118th birthday of Melvin Tolson

(Born 6 February 1898, Moberly, Missouri, US)

Award-wining prodigiously creative poet, playwright, essayist and academic whose works include Rendezvous with America ([poetry] 1944), The Fire in the Flint ([play] 1952), Libretto for the Republic of Liberia ([poetry] 1953), Harlem Gallery, Book 1, the Curator ([poetry] 1965) and A Gallery of Harlem Portraits ([poetry] 1979) and whose mentoring and training of the celebrated Wiley College (Marshall, Texas) students’ debating society in the 1930s is the focus of the film The Great Debaters (2007), directed by Denzel Washington who also plays Melvin Tolson’s character

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