Lance Jeffers

Lance Jeffers was born on 28 November 1919 in Fremont, Nebraska, but Fremont was only his birthplace. From infancy he was taken into the home of his maternal grandfather, Dr. George Albert Flippin, a distinguished Black physician of Stromsburg, Nebraska, who raised him until his death in 1929. Those Stromsburg years, and his grandfather's example, were the most formative of his early life and shaped a lifelong longing to reclaim ties to African peoples and heritage.

After Flippin's death in 1929, Jeffers moved to San Francisco to live with his mother and his stepfather, Forrest Jeffers. He graduated from high school in 1938 and served in the United States Army during the Second World War. He later studied at Columbia University, earning degrees in English and English education, and began a teaching career in 1951 that carried him across colleges and universities, culminating at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, which he joined in 1974.

Jeffers emerged as a principal poet of the Black Arts Movement. His first collection, My Blackness Is the Beauty of This Land, appeared in 1970, followed by When I Know the Power of My Black Hand in 1974, O Africa, Where I Baked My Bread in 1977, and Grandsire in 1979. In 1983 he published his only novel, Witherspoon, the story of a Black minister who discovers the value of revolution amid racial crisis.

A singular, uncompromising voice — a Black nationalist without a movement — Jeffers wrote toward the dignity of the African American experience until his death on 19 July 1985. May the power of his Black hand be remembered, and honored.