Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T15:01:24.058Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Black Writers and White!”: Jack Conroy, Arna Bontemps, and Interracial Collaboration in the 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Douglas Wixson
Get access

Extract

The task of cultural recovery, George Hutchinson writes, begins with “those moments when places where the intertwined discourses of race, culture, and nation were exposed to questioning, to skepticism, to transformation, however small and localized, and when possibilities for coalitions of cultural reformers were envisioned and exploited” (Harlem, 26). The historical record has been muddied by shifting political currents and fragmented by instances of deliberate neglect over time, yet scholars have recently begun to reconstruct the complicated story of interracial cooperation between the two world wars. More effort, however, should be devoted to discovering connections and parallels between the worlds of work and art — of labor and literature — as part of this story. One reward of such effort, I suggest, will be to reveal the hitherto hidden “lines of continuity and disruption” that James A. Miller sees connecting “the African-American literary production of the 1920s and its production in the 1930s” (87–88). That those lines often intersected lines traced by nonblack literary production and working-class history reinforces Hutchinson's point that it is necessary to rethink “American cultural history from a position of interracial marginality, a position that sees ‘white’ and ‘black’ American cultures as intimately, mutually constitutive” (Harlem, 3).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 23 , October 1998 , pp. 401 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Anzudula, Gloria. “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island.” Bridges of Power: Women's Multicultural Alliances. Ed. Albrecht, Lisa and Brewer, Rose M.. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990: 216–31.Google Scholar
Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. 3 vols. New York: Citadel, 1969–1973.Google Scholar
Baker, Houston A. Jr., ed. The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. 2. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Beck, Warren. Review of The Disinherited, by Jack Conroy. Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books 05 12, 1963: 24.Google Scholar
Faith, Berry, ed. Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1973.Google Scholar
Bergman, Peter M., and Bergman, Mort N.. The Chronological History of the Negro in America. New York: Mentor, 1969.Google Scholar
Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder. Boston: Beacon, 1936: 1968.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna, and Conroy, Jack. “An American Original” Tomorrow 4 (06 1945): 26–30.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna, and Conroy, Jack. Anyplace But Here. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna, and Conroy, Jack. “Exodus Train.” Common Ground 5 (Spring 1945): 61–70.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna, and Conroy, Jack. The Fast Sooner Hound. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1942.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna, and Conroy, Jack. Sam Patch, the High, Wide and Handsome Jumper. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1951.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna, and Conroy, Jack. Slappy Hopper, the Wonderful Sign Painter. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1946.Google Scholar
Bontemps, Arna, and Conroy, Jack. They Seek a City. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1945.Google Scholar
Canfield, Dorothy. Review of They Seek a City. Book of the Month Club News 10 1945, n.p.Google Scholar
Milton, Cantor, ed. Black Labor in America. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Cayton, Horace R. “The Great Migration to Friendlier Clime.” Chicago Sun Book Week, 07 13, 1945.Google Scholar
Cayton, Horace R.Long Old Road. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Chaplin, Ralph. Wobbly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948.Google Scholar
Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conroy, Jack. The Disinherited. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Conroy, Jack. The Conroy Reader. Ed. Salzman, Jack and Ray, David. New York: Burt Franklin, 1979.Google Scholar
Conroy, Jack. “Memories of Arna Bontemps, Friend and Collaborator.” American Libraries 5 (12 1974): 602–6.Google Scholar
Conroy, Jack. “Slave Narratives.” Review of Black Men in Chains: Narratives by Escaped Slaves. Ed. Charles H. Nichols. New Letters 39 (Spring 1973): 77–80.Google Scholar
Conroy, Jack. The Weed King and Others Stories. Introduction, Douglas Wixson. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1985.Google Scholar
Conroy, Jack. A World to Win. New York: Covici-Friede, 1935.Google Scholar
Conroy, Jack, and Curt, Johnson, eds. Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology, 1933–1940. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1973.Google Scholar
Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: William Morrow, 1967.Google Scholar
Denby, Charles. Indignant Heart. London: Pluto, 1979.Google Scholar
Dickinson, Donald C.A Bio-bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902–1967. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1967.Google Scholar
Drake, St. Clair, and Cayton, Horace R.. Black Metropolis. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945.Google Scholar
Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1959.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Negro and Communism.” Crisis 09 1931.Google Scholar
Egerton, John. Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.Google Scholar
Foner, Eric. “The Great Divide,” Nation 261 (09 1995): 487–8.Google Scholar
Foner, Philip S. “The I.W.W. and the Black Worker.” Journal of Negro History 55 (01 1970): 45–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foner, Philip S.Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981. New York: International, 1981.Google Scholar
Foner, Philip S., and Herbert, Shapiro, eds. American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1930–1934. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Fried, Lewis. “Conversation with Jack Conroy.” New Letters 39 (10 1972): 29–40.Google Scholar
Gordon, David, Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael. Segmented Work, Divided Workers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Peter. Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Halpern, Rick. Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904–54. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Harris, Violet J. “From Little Black Sambo to Popo and Fifina: Arna Bontemps and the Creation of African-American Children's Literature.” Lion and the Unicorn 14 (1990): 108–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hart, Henry, ed. American Writers' Congress. New York: International, 1935.Google Scholar
Horowitz, Roger. “Negro and White, Unite and Fight”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the American Tradition.” Nation 06 13, 1926: 692–94.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, Earl Ofari. Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict. East Lansing: Michigan State Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Julius, ed. The Negro and the American Labor Movement. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G.Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Klinkowitz, Jerry et al. , eds. “The Willard Motley Papers at the University of Wisconsin.” Resources for American Literary Study 2 (Autumn 1972): 218–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Letwin, Daniel. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Levine, Lawrence W.Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Locke, Alain. Review of “Flight to Freedom.” New Masses 07 3, 1945.Google Scholar
Mangione, Jerre. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935–1943. New York: Avon, 1972.Google Scholar
“Manifesto.” Rebel Poet 1 (01 1931): 1.Google Scholar
Maxwell, William J. “The Proletarian as New Negro: Mike Gold's Harlem Renaissance.” Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture. Ed. Mullen, Bill and Linkon, Sherry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996: 91–119.Google Scholar
Meier, August, and Rudwick, Elliott. Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Miller, James A. “African-American Writing of the 1930s: A Prologue.” Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture. Ed. Mullen, Bill and Linkon, Sherry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996: 78–90.Google Scholar
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Nichols, Charles H., ed. Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes: Letters, 1925–1967. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1979.Google Scholar
Olsen, James S. “Race, Class, and Progress: Black Leadership and Industrial Unionism, 1936–1945.” Black Labor in America. Ed. Cantor, Milton. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970: 153–64.Google Scholar
Penkower, Monty Noam. The Federal Writers' Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Record, Wilson. “Negro Intellectuals and Negro Movements in Historical Perspective.” American Quarterly 8 (Spring 1951): 3–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodgers, Lawrence B.Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Roediger, David. Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History. New York: Verso, 1994.Google Scholar
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar
Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Thomas, Richard W.Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building a Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Wald, Alan. “Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War.” Prospects 20 (1995): 479–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wixson, Douglas C.Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898–1990. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Wolters, Raymond. “Closed Shop and White Shop: The Negro Response to Collective Bargaining, 1933–1935.” Black Labor in America. Ed. Cantor, Milton. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970: 137–52.Google Scholar
Wolters, Raymond. Negroes and the Great Depression. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. Twelve Million Voices. New York: Viking, 1941.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom's Children. New York: Harper and Row, 1938.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard. White Man Listen! Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1964.Google Scholar
Young, James O.Black Writers in the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.Google Scholar