People, Locations, Episodes

Derek Walcott, Poet born

*Derek Walcott was born on this date in 1930. He is an Afro Caribbean poet, playwright and educator.

He was born in Castries, Saint Lucia; one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. Both his grandmothers were descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolorist, died when Walcott and his twin brother, Roderick, were very young and his mother ran the town’s Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he has worked as theatre and art critic.

Robert Guthrie, Psychologist, and Author born

*Robert V. Guthrie was born on this date in 1930. He was a Black psychologist, author, and educator. Guthrie and his twin brother were born in Chicago. As a baby, his father, a school principal, picked up the family and moved to Richmond, Ky., then to Lexington, Ky., towns in great need of teachers for […]

Lorraine Hansberry, Playwright, and Activist born

Lorraine Hansberry was born on this date in 1930. She was an African American writer and activist for equal rights for Blacks.

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chicago, the daughter of Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl A. Hansberry, both active proponents of civil rights. Hansberry’s father worked with the NAACP and the Urban League to challenge segregation. and he ran for Congress through his His attempt to break down the barriers of racism continued in the political arena when he ran for Congress.

Samuel Greenlee, Author and Poet born.

*Samuel Greenlee was born on July 13, 1930. He was a Black writer of fiction and poetry. Samuel Eldred Greenlee, Jr., was born in Chicago, Illinois, to singer and dancer Desoree Alexander and railroad man and union activist Samuel Greenlee. He grew up in West Woodlawn, attended Englewood High School, and, in 1948, won a […]

Derrick Bell, Educator, and Activist born

*Derrick Bell was born on this date in 1930. He was a Black lawyer, professor, writer, and activist. Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh and received a B.A. from Duquesne University in 1952. He was a Duquesne Reserve Officers’ Training Corps member and later served as an Air Force […]

Chinua Achebe, Nigerian Writer born

*Chinua Achebe was born on this date in 1930. He was a Nigerian Author and literary activist. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born in Ogidi, a Nigerian Ibo village. His father became a Christian and worked for a missionary teacher in various parts of Nigeria before returning to the village. As a student, Achebe immersed himself in Western literature. At the University College of Ibadan, whose professors were Europeans, he read Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Tennyson.

Clarence B. Jones, Writer born

*On this date in 1931, Clarence Jones was born. He is an African American businessman and writer.

Toni Morrison, Writer born

*This date marks the birth of Toni Morrison in 1931. She was an African American writer, whose writings often deal with the Black experience and celebrates the Black community.

Hakim Abdullah Jamal, Author born

*Hakim Abdullah Jamal was born on this date in 1931. He was a Black radical and author. He was born Allen Donaldson in Roxbury, Boston. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother abandoned him when he was 6. Donaldson started regularly drinking alcohol when he was ten and became a heroin user at 14. […]

Etheridge Knight, Poet born

On this date we remember the birth of Etheridge Knight in 1931. He was an African American poet.

Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi and grew up in Paducah, Kentucky. He dropped out of high school, became addicted to drugs, and joined the U.S. Army, serving as a medical technician in the Korean War. Arrested for robbery in 1960, Knight was imprisoned for eight years. There he emerged as a strong voice of the Black aesthetic movement with his first volume of verse, Poems from Prison (1968).

Harriette Gillem Robinet, Biologist and Author born

*Harriette Gillem Robinet was born on this date in 1931.  She is a Black research biologist, professor, and author. Born in Washington, D.C., Harriette Gillem spent her childhood summers in Arlington, Virginia. She is the daughter of Richard Avitus (a teacher) and Martha (a teacher; maiden name, Gray) Gillem. Her mother’s father was enslaved under […]

Marion Patrick Jones, Librarian and Novelist born

*Marion Jones was born on this date in 1931. She was a Black Trinidadian librarian and novelist. Marion Patrick Jones was born in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Her father, Patrick Jones, was of African/Chinese heritage and was a leading Trinidadian trade unionist and socio-political activist at the turn of the 20th century. She […]

Tom Dent, Writer, and Activist born

*Tom Dent was born on this date in 1932. He was a Black poet, essayist, oral historian, dramatist, and cultural activist.

Ernest Gaines, Writer, and Educator born

Ernest J. Gaines was born on this date in 1933. He is an African American writer and educator.

He was born on River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near the town of New Roads, Louisiana (which he would call Bayonne Parish in his novels). Gaines was the oldest of 12 children, and was raised by his Aunt Augustine. Gaines’s first six years of school were in the plantation church, where a visiting teacher taught five to six months a year, depending on when the children were needed to work in the fields.

Ishmael Reed, Writer born

*Ishmael Reed was born on this date 1933. He is an African American writer.

From Chattanooga, Tennessee, when he was still a child, he and his family moved to Buffalo, New York, where Reed eventually attended the University of New York at Buffalo from 1956-1960. Reed is total writer, creating in poems, novels, essays, articles and more.