Bennett, Gwendolyn

By: Theresa Leininger-Miller

Source:

 American National Biography Online

Bennett, Gwendolyn

writer and artist, was born in Giddings, Texas, the daughter of Joshua Robin Bennett and Mayme F. Abernathy, teachers on a Native American reservation. In 1906 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Bennett’s father studied law and her mother worked as a manicurist and hairdresser. Her parents divorced and her mother won custody, but her father kidnapped the seven-year-old Gwendolyn. The two, with her stepmother, lived in hiding in various towns along the East Coast and in Pennsylvania before finally settling in New York.

At Brooklyn’s Girls’ High (1918–1921) Bennett participated in the drama and literary societies—the first African American to do so—and won first place in an art contest. She next attended fine arts classes at Columbia University (1921) and the Pratt Institute, from which she graduated in 1924. While she was still an undergraduate, her poem “Nocturne” was published in Crisis (Nov. 1923); “Heritage” appeared in Opportunity (Dec. 1923).

Bennett’s poetry generally dealt with racial uplift and pride in her African heritage. “To Usward” was a tribute to the new generation and a call to those who have “a song to sing,” published in both Opportunity and Crisis in May 1924. She also produced symbolist-inspired and romantic lyrics, such as “Quatrains” (1927). It expressed the tension Bennett experienced, torn between art and literature: Brushes and paints are all I have
To speak the music in my soul
While silently there laughs at me
A copper jar beside a pale green bowl.

Over the next nine years, twenty-two of Bennett’s poems appeared in Opportunity, Crisis, Palms, and Gypsy. Additional poems were published in William Stanley Braithwaite’s, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927 and Yearbook of American Poetry (1927), Countée Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927), and James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1931).

Bennett also created cover illustrations for Crisis (Dec. 1923, Mar. 1924); the latter, “Pipes of Pan,” was a line drawing of a young African-American man listening to music produced by nymphs and satyrs. Her covers for Opportunity appeared in January and July 1926 and December 1930. She also produced oil landscapes, but she rarely exhibited her work publicly.

In 1924 Bennett began teaching design, watercolor, and crafts at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and was reunited with her mother. The following year, on a $1,000 Delta Sigma Theta sorority fellowship, she studied art in Paris at the Académies de la Grande Chaumière, Julian, and Colarossi, and at the École du Panthéon. She published two short stories—“Wedding Day” published in Fire!! (1926), and “Tokens” in Charles S. Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (1927). Both express the isolation and loneliness she experienced in Paris and feature African-American expatriates who remained in France after serving in World War I.

After Bennett returned to Washington, D.C., in 1926, her father died, and she lost most of the paintings and batiks she had produced abroad in a fire in her stepmother’s home. She then spent two years (1927–1928) writing “The Ebony Flute,” a “literary and social chit-chat” column for Opportunity, for which she had also written book reviews. During the summer of 1927 she also taught art classes at Nashville’s Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College. The same year, she served as editor for the magazine Black Opals.

In 1928 Bennett received a scholarship to study art at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. She also married Alfred Jackson and moved to Eustis, Florida, where her husband had a medical practice. Unhappy in the segregated South, Bennett gained sixty pounds in four years and wrote little. The couple moved to Hemstead, Long Island, in 1932, and Bennett took a job with the Department of Information and Education of the Welfare Council of New York, writing feature articles that appeared in the Amsterdam News, the New York Age, the Baltimore Afro-American, and Better Times.

After Jackson died in 1936, Bennett lived alternately with her stepmother and with the sculptor Augusta Savage in New York. She worked as a teacher, then a project supervisor, in the Federal Art Teaching Project. When Savage resigned as director of the Harlem Community Art Center, a Federal Art Project endeavor, in 1939, Bennett took that position. She was also active in the Harlem Artists Guild, the National Negro Congress, the Artists Union, the Negro People’s Theater, and the Negro Playwright’s Company, serving on the board of directors of the last.

In 1941 Bennett gave a series of lectures on African-American arts at the School for Democracy; she also married a white Harvard graduate and fellow teacher, Richard Crosscup. Three years later, Bennett was suspended from the Art Center by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for her leftist sympathies. She then cofounded and directed the George Carver Community School, an adult education center for African Americans in Harlem. HUAC investigated the school, and it closed in 1947. From the end of the 1940s until the late 1960s, Bennett worked for the Consumers Union as a correspondent.

Upon their retirement in 1968, Bennett and her husband moved to Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and opened an antiques store. Bennett died of congestive heart failure in Reading. She had no children.

Although she was a minor writer and artist, Bennett contributed significantly to the New Negro movement with her editing, teaching, and leadership, aiding the careers of such better-known colleagues as Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen.

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