Brenda Ray Moryck

Brenda (Estelle) Ray Moryck (1892-1945) was an American writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Brenda Ray Moryck
Brenda Ray Moryck, from the 1916 Wellesley College yearbook
Born	(1892-06-13)June 13, 1892 Newark, New Jersey, US
Died	(1945-12-06)December 6, 1945[1] Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Other names	Brenda Moryck Francke (after 1930)
Occupation(s)	Writer, teacher

Early life and education

Brenda Ray Moryck was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1892,^[2][3] the daughter of John W. Moryck and Sarah Rose Ray Moryck. Her father owned a saloon and her mother was an educator and clubwoman.^[4][5][6] Though Brenda wrote that her great-grandfather was Charles Bennet Ray, her mother's death record gives Adam Ray and Sarah Closson as Brenda's maternal grandparents.^[6][7][8][9] Multiple records for Adam Ray state that his father was Adam Ray Sr., not Charles Ray.^[10][11][12]

William Ashby wrote, "John Moryck [had] a saloon on Academy Street. He lived on Kearney Street. Moryck had an unusual daughter, Brenda. She graduated from Barringer High School, and won a scholarship at Wellsley College, certainly the first Negro girl from Newark to attend a prestigious white school."^[4]

Moryck completed a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1916, the only black graduate in her class.^[13] She earned a master's degree in English literature from Howard University in 1926.^[14] Moryck was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and was active in the Tau Omega chapter.

Career

Moryck worked for the Newark Bureau of Charities after college, and taught physical culture at a technical school in Bordentown.^[15][16] She taught English and drama at Armstrong Manual Training School in Washington, D.C. during the 1920s.^[17] She wrote essays and stories published in The Crisis, Opportunity, and other national periodicals and newspapers.^[18][19][20] She was also a drama critic for the New York Age,^[21] and wrote at least one play, The Christmas Spirit, performed at Armstrong high school in 1927. She was active in the National Urban League, the Harlem YWCA,^[22] and the NAACP in New York.^[14] She was also an avid golfer.^[23]

Moryck's writings are associated with the Harlem Renaissance^[24][25] and have been included in several recent anthologies, among them The new Negro: Readings on race, representation, and African American culture, 1892-1938 (2007), edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Garrett,^[26] Double-take: A revisionist Harlem Renaissance anthology (2001), edited by Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey, Harlem's Glory: Black women writing, 1900-1950 (1996), edited by Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph,^[27] and Speech & power: The African-American essay and its cultural content, from polemics to pulpit (1992). edited by Gerald Early.^[28] She had an unpublished novel in manuscript at the time of her death.

Personal life

Moryck married twice. Her first husband was Lucius Lee Jordan; they married in 1917 and he died before their first anniversary.^[9] She married Robert Beale Francke in 1930. She had a daughter, Elizabeth (Betty) Osborne Francke,^[5][29] and a foster daughter, Julia Wormley.^[30][31] She died in 1945, in Massachusetts.^{[3][32][33][34]} She had been scheduled to meet up with her daughter who was in boarding school in Albany, New York.^[32]