"OUR RICH BLACK HERITAGE" : MARITA O.B. OCCOMY

Certainly, we all know how devastating the loss of a loved one can be. Thankfully, we can choose to do as Marita did, and turn to things such as writing to help us get through it. In 1924, Marita had moved from where her parents lived to Washington D.C. to take a teaching position. However, within a year of her moving away, both of her parents died unexpectedly. It was at this time that Marita used writing as a way to deal with her grief. Although many Black People don’t know it, Marita was a writer, and playwright who is often associated with the “Harlem Renaissance Era.”  Marita O.B. Occomy was born on June 16, 1899 in Boston, Massachusetts to Joseph Andrew and Anne Noel Bonner. Marita attended Brookline High School, a place where she first began to take an interest in writing( she helped put together the school magazine called the Sagamor ). After graduating from Brookline in 1918, Marita attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she majored in Comparative Literature and English. By the way, she had to commute back and forth[ from the city of Brookline and Radcliffe College ], because Black students were not allowed to live in campus dormitories. In addition to doing well in academics, Marita could make the piano sing{ she won two music competitions when she attended Radcliffe College }. Not only was Marita a member of the “Delta Sigma Theta Sorority,”she was founder of the Boston-Area Chapter! Once she graduated from college in 1922, Marita began teaching at Bluefield Colored Institute (now Bluefield State University) in Bluefield, West Virginia. Two years later, she decided to leave Bluefield and take a teaching position at Armstrong High School[ an all-Black high school in Washington, D.C. ]. Sadly, this was when both of her parents died and she turned to writing to give her consolation from her grief. To her delight, her first essay, “Being Young-A Woman- And Colored” got published in The Crisis magazine{ in December of 1925 }. Her essay immediately catapulted her into the limelight. Following the publishing of her essay, Marita was invited into a group of distinguished Washington, D.C. writers, poets, playwrights, and composers( they met regularly at the “S” Street Salon, owned by composer, poet, and playwright Georgia Douglass Johnson ). The thing that made Marita’s essays and writings standout is that they emphasized “self-improvement through education!” While attending events in Washington and enjoying her success as a writer, she ended up meeting a man named, William Almy Occomy[ who would later become her husband ]. They were married in 1930, and a year later they moved to Chicago, where Marita was well accepted as a writer. As time moved on, her family had grown from two to five[ the couple now had 3 children ]. In 1941, Marita decided to return to teaching and focus more on taking care of her family. Up until she retired in 1963, she taught in Chicago’s public school system. Regretfully, in 1971, Marita was caught in a fire at her Chicago apartment. On December 7,1971, Marita O.B. Occomy died of smoke inhalation from the fire in her apartment. In closing, I would like to say how disappointing it is that “the selectors” of the books that go to the schools in our “Black Communities” have failed to include more of the writings of Black Writers like Marita and those who wrote during the “Black Renaissance Era” and “The Harlem Renaissance Era“ in the school textbooks.