Jessie Redmon Fauset

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister. She attended Cornell University, where she studied Latin, Greek, German, and French, and became one of the first Black women elected to Phi Beta Kappa. According to some sources she studied at the Sorbonne before earning her M.A. in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Fauset began contributing to The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, in 1912. By 1919, she was its literary editor, becoming the first person to publish Langston Hughes’s and Gwendolyn Bennett’s poetry as well as shaping the careers of Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay.