Arna Bontemps African American Museum

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Arna Bontemps - a noted Black poet, author, anthologist, librarian - was born in Alexandria, Louisiana on October 13, 1902. He was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. Arna, son of Paul Bismark and Marie Pembrooke Bontemps, lived in a typical turn-of-the-century, middle class, wood-frame house at the corner of Ninth and Winn Streets. As a youth he moved with his family to California as a part of the great migration of that period.

Bontemps is credited with writing over 20 books, plays, and anthologies and was considered the leading authority on the Harlem Renaissance. He was part of a core of young Black writers who led the "New Negro" movement. Bontemps wanted a front row seat to view and participate in the stirrings of jazz, theater and literature taking place in Harlem. His scholarly interest in fostering a new appraisal of his race and reevaluation of the Black man's place in American history is just a part of his legacy. His children's books are unique and his poetry and writings convey the rhythms and richness of the African American culture which was to influence a number of writers who followed him. (Edwin Blair. "Literary Habitats." Preservation in Print. September 1996.)

Bontemps' writings were greatly influenced by his memories of Alexandria, his cultural and social roots. As an adult, he returned to the South because of certain changes he observed as "Jim Crow" laws were being eradicated. Bontemps would later write in his novel, Black Thunder, "Time is not a river. Time is a pendulum...intricate patterns of recurrence in...experience and in...history".