African-American women writers, 1910-1940

Poet, playwright, and short-fiction writer Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966) was a central figure in the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Her Washington literary salon, the Round Table, was frequented by such artists and intellectuals as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Countee Cullen, and Angelina Weld Grimke. This volume collects some of Johnson's most important work: four volumes of poetry (including The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems); four short stories (one never before published); eight plays (two never before published); and previously unpublished poems from her private papers. In addition, Claudia Tate's revealing introduction offers newly discovered information on Johnson's life and work.

The Black Boy of Atlanta (1952), also written for young readers, is Ross Haynes's biography of Major Richard R. Wright, the first president of the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth and of the Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust Company. "Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States," published in The Journal of Negro History in 1923, was the subject of Ross Haynes's M.A. thesis for her degree in sociology from Columbia University. It was the first comprehensive study of the largest segment of black nonfarm workers.

During the 1920s the annual literary contests sponsored by The Crisis and Opportunity magazines provided critical professional outlets for African-American women playwrights. The works presented here (both prize-winning plays and plays that received their first publication in such organs as The Saturday Evening Quill and Carolina Magazine) cover a wide range of dramatic genres - from propaganda plays and light comedies to melodramas, folk plays, and poetic drama.

Comedy: American Style (1933), Fauset's fourth and last published novel, is the tragic story of how color prejudice and racial self-hatred result in the destruction of a family. The work is filled with vivid characters: Olivia Cary, whose mania in passing for white poisons her relationships with those closest to her; her daughter, Teresa, compelled by her mother to make choices that ruin her life; Phebe Grant, a woman of integrity who refuses to deny her race; and Oliver Cary, rejected by a mother unable to accept the color of his skin and her own heritage. A novel that received mixed reviews on its original publication, Comedy: American Style raises compelling and disturbing themes.

The Chinaberry Tree (1931), Fauset's third novel, is a tale of the lives and loves of two generations of African-American women. Its seemingly quiet small-town setting is the backdrop for such bold and explosive issues as adultery, incest, miscegenation, lust, envy, and deception. The story focuses on two women: Laurentine Strange, the beautiful daughter of a common-law interracial union, tormented by the idea that life has passed her by because of her "bad blood"; and her cousin Melissa Paul, a self-confident teenager to whom even darker secrets are revealed.

Both writers from the pre-Harlem Renaissance era, Carrie Williams Clifford (1862-1934) and Carrie Law Morgan Figgs (1878-1968) were teachers and community leaders who saw in poetry a means of addressing racial concerns and promoting the betterment of the black race. The poems in Clifford's Race Rhymes (1911) and The Widening Light (1922) and Figgs's Poetic Pearls (1920) and Nuggets of Gold (1921) cover such issues as the Jim Crow laws, military and social contributions of African Americans, Christian ideals, and the injustice of racial prejudice. This collection also includes Figgs's Select Plays (1923).