DAY, CAROLINE STEWART BOND
(November 18, 1889–May 5, 1948) Anthropologist, writer, educator
During the Harlem Renaissance, Caroline Stewart Bond Day wrote essays, short stories, plays, children’s stories, and poetry that were published in both anthologies and magazines. As an anthropologist, she was interested in the life and problems of blacks, as well as those of mixed racial heritage, a concern she had as the result of her own racially mixed background.
A Montgomery, Alabama, native, Day was the daughter of Georgia Fagain and Moses Stewart. A light-skinned woman, she was a descendant of black, Native American, and white forebears. For several years, the family lived in Boston. After Moses died, the family moved to Tuskegee, Alabama, where Georgia taught school and later married John Percy Bond, whose last name Caroline assumed. Caroline graduated from Atlanta University, taught English at Alabama State College (now Alabama State University) in Montgomery, and worked for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Montclair, New Jersey. When she applied to Radcliffe College of Harvard University to pursue a graduate degree, the school refused to accept her Atlanta credits toward the degree; she was instead admitted to the undergraduate program and, in 1919, received a second bachelor’s degree.
After World War I, Day worked with W. E. B. Du Bois as executive secretary of the Circle for Negro War Relief, and she also became student secretary of the National Board of the YWCA. She moved to Texas, taught English, and served as dean of women at historically black Paul Quinn College. She then moved to Prairie View State College (now Prairie View A&M University) as head of the English Department. In 1920, she married Aaron Day, who taught chemistry at the college and later became a salesman for the National Benefit Life Insurance Company. She returned to Atlanta University as instructor of English, drama, and anthropology, where she remained from 1922 to 1929.
Day continued her studies at Harvard’s graduate school of anthropology and, in 1930, received her master’s degree. Her thesis, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States, was published in 1932, and republished in 1970. Her examination of mixed-race families was a first in the field of anthropology. The Days moved to Washington, D.C.; adopted a teenage boy; and taught English at Howard University. Caroline was also a social worker and directed a local settlement house in 1934. Her work with the YWCA continued, as she was appointed general secretary of the local Phillis Wheatley “Colored” YWCA in 1937. Aaron rose to the head office of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in Durham; his family joined him in 1939. Caroline taught English and drama at North Carolina College for Negroes (later North Carolina Central University). Due to health problems that she had endured for many years, she began to teach only occasionally, published some of her works, and spent time with her family. She also read, engaged in gardening, and attended local club activities. Complications of her chronic heart condition led to her death in 1948. In addition to her contributions in the classroom, Day had also made a name for herself in the field of anthropology.—Jessie Carney Smith
DEAN, LILLIAN HARRIS [“PIGFOOT MARY”]
(1872–July 15, 1929) Food vendor, realtor
Known for her business acumen, Lillian Harris Dean became successful during the Harlem Renaissance by turning a small (five-dollar) investment in the food business into a fortune. Her entrepreneurial success is well documented in the literature of the era.
Dean was born in Tougaloo, Mississippi, in 1892, and became part of the major migration of African Americans from the rural, segregated South to the urban North, looking to improve their lives. She first moved to Chicago, then to Boston, and, according to her obituary in the New York Amsterdam News, arrived in New York City in 1896. Blessed with an entrepreneurial spirit and a willingness to work hard, Dean began a cooked food vending business based on her southern roots, which became popular and lucrative. Although she sold such soul-food favorites as fried chicken and hot corn, her most desired menu item, which brought her lasting fame, was boiled pigs feet. The food stand was located on 135th and Lenox, near a newsstand that was owned by John Dean, a postal worker who became her husband of twenty-three years. Known as “Pigfoot Mary” throughout Harlem, Lillian saved the money she made from her entrepreneurial cooking and gained a reputation for thriftiness and shrewd investments.
In 1911, the New York legislature passed a food act that outlawed the sale of cooked food on the streets. This caused Dean to go out of the food vending business. She and her husband decided to transition into the real estate business and began purchasing property in the New York area. In his book Black Manhattan, which was first published in 1930, the famed author and poet James Weldon Johnson writes that “Pigfoot Mary” purchased an apartment building with five stories near the corner of Seventh Avenue and 137th for $42,000 and made a profit of $30,000 when she subsequently sold it to a black funeral director. At a time when many African Americans were struggling in dire poverty, Dean was able to purchase an apartment building worth $100,000, as well other properties.
Although she attended the Mother Zion A.M.E. Church for several years, Dean later became a member of the Mount Olivet Tabernacle and belonged to such fraternal organizations as the Independent Order of St. Luke and the Household of Ruth. In her retirement years, Dean decided to pursue her dreams of traveling both domestically and abroad. She made many trips to California, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands. Her newspaper obituary states that she died in Los Angeles on July 15, 1929, leaving her husband, daughter, son-in-law, and seven-month-old granddaughter to mourn her passing. The family brought her back to New York and buried her in Woodlawn Cemetery. An article that appeared in the New York Amsterdam News after her death reveals that her husband filed a petition to be given authority of her personal property, which was valued at $75,000. She owned properties in both California and New York. At the time of her death, John’s newsstand was located on 145th Street and Eighth Avenue, and the couple was fondly remembered for the three-week whirlwind romance that led to their lengthy marriage.
The memory of “Pigfoot Mary” still lives in Harlem lore. She was portrayed by actress Loretta Devine in the 1998 movie Hoodlum, starring Laurence Fishburne and Vanessa Williams.—Glenda Marie Alvin
DELANY, CLARISSA MAE SCOTT
(May 22, 1901–October 11, 1927) Poet, critic
Clarissa Mae Scott Delany is best known as a poet, as well as one of the best representatives of the New Negro model of excellence during the 1920s, as she contributed literary writings and social commentary on key issues during the Harlem Renaissance era. Although she only lived a short twenty-six years, her involvement and influence were important.
Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, on May 22, 1901, Delany spent her early years on the campus of Tuskegee Institute, while her father, Emmett Jay Scott, was secretary to the school’s founder, Booker T. Washington, for almost two decades. At the age of fifteen, Delany left home to study at Bradford Academy in Haverhill, Massachusetts, from 1916 to 1919, and Wellesley College from 1919 to 1923. While in college, she was active in sports and various clubs, and got her literary inspiration from the Literary Guild in Boston, where, on one occasion, she heard and was inspired by Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay.
Delany graduated from Wellesley in 1923, Phi Beta Kappa, with a focus on poetry and social economics. With such high honors, her picture was placed on the June 1923 issue of Crisis magazine, representing young, educated black women of her time. After traveling in Europe, Delany spent three years teaching at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., before marrying Hubert T. Delany, a lawyer, in 1926, and moving to New York City. During this time, Delany wrote often and submitted essays, book reviews, and poems to Crisis, Opportunity, and Palms. One such essay, published in 1925, by Opportunity, addresses major issues of the period, including art and Pan-Africanism. In 1926, Delany became a social worker with the National Urban League and the Women’s City Club, and she collected statistical data regarding delinquency among black children in New York.
Delany’s poetry, which was considered subtle in presentation and often personal in content, was popular with the literary community. From her early poetry “Interim,” which appeared in 1923, to her series of lyrical poems, which include the well-known work “Solace,” a fourth-place winner in the first literary contest held by Opportunity, Delany’s style was lauded by such familiar contemporaries as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Countee Cullen. Her work was subsequently published in Cullen’s anthology of black poets, Caroling Dusk, in 1927, a collection that was actually compiled by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. Only a small portion of Delany’s poetry was published, and the remaining works were lost throughout the years. The poet and critic died from a kidney disease that may have been the result of a six-month bout with a streptococcal infection or possibly tuberculosis. Special tributes were written for Delaney by Anna Julia Cooper and Angelina Weld Grimké, who wrote the poem “To Clarissa Scott Delany,” published in Ebony in 1927.—Lean’tin L. Bracks
DICKINSON, BLANCHE TAYLOR
(1896–1972) Poet, fiction writer, teacher
Blanche Taylor Dickinson’s work appeared in prominent publications of the Harlem Renaissance, including Crisis, The American Anthology, Caroling Dusk, the Louisville Leader, and Opportunity. In the September 1927 issue of the latter, she was awarded the Buckner Award for “A Sonnet and a Rondeau,” and for her potential, and in October, Opportunity printed her biographical statement. She wrote that she had an intense interest in young black writers and kept in touch with them through the black press.
Dickinson was born in Franklin, Kentucky, and attended Bowling Green Academy and Simmons University in Kentucky. She taught for a period in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where she lived with her husband, Verdell Dickinson (1898–1978), a truck driver born in Trenton, Kentucky.
In the biographical statement that ran in Opportunity, Dickinson indicates that she and her mother shared the desire to write poetry and stories. In the output from her brief public publishing period (1927–1929), she reflects the themes and issues of black female writers the likes of Marita Bonner and Georgia Douglas Johnson, as well as the realities of the time. She details the plight and pain of women suffering racial, gender, and psychological oppression, and beauty measured by white standards. The women in Dickinson’s poems are invisible and without voice, trapped and living within themselves. They are isolated and vulnerable in a world that disregards their thoughts and feelings. In her poem “Fortitude,” Dickinson portrays the woman of the silent scream, the denial of her person, and her acceptance with a countenance of pride and a broken spirit. In the poem “Four Great Walls,” Dickinson focuses on curtailed liberty, freedom, and expectations. She is buried in Pleasant View Cemetery in Simpson County, Kentucky.—Helen R. Houston
DISMOND [HODGES], GERALDYN
(July 29, 1894–1984) Journalist, writer, editor
Also known as the “Harlem Hostess” and “Gerri Major,” Geraldyn Hodges Dismond served as editor and society columnist for some of the key black publications in New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Baltimore. Her work spanned the Harlem Renaissance era and well into the 1980s. Dismond was born July 29, 1894, in Chicago. She went on to graduate from the University of Chicago in 1915. She later married a local doctor. After spending time as a teacher and serving as a major in the Red Cross during World War I, Dismond found her true calling in journalism and writing about the black society scene. She wrote columns for such black newspapers as the New York Amsterdam News in 1925, the Pittsburg Courier from 1926 to 1927, and the Baltimore Afro-American in 1928.
In 1927, Dismond won first place in a “Survey of the Negro Press”; in 1928, she presented herself as a “publicity agent” and opened the Geraldyn Dismond Bureau of Specialized Publicity, and from 1928 to 1931, served as manager-editor of the Inter-state Tattler, and later as its associate editor. Under Dismond’s leadership, her frank commentaries, specifically on gossip columns in the New York Amsterdam News from 1939 to 1944, on the activities of luminaries on one hand, and the bohemian lifestyle on the other, all while excelling in her literary commentary as a journalist, made her columns a key part of the events of the age. Dismond was a familiar figure at many social galas of the time and found the extravagant parties given by A’Lelia Walker at her Harlem townhouse, known as the Dark Tower, a showcase of the vibrant times. Dismond hosted numerous parties of her own and was dubbed the “Harlem Hostess.” Not limited by print media in showcasing black culture, she also became the first black female radio announcer and hosted the program “The Negro Achievement Hour” on station WABC.
After working as an administrative assistant from 1934 to 1946 for the New York Health Department’s Bureau of Public Health Information and Education, Desmond became society editor and associate editor of Ebony magazine in 1953. She then became known as Gerri Major. Her career lasted another twenty-five successful years and included coauthoring the book Black Society, published in 1976. Dismond died in New York City.—Lean’tin L. Bracks
DRAPER, MURIEL
(1891–August 26, 1956) Hostess, writer
During the 1920s, Muriel Draper used her New York salon to entertain many young black artists and writers of Harlem. Each Tuesday, her renovated stable on 40th Street was the site of teas, with an abundance of refreshments provided by friends, as she entertained about a third of her guests.
The years of Draper’s birth and death are variously recorded; some sources say she was born in 1891 and died in 1956, while others say she was born in 1856 and passed away in 1952. The wife of Paul Draper, a baritone whom she divorced in 1916, Muriel had become famous for her salon in London known as “Edith Grove.” Musicians and writers, including Henry James, John Sergeant, and possibly Gertrude Stein, whom she befriended, were her regular guests. She became known as a writer, as well as a “worldly society hostess, arts aficionado, decorator, and memoirist.” Draper returned to her native New York in 1915, and became an interior designer, serving wealthy clients. She was a talented public speaker and published essays in Vogue and Town and Country magazines. In addition to her talents, Draper was known for her “strange beauty” and ability to attract the public eye with her fashionable dress.
Draper was a welcomed guest at A’Lelia Walker’s Harlem townhouse, known as the Dark Tower, and at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue pied-à-terre, along with such black luminaries as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Florence Mills; white writers from downtown, for example, Carl Van Vechten and Witter Byrnner, and a mixture of African and European royalty would also be in attendance. Draper is among those white benefactors who supported the African Americans who were connected to the arts during the Harlem Renaissance.—Jessie Carney Smith
DU BOIS, [NINA] YOLANDE
(1900–1960) Teacher
Yolande Du Bois was the only surviving daughter of the esteemed activist and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and Nina Gomer Du Bois, his first wife. She is also known for her lavish wedding to the acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. The wedding was a milestone event in Harlem Renaissance history.
Born in 1900, Du Bois received a prestigious education. She attended the Bedales School, a British preparatory academy. Her father expected no less. Indeed, he had been the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a predominately white institution. He went on to achieve spectacular fame as an activist fighting for equality and against racial violence. He published several books and novels, for instance, the seminal work The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He taught at Atlanta University and cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As editor of the NAACP’s magazine, Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois became an influential voice for the African American people. In Crisis, he promoted writers, including the men and women of the Harlem Renaissance.
Yolande followed in her father’s footsteps when she attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her father had received his undergraduate degree there in 1888. In 1924, she received a degree in fine arts. After graduation, she taught in the Baltimore public school system.
In 1928, Du Bois made headline news as she and her fiancé, Countee Cullen, prepared for their greatly anticipated wedding. Cullen, born in Harlem, was a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, earning several awards for his literature. Due to Du Bois’s famous father and celebrated fiancé, the wedding was the social event of the year. There were some 3,000 guests in attendance for the nuptials, which took place on April 9, 1928. Guests included such well-known figures as African American writers Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson, and Mary White Ovington, a suffragist, journalist, and cofounder of the NAACP.
Following the wedding, the newly married couple traveled to several cities, including Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts. They also traveled to France; however, in 1930, the couple divorced. Yolande married a second time and gave birth to daughter Du Bois Williams in 1932. After Yolande’s death from a heart attack in 1960, her father buried her near her mother in Great Barrington.—Gladys L. Knight
DU BOIS, SHIRLEY LOLA GRAHAM [SHIRLEY GRAHAM]
(November 11, 1896–March 27, 1977) Writer, composer, playwright, activist
Shirley Lola Graham Du Bois contributed creative works during the Harlem Renaissance. She remained productive throughout the 1970s until her death in 1977. Du Bois is also known for her marriage to prominent scholar and activist William E. B. Du Bois and her activism.
Born Shirley Lola Graham on November 11, 1896, in Evansville, Indiana, Du Bois was nurtured from childhood to transcend the limitations that were imposed on her ethnicity and gender by society. She was born into a world that denied blacks and women equal rights and full inclusion into mainstream society; however, her father, David A. Graham, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and mother, Etta Bell Graham, instilled in her a passion for reading, learning, and pursuing grand dreams. The family moved frequently. Each new experience in New Orleans, Louisiana, Nashville and Clarksville, Tennessee, and Spokane, Washington, yielded opportunities for Du Bois to explore her talents and broaden her outlook on life. At only eight or nine years of age, she received payment for contributing articles to a local newspaper. She won a contest for an essay entitled “Booker T. Washington” while in high school in 1912.
Several years later, Du Bois focused on family life. In 1921, she married Shadrach McCants. An ambitious individual, McCants owned a clothing store and worked for a newspaper. In 1923, Du Bois gave birth to their first son, Robert. A few years later, in 1925, they welcomed their second son, David; however, in 1927, Du Bois and McCants divorced.
While the Harlem Renaissance was still at its peak, Du Bois emerged a single mother intent on continuing her educational and creative goals. In 1929, she launched her educational experiences at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied music composition. In 1934, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from Oberlin College in Ohio. The following year, she received an M.A. in music history from the same institution. Throughout the 1930s, Du Bois was productive. A notable work includes her musical composition Tom-Tom, which she wrote in 1932. The production pays tribute to the history of African Americans from Africa to Harlem. In the 1930s, Harlem was still a vortex of African American talent in art, music, and literature.
Du Bois used her multiple talents in various ways. She taught music at Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland (now Morgan State University), and music and arts at the Agricultural and Industrial State College in Nashville, Tennessee (now Tennessee State University). From the mid-1930s to the 1940s, she was also supervisor of the Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theater and a USO director at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. She was also a longtime national field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Her abundant writings include the plays Coal Dust (1938) and Dust to Earth (1941), as well as books on such eminent African American figures as George Washington Carver, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and husband-to-be W. E. B. Du Bois (after his death).
In 1951, Du Bois married W. E. B Du Bois. At the time of their marriage, she was fifty-four; he was eighty-four years old and still deeply entrenched in the struggle for equality for African Americans. W. E. B. helped found and lead the NAACP and greatly supported the Harlem Renaissance. Stories, poems, and reviews by African Americans appeared regularly in the NAACP’s magazine, Crisis, during a time when talented African Americans were largely ignored by the mainstream media. The lives of the newlyweds took a sudden turn following Du Bois’s arrest for his association with Communism. Following his arrest, the couple traveled to Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. They eventually became members of the Communist Party and moved to Accra, Ghana, in 1962. In Ghana, Shirley helped her husband with his book, Encyclopedia Africana. He died in 1963.
Denied permission to return permanently to the United States, Shirley moved from Ghana to Cairo and China. She died in Beijing, China, of breast cancer.—Gladys L. Knight
DUNBAR-NELSON, ALICE RUTH
(July 19, 1875–September 18, 1935) Author, activist, educator
Alice Ruth Dunbar-Nelson
Alice Ruth Dunbar-Nelson was one of the most influential women of the Harlem Renaissance; she was a prolific writer (poet, short story writer, dramatist, novelist, essayist, journalist, and diarist), editor, educator, and lecturer, as well as a social and political activist. Dunbar-Nelson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on July 19, 1875, to Joseph Moore, a merchant marine, and Patricia Moore, a seamstress. She attended the city’s public schools and completed the two-year teachers’ program at Straight College (now Dillard University) in 1892. Dunbar-Nelson also studied at Cornell University, Columbia University, the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art, and the University of Pennsylvania. She is also known as the widow of her first husband, Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Prior to Dunbar-Nelson’s marriage to the most prominent African American poet of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she taught school in her hometown from 1892 to 1896. During that period, her Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of essays, poetry, and short stories, was published. In 1897, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she taught at a public school. She also helped Victoria Earle Matthews with the founding of the White Rose Mission Home for Girls, located in Harlem, and met Dunbar face-to-face after a two-year correspondence initiated by the famous poet. They married on March 8, 1898, and lived in Washington, D.C., where they were considered the African American version of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Dunbar-Nelson’s second book, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899), was presented in conjunction with Dunbar’s Poems of Cabin and Field (1899) by his publisher. In September 1900, Dunbar-Nelson’s first play, The Author’s Evening at Home, was published in the Smart Set, a periodical edited by George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken. Alice and Paul legally separated in 1902, four years before his death at the age of thirty-three.
In 1902, Dunbar-Nelson moved to Wilmington to teach English and drawing at Howard High School, the only African American high school in Delaware. She later served as head of the English Department. In addition to working at Howard, Dunbar-Nelson ran the in-service teachers’ summer sessions at the State College for Colored Students (now Delaware State University) for seven years, and she taught for two summers at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). In April 1909, an excerpt from her Cornell thesis, “Wordsworth’s Use of Milton’s Description of the Building of Pandemonium,” appeared in Modern Language.
On January 19, 1910, Dunbar-Nelson married Henry A. Callis, a fellow Howard High educator, Cornell University acquaintance, and cofounder of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. The following year, Callis, who was twelve years younger than his wife, left Wilmington to attend medical school, and the couple subsequently divorced. Callis later became a physician and a Howard University professor of medicine. Dunbar-Nelson’s tenure at Howard High School ended in 1920, when her political activism led to her termination after she returned from Marion, Ohio, where she participated in Social Justice Day events. Four years later, along with other members of the Federation of Colored Women, she established the Industrial School for Colored Girls (later named the Kruse Industrial School) in Marshalltown, Delaware, where she volunteered as a teacher and parole officer until 1928.
On April 16, 1916, Dunbar married Robert John Nelson, a journalist and widower with two children. The previously published writer continued to write during her second and third marriages. She also edited two books: Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the Days of Slavery to the Present (1914) and The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, Containing the Best Prose and Poetic Selections by and about the Negro Race (1920). Dunbar-Nelson included eight of her works in The Dunbar Speaker, including the short story “The Praline Woman,” the poem “I Sit and Sew,” and the one-act play about African American men fighting in World War I entitled Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. During the author’s lifetime, her creative works were also published in such periodicals as the Brooklyn Standard Union, the Southern Workman, Lippincott’s Magazine, Leslie’s Weekly, Crisis, Opportunity, and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, as well as in anthologies. These include Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson; Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923), edited by Robert T. Kerlin; Caroling Dusk (1927), edited by Countee Cullen; and Ebony and Topaz (1927), edited by Charles S. Johnson. Dunbar-Nelson’s articles appeared in various sources, namely Education, A.M.E. Church Review, Messenger, and the Journal of Negro History. She was a syndicated columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier in 1926, and for the Washington Eagle from 1926 to 1930. From 1920 to 1922, the Nelsons published and edited the Wilmington Advocate, an African American newspaper. Dunbar-Nelson’s diary from the 1920s and early 1930s was edited by Gloria Hull and published as Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1984). It provides insight into the life of an African American female intellectual, writer, and activist, and offers Dunbar-Nelson’s firsthand observations of early twentieth-century life.
Dunbar-Nelson remained steadfast in her determination to battle racism and sexism. She was a field representative for the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense in 1913; a field organizer for the Middle Atlantic to campaign for women’s suffrage in 1915; a member of the prominent African American group that met with President Warren Harding in the American Friends Peace Committee; and, in 1929, the first African American woman to serve as a Republican state committee member in Delaware. In 1932, when Robert Nelson was appointed a member of the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission, the family moved to Philadelphia. Dunbar-Nelson died at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital at the age of sixty.—Linda M. Carter
DUNCAN, THELMA MYRTLE [THELMA BROWN]
(1902–?) Playwright, novelist, short story writer, educator
Thelma Myrtle Duncan was a member of an elite group of university students and writers who formed the National Negro Theater at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was active in the New Negro Movement in Washington, D.C., an extension of the renaissance that was taking place in Harlem. She associated with other luminaries of that era, including Mae Miller, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was also author of nine plays, some published and some unpublished.
Duncan was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1902, and graduated cum laude from Howard University with a degree in music. She later attended Columbia University. She became a music teacher as a necessity, although her true passion was writing. She taught music in North Carolina.
At the Civil War’s end, 90 percent of African Americans lacked literacy. In the 1800s, 30 percent were literate, and, by 1890, 50 percent could read. With the improved literacy, a larger percentage of blacks were educated and produced an audience for black plays, poems, and other writings. The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, of the 1920s and 1930s was not strictly confined to the Harlem section of New York, but flowered in several urban areas.
At Howard University in Washington, D.C., students and faculty were active in literary and artistic pursuits. It was in this rich climate that Howard students were writing plays to be performed by the Howard Players and other theater groups. Duncan’s Death Dance was one of the first plays put on by the Howard Players. It was performed in Rankin Memorial Chapel at Howard, and in the Douglass Theatre in Baltimore. Some of the New Negro one-act plays were performed at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library.
Duncan wrote several one act-plays, including The Death Dance (1927). Sacrifice is the story of a character named Roy who sacrifices his good name so his friend can graduate from college. Black Magic is a comedy about superstition among blacks in the South. Duncan also wrote Drifter: One-Act Plays of Lower Negro Life, Jinda, Payment, and The Scarlet Shawl.
Duncan was mentored by Howard University professor and editor of The New Negro, Alain Locke. A second mentor was Thomas Montgomery Gregory, founder of Howard University’s Drama Department. She wrote at least two more plays, The Witch Woman and Hard Times, with the wish that they be published in a collection by Montgomery. Her novel, Ham’s Children, was never published.
The plays at National Negro Theater were of three different genres—the revelation class, contribution class, and conscience class. The revelation class was written to introduce the Negro world to the white world. The contribution class showed how important the Negro was to society as a whole. The conscience class attempted to appeal to Caucasian liberals to get them to join in the fight for equality. Duncan wrote three plays in the conscience category, with characters like Roy in Sacrifice. Duncan’s mentor, Alain Locke, was probably disappointed in his students for trying to change white people’s minds with one-dimensional characters in their plays.
Duncan traveled by automobile throughout New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. She returned to her parents’ home in La Junta, Colorado, in 1929, hoping to write full-time, but she was not successful, even though her play Sacrifice was published in Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro in 1930. She wrote a letter to her professor, Gregory, indicating her disappointment with her writing career. She wanted to write but was unable to make a career of it. Duncan’s play Black Magic was published in Yearbook of Short Plays, edited by Claude Merton.
When she was thirty years old and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Duncan married a Mr. Brown in 1932. Here she started a novel and had some success with short stories; two of her stories were published. The date of her death is unclear.—Elizabeth Sandidge Evans
DUNN, BLANCHE
(April 1911–?) Socialite, actress
Blanche Dunn was recognized by many of her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries as one of the most beautiful and fashionable women in New York. She has been called the “it” girl of that era.
Dunn was born in Jamaica in 1911, and arrived in New York City in 1926, when she was fifteen or sixteen years old. She met Wilda Gunn, a fashion designer, who mentored the teenager and taught her how to dress appropriately and stylishly. Dunn was a showgirl in the Broadway musical Blackbirds of 1930, and she had a minor role in The Emperor Jones, the 1933 film starring Paul Robeson.
Dunn attended the opening nights of numerous Broadway productions, as well as many social events in Harlem and elsewhere in Manhattan, including parties hosted by such prominent figures as A’Lelia Walker and Carl Van Vechten. In addition to being a mainstay at Van Vechten’s parties, Dunn posed for his photographs of her as early as January 1924, and as late as May 1941. There are at least two photographs from 1924 of Dunn’s legs and shoes, in addition to a 1941 photograph of Dunn wearing Martinique attire. Her popularity guaranteed that a table was always reserved for her at the Hot Cha, a popular and exclusive Harlem nightclub. Dunn’s beauty, personality, and sophistication enabled her to wear expensive clothes, shop in Paris, and travel to other European locales. In late January or early February 1953, for example, she returned to New York after a nine-month European vacation that included trips to Paris and the Riviera. She ultimately married and relocated to a villa in Capri.—Linda M. Carter