Overlooked No More: Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Harlem Renaissance Star Plagued by Misfortune
She was a talented young poet and artist who was central to a fledgling cultural movement, but her life was shrouded by one tragedy after another.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
On March 21, 1924, a group of artists, writers and intellectuals filled the distinguished Civic Club in Manhattan for a dinner party, one that would turn out to be a pivotal moment in the early days of the Harlem Renaissance.
The event was conceived to celebrate Jessie Fauset, the novelist, poet and literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., who had just published a new novel, “There Is Confusion.” But it wasn’t Fauset who captivated the crowd with a reading. Nor was it W.E.B. Du Bois, the éminence grise at the event, who capped the evening with a reading.
Rather, it was one of the youngest talents at the party, Gwendolyn Bennett, a 21-year-old poet and artist who entranced the room with “To Usward,” a poem she dedicated to Fauset and “to all Negro youth known and unknown who have a song to sing, a story to tell or a vision for the sons of earth.” It went, in part:
For some of us have songs to sing
Of jungle heat and fires
And some of us are solemn grown
With pitiful desires,
And there are those who feel the pull
Of seas beneath the skies,
And some there be who want to croon
Of Negro lullabies.
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Bennett would go on to write some of the most elegant poetry of the era, illustrate dynamic covers for prominent Black journals and form close relationships with luminaries like Du Bois, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. Yet, by about 1930, her literary career had been derailed by emotional turmoil arising from a series of hardships, including her father’s death, an ill-fated marriage and unwarranted attention from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Gwendolyn Bennetta Bennett was born on July 8, 1902, in the small East Texas town of Giddings. Her parents divorced when she was about 4, and her father, Joshua, kidnapped her and remained on the run with her for several years before landing in Washington, D.C., where he began practicing law. (It would be more than 15 years until Gwendolyn would reconnect with her mother, Mayme, a teacher.)
Bennett studied arts and drama at Columbia University’s Teachers College but transferred to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn because of what she called a “racist atmosphere” on the Columbia campus; she graduated in 1924. She was named a faculty member of fine arts at Howard University in Washington, then left for Paris on a scholarship the following year.
By the time she was 23 it was clear that Bennett was a rising star of what Alain Locke, one of the high-minded organizers of the Civic Club dinner, called the New Negro movement.
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“I really think of her almost like a poster child of the youthfulness of the movement at that point,” Melissa Barton, a curator of drama and prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature, said in an interview.
Bennett put race at the forefront of her work, both literary and artistic — one of the early Black creatives to do so. Her published poems (24 in all, from 1923 to 1934) were peppered with references to Black bodies, history and lives, and the verse could be lyrical, melancholy and even affronted in tone:
“I sailed in my dreams to the Land of Night/Where you were the dusk-eyed queen” (“Fantasy,” 1927); “I love you for your brownness,/And the rounded darkness of your breast” (“To a Dark Girl,” 1927); “Memory will lay its hand/Upon your breast/And you will understand/My hatred” (“Hatred,” 1926).
Historians regard her as a foundational member of the race-conscious writers of the Harlem Renaissance, that uptown blossoming of artistic and intellectual life.
“This is her acknowledging what she’s seeing in the world, but placing herself in the center of this space, in this new age for young African American artists,” Belinda Wheeler, co-editor of “Heroine of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Gwendolyn Bennett’s Selected Writings” (2018, with Louis J. Parascandola), said in an interview.
Bennett was also a stylish illustrator, exploring racial awareness through her covers for The Crisis and Opportunity, a literary journal essential to the Black community. Three in particular stand out, each with a different theme: mythological, religious and contemporary.
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Her cover for the March 1924 issue of The Crisis depicts a dark-skinned version of the Greek god Pan sleeping at the base of a tree while flanked by flute-playing satyrs, as dancers in the background engage in a Bacchanalian reverie. For the January 1926 cover of Opportunity, she drew the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus accepting gifts from the Three Kings, including one of African origin, wearing an Afro and hoop earrings.
And in July of that year, she depicted a swaying figure of a Black woman, draped in a fashionable dress while silhouetted figures behind her dance in what appears to be a stage show (one, clad only in a banana skirt, may be the singer and dancer Josephine Baker, whom Bennett had seen perform in Paris).
“She was a vibrant person,” said Sandra Govan, professor emeritus at University of North Carolina-Charlotte, who interviewed Bennett toward the end of her life. (She died in 1981.) “And she wanted to be engaged by everything.”
Paris in particular was a formative, albeit mixed, experience. Her letters to friends at home — Hughes, Locke, the young poet Countee Cullen, the patron Harold Jackman and the author Richard Wright, among others — were bursting with excitement but also reveal a yearning for what she was missing in Harlem.
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“She genuinely has FOMO,” Barton said. “The Harlem Renaissance is in full swing, and she’s just by herself.”
Indeed, Bennett was ahead of her time — more than two decades before figures like Wright and James Baldwin would make the Black artist-Paris connection famous.
Her first diary entry from Paris, on June 26, 1925, begins, “Could I mark this day I should put a black ring around it as one of the saddest days I have ever spent.”
Yet while she was there she met Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway (whom she initially referred to as “Alan” in a letter). And the celebrated singer and actor Paul Robeson and his wife, Essie, took her to dine at the home of Henri Matisse (though it’s unclear if she actually met the artist there). “It was like going to a holy shrine,” she wrote to Jackman.
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And then there was Baker’s performance and the Paris nightlife scene in general. “Every vaudeville house, every cabaret, every dinner club and every tea dansante twirls to wild joy of the Negro’s dance,” Bennett wrote in an essay.
She returned to the United States in 1926 hoping to rejoin the Harlem art scene. She wrote a column, “Ebony Flute,” for Opportunity for two years and sat on the editorial board of the seminal one-off magazine Fire!!, alongside Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and others.
Things then took a tragic turn. Her father is believed to have died by suicide that August. She returned to Howard University, only to resign the next year after controversy swelled when she got engaged to a student, Alfred Jackson.
In 1928, she married Jackson, by then a doctor, and they moved to Eustis, Fla., northwest of Orlando. By all accounts the marriage was an unhappy one. Her father’s death and her failed marriage “had a tremendous impact on her life,” Govan said in an interview. “She had to pull herself back up.”
In 1934, Bennett published poetry for the last time — a piece in Opportunity, appropriately called “Epitaph” — though she would continue to write for years to come.
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Jackson died in 1936, and Bennett turned to arts administration, taking over direction of the Harlem Artists Guild. For the first time in years, she found a measure of happiness — and recognition. In 1939, she was one of 12 Black women honored by the Women’s Service League of Brooklyn as “distinguished women of today” at the New York World’s Fair.
But just before then, in 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee had accused her of being a Communist because of her work through the guild. Their file, which would grow to 115 pages over decades despite yielding nothing, would haunt her for years.
Bennett had a tumultuous three-year affair with the Harlem-born painter Norman Lewis in the mid-1930s. In 1940, she married Richard Crosscup, a white teacher and social activist. After a series of other arts positions and teaching jobs, she moved with him to eastern Pennsylvania, settling in Kutztown, where they opened an antique store. The marriage was much happier than her first.
“I think the Crosscup marriage rescued her,” Govan said.
Crosscup died in 1980, leaving Bennett devastated. She died of heart failure the next year, on May 30, in Reading, Pa. She was 78.
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Though she never gained the wide audience she desired, Bennett left a rich legacy through her writing and art, and her passion and fortitude helped the Harlem Renaissance grow, through her own work as well as her fostering of young talent.
“I have decided that I will continue telling the story of the Negro’s cultural contribution to American culture,” she wrote to Locke in 1941, “no matter what my enemies have tried to do to me.”
