Meet the woman who edited the greatest voices of the Harlem Renaissance
Jessie Redmon Fauset “midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being”
The names we’re most likely to associate with the literature of the Harlem Renaissance are Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay. Along with other cultural luminaries of the era, these men are credited with bringing the realities of African American experience to a broader audience than ever before. But we rarely hear about the person largely responsible for amplifying their voices, the writer and editor Jessie Redmon Fauset. As literary editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, Fauset was instrumental in shaping Harlem’s cultural movement by selecting and working closely with some of the era’s most important writers. Hughes would call her “one of three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro Literature into being.”
The Crisis was co-founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and six others in 1910, with a mission to pursue the “world-old dream of human brotherhood” by celebrating the achievements of African Americans and chronicling the violent struggles that attended the “great problem of inter-racial relations.” It specifically sought to address the toll of racism. An editorial in the inaugural issue began, “The object of this publication is to set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested to-day against colored people.”
Fauset began writing for The Crisis in 1912 and soon became a columnist. “The Looking Glass” dove deep to consider the complexities of the black experience, including the particular plight of black women. “The status of the Negro woman will determine the status of the race,” she wrote in a 1918 installment. A year later, in 1919, W.E.B. Du Bois offered Fauset a full-time job as the publication’s literary editor, and she moved to Harlem with her sister.
Fauset was born in Camden County, New Jersey, in 1882. She was the seventh of her parents’ children, and her mother died early in Fauset’s life, after which her father remarried a white woman with three children; they went on to have three more. Fauset went to school in Philadelphia and attended Cornell, graduating Phi Beta Kappa (she may have been the first black woman to do so). She then earned a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Fauset published four novels in the 1920s and ’30s. The first, There Is Confusion, which Alain Locke called a “novel of the educated and aspiring classes,” was especially well received. Fauset was also an editor of The Brownies’ Book, a short-lived children’s magazine that grew out of The Crisis and aimed, according to Du Bois, to “make colored children realize that being ‘colored’ is a normal, beautiful thing” and “to make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race,” among other things. Fauset wrote most of the material.
Her work on The Brownies’ Book signaled her commitment to raising the profile of African Americans by sharing positive stories. Of course, the magazine’s content was bound to skew happy, as it was expressly targeted toward children, but the project also reflects Fauset’s (and her co-editors’) desire to cultivate the “Talented Tenth,” a class of African American leaders who could guide their race toward achievement. “The Negro race, like all races, will be saved by its extraordinary men,” Du Bois had written in his famous essay on the subject in 1903. This elitist idea gained traction in the early 20th century and was arguably one of the organizing principles of the Harlem Renaissance, which sought to elevate African Americans’ status.
Fauset was primarily concerned with telling the truth of African American experience.
In a 2017 New Yorker piece, essayist Morgan Jerkins writes that Fauset’s work emphasized the “subtler, more inward burdens.” Jerkins interviews David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of a two-volume biography of Du Bois, who says that Fauset’s work represents “a tier of African-American fiction that whites and many African-Americans didn’t know or weren’t going to get to, which is upper-class, very genteel, college-educated.” And while he concedes that the books were “a bit prissy,” even for their time, they are “useful.”
Indeed, Fauset’s novels and short fiction were often concerned with nuanced social dynamics and the ways that all experience is racialized, however understatedly. She also often featured characters of European ancestry or mixed race navigating gradations of American racism.
To some, that sensibility was overly assimilationist, meaning it capitulated to the tastes of white audiences. According to an essay in the collection No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, African American literature scholar Robert Bone claimed that Richard Wright was thinking of Fauset when he wrote about “the prim and decorous ambassadors [of the Harlem Renaissance] who went a-begging to white America, dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior.” Wright’s comments, whether directed specifically at Fauset or not, encapsulate the larger tensions that existed among Harlem Renaissance writers and artists. Wright, who forged close ties with the Communist Party and later moved to Paris, in part to escape the grinding reality of racism in America, believed that only radical societal change — not gentle, positive depictions of black life — could bring about greater respect for African Americans. On the whole, Wright objected to black literature that he thought was suited to white tastes; he was similarly critical of Zora Neale Hurston, whose 1937 masterwork Their Eyes Were Watching God he skewered for catering to “a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” Hurston shot back in a later review of Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, calling it a “book about hatreds” that doesn’t bother with advancing “understanding.”
Fauset’s work was certainly pushing for greater understanding, but dismissing it for its tameness is a bit too simple. In fact, Fauset was always deeply concerned — in her life and her writing — with black self-determination. Even as she dealt largely in nuance, she also wrote boldly about the many everyday barriers she encountered. In a 1922 essay called “Some Notes on Color,” she writes about the challenge of finding a restaurant to eat at with a white acquaintance, and myriad other quotidian experiences that register anywhere along a confusing scale from inconvenience to injustice. True to form, she chronicles at the micro level the tragedy of race relations and illuminates the “network of misunderstanding” in which Americans live.
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