Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Elevator Man and the Poet
Near Dayton, Ohio
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton on June twenty-seventh, eighteen seventy-two, the son of two people who had been enslaved in Kentucky. Both parents survived the Civil War. His father, Joshua, had escaped to Canada and later joined the Massachusetts Fifty-Fifth Infantry. His mother, Matilda, walked free when the war ended and made her way to Ohio.
At Central High School, Dunbar was the only Black student in his class. He edited the school newspaper, led the debate society, and wrote poetry. His classmate Orville Wright would later print Dunbar's Dayton Tattler, the city's first Black weekly newspaper, at the Wright brothers' print shop.
After graduation in eighteen ninety, Dunbar could not find work suited to his education. He ran elevators in a downtown Dayton building for a time, writing poetry in the gaps between floors. He self-published his first collection, Oak and Ivy, in eighteen ninety-three. A review by the influential critic William Dean Howells in Harper's Weekly in eighteen ninety-six brought him national attention. Dunbar's dialect poems captured the rhythms of Black life in a way that moved audiences across racial lines. His more formal verse in standard English pushed back against the confined expectations his readership placed on him.
He died in Dayton on February ninth, nineteen oh six, at thirty-three, of tuberculosis. His mother's house on what is now Paul Laurence Dunbar Street became the first state memorial in Ohio honoring African American history. It is now managed by the Ohio History Connection and is part of Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, sharing a campus, in a sense, with his old classmates' legacy. Dunbar's writing influenced Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and the whole arc of the Harlem Renaissance.
