[songbirds chirping] [soft piano music] ♪ ♪ narrator: Over the many decades since his death, hundreds of schools in the United States have been named in honor of the prolific African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

♪ ♪ The first school so named was in Washington, D.C., in 1916, just ten years after Dunbar's premature passing and became a bastion of Black achievement.

[crowd cheering] Some of these namesake schools have now closed.

[applause] And some, with desegregation and shifting demographics, have transformed and become truly integrated.

But how many students now attending these institutions have anything more than a cursory understanding of the man behind the name they see, hear, and casually utter every day, the man whose portrait hangs in their hallways, whose poetry they occasionally perform in their classroom?

- Raised my lips and took a taste.

Jump back, honey, jump back.

Love me, honey.

Love me true?

Love me well as I love you?

Then she answered, 'cause I do.

Jump back, honey, jump back.

- Seen you down at church last night.

Never mind, Miss Lucy.

What I mean?

Oh, dat's all right.

Never mind, Miss Lucy.

narrator: With a few prominent exceptions, Dunbar's dialect poems are today his best remembered and most often recited.

- Never mind, Miss Lucy.

narrator: Yet the lasting popularity of these works, many of which depict sentimental scenes of plantation life, belies their bittersweetness for Dunbar, who described his dilemma in "The Poet."

- He sang of love when Earth was young, and love itself was in its lays.

But ah, the world, it turned to praise a jingle in a broken tongue.

narrator: When Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, the city was already nationally known for innovation and ranked fifth in the number of U.S. patents received.

By 1890, Dayton, a city of 60,000, would have more patents per capita than any city in the United States.

There was little reason to think that another of Ohio's native sons, least of all a Black boy born to former slaves, would become an innovator in his own right, crafting ingenious poetry and prose.

Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation declared four million slaves free.

Among them, Dunbar's mother, Matilda.

Separated from her family after being sold twice before she was 16, Matilda had married Willis Murphy, a slave from a neighboring plantation.

But Murphy abandoned Matilda after emancipation.

With William, her firstborn, in tow, pregnant with second son, Robert, she headed for Ohio.

[steam whistles] For decades, the Ohio River had served as both a slave trading highway and an escape route for fugitives brave enough to cross the borderland.

One of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe's sources for "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the book that helped fuel the abolitionist movement, was a series of interviews she conducted with escaped slaves when she was living in Cincinnati, just across from Kentucky.

Though many hardships still awaited Matilda, she made the crossing of the Ohio River a free woman.

She resettled in Dayton, where she reunited with both her mother and grandmother, who had been freed by their masters many years prior to the proclamation.

Matilda's second husband, Joshua Dunbar, more than 20 years her senior, was also born into bondage.

But Joshua's path to freedom was far more harrowing.

[dog barking] He too crossed the Ohio, but continued on to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

Joshua's exact age isn't known, but at about age 40, he recrossed the border and joined the 55th Massachusetts, the North's second Black regiment.

Due to a disability, he was honorably discharged, but Joshua soon signed on with the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry, rising to the rank of sergeant.

[hooves plodding] [horse nickers] narrator: Matilda and Joshua were wed on Christmas Eve, 1871.

Paul was born six months after the ceremony, followed by a sister who died in infancy.

Many freed men who were now in the North found it difficult to secure steady employment.

Even skilled laborers, such as Joshua Dunbar, who had worked as a plasterer during his enslavement, still fared poorly.

It was far easier for Black women to find work in white households.

Matilda became a laundress.

- And when he'd walk into the house, Joshua Dunbar would observe that his wife had been taking care of the children, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, and washing and ironing for white people.

And had made more money doing all of that than he had made all day, looking for a job to feed his family.

And it got to the point that he said, "No, I fought for freedom, "and I will not stay in a house if I can't feed my family."

narrator: After Matilda and Joshua were divorced, there was a period of reconciliation.

But Joshua's drinking and Matilda's refusal to remarry permanently ended the relationship.

Paul's father moved first to a boarding house, and later, to the Dayton Soldiers' Home.

[soft banjo music] Opened in 1870 as one of the first three branches built to serve Civil War veterans, the facilities at the Soldiers' Home were unrivaled.

♪ ♪ The hospital provided comprehensive care and rehabilitation and was regarded as the finest complex of its kind in the country.

♪ ♪ The expansive grounds included greenhouses and gardens, and a grotto, where residents could visit with guests who stayed at the on-site hotel.

♪ ♪ Even animal exhibits were part of the therapeutic plan.

♪ ♪ Joshua Dunbar remained at the Dayton Soldiers' Home for the rest of his days.

Paul would sometimes make the long weekend walk out to the home to visit his father.

- He would go out to the Old Soldiers' Home to-- it was a big day, to walk all the way out there and then spend the day with his father.

And by that time, his father was grandfatherly.

So his father would tell him all about the past and all about the experiences that he had had, primarily in the military.

And he told Paul about other Black experiences in the Civil War.

narrator: In 1885, Joshua Dunbar died at the approximate age of 62.

Looking back, Paul recalled Joshua praising him to his mother.

- I remember my father used to tell her I was not an ordinary boy.

And one of my regrets is that he did not live to realize any of his hopes in regards to me.

narrator: Always entranced by his father's stories, Paul would create a fictionalized version of Joshua's escape from slavery in a short story called "The Ingrate."

And he would also commemorate his father and the 179,000 Black men who fought for the deliverance of their still-enslaved brethren in his poem, "The Colored Soldiers."

- They have slept and marched and suffered 'Neath the same dark skies as you, They have met as fierce a foeman, And have been as brave and true.

And their deeds shall find a record in the registry of Fame; For their blood has cleansed completely Every blot of Slavery's shame.

narrator: Because she had divorced Joshua, Matilda could not lay claim to his $25 per month pension.

She continued to work in white households to support all three of her sons, but her primary focus was now on Paul.

- She was so desperate to learn to read, and she took her bowl and mixed the cookie batter in it, and when little children were coming in from school in the afternoon, she would present them with warm cookies on a tray and say, "I'll give you a cookie if you tell me what you learned at school today."

narrator: Matilda's coaxing of school children with cookies was part of her plan to forge Paul's path.

She learned to read and write well enough to encourage Paul, dreaming that he might someday become a minister.

Through her work as a domestic, Matilda developed friendships with a circle of Dayton women who were also former slaves.

Paul listened as these women looked back on their past lives, and was soon able to imitate their plantation dialect.

The accounts of those who had been house servants, as opposed to fieldworkers, often described a less oppressive enslavement.

Many of the stories Paul heard as a child would eventually find their way into his writing.

- I have heard so many fireside tales of that simple, jolly, tuneful life down in the country districts of Kentucky, I have seen it all.

narrator: But Paul Dunbar had barely crossed the Mason-Dixon line, and had not witnessed any side of slavery.

narrator: When Paul entered Dayton's public schools in 1878, Matilda was determined that he would graduate from high school at a time when most students, Black or white, failed to do so.

[children chattering and laughing] The Dunbars moved frequently during this period, forcing Paul to attend several different schools.

At the time, he attended the all-Black 10th District School, Dayton had begun plans to integrate its schools to decrease expenses.

Many African American parents protested this measure, feeling it would inhibit their children's potential.

Before he turned 12... [church bell tolls] Paul gave his first public recitation, an Easter ode, at the Eaker Street African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Soon, he was reciting his verse at the intermediate school's afternoon assemblies.

Due to his dignified demeanor, he was affectionately dubbed "Deacon," earning the admiration of many, including a classmate named Orville Wright.

The friendship between the future pioneer of flight and the budding poet would deepen once they reached Central High School, where Paul was the only African American in his class.

One year behind Paul was his good friend, William "Bud" Burns, who would become Dayton's first Black doctor, and later serve as Dunbar's personal physician.

Paul became editor of Central's school newspaper, and had pieces published in "Tomfoolery," its weekly, handwritten, amply illustrated humor magazine.

To conserve resources, only a single copy of each issue of "Tomfoolery" was created.

Anyone wanting to peruse the publication was charged a nickel.

As a member of the Debate Club, The Philomathean Society... [students chattering] Paul and the other members were lampooned in a cartoon.

While Deacon Dunbar sits with his usual, dignified restraint, other members are shown vigorously arguing which is the butt end of the goat.

[students chattering] narrator: Popular with his fellow Philomatheans, Paul became the club's president at a time when his poetry was already being published by "The Dayton Herald."

- Dayton was a genuinely influential place, He was able to get a high school education which, to my mind, is something like an equivalent of the first two years of university these days.

And he read so much, in terms of 19th-century literature, that I found an essay by him written on William Makepeace Thackeray.

Well, nobody remembers who Thackeray is these days, and that, to my mind, was absolutely amazing, that this kid, 17, 18, 19 even, was writing on somebody that important.

narrator: Unlike Paul Dunbar, Orville Wright became bored with high school and dropped out.

He and his older brother, Wilbur, already exhibiting their passion for many things mechanical, had built their own printing press and were publishing a newspaper known as the "West Side News."

In a letter looking back many years, Orville Wright wrote... - When he was 18 and I was 19, we published a weekly newspaper for the people of his race.

We published it as long as our financial resources permitted, which was not for long.

narrator: The "Dayton Tattler" lasted three issues, but its 18-year-old editor did his best to rouse the city's African American population, condemning the Democratic Party's policy of buying Black votes.

- The agitation of deeds is tenfold more effectual than the agitation of words.

For your own sake, for the sake of Heaven and the race, stop saying and go to doing.

narrator: Grateful to Orville for having supported this venture, Paul expressed his appreciation in verse.

- Orville Wright is out of sight In the printing business.

No other mind is half so bright As his'n is.

narrator: On June 16, 1891, Daytonians gathered at the Grand Opera House for Central High School's commencement.

The lyrics to the class song were, of course, penned by Paul.

But Paul's aspirations extended far beyond commemorative verse.

In a letter written in 1895, he articulated what he termed, "an all-absorbing desire."

- To be able to interpret my own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that after all, we are more human than African.

narrator: After graduation, lacking the funds to attend nearby Wilberforce University, the first college to be owned and operated by African Americans, Paul searched for employment.

Mother Dunbar had no way of knowing that she would one day reside in a house that rivaled those owned by many of her employers... A home, purchased by Paul, that would become a state memorial and a Mecca for many of his admirers, among them a local youth named Willis "Bing" Davis.

Ironically, Bing Davis opted against attending Dayton's own predominantly Black Dunbar High School.

To play basketball for a man who had become his mentor, he went to Wilbur Wright High, where he was one of only five African Americans in his senior class.

- I'm one of the fortunate ones of many, I'm sure, in Dayton, because Dunbar came into my life very early.

It was woven in right from the beginning because as a young kid, we heard poems in the community and in the house by Dunbar.

narrator: Bing Davis has been an artist and educator for more than 60 years.

At an early age, he sought inspiration and validation from Paul Dunbar.

- I would go by the house just to be in that environment, and that was before it was a state memorial.

I can remember sitting on the steps and saying, "I wonder if he sat here, I wonder if he sat here."

Just to feel those spirits.

I remember one day looking up into the-- which was, I found later on, was his bedroom-- and I would often times tell him that I wanted to be an artist.

And once I saw-- I thought I saw him look out and give me a blessing, just a little smile.

But I was very much aware of Dunbar and his stature, both the dialect poems and his standard poems.

But he's always been an influence in my life because that was one African American in this community that I knew had excelled as an artist.

And when I looked up and told him, "I want to be an artist too," he did not say, "No."

narrator: As Paul continued his job search, he quickly learned that despite Dayton's abolitionist past, the color line was clearly drawn.

- The minute he graduated, racism kicked in.

He had this remarkable experience at Central High which really was very atypical of what young Black men in America could expect to encounter.

And he realized that as soon as he graduated.

narrator: While white-owned newspapers were willing to publish Paul's writing, regular employment was another matter.

[steam whistling] Dispirited, Dunbar accepted a job as a janitor at the rapidly expanding National Cash Register Company.

Paul was one of more than 30 African American men on the custodial staff at NCR, but the physical demands were too tiring for his fragile frame.

He left after a short while.

Next, Paul applied for a clerical position at the office of attorney Charles Dustin, who later recounted... - There was nothing in my control that I could give him except the position of elevator boy in the Callahan block, of which I was Mr. Callahan's agent.

One day, I found that he was trying his hand on a class of literature I did not suspect he had any fancy for, Wild West stories.

narrator: Written in a Western dialect and containing no characters of color, "The Tenderfoot" was purchased by the Kellogg Syndicate of Chicago for $6.

As an elevator boy, Dunbar was earning $4 per week for 11-hour days.

Meanwhile, the bicycle craze of the 1890s had begun.

[light piano music] ♪ ♪ In response to the boom, the Wright Brothers had opened their own shop, and were now selling, renting, and repairing bicycles.

- When Paul was working on the elevator, he was living at various distances because they moved often.

And the Wright brothers had a trade-in, a Viking that was built in Toledo, and they gave Paul that bicycle.

Paul used that bicycle to ride to his job when he was working downtown on the elevator.

narrator: Though the Wright Brothers would soon manufacture bicycles of their own design, they still maintained their printing business, and Paul had them produce handbills to promote his appearances.

In the summer of 1892, Paul was invited to present the welcoming address at the Western Association of Writers meeting, which was held in Dayton on June 27th, his 20th birthday.

Present that day was Dr. James Newton Matthews, a physician and poet who praised Paul's performance in a letter to the "Indianapolis Journal."

[crowd chattering] - Great was the surprise of the audience to see, stepping lightly down the aisle, a slender Negro lad, as Black as the core of Cheops' pyramid.

He ascended the rostrum with the coolness and the dignity of a cultured entertainer.

- Westward the course of empire takes its way, so Berkeley said.

[applause] - He was applauded to the echo between the stanzas, and heartily encored.

He then disappeared from the hall as suddenly as he had entered it, none believing it possible that one of his age and color could produce a thing of such evident merit.

narrator: Matthews' letter, reprinted in newspapers around the nation, introduced Paul Dunbar to James Whitcomb Riley, at the time America's most-loved poet.

Riley, whose sentimental, vernacular verse captured the cadence of Central Indiana, was known as the "Hoosier Poet," and was at the peak of popularity.

his endorsement helped garner Paul a greater number of speaking engagements, but not enough notoriety to quit his job at the Callahan Building.

His two half brothers had both left home, leaving Paul to provide for himself and his mother.

James Newton Matthews lamented Paul's plight.

- Poor Dunbar.

He deserves a better fate.

Dayton should be proud of him, and yet, he is chained like a galley slave to the ropes of a dingy elevator at starvation wages.

narrator: But Paul's readings were beginning to reap some modest reward.

He even felt confident enough to purchase a small house and to seek a publisher for a book of poetry.

The Wright Brothers' father, Milton, was the bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, so Paul approached a publishing house operated by the diocese.

Dunbar was disheartened when he was informed that the company was not interested in financing a royalty arrangement.

But the firm's foreman, William Blocher, agreed to loan Paul the funds.

"Oak and Ivy" was printed just before Christmas of 1892, and lovingly dedicated to Mother Dunbar.

Years later, in a collection of stories, Paul would not forget to honor the man who made his first book possible.

Paul was now a self-published author, but still working 11-hour days as an elevator boy.

- Dunbar's elevator is a-- first of all, it's wonderful symbol, when you put it up against the idea of the caged bird and here he is in this elevator, and he's at the beck and call of everybody who...

But they ring for him, and meanwhile, he's sitting in there, he's reading, and he's writing.

You know, you think, okay, I've got books to sell, they get in my elevator, I got them all the way to the top.

And if I don't get them on the way up, I'm gonna get them on the way down.

[laughs] You know.

So I mean, I think that the elevator as a symbol is not so much ambivalent, but indicative of all the kind of problems that a writer faces at any time, regardless of race.

I mean, he has an audience.

He had a captive audience.

He needs time to write.

The job gave him time to write.

narrator: One of Paul's captive customers was Charlotte Reeve Conover, whose husband worked at the Callahan Building.

It was Mrs. Conover who presented a copy of "Oak and Ivy" to George Washington Cable, and arranged for Dunbar to meet the son of slaveholders who also wrote in dialect, documenting Creole life and the multiracial nature of his native New Orleans.

Among the more than 50 poems included in "Oak and Ivy" was one called "Sympathy."

Dunbar would never republish this apprentice piece, but he would later reuse the title and express a similar sentiment, but in lines that have become his most immortal.

- "I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, "When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,-- "When he beats his bars and he would be free; "It is not a carol of joy or glee, "But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, "But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings-- I know why the caged bird sings!"

narrator: Herb Martin is a scholar and poet who grew up hearing Dunbar's verse when he was a boy in Birmingham, Alabama.

Having decided that Herb bore a resemblance to the writer whose poems they were made to memorize in school, his classmates would tease him.

- And so I suppressed Dunbar all those years, and then, finally, when we came north to Ohio, he was completely in my long, long, long-term memory somewhere, and then I realized I had an interesting connection with him.

And it's at that point that I went back and relearned the dialect, and how to say those curious words on the page, and found the accurate pronunciation of them.

"Towser, you stop that barking, you hear me?

[high-pitched voice] "Mandy, make that child keep still.

"Don't you hear the echoes are calling "from the valleys to the hill?

"Let me listen.

I can hear it through "the brush of angels' wings.

Soft and sweet."

♪ Swing low ♪ ♪ Sweet chariot ♪ narrator: Paul's readings at church gatherings and civic clubs throughout Ohio and Indiana continued to increase.

[choral music] When the famous Fisk University Jubilee Singers came to Dayton, Dunbar recited several poems to an audience of more than 600.

"The Dayton Herald" hired Paul to write a feature about the Old Soldiers' Home, and he made an emotional return to his father's final resting place.

The location of "The Herald's" next assignment, however, could not be reached by local streetcar.

Chicago had been selected to host the 1893 World's Fair, and Paul had quit the Callahan Building to be "The Herald's" correspondent.

[light piano music] But sending dispatches back to Dayton would not cover all his expenses.

♪ ♪ He first found work as a waiter in a downtown hotel, and then as a lavatory attendant on the fairgrounds, when the world's Columbian Exposition opened.

♪ ♪ The White City consisted of 14 exquisite Beaux-Arts buildings and more than 200 other elaborate but temporary structures situated on 630 acres, complete with canals, lakes, and lagoons, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted.

♪ ♪ Held to honor the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, the Fair attracted more than 27 million visitors at a time when the population of the United States was just 65 million.

By chance, a friend introduced Paul to Joseph Douglass, a classical violinist who was performing at the Fair.

Joseph, it turned out, was the grandson of abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass.

In a letter to his mother, Paul wrote of his first encounter with the aging lion of Civil Rights.

- "And this is Paul Dunbar," he said, shaking hands and patting me on the shoulder.

- I think that Frederick Douglass was a father figure for every African American intellectual that lived in the 19th century, including Dunbar.

Frederick Douglass, of course, his own example, of, of course, becoming an abolitionist, forthright thinker, and writer.

Frederick Douglass sort of mentored Dunbar and provided opportunities.

narrator: Frederick Douglass had served as U.S. Minister to Haiti, and was overseeing that country's activities at the Fair.

Douglass offered the impoverished poet a job as his assistant at the Haitian Pavilion, paying Paul's salary out of his own pocket.

Exhibitions celebrating the contributions of African Americans had been excluded from the Fair.

The only Negro of note with an official forum was former slave Nancy Green, who, as the first Aunt Jemima, drew large crowds for her demonstrations of pancake mix.

In response, African American leaders, including anti-lynching crusader Ida B.

Wells, produced the pamphlet that editorialized against the apartheid that pervaded the American South and catalogued Black achievements since slavery.

Frederick Douglass derided the staged, sensationalized presentation of the men, women, and children from the African kingdom of Dahomey, who were among the 46 nations represented.

- Apparently, they want us to be represented by the music and by the civilization of the Dahomey.

They have filled the Fair with the sound of barbaric music and with the sights of barbaric rights and deny to colored Americans any representation.

narrator: At Colored Americans Day, an event organized in response to the Fair's omission, Paul Dunbar recited several poems before the 2,500 people who had filled Festival Hall.

Frederick Douglass told an acquaintance... - I regard Paul Dunbar as the most promising young colored man in America.

narrator: Among the many who were taken by Dunbar's performance was a young teacher named Rebekah Baldwin.

Rebekah Baldwin was also a confidant of Frederick Douglass.

- I saw your good friend Douglass not long ago.

He says you are despondent.

I, too, have noticed that, my dear Paul.

narrator: Disturbed by Dunbar's melancholy, Douglass extended an invitation to his hilltop home overlooking Washington, D.C. - It would do my heart good just to have you there and take care of you.

I've got one fiddler, my grandson, and now I want a poet.

To have you up there in my old study, just working away at your poetry.

narrator: But the 75-year-old Douglass was less than two years away from death, and Paul never visited Cedar Hill.

[somber piano music] When word of Douglass' passing reached Dunbar, he stayed up all night to compose a tribute to the old warrior.

- We weep for him, but we have touched his hand And felt the magic of his presence nigh.

The current that he sent throughout the land, The kindling spirit of his battle cry.

♪ ♪ narrator: Winning the praise of Frederick Douglass elevated Paul Dunbar in the eyes of many.

But it did not ease his financial fears.

The United States was now in the midst of an economic panic, the likes of which would not be seen again until the Great Depression of the 1930s.

- I have no funds, and a foreclosure is threatened on the little home I have been paying for through the Building and Loan Association.

narrator: A young Toledo attorney named Charles Thatcher had recently befriended Paul, and it was a last-minute loan from Thatcher that enabled Paul and his mother to avoid eviction.

When his replacement at the Callahan Building quit, Paul accepted his old job back.

In the spring of 1895, after nine years of rejection, "Century Magazine," the most prestigious periodical of the day, accepted three of Dunbar's poems.

The first to appear in print was "Negro Love Song," inspired by Paul's brief stint as a waiter in a Chicago hotel, just prior to the World's Fair.

Anticipating increased business due to the Fair, the hotel had hired additional waiters, who sometimes had little to do.

While some wait staff rushed about, others stood idly by the entrance to the kitchen, sometimes bragging about their romantic conquests.

Those with customers waiting for their food would call out, "Jump back, honey!"

to those who blocked the swinging doors.

- "I seen my lady home las' night, "Jump back, honey, jump back.

"I hel' huh han' an' sque'z it tight, "Oh, jump back, honey, jump back.

"I hyeahd huh sigh a little sigh, "I seen a light gleam f'om huh eye, "An' a smile go flittin' by "Hey, jump back, honey, jump back.

"I hyeahd de win' blow thoo de pine, "Jump back, honey, jump back.

"The Mockin'-bird was singin' fine, "Jump back, honey, jump back.

"An' my hea't was beatin' so, "When I reached my lady's do', "Dat I couldn't ba' to go-- "Jump back, honey, jump back.

"Now I put my ahm aroun' huh wais', "Jump back, honey, jump back.

"I raised huh lips an' took a tase, "Jump back, honey, jump back.

"Love me, honey, love me true?

"Love me well ez I love you?

"An' she answe'd, ''Cose I do' Jump back, honey, jump back."

[laughter and applause] narrator: In "Negro Love Song," Paul had written playfully of his coworkers' amorous activities.

His good friend, Bud Burns, now at medical school in Cleveland, noted that Paul himself had always had a good supply of the fairer sex.

Paul had recently ended a serious relationship with a Dayton woman named Maud Clark, who chided him for his drinking.

- Won't you give up that cursed drink, Paul?

Unless you alter your ways, your race will never have cause to be proud of their poet.

Take the mask off, Paul, and be your own true self.

You are not on stage.

narrator: Not long after breaking things off with Maud, he came across an issue of an African American magazine called "The Monthly Review."

Upon seeing the photo of a fellow writer named Alice Ruth Moore, he reached out to her in a letter.

- You will pardon my boldness in addressing you, I hope, and let my interest in your work be my excuse.

narrator: Dunbar mailed his letter to Alice Moore, care of the Boston-based magazine, just before moving to Indianapolis to serve as the temporary editor of a Black newspaper called "The Indianapolis World."

More than a month passed before he received a reply, posted from New Orleans.

- Dear sir, your letter was handed to me at a singularly inopportune moment.

The house was on fire.

narrator: The fire at the home Alice shared with her mother and sister was extinguished quickly enough, but Dunbar's letters would spark a stronger flame.

Alice Ruth Moore was born to a mulatto mother, who had been a slave, and an absentee father, who was either white or of mixed race.

Educated at historically Black Straight University, she was a 20-year-old teacher and the women's columnist for "Journal of the Lodge," a local African American newspaper.

Alice came from the Creole culture of New Orleans, found in the fiction of native son, George Washington Cable.

Many light-skinned Creoles identified strongly with their French or Spanish descendants, but looked down on their African ancestry.

Alice never hid her Black heritage, but she was acutely aware that a caste system of color existed, based on the shade of one's skin.

From his desk at "The World," Paul carefully courted Alice, sending her poems and seeing to it that one of her stories was published in the paper before his time there ended.

He also used his editorial influence to promote his own performances.

In August, Dunbar traveled to Toledo to recite for a rather unusual audience.

When he arrived at the train station, he was met by a carriage and taken to the Toledo State Hospital for the Insane.

When Paul arrived at the asylum, and alighted from the carriage, his host looked out the window.

- Thank God, he's Black.

- He was interested in the fact that he was not a mulatto.

Any time a Black person-- a nominally Black person achieved anything, if they were partly white, that was the white part doing it.

narrator: Dunbar's host was Dr. Henry Tobey, superintendent of the asylum, who had praised Paul in a letter.

- I have read your poems again and again, and the more I read them, the more I recognize the divinity that stirs within you.

narrator: Opened in 1888, the Toledo State Hospital was the first in America to forego the prison-like appearance of similar institutions.

Instead of living quarters that were similar to cells, most patients lived in a complex of cottages.

- In treatment, we have sought to substitute kindness for force, and to omit, to the farthest extent possible, all restraint, and to give our people all the amusements we could devise.

narrator: Dunbar's reading was one of those prescribed amusements, but it also marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship between Tobey and the young poet.

In September, Dunbar returned to the Asylum to recite for an expanded audience that included Charles Thatcher, the Toledo attorney who had rescued Paul's home from foreclosure.

Thatcher and Dr. Tobey decided to co-finance the printing of a second volume of poetry and allow Paul to keep all of the proceeds.

Dunbar set to work on a new manuscript.

[upbeat orchestral music] Also that September, the Cotton States Exposition of 1895 opened in Atlanta, complete with a composition by the March King, John Philip Sousa.

♪ ♪ The African tribe from the kingdom of Dahomey, which had attracted large crowds in Chicago, was, once again, in residence.

But unlike the World's Fair, where the achievements of African Americans were ignored, Atlanta did include a Negro pavilion.

December 26th was designated as Negro Day at the exposition, but opening day, September 18th, provided a watershed moment, when a former slave named Booker T. Washington delivered a speech that addressed what was commonly called "The Negro Problem."

- Well one of the major questions that African Americans had asked themselves is, what is the best way for African Americans to uplift themselves from their second-class status?

Booker T. Washington thought that it was best to be an accommodationist.

And in his Atlanta Compromise speech, he argued that African Americans could be as separate as the five fingers of the hand and still be equal.

So he was an economic separatist who argued that African Americans should not endeavor to gain higher education, but secondary technical education.

Building, maybe being brick masons, hairstylists, and things of that particular nature.

narrator: Washington's speech catapulted him into the leadership role left vacant by the death of Frederick Douglass less than a year earlier.

Washington was President of Tuskegee Institute, a school that reflected his philosophy that African Americans should develop vocational skills in agriculture, the domestic arts, and construction.

Situated on an old plantation, students and faculty literally built the Tuskegee campus, even making the bricks that were used for the buildings, including the Oaks, Booker T. Washington's residence.

"No race can prosper," Washington said, "Till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."

Poet Paul Dunbar was still scarcely known outside the Midwest when Washington made his conciliatory speech.

But soon, Dunbar would attain enough notoriety to counter Washington's words in an essay.

- I do not believe that a young man, whose soul is turbulent with a message which should be given to the world through the pulpit or press... [hammer dinging metal] Should shut his mouth and shoe horses.

narrator: In his first book, Paul's dialect poems had been intertwined with his standard verse.

With "Majors and Minors," the "Minors" were segregated in a section called "Humor and Dialect."

Dedicated once again to his mother, this book contained, within its pages, perhaps Dunbar's best-known poem.

- We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while we wear the mask.

- "We Wear the Mask" has no racial signifiers.

It could be anybody's mask.

And I have defied students to read that poem and tell me it is not them.

I'm talking white students.

Tell me that you do not put a mask on.

Of course we do.

It's just a poem about the human condition.

narrator: Compared to "We Wear the Mask," another poem contained in "Majors and Minors," was a mere trifle, but it also addressed the human condition.

- Know you, winds that blow your course Down the verdant valleys, That somewhere you must, perforce, Kiss the brow of Alice?

When her gentle face you find, Kiss it softly, naughty wind.

narrator: With each exchange, Paul and Alice's letters were growing more familiar and affectionate.

Alice Ruth Moore's first book, a thin volume of stories, sketches, and poems, came out prior to Paul's new collection.

A frustrating, but frequently made mistake was the misspelling of Paul's middle name on the cover, the title page, and in one other location.

- Dunbar did something very important in 1896 when he published his book, "Majors and Minors."

He broke one of the cardinal rules of poetry of the 1800s.

And that was, he published his own photograph as the frontispiece to his book.

narrator: With freshly printed copies, Dunbar made another trip to Toledo, at the urging of Dr. Tobey, who gave Paul a list of prospective buyers.

One evening, weary of hocking his book, Paul treated himself to a performance of "Shore Acres," starring James Herne.

When Paul admitted that he had gone to see Herne's play, Dr. Tobey sent Dunbar to the Boody Hotel, to speak with the night clerk, and leave a copy of "Majors and Minors" for Herne, soon to become known as "The American Ibsen."

From the touring company's next stop came a letter from Herne.

- While at Toledo, a copy of your poems was left at my hotel.

Your poems are wonderful.

I shall acquaint William Dean Howells with them.

I wish you all the good fortune that you can wish for yourself.

narrator: When Dunbar returned to Dayton on June 27th, his 24th birthday, a note from Dr. Tobey was waiting.

- Get a copy of "Harper's Weekly" and see what William Dean Howells has to say about you.

- William Howells had many connections within the United States.

He was the "Dean of American Letters."

He could end careers as easily as he began careers.

As soon as this review was published, a lot of people heard about it because, actually, that issue of "Harper's Weekly" was also discussing a presidential election.

And so, it was on stands everywhere, and it sold out.

So it was in that, by chance, that all the stars lined up, and Dunbar became a national phenomenon.

narrator: But William Dean Howells' life-changing review also came with a cost.

- Once that review by Howells set the ball rolling, everyone else followed in line and began to reiterate exactly what Howells was saying.

And to some extent, what Howells said was racist, it was stereotypical, it was a very narrow view of what Dunbar could do.

narrator: Once again staying with Dr. Tobey and his family on the grounds of the Toledo Asylum, Paul contemplated his sudden celebrity.

The consensus among Paul's patrons, which now included Toledo's four-term mayor, Brand Whitlock, was that he needed to capitalize on William Dean Howells' review.

It was decided that Major James Pond would be approached about managing Paul's speaking engagements.

Pond's Lyceum Theatre Lecture Bureau had coordinated Mark Twain's 1884-1885 tour, as well as the North American stage of the 1895-1896 world tour that Twain undertook to climb out of debt.

And he would soon supervise the first U.S. tour by a young writer and Army officer named Winston Churchill, who called the fast-talking Major Pond a "vulgar Yankee impresario."

With a new suit purchased for him by Dr. Tobey and Mayor Whitlock, Paul Dunbar boarded the train for New York.

After Paul received favorable reviews at a reading, Major Pond accepted him as a client.

Pond also selected the firm of Dodd, Mead from several suitors to publish a new edition of Paul's poems.

Paul's benefactor, Charles Thatcher, was vacationing in Rhode Island and arranged for several recitals at Narragansett Pier.

While resting in Thatcher's room at the Mathewson Hotel, Dunbar was asked to give a private reading for the First Lady of the Confederacy.

- I recited yesterday for Mrs. Jefferson Davis, and she was delighted.

The Southern people here have eaten me up wonderfully.

narrator: Next, Major Pond took Dunbar to Far Rockaway, to the family cottage of the literary lion who had changed his life.

Convivial and encouraging, William Dean Howells spoke of his own Ohio upbringing, and agreed to write the introduction to Paul's new book.

Just six months after Howells' review in "Harper's," "Lyrics of Lowly Life," Dunbar's first commercially published book, appeared.

Howells' introduction still proclaimed Paul as the "Bard of the Negro race."

But the racial stereotypes now seemed more measured.

- The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood to come for the work of a poet because he is Black, because his father and mother were slaves.

narrator: Major Pond had sent copies of the little green book to London, and when it garnered favorable reviews, he urged Paul to go abroad.

It was decided that Major Pond's disagreeable daughter, Edith, would manage Paul's engagements.

Dunbar's newfound fame would come nearly two years after he had posted his first letter to Alice Ruth Moore.

They still had not met face-to-face, but their missives had grown more and more intimate.

The lengthy courtship and correspondence between Paul and Alice would one day become the inspiration for a stage play... [soft dramatic music] ♪ ♪ And also, for one man's operatic odyssey.

♪ ♪ both: ♪ Love breedeth love ♪ - ♪ Be thou but true ♪ - ♪ Breeds love ♪ - ♪ And soon thy love shall ♪ narrator: After poring over more than 300 letters between Paul and Alice, Steven Allen took on the daunting task of interpreting the complexities of their romance through music.

- The color line was a problem there.

Alice's mother made sure that she was the crème de crème, and being Creole, you had a higher standard, being of a lighter hue, a lighter color.

But Patricia did not like and was just totally loathing of the thought that Dunbar would be seeking her daughter.

He being, and I quote in the opera, "three shades past midnight."

[chuckles] You know, being that dark and his-- you know, her daughter being, you know, a good stock of the Creole hue, fair skin, well educated.

What would you need with this Dunbar fellow anyway?

And I think he's the type that chase women anyway.

And, you know, what would you need with him?

- ♪ Wait, who's this?

♪ ♪ My God, she's beautiful ♪ ♪ Alice Ruth Moore ♪ narrator: On February 5, 1897, the night before Paul's departure for London, a party was held in his honor in Brooklyn, at the home of social reformer Victoria Earle Matthews.

But the only guest Paul Dunbar spent time with was Alice Ruth Moore.

- Alice comes out with this bouquet of violets on her wrist.

And Paul, of course, is just struck.

This is the first time that I've seen you, and I felt like I've known you all my life.

And he proposes right there on the spot.

narrator: The following day, Dunbar departed for Liverpool on the Umbria.

[light piano music] [ship horn blows] ♪ ♪ In a letter written at sea, Paul told his mother... - Now don't laugh, but Alice and I are engaged.

You know that is what I have longed for.

I know that you won't object to this.

♪ ♪ narrator: Among those who welcomed Dunbar to London was the American Ambassador, John Hay.

As a young man, Hay had been a pioneer of dialect poetry, with his "Pike County Ballads" in 1871.

Hay arranged for Paul to recite at the Savage Club, whose members were writers, actors, and artists.

Following his performance, Paul was invited to tea with Henry Morton Stanley, the man who had presumed to have found missionary Dr. Livingstone in Africa.

- It appears that I am the most interviewed man in London, the best papers having sent reporters to me.

narrator: One American correspondent observed... - Paul Dunbar, the Negro poet, is being lionized in London in most flattering fashion.

The color line is not drawn in English society, and the colored versifier, being the latest literary novelty, is much sought for receptions, garden parties, and similar gatherings.

narrator: It soon dawned on Dunbar that in some circles, he was indeed being seen as a curiosity.

- I see now, very clearly, that Mr. Howells has done irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse.

- America really kind of stereotyped him as being this blackface minstrel character.

So his hope for London was to be recognized as an American poet.

Although some of the tours were successful, he was really, kind of, burned by Edith Pond.

narrator: Requests for Paul to perform continued into mid-June.

But then, they stopped.

The reading season was over, and London turned its attention to Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Celebration.

When the bookings dried up, Edith Pond departed for Paris, leaving the bill for Paul's dingy lodgings unpaid.

[soft piano music] Abandoned by Edith Pond, Paul found himself in financial straits.

Ambassador Hay again reached out to Paul, introducing him to composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Soon to achieve fame with "Song of Hiawatha," a trilogy based on Longfellow's epic poem, Coleridge-Taylor set seven of Paul's poems to music for what became known as "African Romances."

And they collaborated on an opera called "Dream Lovers."

Ambassador Hay arranged for a public performance in which Paul read his poetry and Coleridge-Taylor played several compositions.

When Edith Pond discovered that Dunbar had been giving recitations, she sought an injunction to prevent him from appearing without her sanction.

Dunbar also completed a large portion of his first novel and wrote an article about his impressions of England.

And he arranged for a British edition of "Lyrics of Lowly Life" with Chapman & Hall, the firm that had once published Charles Dickens.

But with money woes mounting, Paul had to return home.

When Edith Pond refused to buy him a ticket for the return journey, it was Dr. Tobey who cabled Paul the funds.

Always Paul's staunchest supporter, Tobey had also sent a copy of "Majors and Minors" to political leader Robert Ingersoll.

Known as "The Great Agnostic," Ingersoll was one of the most popular orators of his day.

- My Dear Dr. Tobey, at last I got the time to read the poems of Dunbar.

I have only time to say that Dunbar is a genius.

Now I ask, what can be done for him?

I would like to help.

narrator: On November 1, 1897, the new home of the Library of Congress opened its doors.

Designed and built in a decorative Beaux-Arts style, it was a marble palace of murals and mosaics, stucco reliefs and statuary.

Librarian of Congress John Russell Young had recently received a letter from orator Robert Ingersoll regarding Paul Dunbar.

- Dunbar is in England, and he is coming home.

He is crazy to read and to be in the company of books.

Can you give this young fellow a place in the Library?

narrator: By coincidence, Paul was now living in Washington, as a houseguest of Howard University professor Kelly Miller.

While waiting for word from Ingersoll, Paul was completing the novel he had begun overseas.

- While in England, he wrote a letter to Alice saying that he felt so liberated from racism that he often experienced in the United States, that he felt white.

"The Uncalled" was his first novel, but it does not have an African American protagonist.

And so, in many respects, Paul Laurence Dunbar was contesting or critiquing what Howells kind of asserted at that time, which was that African Americans have to portray their people in a certain way.

But Dunbar decided not to portray the race explicitly.

narrator: Also while in Washington, Dunbar was collaborating with composer Will Marion Cook, whom he had first met at the Chicago World's Fair.

Two years earlier, Cook had put music to Paul's poem, "Negro Love Song," transforming it into "Jump Back, Honey."

- ♪ Seen my lady home last night ♪ ♪ Jump back, honey, jump back ♪ ♪ Held her hand... ♪ narrator: Will Cook had convinced Paul to supply both the book and lyrics to a one-act musical called "Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk."

The "Cake Walk" was a carryover from the high-stepping dances developed by slaves, exaggerated movement that mocked the high society of their masters.

[light piano music] ♪ ♪ Far more refined, extremely elaborate versions of the "Cake Walk" had become a highlight of many traveling minstrel shows.

In plantation days, a cake was the customary prize awarded to the winning couple, giving rise to the expression, "Take the cake."

Many minstrels were whites wearing blackface, but there were African American companies as well.

♪ ♪ Will Cook's plan was to create a musical that would transport the "Cake Walk" from the world of gigantic tents and minstrelsy to Broadway.

♪ ♪ narrator: While Cook and Dunbar were creating "Clorindy," word came from Robert Ingersoll, who had succeeded in securing Paul a position at the Library of Congress.

Six days a week, Dunbar retrieved and reshelved scientific and medical books from the stacks.

He also had the honor of being the first poet to give a reading at the Library of Congress at the reading room for the blind.

Dunbar's time as an elevator boy back in Dayton is often assumed to be the inspiration for one of his most lasting poems in standard English.

But it was here, amidst the musty stacks and the stifling summer heat of Washington, that Dunbar felt truly caged.

The poem's last line would become the well-known title of another African American poet's autobiography.

- Where did "Caged Bird" come from?

That title?

- It came from a poem written by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

A Black male poet writing in the 1800s, and-- - Do you remember that?

- Yes.

It's called "Sympathy," the poem.

"I know what the caged bird feels, ah me.

"When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; "When the wind blows soft through the springing grass, "And the river flows like a sheet of glass; "When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, "And the faint perfume from its chalice steals-- "I know what the caged bird feels.

"I know why the caged bird beats its wing "Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; "For he must fly back to his perch and cling "When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; "And the blood still throbs in the old, old scars "And they pulse again with a keener sting-- "I know why he beats his wing!

"I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, "When its wings are bruised and its bosom sore,-- "It beats its bars and would be free; "It's not a carol of joy or glee, "But a prayer that it sends from its heart's deep core, "But a plea, that upward to Heaven it flings-- I know why the caged bird sings."

- That is a fantastic poem.

Fantastic poem.

narrator: Paul's $720-per-year salary allowed for a move to Le Droit Park, where his next-door neighbor was Civil Rights activist Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the National League of Colored Women.

Alice Moore had moved to New York to teach school and to work for Victoria Earle Matthews, the woman who had hosted the gathering where Paul and Alice had secretly become engaged.

Matthews had founded the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for poor Black women recently arrived from the South, seeking a better life.

Now a teacher in the Brooklyn public schools, and an important staff member at the Mission, these commitments kept Alice from joining Paul in Washington, who wrote not too reassuringly... - Liquor seldom passes my lips.

I've not given way to Bacchus, nor Venus either.

Though the temptation to both is strong.

narrator: Because editors were clamoring for his plantation stories, Paul would visit the Freedmans Village in Arlington, Virginia, a self-contained colony of ex-slaves.

Here, Paul found men and women who were more than willing to talk about their days of enslavement, often doing so in dialect.

Paul's reworking of such tales was routinely interpreted as falling squarely within the plantation tradition.

- Now, the plantation tradition was a genre of literature that became popular after the Civil War, when white writers, such as Joel Chandler Harris, whose "Uncle Remus" tales became very popular in the 1880s and maintain some popularity today.

It was a kind of writing in which white writers depicted the 1840s, the time of slavery, with a revisionist lens.

In other words, slavery was seen as a time in which slaves were happy, in which masters were largely kind.

It was a sentimental and nostalgic way of writing.

narrator: But Dunbar's short fiction wasn't simply a sentimental depiction of slavery.

- He understood that, yes, there was brutality and there was tremendous hardship in the world that his parents had lived in.

But there was also a sense of community.

There was a vibrant home life.

There were families, multigenerational groups that appreciated each other and celebrated each other.

He wasn't going to allow white racist writers to have control over how that world was represented in literature.

- The short stories are magnificent, and at least three of them are wonderful examples of trickster tales.

One is set at a racetrack, another one is about political chicanery in a little, small town.

Another one's about a con man who comes to a town and has this wonderful scheme to fleece people of money.

And at the same time, I think he understood the profound ways in which humor could be instructive, and corrective, and provocative, and subversive.

narrator: When Dodd, Mead agreed to publish a collection of Dunbar's stories, he was excited that Edward Kemble was chosen to provide drawings.

Kemble had illustrated the poems of James Whitcomb Riley, one of Paul's early heroes.

as well as the first edition of Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn."

But Kemble had also done drawings for Thomas Nelson Page, whose work perpetuated the mythology of benevolent masters and simpleminded slaves.

Kemble became well-known for his renderings of postbellum African Americans, which sometimes evoked sympathy.

But he often crossed the line into cruel caricature and sickening stereotypes.

Dunbar was still pleased to be working with this famous artist, and would later own some original drawings.

Still secretly engaged and living apart, Alice wrote... - Suppose we marry quietly, say nothing of it to anyone, and live apart for a short while, until we are both ready to be together for good.

narrator: On March 6, 1898, Paul and Alice were married in New York.

- It had to remain a secret because Alice was teaching school, and the rule at that time was that only unmarried women could be schoolteachers.

So they kept it secret, but then, finally, they decided this was too difficult, and they agonized over it.

They made it public, she resigned her position and then went to live with him.

narrator: When Alice joined Paul in Washington, she was also welcomed to her new home by Mother Dunbar.

- Paul was her baby.

They had an inseparable relationship.

They lived together for quite some time.

Even after the couple were married, Matilda lived in the same home.

And Paul made sure that he took very good care of his mother.

She was relatively overprotected and as far as the point as wanting a better life for herself, really.

She had struggled enough.

And she felt as if Paul's success was part of her labor.

And she was due that.

narrator: Once they made their marriage public, Paul and Alice set about establishing themselves among Washington's Black elite.

- They saw themselves as a literary couple.

They liked to think of themselves in the Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning mold.

There was a definite air of storybook romance about their whole union that they had internalized and created.

But that was also played up by everybody who wrote about them in the media.

So in many ways, they were living out both a private and a public relationship.

narrator: In April, Dodd, Mead published "Folks From Dixie."

Dedicated to Henry Tobey, the book sold well and was reviewed as, "The first expression in national prose fiction of the inner life of the American Negro."

Soon, another Negro writer, Charles Chesnutt, would publish his first collection of stories.

Because of subject matter such as color and class within the Black community, Chesnutt wrote to far less acclaim.

After his publication in "Lippincott's Magazine," "The Uncalled," Dunbar's first novel, appeared in book form soon after "Folks From Dixie."

But the struggles of Paul's white protagonist wrestling with his spirituality did not please most critics, one of whom wrote... - Mr. Dunbar should write about Negros.

narrator: On July 5, 1898, "Clorindy," Dunbar's collaboration with Will Cook, became the first performance of an all-Black musical comedy above Broadway.

Paul attended the premiere at the Casino Theater's roof garden, but was disillusioned when he discovered that most of his dialogue had been eliminated in favor of more dance numbers.

- ♪ There was once a great assemblage ♪ ♪ Of the cullud population ♪ ♪ All the cullud swells was there ♪ narrator: "Clorindy brought the "Cake Walk" craze to the Great White Way.

It also acquainted Paul Dunbar with nightlife in the Tenderloin.

Infamous for its bars, brothels, and bribery, the district had been so named by a policeman who, after transferring from another precinct, noted that he could now afford to switch from eating chuck steak to tenderloin.

In letters, Alice urged Paul to stay away from this notorious neighborhood.

- She is telling him to not stay in the Tenderloin with all those Black musicians and show people.

When he goes to New York, she wants him to stay at a first-class white hostelry.

"You cheapen yourself too often by being too friendly "with inferior folks, and your wife doesn't want it."

[crowd chattering] narrator: Dunbar's work on "Clorindy" was a far cry from the libretto he had written with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and much closer to the original blackface tradition that started in the 1830s.

A white performer named T.D.

Rice became the best known of these early minstrels.

Wearing burnt cork blackface, he danced about the stage, singing a slave song he had adapted and renamed "Jump Jim Crow."

[jaunty fiddle music] After the failure of reconstruction, African Americans would be forced to surrender what modest ground they had gained, and endure for decades what became known as separate but so-called "equal" Jim Crow Laws.

[bell ringing] In 1892, in an act of civil disobedience, a man named Homer Plessy, of 1/8 African descent, bought a first-class train ticket in New Orleans, and refused to move to the "colored car."

Plessy lost his challenge when Louisiana's Separate Car Act was upheld by State Supreme Court Judge John Ferguson.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson, clearing the way for legal segregation.

A frequent traveler, Dunbar was constantly reminded that his celebrity could not always insulate him from the indignities of Jim Crow.

- He never wrote about encountering the dirty, awful, hot smoking cars that were designated for Black passengers, particularly after the passage of Plessy v. Ferguson.

But we do know the times when he says "I wasn't put in the Jim Crow car."

And he sort of brags to his mother in a letter that he was able to avoid the Jim Crow car.

narrator: With the rise and spread of Jim Crow came a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and an increase in the number of lynchings of Black men and women.

In November, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, where African Americans were an almost 2/3 majority, white supremacists burned the offices of the state's only Black newspaper, killing more than a dozen residents.

Although a mob of 2,000 whites had committed murder and mayhem, the cover of "Collier's Weekly" featured an illustration that showed only Black citizens engaged in acts of violence.

Paul Dunbar responded with a dispatch that appeared in a number of newspapers.

- For so long, the Black man believed that he is an American citizen that he will not easily be convinced to the contrary.

[tense music] ♪ ♪ It will take more than the burnings and the lynching, both North and South.

- You're at the beginning of what is more than a 50-year-long campaign against lynching.

You see in Dunbar, a figure who understands that, in fact, the problems of race relations aren't regional, they're in fact national.

And so with that in mind, he reads the Wilmington Race Riots as comparable to the kinds of outrages, the kinds of lynchings that are going on in places like Illinois, in places like Ohio.

[crows cawing] narrator: As Dunbar's reputation continued to rise, his always fragile health was worsening.

Unable to cope with the stale confines of the book stacks, he resigned his position at the Library.

In early 1899, "Lyrics of the Hearthside" appeared.

Included in this collection was one of Dunbar's most tender poems.

[banjo music] ♪ ♪ - "Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes, "Come to yo' pappy "an' set on his lap.

"What you been doin', son, makin' san' pies?

Look at dat bib-- you's es du'ty ez me."

narrator: Phillip Cherry's passion for Dunbar's poetry began in 1975 in the form of a challenge from his father.

- My dad gave me the book, "The Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar," asked me to memorize the poem "The Party."

And I realized that I needed to start working on the poem, and I opened the book and began to look at the poetry, and I realized that I did not understand how to read it because it was written in a dialect that I had not seen before.

So I was getting to memorize that that was the first Dunbar piece that I memorized.

My father, unfortunately, passed away before I had a chance to recite it for him, but it lit a desire in my heart to share these poems with as many kids and as many people as I can.

[children laughing] We just had one scrumptious time.

♪ ♪ narrator: Paul had dedicated "Lyrics of the Hearthside" to Alice.

"Keeping up with the Brownings," Alice's second book of sketches and stories, was also published by Dodd, Mead, and, in turn, devoted to Paul.

But after being bedridden for more than a month, Dunbar was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Paul and Alice traveled by train to Broadheads Bridge in the Catskills, where Paul could convalesce, with a waterfall just outside his window.

Bud Burns, now a doctor, and returned from serving in the 9th Ohio Volunteers during the Spanish-American War, came to check on his friend.

Paul regained enough strength to resume writing, and he was pleased when he learned that a special edition of his poetry would be published in time for Christmas.

"Poems of Cabin and Field" contained eight of Paul's previously published poems, illustrated by an amateur camera club, based at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia.

Like Tuskegee Institute, Hampton stressed trade and industrial skills for African Americans as well as Native Americans.

- The Camera Club's illustrations of Paul Laurence Dunbar's books became extremely popular.

They're largely credited with having greatly increased the popularity of Paul Laurence Dunbar's work because they were such attractive volumes.

There was a nostalgic impulse to the founding of the Camera Club from its beginning.

They were trying to capture a life that they believed was on the verge of passing into history.

It was largely white, although there were some Black members of the Camera Club.

It's safe for us to assume that if he had been uncomfortable with their representation of his poems, he wouldn't have given permission because in some cases, he didn't give permission.

narrator: Club members were seeking to reform images of African Americans in popular culture, especially the demeaning depictions by Edward Kemble, the illustrator of three of Dunbar's short story collections.

- And the Camera Club specifically singled out Kemble for his caricatures of African Americans and stated that they wanted to present fair-minded and accurate renderings of African Americans and African American culture.

narrator: Of the six volumes produced by the club, the first three were collaborations.

- And then the last three books were published by an individual photographer who had been a member of the Hampton Institute Camera Club, Leigh Richmond Miner, who, for my money, is really one of the great unsung photographers of African American culture at the turn of the century.

[train chugging] narrator: After their summer in the Catskills, still seeking to ease Paul's pain, the couple headed west, with Matilda in tow.

Arriving in Denver, Colorado, Paul wrote to a friend... - Well, it is something to sit down under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, even if one only goes there to die.

narrator: Paul's fame as a writer and the reason for his arrival was duly noted in the newspapers.

Within a few weeks, the Dunbars found a small home in Harman, just outside Denver.

Most exercise was now prohibited, but Paul bought an old mare named Sukey that he immortalized in a poem he sold to "Century Magazine" for half of Sukey's original cost.

He also composed essays and immersed himself in the writing of a new novel.

"Love of Landry" was a romantic Western, complete with a cattle stampede.

But again, Dunbar's white characters were deemed unconvincing, and the work was quickly dismissed.

More successful was "The Strength of Gideon."

Most of the stories were still set in the Old South, but several also draw strongly upon biblical parable.

In the title story, Gideon remains on the plantation after the War, forgoing true freedom and a woman's love, in order to keep his promise to his deceased slave master.

- African Americans have always used religious language and infused it with elements of their culture to create this African American vernacular.

So unlike, I think, instances of dialect that we see in his poetry, where it's clear that there's a lot of tension there and that that may have been imposed on Dunbar from outside, I think in his short stories, he is willingly adapting this vernacular to tell a different kind of story.

narrator: Paul Dunbar was at the apex of his popularity, but his health was now in deep decline.

- A doctor prescribed alcohol for him as a way of alleviating some of the symptoms.

So he drank.

And drank to excess.

And I don't think it would be inaccurate to say that he was an alcoholic, using our definition.

But that was only the beginning, because he also took heroin tablets, and that was also prescribed.

narrator: After a severe hemorrhage, Dunbar tried to honor a commitment, but arrived late and inebriated, and then mumbled through the reading, repeating one of his poems.

The Colorado climate had done nothing to stave off what Dunbar called "the little red devils" that were ravaging his lungs.

It was time to return to Washington.

March 4, 1900, was the second inauguration of president McKinley, but it was the first for the 20th century.

And Paul Dunbar took part in the procession, riding on horseback with the honorary rank of colonel.

[soft music] Just five months after receiving this honor from the President, Dunbar was robbed, but escaped with his life during a race riot in New York's Tenderloin, where police officers allowed white mobs to drag Black passengers off streetcars and attack them.

Despite his illness, and his differences with Booker T. Washington's approach to the education of African Americans, Dunbar made several trips to Tuskegee, where he met acclaimed chemist, George Washington Carver.

He was also commissioned to write the school's song.

In a letter to Washington, he wrote... - As to emphasizing the industrial idea, I will make the concession of changing the fourth line of the third stanza into: "Worth of our minds and our hands," although it is not easy to sing.

[bright piano music] narrator: Even with consumption, Dunbar maintained a prodigious pace, producing more stories, a new collection of poems, and a Civil War novel.

Originally called "The Copperhead," after the faction of Northern Democrats who opposed war with the South, "The Fanatics" features a family of white Ohioans during the Civil War, and was, again, deemed a failure.

- I think we often judge Dunbar too harshly for the things that he failed at, but the for the things that he tried to do, we should look at his inspiration and his aspiration because he was really quite brave.

[light piano music] narrator: But bravery was not enough to sustain Dunbar's marriage.

- He would have bouts of temper.

Fits of temper.

Mood swings.

All of that that you would expect.

And I haven't even talked about whatever pressure he felt within himself as a writer, what he had to do, being frail of health, the traveling, you know, the wanting to be recognized as a man of letters.

narrator: One night in 1902, Dunbar's demons broke down the door.

- It was physical, it was violent, and she wrote that he said something vile about her.

Whatever happened that night was so traumatic, and so unacceptable to her, that she refused to be reconciled with him, even after he begged and pleaded.

Even after his mother begged and pleaded.

narrator: Alice left Washington for a teaching job in Delaware.

Paul poured out his grief in letters beseeching her to reconsider.

While performing in nearby Baltimore, Paul telegrammed Alice asking her to meet him at the Wilmington train station.

But Paul and Alice would never see each other again.

narrator: Dunbar shared his lament with the world in lines from "The Debt."

- This is the debt I pay Just for one riotous day, Years of regret and grief, Sorrow without relief.

narrator: After the end of his marriage, Paul Dunbar was in New York, consorting with Will Marion Cook and the Tenderloin types that Alice disdained.

He was writing, with ambivalence, lyrics for "In Dahomey," which would become the first full-length musical comedy written and performed by African Americans on Broadway.

The genesis for this breakthrough show had actually begun in San Francisco, at the Midwinter Exposition of 1894.

When the arrival of the Dahomey, the African tribe that was such a sensation at the Chicago World's Fair, was delayed, stand-ins were hired.

Comedian George Walker and his partner, Bert Williams, were among the impersonators.

When the authentic Dahomians arrived, Williams and Walker moved on, but with an experience that would inspire their Broadway breakthrough.

[bright piano music] ♪ ♪ Combining elements of vaudeville and comic opera, "In Dahomey" centers upon a group of African Americans who find a pot of gold, and then move to Africa to become rulers of Dahomey.

The show was a milestone in many ways, but it still retained elements of minstrelsy.

♪ ♪ "In Dahomey" would be the last musical Paul Dunbar would contribute original lyrics to.

But many of his poems, which he often referred to as songs, are still being put to music today.

[upbeat music] - ♪ Ain't you never heard Malindy ♪ ♪ Blessed soul, take up the cross ♪ ♪ Look here, ain't you joking, honey ♪ ♪ Well, you don't know what you los' ♪ ♪ Y'ought to hear that girl a-wa'blin' ♪ ♪ Robins, la'ks, and all them things ♪ ♪ Heish dey moufs an' hides they faces ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ When Malindy sings ♪ ♪ ♪ narrator: Inspired by his mother's singing of Negro spirituals when he was a child, "When Malindy Sings" became the title of the Hampton Camera Club's next deluxe edition of Paul's poems.

Plantation portraits in prose and poetry still sold best, but Dunbar had also published a fourth novel.

Abandoning his previous attempts to portray white protagonists, "The Sport of the Gods" follows a Black Southern family forced to migrate north when their patriarch is falsely imprisoned.

During the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, Dunbar's novel was adapted into a film.

Reol pictures, one of the earliest producers of films for Black audiences, sought to offer higher-class entertainment.

Both the novel and the film are inhabited by musicians, actors, and gamblers, denizens of the Tenderloin district that Dunbar knew well.

The film featured Black actors, but some roles were played by whites, a breakthrough in the entertainment industry.

When Berry Hamilton is pardoned, he follows his family to New York, where he finds his wife married to another man, and his son in prison for murder.

Well aware of naturalism, a powerful literary movement, Dunbar was writing in a realistic manner, but the film provided his audience with a somewhat sugarcoated return to the South.

narrator: Perhaps it was Dunbar's sentimental side that prompted his move to Chicago, where his mother could spend time with her two older sons and their families, and where Paul had first come to prominence thanks to the patronage of Frederick Douglass.

In a new volume of poetry dedicated to his friend Catherine Impey, the founder of Britain's first anti-racist magazine, Paul called out to his mentor.

- Ah, Douglass, we have fall'n on evil days, Such days as thou, not even thou didst know, When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways, And all the country heard you with amaze.

narrator: Booker T. Washington was still the nation's preeminent Black spokesman, and in 1903, he edited "The Negro Problem," with essays by accomplished African Americans, including Paul Dunbar.

Washington's own essay was, predictably, on industrial education.

Dunbar discussed "Representative American Negroes," most notably W.E.B.

Du Bois, whose own book, "The Souls of Black Folk," also appeared in 1903, and was seen as a public repudiation of Washington's approach.

Just as Du Bois, a Harvard-educated easterner, was ascending the main stage, Dunbar was stepping away.

Near the end of 1903, Paul and his mother moved back to Dayton, leasing a house just a few doors away from one of his childhood homes.

He would make something of a triumphant return to read to the employees at National Cash Register, where he had briefly been a janitor after high school.

[soft piano music] Though he had lost touch with his boyhood friends, the Wright brothers were about to have a different kind of homecoming.

- Success.

Four flights Thursday morning.

All against 21-mile wind.

Average speed through air: 31 miles.

Longest: 57 seconds.

Inform press.

Home Christmas.

narrator: Dayton has honored the bishop's boys with statuary in several locations.

When it came time to honor Paul Dunbar with a sculpture, the city called upon locally based but internationally known artist Bing Davis, who took a more abstract approach.

- So, of all the poems-- 'cause I love Paul Laurence Dunbar and his work-- so I had his whole menagerie of poems to select from, and when I thought about fun and whimsical, then I thought of the "Negro Love Song," because it had a hook in there that was just so melodic and so rhythmic that it just caused us, as kids, to want to hear it over and over again.

And that hook was the title of this piece.

"Jump back, honey, jump back."

And so, I took that as a challenge, and I began to play with shapes, and forms, and colors that would give me that feeling of when I heard that poem, and particularly that phrase, "Jump back, honey, jump back."

narrator: In June of 1904, Paul bought a house on North Summit Street for himself and his mother, placing the deed in Matilda's name.

When his health allowed, he would welcome guests, sometimes holding court in his study, which he called his "loafing holt," or go riding in his buggy with Bud Burns, who was now his attending physician.

But word of his frail condition was spreading across the country.

Among those who saw the headlines was Alice Dunbar.

- She got in touch with his doctor in Dayton-- Dr.

Bud Burns, his personal friend, first African American doctor in Dayton-- and she told Bud, "Let me know when Paul is ill, and I will come and be at his side."

narrator: Another dear friend, Dr. Tobey, was distraught when he learned that Dunbar was near death.

But Henry Tobey's life had taken a turn of its own after the death of his wife.

Brought down by partisan politics, accused of corruption, the good doctor also sought to soothe his pain with alcohol.

[soft music] He was living in the Boody Hotel in Toledo when he wrote a rambling letter to Paul on February 6, 1906.

- Poor boy, you are resting easy.

Wish you had to fight like I do.

You would forget you ever had what someone called tuberculosis.

You poor, Black, discouraged, dying wretch.

I envy you.

narrator: But Paul never read this dark missive from the man who had done so much to further his career.

The day Tobey mailed his letter, February 9th, Dunbar died at the age of 33.

[bell ringing] narrator: Alice Dunbar was on a streetcar, on her way to work in Wilmington, when she read of Paul's passing.

[somber piano music] - She was so outraged.

She just could not understand how Bud did not inform her of Paul's death.

narrator: Alice wrote an angry letter to Bud Burns.

- I would have come to Dayton by the first train had you or anyone telegraphed me to come before he passed.

I am sorry that you, whom I had depended upon, failed me at the last.

narrator: But her letter to Bud Burns was returned to her.

- Being the first African American doctor in Dayton, he was trying to take care of the whole African American community.

In the process, he was exposed to a violent fever and died within two weeks.

And she understood that Bud had died before Paul.

And I'm told that Dr. Tobey cried so at Paul's funeral until he could hardly speak.

His voice was just not quite audible.

Dr. Tobey came to view Dunbar as a son.

He came to love Paul, and he so gloried in Paul's accomplishments.

narrator: Dr. Tobey's own decline worsened, and newspapers reported that he had become a patient in the asylum he had once superintended, something his daughters denied.

Three years after Paul's passing, the Dunbar Memorial Association, headed by Charles Dustin, the man who had given Dunbar his job as an elevator boy, had Paul reinterred on higher ground.

- Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass, Whah de branch'll go a-singin' as it pass.

An' w'en I's a-layin' low, I kin hyeah it as it go Singin', "Sleep, my honey, tek yo' res' at las'."

- So, on the day Paul died, she closed the door to his loafing holt, his study, and she closed the door to his bedroom, and she did not touch a thing.

narrator: Matilda Dunbar remained in the house on North Summit Street for the next 28 years, living on her share of Paul's publishing royalties and the kindness of family and friends, welcoming her son's many admirers.

Luminaries from the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen were among those who came to pay homage.

In 1938, once again on Dunbar's birthday, the home and permanent displays were opened to the public.

Among those who attended commemorative events at the house over the years was Orville Wright.

Designated a National Historic Site in 1962, the house and its visitors' center continue to serve as an American literary landmark that celebrates Dunbar's achievement.

[light banjo music] - Days git wa'm and wa'mah, School gits mighty dull, Seems lak dese hyeah teachahs mus' feel... both: Mussiful!

- Hookey's wrong, I know it Ain't no gent'man's trick; But de aih's a-callin' "Come on to de crick."

- Dah de watah's gu'glin' Ovah shiny stones... narrator: The Dunbar house is a keystone within the Wright-Dunbar district, the Third Street section of Dayton that the Wright Brothers and Paul Dunbar called home.

For 40 years, this part of town was an eyesore ravaged by riots.

- After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968, it seems as if people went home.

They didn't close the windows, they didn't turn out the lights.

They didn't lock the doors-- just never came back.

It was actually an embarrassment to the legacy of the Wright Brothers and, of course, Paul Laurence Dunbar.

narrator: It wasn't until the centennial of powered flight approached that city leaders launched into action.

Through city, state, federal, and private partnerships, Wright-Dunbar has been transformed.

Crucial to the preservation and redevelopment was the placement of a national park and the Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center, where the stories of Dayton's three native sons are celebrated.

- Having such a major institution in West Dayton in the heart of Wright-Dunbar sent a message that this was a real redevelopment project, and also it would attract people from all over the world.

narrator: Also attracted to the district was artist James Pate.

Pate has drawn inspiration, literally, from the life of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

- Spit a verse like Dunbar.

I didn't want to do a typical portrait of Dunbar because I know, you know, countless artists have done portraits of him.

So I wanted to relate Dunbar to contemporary times.

I wanted to say that Dunbar, if he was around today, he would be one of the-- one of the more sought-after rappers, or MCs, or poets.

[hip-hop music] ♪ ♪ - ♪ Yo, 'cause I wear the mask ♪ ♪ You wear the mask ♪ ♪ We wear the mask ♪ ♪ And we all wear the mask ♪ ♪ 'Cause I wear the mask ♪ ♪ You wear the mask ♪ ♪ We wear the mask ♪ ♪ And we all wear the mask ♪ ♪ We wear the mask ♪ - I also was saying that-- that the contemporary poets and rappers of today, you know, stand on the shoulder of Dunbar.

And they may not realize it, but the sacrifices that Dunbar went through during his time is something that they don't have to worry about, and they can freely express themselves.

- ♪ While we wear the mask ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ We smile but great our cries ♪ ♪ Those tortured souls arise ♪ ♪ We sing but the clay is vile ♪ ♪ Beneath our feet and the long mile ♪ ♪ But we let the world dream otherwise ♪ ♪ Because we wear the mask ♪ ♪ And we let the world dream otherwise ♪ ♪ Because we wear the mask ♪ ♪ 'Cause I wear the mask, you wear the mask ♪ ♪ We wear the mask and we all wear the mask ♪ ♪ I wear the mask, you wear the mask ♪ - I think there really is a direct line from Dunbar being a great crossover artist of spoken word poetry performance popular among white audiences and Black to today's poetry slams.

narrator: After Paul Laurence Dunbar's death, the person who kept his spoken word legacy alive was his estranged wife, who remarried, but always referred to herself as Alice Dunbar Nelson.

- She continued to be known as the widow of Paul Laurence Dunbar, remained an interpreter of his work for some time, both as a critic and as the editor of a Dunbar reader.

narrator: Alice would also continue her career as a teacher, journalist, and activist for nearly 30 years.

- At one point, Alice writes about doing a whole Dunbar reading and talk, 'cause she would talk about him, and tell about him, and talk some about their life together, and she would intersperse that with readings of the poetry.

And after one of them, where she tried not to do so much of the dialect work, she says-- she wrote this in her diary: "And what they wanted was 'Dialect Dunbar.'"

- I think that some of Dunbar's poems, "When Malindy Sings," "Sympathy," "We Wear the Mask," these are among the great poems of world literature, and we need to celebrate them and be proud of them as Americans.

I think, at the same time, to look at those poems in isolation from his hard-hitting, direct, and satiric condemnations of racism in his journalism and in his fiction is a mistake.

We have to look at the whole man.

- I think Dunbar has been medicine for us.

Dunbar has helped us to stay well.

Du Bois says that the African American is always seeing himself through the eyes of the other.

Dunbar took us through the eyes of the other, and then back to ourselves again.

- We should remember forever and draw inspiration from what he did at the time and what he accomplished.

And still, a man who had frailties, who had inconsistencies.

And his outstanding artistic expression should be a monument and an inspiration to everybody.

- "Hyeahd de win' blow thoo de pine..." [together] "Jump back, honey.

Jump back."

- "Mockin'-bird was singin' fine..." [together] "Jump back, honey.

Jump back."

- "An' my hea't was beatin' so, "When I reached my lady's do', "Dat I could n't ba' to go..." [together] "Jump back, honey.

Jump back."

- "Ooh, I put my ahms aroun' her..." [soft piano music] ♪ ♪ [indistinct chatter] ♪ ♪ [soft jazz music] - ♪ Go away and quit that noise, Miss Lucy ♪ ♪ Put that music book away ♪ ♪ What's the use to keep on tryin'?

♪ ♪ If you practice till you're gray ♪ ♪ You can't start no notes a-flying ♪ ♪ Like the ones that rants and rings ♪ ♪ From the kitchen to the big woods ♪ ♪ When Malindy sings ♪ ♪ Easy 'nough for folks to hollah ♪ ♪ Lookin' at de lines and dots ♪ ♪ When dey ain't no one can sense it ♪ ♪ And de tune comes in in spots ♪ ♪ But for real melodious music ♪ ♪ That just strikes your heart and clings ♪ ♪ Just you stand and listen with me ♪ ♪ When Malindy sings ♪ ♪ Oh, it's sweeter than the music ♪ ♪ Of an educated band ♪ ♪ And it's dearer than de battle's songs ♪ ♪ Of triumph in de land ♪ ♪ It seems holier than evenin' ♪ ♪ When those silent church bells ring ♪ ♪ As I sit and calmly listen ♪ ♪ When Malindy sings ♪ ♪ ♪