Cecil Brath
*Cecil Brath was born on this date in 1936. He was a Black Pan-African activist.
Cecil Elombe Brath was born in Brooklyn, New York, where his father had migrated from Barbados in the 1920s. Brath and his brother, Kwame Brathwaite, grew up in Harlem and Hunts Point, attending the High School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design), and later won a college scholarship to the School of Visual Arts.
In 1956, he was among the co-founders of the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios, "to reclaim jazz as music of contemporary African traditions that black artists should control", and in 1962, he began working as a graphic artist for ABC Television, remaining there until his retirement in 1999. Brath fought to eliminate the use of the term "negro" and, in 1961, launched a "Black is Beautiful" campaign with a series of Afrocentric fashion shows featuring African-American women known as the Grandassa Models, who sported large afros.
In 1975, Brath, along with Irving Davis, founded the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, which advocated for the right to self-determination for Angolans, South Africans, and Namibians, as well as other African liberation movements. In 1976, the Coalition released a policy memo calling for the support of the Zimbabwe Liberation Army. They garnered attention for a 1977 boycott of Ipi Tombi, a Broadway musical that purportedly misrepresented life under apartheid. Brath was the host of the New York City radio show "AFRI Kaleidoscope" on WBAI and often organized events and panels in the city to bring attention to African politics and current events.
In 2003, Brath co-founded the World African Diaspora Union (WADU) to advocate for the political, cultural, and economic unification of the African Diaspora with Africa. WADU was officially launched in 2004. The great thinkers whom Brath counted as influences, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Carlos A. Cooks, and his cousin Clennell Wickham, waged a political battle on behalf of working-class blacks in colonial Barbados. Cecil Elombe Brath died in Harlem on May 19, 2014.
