Black History: Writers of Color Posters & Prints, “O...-V...-”
for the social studies classroom, home schoolers and theme decor.

Lucy Parsons
Ann Petry

Victor Séjour
Anne Spencer

Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons
b. c. 1853; Texas
d. 3-7-1942; Chicago, IL (house fire)

“We are the slaves of slaves.
We are exploited more ruthlessly than men.”
- Lucy Parsons

Lucy Parsons, radical American labor organizer and anarchist, is remembered as a powerful orator and author. In 1871 she married former Confederate soldier Albert Parsons; they were forced from Texas to Chicago by intolerant reactions to their interracial marriage. Albert was hanged for his supposed envolvement in the Haymarket Riot.

• Lucy Parsons at Amazon
• Native American posters
• Hispanic Latino History posters
• Peace Education posters

Ann Petry
née Lane
b. 10-12-1908; Old Saybrook, CT
d. 4-28-1997; CT

Ann Petry became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street (1946). She had practiced pharmacy, following her father's footsteps, prior to beginning her career as a writer in 1938.

Sejour: Parisian Playwright from Louisiana (no commercially available poster)

Juan Victor Séjour
b. 1817; New Orleans, LA
d. 1874; France

Victor Sejour, the son of a free people described as mulatto and octoroon wrote “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”), the first known work of fiction by an African-American author.

Sejour, who was educated in a private school by his wealthy parents, moved to Paris at the age of nineteen to continue his education and find work.

Anne Spencer
née Annie Bethel Scales Bannister
b. 2-6-1882; Henry Co., Virginia
d. 7-27-1974; Lynchburg, VA

Anne Spencer was the first African-American (and Virginian) to have her poetry included in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry. She was also a noted teacher and civil rights activist.

Spencer's home was a center for the meeting of people such as Langston Hughes, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. artin Luther King Jr., James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois.

“White Things”
Most things are colorful things-the sky, earth, and sea.
Black men are most men; but the white are free!
White things are rare things; so rare, so rare
They stole from out a silvered world — somewhere. [read more]

• Anne Spencer House & Garden Museum - Lynchburg - a Virginia Landmark
• Anne Spencer Revisited

Susie King Taylor
b. 1848; Georgia
d. 1912

Susie King Taylor, who learned to read and write in secret, was the first African American to teach openly in a school for former slaves in Georgia. She was also the only African American woman to publish a memoir of her Civil War experiences, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers.

The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

Wallace Thurman
b. 8-16-1902; Salt Lake City, UT
d. 12-22-1934; NYC

Wallace Thurman was a writer during during the Harlem Renaissance whose best known work is the novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, which explores discrimination among black people based on skin color.

Jean Toomer Reader

Jean Toomer
b. 12-26-1894; Washington, DC
d. 3-30-1967, Doylestown, PA
“O people, if you but used
Your other eyes
You would see beings.”

Jean Toomer is one of the most interesting and puzzling figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nathan Eugene Toomer was born into a prominent mixed-race family and raised in white neighborhoods by his mother after his father left. When Toomer was just 11 years old, his mother died and he went to live in a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C. with his grandfather P.B.S. Pinchback, who had served as governor of Louisiana. It was the first time Toomer had actually lived around other African Americans.

This experience and his time as the principal of a school in Georgia provided Toomer with ideas for stories and poems. Toomer, who now called himself “Jean,” sent his writings to several important Harlem-based magazines, which published them and asked for more. In 1923 his work was collected and published as the book Cane, and Harlem, in the words of one writer, “went quietly mad.” Cane, a mix of poetry and short stories, is regarded as the first great literary work of the Harlem Renaissance.

Everyone hailed Jean Toomer as the next great black literary hero – everyone except Jean Toomer himself. He was angry with his publisher for calling him a “Negro” writer. He said he was “neither white nor black, but simply an American.” Toomer devoted the rest of his life to studying and teaching philosophy, and although he wrote many books after Cane, none of them was ever published for the general public. He was largely forgotten when in died in 1967, but when Cane was reprinted two years later, its reputation as a classic was quickly restored.

Toomer was married twice: his first wife was author and activist Marjery Latimer who died in childbirth; his second wife was photographer Marjorie Content.

Toomer, who began following Gurdjieff in the 1920s joined the Quakers in 1940 and afterwards devoted most of his time to serving on Quaker committees and working with high school students.

• Jean Toomer Bio