Arna Bontemps
Novelist, historian, poet, anthologist and archivist, Arnaud Wendell Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on October 13, 1902. When Arna Bontemps was three, his family moved to the Watts community just south of Los Angeles, as part of the Great Migration. Bontemps attended public school in Los Angeles before heading to Pacific Union College. They soon abandoned Catholicism and became devout Seventh Day Adventists. After attending public schools Bontemps, graduated from Pacific Union College, an Adventist school in California in 1923.
Following his graduation, Bontemps met and befriended the author Wallace Thurman, of "Fire!!" magazine in his job at Los Angeles Post Office. He next used his church connections to secure a teaching job at the Harlem Academy in New York City in 1924 at the age of 22. During that year Bontemps published his first poem, "Hope" in The Crisis, official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He depicted Hope as an "empty bark" drifting meaninglessly with no purpose, referring to his confusion about his career.
Bontemps, along with many other West Coast intellectuals, traveled to New York during the Harlem Renaissance. Also during 1924, Bontemps accepted a teaching position in Harlem, New York. Bontemps’ arrival in the metropolis coincided with the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps' poem "The Day Breakers" was published in the anthology, "The New Negro" in 1925. The following year, Bontemps' poem, "Golgatha is a Mountain" won first prize in the Alexander Pushkin contest sponsored Opportunity, an academic journal published by the National Urban League.
In 1926 he won the Crisis Poetry Prize. While he was teaching, Bontemps continued to publish poetry. Early in 1926 Bontemps married a former student, Alberta Johnson. In the early 1930s, Bontemps began to publish fiction, in addition to more poetry. Bontemps published his first novel, "God Sends Sunday" (1931). This novel explored the story of a Black jockey named Little Augie who easily earns money and carelessly squanders it. Little Augie ends up wandering through the Black sporting world when his luck as a jockey eventually runs out.
Bontemps was praised for his poetic style, his re-creation of the Black language and his distinguishing characters throughout this novel. In New York, Bontemps met other writers who became lifelong friends, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, W.E.B Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer. Hughes became a role model, collaborator, and friend to Bontemps. He also began publishing children's books. The first, "Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti", was written with Langston Hughes in 1932. This story followed the lives of siblings Popo and Fifina, in an easy to understand introduction to Haitian life for children.
Eventually, the Great Depression dispersed talented Harlemites like Arna Bontemps who returned to the South. He and his family moved to Huntsville, Alabama in 1931. That same year, Bontemps accepted a teaching position at Oakwood Junior College. The following year, Bontemps was awarded a literary prize for the short story, "A Summer Tragedy." In 1934, Bontemps published "You Can't Pet a Possum" which followed a story of a boy and his pet dog living in a rural part of Alabama.
During the early 1930s, African-American writers and intellectuals were not welcomed in Northern Alabama. Just thirty miles from Huntsville in Decatur, the Scottsboro boys were being tried in court. These were nine Black males charged with rape of two White women and being prosecuted in a case that became renowned for racial injustice. During this time, Bontemps had many friends visit and stay with him while they came to Alabama to protest this trial. The school administration was worried about his many out-of-state visitors.
The Oakwood Junior College administration demanded he burn many of his private books to demonstrate that he had given up radical politics. Bontemps refused to do so. Bontemps resigned from his teaching position and returned with his family to California in 1934. Yet, Bontemps continued to write and in 1936 authored the best known of his novels, the critically-acclaimed "Black Thunder". It was based on the actual event of a slave revolt in Virginia led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800.
It shares Prosser's attempted plan to conduct a slave army to raid an armory in Richmond, defend themselves against any assailants. A fellow slave betrayed Prosser, causing the rebellion to be shut down. Prosser was captured and lynched. In Bontemps' version, Whites were compelled to admit that slaves were humans who had possibilities of a promising life. Black Thunder received many extraordinary reviews by both Black and mainstream journals.
Shortly after the novel was published, Bontemps moved to Chicago and taught at the Shiloh Academy but did not stay long, leaving for a job with the WPA Illinois Writers' Project. The WPA had writers working on histories of states and major cities. In 1938, following the publication of children's book Sad-Faced Boy (1937), Bontemps was granted a Rosenwald fellowship to work on his novel, Drums at Dusk (1939). This was based on Toussaint L’Ouverture's slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (which became the independent republic of Haiti).
The book was more widely recognized than his other novels. Some critics viewed the plot as over dramatic, while others commended its characterizations. In 1943, Bontemps returned to school, earning a master's degree in library science from the University of Chicago. Following his graduation, Bontemps worked as the head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. For more than twenty years, Bontemps worked at Fisk University, spearheading the development of various collections and archives of African-American literature and culture. Through these archives, he was able to coordinate the anthology Great Slave Narratives.
Bontemps was initiated as a member of the Zeta Rho chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia fraternity at Fisk in 1954. He served at Fisk until 1964 and would continue to return occasionally. In addition to working as a librarian, Bontemps continued to write. The Broadway musical "St. Louis Woman," based on his first novel, premiered in 1946, and he collaborated with Langston Hughes to publish "The Poetry of the Negro" in 1949. In the decade of the 1950s Bontemps wrote biographies aimed at young people. He teamed up again with Hughes to co-edit "The Book of Negro Folklore" (1959). After retiring from Fisk University in 1966, Bontemps worked at the University of Illinois (Chicago Circle).
Arna Bontemps, then later moved to Yale University, where he served as curator of the James Weldon Johnson Collection. During this time, he was writing pieces targeted for teenagers, including biographies on George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. He compiled his poetry in Personals (1963) and also wrote an introduction for a previous novel, Black Thunder, when it was republished in 1968. He returned to Fisk University in 1971 as writer-in-residence. Bontemps’ final book was "The Harlem Renaissance Remembered", published in 1972.
Among his honors and awards were two Julius Rosenwald Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships; the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1956 for "The Story of the Negro" in 1948. He received honorary doctorates from Morgan State University and Berea College. Through his librarianship and bibliographic work, Bontemps became a leading figure in establishing African-American literature as a legitimate object of study and preservation. His work as a poet, novelist, children's writer, editor, librarian and historian helped shape modern African-American literature.
Bontemps was prolific and versatile, publishing over forty works including poetry, fiction, history, plays, and biography. His life was devoted to making a difference and giving back to his African American heritage. He once said of the Harlem Renaissance writers, “Once they find a (united) voice, they will bring a fresh and fierce sense of reality to their vision of human life…What American literature needs at this moment is color, music, gusto….” His devotion to children’s literature reflects his desire for young African Americans to appreciate their heritage and its influence in art and literature.