The better question is who didn’t attend the wedding. Countee and Dr. DuBois worked on the guest list for months. 1,200 were invited to the ceremony with a smaller number attended the reception. A problem arose when the entire congregation of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church assumed that they were invited.
Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, with Reverend Frederick Cullen as Pastor, was the site of the Easter Monday, April 9, 1928 wedding between Yolande DuBois, daughter of WEB and Nina DuBois, and Countee Cullen, adopted of Carolyn and Reverend Cullen. The nuptials were held at night. In his first biography The Big Sea, Langston Hughes described the wedding as follows: “The Countee Cullen wedding [italics mine] was another spectacle that had Harlem talking for a long time. . .It was the social -literary event of the season and very society.”
Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps served as ushers ( see top row). Harold Jackman, to the right of Countee Cullen, was the best man. The pics are lovely but, for those in the know, the countdown to a divorce was on from the moment the couple said I do. For more detailed accounts, follow this blog. I will include material that I excluded from my publications. Some of this material will be in my biography of Harold Jackman. Also see the following resources.
RESOURCES
“Class, the Black Press, and the DuBois Cullen Wedding of 1928.” The Harlem Renaissance Revisited. Ed. Jeffrey Ogbar. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 79-104.
“Harold Jackman.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Vol. 1. Eds. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. New York: Routledge, 2004.
“The Cullen-DuBois Wedding.” Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Vol. 1. Eds. Cary Wintz and Paul Finkelman. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Yolande DuBois traveled from Baltimore to New York City in a special train car along with many of her 16 bridesmaids. Her wedding to poet Countee Cullen took place on Easter Monday, April 9, 1928.
The Best Man: Harold Jackman and the Harlem Renaissance 