Countee Cullen (born Countee LeRoy Porter; May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.
Countee LeRoy Porter was born on May 30, 1903, to Elizabeth Thomas Lucas. Due to a lack of records of his early childhood, historians have had difficulty identifying his birthplace. Baltimore, Maryland, New York City, and Louisville, Kentucky, have been cited as possibilities. Although Cullen claimed to have been born in New York City, he also frequently referred to Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace on legal applications. Cullen was brought to Harlem at the age of nine by Amanda Porter, believed to be his paternal grandmother, who cared for him until her death in 1917.
Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's largest congregation, and his wife, the former Carolyn Belle Mitchell, adopted the 15-year-old Countee Porter, although the adoption may not have been official. Frederick Cullen was a central figure in Countee's life, and acted as his father. The influential minister eventually became president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Cullen entered the DeWitt Clinton High School, then located in Hell's Kitchen. He excelled academically at the school and started writing poetry. He won a citywide poetry contest. At DeWitt, he was elected into the honor society, was editor of the weekly newspaper, and was elected vice-president of his graduating class. In January 1922, he graduated with honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French.
New York University, Harvard University and Early Publications
After graduating from high school, he attended New York University (NYU). In 1923, at the Town Hall in New York City, he gave a speech to the League of Youth in which he said, “For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.” The speech was later printed in The Crisis (August 1923). Also in 1923, Cullen won second prize in the Witter Bynner National Competitions for Undergraduate Poetry, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, for his book of poems titled, "The Ballad of the Brown Girl". Soon after, he was publishing poetry in national periodicals such as Harper's, The Crisis, Opportunity, The Bookman, and Poetry, earning him a national reputation. The following year, he again placed second in the contest, finally winning first prize in 1925. He competed in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity and came in second with "To One Who Said Me Nay", losing to Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues". Cullen graduated from NYU in 1925 and was one of eleven students selected to Phi Beta Kappa.
That same year, Cullen entered Harvard to pursue a master's in English, and published Color, his first collection of poems that later became a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated Black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The volume included "Heritage" and "Incident", among his most widely anthologized poems. "Yet Do I Marvel", about racial identity and injustice, showed the literary influence of William Wordsworth and William Blake, but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there is God, and "God is good, well-meaning, kind", but he finds a contradiction in his own plight reflecting the racial prejudice of the era: he is black and a poet. In 1926, Cullen graduated with a master's degree, while also serving as the guest editor of a special "Negro Poets" issue of the poetry magazine Palms. The appointment led to Harper's inviting him to edit an anthology of Black poetry in 1927.
American writer Alain Locke helped Cullen come to terms with his sexuality. Locke aimed to introduce a new generation of African-American writers, including Countee Cullen, to the reading public. He also sought to present the authentic natures of sex and sexuality through writing, creating a kind of relationship with those who felt the same. Locke introduced Cullen to gay-affirming material, such as the work of Edward Carpenter, at a time when most gays were in the closet. In March 1923, Cullen wrote to Locke about Carpenter's work: "It opened up for me soul windows which had been closed; it threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural".
Critics and historians have not reached a consensus regarding Cullen's sexuality, partly because Cullen was unsure of this himself. Cullen's first marriage, to Yolande Du Bois, experienced difficulties before ending in divorce. He subsequently had relationships with many different men, although each ended poorly. Each relationship had a sense of shame or secrecy, such as his relationship with Edward Atkinson. Cullen later married Ida Roberson while potentially in a relationship with Atkinson. Letters between Cullen and Atkinson suggest a romantic interest, although there is no concrete evidence that they were in a sexual relationship.
Cullen married Yolande Du Bois on April 9, 1928. She was the surviving child of W. E. B. Du Bois and his first wife Nina Gomer Du Bois, whose son had died as an infant. The two young people were said to have been introduced by Cullen's close friend Harold Jackman. They met in the summer of 1923, when both were in college: she was at Fisk University and he was at NYU. Cullen's parents owned a summer home in Pleasantville, New Jersey, near the Jersey Shore, and Yolande and her family were likely also vacationing in the area when they first met.
While at Fisk, Yolande had had a romantic relationship with the jazz saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford. However, her father disapproved of Lunceford. The relationship ended after Yolande accepted her father's preference of a marriage to Cullen.
The wedding was the social event of the decade among the African-American elite. Cullen, along with W. E. B. Du Bois, planned the details of the wedding with little help from Yolande. Every detail of the wedding, including the rail car used for transportation and Cullen receiving the marriage license four days prior to the wedding day, was considered big news and was reported to the public by the African-American press. His father, Frederick A. Cullen, officiated at the wedding. The church was overcrowded, as 3,000 people came to witness the ceremony.
After the newly wedded couple had a short honeymoon, Cullen traveled to Paris, France, with his guardian/father, Frederick Cullen, and best man Jackman. Yolande soon joined him there, but they had difficulties from the start. A few months after their wedding, Cullen wrote a letter to Yolande confessing his love for men. Yolande told her father and filed for divorce. Her father wrote separately to Cullen, saying that he thought Yolande's lack of sexual experience was the reason the marriage did not work out. The couple divorced in 1930 in Paris. The details were negotiated between Cullen and Yolande's father, as the wedding details had been.
Cullen was generally private regarding his personal relationships. Rumors circulated that a relationship between Cullen and school teacher Harold Jackman contributed to Cullen and Yolande's divorce. Jackman was a prominent figure in Harlem social circles. However, according to historian Thomas Wirth, author of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, there is no factual evidence that the men were lovers, despite contemporary newspaper stories and gossip. In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Roberson and lived with her until his death in 1946. In the early 1940s, they lived on Sugar Hill in West Harlem at the Garrison Apartments.
Jackman's diaries, letters, and outstanding collections of memorabilia are held in depositories across the country, such as the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia. At Cullen's death, Jackman requested that his collection in Georgia be renamed, from the Harold Jackman Collection to the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection, in honor of his friend. After Jackman died of cancer in 1961, the collection at Clark Atlanta University was renamed as the Cullen-Jackman Collection to honor them both.