10/12/2024
Louise Jenkins Meriwether (May 8, 1923 – October 10, 2023)
Louise Jenkins Meriwether, a novelist, essayist, journalist, and social activist, was the only daughter of Marion Lloyd Jenkins and his wife, Julia. Meriwether was born May 8, 1923, in Haverstraw, New York, to parents who were from South Carolina, where her father worked as a painter and a bricklayer, and her mother worked as a domestic.
After the stock market crash of October 24, 1929, Louise’s family migrated from Haverstraw to New York City. They moved to Brooklyn first and later to Harlem. The third of five children, Louise grew up in the decade of the Great Depression, a time that would deeply affect her young life and ultimately influence her as a writer.
Despite her family’s financial plight, Louise Jenkins attended Public School 81 in Harlem and graduated from Central Commercial High School in downtown Manhattan. In the 1950s, she received a B.A. degree in English from New York University before meeting and marrying Angelo Meriwether, a Los Angeles teacher. Although this marriage and later marriage to Earle Howe ended in divorce, Louise continues to use the Meriwether name. In 1965, Louise earned an M.A. degree in journalism from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her first book, Daddy Was a Number Runner, a fictional account of the economic devastation of Harlem in the Great Depression, appeared in 1970 as the first novel to emerge from the Watts Writers’ Workshop. The novel sold more than 400,000 copies. It received favorable reviews from authors James Baldwin and Paule Marshall. Daddy Was a Number Runner is a fictional account of the historical and sociological devastation of the economic Depression on Harlem residents.
Meriwether began writing biographies for children about historically important African Americans — including Robert Smalls, Daniel Hale Williams, and Rosa Parks — and later explained: "After publication of my first novel ... I turned my attention to black history for the kindergarten set, recognizing that the deliberate omission of Blacks from American history has been damaging to the children of both races. It reinforces in one a feeling of inferiority and in the other a myth of superiority."
Meriwether had over the years been involved with various organized black causes, including the founding, with John Henrik Clarke, of the anti-Apartheid group Black Concern (originally the Committee of Concerned Blacks), the Harlem Writers Guild, and (with Vantile Whitfield) the Black Anti-Defamation Association (BADA; also known as Association to End Defamation of Black People) that was formed to prevent Twentieth Century Fox's producer David L. Wolper from making a film of William Styron's controversial 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, which misinterpreted African-American history. She was active in the peace movement for most of her life.
Louise Meriwether died at a nursing home in the New York borough of Manhattan, on October 10, 2023, at the age of 100.
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