In this lecture by Magdalena Therrien, she will discuss the life and inspiration that is Paul Laurence Dunbar, who became the acknowledged “poet laureate of the African American people,” while living throughout a politically tumultuous time, when the old South fought a battle to restore the old “Slavocracy” in alliance with Wall Street and abolish Abraham Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies. Paul Laurence Dunbar was loved for his dialect poems as well as his “proper English” poems and his legacy left hundreds of schools all over the United States named after him. He used humour and metaphor to combat “Jim Crow” laws and to uplift the people emerging from the darkness of slavery.