Reflections in Black

Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1941, Stokely Carmichael was a major figure in the civil rights movement who introduced the term and concept of "Black Power" to the public. He served in major campaigns like "Freedom Summer," and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

Ernest James Gaines was born in 1933 in Louisiana, but as a teenager moved with his family to California during the Great Migration. He found his voice as a fiction writer who dives into the Black experience. Gaines' subjects are men and women from rural communities navigating day-to-day life with the backdrop of racial injustice. His most popular novel is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a fictional personal history from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. This is his story.

On today’s Reflections in Black, Raven profiles William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer, and editor. A prominent figure from the end of the 19th century through the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s,  Du Bois’s work continues to be influential in American sociology and American history.

Richard Wright was born in 1908 in Roxie, Miss., and would go on to become one of the most important literary voices in the 20th century. He began writing short stories before moving to Chicago in 1927 and became part of a new wave of Black urban intellectuals joining, and later abandoning, the Communist Party. Wright eventually moved to New York City in 1937 where he received federal funding to write through the Works Progress Administration.

Sonia Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Ala. in 1934. She got her bachelor's degree from Hunter College in 1955 and pursued a graduate degree under the mentorship of poet Louise Bogan. In the 1960s, she worked with the Congress of Racial Equality before hearing Malcolm X and taking a separatist posture instead. She began a career as a professor at Downtown Community School in New York, later moving to San Francisco State College. As a professor, she pioneered in the fields of Black Studies and Women's Studies.