SILER CITY, N.C. — Siler City police chief Gary Tyson is proving to be a positive African American role model.

Tyson was born and raised in Chatham County. He received college degrees from Central Carolina College, Mount Olive College and Central Michigan University.

Tyson’s law enforcement career started in 1991 while as a police officer in Sanford. The Chatham County native worked his way up the ranks to patrol sergeant and eventually patrol captain. Then last year, he was hired as the first black police chief for Siler city.

“I’m just a police chief who happens to be black. The town of Siler City brought me in not because of my race but because I had the knowledge and skills to get the job done,” Tyson said.

Tyson goes beyond the call of duty by mentoring young children whom he says have almost given up on themselves. “I will continue to be that mentor. I will continue to go out in the field and tell kids that the poorest man is not one without money but one with out dreams and if I can make it, Gary Tyson a kid out of Chatham Central high school who came back to be the chief of police, they can make it to,” Tyson said.

On this day in 1934, baseball legend Hank Aaron was born in Alabama.

Aaron was best known as the man who broke Babe Ruth’s all-time career home run record of 714 long balls and finished his career with755 home runs.

Aaron’s record was later surpassed by Barry Bonds in 2007.

Sources: The African American Registry and Baseball-Almanac.com

African America author, poet and playwright Langston Hughes was born on this day in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. 

Hughes’ life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s alongside those of his contemporaries, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas, who, collectively, (with the exception of McKay), created the short-lived magazine Fire!! Devoted to Younger Negro Artists. 

Hughes and his contemporaries were often in conflict with the goals and aspirations of the black middle class, and the three considered the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain Locke, who they accused of being overly fulsome in accommodating and assimilating Eurocentric values and culture for social equality. Of primary conflict were the depictions of the “low-life”, that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata and the superficial divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community. 

Hughes was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé, and he didn’t go much beyond the themes of black is beautiful as he explored the black human condition in a variety of depths. His main concern was the uplift of his people who he judged himself the adequate appreciator of and whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience.  

Thus, his poetry and fiction centered generally on insightful views of the working class lives of blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture.  

“My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind,” Hughes is quoted as saying.  

Therefore, in his work he confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself; a “people’s poet” who sought to reeducate both audience and artist by lifting the theory of the black aesthetic into reality. 

Academics and biographers today acknowledge that Hughes was a homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman, whose work Hughes cited as another influence on his poetry, and most patently in the short story Blessed Assurance which deals with a father’s anger over his son’s effeminacy and queerness. 

It has been noted that to retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted. Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African American men in his work and life. This love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to a black male lover.