Harlem Writers Guild

Harlem Writers Guild, group of African American writers established in New York City in 1950 as the Harlem Writers Club by ambitious young Black authors who felt excluded from the mainstream literary culture and who sought to express ethnic experiences and history in their work.

Unlike their predecessors, the generation of African American writers who came of age in the 1950s were able to interact freely with their white peers. Some of them had attended prestigious universities; others joined white-led writing workshops in New York’s Greenwich Village. Such experiences, however, led many Blacks to conclude that white critics, however progressive, could not fully appreciate African American literature. Likewise, the success that established Black authors such as Langston Hughes had enjoyed during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s seemed unobtainable to a new generation of writers.

John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, and John Oliver Killens were among the emerging talents who sought an alternative forum in which to develop their craft. Killens took writing classes at both Columbia and New York universities in the late 1940s. At Columbia he studied grammar and composition and gravitated toward courses taught by politically and socially conscious professors. In 1950 he invited other African American authors to meet in a Harlem storefront office on the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue to critique each other’s work. Of the first participants, only Clarke had published a book, The Boy Who Painted Christ Black (1948). The group, known as the Harlem Writers Club, continued to meet under Killens’s leadership in the homes of early members, including Aaron Douglas, Julian Mayfield, and Paule Marshall. In 1952 the group changed its name to the Harlem Writers Guild to emphasize the craft of writing.

During the group’s early years, Killens published Youngblood (1954), a novel chronicling the Youngblood family’s struggle with racism and oppression in Georgia. It was the first novel to be published by a Harlem Writers Guild member. Another early landmark publication to emerge from a member was Guy’s novel Bird at My Window (1966), a cultural critique of growing up and surviving in 1950s Harlem while facing poverty and racism. Lonne Elder III, a playwright and screenwriter who had joined the guild soon after its founding, wrote his account of a family making their way in 1950s Harlem in the play Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, which was produced by the newly formed Negro Ensemble Company in 1969 and later adapted for television (1975). His screenplay (1972) adapted from William H. Armstrong’s novel Sounder (1969) was nominated for an Academy Award, making Elder the first African American to be nominated in that category. Sidney Poitier, Amiri Baraka, Ossie Davis, and Harry Belafonte also joined the guild in the 1950s. Members contributed to various African American journals, such as The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP), and Freedomways, the central publication of the American civil rights movement.

By the late 1950s and into the ’60s many guild members wanted to use their talents to effect social change. They used their meetings to discuss topics that transcended the literary. Several members at the time were also union organizers or members of the Progressive and Communist parties, but issues of race continued to unite many of the participants. They endured discrimination in their literary endeavours as well as in their daily lives. Some of the members—who increasingly resided not in Harlem but in Greenwich Village, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and elsewhere—often faced hostile landlords and neighbours. Guild meetings thus served as supportive enclaves in the new neighbourhoods. At meetings, members exchanged information about Freedom Rides, sit-ins, and marches. The visit of Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro to New York in 1960 became a cause célèbre. In later years guild members united behind controversial Black Muslim leader Malcolm X while also organizing to oppose the racist policy of apartheid in South Africa and supporting independence struggles in Angola and Mozambique.

In 1961 a group of authors inspired by the Harlem Writers Guild founded the Umbra Workshop to advance African American literary independence in the arts. The Umbra Workshop was based on the Lower East Side, signifying a break with the literary traditions of Harlem. Umbra participants moved toward a more-radical Black separatist view of American politics and culture. Some members of the Harlem Writers Guild—among them Baraka and Davis—also endorsed the idea of literature as a revolutionary tool.

By the late 1960s a number of guild members had found success within the mainstream. During those years the guild sponsored conferences and book-release parties that drew up to a thousand attendees. Killens and Clarke, who remained active members, organized debates in collaboration with the faculty at the New School for Social Research (now the New School) in New York City. They also worked to introduce Black studies programs to university curricula.

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Membership in the Harlem Writers Guild continued to expand in the 1970s and through the next three decades. In 1983 founder Killens estimated that guild members had published more than 400 literary works. Louise Meriwether, Terry McMillan, and Maya Angelou were among the growing number of guild members who enjoyed critical acclaim for their work.

In the 1990s the guild sponsored a weekly television program, In Our Own Words, that was hosted by guild director William H. Banks, Jr., and featured guild writers. It also organized writers’ workshops in the New York public libraries and public schools. The guild established the Harlem Writers Guild Press imprint in 2000, and in 2005 Banks published the anthology Beloved Harlem, which included writing by guild members. Upholding its mission to help members use the written word to preserve the unique experiences and heritage of African Americans, the Harlem Writers Guild continued to provide support and publicity for emerging Black authors in the 21st century.