Louise Meriwether
| Louise Meriwether | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 8, 1923 Haverstraw, New York |
| Occupation | Novelist, biographer, journalist, activist |
| Notable works | Daddy Was a Number Runner |
Louise Meriwether (born May 8, 1923) is an American novelist, essayist, journalist and activist, as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children. She is best known for her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), which draws on autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance.
She was born in Haverstraw, New York, to Marion Lloyd Jenkins and his wife Julia. After the stock market crash of October 1929, her parents had migrated north in search of work, from South Carolina, where her father was a painter and bricklayer and her mother worked as a domestic. Meriwether grew up in Harlem during the great depression, the only daughter and the third of five children.
She graduated from Central Commercial High School in Manhattan and then, while working as a secretary, studied at night for a B.A. degree in English from New York University. She went on to earn an M.A. in journalism in 1965 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she moved with her first husband, Angelo Meriwether, a Los Angeles teacher. Although this marriage, as well as her second marriage to Earle Howe, ended in divorce she continued to use the name Meriwether. She worked as a freelance reporter (1961–64) for the Los Angeles Sentinel and a black story analyst (1965–67) for Universal Studios, the first black woman hired as a story editor in Hollywood. While still living in Los Angeles, working with the Watts Writers Workshop, Meriwether was approached to be editor-in-chief of a new magazine for Black women called Essence but she declined, saying she preferred to write for them, her article "Black Man, Do You Love Me?" appearing as the cover story for the magazine's first issue in May 1970.
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