The midwife of the Harlem Renaissance was born here and, this year, she's finally going to have a celebration in her home town.

The Lawnside Historical Society will focus on her in its program, "Introducing Jessie Redmon Fauset" on Saturday, April 24 at 2 p.m. in the Lawnside Public School, 426 E. Charleston Ave. A $2 donation is requested.

Miss Fauset was literary editor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis magazine for seven years. She was also a Harlem Renaissance novelist, poet, short story writer like her contemporaries Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston.

Miss Fauset was born in Snow Hill (the old name for Lawnside) on April 26, 1882. Her father the Rev. Redmon Fauset was pastor of Mount Pisgah African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was educated in Philadelphia. In 1905 she graduated of Cornell University then taught at what was to become Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. She earned a master's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania in 1919. She also studied at the Sorbonne.

She headed to New York in 1919 to work with W.E.B. DuBois. It was Langston Hughes who called Miss Fauset the mid-wife of the Harlem Renaissance for nurturing him and others by providing an outlet and pay for their published work. Her first novel was published in 1924, her fourth and last in 1933.

The featured speaker will be Dr. Mychel Namphy of York College of the City University of New York. Dr. Namphy has also taught the Harlem Renaissance, African American and Native American literature, English, and Black women writers at Rutgers and Princeton universities and Bronx Community College. He is a graduate of Columbia University who earned his doctorate at Princeton University. His multi-media presentation will show us who Miss Fauset was.

Award-winning poet and jazz performer, Sandra Turner-Barnes, "The Cadillac Lady," will read from Miss Fauset's work. Ms. Turner-Barnes is excited about the prospect of performing the work of one of her favorites, who like her, is a Lawnside native.

The Society will be selling Miss Fauset's novel The Chinaberry Tree and an informative book by Dr. Cheryl Wall of Rutgers University called Women of the Harlem Renaissance.

Society members William and Sharon Walden are chairing the event which they hope will grow in each successive year.

"People in this town and beyond should know about this lady. We feel honored to be able to share what we've learned about her, her books and her work," said Mr. Walden.