Friday, November 26, 2010

Re: A Royal Harlem Renaissance Wedding



This week there was a review in the New York Times about a play, Knock Me a Kiss, portraying the unsuccessful marriage between W. E. B. Du Bois' daughter, Yolande, and the poet Countee Cullen. The wedding was the major event in Harlem in 1928. Over 3,000 people attended the wedding with another 3,000 people lined up outside the church. The marriage was short-lived. Gossip suggested that the bridegroom was gay. Cullen spent most of his post-wedding time in Paris with the best man, actor Harold Jackman, who co-founded the Harlem Experimental Theatre with Regina and Dorothy Peterson.

Regina most likely attended this wedding. Cullen was the most frequent visitor to the literary salon that Regina hosted and she was a friend of W. E. B. Du Bois. Regina's husband was an assistant usher at the wedding and Regina's former roommate, Ethel Ray Nance, was invited to the wedding. Nance had a copy of the wedding invitation and the exclusive invite to the reception in her collection at the University of California - Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Paris, France


I just found out that I will be presenting my research on Regina Andrews at a conference, The Collegium of African American Research (CAAR), in April 2011 in Paris. I will be on a panel, Dust Tracks on the Translantic Road: Self-Portraits of African American Women Abroad. My talk is called "The evening under the stars": The Cold War Adventures of an African American Librarian.