Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance

tion, Bontemps headed east to NEWYORKCITYat
Thurman’s urging.
Bontemps supported himself in Harlem as a
teacher at the HARLEMACADEMY, a Seventh-Day
Adventist school. In 1926 he married Alberta
Johnson, an orphaned Georgia native who had

been raised by her grandmother and who had

begun her schooling in a Seventh-Day Adventist

school in nearby Waycross, Georgia. Bontemps

met his future wife when she enrolled in the ninth

grade as an older student at the Harlem Academy.

The couple, who were devoted to each other and

Bontemps, Arnaud (Arna) Wendell 55

Langston Hughes (right) and Arna Bontemps; photographed by Griffith Davis(Reproduced by permission of the
estate of Griffith Davis)