May Miller

May Miller (born January 26, 1899 in Washington, DC , † February 8, 1995 ) was an American writer , poet and playwright who joined the African-American artist group Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s .

Life

Origin, playwright and Harlem Renaissance

May Miller was one of five children of mathematician , sociologist, and essayist Kelly Miller , who became the first African American to graduate from Johns Hopkins University . She grew up on the grounds of Howard University , where her father was a professor of sociology, and came in contact with African-American personalities such as WEB Du Bois , Paul Laurence Dunbar , Booker T. Washington , Carter G. Goodson and as a child Alain LeRoy Locke .

She attended Dunbar High School , where Angelina Weld Grimké and Mary P. Burill were among her teachers and who encouraged her to write. After finishing school, she studied at Howard University, which she graduated in 1920, and in 1920 won a literary prize for her one-act play Within the Shadows . She then completed a postgraduate course at the Columbia University and the American University and was then from 1923 to 1943 as a teacher at the Frederick Douglass - High School and was involved beside an active member of the literary Saturday evening salons of Georgia Douglas Johnson , and as an actress and director in the Negro Little Theater Movement .

With the award-winning stage work The Bog Guide (1925) May Miller made her breakthrough in the Afro-American literary scene and she joined the Harlem Renaissance artist movement founded by Alain LeRoy Locke. The prize, donated by Opportunity Magazine in 1925 , for another play written by her was presented to her at a dinner by Langston Hughes , Countee Cullen , James Weldon Johnson and Jean Toomer .

Later plays, poems, and civil rights movement

In her plays Scratches (1929), Stragglers in the Dust (1930) and Nails and Thorns (1933), she dealt with racial issues. Four of her historical pieces, such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, are included in Negro History in Thirteen Plays (1935), an anthology she edited in collaboration with Willis Richardson .

In 1940 she married Bud Sullivan, a Washington, DC school principal who had played in the traditional jazz and blues band The McKinney Cotton Pickers in the 1920s . In 1943 she gave up teaching at Frederick Douglass High School and moved permanently to Washington, where she concentrated solely on writing poetry that appeared in literary magazines and anthologies. She also gave lectures on her work.

When the racial conflicts in Birmingham in the 1950s and 1960s became very intense and numerous bomb attacks by the Ku Klux Klan earned Birmingham the nickname "Bombingham", May Miller became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement . The largest assassination attempt occurred on September 15, 1963 when a bomb exploded in 16th Street Baptist Church and killed four black girls between the ages of 11 and 15. She then wrote the poem BLAZING ACCUSATION .

Numerous other volumes of poetry appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.

Publications

Plays

• The Bog Guide , 1925
• Scratches , 1929
• Stragglers in the Dust , 1930
• Nails and Thorns , 1933

Volumes of poetry

• Into the Clearing , The Charioteer Press, 1959
• Poems , Cricket Press, 1962
• Lyrics of Three Women , Linden Press, 1964
• Not That Far , The Solo Press, 1973
• The Clearing and Beyond , The Charioteer Press, 1974
• Dust of Uncertain Journey , Lotus Press, 1975
• Halfway to the Sun , Washington Writers Publishing House, 1981
• The Ransomed Wait , Lotus Press, 1983
• Collected Poems , Lotus Press, 1989

Web links

• Entry on the homepage of Villanova University
• Entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica (online version)
• Entry in Beltway: A Poetry Quarterly
• Entry into Harlem Renaissance Poets