Photo from The Amistad Research Center
Tom Dent (1932-1998)
Thomas Covington Dent was an African-American poet, essayist, oral historian, dramatist, and cultural activist from New Orleans. His father, Dr. Albert Dent was a longtime president of Dillard University and his mother, Jessie Covington Dent, was a former concert pianist. Tom began his writing career at Morehouse College, working for the school newspaper. After college, he worked for New York Age, a black weekly newspaper. Thurgood Marshall appointed Dent to be press liaison for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. While in New York, Dent was exposed to other writers who were writing about the culture and struggles of African-Americans in that era.
Dent returned to New Orleans in 1965 and helped create Free Southern Theatre (FST), artists and activist collective committed to fighting racism and segregation through theatrical productions. While he was with FST, Dent wrote “Ritual Murder,” a play that examines black-on-black crime. In 1968, he started the writer’s workshop BLKARTSOUTH, to mentor young writers. He was a prolific writer of essays, poetry, articles, and reviews for magazines. Dent co-founded two literary journals: Nkombo and Callaloo, a journal of African and African American arts and letters. Dent conducted oral histories of Mississippi Civil Rights workers from 1978-1987, and in 1984 conducted oral history interviews with New Orleans and Acadian musicians. The tapes from both collections are now at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans.
From 1984 to 1986 Dent worked as a writer on Andrew Young's autobiography, An Easy Burden. In the nineties, Dent worked on the Mississippi Oral History Project focusing on local Mississippi participation in the Civil Rights movement. From 1987 to 1990, he served as the Executive Director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. During the 1990's, he traveled in the Caribbean and in Africa investigating cultural connections between the African-heritage cultures of the Diaspora and Africa. At the time of his death, Dent was working on two journals, a collection of reflections on New Orleans and a series of personal essays on the connections and disruptions between Africa and African Americans. Dent's last and most important book was Southern Journey (1996).
A new collection of his work, New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader, edited by Kalamu Ya Salaam, was published in January 2018.
For more on Tom Dent, check out the following links:
Oral history interviews, Amistad Research Center.
Southern Journey, by Tom Dent. Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Summer 1997
Photo from Thomas C. Dent Papers, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University
Southern Journey by
"More than twenty years after the civil rights movement, one question still lingers: What significant changes, if any, have resulted from its efforts? In search of the answer, author Tom Dent takes us on a unique journey through the contemporary South, revisiting the places where protesters and their supporters took a stand for equality." "Dent interviews blacks, whites, civil rights workers, and just plain folks about the sit-ins, student demonstrations, and protests that shaped the Movement. In their own word, the participants discuss the impressions these events left on their communities." "Dent's journey becomes a personal one as well, as he examines the role the Movement has played in his own life. Raised "a black youth in New Orleans one generation before the legal obstructions that delineated racial segregation in the South were dismantled piece by piece," he was encouraged by his family to seek his fortune outside the South but soon returned home." "Using these smaller towns - "more interesting, more resistant to change, more reflective of the South as a region" than their larger counterparts - Dent demonstrates how the civil rights movement continues to make a positive impact on people's lives, today, but also learns that the goal of equality hasn't been fully achieved."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
A Sourcebook on African-American Performance by
A Sourcebook on African-American Performanceis the first volume to consider African-American performance between and beyond the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the New Black Renaissance of the 1990s. As with all titles in the Worlds of Performanceseries, the Sourcebookconsists of classic texts as well as newly commissioned pieces by notable scholars, writers and performers. It includes the plays 'Sally's Rape' by Robbie McCauley and 'The American Play' by Suzan-Lori Parks, and comes complete with a substantial, historical introduction by Annemarie Bean. Articles, essays, manifestos and interviews included cover topics such as: * theatre on the professional, revolutionary and college stages * concert dance * community activism * step shows * performance art. Contributors include Annemarie Bean, Ed Bullins, Barbara Lewis, John O'Neal, Glenda Dickersun, James V. Hatch, Warren Budine Jr. and Eugene Nesmith.