Tom Dent

Thomas Covington Dent was born on March 20, 1932, in New Orleans, Louisiana, into one of the city's most distinguished Black families. His father, Albert Walter Dent, served as president of Dillard University from 1941 until 1969; his mother, Ernestine Jessie Covington Dent, was an accomplished pianist. Raised amid the achievements and constraints of a segregated South, young Tom took his bearings from both scholarship and struggle. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science at Morehouse College, pursued graduate study at Syracuse University, and served in the United States Army from 1957 to 1959.

Moving to New York City, Dent worked as public information director for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund alongside Thurgood Marshall. In 1962 he helped found the Umbra Writers' Workshop on the Lower East Side, a landmark gathering of young Black poets — among them David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, and Ishmael Reed — that became a seedbed of the Black Arts Movement. There Dent began to shape the voice that would carry the cadences of New Orleans into his verse.

In 1965 he returned home to New Orleans and joined the Free Southern Theater, the touring civil-rights company that had been founded in Mississippi in 1963 and had recently relocated to the city. Serving as its associate director, Dent founded the theater's writing workshop, which grew into the influential BLKARTSOUTH collective. He published two volumes of poetry, Magnolia Street (1976) and Blue Lights and River Songs (1982), co-founded the journal Callaloo, and in Southern Journey (1996) retraced the geography of the movement. As an oral historian he gathered the testimony of civil-rights workers and Louisiana musicians alike.

A poet, playwright, and keeper of memory, Tom Dent died on June 6, 1998. He lived to make certain that the voices of his people would not be lost — and in honoring them, he earned an honored place among them.