Celebrating Black History Month with Recordings from The Writer's Almanac Archive

Feb 08, 2023

“Black History Month shouldn’t be treated as though it is somehow separate from our collective American history or somehow just boiled down to a compilation of greatest hits from the March on Washington, or from some of our sports heroes. There are well-meaning attempts to do that all around us, from classrooms to corporate ad campaigns. But we know that this should be more than just a commemoration of particular events.

It’s about the lived, shared experience of all African Americans, high and low, famous and obscure, and how those experiences have shaped and challenged and ultimately strengthened America. It’s about taking an unvarnished look at the past so we can create a better future. It’s a reminder of where we as a country have been so that we know where we need to go.”

—Remarks by President Barack Obama at Black History Month Reception, February 18, 2016

LUCILLE CLIFTON was born Thelma Lucille Sayles in Depew, New York (1936). She grew up in nearby Buffalo, the daughter of a steelworker and a laundress. Lucille’s mother, Thelma, had only an elementary school education, but she was a gifted poet herself, and was offered the chance to publish her work. Lucille’s father, Samuel, wouldn’t allow it, and he made her throw her poems into the fire. It made such an impression on Lucille that she later wrote a poem about it, called “fury”: “her hand is crying. / her hand is clutching / a sheaf of papers. / poems. / she gives them up. / they burn / jewels into jewels.”

In 1958, she married Fred Clifton, a philosophy professor and sculptor. Clifton often wrote poetry at the family’s kitchen table, an island of peace amid the bustle and chaos of their six young children. That book was called Good Times (1969), and the New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of that year. Many more volumes of poetry followed. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for two separate books in the same year: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir (1987), and Next: New Poems (1987). She won the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats (2000).

LANGSTON HUGHES, the man known as “The O. Henry of Harlem,” was born in 1902. In 1926, he was working as a busboy at a hotel in New York City when the poet Vachel Lindsay arrived for dinner. Hughes placed some poems under Lindsay’s dinner plate. Intrigued, Lindsay read them and asked who wrote them. Hughes stepped forward and said, “I did.” And that’s how he came to publish his first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), at the age of 24.

He was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a storekeeper. His father left the family and moved to Mexico, leaving Hughes mostly in the care of his grandmother, Mary. She was one of the first women to attend Oberlin College, and read to Hughes all the time. By the time he was 12 years old, he’d lived in six different cities. He said: “I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”

He went to college for a little while, but quit because of racism. He mostly traveled, working as a doorman at a nightclub in Paris, a seaman on ships, a waiter, and a truck farmer. He went to the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy, writing poems and essays about the African American experience.

Langston Hughes became a prominent member of the Harlem Renaissance, a group of African American artists and writers in Harlem, New York, that included Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen.

When asked what he wrote about, Langston Hughes answered, “Workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago — people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter — and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”

Langston Hughes, “Little Old Letter” and “Morning After” from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Vintage Books.

RITA DOVE was born in Akron, Ohio (1952). Her father was the first African American chemist to work in the Unites States tire industry; he was a research chemist at Goodyear. Her mother loved to read and often quoted Shakespeare while cooking. Dove’s parents encouraged their children to read widely and there were always a lot of books in the house. Dove remembers reading The Iliad when she was 10, calling it “an incredibly tense and interesting story.” She wrote her first poem at the age of 10, too. It was an Easter poem titled “The Rabbit with the Droopy Ear.” The last lines of the poem were, “Hip-hop hooray / Let’s toast him a cup / For now both ears are hanging up.”

Dove played cello growing up and was an excellent student, even traveling to the White House as a Presidential Scholar. A high school teacher took her to hear the poet John Ciardi and Dove was entranced. She said: “I didn’t know writers could be real, live people, because I never knew any writers. Here was a living, breathing, walking, joking person, who wrote books.” At Miami University, she took a lot of creative writing courses and gradually realized she was scheduling her life around writing. Things clicked when she read Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” Dove says, “It was the first time I realized you didn’t have to be polite.”

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR was born in Dayton, Ohio (1872). He was the one of the first African American writers to gain popular recognition for his work. His father was a slave who had fled the South on the Underground Railroad and later fought in the Civil War as a Union soldier. His mother had been a slave until the end of that war.

Dunbar was the only Black student at his high school in Dayton, Ohio, but he was elected president of his class and editor of the high school newspaper. After high school, none of the newspapers in town would give him a job, so he supported himself as an elevator operator. He read and wrote poems while standing in the elevator stall, waiting for passengers. In 1862, the Western Association of Writers had a meeting in Dayton, and Dunbar’s high school English teacher arranged for him to give the welcoming address. He read a poem that so impressed the audience that they invited him to become a member of the association. One of the people in the audience wrote an article about his poetry that was printed in newspapers around the country.

Dunbar published his first poetry collection, Oak and Ivy, in 1892, and he sold it himself to elevator passengers in his elevator. He went on to publish several more collections before his death of tuberculosis when he was just 33.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, “In Summer Time.” In the public domain.

Poet and teacher ROBERT HAYDEN was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan (1913). He worked for the Federal Writers’ Project. He researched Black history and folk culture, gaining knowledge that would inform his work for the rest of his career. In 1946, he took a job at Fisk University, where he taught for the next 23 years. In 1985, he was the first African American to be awarded the post of Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress.

“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, from Angle of Ascent. © W. W. Norton, 1975.

FESTUS CLAUDIUS “CLAUDE” MCKAY, born (1890) in Jamaica, was a key writer during the Harlem Renaissance.

McKay traveled to the United States to attend college and in 1914 he moved to New York City. He was very involved in the political movement against racism and wrote “If We Must Die,” one of his best-known works. It was a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War.

He was primarily a poet but also wrote five novels, a novella, and a collection of short stories.

Claude McKay, “The Tropics in New York,” from The Selected Poems of Claude McKay, published by Harcourt Brace (1957).

GWENDOLYN ELIZABETH BROOKS, born (1917) in Topeka, Kansas, was an American poet, author, and teacher. She focused on the lives of ordinary people in her community— their personal celebrations and struggles. She received many awards in her life, including being the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize (1950).

Gwendolyn’s first poem, “Eventide,” was published in the magazine American Childhood when she was 13 years old. Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was a series of poems about African American girls growing up in Chicago.

After a few experiences in writing workshops, she ended up teaching in numerous colleges across the country.

DEREK WALCOTT, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, was born 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia, a Caribbean island nation a few hundred miles north of Venezuela. At the time of his birth, it was a British colony. And in his poetry, he writes a lot about the effects of colonialism.

Walcott said in his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.”

Derek Walcott, “A Sea-Chantey” from In a Green Night, London: J. Cape, 1962.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri (1928), MAYA ANGELOU was three years old her parents’ marriage ended and her father put Angelou and her brother on a train and sent them to a tiny town in Arkansas to live with their grandparents. She wrote, “Stamps, Arkansas, with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.” Occasionally, she went back to live with her mother, and during one of these periods her mother’s boyfriend raped seven-year-old Angelou. She told her family and the man was murdered, possibly by her uncles. Angelou felt responsible and she stopped speaking for five years. She said, “I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone.”

One day, young Maya met Bertha Flowers, a stylish, educated Black woman who wore voile dresses and flowered hats and had a library of great books. Flowers took the girl under her wing; she had a beautiful voice, and she read aloud from her favorite novels and poems — from Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, and many more. She was insistent that language was the most important thing that separated people from all other species, and not just written words, but also spoken word. When Angelou was 12, Flowers took her to the library and suggested that she read everything, beginning with books whose titles began with the letter “A”; Angelou eventually read every book in the library. Flowers encouraged Angelou to memorize and recite literature, especially poems, and slowly, by reciting other peoples’ words, the girl began to speak again.

When Angelou was 14, she moved to Oakland to live with her mother and soon dropped out of school to become the first Black streetcar driver in the city of San Francisco. She gave birth to a son at age 17. She found steady work as a calypso dancer and singer and toured Europe as a dancer with a production of Porgy and Bess. She moved to New York City, then lived for a while in Egypt and Ghana, working as a journalist. She met with Malcolm X in Ghana and decided to return to America to help establish his Organization of African American Unity but he was killed days after she returned. A few years later, she had just agreed to help Martin Luther King Jr. when he, too, was killed — on her 40th birthday.

She sank into depression, but she received a lot of support from her friend James Baldwin, a novelist. One night he took her to dinner with some friends, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife, Judy. All three were magnificent storytellers and Angelou had to fight to get a word in edgewise, but she said a few things. Apparently they were impressed because Judy Feiffer called up Bob Loomis, an editor at Random House, and told him that he should convince the dancer Maya Angelou to write an autobiography. Loomis called her up, but she refused. He called several more times and she continued to turn him down. Finally Loomis asked Baldwin for help and Baldwin suggested a strategy. So Loomis called Angelou one more time and said he would stop bothering her and that it was probably a good thing she wasn’t attempting it because it was very difficult to write an autobiography that was also good literature. Immediately Angelou agreed to give it a try. She said, “Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass — the slave narrative — speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we.”

She went to work, and her first autobiography became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). She went on to write many more books of poetry and autobiography, including Gather Together in My Name (1974), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), And Still I Rise (1978), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013).

Maya Angelou, “These Yet to be United States” from I Shall Not be Moved, published by Random House, 1990.

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