James D. Corrothers
James David Corrothers (1869–1917) was an African-American poet, journalist, and minister whom editor T. Thomas Fortune called "the coming poet of the race." When he died, W. E. B. Du Bois eulogized him as "a serious loss to the race and to literature."[1][2]
Corrothers was born in Michigan and grew up in a small town of anti-slavery activists who settled before the war. He attended Northwestern University in Chicago but left to work a newspaper reporter. He met with Frederick Douglass at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition two years before the death of Douglass.[3] In his autobiography, Corrothers claimed credit for bringing another poet's work, Paul Laurence Dunbar's, to the attention of William Dean Howells[4] Corrothers paid tribute to Paul Laurence Dunbar after Dunbar's death with a poem "Paul Laurence Dunbar" published in Century Magazine (1912). In 1922, James Weldon Johnson published seven poems by Corrothers in the anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).
Works
- The Snapping of the Bow, 1901
- The Black Cat Club, 1902
- At the Closed Gate of Justice, 1913
- In Spite of the Handicap, 1916
References
- ^ Gaines, Kevin. "Assimilationist minstrelsy as racial uplift ideology: James D. Corrothers's literary quest for black leadership." American Quarterly (1993): 341
- ^ "The Looking Glass," The Crisis, April 1917 p. 287
- ^ James D. Corrothers, In Spite of the Handicap (New York: George H. Doran Company) 1916
- ^ James D. Corrothers, In Spite of the Handicap (New York: George H. Doran Company) 1916, p. 143-144.
External links
- Errin Jackson, Corrothers, James David (1869-1917), blackpast.org
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