![allen[1]](https://featured.catco.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/allen1-thegem-blog-default-large.jpg)
Nimrod Allen, with five years as a trained social worker and a record of organizing collaborative efforts, becomes executive director of the Columbus Urban League. Major initiatives include improved race relations; health, education, and employment help for new Southern migrants; and counteracting a surge of Ku Klux Klan activity in Columbus.
FeaturedCATCO.Admin
Purportedly written by Langston Hughes while he was on a train crossing the Mississippi the year before, the poem has remained a landmark piece of the period and movement.
Black Swan Records, the first notable Black-owned and operated record company in Harlem, opens.
“Shuffle Along” opens in late May, running for 484 performances through July 15, 1922.
Waldo Tyler, son of the late Ralph Tyler, opens the Community Pharmacy at Long and Hamilton. The Tyler family lives at 175 South Champion, and the Tyler name will become well known in future generations. Dana Tyler will become a popular TV news anchor in Columbus in the 1980s before moving to New York.
Book of American Negro Poetry, ed. James Weldon Johnson, released. While the collection includes precursors to the movement like Paul Laurence Dunbar and founders like WEB Du Bois and Jessie Fauset (both of whom edited The Crisis,) it omits poems by McKay, Toomer, Hughes– in part because some of these had only a few poems (or had yet to be published ) in The Crisis.
Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son” first published in The Crisis. The last quadrain resonates for generations.
Many of the poems are at once ecstatic, ambivalent, and dark. The title poem, for instance, is about a prostitute. In another poem, “America,” he writes “I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!”
Celebrated folk artist Elijah Pierce arrives in Columbus to marry his second wife, Cornelia Houeston, who is from the city. He works as a barber and will eventually have his own shop on East Long Street. Pierce is also a minister, and his work is closely tied to Bibical themes and stories. Not “discovered” by the outside art world until the 1970s, he will be given recognition by the National Endowment for the Arts as one of fifteen master artists in America in 1982.
“Chip Woman’s Fortune” by W Richardson opens on Broadway. It’s the first non-musical written by a Black playwright to be produced there. The one act comedy runs for a month.