Edward Morrow

Edward Morrow was born in 1908 in Lead, South Dakota. He attended Central High School in Minneapolis and Sioux Falls High School in South Dakota, and attended the University of South Dakota for two years before transferring to Yale College in 1927. For a period of time he was the only Black undergraduate student at Yale, and in 1927 was the only undergraduate pledge in Zeta Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, which was predominantly made up of graduate students. According to a draft of an unpublished memoir, found in the Charles T. Davis Papers at Beinecke Library, Morrow, who had previously been a caddy and assistant to professional golfer Jack Burke, Sr., received a "caddy scholarship" to Yale and received scholarship support from Yale alum and writer Donald Ogden Stewart his senior year. He wrote that "alumni and relatives who I met and served on links and clubhouse helped me graduate, even after the 1929 Crash."

According to a 1929 letter Morrow wrote to his classmate Charles Heffelfinger Bell, he struggled to cover his tuition and living expenses at Yale and had been passed over for a scholarship the previous spring. The letter to Bell suggests that Bell’s father, General Mills founder James Ford Bell, may have offered Morrow financial help during his time as a student. In 1988, reflecting on his college experience in the New Journal at Yale, Morrow said that Yale “was phasing blacks out. They froze them out financially, froze up their loans. Yale was Jim Crow and pro-Hitler and fascist as far as I was concerned.” In the same interview, he said that as a student, he spent many of his weekends in New York: “We went over the hill to Harlem and to life. We came down to a Harlem that welcomed us. At Yale you just didn’t exist if you were Black or Jewish.”

In 1930, Morrow wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois about an upcoming Model League of Nations Assembly in which he was appointed to represent Liberia. He wrote, “I am trying to prepare as well as I can to present the case of this Negro Republic.… Since I am, as far as I know, the only Negro delegate, I should like to make a good showing.” He asked Du Bois for any information that might be useful in representing Liberia, and for permission to quote from Du Bois’ editorials on Liberia. He noted that Yale alum Gaylord Howell (Yale College, 1920) and his wife Christine Howell had suggested he write to Du Bois. At Yale, Morrow was a contributor to the Yale Daily News. In 1928, he reviewed Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem for the Daily News, criticizing the “surface realism” of the book: “We fail to see the poet’s deep insight into the place he is portraying. We even fail to see the penetration to be expected of one who writes of his own people. Perhaps McKay has been too long in France and in Russia to remember his Harlem. He is writing what any number of person, white and black, could have written, namely, what most white people of the ‘thrill-seeking’ variety believe to be the true Harlem after one visit to Small’s night club.”

Following his graduation in 1931, Morrow worked as a journalist in Harlem and for the Emergency Home Relief Bureau. He was a New York correspondent for the Chicago Defender, along with Bessye J. Bearden, mother of artist Romare Bearden. He worked for the New York City Department of Public Welfare and for the New York State and U.S. Employment Service, and the Municipal Workers of America CIO Union Local 28. He also wrote the constitution for the Negro Actor’s Guild. In 1936 he married Juanita Delores Smith Alston.

In the early 1940s, Morrow’s work began to concentrate primarily on the war effort. From 1939 to 1942 he worked for the New York Selective Service System, and in 1942 he organized the Democrat-in-Action group, worked for the Red Cross, and enlisted in the U.S. Army. During and after WWII, he worked in information and education for the Army. There, he trained specialists, supervised publications, wrote histories of the 372nd Infantry Regiment, worked on newscasts, radio, and TV programs, and other duties. He was also involved with a pilot project to integrate Army personnel. He attended the Armed Forces Information School in Carlisle, PA in 1948-1949.

In 1949 he divorced Juanita Morrow and remarried in 1950 to Corienne Kathleen Robinson, who was Race Relations Advisor to the Administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. In 1961, he married Ruby Downs Williams. In the 1920s, she had been a professional dancer, performing in the original 1928 production of "Showboat" and in "Shuffle Along." She later went on to become a legal secretary to Thurgood Marshall and to Charles Hueston of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She was also a teacher in the 1960s in Queens, and had a real estate business. She died in 1979.

From 1954-1955, he took courses in communications at American University in Washington, DC. He then began taking courses in education at New York University, specializing in communications in secondary education. He received an M.A. from NYU in 1957, and continued taking courses until 1963. From the late 1950s through the 70s, while continuing to write, he taught in New York City public schools and worked in real estate with his wife. In the 1970s, he worked on a book about Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and particularly the less-explored "recovery era" of the 1930s.

Edward Morrow died in 1999.

"A Modern Illiad," The Yale Daily News, March 22, 1928.

"Colorphobia," The Yale Daily News, October 25, 1929.

"A Colored Prima Donna," The Yale Daily News, February 22, 1929.

"A Review of 'Bloodstream'," Opportunity 10, no. 5 (1932).

"Our Book Shelf: Review of Black God," Opportunity 12, no. 12 (1934).

"Our Book Shelf: Review of Point Noir," Opportunity 16, no. 6 (1938).

"Career of A. Lois Perry, Cut Short By Tragedy," New York Amsterdam News, August 24, 1940.