Evolution of Love 2

Nancy Cunard

She was heir to a shipping fortune. Then she fell in love with a Black jazz musician—and her family disowned her. So she spent her fortune publishing the voices they wanted silenced.
This is the story of the heiress who chose justice over jewels.
In 1928, Nancy Cunard walked into a Venice jazz club and heard Henry Crowder play piano. She was 32, an aristocratic British poet, heiress to the Cunard shipping line, surrounded by Europe's artistic elite. He was a self-taught Black musician from Georgia, playing with Eddie South's Alabamians.
By the end of the night, Nancy's privileged world had cracked open.
Their relationship wasn't just scandalous—it was considered biological treason. Mixed-race couples were kicked out of hotels. Newspapers published racist cartoons depicting Crowder with grotesquely exaggerated features and Nancy as a race traitor. Her mother, Lady Maud Cunard, was horrified.
"Is it true that my daughter knows a Negro?" her mother asked, the question dripping with disgust.
Nancy's response was defiant: publish a pamphlet titled Black Man and White Ladyship, send it to all her mother's society friends, and publicly defend her relationship as a rebuke to racist Britain.
The consequence was swift: complete disinheritance. The Cunard fortune—gone. Her place in British society—revoked. Her family—done with her.
Nancy accepted it without hesitation. Because Henry Crowder had given her something more valuable than money: he'd introduced her to the realities of racism in ways her privileged upbringing never could.
And Nancy Cunard decided to use what remained of her wealth and influence to fight back.
She'd already established Hours Press in 1928, a small publishing house operating from a renovated farmhouse in Normandy. Using a 200-year-old Belgian hand press, Nancy personally set type, inked plates, and printed works by modernist writers—Samuel Beckett's first published work came from Hours Press.
But after meeting Crowder, her focus shifted. She visited Harlem, immersing herself in the Renaissance happening there—the explosion of Black art, literature, music, and intellectual thought that white America was largely ignoring or actively suppressing.
She met Langston Hughes. Zora Neale Hurston. W.E.B. Du Bois. She listened to their stories of segregation, lynching, systemic oppression. She learned about the Scottsboro Boys—nine young Black men sentenced to death in Alabama on false rape charges.
And Nancy decided to do something unprecedented: create an anthology that would document Black culture, history, and struggle in a way no publication ever had.
Negro: An Anthology took three years to compile (1931-1934). Nancy worked herself to exhaustion, tracking down contributors across continents, translating works, setting 855 pages of type by hand. The book weighed eight pounds. It contained 250 articles from 150 contributors—Black and white, from Africa, the Caribbean, America, Europe.
Langston Hughes contributed poetry. Zora Neale Hurston provided cultural analysis. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote on civil rights. Arthur Schomburg documented Black history. The anthology included music scores by Henry Crowder, photographs documenting racism, essays on colonialism, reports on the Scottsboro case.
It was revolutionary—not just in content but in concept. A wealthy white British woman using her platform and remaining resources to amplify Black voices at a time when most of the world wanted those voices silent.
The book was dedicated "to Henry Crowder, my first Negro friend."
Publishing it nearly bankrupted her. No publisher would take the risk, so Nancy paid for everything herself—using what little money she had left after disinheritance and proceeds from libel suits against racist press coverage.
When Negro was published in February 1934, it was immediately banned in British colonies across Africa and the West Indies. Colonial authorities understood exactly how dangerous this book was—it gave colonized people a vision of their own worth, their own power, their own right to resist.
Sales were dismal in Britain and America. The book was too expensive, too controversial, too ahead of its time. Many copies were later destroyed during the London Blitz.
But in Black intellectual circles? It was received as groundbreaking. Alain Locke called it "the best anthology, in every sense of the word, ever made about Negroes." Mary McLeod Bethune thanked Nancy for highlighting Black women's contributions.
Nancy had created something that wouldn't be fully appreciated for decades: the first comprehensive documentation of the Black Atlantic—a transnational portrait of African diaspora culture that celebrated achievement while unflinchingly documenting oppression.
But Nancy didn't stop there.
In 1935, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Nancy became one of the earliest and most vocal critics. She wrote articles exposing the brutality of Italian occupation, the use of chemical weapons, the systematic destruction of Ethiopian culture. She predicted—accurately—that fascism's expansion in Africa was a prelude to a larger European war.
When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Nancy threw herself into refugee relief work. She trudged twenty miles in rain to reach camps. She organized fundraising—parties, dances, film screenings. She wrote stories about refugees' suffering for the Manchester Guardian, using journalism to mobilize support.
She worked until physical exhaustion forced her back to Paris, where she stood on street corners collecting funds.
Throughout, she drank heavily. Took lovers indiscriminately. Burned through friendships. Henry Crowder had left her by 1935, fed up with her infidelities and volatile temperament. Nancy's behavior became increasingly erratic, self-destructive.
But her commitment to fighting fascism never wavered.
When World War II began, Nancy worked as a translator in London for the French Resistance. She worked to the point of collapse, translating intercepted communications, supporting the underground fight against Nazi occupation.
She had gone from heiress to outcast to activist to resistance worker—each transformation stripping away more privilege, more comfort, more of the life she'd been born into.
By the time Nancy Cunard died in 1965 at age 69, she was destitute, alcoholic, weighing only 57 pounds. She died alone in a Paris hospital, her health destroyed by decades of relentless activism and self-destruction.
History largely forgot her. The men she'd published—Beckett, Pound—became famous. The causes she'd championed eventually gained traction. But Nancy herself faded from memory, reduced to footnotes in other people's biographies or objectified in photographs as a "muse" to famous artists.
But here's what Nancy Cunard actually was: a woman who looked at the racist, colonialist, fascist world of the 1930s and refused to be complicit. Who used her privilege not to insulate herself but as a weapon against injustice. Who gave up wealth, family, reputation, and eventually her health for causes that mattered more than comfort.
She published Black writers when no one else would. She documented colonialism's brutality when Europe wanted to look away. She fought fascism before most people recognized the threat. She worked for the Resistance when the Nazis occupied France.
Nancy Cunard proved that privilege isn't destiny—it's a choice. You can use it to protect yourself, or you can burn it down fighting for people the world has decided don't matter.
She chose to burn.