  An African-American poet and leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance  Cullen considered poetry “raceless”  said, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet.”  married Yolanda Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois in 1928 – the marriage did not last due to questions of Cullen’s sexuality, but in 1940 Cullen married Ida Mae Robertson, whom he had known for 10 years  was criticized by Langston Hughes for not seeming to prize or emphasize the traditions of black art  often borrowed from the English poetic tradition in his own poetry

  a Jamaican-American writer and an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance  left Jamaica in 1912 to attend college and was shocked by the intense racism he experienced when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina.  Read W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks which stirred him to write more poetry  in New York, he published one of his most famous poems, “If We Must Die” during the “Red Summer,” the summer of 1919 in which many race riots occurred across the United States and was a period of intense racial violence against black people in white societies.  The riots were in response to the arrival of veterans, both black and white, back home after WWI and the competition for jobs among white and black people.