Our Own Hall of Fame
PAUL DUNBAR
DIFFERENT BACK HOME
Slaves’ Son Held His Head High Before Queen
Dayton Daily News, Feb. 6, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
Second in a Series
A poised Paul Laurence Dunbar stood in Buckingham palace on a fall afternoon in 1897 and read his poems to Queen Victoria. But a few months later as he waited to be introduced to the Dayton Woman’s Literary Club, the Negro poet confided to a friend:
“I have never been so uneasy…I have looked after the furnaces and the lawns of these ladies and taken them all up and down in my elevator…”
For Dunbar had come far fast. He went from servant to savant in a few years, rode literary crests for a decade and then, at 34, he died to be eulogized as “the Negro poet laureate.”
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on Howard St., in 1872, the son of former slaves. (At one time, his mother was in a group of southern Negroes who had been freed on the condition that they go to Liberia. Only the Civil War saved her from deportation).
THE DUNBARS were the only Negro family on their street and at old Central high school (now Central elementary) at Fourth and Wilkinson Sts.
Paul was the only Negro in his class. Popular and bright, he edited the school paper and was president of the literary society in his senior year. He wrote the class poem, relished an assignment on the debating team and insisted that he loved baseball more than literature.
It was after graduation that Dunbar found doors closed to him. The only job he could find was running an elevator at the Callahan building for $4 a week. There hunched on his stool in the semi-dark, the youth poured over Tennyson and Shakespeare and scribbled his own verses on scraps of paper.
WHEN DUNBAR was 21, he published his first collection. It was a slim brown volume called “Oak and Ivy” and a friend had to guarantee $125 to get it out. (Dunbar pushed his book hard with pals and passengers alike, paid off the money in two weeks.)
Three years later, 1896, his second book, “Majors and Minors” was published and on Dunbar’s 24th birthday it received a long and laudatory review in Harper’s Weekly. Paul Laurence Dunbar was on his way.
THE NEXT decade saw him befriended by William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, recognized as a leading literary figure of his time. In all, he wrote 21 volumes and mingled with the social elite of two continents.
Dunbar was poised and articulate, but one thing troubled him: “I wish you would tell me what I ought to say when people praise my poems,” he begged a friend. “I only stand there and smile and feel awkward.”
Although Dunbar was perhaps most famous for his dialect poems, he could neither read nor write dialect in childhood. When he did learn, it was through mimicry, through long hours spent studying the speech of older Negroes who did speak dialect. His own parents did not.
THE BRIGHT career had it shadows. A brief marriage to his boyhood sweetheart ended in separation. When he was 27, Dunbar was stricken with tuberculosis. He never fully regained his health and on Feb. 9, 1906—reciting the 23rd Psalm in unison with a minister—Dunbar died in his house at 219 N. Summit St.
One of his poems begins: “Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass…”
And under the willows in Woodland cemetery, the poet is buried.
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