MARITA BONNER, “ON BEING BLACK—A WOMAN—AND COLORED”
Marita Bonner grew up in the wealthy suburb of Brookline,
Massachusetts and attended Radcliffe College as a day student,
since Black students were not allowed to live on campus. After
graduating in 1922, she took a teaching job in Virginia. She lived in
Washington, DC, where she visited Georgia Douglas Johnson’s S-
Street literary salon and met Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, Angelina Grimke, and others. Bonner’s first two pieces
appeared in 1925: a short story, “The Hands,” in Opportunity and an
essay, “On Being Black—a Woman—and Colored,” in The Crisis.
The following year she published her first play, The Pot Maker (A
Play to Be Read). As with other plays she wrote sporadically, it was
never produced. Known primarily as a writer of struggling
proletarian characters, many of whom were part of the Great
Migration, she lived a comfortable middle-class life herself. She
married in 1930 and moved to Chicago, where she was associated
with the Black Chicago Renaissance. She continued writing a
desultorily until 1941, when she stopped, perhaps, some speculate,
due to her conversion to Christian Science that year.
(See also Georgia Douglas Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, Angelina Grimke, Fenton Johnson)