Aiken Lecture featuring A’Lelia Bundles in conversation with Ernie Suggs

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Dubbed the “joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” by poet Langston Hughes, A’Lelia Walker was a dazzling cultural icon whose legendary parties and Dark Tower salon helped define the Harlem cultural scene.

After inheriting her mother’s pioneering hair care business, A’Lelia became America’s first high-profile Black heiress and a patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her New York homes, where she hosted luminaries including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, and W.E.B. Du Bois—figures who shaped African American history and culture during the Roaring Twenties.

Drawing on extensive research and personal correspondence, A’Lelia Bundles presents a nuanced biography of a woman navigating life as a wife, mother, businesswoman, and patron outside the shadow of her famous mother’s legacy.

With vivid detail, Joy Goddess brings to life A’Lelia’s radiant personality, fashion-forward influence, and role as one of the most important cultural icons of Harlem, offering a fresh and unforgettable portrait of the woman who embodied the spirit of a new Black cultural era.

The Aiken Lecture Series is supported by the Lucy Rucker Aiken Foundation.

A’Lelia Bundles is the author of five books including Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, a biography of her great-grandmother whose parties, arts patronage and convenings helped shape the social and cultural scene of that era. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times Notable Book about her entrepreneurial great-great-grandmother, is the fact-based biography that inspired Self Made, a fictional four-part Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer.

A'Lelia is a board member of the March On! Festival, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, BIO (Biographers International), Columbia Global Reports and the National Archives Foundation. She founded the Madam Walker Family Archives, the largest private collection of Walker ephemera, photographs and correspondence.

A’Lelia was a network television producer for thirty years, first at NBC News and then at ABC News, where she was Washington, DC deputy bureau chief and director of talent development.

Journalist Ernie Suggs earned his B.A. degree in English Literature from North Carolina Central University in 1990, where he was the editor in chief and sports editor of The Campus Echo. Upon graduation, he was awarded an internship by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) to work for Gannett Newspapers. He returned to Durham, North Carolina in 1992, as a writer for The Herald-Sun. In 1996, Suggs was awarded a fellowship by the Education Writers Association, which culminated in his award-winning, Pulitzer nominated series Fighting to Survive: Historically Black Colleges and Universities Face the 21st Century. He was hired as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1997. In 2005, Suggs became the vice-president of the NABJ. He was chosen for the prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 2008, and in 2009, he joined the Nieman Foundation’s board. Suggs was given the Pioneer Black Journalist Award by NABJ in 2013. In 2021, an endowed scholarship was created in his name at NCCU’s English Department to fund journalism scholarships.    And in 2022, he published his first book, “The Many Lives of Andrew Young,” which chronicles the life of the former Atlanta mayor, civil rights icon and United Nations Ambassador. And in 2023, he wrote and produced the Emmy-nominated, “The South Got Something to Say,” the AJC’s look at Southern hip-hop.