Vintage Black Glamour

#BlackHistory Poet, Novelist, Essayist and Teacher Jessie Redmon Fauset was born in an all-black hamlet called Fredericksville in what is now Lawnside, New Jersey.  She graduated from Cornell University in 1905 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1919 with a degree in French. She also graduated from the Sorbonne.  

The author of four novels between 1924 and 1933 (Plum Bun, There Is Confusion, The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life and Comedy, American Style) Fauset was known as “the Midwife of the Harlem Renaissance.”  As literary editor of the NAACP’s “The Crisis from 1919 to 1926 under editor W.E.B. DuBois, she was amongst the first to publish the works of writers Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.  

After leaving “The Crisis,” Fauset traveled extensively, lecturing on black writers. She would go on to be a visiting professor at Hampton Institute in 1949 and teach French and writing at Tuskegee Institute.  She died in Philadelphia in 1961.