Countee Cullen (1903–1946) was born Countee Leroy Porter in New York City. In 1918, he was adopted by Reverend Frederick Cullen, a Methodist minister. He attended New York public schools, graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. from New York University in 1925, and took an M.A. at Harvard in 1926. He married twice. His first marriage to Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, black educator and sociologist, lasted two years.

Like many African Americans of his time, Cullen shaped the expression of his talents in reaction to racism in the society in which he lived. Recalling an incident in 1930 when he was barred from eating in a restaurant at the New York Central terminal in Buffalo, New York, he later said, "There may have been many things in my life that have hurt me, and I find that the surest relief from these hurts is in writing. Most things I write, I do for the sheer love of the music in them. Somehow or other, however, I find my poetry of itself treating of the Negro, of his joys and his sorrows, mostly of the latter, and of the heights and the depths of emotion which I feel as a Negro."

From 1926 to 1928, Cullen was assistant editor of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, the magazine of the National Urban League, where he wrote "The Dark Tower," a column of reflections and literary criticism. He taught French at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City from 1934 to 1945 and wrote and published children's stories. Cullen was proud of being African American, of his "ebony muse," but not surprisingly, he was bitter about the African-American experience in America. Best known for his poems about racial issues, he was nonetheless criticized by his contemporaries for the mildness of his attacks on racial injustice. Cullen was a middle-class New Yorker who wanted to be a traditional poet, and his ideas about poetry were counter to those of other writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Among other awards and honors, Cullen received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929 to complete The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). His works include Color (poetry, 1925), Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1928), One Way to Heaven (novel, 1932), and On These I Stand (1947).

In 1995, a monument honoring Countee Cullen was created by sculptor Meredith Bergmann for an exhibition at the Woodlawn Cemetery in New York where Cullen is buried. A bronze-colored Countee Cullen is portrayed reaching out to a bust of himself in the classic representation of a poet: a white marble-colored bust crowned with a laurel wreath. His other hand holds his book Color. The two portraits of the poet are made of brown and white cement, imitating the colors of the two most traditional sculpture media: bronze and marble. By making both pieces out of cement the artist is telling us that we are all made of the same stuff regardless of our "color." This sentiment echoes Cullen's words: