Christian was born in Mechanicsville, Terrebonne Parish, a rural town seventy to eighty miles south of New Orleans, now known as part of Houma, Louisiana.
[1][2] Emmanuel Sr. was a Knights of Labor union organizer among the sugar cane workers as well as a schoolteacher at Houma Academy; his son also came to matriculate at the same school.
He was among the throng of blacks who left their agrarian existence to find a new and better life in urban cities like New Orleans in the decades immediately before, during and after World War I. Emmanuel Christian, however, had managed to instill in his son a love for literature, particularly for the works of Whittier, Longfellow and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
He tried without success to self-publish his first collection Ethiopia Triumphant and Other Poems; disappointed at the results, he later bought his own printing press, and published his own chapbooks.
Christian's writing came to public notice when he began contributing to the Louisiana Weekly, a New Orleans black newspaper, as a poetry editor and writer.
By 1932, Christian was corresponding with Arna Bontemps, also a native Louisiana writer, and Langston Hughes, who commented favorably on his contribution to the Crisis, then the literary as well as the political organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
He also published numerous poems and essays in other African American newspapers and magazines—like Phylon, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, and the Pittsburgh Courier—across the country.
He also made up his mind to marry Dillard co-ed Ruth Morand after dividing his affections between her and Irene Douglas, a New York sketch artist who may or may not have been passing for white.
It didn't take long to Christian realize his mistake: Ruth wanted a breadwinner who could command the kind of salary and overtime that many blacks were making in the war industries.
After his abrupt and painful termination, coupled with the failure of his marriage, the poet became a complete recluse and sank into what one biographer called "abysmal poverty."
He tried to maintain his collection in his Ninth Ward home, especially in the face of flooding caused by Hurricane Betsy in 1965, but he was arrested as a looter while wading in the rising, dirty waters, trying to save his papers.
[5] It was fitting that, in a University of New Orleans classroom, lecturing on what he loved best, Christian collapsed and was brought to Charity Hospital, where he died a few days later at the age of 76.