Meet more superstars of Black History Month
As part of Benchmark School’s celebration of Black History Month, its library is featuring a different Superstar of Black History each day — people whose accomplishments might not normally be known to the children or even to adults. Benchmark is pleased to share these mini-biographies with the Daily Times readership.
They were compiled by Leslie Komarnicki, librarian at Benchmark School. Benchmark School — now celebrating its 50th anniversary — is an independent, co-ed school located in Media for bright children in grades 1-8 who have dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, or other learning differences. Benchmark School strives to include multiple perspectives in all areas of instruction, and is committed to supporting a vibrant multicultural collection in the library.
Here are some of the superstars.
Arturo Schomburg, (1874-1938) Historian, Writer, and Activist
When Arturo Schomburg was a schoolboy in his native Puerto Rico, a teacher told the class that blacks had no history, no heroes, and no accomplishments. In effect, they had nothing to take pride in. Instead of accepting this bigoted and ignorant statement as truth, the young boy tucked it away as something he was determined to prove wrong.
Born in 1874 in the town of Santurce near San Juan, Schomburg was of mixed race. His mother, who was Black, was a midwife from the Virgin Islands.
His father, Carlos Federico Schomburg, was a merchant of mixed German and Puerto Rican heritage. After learning commercial printing at the Instituto Popular in San Juan, Arturo went on to attend St. Thomas College in the Virgin Islands, where he studied what was then called “Negro literature.”
In 1891 he moved to the United States, settling in the Harlem section of Manhattan. He married
Elizabeth Hatcher in 1895 and had three sons. At this point, he was working as a Spanish teacher to support his family, but he was already beginning his quest to document the accomplishments of his people. He was also becoming an ardent proponent of freedom for Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish control.
When his first wife died in 1900, Schomburg married another Elizabeth – Elizabeth Morrow Taylor – by whom he had two more sons. By then he was working as a messenger in a Manhattan law firm, but he was always studying – and always collecting – in his pursuit of tangible proof that Black people did indeed have a history. To
this end, he amassed over 5,000 books, 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, and several thousand pamphlets. Drawing upon this collection, he wrote numerous articles about the “diaspora,” which was the kidnapping of Africans from their homeland to work as slaves. He became an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance and was friends with writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.
In 1926 the New York Public Library purchased Schomburg’s collection for $10,000 with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and placed it at the 135th Street branch. With this windfall, Schomburg was able to travel to Europe and Cuba to collect more documents and artifacts. Soon his work became a profession rather than merely a passion. In 1931 he was hired as the curator of the Negro Collection at the library of Fisk University in Nashville, and in 1932 he was hired by the New York Public Library to curate the collection they had bought from him, which was now a highly valued part of the library’s Division of Negro History, Literature, and
Prints.
Arturo Schomburg died in 1938 while he was still in his intellectual prime, but not before he’d married one more Elizabeth after the passing of his second wife and had fathered three children by her. His work is very much alive today in the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which features diverse programming and a collection of over 11 million items that reflect the richness of Black culture and history.
Ida B. Wells, (18621931)
Writer and Political Activist
Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Miss., in mid-1862. She was born into slavery, but this status changed radically when President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation not quite six months later. With freedom, her parents found a voice. They became active in the Republication Party during Reconstruction, and her father founded a Black liberal arts college and also volunteered with the Freedman’s Aid Society. All of this changed when her parents died of yellow fever, leaving the 16-year-old to care for five younger brothers and sisters. Lying about her age, Wells managed to obtain a teaching job 6 miles away and supported the entire family on a meager salary of $25 a week.
Her career as an outspoken journalist was sparked by an incident that occurred in May 1884. While taking the train between Memphis and a rural school where she now taught, Wells was asked by the conductor to move to a car that was set
aside for Blacks. She refused, and it took three men to physically remove her from her seat. She immediately hired a lawyer to bring suit against the Chesapeake and Ohio. The court ruled in her favor, stating that the railroad company had violated the “separate but equal clause” by trying to force her to ride in a car that was not equal to the first-class seat she had purchased. The case was the first of its kind in the South, and it generated tremendous public interest.
Eager to share her story, Wells wrote an article for The Living Way, a Black church weekly. Her article was so well received that the editor asked for additional contributions. By 1886 her work was being carried in Black newspapers across the country, and she began to attack the larger issues of discrimination and inequality. In 1889 she was offered an editor’s position at a small Memphis paper called Free Speech and Headlight. She became part-owner of the paper and wrote blistering editorials about the continuing oppression of freed Blacks. Within nine months, subscriptions to the controversial newspaper had risen by 2,000, and Wells was becoming quite well known – well known enough to receive numerous death threats.
In 1892, when three Black men were dragged from a local jail and lynched, Wells named names and called for action. She then began traveling through the South to root out information on other lynchings and reported them in her paper. This enraged many whites, and her newspaper office was stormed and her printing equipment destroyed. Not to be silenced, Wells moved north, wrote an indepth series on lynching for the New York Age, and later
took her campaign against it to President McKinley. She married attorney Ferdinand L. Barnett in 1895 and had four children by him, but she kept her maiden name and remained fiercely active in civil rights and women’s suffrage. She died in 1931 of kidney disease.
James
Lafayette, (Circa 1748 - 1832)
Patriot and Slave
In the mid-1700s, the boy who would later become known as James Lafayette grew up on a Virginia tobacco plantation, born into slavery. Like many other slaves, he carried only a first name. It was the American Revolution that altered the course of his life — giving him a role that required courage and cunning rather than obedience and brawn and eventually bringing him a surname.
While accompanying his master, William Armistead, to Richmond to supply the Marquis de Lafayette’s
troops, James asked permission to enlist in the general’s French Allied Unit. Armistead gave his permission, but instead of taking James on as a soldier the army dispatched him as a spy, disguising him as a runaway slave so that he could infiltrate British headquarters.
Because James was a native Virginian, the British welcomed his knowledge of the terrain and allowed him to float freely between the British and American camps. After being assigned to the regiment of notorious turncoat Benedict Arnold, James worked as a double-agent, feeding false information to the British and transmitting detailed information about British strategy to the colonists.
His finest act took place during a critical turning point of the war, when he alerted Lafayette and Washington about approaching British reinforcements, allowing the generals to devise a blockade against enemy advancements. This led
to Lord Cornwallis’s surrender on Oct. 17, 1781, which effectively ended the war and brought victory to the colonists.
A fight for justice
While Americans celebrated their freedom from Britain, many Blacks were also celebrating another sort of freedom. A promise of emancipation had been promised to slaves fighting on the colonial side, but ironically James’ status as spy rather than soldier meant that he did not qualify for emancipation, despite his contributions to the American victory. After petitioning Congress without success, James turned to his former general, the Marquis de Lafayette, who wrote a letter praising him for his assistance during the war. He was finally granted his freedom in 1787, six years after he played his key role in the Battle of Yorktown. Out of gratitude for the French general’s support and as a testimony to the bond they shared, James added Lafayette as his surname.
James settled in his native state of Virginia, where he purchased 40 acres of farm land, married, raised a family, and lived out the rest of his life as a free man. The former comrades in arms crossed paths again during the Marquis de Lafayette’s grand tour of the United States in 1824, when he spotted James in a crowd and embraced him. James Lafayette died in 1832.
Robert Smalls, (18391915)
Former Slave and Daring War Hero
Robert Smalls was born in Beaufort, S.C., the son of a house slave who took care of her owner’s five children. Although Lydia was treated well, she did not equate this with true freedom. To show her son just how bad slavery was, she took him to the Beaufort jail yard to watch the public beating of slaves and witness slave auctions firsthand. She also sent him to live for a while on the Ashdale Plantation, where she still had family and where he slept on a dirt floor with his cousins and worked in the fields from sunup to sundown.
Smalls’ hatred for slavery steadily grew, and after marrying Hannah Davis, also a slave, he began taking extra jobs so that he could buy freedom for himself and his family. According to the unjust rules of the time, all of his earnings except for a dollar a month had to be sent back to his owners, but trickle by trickle his savings grew un
til he was just $100 short of his goal.
Some of Smalls’ jobs were on the waterfront. He started out as a stevedore, raising and lowering heavy objects between dock and ship, but soon rose to the position of a foreman. The shipyard owner, recognizing Smalls’ abilities, promoted him to sailmaker and topsail rigger. During the warm months, he sailed the Carolina and Georgia coasts on a merchant schooner and learned maps, charts, and navigation. Before long he became an expert steamship pilot and knew the waters off the Carolinas like the back of his hand.
Smalls was piloting a confederate supply vessel, The Planter, when war broke out in 1861. He soon hatched a daring plan that would ultimately gain freedom for his family. Dressed in the captain’s straw hat and uniform and knowing the signals that would enable him to pass Fort Sumter, Smalls moved the ship to a nearby wharf where his family was waiting to be picked up. With them on board, he daringly navigated past the fort and out to the union fleet and freedom. Just imagine the joy of the Union officers when they saw their prize. (And imagine the chagrin of the Confederate officers when they found that their prized ship had vanished from its berth!)
At the end of the war Smalls bought his former master’s home in Beaufort, including the slave quarters where he was born, and lived there for the rest of his life. He later became a South Carolina legislator and then a US Congressman.
Gwendolyn
Brooks, (1917-2000) Poet and Teacher
Born in Kansas in 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was still an infant when her parents moved to Chicago as part of the “Great Migration” of Blacks to northern cities. Her father had set aside his ambitions to be a doctor and provided for his family by working as a janitor. Her mother, a classically trained pianist, was a schoolteacher. Brooks later said that she could never have written the poetry she did if her family had stayed in Kansas. It was Inner City Chicago that gave her the multiplicity of characters who peopled her poems.
Brooks began writing as a child and had published 75 poems by the age of 16, causing her proud mother to predict that she was going to be a “lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Dunbar
had been a highly respected poet and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but Brooks actually surpassed him in stature, particularly when she became the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize. It was presented to her in 1950 for her second volume of poetry, “Annie Allen.” Her first volume, “A Street in Bronzeville,” published in 1945, had also been a critical success and had led to a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous honors. It consisted of 12 poems, each about the urban Black poor of Chicago’s South Side. Author Richard Wright had lent his support when she was seeking publication. When asked by the editors at Harper & Brothers for his opinion of her work, he had answered with the following words:
“She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully. She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes.”
In 1960 she published her third poetry collection, “The Bean Eaters,” which includes her jazz poem, “We Real Cool,” which explores themes of youth and rebellion against the establishment. Focusing on a group of high school dropouts who hang around a pool hall and expect to die young, it is composed of only four verses of two lines each and is still studied in literature classes today.
Although Brooks wrote poetry all her life, she began a second career as a teacher in the 1970s, teaching poetry at Northeastern Illinois State College (now Northeastern Illinois University), University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the City College of the City University of New York. She also mentored individuals, particularly the new generation of Black poets, and sponsored poetry workshops and a poetry contest for the incarcerated.
Brooks was married to Henry Lowington Blakely Jr., from 1939 until his death in 1996. They had two children: Henry Lowington Blakely III and Nora Brooks Blakely. Brooks’ husband died in 1996, and she herself died in 2000 at her Chicago home. At the time of her death, she still held the position of Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she had held continuously since 1968.
“She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully. She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes.”
— Author Richard Wright on Gwendolyn Brooks