Vivian Ayers Allen, the Pulitzer-nominated poet who envisioned the nation’s spaceflight and was the mother of Debbie Allen and Phylicia Rashad, has died, Allen’s family announced on social media. She was 102.
“Mommy you have transformed into that cosmic bird hawk that lives and breathes freedom,” the message posted on Wednesday said. “We will follow your gold dust trail and continue to climb higher. We promise to ‘be true… Be beautiful… be free.'”
It was signed with lots of love – literally five “loves” and dozens of red hearts – “Norman, Debbie, Lish, Tex, Hugh, Vivi, Thump, Condola, Billy, Oliver, Gel, Tracey, Carmen, Shiloh, Aviah, Eillie, Gia and all the Turks in our family.” A carousel of precious family photos set to Stevie Wonder’s “Golden Lady” was shared.
The family celebrated Ayers’ 102nd birthday a little more than three weeks ago, in late July. The celebration, which included four generations of the family, included a jazz concert put on by Andrew “Tex” Allen Jr., a jazz musician and the eldest of Ayers’ four children with dentist Andrew Allen. Ayers and Allen, who died in 1984, divorced in 1954 after nine years of marriage, which also produced children Debbie, Hugh and Filicia. All but Hugh would go into the performing arts.
Debbie Allen, 75, spoke about her mother in 2018 at an event honoring the “Grey’s Anatomy” star and her sister Rashad, 77.
“We grew up with 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,” Allen said. “And so my mother, Vivian Ayers, always made us believe that we were part of a universe that was waiting for us and wanted our creativity and was waiting for us to do something good. And so we did it forever.”
Ayer told Rashad that acting made him one of the “magical” people.
“I said, ‘What do you think, Mom?'” the “Cosby Show” star told The Times in 2015. “She said, ‘You’re making a big deal out of nothing.'”
Born in 1923 in Chester, SC, Ayers graduated in 1939 from Brainerd Institute High School, which was founded in 1866 for the children of freed slaves in her hometown. That was the last year the school operated. She then went on to study at Barber-Scotia College in Concord, NC, and Bennett College in Greensboro, NC, eventually earning an honorary doctorate from the latter of the two HBCUs.
Ayers flourished at a time ripe with talent. “The Spice of Dawn,” her 1952 book of poetry, earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1953. That year, Ernest Hemingway won the fiction prize for “The Old Man and the Sea,” and William Inge won the drama prize for “Picnic.” Archibald MacLeish won the poetry prize that year, one of his three Pulitzers, while two North Carolina weekly newspapers took home the public service journalism award for their campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, which resulted in the arrest of more than 100 Klansmen.
“The Hawk,” a book-length poem set a century in the future, was self-published by Ayers in 1957 and linked the freedom of flight to the possibility of space travel. It foretold what was to come: 11 weeks later, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth. Clemson University officially published “The Hawk” in 2023.
NASA celebrated Ayers’ work in 2024 — she had been an editor and typist for the space agency — as it dedicated the Dorothy Vaughan Center to honor the women of Apollo, some of whom were immortalized in the film “Hidden Figures.” Rashad read “Hawk” at a July 19 ceremony honoring all the women who worked tirelessly to make the Apollo mission to the moon possible.
Ayers worked as a librarian at Rice University and became the school’s first full-time black faculty member in 1965. While there, she started the Adept quarterly literary magazine in 1971. She was a playwright, with works including “Bow Boly” and “The Marriage Ceremony.”
She nurtured her children’s artistic talents—and did so for the benefit of other children— through the Open Fields Seminars program, which teaches literacy through art, which Ayers founded in Houston and later brought to the Brainerd Institute. She also founded a museum, the Center for the Artful New American Folk, focusing on the art of the American Southwest.
“Don’t wait for them to ask for something, just playfully introduce them to something they’ve never thought about and get them excited about taking the discipline,” Ayers told the Rock Hill Herald in 2018 about teaching children. “You have to do it. It takes a little encouragement when they’re young to get them to stick with the discipline. They’ll bless you forever.”
Ayer moved with her children to Mexico for a time, where they learned Spanish and she studied Greek literature and Mayan culture.
Rashad recalled his childhood in a conversation with The Times in 2012.
“There were a lot of books and artists who visited our house. And as children we had private intellectual and artistic debates,” she said. “My mother included us in everything she did, and I mean everything. I remember as a child picking up the pages of her second book. It was wonderful.”
Ayers was also there for dancer actor Debbie Allen.
“My mother took the banister off the stairs and put it on the wall in what was supposed to be the dining room to create a ballet studio for Debbie to study privately with a dance instructor when she couldn’t get into the best schools across town in Houston,” Rashad explained. “Ultimately, Debbie was accepted into the Houston Ballet Foundation, but that was because she received private instruction in our home.
“My mother would do things like that. … She always taught us.”
