A00036 - W. E. B. Du Bois, NAACP Founder, Author and Sociologist

W. E. B. Du Bois, in full William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (b. February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts — d. August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana), American sociologist, was the most important African American leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. Late in life he became identified with communist causes.

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, an African American institution at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of African Americans. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of African Americans, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914  at Atlanta (Georgia) University, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro; A Social Study (1899), the first case study of an African American community in the United States.

Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential African American leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged African Americans to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of the European Americans. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington’s strategy, rather than freeing the African American from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many African American intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the African American community into two wings—the “conservative” supporters of Washington and his “radical” critics.

Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington’s opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association’s director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the black protest from 1910 until 1934.

Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of African Americans:

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.…He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Du Bois’s black nationalism took several forms—the most influential being his pioneering advocacy of Pan-Africanism. the belief that all people of African descent had common interests and should work together in the struggle for their freedom. Du Bois was a leader of the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the architect of four Pan-African Congresses held between 1919 and 1927. Second, he articulated a cultural nationalism.  As the editor of The Crisis, he encouraged the development of African American literature and art and urged his readers to see “Beauty in Black.” Third, Du Bois’s black nationalism is seen in his belief that African Americans should develop a separate “group economy” of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives as a weapon for fighting economic discrimination and African American poverty. This doctrine became especially important during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s and precipitated an ideological struggle within the NAACP.

He resigned from the editorship of The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, yielding his influence as a race leader and charging that the organization was dedicated to the interests of the black bourgeoisie and ignored the problems of the masses. Du Bois' interest in cooperatives was a part of his nationalism that developed out of his Marxist leanings. At the turn of the century, he had been an advocate of African American capitalism and African American support of African American business, but by about 1905 he had been drawn toward socialist doctrines. Although he joined the Socialist Party only briefly in 1912, he remained sympathetic with Marxist ideas throughout the rest of his life.

Upon leaving the NAACP, he returned to Atlanta University, where he devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, Atlanta University’s “Review of Race and Culture.” In 1945 he published the “Preparatory Volume” of a projected encyclopaedia of people of African descent, for which he had been appointed editor in chief. He also produced two major books during this period. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935) was an important Marxist interpretation of the Reconstruction era (the period following the American Civil War during which the seceded Southern states were reorganized according to the wishes of Congress), and, more significantly, it provided the first synthesis of existing knowledge of the role of African Americans in that critical period of American history. In 1940 appeared Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom, viewing his career as an ideological case study illuminating the complexity of the black-white conflict.

Following this fruitful decade at Atlanta University, he returned once more to a research position at the NAACP (1944–48). This brief connection ended in a second bitter quarrel, and thereafter Du Bois moved steadily leftward politically. Identified with pro-Russian causes, he was indicted in 1951 as an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although a federal judge directed his acquittal, Du Bois had become completely disillusioned with the United States. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party and, moving to Ghana, renounced his American citizenship more than a year later. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in 1968.

A00035 - Lillian Allen, Jamaican Canadian Poet and Writer

Lillian Allen (b. April 5, 1951, Spanish Town, Jamaica), a Jamaican Canadian dub poet, reggae musician, writer and Juno award winner.

Born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, she left that country in 1969, first moving to New York City, where she studied English at the City University of New York. She lived for a time in Kitchener, Ontario, before settling in Toronto, where she continued her education at York University, earning a bachelor of arts degree. After meeting Oku Onuora in Cuba in 1978, she began working in dub poetry. She released her first recording, Dub Poet: The Poetry of Lillian Allen, in 1983.

Allen won the Juno Award for Best Reggae/Calypso Album for Revolutionary Tea Party in 1986 and Conditions Critical in 1988. Both albums were produced by Billy Bryans, the percussionist for Canadian dance-pop band Parachute Club. 

In 1991, she collaborated on the one-off single "Can't Repress the Cause", a plea for greater inclusion of hip hop music in the Canadian music scene, with Dance Appeal, a supergroup of Toronto-area musicians that included Devon, Maestro Fresh Wes, Dream Warriors, B-Kool, Michie Mee, Eria Fachin, HDV, Dionne, Thando Hyman, Carla Marshall, Messenjah, Jillian Mendez, Lorraine Scott, Lorraine Segato, Self Defense, Leroy Sibbles, Zama and Thyron Lee White.

In 2006 Allen and her work were the subject of an episode of the television series Heart of a Poet,  produced by Canadian filmmaker Maureen Judge. She is a Faculty of Liberal Studies Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, where she teaches creative writing. She recently held the distinction of being the first Canada Council Writer-in-Residence for Queen's University's Department of English. Allen also co-produced and co-directed Blak Wi Blakk, a documentary about the Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka. 

A00034 - Tony Gleaton, Photographer of African Mexican Legacy

Tony Gleaton (b. August 4, 1948, Detroit, Michigan - d. August 14, 2015, Palo Alto, California) was an African American photographer, scholar, and artist who is best known for his photographic images capturing and documenting the African influence in the American West and Central and South America. Gleaton, the youngest son of an elementary school teacher and police officer, was born into a black middle-class family on August 4, 1948 in Detroit, Michigan.  His father, Leo, was a police officer; his mother, the former Geraldine Woodson, taught school. In 1959, his mother left his father and moved the family to California. Gleaton played football in high school and briefly at East Los Angeles Junior College before joining the United States Marine Corps in 1967. While on his first tour of duty in Vietnam, he became fascinated with the camera. 

After serving in the Marine Corps until 1970, Gleaton returned to California and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While there, he took a photography class that revealed his talent for shooting photos. He left UCLA without getting a degree and studied for a semester at the Arts Center School of Design in Los Angeles before venturing to New York to pursue his aspirations of becoming a fashion photographer. Gleaton worked as a photographic assistant and performed other various jobs through the 1970s.

Dissatisfied with the fashion world, Gleaton left New York in 1980 and hitchhiked throughout the American West, photographing cowboys first in northeastern Nevada and then in Texas. He captured the lives of Native American ranch hands and black rodeo riders. His photographic ventures in Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Kansas formed the essence of his project titled Cowboys: Reconstructing an American Myth. This collection featured a series of portraits of African, Native, Mexican and European American cowboys.

Gleaton’s interest in the multicultural Southwest influenced his travels to Mexico. By 1981 he had begun traveling to and from Mexico, shooting photographs. In 1982 he moved to Mexico City, and from 1986 to 1992, he resided with the Tarahumara Indians in northern Mexico and then moved to Guerrero and Oaxaca. Here, Gleaton began what is now his most famous project, Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa’s Legacy in Mexico, Central & South America. Gleaton photographed the present-day descendants of African slaves brought to the region by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.  

Africa’s Legacy gained international recognition. In 1993 the collection was placed on exhibit by the Smithsonian Museum and toured throughout Mexico and Cuba with the sponsorship of the Mexican National Council of Art. By 1996 Gleaton had expanded his project to include Central and South America, eventually traveling over fifty thousand miles with stops in sixteen countries between 1993 and 2002.

In 2002 Gleaton became a visiting professor of photography at Texas Tech University.  That same year, he finished a Master’s in Art at Bard College. In 2004 Gleaton became a scholar in residence for the Texas Tech Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library in Lubbock, Texas. The collection houses the Tony Gleaton Archive.  

A big man — he was well over 6 feet tall and weighed more than 300 pounds — Gleaton was known as a charmer, especially with his subjects and with students of photography. He was divorced three times before he married Lisa Ellerbee, a teacher, in 2005. She was his only immediate survivor. They lived in San Mateo, Calif.

Gleaton, who was light-skinned with green eyes, said he often had to explain to people that both his parents were black and that he was not biracial, and that the preconceptions people had of him found their way into his work.

Tony Gleaton died on August 14, 2015, in Palo Alto, California.  His only immediate survivor was his wife, Lisa Gleaton.

A00033 - Chenjerai Hove, Chronicler of Zimbabwe's Struggles

Chenjerai Hove (b. February 9, 1956 – d. July 12, 2015), was a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both English and Shona. 

Chenjerai Hove was born on February 9, 1956, in Mazvihwa, Rhodesia. His father was a local chief with many wives and dozens of children. The younger Mr. Hove attended Roman Catholic schools run by the Marist brothers and, after graduating from a teacher training college, taught literature in rural high schools. He studied for degrees in language and literature at the University of Zimbabwe and then, in the 1980s, was a literary editor at Mambo Press and Zimbabwe Publishing House.

“Up in Arms” (1982), his first book of poetry, depicted in taut, lyrical verse the emotional devastation wrought by the independence struggle. “These poems ring with the self-evident truth of one who had suffered and survived, one who has been there,” the Zimbabwean novelist Charles Mungoshi wrote in his introduction to the book.

“Red Hills of Home,” published in 1985, reflected Mr. Hove’s inner conflict over the brutality he witnessed while teaching in the countryside. In his 1998 collection, “Rainbows in the Dust,” he lamented the broken promises of the independence movement.

He turned to prose fiction in the mid-1980s, writing, in Shona, about the plight of Zimbabwean women in the novel “Masimba Avanhu?” (“Is This the People’s Power?”), published in 1986. He followed up on the success of “Bones” with “Shadows” (1991), a harrowing tale of two lovers coping with poverty and the violence of the bush war. In the fable-like “Ancestors,” he told the story of a young boy, growing up on the eve of independence, who is haunted in his dreams by ancestral female voices.

Mr. Hove also published two collections of political essays, “Shebeen Tales: Messages From Harare” (1994) and “Palaver Finish” (2002). Speaking last year on the BBC radio program “Focus on Africa,” he said that it was his responsibility “as a citizen, as an African, as a Zimbabwean” to take a critical look at his own country — “to look at our lives and at whether our leaders are enhancing our dignity or taking it away.”

Mr. Hove was a founder and board member of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, and in 1984 he became the first president of the Zimbabwe Writers Union, a post he held until 1992. In addition to his wife, he is survived by six children and many siblings.

A00032 - Philippa Schuyler, Child Piano Prodigy

Philippa Duke Schuyler (b. August 2, 1931, New York City, New York – d. May 9, 1967, Vietnam) was a noted American child prodigy and pianist who became famous in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of her talent, mixed-race parentage, and the eccentric methods employed by her mother to bring her up.

Schuyler was the daughter of George S. Schuyler, a prominent African American essayist and journalist Josephine Cogdell, a European American Texan and one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty, from a former slave-owning.  Her parents believed that inter-racial marriage could "invigorate" both races and produce extraordinary offspring. They also advocated that mixed-race marriage could help to solve many of the United States' social problems.

Cogdell further believed that genius could best be developed by a diet consisting exclusively of raw foods. As a result, Philippa grew up in her New York City apartment eating a diet predominantly comprised of raw carrots, peas and yams and raw steak. She was given a daily ration of cod liver oil and lemon slices in place of sweets. "When we travel," Cogdell said, "Philippa and I amaze waiters. You have to argue with most waiters before they will bring you raw meat. I guess it is rather unusual to see a little girl eating a raw steak."

Recognized as a prodigy at an early age, Schuyler was reportedly able to read and write at the age of two and a half, and composed music from the age of five. At nine, she became the subject of "Evening With A Gifted Child", a profile written by Joseph Mitchell, correspondent for The New Yorker, who heard several of her early compositions and noted that she addressed both her parents by their first names.

Schuyler began giving piano recitals and radio broadcasts while still a child and attracted significant press coverage. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was one of her admirers and visited her at her home on more than one occasion. By the time she reached adolescence, Schuyler was touring constantly, both in the US and overseas.

Her talent as a pianist was widely acknowledged, although many critics believed that her forte lay in playing vigorous pieces and criticized her style when tackling more nuanced works. Acclaim for her performances led to her becoming a role model for many children in the United States of the 1930s and 1940s, but Schuyler's own childhood was blighted when, during her teenage years, her parents showed her the scrapbooks they had compiled recording her life and career. The books contained numerous newspaper clippings in which both George and Josephine Schuyler commented on their beliefs and ambitions for their daughter. Realization that she had been conceived and raised, in a sense, as an experiment, robbed the pianist of many of the illusions of her youth.

In later life, Schuyler grew disillusioned with the racial and gender prejudice she encountered, particularly when performing in the United States, and much of her musical career was spent playing overseas. In her thirties, she abandoned the piano to follow her father into journalism.

Schuyler's personal life was frequently unhappy. She rejected many of her parents' values, increasingly becoming a vocal feminist, and made many attempts to pass herself off as a woman of Iberian (Spanish) descent named Felipa Monterro. Although she engaged in a number of affairs, and on one occasion endured a dangerous late-term abortion after a relationship with a Ghanaian diplomat, she never married.

Philippa Schuyler and her father, George Schuyler, were members of the John Birch Society.

In 1967, Schuyler traveled to Vietnam as a war correspondent. During a helicopter mission near Da Nang to evacuate a number of Vietnamese orphans, the helicopter crashed into the sea. While she initially survived the crash, her inability to swim caused her to drown. A court of inquiry found that the pilot had deliberately cut his motor and descended in an uncontrolled glide – possibly in an attempt to give his civilian passengers an insight into the dangers of flying in a combat zone – eventually losing control of the aircraft.

Her mother was profoundly affected by her daughter's death and committed suicide on its second anniversary.