Arna Bontemps African American Museum

The house on Third Street operates now as a museum honoring Arna Wendell Bontemps, who was born in Alexandria on October 13, 1902, into a Louisiana Creole family whose ancestors included free people of color and French colonists. When he was three, his family joined the Great Migration out of the South, settling in what became the Watts district of Los Angeles. They had faced racial threats in Louisiana. Bontemps would spend most of his life elsewhere — California, New York, Alabama, Nashville — but Alexandria remained the opening fact of his story, the place he was from before his family had to leave. By age twenty-four he had traveled to New York and become a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, teaching at the Harlem Academy while writing poetry that won him the Alexander Pushkin Prize in both 1926 and 1927. He met and befriended Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. Du Bois. His first novel, *God Sends Sunday*, arrived in 1931; his best-known work, *Black Thunder*, a novel about Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave rebellion near Richmond, came in 1936 to extraordinary reviews. He wrote children's books, collaborated with Hughes on folklore anthologies, worked for the Illinois Writers' Project during the Depression, and in 1943 earned a master's degree in library science from the University of Chicago. In 1943 he was appointed head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, becoming the first Black head librarian and first Black professional librarian the institution ever had. He stayed until 1964, building what became the Langston Hughes Renaissance Collection and preserving African American literary history as a legitimate object of study. His work as librarian, editor, novelist, poet, and historian shaped modern African American literature and culture. He died in Nashville in 1973, at seventy-one, while working on a collection of short fiction. The museum in Alexandria is housed in the restored family home. It's a return of sorts — Bontemps back in the city his family had to leave, his work preserved in the place where it all began.