Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where she became active in the civil rights movement at an early age. Hall helped to organize the New Orleans Youth Council, a militant, interracial, anti-segregation movement in 1945, and in 1947 she was elected to the national board of the Southern Negro Youth Conference. Her deep commitment to the civil rights movement was visible when she was arrested in 1949 for violating segregation laws. Her family sent her to France from 1949 to 1953 where she learned French and studied classical piano. While in France, Hall briefly married Michael Yuspeh (a piano instructor), with whom she had one child, Leo Yuspeh.

From 1953 to 1964, Hall worked closely with Harry Haywood (also known as Haywood Hall), an African-American leader and member of the American Communist Party, who wrote on topics related to Marxism, particularly as it related to the civil rights movement and the condition of African-Americans in the United States. Now divorced from Michael Yuspeh, Hall married Harry Haywood in 1955; they had two children (Rebecca and Haywood) before separating in the early 1960s.

...