Beatrice Graham

Ottie Beatrice Graham Jefferson, born on December 11, 1901, in Virginia, was an American writer, playwright, and Broadway performer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was raised in Philadelphia, the daughter of Rev. Wesley Faul Graham, a Baptist clergyman and insurance executive, and Josephine A. Shields Graham. Graham graduated from William Penn High School for Girls in Philadelphia in 1918 and went on to earn a degree from Howard University in 1922, where she studied drama under Thomas Montgomery Gregory and participated in the first productions of the Howard Players. She was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Graham's creative work began taking shape during her university years. In 1921 she wrote the one-act play The King's Carpenters, which she starred in at the Harlem YWCA in 1922. Her short story "To A Wild Rose," published in 1923, received first prize in a student fiction contest, with Arthur B. Spingarn, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and W. E. B. Du Bois serving as judges. Her additional publications include the one-act play Holiday (1923) and the short stories "Blue Aloes" and "Slackened Caprice," both published in 1924. Her stories have since been included in anthologies of African-American women's writing.

Graham appeared on Broadway between 1936 and 1938, with credits spanning four productions: Glorianna, Who's Who?, The Holmeses of Baker Street, and Ethan Frome. During other periods of her life she taught school in Pennsylvania.

In 1925, Graham married William Guss Jefferson, a physician and musician. The couple settled in Steelton, Pennsylvania, and had a son, Michael Graham Jefferson, born in 1927. Her husband died by suicide in December 1941. Graham died on March 31, 1944, at a hospital in Harrisburg, at the age of 42. Her great-granddaughter, writer Aileen Imana Muhammad Lassiter, later produced a documentary about her life titled What Happened to Ottie B. Graham?