Jessie Redmon Fauset - Life and Work

Life and Work

Fauset was born on April 27, 1882 in Camden County, New Jersey. She was the daughter of Redmon Fauset, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Annie Seamon Fauset. Jessie’s mother died when she was a child and her father remarried. Fauset came from a large family mired in poverty. She attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls, and became the school's first African-American graduate. She wanted to study at Bryn Mawr College but they circumvented the issue of admitting a black student by finding her a scholarship for another university and so she continued her education at Cornell University. She graduated from Cornell University in 1905 with a degree in classical languages. It was speculated that she was the first black woman in the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Fauset later received her Master’s degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania.

Following graduation Fauset became a teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington DC, spending her summers in Paris studying at la Sorbonne. In 1919 Fauset left teaching and became the literary editor for the The Crisis alongside W.E.B. Du Bois until 1926. Fauset became a member of the NAACP and represented them in the Pan African Congress in 1921. After her Congress speech, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority made her an honorary member.

Fauset married insurance broker Herbert Harris in 1929 at the age of 47. Harris died in 1958. She then moved back to Philadelphia with her stepbrother. Fauset died on April 30, 1961 from heart disease.