Olivia Ward Bush-Banks papers

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks lived a life spanning cataclysmic redefinition of social, economic, and legislated boundaries. Born in 1869 into the immediate post Civil War era of Reconstruction, her mother was a descendant of the Montauk people, an Algonquian-speaking group, and her father was of Portuguese, East Indian, and African descent. The effect of a varied and rich heritage found voice in her teaching, writings, social activism, and public speaking. Ward was active in both the Chicago and Harlem Renaissance in the early to mid-twentieth century.

An unpleasant marriage in 1889 to Frank Bush was over by 1895. Divorced, she became the sole provider for her two daughters, Rosa Olivia and Marie. Ward sought menial labor as a source of income. After work and the responsibilities of motherhood, she found time to write poetry, publishing her first collection, Original Poems, in 1899. Another collection, Driftwood, followed in 1914. Ward remarried in the early twentieth century to Anthony Banks, a Pullman porter.

Ward's vignettes, plays, essays, and poetry reveal her sensitivity and awareness to the plight of Native Americans and African Americans within the Euro-centered United States culture of her time. She was deeply religious, though not uncritical of the hypocrisy within aspects of organized religion. The title of one of her plays is telling, "Even the Church is a Racket." Controversial topics did not deter her. In Black Communism, a character voices the despair of certain African Americans during the depression, "Why should his people continue to endure the fiendish practices of southern injustices?" In Shadows, African heritage is fore grounded, "Later the urgent primal call within her, seems to forecast the centuries of bondage, under the pitiless white light of advanced civilization...."

Both Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carter Woodson praised her poetry. In a letter to Ward accepting her poetry for publication in The Journal of Negro History, Woodson wrote, "I have received your poetry and I like it very much."

Ward opened her home to intellectual and cultural exchange, encouraging young artists. Press clippings noted the atmosphere, "There was a time when her salon was filled as of a Sunday evening with 'promising' young playwrights, poets, novelists, and others fired with the ambitions of youth." In 1931, the Chicago Defender referred to her as the "Grand dame of the literati."

At the end of her life, Ward began work on a memoir. She died in New York City in 1944.