On this date… 27 April 1882
Jessie Redmon Fauset born
A driving figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a novelist, poet, editor, teacher, and critic. All of these descriptives can be used for the well traveled, well educated, and well respected (mostly) Jessie Redmon Fauset, who was born on this date, 27 April 1882.
Born in Camden County, New Jersey, and she grew up in Philadelphia. Her academic career included many notable firsts. She was valedictorian from the Philadelphia High School for Girls, a prestigious Philadelphia school, and was likely the first Black graduate. Normally the valedictorian was awarded a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College. However, the President of Bryn Mawr, Carey Thomas, prevented Black and Jewish students from attending the college during her tenure and instead raised funds for Fauset to attend Cornell University. Achieving another academic first, Fauset was probably the first Black female student at Cornell, where she graduated with a BA in classical languages in 1905. She was accepted into Phi Beta Kappa, the National Honors Society (note, I’m also a PBK member), where she was one of the first Black members (the first member was Mary Annette Anderson, who became a member in 1899). After college she worked as a French and Latin teacher in Baltimore and Washington, DC, which was still segregated at the time. She summered in Paris, where she often took classes at the Sorbonne. She received her master’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania in 1919.
A lover of words and writing, in 1912 Fauset began contributing poems, essays, and reviews to The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Founded by W. E. B. Du Bois, the noted civil rights activist, in 1910 (just a year after the NAACP was created), The Crisis is the longest continuously-running Black-oriented magazine in the world. Du Bois asked her to become the magazine’s literary editor in 1919, and she moved to New York City for the job. There she helped usher in the magazine’s most prolific literary period. As editor she published works from numerous then-unknown writers, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer, amongst others. These authors all flourished in the period known as the Harlem Renaissance, the revival of Black intellectual and cultural life that included music, dance, fashion, literature, politics and scholarship that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. Langston Hughes wrote in his memoir, The Big Sea, that Fauset was one of the people “who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being.”
In addition to her work as editor on The Crisis, Fauset also contributed poems and short stories to that journal and edited and was co-author of the Black children's magazine The Brownies' Book, which ran monthly from January 1920 until December 1921. Additionally, Fauset published four novels focusing on middle-class Black life and identity – especially the idea of “passing” in White culture. These were There Is Confusion in 1924, Plum Bun in 1928, The Chinaberry Tree in 1931, and Comedy, American Style in 1933.
After leaving The Crisis in 1926, she returned to teaching French at a high school in the Bronx, then married businessman Herbert Harris in 1929. They lived in New Jersey until his death in 1958, when she returned to Philadelphia until her death on 30 April 1961.