Early years and education She was born as
Arthenia Jackson in
Sumter, South Carolina, to Baptist minister Calvin S. Jackson and his second wife, Susan Emma David Jackson. Encouraged by her father to write, Arthenia published her first poem, "Christmastide", in
The Sumter Daily Item when she was 16 years old, while she was attending
Lincoln High School (1934–37). She went on to earn a BA degree in English from
Morris College (1941) and a master's degree in 1948 from
Clark Atlanta University, where she studied under
Langston Hughes, In 1972, she became only the second Black woman to earn a PhD in English from
Louisiana State University, with a thesis on
James Weldon Johnson entitled "In Quest of an Afro-Centric Tradition for Black American Literature."
Career and later life She began teaching in South Carolina's public school system in the early 1940s, first at Westside High in
Kershaw (1942–45), then at Butler High School in
Hartsville (1945–46). From 1947 to 1949 she was chair of the English Department at her alma mater, Morris College in Sumter. Moving to
Halifax, Virginia, she married her first husband, Noah Bates (they subsequently divorced), and taught English from 1949 to 1955 at Mary Bethune High School. For a year, she had a post as an English instructor at
Mississippi Valley State, then from 1956 to 1974 worked in the English Department at
Southern University in
Baton Rouge, rising to the position of professor. During this time, she married her second husband, Wilbur Millican, and received critical acclaim for her writing, which appeared in such publications as
National Poetry Anthology,
Negro American Literature Forum,
Scriptiana,
The Negro Digest,
The Last Cookie, and
Obsidian, as well as in three books – two collections of short stories and a novel. ==Critical reception==