Rudolph Fisher
Rudolph Fisher was born on this date in 1897 in Washington, D.C. He was a Black physician, gastroenterology specialist, novelist, short story writer, dramatist, musician, and orator.
Brought up in Providence, Rhode Island, his parents, John Wesley Fisher, a clergyman, and Glendora Williamson Fisher, had three children. In 1915, young Fisher graduated from Providence's Classical High School and Brown University with a B.A., majoring in English and Biology. In 1920, he received an M.A. from Brown. During this time at Brown, Fisher's public speaking skills won him the first Caesar Misch Premium (in German) in his first year, first prize in the Carpenter Prize Speaking Contest in his sophomore year, the Dunn Premium in his junior year, and he delivered one of the three orations at his commencement program.
In 1917, Representing Brown, he won first prize at an intercollegiate public speaking contest at Harvard. In 1924, Fisher graduated from Howard University Medical School. That same year, while in Washington, Fisher married Jane Ryder, a Miner's Teachers College graduate and a grade-school teacher. Their only son, Hugh, was born in 1926.
Fisher wittily gave his son the nickname "The New Negro." Though most noted for his literary works, he was an accomplished musician, arranging many songs for Paul Robeson's first New York concert. Fisher is considered one of the significant or critical literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance and, along with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Hurston, and Wallace Thurman, made up the core of the young writers who launched the Renaissance movement. This truly Renaissance man's short life (he lived for 37 years) was filled with academic, expressive, and literary undertakings.
He was an active and dominant part of the African American literary bohemia that dominated Black literature in the 1920s and early 1930s. Rudolph Fisher died on December 26, 1934.
