Nellie Rathbone Bright

Nellie Rathbone Bright, was born on March 28, 1898, in Savannah, Georgia, to Reverend Richard Bright and Nellie Jones Bright. In 1910, the Brights moved to Philadelphia. In 1923, Bright earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She traveled extensively and became a landscape painter while working as a teacher in Philadelphia public schools.

With Arthur Fauset, Bright cofounded Black Opals, a literary magazine published in Philadelphia and became grew to be a representative of the artistic merit of the Harlem Renaissance movement. The magazine drew its name from a line from the poem “Longings,” published in the first issue in 1927. Bright and Mae Cowdery, a fellow Philadelphian poet, both had poems published in the first issue, and they were praised by Countee Cullen when he was the new literary editor of Opportunity in New York.

Bright and Fauset intended to have their journal be a quarterly but ceased publication in 1928 after only three issues because the journal failed to gain a large enough readership. In 1935, Bright was appointed as a principal at a segregated school in Philadelphia and later served as a principal in three different schools until she retired in 1952. She died on February 7, 1977.