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 family moved to Philadelphia. In 1923, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania. 

With Arthur Fauset, Rathbone Bright cofounded Black Opals, a literary magazine published in Philadelphia that grew to be representative of the artistic merit of the Harlem Renaissance. The magazine drew its name from a line in the poem “Longings,” published in the first issue in 1927. She and Mae Cowdery, a fellow Philadelphian poet, both had poems published in that issue, which were praised by Countee Cullen when he became the literary editor of Opportunity magazine. She and Fauset intended to have Black Opals be a quarterly but ceased publication in 1928 after only three issues because the journal failed to gain a large enough readership. Later, they cowrote the history textbook America: Red, White, Black, Yellow (Franklin Publishing and Supply Co., 1969).

In 1935, Rathbone 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. From 1952 to 1959, she taught courses on African American history to other teachers. During her years as an educator, she also became a landscape painter. Rathbone Bright died on February 7, 1977.