| Summary: | Professor, civil rights activist, and poet Askia M. Tour was born on October 13, 1938 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Raised in Dayton, Ohio, he graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1956 and joined the United States Air Force. After being discharged in 1959, Tour moved to New York City, working for Umbra magazine, The Liberator magazine and contributing to Freedomways. Tour founded Afro World in 1965 with Larry Neal and organized the Harlem Uptown Youth Conference. In 1967, he taught in the first Africana Studies program at San Francisco State University. Organizing the 1984 Nile Valley Conference in Atlanta, and co-founding the Atlanta chapter of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC) in 1986, he authored From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature and Dawnsong, which received the 2000 Stephen E. Henderson Poetry Award from the American Literature Association.
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