the introduction, it is stated that the issue "disproves the 'non-existence' of Black feminist and Black lesbian writers and challenges forever our invisibility, particularly in the feminist press." Bethel wrote the poem, "What Chou Mean We, White Girl? Or, The Cullud Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence", which was published in this issue.


Bethel's essay, ""The Infinity of Conscious Pain": Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition" appeared in the seminal book, "All of the Women Are White, All of the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies." Identifying in this essay as a Black feminist critic, she wrote, "...I believe there is a separate and identifiable tradition of Black women writers, simultaneously existing within and independent of the America, Afro-American, and American female literary traditions."


Reverend Horace L. Griffin is an Episcopal minister and gay man. Griffin is the author of "Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbian and Gays in Black Churches", which was released in October 2006.


Vernice Armour (born 1973) is a former United States Marine Corps officer who was the first African-American female naval aviator in the Marine Corps and the first African American female combat pilot in the U.S. Armed Forces. She flew the AH-1W SuperCobra attack helicopter in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and eventually served two tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.


Armour was born in 1973 in Chicago, Illinois to Gaston Armour Jr. and Authurine Armour. After her parents divorced, Clarence Jackson married Authurine. Both her father and her stepfather had served in the military - Gaston Armour was a retired major in the U.S. Army Reserve, and Clarence Jackson was a former Marine Corps sergeant that served three tours in Vietnam.


Her grandfather was a Montford Point Marine, the first African Americans to integrate the Marine Corps between 1942 and 1949.


Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Armour graduated from Overton High School, where she was a member of the mathematics honor society, the National Honor Society, and class vice-president.


In 1993, while a student at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), Armour enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve and later entered into the U.S. Army's ROTC.


In 1996, she took time off from college to become a Nashville police officer (her childhood dream). She became the first female African-American on the motorcycle squad.


Armour graduated from MTSU in 1997. In 1998, Armour became the first African American female to serve as a police officer in Tempe, Arizona before joining the U.S. Marines as an Officer Candidate in October 1998.


Commissioned a second lieutenant on December 12, 1998 Armour was sent to flight school at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas and later Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. Earning her wings in July 2001, Armour was not only number one in her class of twelve, she was number one among the last two hundred graduates. She became the Marine Corps' first African-American female pilot.


After flight school, Armour was assigned to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton near San Diego, California for training in the AH-1W SuperCobra. While at Camp Pendleton, she was named 2001 Camp Pendleton Female Athlete of the Year, twice won the Camp's annual Strongest Warrior Competition, and was a running back for the San Diego Sunfire women's football team.


In March 2003, she flew with HMLA-169 during the invasion of Iraq becoming America's first African-American female combat pilot. She completed two combat tours in the Gulf. Afterwards, she was assigned to the Manpower and Reserve Affairs Equal Opportunity Branch as program liaison officer.


Leaving the U.S. Marine Corps in June 2007, Armour began a career as a professional speaker and expert on creating breakthroughs in life.


In 2011, her book "Zero to Breakthrough: The 7-Step, Battle-Tested Method for Accomplishing Goals that Matter" was published.


Robert A. George is an editorial writer for the "New York Daily News" (and formerly for the "New York Post") and a conservative/libertarian blogger and pundit. He was born in Trinidad and lived in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. A 1985 graduate of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, George worked for the Republican National Committee and, following the 1994 midterm elections, Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.


In an article for the New York Daily News, January 31, 2018, he wrote these autobiographical comments regarding his work for the GOP:


Nearly 30 years ago, a recent college graduate noticed that it was a presidential election year. He had always been interested in politics, and, while his ideological compass was all over the map, wouldn't it be interesting to see the process upclose? How about attending a political convention. Heck, let's be really crazy/dumb, why not try going to both conventions, see everything really intimately, interact with politically aware folks of my own age, learn from them?


Well, if a youngish black immigrant with few connections — and less experience — in politics, what does he do? Well, he realized, he did have some connections.


On the one hand, a professor — or tutor, as faculty at his alma mater, St. John's College in Annapolis, are called — was married to a member of a prominent Democratic family. He asked the tutor if he could inquire with his wife about any possible volunteer positions at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. The tutor said he'd look into it.


And, a few months before, the graduate had befriended a couple who had just moved in next door. The husband was the fund-raising director at the Republican National Committee. The graduate asked his neighbor about volunteering for the '88 GOP convention in New Orleans.


After allowing a reasonable amount of time to pass, the graduate circled back. The GOP neighbor said, "Yes, we'd love to have you!" Conversely, the tutor said his wife had said, alas, that the DNC volunteer slots were assigned months before and, well ... sorry.


Who knows? Many years later, that graduate may still have become an editorial writer for two metropolitan newspapers, but the road would likely have been vastly different if Kathleen Kennedy Townsend — aunt to Joe Kennedy III — had managed to find a volunteer spot at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.


In addition to his newspaper work, George also has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox and regularly appears on other political affairs programs. George has written for the conservative "National Review," the libertarian "Reason" and the liberal "Huffington Post." He also sponsors his own group political/cultural blog, Ragged Thots. In addition, George occasionally moonlights as a stand-up comic and improviser.


George was one of the first conservatives to call for the resignation of Trent Lott as Senate Majority Leader following comments made by Lott at the birthday party of retiring Senator Strom Thurmond.


George has not written for "National Review" since publishing an article in "The New Republic" that he could not vote for the re-election of George W Bush. He instead voted for Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and said he voted in 2000 for Harry Browne.


George shares a name with a well known Princeton University professor and ethicist. Because they often wrote for the same publications, it became standard to refer to George as Robert A. George and to the Princeton professor as Robert P. George.


Linda Beatrice Brown is an American author and educator. She was born in Akron, Ohio, and went to college in North Carolina at Bennett College. While in North Carolina, she won several awards for her writing in both fiction and nonfiction. Brown has published many books, including "Belles of Liberty", "Black Angels", "Crossing Over Jordan" and "The Long Walk". The genres and styles of writing in which she wrote include fiction, nonfiction, playwriting and poetry. Many of her works are centered on the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles that can be rooted back to slavery during the time of the American Civil War.


Brown was born in Ohio, the daughter of Raymond R. Brown and Edith Player Brown. She moved to North Carolina to pursue her education at the collegiate level. She attended Bennett College, while her aunt Willa Beatrice Player was the president, and majored in English and French. She graduated as the valedictorian of her graduating class at Bennett. After undergrad, she attended graduate school at Case Western Reserve University where she got her master's degree. Moving back to Ohio, she received her PhD in African American Literature and Creative Writing from Union Institute and University.


Brown has been an educator at schools and universities including Kent State University, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and finally Guilford College. Presently, she is the Willa B. Player Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Bennett College for Women. She teaches African American literature there.


Brown has received awards during her time in North Carolina. These include 2nd place in the Creative Writing Contest at her college, 1st place in fiction writing from the NC Coalition of the Arts and a residency at the Headlands Center.


The Lady Chablis (March 11, 1957 – September 8, 2016), also known as The Grand Empress and The Doll, was an American actor, author, and transgender club performer. Through exposure in the bestselling nonfiction book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", and its 1997 film adaptation, she became one of the first trans performers to be introduced to a wide audience.


Chablis' mother moved back to Florida and practiced nursing at Sunnyland Hospital in Tallahassee. She lived with her mother and her new husband, who owned a dry-cleaning business. Chablis became close to her neighbor, Connie, who offered her a lot of support and a refuge from homophobic troubles at home.


Chablis began her career at age 15 in the Fox Trot gay bar in Tallahassee. It was there that she met Cliff Taylor, who performed under the pseudonym of Miss Tina Devore. He was the first male in Quincy that Chablis ever met who dressed up. Taylor offered to have Chablis stay with him if she ever moved to Atlanta. She moved there in 1974 at the age of 17, previously living with her aunt in Tallahassee for about eighteen months.


She began working at the Prince George Inn, a gay-owned restaurant, where she began a relationship with one of her co-workers. She left in 1975 after the relationship ended, and picked up work at Eckerd's Drugstore. After becoming sick for three weeks, she had to leave that position too. A new friend, Linda, saw the decline in Chablis' health and moved her into her two-bedroom apartment. She found another job, this time at a Burlington Coat Factory outlet.


Chablis and Linda moved to Regency Woods apartment complex. Encouraged by her friend's lush life and surroundings, Chablis decided to return to the stage. She eventually found herself at The Locker Room, a bathhouse.


In the late 1980s, a job offer from The Friends Lounge, a cabaret bar in Savannah, Georgia, resulted in her moving south from Atlanta.


She performed at Club One on its opening night in 1988, and was a regular performer there until August 6, 2016, just before she was hospitalized.


In the early 1990s, she moved with her partner, Jesse, to Columbia, South Carolina, where she began working at a new spot, The Menage. The Menage closed after three years, due to new competition, and Chablis did not find much work for a couple of years.


Chablis returned to Savannah, beginning work at new club, The Edge.


She was a prominent character in John Berendt's best-selling 1994 book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", during her days working at The Pickup on Congress Street. She left her job in a dispute over pay.


Chablis frequently performed at her "home" nightclub of Club One, where she was known as the "Grand Empress". Chablis traveled the U.S. performing her show, "The Doll Revue", at various venues and special events, such as gay pride gatherings. She also appeared on radio shows.


Chablis' autobiography "Hiding My Candy: The Autobiography of the Grand Empress of Savannah" was published in 1996, a year before she played herself in the Clint Eastwood-directed movie adaptation of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack.


The Lady Chablis was featured in the closing segment of the Savannah episode of "Bizarre Foods America" on The Travel Channel. She joined host Andrew Zimmern at several Savannah restaurants including Elizabeth on 37th. In 2012, she was interviewed in Savannah on the local television and internet talk show "MAMA Knows Best" (season 2, episode 1). On April 19, 2013 Chablis performed for the grand opening of the short-lived Mama's Cabaret in Lewiston, Maine, with "MAMA" Savannah Georgia.


In her early career as an entertainer, under the name Brenda Dale Knox, she won multiple titles in drag pageantry including:


Chablis said she did not want any label except her name, "The Lady Chablis", and said she found it hurtful when people called her a "drag queen". In his book, Berendt wrote that he met Chablis as she was returning home from having a hormone injection. In her book "Hiding My Candy", Chablis said she had not undergone sex reassignment surgery.


The Lady Chablis died on September 8, 2016, from "Pneumocystis" pneumonia, aged 59, at Savannah's Candler Hospital.


On November 5, a special screening of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" was shown at Savannah's Lucas Theatre for the Arts, with a tribute to Chablis beforehand. A few of Chablis' gowns were on display in the theatre's lobby. Jerry Spence, the former hairdresser who appeared in both the book and movie, was in attendance. A reception was held at Club One after the memorial service and, after the movie screening, Club One Cabaret held two Lady Chablis tribute shows.


Upon news of her death, several of Chablis' former co-stars made tributes to her. Paul Hipp, whom she appeared alongside in the movie adaptation of "Midnight in the Garden", said: "So sad to hear of The Lady Chablis' passing. She was super talented, kind, and laugh out loud funny. She was a true transgender pioneer, way ahead of her time (in the Deep South, no less). This pic of The Lady and me was taken between shots while filming "Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil". Feel free to envy our glamour."


John Mason Brewer (March 24, 1896 – 1975) was an American folklorist, scholar, and writer noted for his work on African-American folklore in Texas. He studied at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and Indiana University, while he taught at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas, Claflin College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Texas Southern University in Houston, Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas (now Texas A&M University–Commerce). He published numerous collections of folklore and poetry, most notably "The Word on the Brazos" (1953), "Aunt Dicey Tales" (1956), "Dog Ghosts and Other Texas Negro Folk Tales" (1958), and "Worser Days and Better Times" (1965).


Brewer was the first African American to be an active member of the Texas Folklore Society, to be a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and to serve on the council of the American Folklore Society. He was also the first African American to deliver a lecture series at the University of Arizona, the University of California, and the University of Colorado, and he broke the color barrier at Austin's Driskill Hotel. He has been compared to Zora Neale Hurston, Joel Chandler Harris, and Alain Locke. He also published a book on African American legislators in Texas during the Reconstruction era up until their disenfranchisement.


In 1932, while in Austin, Brewer met J. Frank Dobie, then the secretary and editor of the Texas Folklore Society. According to Byrd, Dobie was the "biggest influence on [Brewer's] career as a writer". Also in 1932, the Society published a collection of African-American folktales collected by Brewer that was entitled "Juneteenth". He studied folklore formally for the first time at Indiana University, under the direction of Stith Thompson, ultimately earning his Master of Arts degree there in 1933. That same year, he published "Negrito: Negro Dialect Poems of the Southwest". In 1936, he wrote "The Negro in Texas History" for the occasion of the Texas Centennial.


Brewer began his tenure as a professor of English at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1959. After moving to North Carolina, Brewer's most significant publications were the articles "Animal Tales as Told by African Students of Livingstone College" and "North Carolina Negro Oral Narratives" (both published in the journal "North Carolina Folklore") and two books, "Three Looks and Some Peeps" (1963) and "Worser Days and Better Times" (1965).


Brewer was a Methodist and a member of the Democratic Party. He married twice, and had a son with his first wife; his second wife, Ruth Helen, was from Hitchcock, Texas. After his death, he was buried in Austin.


Brewer was the first African American to be an active member of the Texas Folklore Society, to be a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and to serve on the council of the American Folklore Society, where he rose to the position of vice-president. He was also the first African American to deliver a lecture series at the University of Arizona, the University of California, and the University of Colorado. Additionally, he broke the color barrier at Austin's Driskill Hotel when he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.


A 1969 interview with Brewer is featured in the Oral History Collection at Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection. In 1997, Brewer was posthumously given the "Compañero/a de las Americas" award by the American Folklore Society for his "outstanding contributions to the further understanding of folk traditions in the Americas and the Caribbean" at the same ceremony at which his friend Américo Paredes was likewise honored. In 1999, the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center held an exhibition on "Aunt Dicy Tales" that prominently featured the illustrations created by John Biggers. In January 2017, Texas A&M University–Commerce held a J. Mason Brewer Day featuring Brewer scholars Bruce Glasrud and Milton Jordan as well as a panel discussion involving his former colleagues and students.


Brewer described his tales in "Dog Ghosts" in his own words as "as varied as the Texas landscape, as full of contrasts as Texas weather. Among them are tales that have their roots deeply embedded in African, Irish, and Welsh mythology; other have parallels in pre-Columbian Mexican traditions; and a few have versions that can be traced back to Chaucer's England."


Clay Cane is a journalist, author, television commentator, radio host and filmmaker. He is the director and creator of the documentary "Holler If You Hear Me: Black and Gay in the Church", which was nominated for a 2016 GLAAD Media Award. He is the author of "Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race", which was released June 2017. Cane is also the host of "The Clay Cane Show" on SiriusXM Urban View channel 126.


A graduate from Rutgers University, Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in English and African-American Studies, Cane's commentary is heard on MTV, HLN, MSNBC, FOX, VH1, CNN and numerous other television programs, including "The O'Reilly Factor", "Don Lemon Tonight" and "Melissa Harris-Perry". He has contributed to print and online publications including CNN.com, The Washington Post and Gawker.


Cane was the host of "Clay Cane Live", a weekly, call in and political radio talk show on WWRL 1600AM, which was home to radio programs for Reverend Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz. After 86 years, the station aired its final broadcast in December 2013. In November 2017, Cane returned to radio on SiriusXM Urban View channel 126 for "The Clay Cane Show".


He is a member of New York Film Critics Online and the Broadcast Television Journalists Association.


Cane is the author of "Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race." The book was published via Cleis Press in June 2017. Publishers Weekly called the book, "Cane’s observations on the intersections of class and race, which do not shy away from the quagmire of being poor in America, resonate in today’s fraught political climate. Even when he addresses painful issues such as domestic violence, sexual exploitation, food insecurity, and inadequate mental health care, he retains humor and compassion."


Lucy Ann Delaney, born Lucy Berry (c. 1830 – after 1891), was an African-American author, and activist, a former slave notable for her 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom. This is the only first-person account of a "freedom suit" and one of the few slave narratives published in the post-Emancipation period.


The memoir recounts her mother Polly Berry's legal battles in St. Louis, Missouri, for her own and her daughter's freedom from slavery.For her daughter's case, Berry attracted the support of Edward Bates, a prominent Whig politician and judge, and the future US Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln. He argued the case of Lucy Ann Berry in court and won in February 1844. Their cases were two of 301 freedom suits filed in St. Louis from 1814 to 1860. Discovered in the late twentieth century, the case files are held by the Missouri Historical Society and are searchable online.


For decades little was known of Lucy Ann Delaney beyond her memoir. In the 1990s her mother's and her freedom suits were among the brief case files found for 301 freedom suits in St. Louis, dating from 1814–1860. Related material is available online in a searchable database created by the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Project, in collaboration with Washington University. In addition, scholars have conducted research into censuses and other historic material related to Delaney's memoir to document the facts.


Born into slavery in St. Louis, Missouri in 1830, Lucy Ann Berry was the second daughter of slaves Polly Berry (born Polly Crocket) and a mulatto father whose name she did not note. Their first daughter was named Nancy. Berry's family was held by Major Taylor Berry and his wife, Frances. Lucy's mother had been born free in Illinois (a free state), but was kidnapped as a child by slave catchers and sold into slavery in Missouri.


In her freedom suit, Polly Berry deposed that she was held as a slave in Wayne County, Kentucky by Joseph Crockett, and was brought by him to Illinois. There they stayed for several weeks while he hired her out for domestic work. As Illinois was a free state, he was supposed to lose his right to hold slave property by staying there, and Polly could have been freed. It was on this basis that she was later awarded freedom, as witnesses were found to testify as to her having been held illegally as a slave in Illinois.


The major told Polly and her husband that they and his other slaves would be freed upon his death and the death of his wife. After the major died in a duel, the widow Fanny Berry married Robert Wash, a lawyer later appointed as a Missouri State Supreme Court judge. When Fanny Wash died, the Berry slave family's fortunes changed. Judge Wash sold Lucy Ann's father to a plantation down the Mississippi River in the Deep South.


Polly Berry became concerned for the safety of her daughters, and determined they should escape. Lucy Ann's older sister Nancy slipped away while traveling with a daughter of the family, Mary Berry Cox, and her new husband on their honeymoon in the North. Nancy left them at Niagara Falls, took the ferry across the river, and safely reached Canada and a friend of her mother's.


After having conflict with Mary Cox in 1839, Polly Berry was sold to Joseph A. Magehan, but escaped about three weeks later. She reached Chicago, but was captured by slave catchers. They returned her to Magehan and slavery in St. Louis.


On returning, Polly Berry (also known as Polly Wash after her previous master) sued for her freedom in the Circuit Court in the case known as "Polly Wash v. Joseph A. Magehan" in October 1839. When her suit was finally heard in 1843, her attorney Harris Sproat convinced a jury of her free birth and kidnapping as a child. Wash was freed. She remained in St. Louis to continue her separate effort to secure her daughter Lucy Ann Berry's freedom, for which she had filed suit in 1842, shortly after Berry fled her master.


In 1845, Lucy Ann met and married steamboat worker Frederick Turner, with whom she settled in Quincy, Illinois. Her mother lived with them. Turner died soon after in a boiler explosion on the steamboat "The Edward Bates". (It was named for the lawyer who had helped secure Lucy Ann's freedom two years before.)


Polly Wash and Lucy Ann returned to St. Louis. In 1849, Lucy Ann met and married Zachariah Delaney. They were married for the rest of their lives, and her mother lived with them. Though the couple had four children, two did not survive infancy. The remaining son and daughter both died in their early twenties.