ChickenBones: A Journal

for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes

   

Home  

Google
 

Elmer A. Carter Comments on Christian's

"McDonough Day in New Orleans"

 

 

 Letter 3

OPPORTUNITY: Journal of Negro Life 

(Published by the National Urban League)

1133 Broadway, Room 826 

New York City 

June Twenty-fifth 1934 

 

My dear Mr. Christian: 

Your poem, "McDonogh Day in New Orleans," was reprinted in the New York Herald Tribune on Sunday, June 17. I am using "Spring in the South" this month and will be glad to see another group of your poems.

Sincerely yours, 

Elmer A. Carter  

<<---Previous                                                                           Next-4-->>

 

 
 

Elmer A. Carter (1890-1973), editor and a prominent Republican, was the first chairman of the New York State Commission Against discrimination (the predecessor of the State Division of Human rights) and first director of the State Human rights Division until his resignation in 1961. He then served for two years as special assistant to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller on issues of race relations. In 1937, while editor of Opportunity, a journal published by the Urban League, Carter was appointed by Governor Herbert Lehman to the Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board.

 He thus began a career in public service devoted to eliminating racial bias in housing, employment, and public accommodation. Carter's wife, the former Thelma Johnson, died just a few weeks before her husband. the carters lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue from the 1940s until their deaths.

OPPORTUNITY -- Journal of Negro Life, the official organ of the National Urban League, completing in December thirteen brilliant years under the able editorship of distinctive contribution to the literature dealing with the problems of interracial contacts in America. Dispassionate, factual data and illuminating articles from the pens of some of America's most distinguished students and writers graced the columns of the magazine -- establishing it in the minds of discriminating readers as one of the indispensable sources of light on "America's most baffling problem." Opportunity Journal, thanks to its perceptive, broad-minded editors, first, Charles S. Johnson, and then Elmer A. Carter, was a leading venue for the work of African-American artists.

 

Home  Selected Letters   Marcus Bruce Christian