John Oliver Killens

John Oliver Killens (born January 14, 1916, Macon, Georgia, U.S.—died October 27, 1987, Brooklyn, New York) was an American writer and activist known for his politically charged novels—particularly Youngblood (1954)—and his contributions to the Black Arts movement and as a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild.

From an early age Killens was exposed to African American writers and thinkers. His father encouraged him to read Langston Hughes, and his mother introduced him to the work of poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar. Growing up in Georgia under Jim Crow law had a profound impact on Killens’s political and social outlook and provided source material for his writings.

Between 1934 and 1936 Killens attended many colleges and universities, including Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, and Morris Brown College in Atlanta. In 1936 he moved to Washington, D.C., and, while working for the National Labor Relations Board (through 1942), he took night classes and completed a bachelor’s degree at Howard University. He then began to pursue a law degree with evening classes at Terrell Law School but was interrupted by military service during World War II. The racism he experienced while serving in the South Pacific in the highly segregated U.S. Army inspired later writings, especially the novel And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963).

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When Killens returned from the war, he settled in Brooklyn and began taking writing classes first at Columbia University and later at New York University. At that time, during the late 1940s, he began meeting regularly with other young socially conscious African American writers. In 1950, with John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, and Walter Christmas, he founded the Harlem Writers Club, which became the Harlem Writers Guild two years later. In 1954 Killens published the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Youngblood, for which he is best known. The story focuses on the Youngbloods, an African American family that faces the struggle of living in the South under Jim Crow law in the first decades of the 20th century. The inspiration for the characters and their experiences, at least in part, stemmed from Killens’s own upbringing. Youngblood was the first book published by a guild member and became a landmark protest novel of the American civil rights movement. It also launched his role as a leader among African American activist writers.

Killens was active in the civil rights movement, participating in the Montgomery bus boycott and associating with Martin Luther King, Jr. However, by the early 1960s Killens had become more interested in the philosophy of Malcolm X, and in 1964 he helped cofound the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which encouraged African Americans to look to and embrace their African heritage. That year he also received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his book about facing racism in the U.S. Army, And Then We Heard the Thunder. Killens’s affiliation with Black nationalism and his new, more-militant perspective on fighting racism was apparent in his 1965 collection of essays Black Man’s Burden, which addressed the African American experience in the United States and denounced the nonviolent approach to facing oppression.

In 1967 Killens became a writer in residence at Nashville’s Fisk University, the first of many teaching positions he would hold over the next 20 years. While there he organized what would be his first major Black writers conference. It was held in both 1966 and 1967. In its first year important figures in the Black Arts movement such as Ossie Davis, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker were in attendance. While at Fisk he also wrote ’Sippi (1967), which tells the story of a college student embroiled in the struggle to achieve the right to vote. Though its characters are from the South, the story takes place in New York City, Killens’s first novel to be set in the North. From 1968 to 1974 Killens taught writing at Columbia University.

Killens continued writing prolifically as well as teaching, at Trinity College (1970–71) in Hartford, Connecticut, and Howard University (1971–77) in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, he organized another Black writers conference (1974) and wrote his fourth novel, The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), which, from his strong Black nationalist perspective, examined class division among African Americans in two communities in New York. The novel, though it received mixed reviews, earned him another Pulitzer Prize nomination. He next wrote a book for young adults, Great Gittin’ Up Morning (1972), a biography of Denmark Vesey, an enslaved African American who in 1822 led the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history. In 1975 Killens wrote a book for a younger audience titled A Man Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man: The Adventures of John Henry. He taught from 1978 to 1983 at Bronx Community College and from 1983 to 1987 at Medgar Evers College at the City University of New York, where in 1986 he established the National Black Writers Conference, which continued into the 21st century. The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College sponsored the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, a biannual publication launched in 2010 in honour of the author. The book Great Black Russian: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin was published posthumously in 1989. (According to Pushkin family tradition, the writer’s mother was the granddaughter of an Abyssinian princeling bought as a slave at Constantinople and adopted by Peter the Great.) The satirical The Minister Primarily, a completed manuscript found in Killens’s papers after his death, was released in 2021.

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Killens, though prolific, was largely underappreciated. The reception of his work was varied after his first two novels. Critics largely objected to his writing style, which, because of his highly charged messages, was often perceived as didactic and inauthentic. Many of his works went out of print throughout the 1980s and ’90s. And, further, in the three years in which he earned nominations for the Pulitzer Prize (1954, 1964, and 1971), no award was issued. Beyond his essays and works of fiction—and two screenplays: Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) and Slaves (1969)—Killens was noted for his teaching, especially for the impact he had on young African American writers such as Ntozake Shange and Nikki Giovanni, who both studied with him. He also served as the vice president of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters from its founding in 1969 and was instrumental in the formation of the Junior Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977.