Otto Leland Bohanan was a Black poet, singer, and composer born around 1895 in Washington, D.C. He attended the Catholic University of America before transferring to Howard University. At Howard, he joined the fraternity Omega Psi Phi and went on to compose its first hymn, “Omega Men Draw Nigh.” After receiving his BA in English from Howard in 1914, he was quickly offered a position in Howard’s English faculty, but he declined to pursue a music career in New York City.
Bohanan flourished in New York’s arts scene, working as a composer and singer while his poems began to appear in The Crisis, the then-young official magazine of the NAACP. Perhaps his best-known work, 1917’s “The Dawn’s Awake” captures the determination and dauntless optimism that helped fuel the nascent Harlem Renaissance. Bohanan received his master’s from Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1928 and married fellow educator Florence Dulcia Coffer in 1931. He took a music-teaching position at DeWitt Clinton High School, where he worked when illness took his life in 1932. Bohanan’s poetry was included in multiple major anthologies of Black poets in the years after his death.