Arna Wendell Bontemps

Bontemps came to Fisk in 1943 after a library degree at Chicago, and he was the school's first Black head librarian. He built the Langston Hughes collection there and mentored younger librarians, among them Jessie Carney Smith, who succeeded him. His 1936 novel Black Thunder retold Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave conspiracy near Richmond. He wrote the children's book Popo and Fifina with Langston Hughes and edited anthologies with him. After Fisk he taught in Illinois and curated the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale. He died of a heart attack at his Nashville home in 1973.

What the plaque says

Arna Wendell Bontemps 1902-1973 At this site lived Arna W. Bontemps, one of the most prolific contributors to the Harlem or Negro Renaissance. From 1943 to 1965, Bontemps, an award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, historian, editor, and author of children's books, was head librarian of Fisk University. During his tenure, the Fisk University Library became a rich repository for the study of African-American culture and history.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.3 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Tennessee State Capitol — 1.2 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 1.3 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.5 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Fisk University — steps away
• Samuel Allen McElwee — steps away
• Ella Sheppard (Moore) — steps away
• Hulda Margaret Lyttle — steps away