"Brenda Ray Moryck" {1894-1949}

Was a Washington, D.C.-based black writer and social activist often associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.While she and her female peers did not receive as much mainstream public attention as did many blacck male artists,Brenda published short stories,essays, and book reviews,in important journals such as the Urban League's Opportunity and the NAACP Crisis.She born in Newark,New Jersey.The great-granddaughter of Rev. Charles Ray,editor of the important antebellum black newspaper the Colored American,Brenda noted that "writing is a tradition in our family."In 1916,she graduated from Wellesley College and returned to New Jersey to do volunteer work with the Newark Bureau of Charities.Married to Lucius Lee Jordan in 1917,Brenda was widowed within a year and later remarried Robert B. Francke in 1930.During this interim,she taught English at Armstrong Technical School,one of two segregated high schools for African Americans youths in Washington, D.C.In the mid-1920s,Brenda was influenced by the African American arts movement centered in Harlem and Washington, D.C. Her first major essay,"A Point of View,which appeared in Opportunity in 1925,critqued the idea that black writers were best suited to comic or emotional tales about rural black "folk."Her 1928 story,"days,"published  in Crisis, centered on a black family who initially encountered hostility ehen they purchased a home in a segregated urban district but who eventually won over the neighbors.Brenda was also an active participant in a variety of reform organizations including the Urban League,The Harlem YWCA,and the prestigious New York Women's Auxillary,among other groups.She resigned from her teaching position after her marriage to Robert,but lectured frequently on social reform intrests and wrote commentary on the black literary and social scene for the Baltimore Afro-American and other East-coast newspapers.She died in Washington D.C.