Black History Culture : Today In Black History

Awww. Thank you, Brother Lilpea!

Sometimes, I get sidetracked and miss some days, but I try to keep up.

1806 Benjamin Banneker ~ (mathematician and inventor) dies in Elliot's Mills, Maryland

1975 Frank Robinson ~ (professional baseball player) becomes the manager of the Cleveland Indians and the first Black manager of a major league team

1962 Uganda ~ Independence Day

born Oct. 12th

1879 - Chris Smith, song writer

1904 - William Cobb, scientist

1908 - Ann Petry, novelist

1916 - Alice Childress, playwright

1919 - Dorie Miller, Naval hero

1925 - Charles Gordone, actor, director, playwright, educator

1932 - Dick Gregory, activist, writer

Arna Wendell Bontemps (October 13, 1902 - June 4, 1973) was a well-known American poet and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. As the librarian at Fisk University, he established important collections of African-American literature and culture, establishing it as an important goal of scholarly study. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Arna Bontemps on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Bontemps was born in the city of Alexandria in the U.S. state of Louisiana. the son of Paul Bontemps and Marie Pembrooke Bontemps. His birthplace at 1327 Third Street has been recently restored and converted for use as the Bontemps African American Museum. It is included on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

When he was three, his family moved to the Watts district of Los Angeles, California in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South to cities of the North, Midwest and West. He graduated from Pacific Union College in California in 1923. After graduation he went to New York to teach at Harlem Academy. In New York he became an important contributor to the Harlem Renaissance.
He began writing while a student at Pacific Union College and became the author of many children's books. His critically most important work, The Story of the Negro (1948), received the Jane Addams Book Award and was also a Newbery Honor Book. He is best known for the 1931 novel God Sends Sunday. He also wrote the 1946 play St. Louis Woman with Countee Cullen.

In 1943, after graduating from the University of Chicago with a masters degree in library science, Bontemps was appointed librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. He held that position for 22 years and developed important collections and archives of African-American literature and culture. Through his librarianship and bibliographic work, Bontemps became a leading figure in establishing African-American literature as a legitimate object of study and preservation.



Bontemps died June 4, 1973 from a myocardial infarction (heart attack), while working on his autobiography.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arna_Bontemps