Bennett, Gwendolyn, 1902-1981

Harlem Renaissance poet, teacher, artist, and political activist during the late 1930s and 1940s.

"Born in Giddins, Texas on July 8, 1902, Gwendolyn Bennett is principally remembered as one of the poets of the 1920's Negro Renaissance in Harlem, an artist and a political activist during the late 1930's and 1940's. Her artistic career both as a poet and as a graphic artist, unfolded with the span of the "Harlem Renaissance" which lasted approximately from 1920 to 1931"--Guide.

Born in Giddins, Texas on July 8, 1902, Gwendolyn Bennett is principally remembered as one of the poets of the 1920's Negro Renaissance in Harlem, an artist and a political activist during the late 1930's and 1940's. Her artistic career, both as a poet and as a graphic artist, unfolded within the span of the “Harlem Renaissance” which lasted approximately from 1920 to 1931.

Bennett had a difficult life -- as a young child and as an adolescent. Both her father and mother were professional people -- her father Joshua Robin Bennett was a lawyer and teacher and her mother Maime Frank Bennett a teacher -- who had migrated from Texas to Washington D.C. around 1906. Their marriage, however, collapsed soon afterward, and Maime Bennett was awarded custody of young Gwendolyn. Joshua Bennett was dissatified with the legal settlement and in 1910, shortly after his second marriage to Marechal Neil, he kidnapped his daughter and, along with his new family, started moving from town to town along the eastern seaboard and the mid-Atlantic states.

Gwendolyn was able to complete her elementary education in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania before following her father to New York, where she enrolled at Brooklyn Girl's High and graduated in 1921. She had begun to write poetry in high school and was the first African American student to be elected to her school's Literary and Drama societies. In the fall of 1921, she enrolled in the Fine Arts Department of Teachers' College at Columbia University, but unhappy with the racist atmosphere prevailing on the campus she transferred two years later to Pratt Institute where she studied Drama and Fine Arts, as well as Architecture and Planning. She graduated in 1924.

During her adolescence, Bennett had dreamed of becoming a poet. The Harlem of the 1920's was the best place and time to make this dream come true. Coming on the heels of Dr. William E. Burghardt Du Bois and his “talented tenth” school of thought, a new generation of poets had begun to unveil the richness of African culture. A new cultural field had thus opened itself to the critical and inquisitive minds of Bennett and her peers, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, among others. At the same time, the emergence of a black urban middle-class led to an unprecedented concentration of talented and enlightened people in Harlem and provided the necessary infrastructure for an intellectual and artistic awakening -- literary magazines and awards, social and cultural circles, as well as limited financial support. The Crisis and Opportunity magazines, in particular, became the home of the upcoming generation of artists.

By 1925, Bennett was already an established figure in the literary and artistic milieu in Harlem. She was featured as a poet in the March 1925 special edition of Survey Graphic edited by Alain Locke and dedicated to the New Negro, and again in Locke's expanded volume The New Negro published in 1926. Earlier in 1926, while still at Pratt, she had illustrated the Christmas cover of The Crisis. Her poem To Usward, a statement of purpose and a tribute to the new generation was published in the May 1926 issue of both The Crisis and Opportunity magazines. The same year, she became assistant-editor of Opportunity magazine, and she contributed a regular column, The Ebony Flute, to that publication until 1928. In addition, in the mid-1920's, when the Negro Renaissance was in full swing, Bennett joined a group of young poets and artists, including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, in publishing a quarterly literary magazine called Fire!, devoted to the new generation of black artists. The historic and only issue of Fire! was published in 1926, and featured a short story, Wedding Day, by Bennett.

The Negro Renaissance was not physically confined to Harlem. Bennett, for one, made her biggest contribution to the movement away from Harlem. In 1924, after her graduation from Pratt, she became a member of the Fine Arts Department at Howard University, and, as an assistant-professor, taught Design, Water-color and Craft. By the end of that year, she received a scholarship from the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and, in June 1925 sailed to Paris where she studied oil painting at the Julian Academy and philosophy at the Sorbonne. She returned to the United States in the summer of 1926 and resumed her classroom work at Howard University in September of that year.

Bennett had married a medical student at Howard, Alfred Joseph Jackson, in the spring of 1927, in violation of the mores governing faculty-student relations at Howard. She resigned from her post, and, soon after his graduation, the new couple moved from Washington to Florida where Bennett worked as a teacher in the segregated Florida school system. There, confinement to a racially and culturally stifling environment and a difficult and disappointing marriage induced her to abandon poetry and the art world. She did not give up writing entirely however, and many book reviews and articles appeared under her name in the New York Herald Tribune, the New Republic, The Crisis and Opportunity magazines during that period.

In the early 1930's, Bennett convinced her husband to leave Florida. The couple moved to Hempstead, Long Island in New York, where they bought a house in 1933. The following year, she started to work as a journalist for the Department of Information and Education of the Welfare Council of New York. Many feature articles appeared in that period under her name in the columns of the Amsterdam News, the New York Age, and the Baltimore Afro-American, and in the magazines The Crisis, Opportunity and Better Times. She also handled press releases for the department and assisted many reporters in covering stories related to the Welfare Council and the Harlem community.

Jackson fell ill in 1934 and died the following year. Bennett left Hempstead in debt and moved to a studio in Harlem owned by the sculptor Augusta Savage. In December 1935, she left her job at the Welfare Council and started working, first as a teacher, and in 1936 as a project supervisor in the Federal Art Teaching Project, in Harlem. In 1938, she became the director of the Harlem Community Art Center, under the Work Projects Administration. Bennett's stay at the Community Art Center was not uneventful. The Center was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (H.U.A.C.) for “communist infiltration” and labeled a “Red front.” She was suspended and eventually dismissed in 1941; this was not to be her last encounter with the H.U.A.C. That same year, she started working at the School for Democracy where she held a series of lectures on African-American art and music, a class on journalism and a poetry workshop.

After her return to New York, Bennett had gone back to writing poetry, although her output remained sporadic. Intimate and personal, and permeated with a subtle feminine consciousness, her poetry reflects in general the changes in her life and the mood of the times. While growing up as an artist in the exuberant twenties, her poetry was optimistic and full of life. Later, in the thirties her writing became somber and bitter, not so much due to the Depression but because her life had grown somewhat more painful. She became ill and depressed after a difficult marriage and the death of her husband. Rejection and betrayal were the dominant themes in her poetry of that period. Then, in 1940, she married a white Harvard graduate and fellow school teacher, Richard Crosscup; the Second World War had already started, the economy was recovering from the Depression and the whole country was reconciled within a broad anti-fascist front. Bennett's life became more serene and her poetry more open to the world. At the beginning of the Cold War she retreated in silence.

Bennett had grown more socially conscious in the mid 1920's. She was a founding member and the director of the George Washington Carver School from its inception in 1943 until its closure in 1947. The school and its staff were highly controversial. The school itself was an adult education center oriented toward blacks in Harlem who could not meet the academic standards or the high tuition fees required by other New York institutions. It had a broad range of courses and workshops, from English composition and American history to anthropology, music, consumer education, race relations and the labor movement. The presence on its board of Benjamin Davis, well known communist and New York City councilman, and other communist sympathizers such as actors Paul Robeson and Canada Lee prompted a communist “witch-hunt” in the New York newspapers, which led to the hurried departure of a great many teachers. The school was to be continuously harassed and, following a H.U.A.C. investigation, it finally closed down in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War.

Bennett was also active in the National Negro Congress, the Artists Union, the Negro Playwrights Company and the Negro People's Theater, all of which were indicted by the H.U.A.C. as “red front organizations.” In the 1950's however, Bennett retired from public life. In 1948, she was hired by Consumers Union were she worked in various capacities until 1968 when she and her husband retired to Kutztown, Pennsylvania. There, the Crosscups opened and operated an antique shop named Buttonwood Hollow Antiques. Gwendolyn Bennett died on May 30, 1981 at the age of 77. She survived her husband by one year. She had no children.