On November 28, 1878, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Marshall Walter Taylor was born to Gilbert and Saphronia ( née Kelter) Taylor; he would be one of three sons among the family’s eight children. Upon migrating from Louisville, Kentucky, Gilb...
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Important Figures
On July 17, 1921, in Bluefield, West Virginia, Boykin and Willa (née Maynard) Stone welcomed Marcenia Lyle Stone into the world. In 1931, the Stone family moved to live in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. As a chil...
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Born on November 20, 1919 in the Manhattan borough of New York City, Jane Cooke Wright was the oldest of two daughters born to Louis Tompkins and Corinne (née Cooke) Wright. Her mother was a professional educator and her father was amo...
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On January 16, 1862, Henry Floyd Gamble was born in the North Garden community of Albemarle County, Virginia to Henry Harmon and Willie Ann (née Howard) Gamble. Henry Harmon Gamble, who was of Scottish-Irish and Indigenous American desc...
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Born on July 3, 1923, in Houma, Louisiana, John Maurice Hartman was reared in Chicago, Illinois. His close-knit family moved to “The Windy City” during The Great Migration when John was an infant, the youngest of six children. As w...
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On May 1, 1934, Shirley Valerie Horn was born in Washington, D.C. Her parents created a musical household: her father, an accounting clerk, and her mother, a homemaker, often sang love songs around their home. In a Jazz Times interview...
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Born on March 12, 1934, Virginia Esther Hamilton was born to Kenneth and Etta Belle (née Perry) Hamilton in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The land upon which she was reared with her four older siblings had been in her mother’s family since the 185...
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There is such a wonderful opportunity to learn and to celebrate the depth and breadth Paul Laurence Dunbar created in his work, especially regarding the diversity of Black cultural life. Although he wrote twelve books of poetry, he was so much more...
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Long before Reggie Hudlin, Kasi Lemmons, Robert Townsend, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, John Singleton, Mattty Rich, Ava DuVernay, husband-wife duo Reggie Rock Bythewood & Gina Prince Bythewood, and Spike Lee, there was Oscar Micheaux. A film di...
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In 1991, Julie Dash made history when her groundbreaking film, Daughters of the Dust, became the first feature film directed by a Black woman to receive theatrical distribution in the United States.
Premiering at the Sundance Film Fe...
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