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 Yo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA (CPUSA), officially the Communist Party of the United States of America, also referred to as the American Communist Party mainly during the 20th century, is a communist party in the United States. It was established in 1919 in the wake of the Russian Revolution, emerging from the far-left wing of the Socialist Party of America (SPA). The CPUSA sought to establish socialism in the U.S. via the principles of Marxism–Leninism, aligning itself with the Communist International (Comintern), which was controlled by the Soviet Union. The CPUSA's early years were marked by factional struggles and clandestine activities. The U.S. government viewed the party as a subversive threat, leading to mass arrests and deportations in the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920. Despite this, the CPUSA expanded its influence, particularly among industrial workers, immigrants, and African Americans. In the 1920s, the party remained a small but militant force. During the Great Depres ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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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 improvisation, improviser, building on the virtuosic style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of Harmony, 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 have made him an enduring icon. 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: "Di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Shirley Graham Du Bois
Shirley Graham Du Bois (born Lola Shirley Graham Jr.; November 11, 1896 – March 27, 1977) was an American-Ghanaian 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 Du Bois in 1925. In 1926, Graham moved t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American novelist, playwright, and actress, acknowledged as "the only African-American 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 uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne." Childress became involved in social causes, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway theatre, Broadway. Her best-known work, the play ''A Raisin in the Sun'', highlights the lives of History of African Americans in Chicago, black Americans in Chicago living under Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem (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 Covenant (law)#History, restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case ''Hansberry v. Lee''. After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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 the fac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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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 a 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 World of Henry Orient'' (1964), '' The Great Escape'' (1963), '' Hud'' (1963), '' Thoroughly Modern Millie'' (1967), '' True Grit'' (1969), '' My Left Foot'' (1989), '' The Grifters'' (19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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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. 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. Killens, Sarah ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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University Of North Carolina Press
The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a not-for-profit university press associated with 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 publications, as well as academic journals, in subjects that include southern/US history, military history, political science, gender studies, religion, Latin American/Caribbean studies, sociology, food studies, and books of regional interest. It receives some financial support from the state of North Carolina and an endowment fund. Its office is located in Chapel Hill. History In 2006, UNC Press started the distribution company Longleaf Services as an affiliate. See also * List of English-language book publishing companies * List of university presses References External links * Longleaf Services [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Alfred Hayes (writer)
Alfred Hayes (18 April 1911 – 14 August 1985) was an American screenwriter, television writer, novelist, and poet, who worked in Italy as well as 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 grew up in New York, and attended the City College (now part of City University of New York). At the age of seventeen, he joined the Young Communist League. Hayes worked briefly as a copy boy for the ''New York American'' newspaper, before moving on to a job as a crime reporter for the ''New York Daily Mirror''. He began writing fiction and poetry in left-wing magazines in the 1930s, such as the poem 'In a Coffee Pot', published in the first issue of Partisan Review. During World War II he served in Europe in the U.S. Army Specia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Earl Robinson
Earl Hawley Robinson (July 2, 1910 – July 20, 1991) was an American 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. While at Washington, Robinson was a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a men's music fraternity. In 1934 he moved to New York City where he studied with H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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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. The song recounts a dream in which Joe Hill appears and claims he never died despite being framed for murder and shot by "the copper bosses." He tells the dreamer, "From San Diego up to Maine / In every mine and mill / Where workers strike and organize / It's there you'll find Joe Hill." 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 * Paul Robeson released the song on his albums '' Songs of Free Men'' (1943), '' Paul Robeson: Favorite Songs'' (1959) and the live album '' Paul Robeson at Carnegie Hall'' (1959) * Joan Baez perfor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |