Jessie Fauset And Her Legacy

Jessie Fauset and Dorothy West were ahead of their time and empowering in many ways. More specifically, they were ambitious advocates to women and to African Americans. Jessie Fauset and Dorothy West were prominent leaders during the Harlem Renaissance. Education, writing (magazines, novels, and short stories) and teaching were their priorities. They both influenced and worked with the talented, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.

Jessie fauset was born in Camden County, New Jersey on April 27th, 1882. She was raised with six other children in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother died very young, and her father remarried a white woman who was Jewish and later converted to Christianity. She was accompanied by three siblings of his father’s new marriage, and she brought three children into the marriage from her first marriage. Jessie than lost her second parent, her father, at a young age as well. She attended Philadelphia High School, and went on to graduate as valedictorian. After high school in 1905, she desired to attend Bryn Mawr College but it was reluctant to accept her due to the color of her skin. Bryn Mawr assisted her with a scholarship, she became a member of Phi Betta Kappa, and graduated from Cornell University. In 1906, she searched for teaching employment in Philadelphia but they were not hiring her again due to the color of her skin. She ended up moving to Baltimore and then Washington D. C. to teach Latin and French. In the summertime, she would travel to Paris to teach French and Latin as well. Later on she earned her masters at the Ivy league, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. A year before the Harlem Renaissance in 1919, Fausset resigned teaching at Dunbar high school to move to New York. She landed the position as a contributing editor for her first published writing in The Crisis. This is the journal of the NAACP (National Advancement Association of Colored People). It was created by W. E. B. Du bois who inspired Jessie to mentor literary writers such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude Mckay. In 1920, the Harlem Renaissance was born.

Jessie Fauset contributed to her second book, The Brownies Children’s Book, written to inspire African American children about their heritage. From 1924 to 1933 she wrote her four books; There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bum (1928), the Chinaberry Tree (1931) and fourth book, Comedy American Style (1933). All of these writings focus on African American culture and economic struggles during that period, There is Confusion is about African-American characters in a middle-class setting. In between writing her four books she had left The Crisis due to her serving as Literary Editor and having conflicts with Du Bois. She searched for at home employment but no one was hiring her, so she returned to teaching. At 47 years of age she married Herbert Harris, an insurance broker. They lived in New Jersey but she traveled to Dewitt Clinton High school in New York until she retired in 1944. Jessie Fauset returned to Philadelphia one last time, she died from heart disease at the age of 79 on April 30th, 1961 in her hometown.