Our Miss Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She won the Pulitzer for her book of poetry, Annie Allen, which consists of three parts about a Black girl growing into womanhood. Other popular works by Ms Brooks include the poem We Real Cool, and Malcom X.

Ms. Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas to Keziah Wims Brooks and David Anderson Brooks. Brooks' mother was a former school teacher who left teaching for marriage and motherhood, and her father, the son of a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War, had given up his ambition to attend medical school to work as a janitor because he could not afford to attend medical school. Her family moved to Chicago when Brooks was only six weeks old.

Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents. Her father provided a desk and bookshelves, and her mother took her, when she was in high school, to meet Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.

Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. When Brooks was sixteen years old, she had compiled a portfolio of around seventy-five published poems. At age 17, Brooks began submitting her works to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the Chicago Defender. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters are often drawn from the poor inner city. During this same period, she also attended Wilson Junior College, from where she graduated in 1936. After publishing more than seventy-five poems and failing to obtain a position with the Chicago Defender, Brooks began to work a series of typing jobs.

In 1938, Gwendolyn married Henry Blakely and gave birth to two children, Henry, Jr. and Nora. By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. In 1943 she received an award for poetry from the Midwestern Writers' Conference.

Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945 brought her instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle Magazine. In 1950, she published her second book of poetry,Annie Allen, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize.

After President John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began a career of teaching creative writing. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin. In 1967, she attended a writer’s conference at Fisk University where, she said, she rediscovered her Blackness. This rediscovery is reflected in her work In The Mecca, a book length poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago housing project. In The Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

Gwendolyn Brooks was made Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. In 1985, Brooks became the Library of Congress's Consultant in Poetry, a one year position whose title changed the next year to Poet Laureate. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1994, she was chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors for American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government. Other awards she received included the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brooks was awarded more than seventy-five honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide. In 1995, she was honored as the first Woman of the Year by the Harvard Black Men's Forum.

After a short battle with cancer, Gwendolyn Brooks died on Sunday, December 3, 2000, aged 83, at her Southside Chicago home with "pen in hand," and surrounded by verse and people she loved.

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston was an author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God which was adapted for a 2005 film of the same title by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions, starring Halle Berry with a teleplay by Suzan-Lori Parks. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida located six miles north of Orlando. It was one of the first all-Black towns to be formed after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and, on August 15, 1887, was the first such town to be incorporated. Hurston's parents were Lucy Ann Potts Hurston, a schoolteacher, and John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher. Her father was also a three-term mayor who helped establish the laws of the town. In 1904, her mother died and her father sent her to a private school in Jacksonville, Florida. She graduated from Morgan Academy, the high school division of Morgan College, (Morgan State University), formerly Centenary Biblical Institute, a historically black college. She did undergraduate studies at another HBCU school, Howard University. While at Howard, Hurston became one of the earliest members of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and co-founded The Hilltop, the University's student newspaper. Hurston left Howard in 1924, unable to support herself. Hurston was offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she received her B.A. in anthropology in 1927. While at Barnard, she conducted ethnographic (Ethnography is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of character and number descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork).

In 1925, shortly before entering Barnard, she became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, producing the literary magazine Fire!! along with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent and Gwendolyn Bennett. (Fire!! is a Black literary magazine published in 1926. This literary movement became the center of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston applied her ethnographic training to document Black folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men (1935) along with fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God and dance, assembling a folk-based performance group that recreated her Southern up bring, with one performance on Broadway. Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Haiti and conduct research on Haitian spiritual magic in 1937. Her work was significant because she was able to break into the secret societies and expose their use of drugs to create the voodoo trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham.

In 1954 Hurston was unable to sell her fiction but was assigned by the Pittsburgh Courier to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the rich Black wife of a local racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail, a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie. Hurston spent her last 10 years as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. She worked in a library in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and as a substitute teacher in Fort Pierce, where she died of a stroke. The publication of Alice Walker's article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine revived interest in her work and helped spark a Hurston renaissance. Hurston's house in Fort Pierce is a National Historic Landmark. Fort Pierce celebrates Hurston annually through various events such as Hattitudes, birthday parties, and a several-day festival at the end of April, Zora Fest. Her life and legacy are also celebrated every year in Eatonville, the town that inspired her, at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.

During her prime, Hurston was a bootstrap Republican and fan of Booker T. Washington's self-help politics. She was opposed to the visions (including communism) professed by many of her colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston thus became the leading Black figure on the conservative Old Right, and in 1952 she actively promoted the presidential candidacy of Robert Taft, who was, like Hurston, opposed to forced integration. She opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt the physical closeness of Blacks to Whites was not going to be the salvation her people hoped for, as she herself had had many experiences to the contrary. In addition, she worried about the demise of Black schools and Black teachers as a way to pass on cultural tradition to future generations of Black Americans. She voiced this opposition in a letter, Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix, which was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955.

Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of reasons, both cultural and political. Many readers objected to the representation of Southern Black dialect in Hurston's novels. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research. Some critics during her time felt that Hurston's decision to render language in this way caricatured black culture. In more recent times, however, critics have praised Hurston for her artful capture of the actual spoken idiom of the day.

With the publication of the ambitious novel Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948, Hurston burst through the tight bounds of contemporary Black writing in another way. This is a tale of poor Whites struggling in rural Florida's citrus industry. Black characters recede to the background. Neither the Black intelligentsia nor the White mainstream of the late 1940s could accept the notion of a Black writer speaking through White characters. Seraph ended up being Hurston's last major literary effort as she retreated to small-town Florida for the rest of her life. The text stands out, as she remarked herself, as a testimony to her own self-definition as a regional as much as a Black writer. The re-discovery of Hurston's work coincided with the popularity and critical acclaim of authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Walker herself, whose works are centered on Black experiences which include, but do not necessarily focus upon, racial struggle.

Eugene Bullard: “The Black Swallow of Death”

Eugene Jacques Bullard was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1894 and went on to become the first Black American fighter pilot. He was loosely protrayed by Abdul Salis in the 2006 movie Flyboys. In an interview Mr. Salis discussing the notion of doing an entire movie on Eugene Bullard revealed that director Dean Devlin had said on the shoot, “of the characters, Eugene’s story alone is the only one worth a film in its entirety.”

And it really is a story -- his dad, “Big Chief Ox” was a slave; his mother was a Creek Indian. Bullard stowed away on a ship headed for Scotland to escape racial discrimination (he said that he witnessed his father’s narrow escape from a lynching as a child). While in the United Kingdom he became a boxing champion and also worked in a music hall. On a trip to Paris, he decided to stay and joined the French Foreign Legion upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He was wounded in the 1916 and awarded the Croix de Guerre (Cross of War") which is given to individuals who distinguish themselves by acts of heroism involving combat with enemy forces.

Bullard transferred to the Lafayette Flying Corps – better known as Lafayette Escadrille -- (composed largely of American volunteer pilots flying fighters. He flew some 20 missions and shot down two enemy aircraft. But, with the entry of the United States into the war the US Army Air Service convened a medical board in August 1917 for the purpose of recruiting Americans serving in the Lafayette Flying Corps. Although he passed the medical examination, Eugene Bullard was not accepted into American service because Blacks were barred from flying in U.S. service at that time. Bullard was discharged from the French Air Force after fighting with another officer while off-duty and was transferred to the 170th (French) Infantry Regiment on January 11, 1918, where he served until the end of the war.

Following the end of the war, Bullard remained in Paris. He began working in nightclubs and eventually owned his own establishment. He married the daughter of a French countess, but the marriage soon ended in divorce, with Bullard taking custody of their two daughters. His work in nightclubs brought him many famous friends, among them Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong and Langston Hughes. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Bullard, who spoke German, readily agreed to a request from the French to spy on German agents frequenting his club in Paris. After the German invasion of the France, Bullard took his daughters and fled south from Paris. In Orléans he joined a group of soldiers defending the city and suffered a spinal wound in the fighting. He was helped to flee to Spain by a French spy, and in July 1940 he returned to the United States.

Bullard spent some time in a hospital in New York for his spinal injury, but he never fully recovered. During and after World War II, when seeking work in the United States, he found, like many Blacks that became famous in Europe that the fame he enjoyed in France had not followed him to New York. He worked in a variety of occupations, as a perfume salesman, a security guard, and as an interpreter for Louis Armstrong, but his back injury severely restricted his activities. For a time he attempted to regain his nightclub in Paris, but his property had been destroyed during the Nazi occupation, and he received a financial settlement from the French government which allowed him to purchase an apartment in Harlem.

In the 1950s, Bullard was a relative stranger in his own homeland. His daughters had married, and he lived alone in his apartment, which was decorated with pictures of the famous people he had known, and with a framed case containing his 15 French war medals. His final job was as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center, where his fame as the “Black Swallow of Death” was unknown.

In 1954, the French government invited Bullard to Paris to rekindle (together with two Frenchmen) the everlasting flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, and in 1959 he was made a chevalier (knight) of the Légion d'honneur. Even so, he spent the last years of his life in relative obscurity and poverty in New York City where he died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961. He was buried with military honors by French officers in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery in the Queens, New York.

In 1972, his exploits as a pilot were published in the book The Black Swallow of Death: The Incredible Story of Eugene Jacques Bullard, The World's First Black Combat Aviator. This book is part of the Bullard display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio. On 23 August 1994, 33 years after his death, and 77 years to the day after his rejection for U.S. military service in 1917, Eugene Bullard was posthumously commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

His Medals include:
• Knight of the Légion d'honneur
• Médaille militaire
• Croix de guerre
• Volunteer's Cross (Croix du combattant volontaire)
• Wounded Insignia
• WWI commemorative medal
• WWI Victory medal
• Free French Medal
• WWII commemorative medal