https://apnews.com/article/louise-meriwether-dies-100-daddy-number-runner-2540caba9620400fbbf4a2ffb71a6076
(this was reprinted at the Washington Post and two other media)

By HILLEL ITALIE
Updated 10:20 PM EDT, October 10, 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — Louise Meriwether, the author and activist whose coming-of-age novel “Daddy Was a Number Runner” is widely regarded as a groundbreaking and vital portrait of race, gender and class, has died. She was 100.

Meriwether died Tuesday at the Amsterdam Nursing Home in Manhattan, according to Cheryl Hill, a filmmaker who said she is part of the author’s “extended family.” The cause was old age, Hill said.

“Daddy Was a Number Runner,” published in 1970, tells of a poor Black community in Harlem during the 1930s as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old Francie Coffin. The narrative is a grim panorama of gangs, gambling, confrontations with the police and endless worrying about money. But it is also a testament to the human spirit, whether Francie’s growing consciousness of her sexuality or the tenuous bond she feels as she looks out on the street life of Harlem.

“I wanted to hug them all,” Francie thinks to herself. “We belonged to each other somehow. I’m getting sick, I thought, as I shifted my elbows on the windowsill. I must have caught some rare disease. But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn’t want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self.”

Meriwether’s debut novel sold hundreds of thousands of copies and, along with such contemporaneous works as Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” helped mark a rise of Black women’s voices in literature. James Baldwin, who contributed a foreword, praised Meriwether for telling “everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country.” National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson was among many who would later credit the novel with helping inspire them to become authors.

In 2016 the Feminist Press and TAYO Literary Magazine launched the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize for “debut women/nonbinary writers of color.” The same year she received a lifetime achievement from the Before Columbus Foundation for her contributions to multicultural literature.

Meriwether was dedicated to enlightening young readers about the achievements of Black people and completed biographies of Rosa Parks, heart surgeon Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Robert Smalls, an escaped slave who became a Civil War hero and member of Congress. Her other novels included the Civil War drama “Fragments of the Ark” and the modern love story “Shadow Dancing.”

Meriwether also was a journalist who wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Essence and other publications and a self-described “peacenik” who would recall dodging eggs while marching in May Day parades, protesting the “disastrous” policies of the IMF and World Bank and being arrested during a sit-in against the extremist John Birch Society. As head of the anti-apartheid organization Black Concern, she protested Muhammad Ali’s plan in 1972 to fight before a racially segregated audience in South Africa. (The bout was eventually cancelled over financial issues).

Meriwether taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Houston. She was married twice, to Angelo Meriwether and Earle Howe, with both marriages ending in divorce.

“Daddy Was a Number Runner” was a personal story. She was born Louise Jenkins in Haverstraw, New York, and later moved to Brooklyn and then Harlem, one of five children of a housekeeper and a janitor who became a number runner when he couldn’t find work. A passionate reader, Meriwether vowed to rise above the “deep feeling of shame” she felt over being in an all-white grade school in Brooklyn, to write her way “out of the wilderness.”

She majored in English at New York University and in her 40s received a master’s in journalism from UCLA. She developed “Daddy Was a Number Runner” through the Watts Writers Workshop, founded by screenwriter Budd Schulberg and others in 1965 not long after the devastating riots in South Central Los Angeles. Around the same time, she became one of the few Black women working in Hollywood, hired as a story analyst by Universal Studios. After returning to New York in the late 1960s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and befriended Angelou and Sonia Sanchez, among others.

In a 2010 commencement speech at Pine Manor College, Meriwether explained that writing meant the willingness to draw upon the “totality” of one’s self. She remembered criticizing a story submitted by a Black student at Sarah Lawrence, contending that the young woman had not revealed everything she knew.

“She replied, ‘If I write the truth I’ll be crying every step of the way,’” Meriwether said of the student. “‘All right,’ I counseled, ‘Rewrite it and cry.’”
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What I posted this spring:

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2023/02/23/when-harlem-writers-guild-came-home-schomburg-center
(this was the only mention of her upcoming 100th birthday that I could find - scroll down almost all the way to see a 1970 article from Ebony Magazine, with photo)

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/louise-jenkins-meriwether-1923
(brief bio and photo)

http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22louise+meriwether%22+&btnG=Search+Images
(photos & book covers)

http://www.answers.com/topic/louise-meriwether
Excerpt:
"Three juvenile readers on historical black figures were published in the 1970s: The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls (1971), The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1972), and Don't Take the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Parks Story (1973). Whether for adult or juvenile reading, each work includes some aspect of African American life not usually found in American history texts."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Meriwether

"It’s Not Too Late to Discover Louise Meriwether"

"The author, 98, wrote one of the classic novels of Depression-era Black life, 'Daddy Was a Number Runner,' and its themes still resonate today."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/books/louise-meriwether.html

(It's very long, with very nice photos.)

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/louise-meriwether/fragments-of-the-ark/
(review of "Fragments of the Ark")

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/174707.Louise_Meriwether
(reader reviews)

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1CAJMBU_enUS1061&q=%22louise+meriwether%22&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjcw6PF2bz_AhWgEFkFHbt7ApYQ0pQJegQIbBAB&biw=1366&bih=649&dpr=1
(videos)

WORKS:

Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970, introduction by James Baldwin)

"Francie, aged 12, watches as her father loses his job and, out of desperation, begins running numbers. When he leaves the family, her mother must go on government assistance. Francie's brother winds up in jail, while Francie herself struggles to maintain her self-possession in an increasingly chaotic and hostile world."

The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls (1971)
"A brief biography of the slave who escaped to freedom with his family and other runaway slaves on a captured Confederate gunboat."

The Heart Man: Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1972)
"A brief biography of the black surgeon who performed the first successful heart operation in 1893."

Don't Ride the Bus on Monday: The Rosa Parks Story (1973)
"A brief biography of the Alabama black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on the bus marked the beginning of the civil rights movement."

Francie's Harlem (1988)

Fragments of the Ark (1994)
"In the tradition of Alex Haley's Roots, Fragments of the Ark tells the heroic story of Peter Mango, a South Carolina slave whose daring Civil War escape from Confederate Charleston to the Union Navy brings him face-to-face with his freedom--and still closer to his own soul."

Shadow Dancing (2000)
"Glenda is a journalist at the top of her profession. When she falls in love with a charismatic theatre director who is also a nightmare-haunted Vietnam vet, Glenda must draw on all her strengths if the relationship is to survive."

She also wrote the introduction to Harriet Jacobs' " Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : The Givens Collection."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/books/louise-meriwether-dead.html

"Writing of life in Harlem, she emerged at the same time as Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou but never achieved their fame, though James Baldwin was an admirer."

By Richard Sandomir
Published Oct. 13, 2023Updated Oct. 18, 2023

Louise Meriwether, whose acclaimed 1970 novel, “Daddy Was a Number Runner,” about a struggling family in Depression-era Harlem, introduced a new Black female voice at the same time that Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou were emerging as literary forces, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 100.

Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Cheryl Hill, a member of Ms. Meriwether’s extended family.

Ms. Meriwether was a journalist and literary critic when she started to write “Daddy” at the Watts Writers Workshop in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. Drawing on her impoverished childhood in Harlem, she created the Coffin family — 12-year-old Francie, her two older brothers and their parents — who in 1934 are trying, with diminishing success, to avoid being crushed by economic insecurity, racial prejudice and crime.

“Daddy” chronicles a year in Francie’s life and is told in her voice. It opens with her picking up betting slips and cash for her father — a number runner, who collects bets and later pays off the winners in a local, illegal gambling racket. She races home to her family’s tenement apartment and describes the scene before her.

“Knots of men, doping out their numbers, sat on the stoops or stood wide-legged in front of the storefronts, their black ribs shining through shirts limp with sweat,” Ms. Meriwether wrote. “They spent most of their time playing the single action — betting on each number as it came out — and they stayed in the street all day long until the last figure was out. I was glad Daddy was a number runner and not just hanging around the corners like these men.”

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Paule Marshall called Francie “a remarkable heroine,” a vulnerable, innocent dreamer trying desperately to survive.

“There, on those mean streets,” Ms. Marshall wrote, “all her bright promise is slowly eclipsed by the realities of ghetto life, by the evils she encounters — an evil personified by child molesters who infest the roofs, movies and parks of her world and the white shopkeepers who prey on her poverty.”

The critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote in The Times in 2021 that “Daddy,” Ms. Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye” (1970) and Ms. Angelou’s first memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1969), were among a handful of books of that era that “took the perspective of Black girls seriously, attending to their simultaneously brutal and tender realities.”

Unlike Ms. Morrison and Ms. Angelou, Ms. Meriwether did not achieve fame. But she won the admiration of James Baldwin, who wrote in the foreword to “Daddy” that she “has told everyone who can read what it means to be a Black man or woman in this country.”
“She has achieved,” Mr. Baldwin added, “an assessment, in a deliberately minor key, of a major tragedy.”...

(snip)