Here is a handwritten letter to Naomi Long from Reverend S.S. Jones. In it, Jones praises Long on a poem she wrote to her father, Clarence Long. Reverend Jones was a Baptist minister, businessman, and amateur filmmaker. Jones was born in Tennessee to former slaves and grew up in the South before moving to Oklahoma in 1889. He became an influential Baptist minister, building and pastoring fifteen churches. Jones was a circuit preacher assigned by the National Baptist Convention to document the glories of Oklahoma's black towns of Guthrie, Muskogee, and Langston
Naomi Long Madgett is an African American poet, born Naomi Cornelia Long in Norfolk, Virginia. Madgett was a teacher and an award-winning poet, and she is also the senior editor of Lotus Press, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Madgett was the daughter of a Baptist minister, and spent her childhood in East Orange, New Jersey. She began writing at an early age. While living in New Jersey in the early1930s, she went to an integrated school, where she faced racism. In 1937, her family moved to St. Louis, where Madgett was encouraged to write while attending high school. At the age of 17 Naomi published her first book of poetry, Songs to a Phantom Nightingale, a few days after graduating from high school. Help us transcribe this letter that shows the far reaches a young woman’s poem had in America.