Black History Trivia

The next time you host game night with family and friends, include these little facts in a test of Black History knowledge.

• Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. Born in the Gambia and sold to the Wheatley family in Boston when she was 7 years old, Wheatley was emancipated shortly after her book was released.

• “Bars Fight,” written by poet and activist Lucy Terry in 1746, was the first known poem written by a Black American. Terry was enslaved in Rhode Island as a toddler but became free at age 26 after marrying a free Black man.

• Clotel: The President’s Daughter was the first novel published by an African American, in 1853. It was written by abolitionist and lecturer William Wells Brown.

• Dubbed “Hip-Hop’s First Godmother” by Billboard, singer and music producer Sylvia Robinson produced the first-ever commercially successful rap record: “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugar Hill Gang. And along with her husband, she co-owned the first hip-hop label, Sugar Hill Records.

• Renowned singer and jazz pianist Nat King Cole was the first Black American to host a TV show: NBC’s The Nat King Cole Show.

• In 1981, broadcast journalist Bryant Gumbel became the first Black person to host a network morning show when he joined NBC’s Today show.

• In 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Oscar, for her supporting role in Gone With the Wind. Twenty-four years later, Sidney Poitier became the first Black man to win an Oscar, for his leading role in Lilies of the Field.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: A multidisciplinary artist who denounced violence against African Americans. A commentary.

By John Harbour

The exhibition Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, which ran at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts earlier this year, demonstrates that the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is usually associated with painting, also calls upon other media, including music—the main theme of this exhibition—literature, comic strips, cinema and animation, a much lesser-known aspect of his work.

Basquiat was born in New York in 1960 to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto Rican descent. In the late 1970s, in collaboration with Al Diaz, he drew enigmatic graffiti under the pseudonym SAMO. The artist quickly made a name for himself in the New York art world (becoming friends with Andy Warhol and Madonna, among others). He then produced solo paintings and achieved international fame that continued to grow until his death in 1988.

At the time of the Black Lives Matter movement, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work is more relevant than ever. It highlights racial inequalities and the lack of representation of racialized people in the media, but also the violence suffered by African Americans.

This is what I propose to explore in this article. As a Ph.D. student in literature and performing and screen arts, my research focuses on the interactions between animated film and the visual arts (comics, painting) as well as on the American cartoon.

Read the entire article in the January/February 2023 issue of ONYX Magazine.