Top Ten Famous People Who Were Homeless Once

According to William James, "Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us". One of the worst combinations of struggle and need is homelessness. Few, have nerves to go through such crisis, and yet come out as successful individuals. Here is a list of ten famous people who successfully faced homelessness at some point during their lives.

1) Halle Berry

Halle Berry might be one of the most highly paid actresses in Hollywood, but she wasn't always like this. At the age of 21, her mom refused to support her, forcing her to take refuge in a homeless shelter. In an interview she said, "When I moved to Chicago, she (mom) drove me there, but I don't think she ever thought it would pan out. After a month or two, I ran out of money and called her. I said, "Mom, I hate to ask you this, but could you send me some money? I just have rent money; I can't eat this week." And she said, "No, I'm not going to start this calling home, asking mom for money thing. No, figure it out or come home." I was so mad; I didn't speak to her for a year and a half."

Halle did not remain homeless for long. Soon, she started getting roles in movies and rented an apartment. Halle has now made peace with her mom, she thinks that her mom's refusal to support her made her tough and gave her the ability to deal with harsh circumstances.

2) Chris Gardener

Chris Gardener, a millionaire entrepreneur, became famous when his book of memoirs was made into a super-hit movie, "The Pursuit of Happyness". Although, Gardener currently owns a successful stock brokerage firm, but in early 1980's, he had to face homelessness with his son. He came to this stage of poverty, because he invested all his life savings to buy portable X-ray machines which he thought he would be able to sell on high profits but he failed, even to reach breakeven. Consequently, he was unable to pay his rent and was kicked out by the owner. Before they could move into a homeless shelter Chris and his son had to sleep in a public toilet for few days. Chris, later on found a Job in a stock brokerage firm, and moved to an apartment with his son.

3) Hilary Swank

There are only 38 people, in the history of Hollywood, who have won Academy award for Best Acting, more than once. One of them is Hilary Swank. With her sizzling performances in "Boys Don't Cry" and "Million Dollar Baby", she proved her mettle. And yes, she was homeless once. Reader's digest quoted her story saying, "In 1989, when she was 15, Swank and her mom packed up their Oldsmobile Delta 88 and, with just $75, headed to Los Angeles. They lived in the car, until a friend gave them a place to stay". In an interview with CBS news she said, "We had a friend, who was selling their house. And so they said, "You know, there's no furniture, but you can stay there at night. And then, during the day, you have to leave so we can try and sell it out. So we got air mattresses, blew them up, slept at night and left in the morning." Hilary and her mother remained homeless for couple of months, after that she started landing roles. However, her hard time was not over until she got the leading role in "Boys don't cry".

4) Shania Twain

Five times Grammy awards winner, Shania twain was also homeless at one point in time. She spent her childhood in extremely miserable conditions and often starved for days. At the age of thirteen she convinced her mother to move to Toronto where there were many homeless shelters. In an interview with Reader's digest she said, "My mother was very depressed at the time -- she wasn't getting out of bed. I decided that I had to convince her to take us to Toronto, where they have a lot of good programs for desperate families. We were living in this small town which didn't have anything. I was 13 then and told my mother to get in the car, the next day, when my dad was gone. I said, "All you've got to do is, drive." I don't know why she listened to me. I think she was numb. We drove to Toronto and went to a shelter. We finally got fed every day."

She started her professional singing career in Toronto and later on she became one of the most popular female singers of her time. Her album Come On Over sold 39 million copies worldwide.

5) Colonel Sanders

Seeing, Colonel Sander's pictures and statues on every KFC outlet, one assumes that he must've had invested millions of dollars to make such a large network of fast food restaurants. However, it's not true. Colonel Sanders, who started Kentucky fried chicken (KFC) in 1952, had to experience homelessness for a long period during his childhood. His father died, when he was five and his mother quickly remarried. At the age of ten, he decided to leave his home because his step-father used to beat him. After that, he remained homeless for a long period of time and did many jobs, during that time. It was not until the age of forty, that Colonel found a proper home and a Job as a cook in a restaurant and started working on his own Secret recipe, which would later on become the main item on KFC menu.

6) Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin was not just an Oscar-winning actor, director and author. He was also one of those famous people who faced homelessness. According to his autobiography Charlie's parents separated before he was three. Throughout his childhood he lived with his mother, except for a small period of time when he and his brother moved with their father and his mistress. At the age of 12, Charlie's father died of Cirrhosis and soon after that his mother became mentally ill and had to be admitted to a hospital. This left Charlie homeless and he had to go to a workhouse in London. He spent the rest of his childhood moving from one charity home to another. Charlie continued his struggle until he reached United States in 1912, where he started getting roles and acted in major silent films.

7) Adolf Hitler

In his book Mien Kampf Hitler said, "I owe it to that period, that I grew hard and am still capable of being hard." Here Hitler is referring to his period in Vienna where he had to face four years of homelessness from 1909 to 1914. After the death of his parents, he came to Vienna to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. However, he failed in the entrance exam of Vienna school of Fine arts. Eventually, he ran out of money and was forced to live on streets. Afterwards, he found a homeless shelter and spent his nights there until the beginning of World War 1 in 1914.

During his homelessness period Hitler used to sell his own paintings to get enough money to eat. It was during this time that he developed anti-semantic sentiments, which would later on become the fundamental principles of Nationalist socialist movement.

8) Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the most powerful nation in the world (USA) and one of author of American declaration of Independence, also went through a rough patch when he had no home to live in. In his birthplace Boston, Benjamin worked as an apprentice to his brother who published a Newspaper named "New England Courant". Benjamin wrote certain materials in that paper which were not liked by the authorities of his time so they banned the "New England Courant". However, Benjamin continued to publish against the government without the consent of his brother. This raised a quarrel between the brothers and Benjamin ran away to New York. It was in New York that he had to face homelessness because he had very little money and he knew nobody in the city. However, Benjamin remained homeless for a short period of time and found a Job after moving to Philadelphia.

9) Buddha

Buddha was among those who voluntarily adopted homelessness for a purpose. He was the heir to the throne of his father. After seeing the suffering of ordinary people he decided to give away the luxurious life and adopted ascetic way of living. During his ascetic time he lived in streets and begged for food. His purpose was to achieve enlightenment, and he achieved it in form of the 'four truths'. During his struggle for enlightenment and even after that, Buddha never had a shelter to live under.

10) Jesus Christ

Although Jesus spent most of his childhood in Nazareth and he had a home there, but after being baptized at the age of 30, Jesus started a campaign to spread his teachings. For that purpose he had to move from one place to another and during that period he did not have any proper home. In New Testament, Matthew and Luke narrated incidences which prove Jesus' homelessness. Following, is one such incidence;
"Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." (Matthew 8:19-20)

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Famous International Black Literary Figures From Africa and America - Keorapetse William Kgositsile

Keorapetse William Kgositsile, because of his integrating African and African-American literary and artistic traditions has easily become one of the most recognisable names in international literary circles.

Keorapetse Kgositsile was born in September. 19, 1938, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has established an enviable reputation as a South African poet, essayist and political activist whose writings focus on Pan-African liberation as the product of enlightened heroism and humanism.

Born in humble circumstances, he grew up in a small backyard shack in a white neighborhood. His schooling was therefore outside of his locality. One of his first experiences of apartheid, other than that, was a conflict that erupted with a local white family. This resulted from a fight he had had with a white friend who had hesitated in joining other friends in boycotting a boxing club that had denied him, Kgositsile, membership. He had Increasing experiences of exclusion throughout his teenage years. These were vital aspects of the formation of his artistic sensibility and his political and social consciousness.

He was one day at the Kimberly train station as a child walking on a steep, steel stairway which was to be crossed from one side to the other with his frail grandmother who was holding a vase someone had given her. Unfortunately, just a few steps before the last step she faltered and fell breaking the vase. Seeing this made him start questioning the state of affairs in his country. How should such an old woman be forced to walk on those rickety steel stairs when more suitable and stable walkways which were available were reserved for only whites?

Kgositsile attended amongst others, elsewhere in the country, Matbane High School in Johannesburg where he discovered and started reading black writers like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. He thus developed a passion for reading African-American as well as European writers such as Charles Dickens and D. H. Lawrence. With that induction into the literary world he then started writing little sketches, and stories mainly to entertain his friends.

After finishing high school, within the space of a few months, Kgositsile had worked at three different jobs. He quit his third job intending to start masterminding payroll robberies which had become quite popular then. His former high school English teacher who went to dissuade him out of such an anti-social proposition, suggested his considering writing professionally instead which he believed he had much talent in.

Kgositsile, however, worked at a series of odd jobs, before he took to more serious writing. He got engaged at the politically charged newspaper New Age contributing both reports and poetry to it. From this point he started directing the sheer urgency of his expression principally through the more direct means of poetry, thus. drowning his earlier interest in fiction.

In 1961,Kgositsile started fearing for his life. Urged by the African National Congress to do so, so as to ensure his safety, he left the country. He was thus one of the first active young ANC members to do so. He traveled through Botswana to what was then Tanganyika. He then began a self-imposed exile in 1961 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. There he got engaged in the external mission of the ANC under Oliver Tambo. Fortunately as well for him he soon found employment, writing for the Spearhead magazine.

The following year he immigrated to the United States. At first as a graduate student on scholarship, he studied successively at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the University of New Hampshire and The New School for Social Research. He then enrolled in the Masters program in creative writing at Columbia University. Whilst here he studied African-American literature and culture extensively. He became so engrossed with it that he would spend long hours every day in the library reading as much black literature as he could lay his hands on.

By the 1970s Kgositsile had emerged as an important African-American poet, one of the most significant in the Pan-African movement. He was actively engaged in encouraging interest in Africa. He thus brought African and Black American poetry closer together in the United States. He also took a lead in encouraging and promoting the art of poetry performance. He conducted regular dynamic readings in New York City jazz clubs. His first collection of poems published, Spirits Unchained, was well received, earning him a Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award. So absorbed was he now in his new calling that even after graduating from Columbia in 1971, he remained in New York, teaching and giving readings. His most influential collection, My Name is Afrika, was published in that year. The response to it, including an introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks, was tremendous thus establishing him as a leading African-American poet. He even later became accepted as a part of the Uptown Black Arts Movement. His literary career eventually blossomed into that of a world-renowned poet.

Kgositsile had become particularly interested in jazz. For it was particularly important to his emerging sense of black American culture and in defining his own place in it. Jazz was crucial to his sense of a worldwide African Diaspora centering on a certain quintessentially black sound. He wrote to African-American musicians he met in the jazz clubs of New York. He also wrote of them in his poems. He wrote of the black aesthetic he pursued and celebrated. He strove equally to be freed from a constricting white aesthetic sensibility and for discovering all black people's rhythmic experience.

Also in pursuit of the latter aim, while in New York, Kgositsile became active in theater. Seeing black theater as a fundamentally revolutionary activity, whose aim must be to destroy the ingrained habits of thought that have been responsible for widely held negative perceptions of black people, he founded the Black Arts Theater in Harlem.This was part of a larger project aimed at creating a literary and boldly militant black voice. He therefore resolved: to destroy the symbols which had facilitated the captivity of blacks and to create and establish symbols to facilitate their mental liberation.

He lived in the U.S.A. on to 1975 when he returned to Africa. He started teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. In 1978, he married Baleka Mbete, another ANC exile living in Tanzania. Resuming his work with the ANC, he founded its Department of Education in 1977 and its Department of Arts and Culture in 1983. He became its Deputy Secretary in 1987. He lectured in different parts of Africa: Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia. Meanwhile, he remained banned in South Africa, until in 1990, when the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), with which he was already associated, decided to publish his work there. The successful result was When the Clouds Clear (1990), a collection of poems from other volumes, which was his first book to be made available in his native land.

In July, 1990, after 29 years in exile, Kgositsile returned to South Africa. He soon enough discovered that he had returned to a country wholly different from the one he had left. It had been transformed by the end of apartheid and Nelson Mandela's release, his political triumph and his later election as President. But it was still characterized by great confusion, particularly for the many returning black writers, artists, and intellectuals like himself.

In his essay,"Crossing Borders Without Leaving," Kgositsile describes the contradictions inherent in this first trip back home. Those receiving him were rather paradoxically both his colleagues and his hosts. He mused at such contradiction: being hosted in his own country which amazingly no longer seemed his any more. All the connections and memories of home seemed lost. Despite feeling distanced from it, he delved immediately into political and cultural activism.

He traveled to various places from Mongolia to Havana, Cuba which greatly inspired all of his works since he had become in the process hugely impressed by the Cuban people's hard work.

Kgositsile's poetry ranges from the political and public to the lyrical and confessional. It melds indigenous South African with black American structural and rhetorical traditions. Through it he recognizes and celebrates his influences, his friendships with other artists and his deep love of black musical forms such as blues and jazz. In spite of its infusion with quotations from songs, references to music and to Black musicians, his poems remain easily accessible. His yearning to be a musician which ironically suggests the subtle musicality of his verse is evident in the title of his collection If I Could Sing. His most recent poems, have however been moving away from his once-fiery nationalism, thus becoming less lyrical, more conversational, subtle and skeptical.

A gifted teacher, he has written and published an excellent book on teaching the craft of poetry.For poetry, he believes, is a contribution to the intellectual, psychological, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life - part of a people's memories. Amongst the awards he has received are the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Poetry and a visiting professorship at the New School. He was also a part of the editorial board of This Day a newspaper in Johannesburg. Since 8 December 2006, he has had the distinction of being the second National Poet Laureate in South Africa.

Whilst serving as vice president of COSAW in the early 1990s he hosted THE FIRST ANNUAL PAN AFRICAN LITERARY Forum in Ghana which brought more than 200 writers, publishers and filmmakers from all over the world. By bringing together aspiring writers, he hoped, talent could be developed and mentoring relationships built, leading to a wider worldwide distribution of books by black authors. Through his reflections on South Africa, Africa and his life experiences, Kgositsile has excelled in the artistic and literary world, inspiring aspiring and established artists and intellectuals as well as fostering the careers of young writers.

Besides editing The Word Is Here: Poetry from Modern Africa (1973), Kgositsile 'has published several volumes of his poetry which includes For Melba (1970), The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live (1974), Places and Bloodstains (1975), If I Could Sing (2002), and This Way I Salute You (2004).

Kgositsile will remain for long a vital name in Black literature of Africa and America in both continents.

Further Reading:

Born and schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Arthur Smith has been teaching English for over thirty years. He is now a Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing for the past nine years.

Mr Smith's writings have been in various media. He participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature in the U.S. in 2006. He has attended various conferences in Accra, Ghana, Conakry, Guinea, Dakar, Senegal and Corvilha, Portugal in some of which he has presented papers. His writings could be read at his personal website: http://arthuredgaresmith.net/about.php

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