Louise Meriwether: Writing Ourselves into Existence
Colllage of Louise Meriwether. Photo of Louise Meriwether retrieved from Amsterdam News. Photo Credit: Ishmael Reed and Konch magazine.
By Karla Méndez
Tracing the arc of the novelist, journalist, and activist Louise Meriwether, from her literary achievements to her involvement in Black political and artistic communities.
Literacy is power and liberation. Though it is meant to be a right, for some, it is a privilege. Reading books is one of the most crucial ways in which we can make sense of the world around us. For children, having access to books that are not only informative and entertaining, but inclusive and representative is important. This is particularly true for Black American children. Representation not only reminds us that we are not alone, but it is also a way for others to gain an understanding of experiences outside their own. Studies have shown that representation in literature significantly impacts children of color (Footnote 1). Novelist, journalist, and activist Louise Meriwether fervently understood this and used the written word to illuminate the complexities of Black life. Her work insists on the visibility of Black lives, especially those that are often omitted from history.
Raised in the Echo of a Renaissance
Born on May 8th, 1923, in Haverstraw, New York to parents Marion Lloyd and Julia Jenkins, Louise Jenkins was their only daughter and the third of five children. She grew up in Harlem in the depths of both the Great Depression and the Harlem Renaissance, both events that have had significant and long-term impact on Black Americans. Meriwether grew up in Harlem as the Harlem Renaissance reverberated through the neighborhood and beyond. It was the mecca of Black intellectual and artistic life and the place in which writers like Zore Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay resided. Her work–like theirs–shed light on the lived experience of Black people, particularly those who were members of the working class. The Harlem Renaissance also influenced Meriwether’s political understandings of the world and helped to frame her activism.
Through the work of Black artists, she began to realize art’s innate link to politics, especially to Pan-Africanism and anticolonial thought. This discovery taught her that as a Black creative she had a responsibility to write about the world as she experienced it. In the words of these writers Meriwether was able to see herself. She was a curious child who could always be found reading. Her choice in books was varied, reading children’s books like The Five Little Peppers and Huckleberry Finn to novels by Black writers like The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life by Jessie Redmon Fauset and Home to Harlem by Claude McKay.
After graduating from Central Commercial High School, Meriwether began night classes at New York University, studying towards her B.A. in English while working as a secretary during the day. She went on to earn her M.A. in Journalism in 1965 from the University of California, Los Angeles. This educational path was, particularly for the time, groundbreaking. In a study of Black America, W.E.B. Du Bois found that only 54 Black women had earned college degrees by 1880. Many of these women were in an uncharted social position, pursuing an education meant they were less likely to marry and have children. And though she did marry twice, she did not have children. She transgressed societal expectations for women by focusing on her writing and political activism.
Knowledge as Power, Education as Struggle
Educational access for Black Americans in the early to mid-20th century was exceedingly limited due to segregation and discrimination with many universities, especially predominantly white institutions, excluding Black students or imposing quotas that intentionally restricted the number of students that matriculated. While all Black Americans experienced a degree of discrimination in their pursuit of education, the barriers for Black women were compounded by racism and sexism. As Gyana Stewart wrote for The Century Foundation, historically Black women’s existence has been complicated by the double bind of being both Black and a woman.
There were few institutions that admitted Black women, but those that did rarely offered the same opportunities for advancement they did for other students. It wasn’t until 1862 that the first Black woman, Mary Jane Patterson earned a BA at Oberlin College and Conservatory, which also happens to be the college where Lucy Stanton became the first Black woman to complete the requirements for a literary degree in 1850. This was more than two centuries after white men had begun receiving degrees and decades after both white women and Black men had begun to access higher education.
In an essay on Black women and education, Linda M. Perkins stated that by 1950, only 2% of all U.S. women enrolled in higher education were Black, with most of them students at HBCUs (Footnote 2). This stark statistic reflects not only the enduring impact of segregation and systemic racism in American education, but also the compounded barriers Black women faced due to both race and gender. These challenges were not merely institutional, they were economic. The cost of college, especially in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, was a prohibitive factor for many Black families.
For working-class Black women in particular, higher education often seemed like an impossible luxury in a world where their labor, both paid and unpaid, was essential to the survival of their families. As Michelle Wallace argues in Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Black women have historically been cast as tireless laborers, expected to support not only their households but also entire communities while denying their own aspirations. In this context, Meriwether’s pursuit of higher education was not only a personal act of ambition but also a refusal to be limited by the racialized and gendered expectations imposed upon her. Her educational journey represents a defiant insistence on intellectual freedom at a time when Black women were overwhelmingly called to serve others before themselves.
“In this context, Meriwether’s pursuit of higher education was not only a personal act of ambition but also a refusal to be limited by the racialized and gendered expectations imposed upon her. Her educational journey represents a defiant insistence on intellectual freedom at a time when Black women were overwhelmingly called to serve others before themselves.”
Choosing Self in a World of Service
These economic limitations were intertwined with deeply entrenched cultural expectations about the roles Black women were expected to play. Pursuing higher education, especially in predominantly white institutions, was not only a financial risk but a social and emotional transgression. As Wallace contends, Black women have historically been mythologized as tireless, invulnerable laborers, expected to prioritize care work and community needs over their own intellectual or personal fulfillment. Choosing college over caretaking or domestic labor often meant stepping outside of these expectations and facing skepticism or criticism from both white society and within Black communities. Here, the act of imagining a life outside of predefined roles becomes a radical gesture. Meriwether’s academic path was more than a personal triumph; it was a quiet revolution. In choosing education, she asserted her right to imagine and shape her own future. She stepped into a space from which Black women had long been excluded and, through her writing and activism, carved room for others to follow.
Since earning her master’s degree, access to higher education for Black women has expanded significantly. Today, Black women are one of the most enrolled demographic groups in U.S. higher education, particularly in undergraduate and graduate programs at public institutions and HBCUs (Footnote 3). Despite these gains, deep structural inequities persist. Black women disproportionately shoulder high levels of student debt, remain underrepresented in elite academic institutions and tenured faculty positions, and continue to navigate predominantly white academic environments where their presence is often marginalized or hyper-scrutinized (Footnote 4). In many ways, the path Meriwether forged remains both a legacy of access and a site of ongoing struggle.
Education as Cultural Labor and Legacy
For Black women, education has long functioned as a means of liberation, not simply in economic or professional terms, but as a tool for self-definition, resistance, and communal empowerment. As bell hooks writes, “education as the practice of freedom… comes easiest to those of us who teach to transgress” (Footnote 5). Meriwether understood this well as her own journey through higher education positioned her not only as a writer and thinker but as a cultural worker committed to transforming the narratives Black children encountered about themselves.
This commitment is especially visible in her publication of children’s biographies of civil rights figures like Rosa Parks and Mary McLeod Bethune. These books were more than historical accounts; they were intellectual interventions, designed to instill pride, political consciousness, and a sense of possibility in young readers. By writing accessible stories about Black heroes who challenged injustice, Meriwether used education not just for personal uplift, but to extend the liberatory power of learning to the next generation. In giving Black children, especially girls, models of courage, intellect, and resistance, she bridged her own educational journey with a larger vision of collective freedom.
“By writing accessible stories about Black heroes who challenged injustice, Meriwether used education not just for personal uplift, but to extend the liberatory power of learning to the next generation. In giving Black children, especially girls, models of courage, intellect, and resistance, she bridged her own educational journey with a larger vision of collective freedom.”
Meriwether’s Literary Landmark
Meriwether is perhaps best known for her novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, which uses autobiographical elements. Published in 1970 with an introduction by James Baldwin, it is widely recognized as a landmark in African American literature, particularly for its pioneering focus on Black girlhood. It was the first contemporary novel to center a young Black girl’s coming of age in the streets of Harlem, which helped champion future narratives from the perspective of Black girls (Footnote 6).
Set in the 1930s during the height of the Great Depression, the novel follows 12-year-old Francie Coffin as she navigates the daily pressures of poverty, racial violence, and familial fragmentation. Through Francie’s eyes, readers encounter a Harlem marked by both vibrancy and deprivation, a place where dignity is hard-won, and dreams often collide with the brutal realities of survival. Meriwether’s portrayal of Francie is groundbreaking not just because it offers a Black female perspective so rarely seen at the time, but because it refuses to idealize or flatten that perspective.
The novel’s publication came at a crucial moment, on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement and at the rise of Black feminist thought. It offered a shift from both the Black male narratives that dominated earlier literary landscapes and the limited roles available to women of color in mainstream literature. It positioned Meriwether as part of a vital generation of Black women writers, alongside Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Maya Angelou, who reshaped the landscape of American literature by insisting that Black women’s lives, voices, and struggles were not peripheral but central to the national story. Despite its importance, the novel has often been overshadowed by more widely recognized works. Revisiting it today not only honors Meriwether’s legacy but also challenges the literary canon to expand its memory.
“Meriwether’s enduring influence on Black feminist literature, community-based arts, and intergenerational storytelling lies in her radical insistence on centering the voices, lives, and emotional realities of Black girls and women–long before it was considered culturally or academically necessary to do so. Her work stands as a blueprint for storytelling that is emotionally intimate and politically expansive, showing how the personal is always historical, always collective.”
Ink and Uprising
Meriwether’s activism was deeply intertwined with her literary work, rooted in a belief that storytelling could be a force for social change. She was an early member of the Harlem Writers Guild, which was founded in 1950 and is the oldest organization of Black American writers dedicated to supporting Black literary expression and advocating for political and cultural self-determination. She also helped found Black Concern, originally known as the Committee of Concerned Blacks, a civil rights coalition that addressed systemic racism in media and public policy. Additionally, she was an executive board member of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA), an organization for women writers founded in 1991 by Jayne Cortez and Ama Ata Aidoo. Its objective is to create transnational ties between African diasporic women writers and emphasize shared struggles of oppression and creativity.
Following the 1965 Watts Rebellion, she became involved with the Watts Writers Workshop, a writing group established by screenwriter Budd Schulberg. It was a federally funded program meant to offer Black youth in Los Angeles a space for self-expression, skill-building, and healing in the aftermath of the riots. It became a sanctuary for emerging writers from communities that had been devastated by poverty, police brutality, and systemic neglect. It aimed to counter the carceral pipeline by offering art instead of incarceration, imagination instead of marginalization. She joined as a teacher and mentor, recognizing the need for spaces where young Black people could shape and share their own narratives in a society that often criminalized or silenced them.
The workshop quickly became a national model for arts-based community organizing. It nurtured talents like Quincy Troupe, Wanda Coleman, and Kamau Daáood, and attracted visiting artists and intellectuals from across the country. More than an arts program, it functioned as a radical intervention against state violence and racial neglect. In an interview published in L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, Meriwether reflected that, “Watts was burning and what these young people needed wasn’t punishment—they needed power, and power begins with a voice.” The program offered alternatives to incarceration, providing a platform for self-expression and critical consciousness-building in a neighborhood heavily surveilled and over-policed.
Meriwether’s enduring influence on Black feminist literature, community-based arts, and intergenerational storytelling lies in her radical insistence on centering the voices, lives, and emotional realities of Black girls and women–long before it was considered culturally or academically necessary to do so. Her work stands as a blueprint for storytelling that is emotionally intimate and politically expansive, showing how the personal is always historical, always collective. In both her writing and work with organizations like the Watts Writers Workshop, Meriwether understood that literature was not just a solitary act but a communal resource, one that could transform how Black people saw themselves and each other.
Banned, but Unbowed: Why Meriwether’s Words Still Matter
In our current moment, marked by legislative censorship, book bans, and the erasure of Black history from classrooms, Meriwether’s work demands renewed attention. According to PEN America, U.S. schools removed 10,046 books during the 2023-2024 school year, most of which were titles by BIPOC and LGBTQ authors. Works like Meriwether’s are at the risk of being suppressed, not because it lacks literary value, but because they challenge dominant narratives. Her life and writing exemplify what Black feminist scholar Barbara Smith describes as “literature that is meant to disrupt, to illuminate, to testify” (Footnote 7). Revisiting her work is not only an act of remembrance; it is a form of resistance. It reminds us that storytelling is both a weapon and balm, and that in every generation, there will be those who try to silence Black voices, and those, like Meriwether, who insist on making them heard.
Amid ongoing legislative attacks, Meriwether’s body of work is invaluable. She didn’t just document Black life, she demanded that Black girls and women be seen, known, and remembered. Re-centering her voice now is both a cultural necessity and a political act of defiance. Her legacy reminds us of the urgency of storytelling and the power of a pen.
Footnotes
Rudine Sims Bishop, “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3), 1990.
Linda M. Perkins, “The Education of Black Women in the Twentieth Century,” in Womanist and Feminist Afro-American Theologies, edited by Delores S. Williams, (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 81-99.
National Center for Education Statistics, “Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2023,” https://nces.ed.gov/.
Brittani Williams, “Black Women Face Crushing Student Loan Debt,” Center for American Progress, August 13, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/.
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge. 1994), 6.
Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 185-191.
Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 19.
About the author: Karla Méndez is an arts and culture writer whose work examines the histories of Black and Latin American women and their representations within visual art, literature, poetry, and performance. She is interested in how women put forth representations of themselves that are accurately representative of their expansiveness and how they use these avenues to engage with topics of identity, gender, race, and the female body. Ultimately, her work seeks to explore and reinstate forgotten and ignored histories as a site of care for ourselves and our communities.
She is the lead columnist of Black Feminist Histories and Social Movements, a column for the advocacy organization Black Women Radicals. She is a contributor for the Boston Art Review and Elephant Magazine and her work has appeared in the Brown Art Review and Ampersand: An American Studies Journal.