author
Robert Thomas Kerlin
1866–1950
An outspoken educator and minister, he used his writing and teaching to challenge racial injustice in early 20th-century America. He is especially remembered for anthologies that preserved Black journalism and poetry for a wider audience.
2 Audiobooks
The Camp-life of the Third Regiment
by Robert Thomas Kerlin
Negro Poets and Their Poems
by Robert Thomas Kerlin
About the author
Born in Missouri in 1866, Robert Thomas Kerlin became an American educator, minister, author, and civil rights activist. He taught English at several schools and is closely associated with the Virginia Military Institute, where his public opposition to racial violence and unjust convictions made him a controversial figure.
Kerlin is best known today for editing The Voice of the Negro (1920), a collection drawn from African American newspapers after the Red Summer of 1919, and Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), an important anthology of Black poetry from the Harlem Renaissance era. Those books helped bring Black writers and Black public thought to readers who might otherwise never have encountered them.
What makes Kerlin notable is not just that he wrote books, but that he took real personal and professional risks for the views he expressed. He died in 1950, and his work still stands as a record of moral conviction, literary curiosity, and a determined effort to document voices that many mainstream readers had ignored.