John Oliver Killens infused the structures, tone, and style of Southern African American folklore into his acclaimed novels which particularly depicted and commented on the experiences of African American men in the 20^th century.  

John O. Killens was born in 1916 in Macon, Georgia to Charles Myles Killens, Sr., a restaurant manager, and Willie Lee Coleman Killens, an insurance company clerk. Nurtured by his formerly enslaved great-grandmother with tales of the hardships and folklore of slavery, and his parents, who encouraged reading the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, Killens developed a keen sense of cultural pride through folklore and literature.  

In 1933, Killens graduated from the Ballard Normal School in Macon, one of the few secondary schools for Blacks in a segregated Georgia public education system. Between 1934 and 1936, Killens, aspiring to be a lawyer, attended Edward Waters College (Jacksonville, Fl); Morris Brown College (Atlanta); and Howard University through night classes, but never earned a degree. Killens worked for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington, D.C., from 1936 to 1942 and attended Robert H Terrell Law School (Washington, D.C.) at night. His studies were interrupted by World War II during which he enlisted in the US Army and served in the South Pacific during the latter part of the war. 

After the war, Killens moved to New York City, entering its vibrant arts world to launch his literary career. While working as a union organizer for a local chapter of the NLRB and as a news writer, Killens began attending writing classes at Columbia University and New York University. He cofounded and led the Harlem Writers’ Guild, where he read and workshopped Youngblood (1954), a novel about a Black family living in Jim Crow Georgia in the early 1900s.

Over the next three decades, he wrote several more novels, four of which covered Black life in different decades of the 20^th century. He also wrote several plays, screenplays, essays, short stories, and books for youth. Thrice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he taught as a writer-in-residence at Fisk, Howard, and Columbia Universities, New York’s Bronx Community College, and Medgar Evers College. He organized multiple national Black writers’ conferences and community writing workshops, where he mentored generations of contemporary African American writers. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement, a cofounder with Malcolm X of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (1964), and he is recognized as the godfather of the Black Arts Movement.

Killens’ love of and dedication to Black culture was expressed through his extensive incorporation of blues, worksongs, the John Henry ballad, jokes, proverbs, folktales, and social commentary into his writing. His realistic portrayals of Black experiences created a liberatory vision of a better world through the presentation of positive, challenged, and responsible Black male heroes grounded in Black traditions. 

Among his publications of relevance to folklorists is:

‘Sippi  (1967)

Phyllis M. May-Machunda