Edward N. Harleston
*Edward N. Harleston was born on this date in 1869. He was a Black poet and journalist.
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Edward Nathaniel Harleston worked as a carpenter and machinist and later owned a funeral home. After his first wife, Mattie Gadsen, died in 1895, he moved to Atlantic City and became superintendent of the Heinz Company Pier.
While working at the pier in 1907, he began self-publishing a leaflet of his writing, which he and lawyer Robert Vann took on in 1910 and incorporated into the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the first Black-run newspapers in the United States.
Harleston also published his sole volume of poetry, The Toiler's Life, in 1907. His second marriage was to Lovenia Johnson, and from 1911 onward, he was an office building superintendent in New York City. He died in 1919.
