The James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection (JWJ) documents and celebrates the cultural and artistic achievements and the intellectual and political activities of African Americans.
In 2010, Julia Wright was seated in "the comfortable, secluded, air-conditioned calm of the Beinecke Archives where my father's manuscripts are housed at Yale University." She told the AP that she "came across a long version of the short story I knew so well but augmented by the 50 pages on police brutality. Bringing the whole work to light was not only timely, it was a cure against the physical dismemberment suffered by the James Byrds of our dark history."
In 1921, a white mob attacked residents, homes, and businesses in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In a highly segregated city and state, some 10...
A truncated part of the novel was later released as a short story, but the original manuscript’s existence was known only to a handful of scholars. Then, in 2010 Julia, a journalist, poet and advocate for death row inmates, unearthed the novel among her father’s papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut.
Howard added that resources such as the Beinecke Library and a more robust doctoral program in African American literature, as well as interdisciplinary programs in English and other departments, make the move especially enjoyable.
“The Man Who Lived Underground,” a novel publishers rejected in the 1940s, is about an innocent Black man forced to confess to the murder of a white couple.
These songs — the oldest musical expressions of the slave experience in this country — still have a lot to teach us about how we think about death and dignity.