As another Women’s History month closes, it’s only fitting for the AmNews, led by a dynamic woman, Elinor Tatum, to shine the spotlight on an astonishing, but now obscure, woman journalist and editor from our past. “It’s one of the most important things that the new, New York Amsterdam News Museum of Black Journalism will do,” said scholar Dr. Ray Alexander-Minter. “They are going to celebrate the great contributions of Black women even as they bring the enduring relevance of African Americans documenting the news from out of the shadows of oblivion, where it was tried to bury it!”
Marvel Cooke, Thelma Berlack Boozer, Nora Holt, Evelyn Cunningham, Kathy Connors and others have all added to the Amsterdam News’ luster. “But the most important sister of all to work there, was Geraldyn ‘Gerri’ Hodges Dismond Major!” Insisted Dr. Minter.
Using each of her married names, from 1939 to 1952 Dismond-Holland-Major served with distinction as a New York Amsterdam News columnist and editor.
During the 1920s-30s ‘Negro Renaissance period,’ as a counterpart to Hollywood movies extolling the glamorous escapades of Nick and Nora Charles, Harlem had the real-life hijinks of Geraldyn and Binga Dismond to gossip about. Seemingly, like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, they were their era’s most dazzling couple, attending every worthwhile party and theater first night on the calendar.
Geraldyn Hodges was born in Chicago in 1894, to Herbert and Mae Powell Hodges. Because her mother died during childbirth, her father said it saddened him just to look at her. Fortunately, under the circumstances, she was adopted by her mother’s sister, her Aunt Maud Lawrence. Mr. and Mrs. David Lawrence were both not only encouraging, but able to offer their ward material and social advantages like an introduction to the Southside’s Black elite at a debutante dance and (on scholarship) a college education.
Like so many women of her day, deciding to educate children was seen as a suitable pursuit. But she dreamed of doing more. So it was that at just 19, she launched a journalist career, beginning as a reporter for the Chicago Defender. The Midwest’s most renowned Black newspaper, thanks to Chicago’s status as a transportation hub and Pullman porters who saw it as their duty to circulate unbiased Black news throughout the boondocks during their travels, its influence was even broader. This was an auspicious start for a young woman of color.
Tall and handsome Dr. H. (Henry) Binga Dismond, the son of a physician, was born in 1891, in Virginia. He would graduate from Howard, joining the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. His freshman year, Dismond broke a 19-year track record and was subsequently chosen to compete in Berlin as a member of the 1916 U.S. Olympic team. Although the games were cancelled, Dismond was awarded a gold medal anyway, for matching the American quarter mile record time of 47.2/5 seconds. Defeating the titleholder, he became the western intercollegiate champion and earned his varsity letter. Urged by his banker-cousin Jesse Binga, he enrolled in the medical program at the University of Chicago. On completion of enlisting in the army, exhibiting valor recognized by the French government, Dismond left a decorated war hero. A man’s man, some were surprised at the sensitivity of the poetry Dr. Dismond published. Amongst other notables, he was to count Langston Hughes as a friend and patient.
Somehow in the midst of this flurry of activity, Dismond found time to marry and then to quickly divorce. Throughout his life, the soon-to-be doctor seems always to have found time for feminine companionship. His first wife had been a teacher too. But she was nothing like Gerri Hodges, who while a university student, was one of five founding members of an undergraduate chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
This golden couple who met while studying at the University of Chicago, made headlines when they wed at the Texas army base where Dismond trained. Geraldyn Dismond was obliged to teach school for a short time. With the declaration of World War I, she joined the Red Cross as a nurse, rising to the rank of major. A few years after war’s end, in 1923, they migrated to New York for better opportunities. The Dismonds first lived on 135th Street, the spine of “America’s Black Cultural Capital.” Their building, next door to the 32nd police precinct headquarters, unlandmarked, still stands. A short time after their arrival, they were joined by novelist Nella Larsen and her physicist professor husband Elmer S. Imes. The couples became fast friends. Nonetheless, nearby Strivers Row beckoned.
Along Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard, 138th and 139th Streets to Frederick Douglas Boulevard, are the 160 houses and four apartment buildings that David King built in 1893 as the “King Model Houses.” They were meant to show how elegant housing should best be planned. Several architects participated, but they were guided by New York’s foremost designer of the Edwardian era, Stanford White. Stately and elegant, these buildings have always stood in high regard. A century ago, the biggest houses facing busy Seventh Avenue (Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard), were the developments most desirable homes. Not one is now still a private house for one family attended by a staff of full-time, live-in servants. By contrast, the apartments along Eighth Avenue, unsought after because of the irritation of the elevated train going by, revamped with modern units with every amenity and no more elevated train, have become much more than buildings meant to screen noise. Nearer to Frederick Douglass Boulevard’s thriving restaurant row, they have become Strivers’ Row’s gateway to the good life, which is more easily attainable in Harlem than in any other part of Manhattan. The name Strivers’ Row was once used by Blacks finally allowed to live in the King Houses in 1918, to poke fun at the lucky few able to scrape together enough to buy here. Surviving as an exclusive enclave even after the Great Depression, in 1938, proposed to be leveled by the city and replaced by a middle class housing project, the row was seriously threatened. Only the united opposition of Black politics and political bosses, led by the Amsterdam News and other stalwarts of the Black press, saved it from destruction. Presenting planning tsar Robert Moses with an unprecedented defeat, it also scored one of the nation’s nascent, still largely overlooked, historic preservation victories!
It was unusual in the roaring twenties for most middle class women to work, but the Dismonds wanted the best of everything. They arrived in New York less than a decade after houses in Strivers’ Row first became available to African Americans. Acquiring the home of lightweight champion boxer Harry Wills, they became among the area’s most notable residents. Unlike other well-to-do Harlemites who owned houses, but took in roomers, engaging their neighbor, architect Vertner Tandy, the Dismonds remodeled their house into a mixed-use facility. Dr. Dismond’s medical practice occupied the ground floor. With the help of innovative interior designer Harold Curtis Brown, the main ‘first’ or ‘Parlor’ floor was made into the couple’s apartment, replete with leaded casement windows. The top-two floors were devoted to income-producing “efficiency” apartments. Modern, well-equipped and up to date, they were always much sought after.
Geraldyn Dismond reported on the Harlem social and artistic scene in The Inter-State Tattler. It was a brilliant Black journal with subscribers nationwide, a combination of Town and Country, Fortune, and Vanity Fair. Keeping up a fast-paced social life, Dismond was always careful to document herself and her mate at the shindigs she covered. She was ‘Lady Nicotine’ and he, ‘The Night Hawk.’ As popular in Greenwich Village as they were uptown, the Dismonds were part of a social movement of whites and Blacks who enjoyed each others’ company in defiance of convention.
Any New York visitor and many prominent downtown residents like Cary Grant, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Barbara Hutton, flocked to Harlem after seeing Eubie Blake’s hit Broadway musical, “Shuffle Along.” A much larger number of people unfamiliar with Harlem, learned all about its special charms, reading what Geraldyn Dismond wrote. The following lines appeared in 1929:
“The greatest joy in life is to be able to express one’s inner self. The second greatest joy is to be able to mingle with one’s kind. The third greatest joy is to receive the plaudits of one’s fellows. And thereby hangs the success of the Hamilton Lodge dances which for sixty-one years have thrilled and entertained the most blasé of New York … gowns of all descriptions, jewels, feathers and beauty beyond words. But above and over all, a spirit of abandon, hilarity and camaraderie that fired the imagination and made for a true fiesta. Of course, a costume ball can be a very tame thing, but when all the exquisitely gowned women on the floor are men and a number of the smartest men are women, ah then, we have something over which to thrill and grow round-eyed … Never no wells of loneliness in Harlem…”
Besides writing a column in the Tattler, Dismond also served as the magazine’s managing editor. In addition to this, she wrote for the Amsterdam News, The Pittsburgh Courier, and other African-American weekly newspapers. She was also a radio announcer and the first African-American woman to host her own regular program. “The Negro Achievement Hour,” broadcast on WABC, later appeared on other area stations. Childless, as a journalist, editor, newscaster, publicist, public health official, author, and community leader, Dismond’s life never lacked for excitement.
A dedicated fashion plate, Dismond liked to patronize creative young Black designers like milliner Willard Winter and couturier Stefan Young, aka ‘Stefan’! A personal fashion statement that announced her approach with every step, was a golden charm bracelet with countless miniature charms that documented her love of world travel.
Dismond, who unloaded her philandering first husband in 1933, just before he married one of their friends and tenants, married twice more. Interviewed by David Levering Lewis for his groundbreaking book, “When Harlem was in Vogue,” indicative of some of the tactics she must have employed to nail a story, she asked, “How much do you pay?” She also confessed, “If only I’d traveled to West Africa where men practice polygamy, before marrying my first husband, I’d have understood him better.”
Nuptials with New Jersey mortician John Richard Major, her third and final husband, took place in Buenos Aires just after World War ll. Assuming her husband’s surname (which she also had while married to Stirling Holland) was how she became Gerri Major.
Disaffected by America’s political parties, as early as 1928 she declared in the Pittsburgh Courier: “I do not see how any intelligent, self-respecting Negro can support either [party]…” Both were condemned for upholding, “the practices of Jim-Crowism, disenfranchisement, and race discrimination by which Negroes are degraded and oppressed.” So for a time Major admired American communism. In due course however, as the nation’s bicentennial approached, she would revert to Democratic activism.
Major remained an inveterate reporter all her life. Society editor for the still published Ebony and Jet magazines, she covered everything from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth ll, to the active love life of Eartha Kitt. In 1977, she wrote a nostalgic illustrated book with Doris E. Saunders that naturally included her own family, “Black Society.” In 1984, Major died in Harlem.