the historically black college established by the
Adventist Church in Huntsville, Alabama, where
he had a heavy teaching load. Bontemps’s experi-
ence was further compounded by life in northern
Alabama, which had been affected by the Scotts-
boro trials. The case of the “Scottsboro boys” of-
fers a clear example of the injustices southern
blacks experienced under what RICHARD WRIGHT
called the “ethics of living Jim Crow.” When nine
innocent African-American youths, hitchhikers
(hobos) on an open freight train traveling through
Alabama, were arrested, accused, tried, and found
guilty of allegedly raping two white girls, also il-
legal passengers onboard the same freight train,
the black community, led by the NATIONAL ASSO-
CIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE
(NAACP), vociferously came to their defense. The
young men’s convictions, which were in most cases
eventually overturned, were appealed all the way
to the Supreme Court. Recognized as important
spokespersons, African-American writers such
as Bontemps and particularly LANGSTON HUGHES
were often in the vanguard of protestors and chal-
lengers of the blatant injustices blacks suffered in a
world deemed “separate but equal.”
Nevertheless, Bontemps continued writing to
Langston Hughes and borrowing library books by
mail; this correspondence, along with his friend-
ship with Hughes and others who were consid-
ered revolutionaries, aroused the suspicion of
both blacks and whites. Considering Bontemps’s
reading material “race-conscious and provoca-
tive trash,” Oakwood’s president demanded that
he publicly burn his small library. At the end of
the following term, Bontemps returned to Califor-
nia, where he completed Black Thunder, which he
wrote while living in deplorable conditions.
Bontemps later moved to Chicago’s South Side
and began working at Shiloh Academy, another
Seventh-Day Adventist school from which he was
forced to resign for reasons similar to the ones that
lost him his job at Oakwood College. Bontemps
then began working for the Works Project Admin-
istration (WPA). In Chicago, Bontemps was well
received. The Chicago Chapter of the National
Negro Congress featured a symposium on Black
Thunder and hosted a reception for him at Lincoln
Center. While there, he and COUNTEE CULLEN col-
laborated on the drama St. Louis Woman; in 1937
he published Sad Faced Boy, a children’s novel.
An award to the Graduate Library School of
the University of Chicago and a Julius Rosen-
wald Fund Fellowship for creative writing turned
Bontemps’s life around. He traveled to the Carib-
bean and later produced Drums at Dusk (1939), a
historical romance about the Haitian revolution.
Although he briefly returned to Harlem to live in
1942, Bontemps moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to
become librarian at Fisk University. Six months
later, he received his M.S. degree from Chicago’s
Library School. Bontemps remained at Fisk from
1943 to 1966, publishing a novel, Chariot in the
Sky: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1951).
Fisk provided emotional solace and an environ-
ment where his craving for cultural identity and
roots could be satisfied. His correspondence with
CARL VAN VECHTEN resulted in Fisk’s acquiring the
George Gershwin Collection, which became the
first significant acquisition to the famous “Negro
Collection” Bontemps built during his tenure as
chief librarian.
At age 64, Bontemps took a sabbatical from Fisk
and went to the University of Illinois’s Chicago
Circle campus, which offered him a tenure-track
position as an associate professor in American lit-
erature at a salary three times his highest pay at
Fisk. In 1969 he went to the University of Wiscon-
sin at Madison and later was named curator of the
James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale Univer-
sity. While at Yale he taught courses in African-
American literature, including one on the Harlem
Renaissance; he also published the anthology The
Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972), as well
as a collection of short stories, A Summer Tragedy
and Other Stories (1973).
In 1971 he was asked to serve as “Writer in Resi-
dence” at Fisk University. In 1972 he was invited
to speak by the library section of the Louisiana
Education Association in Alexandria, his birth-
place. He accepted, since he had plans for an auto-
biography, “A Man’s Name,” which he had already
outlined, and he wanted to do research there and
in surrounding towns. On May 27, 1973, Berea
College bestowed upon him his second honorary66 Bontemps, Arna Wendell