In his contact with white college students in Atlanta Killens encountered a great deal of racism, which informed the beliefs he would later elucidate in his writing. After graduating from high school, Killens attended Edward Walters College in Jacksonville, Florida, and Morris Brown College in Atlanta, both historically black institutions. Killens attended the segregated Pleasant Hill School until the seventh grade, when he moved to the private Ballard Normal School. His father, who managed a restaurant, and his mother, an insurance agency clerk, were highly literate people who encouraged their children to study and embrace their cultural heritage. Killens was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1916. As a founding member of the Harlem Writers Guild, an organization that has supported the publication of black writers since 1950, Killens influenced later generations of African American authors and artists, and was a seminal figure in the development of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, an overtly political push for the use of art and literature to further a black empowerment agenda. Killens is considered a master of social protest fiction. American novelist, playwright, essayist, screenplay writer, and biographer.
