Esther Popel was a contributor of the Harlem Renaissance as an author and poet, as well as a teacher and an activist. Born in Pennsylvania in 1896 to Helen King Anderson Popel and mailman Joseph Gibbs Popel, her and her siblings were raised in a household that highly encourage them to obtain a good education. Her father especially wished for his children to have a better education and therefore better opportunities than he had. After graduating high school Popel became the first African American to attend the liberal arts college Dickenson College located in Carlisle. She received the John Patten Memorial Prize upon graduating, the top academic honor awarded at the school. There she studied what was called the Latin Scientific curriculum, an education focusing on languages including Latin, German, Spanish, and French. Popel developed her talents in writings from an early age and published her first book of poetry, one of her more renowned works, Thoughtless Thinks by a Thinkless Thoughter while still attending high school. Her poems appeared in a number of influential journals during the Harlem Renaissance including Opportunity and The Crisis, which printed her most famous poem Flag Salulte (1934). The poem was written about the 1933 hanging by an angry mob of George Armwood, a black man, after he was accused of assaulting a 71-year-old woman. It was published to much controversy with its style of intermingling quotes of the angry mob with lines from the pledge of allegiance, eventually being brought to a state committee to determine if it was permissible to be allowed in schools. She also published a collection of her poetry titled A Forest Pool (1934), and her poems would continue to be added to anthologies produced worldwide. In addition to her career as a writer, Popel was also an activist who fought for issues pertaining to women’s rights and problems African Americans experienced in the United States during that time. She served on the board of the National Association of College Women for almost twenty years. Popel and her family, chemist William Shaw who she married in 1925 and their daughter, eventually settled down in Washington, D.C. where she became a high school teacher. The experience she gained teaching led to her work on contributions made to the educational system, both locally and on a national scale. She assisted in the development of numerous teaching policies that would be adopted in the Washington, D.C. area, and ultimately worked for the National Education Association to create long term plans for the educational system throughout the country. Story derived from mypoeticside.com.

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