Thelonious Vs. Monk

While the United States prepared to draft civilians in preparation for World War I, Thelonious and Barbara Monk were preparing to bring a son into the world. A birth which carried its own air of mystery, according to Thomas Fetterling, “For a long time the year of his birth had been given as 1920. In 1974, however, Leonard Feather saw Monk’s entry in the birth register of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It reads, ‘October 10, 1917, Thelius Monk’ [although, quite a few of his family members were misnamed]” (19). Thelonious had two siblings, an older sister Marion and a younger brother Thomas. During the summer of 1922, Barbara relocated herself and her three children, in what is now referred to as the Great Migration, northbound where she had a cousin, Louise Bryant who helped motivate the decision in order to give her children a better chance in life (Kelley
The Monk family moved in with their cousin who had an apartment located in the San Juan Hill neighborhood on West 63rd Street, between Amsterdam and West End Avenues, now known as Thelonious Sphere Monk Circle