Skip to main content

Jessie Redmon Fauset

View
@ National Portrait Gallery

Description

Born Camden County, New JerseyJessie Redmon Fauset was the first African American woman to be accepted into the chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Cornell University, where she graduated with honors in 1905. Fauset taught high school at M Street High School (now Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., until 1919, when she moved to New York City to serve as the literary editor of the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis. In that role, she worked alongside W. E. B. Du Bois to help usher in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Indeed, the poet Langston Hughes acknowledged that she was among those who “midwifed the . . . New Negro literature into being.” Fauset also published four novels, including Plum Bun (1929). Laura Wheeler Waring made this portrait for the Harmon Foundation’s exhibition Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin. During the 1940s and 1950s, the show traveled the nation, serving as a visual rebuttal to racism.Nacida en el Condado de Camden, Nueva JerseyJessie Redmon Fauset fue la primera afroamericana en ser aceptada en la división de Phi Beta Kappa de la Universidad de Cornell, donde se graduó con honores en 1905. Fauset fue profesora en la escuela secundaria M Street High School (hoy Dunbar High School) de Washington D.C. hasta 1919, cuando se mudó a la Ciudad de Nueva York para trabajar como editora literaria en la revista oficial de la NAACP (Asociación Nacional para el Progreso de las Personas de Color, por sus siglas en inglés), titulada...
Type:
Image
Format:
Oil On Canvas
Rights:
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Harmon Foundation
View Original At:

Record Contributed By

National Portrait Gallery

Record Harvested From

Smithsonian Institution