Paulette Nardal

Paulette Nardal was a French writer and journalist from Martinique and one of the drivers of the development of black literary consciousness and of the creation of the Négritude genre. In 1920 she was the first black person to study at the Sorbonne, and with her sisters held a salon that brought together black intellectuals from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States; her translations introduced French intellectuals to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1931 she co-founded La Revue du Monde Noir. Injured when her ship was torpedoed in 1939, she returned to Martinique, founded Le Rassemblement féminin in 1944 and later worked at the United Nations.