Gerri Major
Gerri Major was an American journalist, editor, newscaster, publicist, public health official, author and community leader. During World War I, she was a major in the American Red Cross. Thereafter, she became a society columnist and editor for African American newspapers in her home city of New York as well as in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Baltimore. In 1936, a newspaper reporter said her talent for writing vivid prose, editing, and maintaining a wide circle of influential friends brought her fame and gave her "a unique position similar to that of an arbiter over the local social set." Ebony magazine attested that by the end of the 1930s she had become "one of the best known black women in America." and at the time of her death in 1984, she held joint positions as associate editor of Jet and senior staff editor of Ebony.
During all of her adult life, she was an active participant in civic organizations that worked to improve the health, education and general well-being of New York's African American community, and for 10 years was a publicity specialist for the Central Harlem Health District.
Parents and immediate family
Major was born on July 29, 1894, in her parents' home on Wentworth Avenue at the western border of the Douglas section of Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Her father was Herbert Hodges and her mother was Mae Powell Hodges. Major reported that her mother's grandfather had migrated from North Carolina to Indiana seeking freedom. Soon after her mother died while giving birth to her, she was adopted by her mother's sister, Maud Lawrence, and her husband David. The Lawrence family had sufficient wealth to give Major an extravagant debutante ball. While yet unmarried, Major kept Hodges as her family name.On December 15, 1917, Major married H. Binga Dismond in a military ceremony at Camp Logan in Houston. Before becoming a physician, Binga Dismond was a world record holder in the 440 yards and finished 3rd at the 1915 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships. They were divorced in 1933 but remained cordial. In 1942 she married musician Gilbert Holland, a baritone whose voice was heard frequently on radio programs of the 1930s. Her last marriage was to a prominent mortician from Atlantic City, New Jersey, John Richard Major. The ceremony took place in Buenos Aires during a trip they took to South America, probably in 1946. This was her third marriage and his fourth. She was widowed by 1953 and did not remarry during the remaining three decades of her life.
Other names
Major's first name, Geraldyn, was sometimes given as Geraldyne or Geraldine. Her nickname, Gerri, was sometimes given as Jerry or Gerry. While married to H. Binga Dismond she was known as Geraldyn Dismond, Mrs. H. Binga Dismond, or Geraldyn Hodges Dismond. During her brief marriage to Gilbert Holland she was known as Geraldyn Holland, Geraldyn Hodges Holland, or Geraldyn Dismond Holland. After marrying John Richard Major, she was called Geraldyn Major, Geraldyn Hodges Major, and Geraldyn Dismond Major. During the last three decades of her life her name was usually rendered as Gerri Major. During her marriage to H. Binga Dismond, she sometimes called herself and was sometimes called "La Dismond." In writing the "Social Whirl" column for the Afro-American she called herself simply Gerry.
Early life and education
Major was born in Chicago on July 29, 1894. Her birth name was Geraldyn Hodges. When her mother died giving birth to her, Major's father arranged for her adoption by an aunt and uncle who lived nearby. In a biographic sketch published in 1927, Major's first husband explained that her father was "overcome by the sudden loss of his wife... never forgave the innocent cause of his bereavement." Following elementary school, she attended Wendell Phillips High School and subsequently was awarded a work-study scholarship at the University of Chicago, from which she graduated with a Bachelor in Philosophy degree in 1915. On October 8, 1913, while being a university student, she chartered the Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, along with 4 other college women.In the summer months after her graduation from college, Major studied at Hampton Institute and during the next school year she taught dramatic art and physical culture at Lincoln Institute, an African American college in Jefferson City, Missouri. Not liking the situation there, she returned to Chicago to enter a two-year program at Chicago Normal School so that she could qualify to teach elementary school in that city. In the fall of 1917, Major served as a teacher-in-training or "cadet" in the Chicago public school system. In December of that year, she interrupted her progress toward becoming a Chicago school teacher in order to marry H. Binga Dismond, whom she had met at the University of Chicago. The ceremony took place at Camp Logan in Houston, Texas, where Dismond was training for service in the Army. During American participation in World War I, while Dismond served in France, Major became a Red Cross nurse in Chicago, leaving that organization in 1918 with the rank of major.
In 1919, Major taught at the Stephen A. Douglas Elementary School in Chicago, the same school she had attended as a child. In his biographic sketch of 1927, her husband noted that it was a distinctive honor to be appointed school clerk as well as teacher since "95 per cent of the teachers were non-Aframerican." She left the teaching profession in 1923 when she and her husband moved to Manhattan. She later said she found herself with nothing to do in New York and was "positively miserable" until 1925 when she participated in a fundraising effort for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Early in March of that year, she composed and distributed a public announcement for the annual NAACP dance in Harlem's Manhattan Casino. The release, which appeared in the New York Age on March 7, led to the job offer that would prove to be the starting point for her career in journalism.