Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert Delany (brother of the Delaney Sisters) overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem in the 1920s. Photo via the Schomburg Center.
Countee Cullen in Central Park, 1941
photo by Carl Van Vechten
Poet Countee Cullen, photographed in Central Park in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten.
(via backtothefiveanddime)
#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.
Langston Hughes, pictured in his office in 1962, was born 110 years today in Joplin, Missouri.
Eartha Kitt, amidst writing her memoirs, receiving a new fountain pen from Frank D. Waterman, chairmen of the Waterman Pen Co. (Jet, July 14, 1955). The result: Thursday’s Child, published in 1956.
Zora Neale Hurston was born on this day in 1891. Here, she was photographed by Carl Van Vechten in Chicago on November 9, 1934.
Langston Hughes flanked by Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset in 1927 at the grave of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute.
Author Jean Toomer, best known as the author of “Cane,” in 1934.
Mary Elizabeth Vroman on the cover of Jet, October 13, 1952. Her short story, “See How They Run” was published in the June 1952 issue of Ladies Home Journal and adapted into the 1953 film, “Bright Road” which starred Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte.
Prince and Nikki Giovanni were born on Gwendolyn Brooks birthday. The original caption from this May 2, 1950 photo: A 32-year-old housewife and part time secretary has won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Annie Allen,” a ballad of Chicago Negro life. The first woman to capture one of the famed awards, she is the mother of a 9-year-old boy and the wife of Henry Blakely, partner in an auto repair shop.
