Thomas Covington Dent was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a prominent and socially active family. His father, Dr. Albert Dent, was a former president of Dillard University, and his mother, Jessie Covington Dent, was a former teacher and concert pianist, the first black musician honored with a Juilliard scholarship. Tom Dent's grandparents were Dr. Jesse Covington, a leader in Booker T. Washington's National Negro Business League and one of the founders of Riverside General Hospital, the first medical facility for blacks in Houston, and Belle Covington, an early leader in Texas interracial movements and a founder of the Blue Triangle YWCA. They exerted significant influence on him during the early 1950s when he first began writing as a reporter, during his summers off from college, for the Houston Informer, the oldest continuing black newspaper published in the state of Texas.

Educated at both public and private schools...