Tom Dent, N.O. Poet, Playwright, Dies At 65
Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune	06-7-1998


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Tom Dent, a New Orleans playwright, poet and essayist, died Saturday evening at Charity
Hospital. He was 65.

Mr. Dent was admitted to Charity's emergency room early Saturday after his family
noticed he wasn't responding to them, hospital spokesman Jerry Romig said. Mr. Dent had
been released Wednesday from Touro Infirmary after undergoing extensive heart surgery.

"We've lost a major force in literature and theater in the region," said Brenda Marie
Osbey, a poet and friend of Mr. Dent's.

Mr. Dent grew up on South Rampart Street and spent many of his childhood days along the
banks of the Mississippi River dreaming of destinations far from the segregated South.

His mother, Jessie Covington Dent, from Houston, played the piano. His father, Albert
Dent, who was from Atlanta, was president of Dillard University in New Orleans for 28
years.

Mr. Dent attended Gilbert Academy, a private school on St. Charles Avenue that educated
many black New Orleanians who later went on to distinguished careers. After leaving
Gilbert in the late 1940s, he attended a Quaker high school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for
a few years.

"Tom was an absolute loyal and faithful friend with no blemishes as a friend,
whatever," said Lolis Edward Elie, a longtime friend of Mr. Dent's who attended Gilbert
Academy with him.

When it was time for college, Mr. Dent decided on Morehouse College in Atlanta. He
spent some time in New York, where he worked for a Harlem newspaper and for the New
York City Welfare Department.

In 1961, Mr. Dent was appointed press liaison for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund by
Thurgood Marshall, a longtime civil rights leader who later became the first black
justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The job took him to several hot spots of the civil
rights movement, including Jackson, Miss., where he became involved in getting James
Meredith admitted as the first black student at the University of Mississippi in
Oxford.

Mr. Dent held the NAACP job until 1963.

He returned to New Orleans in 1965 and stayed here, producing works that would make him
one of New Orleans' leading literary figures.

"He was really drawn to New Orleans. It was a spiritual kind of thing," said Raymond
Breaux, a friend. "He was drawn to river cities. He wrote about rivers all the time."

Mr. Dent was executive director of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation for a
few years.

He also held teaching posts at Mississippi College and Mary Holmes Junior College in
West Point, Miss. There, he began recording interviews with civil rights leaders and
compiled them into the Mississippi Civil Rights Oral History Collection, which is
housed at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans.

His most recent book, "Southern Journey," chronicles places and events in the civil
rights movement, places he revisited in 1991.

Mr. Dent co-edited the historical compilation "Free Southern Theater" and wrote two
books of poetry, "Magnolia Street" and "Blue Lights and River Songs." He also helped
work on a biography of civil rights leader and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a New
Orleans native who was a friend of Mr. Dent's.

"Tom's work was important because he was able to look at New Orleans culture and
history as an insider and an outsider," Osbey said. "Tom was both a son of New Orleans
and a son of the South. He saw New Orleans differently from those whose families have
lived here for generations. He saw it with affection and a critical eye."

Perhaps one of his best-known works is his play, "Ritual Murder." Mr. Dent wrote this
tale of a murder committed "for no apparent reason" in 1968 while teaching writing
workshops at the Free Southern Theater. But it wasn't until eight years later that it
debuted at the Ethiopian Theater.

Since then, the play has become an annual event, produced each year at Ebony Square on
Magazine Street.

"To me, he was a bridge to a whole other world," Breaux said. "In Tom's company I met
Toni Morrison, James Baldwin. It was just amazing."

Survivors include his mother and two brothers, Walter and Benjamin Dent.

Funeral arrangements, being handled by D.W. Rhodes Funeral Home, are not yet complete.