AWN Honors Black History Month 2024

Celebrating Black Artists and Activists

Throughout February, AWN has been releasing a series of graphics celebrating Black Artists and Activists for Black History Month. In this blog, you can learn more about the four people we are honoring for Black History Month 2024: Octavia Butler, Sonia Sanchez, Josephine Baker, and Alvin Ailey. 

Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez is a poet, essayist, and playwright who received the Wallace Stevens award for her poetry career. Amongst other works known for her groundbreaking epic poem Does Your House Have Lions? which explored gay Black sexuality in America during the AIDS epidemic, telling the story of her estranged gay brother who was part of NYC’s gay subculture and died of AIDS. Sanchez also self-described as an “ordained stutterer.”

As TEDX has described Sanchez’s career: “When Sonia Sanchez was selected as Philadelphia’s first Poet Laureate, then Mayor Michael Nutter noted that she was “the longtime conscience of the city.” A pioneer of black studies and one of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement, Sonia is the author of sixteen celebrated books. The internationally renowned poet, activist, and scholar is a frequent lecturer on black culture and literature, women’s liberation, and peace and racial justice. Sonia was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English until her retirement in 1999. She continues to live and work in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.

You can watch Sonia Sanchez’s Ted X Talk on YouTube here.

Or, check out Sanchez reading her poetry, including her piece “For Tupac Amaru Shakur,” on the Poetry Foundation website”

Alvin Ailey

Videos:

Ailey was a renowned queer dancer, choreographer, director, activist who used dance to fight against racial inequality. He discovered a love of theater at 14, and began studying dancing more intently at 19, at queer dancer/choreographer Lester Horton’s Dance Studio. Ailey faced stigma related to being gay, HIV-positive, and bipolar, and kept much about his private life secret (source CBC Canada).

In 1958 Alvin founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) , a modern dance company based in New York City which still exists to this day. He created AAADT and its affiliated Alvin Ailey American Dance Center (later Ailey School) as havens for nurturing Black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance.”

According to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, “Ailey’s talents and contributions to the dance world earned him the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, a Kennedy Center Honor, several honorary doctorates, the Samuel H. Scripps Award of the American Dance Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the United Nations Peace Medal.”

For more insight into Ailey’s life you can watch a short form documentary on Ailey by Brut America on YouTube or watch the full-length documentary “Ailey,” now available on Hulu.

Octavia Butler

Butler was the author of many speculative fiction books, and the first Black woman to win Hugo and Nebula Awards for best science fiction writing, as well as the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Genius Fellowship. Butler wrote about slavery, fascism and religious fundamentalism, and topics such as environmental crises, including her visionary EarthSeed series of books. She called her stories “cautionary tales”, and became known as the “mother of Afrofuturism.” You can learn more about her in this Democracy Now interview with Octavia Butler, 2006, one of the last television interviews given by Octavia before her death at age 58 in 2006.

You can also learn more about Octavia Butler’s legacy through this interview by activist Adrienne Maree Brown, who co-authored “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements” (along with co-author Walidah Imarisha).

You can also watch another interview with Octavia Butler from 2000 on “Fast Forward” on YouTube, a monthly half-hour series on Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

Josephine Baker

Baker is an icon of the Jazz era whose dancing, singing, and acting influenced generations. She embraced her Black femininity in a way that challenged racial stereotypes and made her an icon for other Black women and queer people for decades (read: Saluting our Sisters: Josephine Baker). Baker was bisexual, but did not openly disclose her sexuality publicly. She used her stage performances and travel to secretly provide the French Resistance and intelligence services with information about the Nazi occupier. After the war, she adopted 12 children from around the world whom she called her “Rainbow Tribe” (source CNN / Reuters “Honoring Josephine Baker”). Josephine Baker was the first black woman immortalized in France’s Panthéon, where a cenotaph was erected in her honor in 2021 – learn more and watch Josephine Baker perform in this video by FRANCE 24 English.