Charles Lampkin
Charles Lampkin (1913–1989) was an American actor, musician and lecturer.
Early life
Charles Lampkin was born on March 17, 1913 in Ward 4 of Montgomery, Alabama. He was the third son of Edgar Lampkin and Sarah Bidell. His lineage is traced to slave-owners and Africans enslaved in the British colonies of Virginia and Georgia before the American Revolution of 1776. His great-grandmother Ann Lampkin, an emancipated slave, was one of the first people to befriend a twenty-five-year-old Booker T. Washington when he arrived in Alabama in 1881. She donated land and along with her church sisters raised funds for the Tuskegee Institute. Edgar Lampkin moved his family from Montgomery to Cleveland in the 1920s, part of the Great Migration.
Career
Lampkin was a pioneer of Spoken Word in the 1930s and winner of Ohio debating cups in 1939, 1940 and 1941. He was one of the very first African-American actors screencast in an intelligent and dramatic role in American cinema. He played the character of Charles in Arch Oboler's Five, the first science fiction film about a Nuclear Holocaust. Lampkin introduced Oboler to The Creation by James Weldon Johnson and convinced him to include excerpts of it in the script of Five. It would become Lampkin's soliloquy and may be the first time that national audiences in the United States, Latin America and Europe were exposed to African-American poetry, albeit not identified as such.