The Lawnside Historical Society returns to study the life and literature of the most prolific novelist of the Harlem Renaissance with "Exploring the Work of Jessie Redmon Fauset." The program, the second annual lecture, will be held Saturday, April 30, at noon in the Lawnside Public School, 426 E. Charleston Ave.
The featured speaker will be Dr. Cheryl A. Wall of Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Wall teaches African-American and American literature in the English Department. Her book just released in March is Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Her previous book, in which she profiles Miss Fauset, is Women of the Harlem Renaissance, published in 1995.
She is the editor of Changing Our Own Words: Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. She has also edited two volumes of writing by Miss Hurston for the Library of America: Novels and Short Stories and Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings as well as two volumes of criticism on Miss Hurston's fiction: "Sweat": Texts and Contexts and Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Casebook.
Dr. Wall earned her undergraduate degree at Howard University and her Ph.D. at Harvard University.
Poet Sandra Turner-Barnes will read from Plum Bun, Miss Fauset's novel, which turns on love, social responsibility and the color line.
The Society will be selling Miss Fauset's novel Plum Bun and Dr. Wall's Women of the Harlem Renaissance.
Miss Fauset was born in Snow Hill (the old name for Lawnside) on April 26, 1882, where her father, the Rev. Redmon Fauset was pastor of Mount Pisgah African Methodist Episcopal Church. She received her education in Philadelphia, a graduate of Girls High School. She is a 1905 graduate of Cornell University and earned a master's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania. She also studied at the Sorbonne. Eventually she taught English at what was to become Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., before heading to New York to work with W.E.B. DuBois, editor of the Crisis, leading African-American intellectual and ground-breaking sociologist. She traveled to the deep South and Africa in her career with the NAACP. Langston Hughes called Miss Fauset the mid-wife of the Harlem Renaissance for nurturing him and others by providing an outlet for their voices and published work. She eventually married, returned to high school teaching and died in 1961.
The Lawnside Historical Society operates the Peter Mott House Underground Railroad Museum at 26 Kings Court. The museum is open every Saturday from noon to 3 p.m., admission is $2. Group tours can be arranged by appointment. The Society, a tax-exempt, membership organization, meets on the second Thursday of each month at the Lawnside Public School. It focuses on preserving and promoting the history of Lawnside, the only incorporated northern municipality founded by free and fugitive African Americans.
On the web, go to www.petermotthouse.org. For more information call, 856-546-8850.
The Lawnside Historical Society, Inc. is a qualified organization of the New Jersey Cultural Trust.
