Paul Dunbar Y'all

Today I learned the great Paul Dunbar was friends with Orville Wright! They lived nearby and went to Dayton Central High School together. Paul's mother was a freed slave named Matilda, and she read and sang to Paul, who was soon reading and singing back to his mother. His daddy Joshua was an escaped slave who served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry > right on, sir ... Paul was the only black kid at DCHS and an active scholar all his life: debating society, literature society, school paper, city papers, writing at home all the time, working as an elevator operator, sometimes selling his books of poetry for a buck a pop while he was working the elevator. Oak & Ivy ! Majors & Minors ! Later he worked at the Library of Congress! Of course they didn't take advantage of his gigantic brains and capabilities. Instead, they simply took advantage of him, giving him a menial job where he became unhappy, then he breathed in too much bookdust, which thereby aggravated his already bad respiratory action into full tuberculosis and so he left the LC after a year. DANG! He kept on writing poetry and novels, but he only lived to be 33 ... he does have a legacy as a true man of letters, which will continue to grow, though, yo, so checkit: lookit all the schools after which he is named!