Word: negroness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Builder. Winston A. Burnett has illustrated what a Negro manager can do when he finds enough capital to expand. Harlem's Burnett, now plump and 45, learned about construction from the bottom up by working as a painter, plasterer and carpenter in his youth. Later he built one of Harlem's larger contracting firms, Winston A. Burnett Construction Co.; it had a yearly volume of $1,000,000. Despite his experience and his sound business practices-he continually reinvested all profits in the company-Burnett could not get the bank loans, and especially the performance bonds, needed...
...Franchise Holder. Charles E. Johnson, 43, got into the franchised fast-food business through a combination of belated Government aid and militant pressure. The Small Business Administration rejected his first application for a loan to buy a McDonald's hamburger franchise near a Negro area of affluent Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb, because officers thought the location he wanted would not produce enough income to repay the loan. They did not realize, says a Cleveland Negro leader, that to blacks "the hamburger stand is breakfast, lunch and dinner-they don't just buy hamburgers as a snack...
Part of the rage must come from the fact that, for over two hundred years of slavery, the black man was usually forbidden to write, publish or even learn to read. Despite this prohibition, there were still about 100 Negro poets of varying significance before the Civil War, many of whom managed to publish their poems in church manuscripts or under white patronage. The best known was the Revolutionary poet Phillis Wheatley (who coined the phrase "first in peace" to describe George Washington and wrote heroic couplets in the style of Alexander Pope...
After the Civil War came a new wave of Negro poets that included Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote in the Negro folk dialect of the rural South as well as standard English. The 1920s produced the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, when Negro poetry began to turn from the classic Eng lish lyric verse of Countee Cullen to the rhythmic, blues-style poetry of Langston Hughes. Later, came Pulitzer Prize-winning Gwendolyn Brooks, Jazz Poet Ted Joans and Margaret Walker, whom some call the mother of the black poets of the '60s. These new poets began to look...
There seems to be little room for the self-mockery which has often characterized Negro humor or for the literary sense of irony that has dominated much of modern white poetry. But the black poets have a continuing oral tradition lacking in the more cerebral white English poetry. This tradition has been handed along from rural preachers to gospel singers to blues singers, to Langston Hughes, who dignified the street language of the blacks and read his poems wherever he could find an audience, even in bars. Today's black poets often chant their poetry in lofts, churches...