Wednesday, September 3, 2014

TRANSITION: Earl Calloway (1926 - 2014)

Earl Calloway, longtime Chicago Defender writer, creator of 'Black Creativity' program, dead at 87

Text | Adrienne Samuels Gibbs, Staff Reporter Chicago Sun-Times
Published | August 23, 2014


Funeral services [were] held Aug. 31 for Earl Calloway, a longtime columnist and fine arts editor for the Chicago Defender who also organized the cultural festival now known as Black Creativity.

Mr. Calloway died Wednesday. He was 87.

Mr. Calloway was born Oct. 4, 1926, in Birmingham, Ala., and graduated from Roosevelt University, where he studied music.

After writing for the Associated Negro Press, the Chicago Courier and Negro Press International, he went to work in 1963 for the Defender, for which the “Earl’s World” columnist wrote for five decades. He was also a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.

An accomplished operatic tenor who performed in Chicago and elsewhere, Mr. Calloway founded the yearly event originally called the Black Esthetic Festival, now called Black Creativity. Now hosted by the Museum of Science and Industry, the annual February exhibition and accompanying gala shine a spotlight on African-American excellence in science and technology and also includes a juried art exhibition.

He also was a founder of the Fine Arts Academy and the Philharmonic Youth Choir and Oratorio Society of Shiloh Seventh-Day Adventist Church and served as executive director of the Supreme African American Academy of Arts and Letters.







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