Calvin Hernton

Calvin Coolidge Hernton was born on the twenty-eighth of April 1932 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, into a Black Baptist family, and was raised largely by his grandmother in the segregated South. From those beginnings he carried both a scholar's discipline and a poet's ear. He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Talladega College in Alabama in 1954, and went on to complete a master's in sociology at Fisk University in Nashville, joining a generation of Black intellectuals coming of age at the threshold of the civil-rights era.

Moving to New York City, Hernton worked as a social worker while entering the literary ferment of the Lower East Side. In the early 1960s he became a co-founder of Umbra, the pioneering collective of Black writers whose workshop and magazine helped seed the Black Arts Movement. Alongside Tom Dent, David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas and others, he helped make Umbra a gathering place for a new, independent Black literary voice.

In 1964 he published the long poem The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, and in 1965 his landmark study Sex and Racism in America, a frank examination of how sexual anxieties shaped the American color line. The book set the tone for a decade of Black social criticism. From 1965 to 1969 he studied in London with the existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing, deepening the psychological cast of his thought.

In 1970 Hernton joined Oberlin College, where he taught African, African American and Caribbean literatures and later became professor emeritus, mentoring students until near the end of his life. He died in Oberlin, Ohio, in 2001. Though the world knew him first as a sociologist, he called himself, above all, a poet. May the honored voice of Calvin Hernton be remembered with the dignity it gave to others.