Born Gilbert Ronald Brathwaite in Brooklyn on January 1, 1938 and brought up in the South Bronx, to immigrant parents from Barbados, who chronicled the cultural, political, and social developments of Harlem, Africa, and the African diaspora. As a boy in the early 1950s, he was enrolled at School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design). He adopted the name Kwame in the early 1960s, a tribute to Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of post-colonial Ghana.
