Henrietta Cordelia Ray

1849 –
1916
Read poems by this poet

Henrietta Cordelia Ray was born in New York, New York. Her birth year is in dispute, but she was likely born sometime between 1849 and 1852. Ray was one of five daughters born to Charlotte Augusta Ray (née Burrough) and Reverend Charles Bennett Ray, an abolitionist and a publisher of the New York City-based African American newspaper The Colored American. Her sister, Charlotte E. Ray, was the first Black woman to practice law in the United States. Henrietta graduated from University of the City of New York (now, City University of New York) in 1891 with an MA in pedagogy. Through her studies, she became proficient in Greek, Latin, German, and French.

Ray’s first poems appeared in The A.M.E. Church Review, published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She authored two collections of poetry, Sonnets (Press of J. J. Little & Co., 1893) and Poems (The Grafton Press, 1910). The latter volume is noted for its elegies to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. In 1876, Ray’s eight-line poem “Lincoln/Written for the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument in the Memory of Abraham Lincoln” was read at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1876. With her elder sister and lifelong companion, Florence, Ray cowrote a biography of their father, Sketch of the Life of Rev. Charles B. Ray (J. J. Little & Co., 1887). 

For thirty years, Ray worked as a teacher. She taught at Colored Grammar School No. 1 in New York. She stopped teaching in public schools to devote time to poetry, but tutored young people in music, mathematics, and languages while also offering instruction in English literature to other teachers. 

Henrietta Cordelia Ray died in 1916.