Lately, I started feeling an increasing amount of hatred in the world. Hatred that has no reason... as if hatred ever had any logical explanation. Rascism has dangerously increased, hitting my "red button of patience", making me wanna scream (Michael+Janet Jackson's song), louder every day, to give people another perspective, to desolve all misunderstandings... to create a new path, to come clean!
So I decided to pay my personal tribute to all those great writers, who most people never heard before, because they are and were "People of color", and this is the term I'm going to use from now! Although, there is no color to our souls... Only the spectrum of love... Love of anything we cherish and hold dear! This time will be ..books!
Maya Angelou , born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
The works of Maya Angelou encompass autobiography, plays, poetic, and television producer. She also had an active directing, acting, and speaking career. She is best known for her books, including her series of seven autobiographies, starting with the critically acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).
All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated. Maya Angelou
Angelou's autobiographies are distinct in style and narration, and "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US. They take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Angelou wrote collections of essays, including Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) and Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997), which writer Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung together with autobiographical texts". Angelou used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House, until he retired in 2011. Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers."
She was one of the most honored writers of her generation, earning an extended list of honors and awards, as well as more than 30 honorary degrees. She was a prolific writer of poetry; her volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by President Bill Clinton to recite her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during his inauguration in 1993.
Angelou's successful acting career included roles in numerous plays, films, and television programs, such as in the television mini-series Roots in 1977. Her screenplay Georgia, Georgia (1972) was the first original script by an African-American woman to be produced. and she was the first to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998. Since the 1990s, Angelou participated in the lecture circuit, which she continued into her eighties.
Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.
In Chicago 1932, Wright began writing with the Federal Writer's Project and became a member of the American Communist Party. In 1937, he relocated to New York and became the Bureau Chief of the communist publication The Daily Worker. He would write over 200 articles for the publication from 1937 to 1938. This allowed him to cover stories and issues that interested him revealing depression era America into light with well written prose.
He worked on the Federal Writers' Project guidebook to the city, New York Panorama (1938), and wrote the book's essay on Harlem. Through the summer and fall he wrote more than 200 articles for the Daily Worker and helped edit a short-lived literary magazine New Challenge. The year was also a landmark for Wright because he met and developed a friendship with writer Ralph Ellison that would last for years. He was awarded the Story magazine first prize of $500 for his short story "Fire and Cloud".
After receiving the Story prize in early 1938, Wright shelved his manuscript of Lawd Today and dismissed his literary agent, John Troustine. He hired Paul Reynolds, the well-known agent of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, to represent him. Meanwhile, the Story Press offered the publisher Harper all of Wright's prize-entry stories for a book, and Harper agreed to publish the collection.
Wright gained national attention for the collection of four short stories entitled Uncle Tom's Children (1938). He based some stories on lynching in the Deep South. The publication and favorable reception of Uncle Tom's Children improved Wright's status with the Communist party and enabled him to establish a reasonable degree of financial stability. He was appointed to the editorial board of New Masses. Granville Hicks, a prominent literary critic and Communist sympathizer, introduced him at leftist teas in Boston. By May 6, 1938, excellent sales had provided Wright with enough money to move to Harlem, where he began writing the novel Native Son, which he published in 1940.
Based on his collected short stories, Wright applied for and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which gave him a stipend allowing him to complete Native Son. During this period, he rented a room in the home of friends Herbert and Jane Newton, a couple and prominent Communists whom Wright had known in Chicago. They had moved to New York and lived at 109 Lefferts Place in Brooklyn in the Fort Greene neighborhood.
After publication, Native Son was selected by the Book of the Month Club as its first book by an African-American author. The period following publication of Native Son was a busy time for Wright. In July 1940 he went to Chicago to do research for a folk history of blacks to accompany photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam. While in Chicago he visited the American Negro Exposition with Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Claude McKay.
Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas in the Orson Welles production of Native Son (1941)
He traveled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to collaborate with playwright Paul Green on a dramatic adaptation of Native Son. In January 1941 Wright received the prestigious Spingarn Medal of the NAACP for noteworthy achievement. His play Native Son opened on Broadway in March 1941, with Orson Welles as director, to generally favorable reviews. Wright also wrote the text to accompany a volume of photographs chosen by Rosskam, which were almost completely drawn from the files of the Farm Security Administration. The FSA had employed top photographers to travel around the country and capture images of Americans. Their collaboration, Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, was published in October 1941 to wide critical acclaim.
Wright's memoir Black Boy (1945) described his early life from Roxie up until his move to Chicago at age 19. It included his clashes with Seventh-day Adventist family, his troubles with white employers, and social isolation. It also describes his intellectual journey through these struggles. American Hunger, which was published posthumously in 1977, was originally intended by Wright as the second volume of Black Boy. The Library of America edition of 1991 finally restored the book to its original two-volume form.
American Hunger detailed Wright's participation in the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party, which he left in 1942. The book implied he left earlier, but he did not announce his withdrawal until 1944. In the book's restored form, Wright used the diptych structure to compare the certainties and intolerance of organized communism, which condemned "bourgeois" books and certain members, with similar restrictive qualities of fundamentalist organized religion. Wright disapproved of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in the Soviet Union, but he continued to believe in far-left democratic solutions to political problems.
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley (August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992) was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. ABC adapted the book as a television miniseries of the same name and aired it in 1977 to a record-breaking audience of 130 million viewers. In the United States, the book and miniseries raised the public awareness of black American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.
Haley's first book was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965, a collaboration through numerous lengthy interviews with Malcolm X.
He was working on a second family history novel at his death. Haley had requested that David Stevens, a screenwriter, complete it; the book was published as Queen: The Story of an American Family. It was adapted as a miniseries, Alex Haley's Queen, broadcast in 1993.
After retiring from the U.S. Coast Guard, Haley began another phase of his journalism career. He eventually became a senior editor for Reader's Digest magazine. Haley wrote an article for the magazine about his brother George's struggles to succeed as one of the first African-American students at a Southern law school.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965, was Haley's first book. It describes the trajectory of Malcolm X's life from street criminal to national spokesman for the Nation of Islam to his conversion to Sunni Islam. It also outlines Malcolm X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Haley wrote an epilogue to the book summarizing the end of Malcolm X's life, including his assassination in New York's Audubon Ballroom.
In 1966 Haley received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In 1973 Haley wrote his only screenplay, Super Fly T.N.T.. The film starred and was directed by Ron O'Neal.
In 1976 Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based on his family's history, going back to slavery days. It started with the story of Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in the Gambia in 1767 and transported to the Province of Maryland to be sold as a slave. Haley claimed to be a seventh-generation descendant of Kunta Kinte, and his work on the novel involved twelve years of research, intercontinental travel, and writing. He went to the village of Juffure, where Kunta Kinte grew up and listened to a tribal historian (griot) tell the story of Kinte's capture. Haley also traced the records of the ship, The Lord Ligonier, which he said carried his ancestor to the Americas.
Haley stated that the most emotional moment of his life occurred on September 29, 1967, when he stood at the site in Annapolis, Maryland, where his ancestor had arrived from Africa in chains exactly 200 years before. A memorial depicting Haley reading a story to young children gathered at his feet has since been erected in the center of Annapolis.
Roots was eventually published in 37 languages. Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for the work in 1977. The same year, Roots was adapted as a popular television miniseries of the same name by ABC. The serial reached a record-breaking 130 million viewers. Roots emphasized that African Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is necessarily lost, as many believed. Its popularity also sparked a greatly increased public interest in genealogy.
In 1979 ABC aired the sequel miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations, which continued the story of Kunta Kinte's descendants. It concluded with Haley's travel to Juffure. Haley was portrayed at different ages by Kristoff St. John, The Jeffersons actor Damon Evans, and Tony Award winner James Earl Jones. In 2016, History aired a remake of the original miniseries. Haley appeared briefly, portrayed by Tony Award winner Laurence Fishburne.
Haley was briefly a "writer in residence" at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he began work on Roots. He enjoyed spending time at a local bistro called the Savoy in nearby Rome, where he would sometimes pass the time listening to the piano player. Today, there is a special table in honor of Haley at the Savoy, and a painting of Haley writing Roots on a yellow legal tablet.
I will continue this tribute in an other part, as the people of color who wrote gems are so many, as the singing birds! African-American writers gave and continue to give so much in the world... trying to raise a voice against rascism and inequality as well as their works have ahuge literary value. Beautiful and strong voices and their pens, need to be heard and we ought to continue imparting their value!!!
To be continued...
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