When Jack Conroy and I first began to compare notes on Negro Migrations within the United States, our desks were about twenty feet apart. We were both employed as editorial supervisors on the Illinois Writers Project of the WPA. Not far away, at a similar desk, was a serious young supervisor who never wasted much time but whom I thought I saw making eyes at a slender young typist in the secretarial pool. He was Nelson Algren. Across the big room, in an area assigned to the radio unit, one occassionally saw the energetic and personable young figures of Studs Terkel and Lou Gilbert, both clearly marked for bigger future roles in television and movies, respectively.
Katherine Dunham, Richard Wright, Frank Yerby, Stuart Engstrand, and George V. Martin had worked at these same desks just weeks or months earlier, and some of them returned occasionally to see how things were going. Meanwhile, their successors continued to fill the files with gleanings from old Illinois newspapers and other library sources. After Conroy and I got steamed up about Negro migrations, we began to pay even closer attention. We discoverd, for example, that Katherine Dunham, who had been working for a doctoral degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, had directed her writers to collect information about the groups that later became widely known as Black Muslims. We came across an inspired days work by a writer who had done nothing but list the names of storefront churches on one street in the southside ghetto. And what names they were!
The project ended suddenly, but not before it and others like it had made publishing history with the excellent series of state guides and other books and pamphlets of regional or local interest, often of substantial value to later researchers. Peripheral benefits, sometimes too intangible to be measured by linage or pagination, were often noted, and the opportunity for development afforded the likes of Wright and Yerby and Algren was matched by the rivitalization of old timers like the poet Fenton Johnson who had been hit even harder by the depression. While Johnson's WPA Poems did not get published as a collection, they obviously did him a lot of good.
When the Project came to an end, a publisher who had heard about our interest in the migration story encouraged us to develop it. We went to work, and They Seek a City was published in 1945. One thing about the impulse we had tried to trace was apparent at first. Another became apparent later. We soon realized that we were dealing with currents that were still running vigorously and that we could not tell when or where they would crest. To that extent our book was premature. But the disasters ahead in Watts and Chicago and Harlem which were later to focus intense light on this fantastic population shift, with all its dislocations, could not have been foreseen. Nor could they have been understood prior to the events of the fifties and sixties, disclosing the depth and intensity of the Negro American's drive toward freedom. Needless to say, twenty years of change and unforeseen developments have made it necessary to recast most of the original chapters of the book and to add a number of new ones.
ARNA BONTEMPS
NEXT
CONTENTS