Marita Bonner, or Marita Odette Bonner, or Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, was a writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was born on June 16, 1899 in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Bonner attended Brookline High School where she first began to write when she became involved in a magazine organized by the student body called the Sagamor. In 1918 Bonner graduated from Brookline High School and enrolled in Radcliffe College in Cambridge.
She was forced to commute from Brookline because Black students were not allowed to live in campus dormitories. Nevertheless, she succeeded, winning the Radcliff song competitions in 1918 and 1922. She also continued to study musical composition and German literature. In 1922 Bonner graduated from Radcliffe and began teaching at Bluefield Colored Institute (now Bluefield State University) in Bluefield, West Virginia. Two years later, she took on a position at Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C.
While in Washington, Bonner became closely associated with poet, playwright and composer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Johnson’s “S Street salon” was an important meeting place for many of the writers and artists involved in the New Negro Renaissance. Her first published pieces, “Hands” and “Being Young-A Woman- And Colored” was published in December of 1925 by The Crisis magazine, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The essay addressed the discrimination that Blacks and in particular Black women faced at the time. Bonner’s early essays, sketches, stories, and plays are notable for their brief, sometimes fragmentary character, lyricism, and experimental quality. These essays called on young Black women to rely on their strength and resilience in dealing with these situations. Bonner also wrote three experimental plays during the 1920s, all symbolic explorations of Black people’s quest for freedom and dignity.
“The Pot Maker” (1927), “The Purple Flower – A Play” (1928) and “Exit, an Illusion” (1929). The most famous being “The Purple Flower,” portrays Black liberation. She also often wrote about multi-ethnic communities, such as in “Nothing New“. Bonner was wholly opposed to generalizations of Black experience, and wrote about several differing Black experiences in her short stories and plays. She is thus remembered as an advocate for intersectionality and a documentarian of multicultural urban life.
During this time she met her future husband William Almy Occomy. The couple married in 1930 and the following year moved to Chicago where Bonner over the next decade enjoyed her greatest success as a short story writer. Most of her stories in the Chicago period centered around a fictitious Frye Street and Environs which included a multiracial and multicultural universe of people drawn to Chicago by the promise of urban life. As with her earlier work these writings emphasized self-improvement through education.
Marita Bonner contributed a variety of things to the Harlem Renaissance. Her writings addressed the struggles of people who lived outside of Harlem. Her greatest involvement was her emphasis on claiming a strong racial and gender identity. She argued against sexism and racism and advised other Black women to remain silent in order to gain understanding, knowledge, and truth to fight the oppression of race and gender. She also encouraged Black Americans to use the weapons of knowledge, teaching, and writing to overcome inequalities.