This lecture draws upon a biography Gene Jarrett has completed about Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the first African American professional writer born after slavery. Gene tells a comprehensive yet intimate story of an African American, in Dunbar, who wrestled with the constraints of Gilded Age America, yet who sought to express or mitigate this strife through the written and spoken word. Reared during and after Reconstruction, Dunbar belonged to a generation of African Americans — of so-called New Negroes — whose parents were slaves, who were adjusting to the capitalist modernity of America, but also who grappled with the public expectation that African American writers had to tailor their creative work to racial stereotypes. Against this backdrop, Gene trace’s the entwined lives of Paul and Orville Wright, eventually one of the co-inventors of the airplane, during their Dayton, Ohio, high school years in the last decade of the 19th century.

These years reveal how two boys — one black, the other white — discovered common ground across the Jim Crow color line: not merely within high school classrooms, where classical curricula forced them to learn the same lessons, but outside them, where the phenomenon of newspapers instilled a shared sense of fascination and forged their partnership in publishing the first black newspaper in Dayton, Ohio, in 1890. Featuring Gene Andrew Jarrett, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Abby Wolf.