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Vivian Ayers Allen, a Pulitzer-nominated poet who foreshadowed the country\u2019s journeys into space and was mother to Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad, has died, the family announced on Allen\u2019s social media. She was 102.<\/p>\n
\u201cMommie you have transformed into that cosmic bird Hawk that lives and breathes Freedom,\u201d said the message<\/a>, posted Wednesday. \u201cWe will follow your trail of golden dust and continue to climb higher. We promise \u2018to be true … be beautiful … be Free.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It was signed with much love \u2014 literally five \u201cloves\u201d and dozens of red hearts \u2014 by \u201cNorman, Debbie, Lish, Tex, Hugh, Vivi, Thump, Condola, Billy, Oliver, Gel, Tracey, Carmen, Shiloh, Aviah, Eillie, Gia, and all the Turks in our family.\u201d A carousel\u2019s worth of family photos was shared, set to Stevie Wonder\u2019s song \u201cGolden Lady.\u201d <\/p>\n The family celebrated Ayers\u2019 102nd birthday just over three weeks ago, at the end of July. The festivities, attended by four generations of family, included a jazz concert put together by Andrew \u201cTex\u201d Allen Jr., a jazz musician and the eldest of Ayers\u2019 four children with dentist Andrew Allen. Ayers and Allen, who died in 1984, got divorced in 1954 after nine years of marriage that also yielded children Debbie, Hugh and Phylicia. All but Hugh would go into the performing arts. <\/p>\n Debbie Allen, 75, spoke about her mother in 2018 at an event honoring the \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy\u201d star and her sister, Rashad, 77. <\/p>\n \u201cWe grew up with not a lot of money. We grew up with racial segregation. We grew up not being able to go to ballet class or downtown to a restaurant or to a movie,\u201d Allen said<\/a>. \u201cAnd so my mother, Vivian Ayers, always made us believe that we were part of a universe that welcomed us and wanted our creativity and was waiting for us to do something good. And so we\u2019ve been doing that forever.\u201d<\/p>\n Ayers told Rashad that acting made her one of the \u201cmagic\u201d people. <\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018What do you mean, Mama?\u2019\u201d the star of \u201cThe Cosby Show\u201d told The Times<\/a> in 2015. \u201cShe said, \u2018You create so much out of nothing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Born in 1923 in Chester, S.C., Ayers graduated in 1939 from the Brainerd Institute high school, established in 1866 for the children of freed slaves in her hometown. It was the final year the school was in operation. She then went on to study at Barber-Scotia College in Concord, N.C., and Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., eventually getting an honorary doctorate from the latter of the two HBCUs.<\/p>\n Ayers flourished at a time ripe with talent. \u201cSpice of Dawns,\u201d her 1952 book of poetry, earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1953, the year Ernest Hemingway won the fiction prize for \u201cThe Old Man and the Sea\u201d and William Inge won the drama prize for \u201cPicnic.\u201d Archibald MacLeish won the poetry award that year, one of his three Pulitzers, while two North Carolina weekly newspapers brought home the public service journalism prize for their campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, which resulted in the arrests of more than 100 Klansmen. <\/p>\n \u201cHawk,\u201d a book-length poem set in a century in the future, was self-published by Ayers in 1957 and linked the freedom of flight with the possibility of space travel. It foreshadowed what was to come: 11 weeks later, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. Clemson University officially published \u201cHawk\u201d<\/a> in 2023. <\/p>\n NASA in 2024 celebrated Ayers\u2019 work<\/a> \u2014 she had been an editor and typist at the space agency \u2014 as it dedicated the Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo, some of whom were immortalized in the movie \u201cHidden Figures<\/a>.\u201d Rashad read \u201cHawk\u201d at the July 19 ceremony, which honored all the women who worked, unheralded, to make the Apollo mission to the moon possible. <\/p>\n Ayers worked as a librarian at Rice University and in 1965 became the school\u2019s first full-time Black faculty member. While there, she started the Adept Quarterly literary magazine in 1971. She was a playwright, with works including \u201cBow Boly\u201d and \u201cThe Marriage Ceremony.\u201d <\/p>\n She nurtured the artistic talents of her children \u2014 and did it for other children through Workshops in Open Fields<\/a>, a program teaching literacy through the arts that Ayers founded in Houston and later brought to Brainerd Institute. She also founded a museum, the Adept New American Folk Center, focusing on arts of the American Southwest.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t wait for them to ask for something, just playfully take them into something they have never thought about and charm them into taking the disciplines,\u201d Ayers told the Rock Hill Herald<\/a> in 2018 about teaching children. \u201cYou have to do that. It takes a little urging when they are young to make them stay with the disciplines. They will bless you forever.\u201d<\/p>\n Ayers moved with her children to Mexico for a time, where they learned Spanish and she studied Greek literature and the Mayan culture. <\/p>\n