Anita Cornwell
September 23, 1923 - May 27, 2023

Anita Cornwell was a Black lesbian feminist, essayist, journalist, poet, author, and cultural worker. She died on Saturday, May 27, 2023, in Philadelphia, at the age of 100. The Sinister Wisdom community and Anita Cornwell's literary executor, Briona Simone Jones, pays tribute to Cornwell's life and work at this memorial event.

Anita Cornwell died on Saturday, May 27, 2023, in Philadelphia, surrounded by compassionate women who cared for her at Wesley Enhanced Living at Stapeley. Anita was born in her grandmother’s house on September 23, 1923, in Greenwood, South Carolina. Anita’s early life was shaped by her close relationship with her grandmother, Iola, who invited Anita to attend the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939, when Anita was 15. This experience in the north transformed Anita’s belief in what was possible for her life and was the impetus that eventually led both her and her mother to move to Philadelphia.

Anita studied Journalism at Temple University and graduated in 1948. Thereafter, she began her career as a writer, working for outlets like the Philadelphia Tribune, and writing poetry and essays for Feminist Review, Labyrinth, Azalea: A Magazine by Third-World Lesbians, and BLACK/OUT. Anita’s work exposed the innerworkings of heteropatriarchy, misogyny, racism, the Jim Crow South, and white supremacy; her writing also attended to love and familial loss. Anita regularly contributed to both The Ladder and The Negro Digest in the 1950s and she was the first of Black women writers to publicly identify as a lesbian in print. Anita was also a scholar of Black Lesbian Studies and wrote the first collection of essays by a Black lesbian, Black Lesbian in White America, published by Naiad Press in 1983, which chronicles her experiences battling against misogyny, homophobia, and racism. A salient interview with Audre Lorde, conducted in 1975, appearing in Sinister Wisdom in 1977, is also included in the book. In 1989, Anita published a young adult book, The Girls of Summer. Recognizing the disinterest publishers had in publishing works about Black lesbians and young adult books for young girls, Anita filled the lacuna with these transgressive texts. Feminist organizing was another facet of Anita’s activism, she helped found the Philadelphia chapter of Radicalesbians and joined the Daughters of Bilitis.

Anita will be remembered as a generous, tenacious, and passionate lover, friend, teacher, mentor, writer, and scholar. She leaves behind her devoted friends and chosen family, literary executor, Briona Simone Jones, and a community of Black lesbians and readers whose lives were transformed by her radical vision and her purposed writing.

If I might be so bold as to express a heartfelt wish for the future, it would be that all Sisters of all races, creeds, colors, and sexual persuasions might realize the folly of fighting amongst ourselves and band together to confront our common enemy, who continues to wage an unrelenting war against all of us.

An online memorial will be hosted by Briona Simone Jones and SinisterWisdom.org on Thursday, September 21, 2023, at 7pm (ET).
An in-person memorial will be held at William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia on Saturday, September 30, 2023, at 2pm (ET).

Obituary of Anita Cornwell at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Obituary of Anita Cornwell at Philadelphia Gay News.

Read more about Anita Cornwell in her interview with Marc Stein.
Read Janet Mason on Anita Cornwell in Sinister Wisdom.
More information on Anita Cornwell.