Despite having “Harlem” in its name, the Harlem Renaissance extended far beyond New York City. It was originally referred to as the New Negro Movement by Alain Locke, a Philadelphia native and one of its main exponents. Similar groups of writers and artists in other cities also sprang up, including the Ink Slingers in Los Angeles, The Scribblers in Baltimore, The Saturday Nighters in Washington D.C., and even smaller cities like Topeka, Kansas, which had the Book and Bench. A group in Philadelphia centered around the literary journal Black Opals.
In Vincent Jubilee’s 1980 dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary Circle and the Harlem Renaissance, he noted a particular impetus for creating Black Opals, writing “Although many of the budding Philadelphia authors had published independently by 1927, a publicly visible proof of their authenticity as serious literary professionals would be to present their own journal.”
Two of those authors, Nellie Rathbone Bright (1898-1977) and Arthur Huff Fauset (1899-1983) were the creators of Black Opals. Bright grew up in West Philadelphia, where her father, Reverend Richard Bright, was the vicar of St. Monica’s Episcopal Church in Powelton Village. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1923, she spent a year at the Sorbonne, followed by a year at Oxford University. Upon returning to Philadelphia, Bright embarked on a long career in public education.
A portrait of Arthur Huff Fauset. Date unknown. | Photo courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries
Fauset studied and practiced anthropology, having earned a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He was the author of folklore studies, including in Nova Scotia and Black urban religious cults. Later, he married Crystal Bird Fauset, a civil rights activist and social worker who became the first Black female state legislator elected in the United States.
Each volume of Black Opals contained 16 to 20 pages of poetry, essays, and illustrations. The print runs varied between 200 and 250. The debut issue in 1927 contained a greeting and endorsement by Locke, as well as three poems by Langston Hughes. Bright’s poem “Longings” opened that issue. Its lines “I want to look deep in a pool at night, and see the / stars / flash flame like fire in black opals,” providing the title for the journal.
In particular, Bright and Fauset were dedicated to promoting the work of younger writers. Poet and visual artist Mae Virginia Cowdery (1909-1953), who hailed from an affluent Germantown family, had three of her poems published in the Spring 1927 edition of Black Opals, while she was still a student at Philadelphia High School for Girls.
Fauset’s sister, poet and novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset, who was well-known in Harlem Renaissance circles, was also a contributor. Visual artist Allan Randall Freelon was the artistic director. The poet Gwendolyn B. Bennett was the guest editor of the second issue, while she was also holding a fellowship at the Barnes Foundation.
The Rare Books Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia holds all four issues of Black Opals in its collection. | Photo courtesy of Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries
In 1927, Albert Barnes created a fellowship program for artists to come to the Barnes Foundation and take classes, providing a stipend and other financial support, with Bennett one of the first recipients. “The Barnes was a local hub for the New Negro Movement, later called the Harlem Renaissance,” explained Alison Boyd, director of research and interpretation at the Barnes Foundation. She noted that Fauset worked there in 1924 as the associate director of education, teaching both night classes in Philadelphia neighborhoods and classes in Barnes’ factory for the largely Black workers there. In correspondence, Fauset and Barnes discussed how to teach without stifling the students’ own thoughts and opinions, which Boyd sees as “a spark of an idea that fostered the mission of Black Opals.”
Beyond Philadelphia, Black Opals had a relationship with the publication Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. Although officially a publication of the NAACP and founded to promote political and educational topics by editor W. E. B. du Bois, Crisis went on to influence the Harlem Renaissance, especially in the years when Jessie Redmon Fauset served as the literary editor. DuBois introduced Crisis readers to Black Opals in 1927, promoting it in the column “The Far Horizon.”
Black Opals was similar to Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, which was founded in 1926 in New York by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. According to Sandra West and Aberjhani in their Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, both featured artistic covers, a small size, erratic distribution, and a short life span, although Black Opals, emerging from Philadelphia’s Black middle-class elite, was not as avant-garde or sexually explicit as Fire!!
A portrait of Gwendolyn Bennett taken some time between 1920 and 1929. | Photo courtesy of Digital Collection, The New York Public Library
The Harlem Renaissance and the Philadelphia circles were different in their sociocultural environments. Harlem’s participants hailed from diverse social levels and places like the West Indies, California, and the South. Those in Philadelphia, by contrast, were almost all from one class and geography; that of the city’s privileged, professional class descended from long-established family lines. In Harlem, many were regarded as “bohemians,” while Philadelphia’s circle included many teachers.
Bright and Fauset ended Black Opals after just four issues due to the pressure from increasing publishing costs and a small audience. Both went on to focus on their careers in education. They would reunite in 1969 to publish America: red, white, black, yellow, a textbook of American history for elementary students with an emphasis on racial inclusion.
June and December 1928 issues of Black Opals. | Photo courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries
Fauset was the principal of the Joseph Singerly School at 22nd and Berks Streets for 20 years. After teaching for many years at the Alexander Wilson School at 46th Street and Woodland Avenue, Bright went on to also serve as a principal. In 1935, she was named principal of the Joseph E. Hill School at Rittenhouse and McCallum Streets in Germantown, and 10 years later assumed the same position at the Harrison Public School at 11th and Thompson Streets. Many Black intellectuals in Philadelphia taught in the city’s segregated elementary schools because they were barred from working in the junior and senior high schools and at the Board of Education.
Despite its short run, Black Opals has had an outsized influence. In March 2021, Swann Auction Galleries in New York City sold a complete set of the four issues of Black Opals. The gallery noted “We trace 13 American institutions which hold scattered issues of Black Opals, but only two (the Schomburg Library of the New York Public Library and the Free Library of Philadelphia) which hold a complete run of all four issues.” The catalog estimated the sale price to be $5,000-7,500. The final sale was actually $45,000.
Poet, musician, and former Philadelphia Poet Laureate Yolanda Wisher has had a long running fascination with Black Opals. “Around 1999 or 2000, I had an idea to do an anthology of living local poets and then started thinking, who came before us,” she recalled. “It spurred a lot of detective work for me as I kept going back further and further.”
Wisher presented an event at the Rosenbach Library in 2017 called “Blues for Black Opals,” where she invited poets to select a work to read from the journal. For her part, Wisher set some of the poems, including Bright’s “Longings,” to music. Wisher’s involvement with Black Opals continues, as she’s working on a piece called “Finding Nellie Bright.”
On March 5, 2026, the Barnes Foundation will open Education & Empowerment: Scholarship Recipients at the Barnes Foundation, 1927–1952, an in-person and online exhibition that will feature Gwendolyn Bennett’s fellowship there. The museum is also currently offering an online course, “The Harlem Renaissance in Philadelphia,” as a lead-up to its semiquincentennial exhibition Freedom Dreams.
