Tom Dent

Writer

  • Born: March 20, 1932
  • Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana
  • Died: June 6, 1998
  • Place of death: New Orleans, Louisiana

Biography

Tom Dent was born on March 20, 1932, in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was the oldest of three sons born to Dr. Albert Walter Dent and Ernestine Jessie Covington Dent. Dr. Albert Dent was president of Dillard University. The younger Dent graduated from Gilbert Academy, a college preparatory school for African American students in New Orleans. He attended and graduated from Morehouse College and did graduate work at Syracuse University’s School of International Studies, where he completed all course work leading to a doctorate. After serving for two years in the Army (1957-1959), Dent moved to New York. From 1959 to 1960 he was a reporter for a Harlem newspaper called The New York Age. From 1960 to 1961 he was a social worker for the New York Welfare Department; he next worked as a press attaché and public information director for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, where he assisted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

As a cultural activist in 1962, Dent was one of the founders of the New York-based Umbra Writer’s Workshop, the first major post-1960’s organization of African American writers. Upon his return to New Orleans in 1965, he began to work with and became associate director of the Free Southern Theater. In this capacity, he organized performances throughout the South. He also founded the FST Writing Workshop, which eventually became BLKARTSOUTH. Dent was instrumental in founding the Southern Black Cultural Alliance, which aimed to coordinate the activities of writers, thespians, and artists from the South. After leaving FST, Dent went on to found the New Orleans-based Congo Square Writer’s Union and edit its Black River Journal.

From 1968 to 1970, Dent taught at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi. In 1969, with Dr. Jerry Ward and Charles Rowell, Dent founded the successful journal Callaloo: A Quarterly Journal of African and African American Arts and Letters. In the early 1970’s, he contributed articles and plays to the then-fledgling Black Collegian Magazine, and he served as public relations director for New Orleans’s antipoverty agency. In 1974 he was awarded an M.F.A in creative writing from Goddard University and a Whitney Young Fellowship. From 1979 to 1981 he was the Marcus Christian Lecturer in African American literature at the University of New Orleans.

Dent produced two books of poetry: Magnolia Street (1976) and Blue Lights and River Songs (1982). He also wrote a number of plays, one of which, Ritual Murder (1976), is now considered a classic of New Orleans theater. Between 1978 and 1985, Dent conducted oral histories of Mississippi Civil Rights workers, and in 1984 he conducted an oral history of New Orleans and Acadian musicians. The tapes from both collections are now housed at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans.

From 1984 to 1986 Dent worked as a writer on Andrew Young’s autobiography An Easy Burden. In the 1990’s, he worked with Dr. Ward on the Mississippi Oral History Project. At the time of his death he was working on two journals, a collection of reflections on New Orleans and a series of personal essays on the connections and disruptions between Africa and African Americans. The culmination of his Civil Rights documentation was the 1996 publication of his last and most important book, Southern Journey, which eloquently and informatively assesses the victories and failures of the Civil Rights movement.