Birth of James Edwin Campbell in Pomeroy, Ohio
Poet involved
What happened
James Edwin Campbell was born on September 28, 1867, in the Kerr's Run section of Pomeroy, Ohio, a small river town along the Ohio River. He was the son of James Edward Campbell and Aletha 'Letha' Esther Starks Campbell, both originally from Virginia, and he grew up with two older brothers in a modest African American community.
Literary impact
Campbell's birth in the post-Civil War North, into a family of Virginia migrants, placed him at the intersection of Southern heritage and Midwestern opportunity. This geographic and cultural positioning later informed his dialect poetry, which drew on the folkways and oral traditions of Black Southern life while being filtered through a Northern educational lens.
Source: Wikipedia
