Like his parents, Thomas Covington Dent dedicated his life to uplifting the Black community.
As the first-born son of Dillard University President Albert W. Dent and classical pianist Ernestine Jessie Covington Dent, Thomas was a poet, jazz scholar, essayist, playwright, oral historian, journalist and cultural activist.
“He was a leading literary figure in New Orleans,” the Amistad Research Center states, “and a prolific oral historian, whose work culminated with the publishing of his book, ‘Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement’ (1997).”
Thomas was 15 when he graduated from Gilbert Academy in 1947. He earned a political science degree from Morehouse College in 1952 and a master’s degree from Goddard College in 1975. After a stint in the Army, Thomas moved to New York City. He was a reporter for the New York Age, press liaison for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and a founder of the Umbra Writers’ Workshop.
“The group’s literary magazine, ‘Umbra,’ featured poetry and other genres of creative writing,” Amistad states. It “became one of the earliest and most prominent ‘little magazines’ that focused on African-American writing.”
In 1965, Thomas returned to New Orleans, where he worked with the Free Southern Theater. He created a writing workshop that morphed into BLKARTSOUTH. His “journey of self-discovery found resolution in New Orleans with a sense of belonging to the South and to its Black community.” Amistad states.
As executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation from 1987 to 1990, Thomas launched the Congo Square Lecture Series “as a means to engage artists and thinkers in an intellectual dialogue on issues of culture and commerce,” the foundation states. The lecture series now bears his name.
Thomas, who taught creative writing at the University of New Orleans from 1979 to 1981, died in 1998.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.