Childhood
Countee LeRoy Porter was born on May 30, 1903, to Elizabeth Thomas Lucas.[1][2] Due to a lack of records of his early childhood, historians have had difficulty identifying his birthplace. Baltimore, Maryland, New York City, and Louisville, Kentucky have been cited as possibilities.[1] Although Cullen claimed to have been born in New York City, he also frequently referred to Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace on legal applications.[1] Cullen was brought to Harlem at the age of nine by Amanda Porter, believed to be his paternal grandmother, who cared for him until her death in 1917.[1][3]
Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's largest congregation, and his wife, the former Carolyn Belle Mitchell, adopted the 15-year-old Countee Porter, although the adoption may not have been official.[1][4] Frederick Cullen was a central figure in Countee's life, and acted as his father. The influential minister would eventually become president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[4]
DeWitt Clinton High School
Cullen entered the DeWitt Clinton High School, then located in Hell's Kitchen.[5] He excelled academically at the school and started writing poetry. He won a citywide poetry contest.[6] At DeWitt, he was elected into the honor society, was editor of the weekly newspaper, and was elected vice-president of his graduating class.[5] In January 1922, he graduated with honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French.[7]
New York University, Harvard University and early publications
"Yet Do I Marvel" I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, And did He stoop to quibble could tell why The little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die, Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never-ending stair. Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
"Yet Do I Marvel" (1925) [8]
After graduating from high school, he attended New York University (NYU).[9] In 1923, Cullen won second prize in the Witter Bynner National Competitions for Undergraduate Poetry, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, for his book of poems titled, "The Ballad of the Brown Girl".[10] Soon after, he was publishing poetry in national periodicals such as Harper's, Crisis, Opportunity, The Bookman, and Poetry, earning him a national reputation. The ensuing year, he again placed second in the contest, finally winning first prize in 1925. He competed in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity and came in second with "To One Who Say Me Nay", losing to Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues". Cullen graduated from NYU in 1925 and was one of eleven students selected to Phi Beta Kappa.
That same year, Cullen entered Harvard to pursue a master's in English, and published Color, his first collection of poems that later became a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.[11] Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The volume included "Heritage" and "Incident", probably his most famous poems. "Yet Do I Marvel", about racial identity and injustice, showed the literary influence of William Wordsworth and William Blake, but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there is God, and "God is good, well-meaning, kind", but he finds a contradiction in his own plight in a racist society: he is black and a poet.[12] In 1926, Cullen graduated with a master's degree[12] while also serving as the guest editor of a special "Negro Poets" issue of the poetry magazine, Palms. The appointment led to Harper's inviting him to edit an anthology of Black poetry in 1927.[13]
