Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved, Joshua and Matilda Dunbar. His father had escaped to Canada and then returned to fight for the Union Army in the Civil War. The only Black student in his Dayton high school, Dunbar was recognized early as a talented writer, and he published poems both in the school newspaper and in local periodicals. He hoped to attend college and work as a journalist after high school, but instead, he found himself employed as an elevator operator. However, in 1892, a former teacher invited him to read his poetry at the Western Association of Writers meeting, and a year later, he self-published a collection of...
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