Papers of Marita Bonner, 1940-1986

Marita Bonner, an African American writer, composer, and educator, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts on June 16, 1898, to Joseph Andrew and Mary Anne (Noel) Bonner. She attended Brookline High School where she wrote for the school's magazine The Sagamore; and Radcliffe College where she graduated in 1922 with a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature. While at Radcliffe Bonner commuted from Brookline since the college did not allow African American students to live on campus. As a Radcliffe student Bonner founded the school's chapter of Delta Sigma Theta, a Black sorority. She was a gifted musician (referred to in the Radcliffe class poem as "1922's Beethoven") and wrote the music for the winning songs in the Radcliffe song competition for 1919 ("The Heathen Song") and 1922 ("The China Lady"). She held memberships in several clubs, including the Music, Mandolin, German, and English Clubs. She also contributed short stories to the Harvard Review and the Boston Post. In her junior year, Bonner was admitted to Charles Townsend Copeland's writing seminar, and one of her sketches "Dandelion Season" was selected to be read annually to the Radcliffe classes. During her senior year she taught at Cambridge High School. After graduation she continued teaching at the Bluefield Colored Institute, Bluefield, Virginia (1922-1924) and at Armstrong High School, an institution for Black students in Washington, DC. (1924-1931). In 1930 she married William Almy Occomy (1901-1968), an accountant, and they moved to Chicago. They had three children: William Almy (1931-2006), Warwick Gale (born 1934), and Marita Joyce (born 1939).

After graduation Marita Bonner wrote plays, essays, and short fiction. Many of her short stories appeared in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine The Crisis and the National Urban League's magazine Opportunity. In her writings Bonner explored the destructive effects of racism and discrimination that African Americans and in particular Black women contended with, such as in her prize-winning essay "On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored" (The Crisis, 1925). In addition to essays and short stories, Bonner's literary works included one-act modernist plays "The Purple Flower" (1928) and "Exit, an Illusion" (1929). She also continued to write music and won the Wanamaker Music Contest for Black composers in 1927. Bonner was a celebrated writer of the Harlem Renaissance Era, and she was a regular at poet and playwright Georgia Douglass Johnson's "S" street salon in Washington, DC, which attracted such writers as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Jessie Redmond Fauset. 

Bonner published her writings until 1941 when she decided to focus on raising her children and involving herself in the First Church of Christ, Scientists, which she and her husband joined that year. She also resumed her teaching career after passing education classes required by the Chicago Board of Education, which discounted her previous teaching experience and Radcliffe degree qualifications. Bonner found teaching positions at Phillips High School (1944-1949) and at the Doolittle School (1950-1963), where she taught students who were educationally disadvantaged.

Bonner died in Chicago on December 6, 1971, from complications of smoke inhalation after a fire in her Chicago apartment.