Illinois WPA -- Arna Bontemps

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When Jack Conroy and I first began to compare notes on Negro Migrations within the United States, our desks were about twenty feet apart. We were both employed as editorial supervisors on the Illinois Writers Project of the WPA. Not far away, at a similar desk, was a serious young supervisor who never wasted much time but whom I thought I saw making eyes at a slender young typist in the secretarial pool. He was Nelson Algren. Across the big room, in an area assigned to the radio unit, one occasionally saw the energetic and personable young figures of Studs Terkel and Lou Gilbert, both clearly marked for bigger future roles in television and movies, respectively.

Katherine Dunham, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Stuart Engstrand, and George V. Martin had worked at these same desks just weeks or months earlier, and some of them returned occasionally to see how things were going. Meanwhile, their successors continued to fill the files with gleanings from old Illinois newspapers and other library sources. After Conroy and I got steamed up about Negro migrations, we began to pay even closer attention. We discovered, for example, that Katherine Dunham, who had been working for a doctoral degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, had directed her writers to collect information about the groups that later became widely known as Black Muslims. We came across an inspired days work by a writer who had done nothing but list the names of storefront churches on one street in the southside ghetto. And what names they were!

The project ended suddenly, but not before it and others like it had made publishing history with the excellent series of state guides and other books and pamphlets of regional or local interest, often of substantial value to later researchers. Peripheral benefits, sometimes too intangible to be measured by linage or pagination, were often noted, and the opportunity for development afforded the likes of Wright and Yerby and Algren was matched by the rivitalization of old timers like the poet Fenton Johnson who had been hit even harder by the depression. While Johnson's WPA Poems did not get published as a collection, they obviously did him a lot of good.

When the Project came to an end, a publisher who had heard about our interest in the migration story encouraged us to develop it. We went to work, and They Seek a City was published in 1945. One thing about the impulse we had tried to trace was apparent at first. Another became apparent later. We soon realized that we were dealing with currents that were still running vigorously and that we could not tell when or where they would crest. To that extent our book was premature. But the disasters ahead in Watts and Chicago and Harlem which were later to focus intense light on this fantastic population shift, with all its dislocations, could not have been foreseen. Nor could they have been understood prior to the events of the fifties and sixties, disclosing the depth and intensity of the Negro American's drive toward freedom. Needless to say, twenty years of change and unforeseen developments have made it necessary to recast most of the original chapters of the book and to add a number of new ones.

Anyplace But Here

Arna Wendell Bontemps : A Bibliography

Robert E Fleming. James Weldon Johnson and Arna Wendell Bontemps: A reference guide. G. K. Hall, 1978

Kirkland C. Jones. Man from Louisiana; A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps.. Greenwood Press, 1992.

Sterling Brown "Arna Bontemps: Co-worker, Comrade." Black World 22:11 (September 1973): 92-98.

Wikipedia-Wendell_Bontemps

Jack Conroy (1899-1990) wrote the influential novel, The Disinherited, which sold only 2,700 copies at the time of publication. Yet Conroy was regarded as one of the great proletarian writers of the 1930s, and is still remembered as such because his radical politics never softened with time. He authored or contributed to numerous books, including fiction, children's fiction, poetry, essay, and sociology. He edited several publications including Rebel Port, 1931-1932, Anvil, 1933-1937 and New Anvil 1939-41.

He was an associate editor of Nelson's Encyclopedia and Universal World Encyclopedia from 1943-1947. In 1935 he received the Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing. Conroy also reviewed for several major newspapers and taught creative writing at a few colleges.

Other Books by Jack Conroy

The Fast Sooner Hound / Sam Patch the High and Wide Handsome Jumper / They Seek a City

Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990

Jack Conroy Reader / A World to Win / Unrest 1931 (radical poetry) / The Weed King & Other Stories

Arna Wendell Bontemps (1902-1973) -- born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of Creole parents -- was one of the more prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He was the author of over 25 books of poetry, history, biography, fiction and anthologies. Bontemps was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps served as head librarian at Fisk University from 1969 to 1972. He was also curator of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University. In 1923, Bontemps received his B.A. from Pacific Union College in Angwin. In 1924, his poetry appeared in Crisis magazine, the NACCP periodical edited by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois.

In 1926 Golgotha Is a Mountain won the Alexander Pushkin Award and in 1927 Nocturne at Bethesda achieved first honors in the Crisis poetry contest. Personals, a collection of poetry was published in 1963.

Bontemps then turned to prose. In the decade of the thirties, he wrote three acclaimed novels God Sends Sunday (1931); Black Thunder (1936); and Drums at Dusk (1939). Frustrated in his ability to reach his own generation Bontemps to literature for children and young graders. In 1937 he published the Sad-Faced Boy; and others for young audience included We Have Tomorrow (1945) Slappy Hopper (1946) and Story of the Negro (1948).

Bontemps was involved in the publication of at least three anthologies: Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941); with Langston Hughes, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1949); and Bontemps, American Negro Poetry (1963 & 1974 rev.). Bontemps was gracious enough to include Christian's poems in all his anthologies.

Bontemps' beautiful short story "A Summer Tragedy" is found often in anthologies. It is indeed a treat. His poems "A Black Man Thinks of Reaping," "Southern Mansion," and "Nocturne at Bethesda" are often anthologized. But such poems as "My Heart Has Known Its Winter" and "Day Breakers" are also found in anthologies.

Early in his career Bontemps had wanted to get a Ph.D. in English but with his marriage in 1926 and the coming of six children he had to work. He taught for awhile at an Alabama junior college. With the coming of the Depression he worked for the Illinois WPA and supervised and assisted in the writing of a history of the Negro in Illinois. In 1943 he completed a degree in library science and served as librarian at Fisk University and developed an archive of African American cultural materials that is a major resource for study in this field.