Today in New Jersey history:
April 27, 1882: Jessie Redmon Fauset, daughter of the pastor of the Mount Pisgah African Methodist Episcopal Church of Snow Hill, was born in Fredericksville, Camden County. Ambitious and intelligent, she attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls and Cornell University and was the first black woman to graduate from that institution, enduring the inherent racism of the time all the while. After graduation Fauset taught in schools in Baltimore and Washington, D. C., and became a writer and active member of the NAACP. Moving to Harlem, she became a columnist for and then editor of The Crisis, W. E. B. Dubois’ publication, and became known as the “midwife of the Harlem Renaissance.” In 1929, as the Harlem Renaissance ended and the American economy tanked following the stock market crash, Fauset and her husband, Herbert E. Harris, returned to New Jersey and lived in Montclair, where she taught courses on “Negro Literature in America.” Following the death of her husband in 1958, she moved once more, to Philadelphia, where she died in 1961.
