Braithwaite (William Stanley) is born in Boston.

The son of a West Indian immigrant father and formerly enslaved mother, William Stanley Braithwaite subsequently explains, “At 15, like a revelation, there broke out in me a great passion for poetry.” He goes on become a poet, and the first African-American literary editor of a major U.S. newspaper for the Boston Evening Transcript. Braithwaite moves to Harlem in 1945 on June 8, 1962. According to Lorraine Elena Roses, “he is little studied today, perhaps because his landmark anthologies of poetry include very few blacks and his aesthetics were more Victorian than modern.”