Chester Himes, world-renowned writer and civil rights pioneer, was born more than a century ago in Jefferson City, but he would go on to become a celebrated author and world traveler.
His literary career began with reflective protest novels, but he is best known for a crime noir series on power, poverty, racial divide and ultra-violence starring two black street-wise Harlem detectives during the 1950s and early '60s.
Lincoln University literature professor Noel Heermance places the Missourian fourth in the hierarchy of major contemporary civil rights authors behind ground-breakers Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison.
"That's a major list to be a part of," Heermance said. "Himes was a more entertaining writer, it seems to me. For the 1960s, he was a major figure. The characters he created - Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed - they aren't caricatures. They are wonderful characters. They are fun to listen to. It is fun to see the world of Harlem through their eyes."
Himes' writing focused on the struggle for liberty and happiness as written in the Declaration of Independence. Much of this thread reflects his life's joyful highs and depressing lows from the American South to Paris, France.
"Himes had once hoped that writing would be a means of resolving his confusing, yet, paradoxically, his greatest strengths came out of his unresolved conflicts," Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre wrote in "The Several Lives of Chester Himes."
Early life
The author's tumultuous journey stands in sharp contrast with a seemingly simple childhood in Jefferson City. Himes wrote in "Quality of Hurt," his 1971 autobiography, "I was born July 29, 1909, in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital, across the street from the entrance to Lincoln Institute, where my father, Professor Joseph Sandy Himes, taught blacksmith and wheelwright courses as the head of the Mechanical Department. The only memory I have of my life in Jefferson City is of my brother, Joseph, and myself painting our hair with green paint left by the house painters."
The Himes family moved south when Chester was 8. His father was a professor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, before a chemistry experiment went awry and blinded Himes' brother, who was refused treatment at the nearby white hospital.
The family moved to St. Louis to seek schooling for his blind brother. Their father couldn't obtain a professorship and went into low-wage construction while Himes attended public school. "Although the public schools in St. Louis were strictly segregated, both white and nonwhite males and females attended the school for the blind," Chester wrote in his memoir. "Revealing isn't it?"
Himes entered Ohio State University with the fourth highest IQ in his class, but racial divides on campus and a strained family life drove him to seek comfort where he felt accepted - speakeasies. He dropped out after a wild moonshine-soaked night was reported to the dean, and he turned to selling white lightning whiskey during prohibition. At home, his parents' marriage crumbled; his dark-skinned father couldn't live up to the expectations of his light-skinned mother.
Angry and cynical, he robbed a wealthy white couple to fund travels to a place where black people were treated as social equals. "It took me forty years to discover that such a place does not exist," he wrote. The 19-year-old was arrested, beaten and sentenced to 20-25 years of hard labor.
Literary career
Himes' literary career began during his eight years in the penitentiary, where he wrote short stories for magazines like "Esquire" based on prisoners' struggles.
He began writing novels after being placed on parole and met Langston Hughes, who introduced him to the publishing world. Nine years after his release, 1945's "If He Hollers Let Him Go" made him a celebrated protest novelist. The story was inspired by his time working in Los Angeles shipyards, where he worked during WWII. The protagonist is determined to be his own man while lovers, co-workers, bosses and the Army try to use him for their own purposes.
His follow-up novel, "Lonely Crusade," was much less successful. His 1948 speech "The Dilemma of the Negro Writer" at the University of Chicago stands as a piece of civil rights history, but it garnered such little attention at the time he was forced to bounce around the United States doing menial labor.
American acclaim was regained with the release of films inspired by the Harlem novels. However, Himes didn't returned to live in the United States, although he occasionally returned for projects like a Harlem documentary. He wrote the majority of his approximately 20 novels outside the states and died of Parkinson's disease at age 75 in Moraira, Spain.
Lasting legacy
Himes' legacy is exhibited through the greater inclusivity of the United States today than in the 1960s, but Heermance said his themes are still reflected in gang violence, police shootings, white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The civil rights pioneer's triumph is seen in the growth of inclusive institutions like Lincoln University, where his father once taught in the city of Himes' birth, Heermance said.
As his book "Pink Toes" shows, we are all the same color on the bottom of our feet, whether in bed or in the community.