James Haskins
Marengo County native James “Jim” Haskins (1941-2005) authored more than 100 books during his prolific career. Many of his numerous works of children’s nonfiction often celebrated key figures and moments in Black history. His 1977 adult nonfiction book The Cotton Club, a history of the famous Harlem jazz club, became his most well-known book; it was loosely adapted for a 1984 film by Francis Ford Coppola. Haskins won the Carter G. Woodson Award five times and the Coretta Scott King Award once; several more of his books have been selected as Honor Books by both award committees. He was posthumously inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.
Haskins was born in Demopolis, Marengo County, on September 19, 1941, to Henry Haskins and Julia Carter Brown Haskins; a source indicates that he may have had nine siblings. He spent his early childhood on his family’s land in Demopolis, among numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, and other extended family. He attended the town’s poorly resourced segregated schools, but he was nonetheless surrounded by adults who inspired a deep love for learning and an appreciation for storytelling. Because the Demopolis library did not allow Black patrons, he had limited access to books. But when a local grocery store offered a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia with a qualifying grocery purchase, his mother collected the full set. He partially credits his lifelong preference for nonfiction to his early introduction to the encyclopedia.
After his parents separated, Haskins’s mother took him to Roxbury, Massachusetts, to live with family. There, he attended the Boston Latin School, the oldest functioning public school in the United States and one of the nation’s most highly rated schools. An aspiring teacher, he returned to Alabama to attend historically Black college Alabama State University (ASU) in Montgomery, Montgomery County. As a student in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he met Martin Luther King Jr. and participated in the civil rights activities of the era, and he was expelled for his activism. After his expulsion, he received a scholarship from the Montgomery Improvement Association to attend Georgetown University and complete his degree in psychology. In 1962, he was welcomed back to ASU to earn a second bachelor’s degree in history. He subsequently earned a master’s degree in social psychology from the University of New Mexico.
After graduate school, Haskins moved to New York City, where he worked short stints as a journalist, a welfare caseworker, and a stockbroker. In 1966, he took his first teaching job at Harlem’s Public School 92, where he taught a special education class. He was encouraged by a school social worker to keep a journal, and his notes on his first year of teaching formed the basis of his first book, Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher. It was published in 1969. The book was critically admired for its honest assessment of racism’s negative effects on Black schoolchildren.
When publishers approached Haskins about writing books for young people, he took on the challenge. Having grown up at the height of the Jim Crow era, he sought to give children access to the kinds of books he did not have when he was young, especially books celebrating Black achievement. Several of his books relate to Alabama people and events; he has written books on Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Nat “King” Cole, George McGinnis (professional basketball player), the defendants in the Scottsboro trials, and the Freedom Riders. His works also include biographies about entertainer Lena Horne, musician Stevie Wonder, jurist Thurgood Marshall, and politician Shirley Chisholm, as well as books about the 1963 March on Washington, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Power movement.
In the 1970s, Haskins began to write nonfiction books for adults. The most famous of these was the 1977 book The Cotton Club, which told the story of the famous Jazz Age club in Harlem. The book was the inspiration for famed director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 film by the same name. He also wrote the book Voodoo and Hoodoo: Their Tradition and Craft as Revealed by Actual Practitioners, as well as numerous adult biographies, many of which covered the same subjects as his juvenile biographies.
In addition to his prolific writing career, Haskins continued to teach throughout his life. After his tenure at Public School 92, he began teaching at the college level. Starting in 1970, he taught courses at the New School for Social Research, Staten Island Community College, Manhattanville College, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. From 1977 until his death, he taught English at the University of Florida. He was instrumental in the school’s establishment of an African American Studies program. He maintained a home in Manhattan, and he commuted between Gainesville, Florida, and New York City each week.
Haskins was married to Kathleen Benson Haskins, with whom he cowrote many of his books. The couple had three children, two daughters and a son. Haskins died on July 6, 2005, from complications of emphysema. He was interred at Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in Morningside Heights, New York.
Selected Works by James Haskins
Diary of a Harlem School Teacher (1969)
The Story of Stevie Wonder (1976)
The Cotton Club (1977)
Black Music in America: A History Through Its People (1987)
Voodoo and Hoodoo: Their Tradition and Craft as Revealed by Actual Practitioners (1990)
The March on Washington (1993)
The Harlem Renaissance (1997)
Rosa Parks: My Story (1999) (with Rosa Parks)
The Rise of Jim Crow (2008) (with Kathleen Benson)
