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Camp Unity
Camp Unity was a communist-affiliated summer resort for adults located in Wingdale, New York. It was one of the first multiracial camps of its kind in the United States. History Camp Unity was founded in 1927 and described itself as "the first proletarian summer colony." The camp was located in the Berkshire Mountains near the border of New York state and Connecticut, just east of Poughkeepsie. It was one of several "workers' retreats" founded outside of major East Coast urban centers by the Communist Party and related socialist organizations. The camp began as an outgrowth of the cooperative housing movement of the 1920s, and its founders were members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In the early days guests were predominantly Jewish, but over time Camp Unity drew a more racially and religiously diverse crowd. It was unusual for leisure resorts to be integrated in the early 20th-century United States, and the camp's tolerant atmosphere and proximity to New York ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revolution. The history of the CPUSA is closely related to the history of the Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37), American labor movement and the history of communist parties worldwide. Initially operating underground due to the Palmer Raids which started during the First Red Scare, the party was influential in Politics of the United States, American politics in the first half of the 20th century and it also played a prominent role in the history of the labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, becoming known for Anti-racism, opposing racism and Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation after sponsoring the defense for the Scottsboro Boys in 1931. Its membership increased during the Great Depres ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuosic style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, scat singing, bent horn, pouched cheeks, and light-hearted personality provided one of bebop's most prominent symbols. In the 1940s, Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Jon Faddis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione, and balladeer Johnny Hartman. He pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz and won several Grammy Awards. Scott Yanow wrote, "Dizzy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shirley Graham Du Bois
Shirley Graham Du Bois (born Lola Shirley Graham Jr.; November 11, 1896 – March 27, 1977) was an American writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works. Biography She was born Lola Shirley Graham Jr. in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1896, as the only daughter among five children. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and the family moved often due to her father's work in parsonages throughout the country. In June 1915, Shirley graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington. Aptheker, Bettina. "Graham Du Bois, Shirley," in Susan Ware and Stacy Braukman (eds), ''Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary'', Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 248–249. She married her first husband, Shadrach T. McCants, in 1921. Their son Robert was born in 1923, followed by David Graham DuBois in 1925. In 1926, Graham moved to Paris, Fra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American novelist, playwright, and actress, acknowledged as "the only African-American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ensl ... woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades."Mary Helen Washington"Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front" in Bill Mullen and James Edward Smethurst (eds), ''Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States'', Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003, p. 186. Childress described her work as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society, saying: "My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary. Each human is u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play ''A Raisin in the Sun'', highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US Supreme Court case ''Hansberry v. Lee''. After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper ''Freedom'', where she worked with other intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert De Cormier
Robert Romeo De Cormier Jr. (January 7, 1922 – November 7, 2017), sometimes known as Robert Corman, was an American musical conductor, arranger, and director. He arranged music for many singers and groups, including Harry Belafonte and Peter, Paul and Mary, and worked with Milt Okun. Biography Robert De Cormier was born in Farmingdale, New York, and grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York. His father was a shop teacher of French-Canadian heritage, and his mother was a Swedish-born guitarist. De Cormier took up the trumpet at age 7, and continued while attending Colby College in Maine and the University of New Mexico. His trumpet playing ended during World War II, when a German mortar shell nearly severed his right wrist while his Army infantry unit was advancing toward the Rhine River. While recovering at a hospital on Staten Island, he began singing with the CIO chorus, which was where he met and started a lifelong association with Pete Seeger. Because of McCarthyism, and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elmer Bernstein
Elmer Bernstein ( '; April 4, 1922August 18, 2004) was an American composer and conductor. In a career that spanned over five decades, he composed "some of the most recognizable and memorable themes in Hollywood history", including over 150 original film scores, as well as scores for nearly 80 television productions. For his work he received an Academy Award for ''Thoroughly Modern Millie'' (1967) and Primetime Emmy Award. He also received seven Golden Globe Awards, five Grammy Awards, and two Tony Award nominations. He composed and arranged scores for over 100 film scores, including '' Sudden Fear'' (1952), ''The Man with the Golden Arm'' (1955), ''The Ten Commandments'' (1956), ''Sweet Smell of Success'' (1957), ''The Magnificent Seven'' (1960), ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' (1962), '' The Great Escape'' (1963), ''Hud'' (1963), ''Thoroughly Modern Millie'' (1967), ''True Grit'' (1969), ''My Left Foot'' (1989), '' The Grifters'' (1990), '' Cape Fear'' (1991), ''Twilight'' (1998), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julian Mayfield
Julian Hudson Mayfield (June 6, 1928 – October 20, 1984) was an American actor, director, writer, lecturer and civil rights activist. Early life Julian Hudson Mayfield was born on June 6, 1928, in Greer, South Carolina, and was raised from the age of five in Washington, D.C. He attended Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and while there he decided on being a writer as a career. After high school, he joined the US Army in 1946 and was stationed in Hawaii before being honorably discharged. He studied briefly at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.He was married Career Mayfield moved to New York in 1948, originally to study at New York University, but instead began a career in theatre. He developed the role of Absalom Kumalo for the Kurt Weil musical ''Lost in the Stars'' during 1949–50, before producing his own play ''Fire'' in 1951 and directing Ossie Davis's ''Alice in Wonder'' in 1952. Along with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, John O. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of North Carolina Press
The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a university press that is part of the University of North Carolina. It was the first university press founded in the Southern United States. It is a member of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) and publishes both scholarly and general-interest books and journals. According to its website, UNC Press advances "the University of North Carolina's triple mission of teaching, research, and public service by publishing first-rate books and journals for students, scholars, and general readers." It receives support from the state of North Carolina and the contributions of individual and institutional donors who created its endowment. Its headquarters are located in Chapel Hill. History In 1922, on the campus of the nation's oldest state university, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, thirteen educators and civic leaders met to charter a publishing house. Their creation, the University of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred Hayes (writer)
Alfred Hayes (18 April 1911 – 14 August 1985) was a British-born screenwriter, television writer, novelist, and poet, who worked in Italy and the United States. His well-known poem about " Joe Hill" (''"I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night"'') was set to music by Earl Robinson, and performed by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and many other artists. Life Born in Whitechapel, London to a Jewish family that moved to the United States when he was three, Hayes graduated from New York's City College (now part of City University of New York), worked briefly as a newspaper reporter, and began writing fiction and poetry in the 1930s. During World War II he served in Europe in the U.S. Army Special Services (the "morale division"). Afterwards, he stayed in Rome and became a screenwriter of Italian neorealist films. His experience in Allied-occupied Rome served as the basis for his first two novels. ''All Thy Conquests'' (1947) is an episodic novel that follows several Americans and Italians ov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earl Robinson
Earl Hawley Robinson (July 2, 1910 – July 20, 1991) was a composer, arranger and folk music singer-songwriter from Seattle, Washington. Robinson is remembered for his music, including the cantata "Ballad for Americans" and songs such as " Joe Hill" and "Black and White", which expressed his left-leaning political views. He wrote many popular songs and music for Hollywood films, including his collaboration with Lewis Allan on the 1940s hit "The House I Live In" from the Academy Award winning film of the same name. He was a member of the Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1950s. The jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson (19382018) was his son. Career in music Robinson studied violin, viola and piano as a child, and studied composition at the University of Washington, receiving a BM and teaching certificate in 1933. In 1934 he moved to New York City where he studied with Hanns Eisler and Aaron Copland. He was also involved with the depression-era WPA Federal Theatre Project, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joe Hill (song)
"Joe Hill", also known as "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", is a folk song named after labor activist Joe Hill, which was originally written in poem by Alfred Hayes and composed into music by Earl Robinson in 1936. Reception In 2014, the Paul Robeson version of the song was the third-most requested song by British Labour politicians on ''Desert Island Discs'', behind "Jerusalem" and "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika", with the song also chosen by then-party leader Ed Miliband. Covers and adaptations * Joan Baez performed the song at the Woodstock music festival in 1969 and later included it in her album, '' One Day at a Time'' * On International Workers' Day in 2014, at Tampa, Florida, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band opened their show with a cover of the song. * Billy Bragg released a modified version in 1990 called ''"I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night"'' about the prolific protest singer from the 1960's. * The High Kings The High Kings is an Irish folk grou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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