Philadelphia Beaux Arts Club, gaining awareness of additional artists from related
exhibitions. He saw paintings by Beauford Delaney for the first time at the home
of sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s nieces, Dorothy and Marie Warrick, circa
1947. He met Delaney ten years later during his Paris residency, and a lifelong
friendship was forged that culminated professionally with the artist creating a
portrait of him in 1965, and Long mounting a retrospective of Delaney’s work at
the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1978 – a project that was ten years in the making.
Long began teaching English at West Virginia State College – Melvin Van Peeples
was his student, then became a colleague of James E. Lewis and Samella Lewis
at Morgan State College (now University). He returned from an acting lecture
position while a Ph.D. student at the University of Poitiers to teach English and
French at Hampton Institute (now University) and direct the College Museum.
As the museum administrator, he facilitated the addition of works by William H.
Johnson and other established artists acquired for collection. In 1968 he joined
the faculty at Atlanta University where he founded the African American Studies
program. He was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 1971-1973, and
lectured in linguistics at the University of North Carolina the following year. He
took an adjunct position at Emory University in 1973, being named the Atticus
Haygood Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Graduate Institute of the
Liberal Arts at Emory University in 1987 until retiring as Emeritus in 2000 with
intermittent visiting lecturer positions in West, Central and South Africa.
Long served on the editorial boards of the Langston Hughes Bulletin, Phylon and
the Zora Neale Hurston Bulletin. He served as president for the College Language
Association and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics. He was Commissioner
for the Smithsonian Museum’s National Museum of African Art and was on the
boards of the High Museum of Art and the Society of Dance History Scholars. He
founded the Triennial Symposium on African Art, Atlanta University’s Annual
Conference at the Center for African and African American Studies and the New
World Festivals of the African Diaspora. He was a U.S. Committee Member at the
Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria from
1971-1977 and has acted as a consultant for both the National Endowment for the
Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
His writings include
Black Americana
(1985),
The Black Tradition in American
Dance
(1989),
African Americans: A Portrait
(1993),
Grown Deep: Essays on the
Harlem Renaissance
(1998),
One More Time: Harlem Renaissance History and
Historicism
(2007), and
Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration
(2008), He edited
Negritude: Essays and Studies
(1967) (with Albert Berrian) and
Afro-American
Writing: Prose and Poetry
(1972, 1991) (with Eugenia Collier) and
Black Writers
and the American Civil War
(1989). His work has also been included in over
twenty anthologies and encyclopedias of African American culture.
