Arna Wendell Bontemps Home

Arna Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier and left Alexandria around age three, when his Creole family joined the Great Migration to Watts. His Louisiana years were short, but he spent his working life tending other writers' books. At Fisk University in Nashville he became the first Black professional librarian there and built collections of African American literature, among them the Langston Hughes Renaissance Collection. He encouraged his assistant Jessie Carney Smith to enter the profession, and she replaced him as head librarian in 1965. At Yale he later curated the James Weldon Johnson Collection.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — steps away
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 1.1 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.
• Kent Plantation House — 2.4 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 4.8 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.

More markers nearby

• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback — steps away
• Alexandria — steps away
• Thomas Courtland Manning — steps away
• Red River — 0.2 mi