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Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872 in Dayton, Ohio. While Dunbar was not the first African American poet and writer, he was the first to gain such respect and to be accepted by both white and black audiences. Dunbar attended schools with many whites. So many of his friends were white, and most of them friends with Dunbar to his death. The Wright brothers were among Dunbar's friends. They not only operated a bicycle …

…an effort to offend any race. Both his work and his life were becoming symbolic of the African-American struggle for equality in the United States. Dunbar often wrote and spoke about civil rights issues, just as his friends Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Charles Chestnut did. His poem, "We Wear the Mask," eloquently states some of his concerns. In 1906, at the age of thirty-three, Dunbar succumbed to tuberculosis at his Dayton home.