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Today’s Black History WOW!
Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on August 16, 1902, to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. His father left the family soon after his birth, and his mother remarried several times, relocating Wallace to different cities. He was reared by his maternal grandmother, Emma Jackson, who was among the founders of Calvary Baptist Missionary Church—the first Black church in Utah.
Thurman was recognized for his brilliance at West High School and the University of Utah, where he was a pre-med major. In 1922, he transferred to the University of Southern California to study journalism but dropped out without receiving a degree.
While Thurman was in Los Angeles he worked at the post office where he met aspiring novelist Arna Bontemps. Soon, Thurman and Bontemps worked together on The Pacific Defender, a Black newspaper, and started an artistic journal, Outlet.
Thurman relocated to Harlem in 1925, and in part as a result of his friendship with Bontemps, Thurman founded a second magazine, The Looking Glass, and became managing editor of The Messenger, the journal of Harlem’s radical Socialists led by civil and labor rights activist Asa Philip Randolph. Thurman also worked as a ghostwriter for the magazine True Story. In 1928 Thurman became the first Black manuscript reader at Macaulay, a major New York publishing company.
Thurman’s writings soon propelled him into the vanguard of the “New Negro Renaissance" in Harlem, New York. Together with Aaron Douglass, Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, Wallace in 1926 founded his third journal: Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, which is believed by many to be the launch of the Harlem Renaissance era.
Wallace Thurman published three novels: The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores intra-racial conflicts related to skin color; Infants of the Spring (1932), which satirizes the Harlem Renaissance and its leading artists; and The Interne (1932), co-authored with A.L. Furman. His play, “Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem” (written in collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp), reached Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews.
By the early 1930s, Wallace Thurman was acknowledged as one of the leading novelists, critics, poets, and playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance although he, in his own works, actually questioned and debunked its existence.
Wallace Thurman died in New York City at age 32 on December 22, 1934, from tuberculosis.
Today In Black History
In 1898, the Niger Convention was signed in Paris by France and Great Britain for a partition of West Africa.
In 1921, Georgianna R. Simpson became the first Black woman to receive a PhD. She was awarded a PhD in German from the University of Chicago.
In 1939, the Ethel Waters Show, a one-hour variety special was transmitted from the NBC studios in New York. It was the first time a Black performer had their own TV show and the first time a Black person appeared on TV.
In 1942, Nat King Cole recorded “The Christmas Song” (written by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells) for the first time.
In 1952, Dr. Harold D. West was named president of Meharry Medical College.
In 1967, the British film “To Sir, With Love,” starring Sidney Poitier was released in the United States.
In 1970, Cheryl Adrienne Brown won the Miss Iowa pageant and became the first African American to compete in the Miss America beauty pageant.
In 1989, William H. Gray (D-PA), Chairman of the House Democratic Congress, was elected by his House colleagues as the Democratic Whip, the highest-ranking leadership position ever held by an African American in Congress to date.
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