Harlem Writers Guild

By: Lisa Clayton Robinson

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Harlem Writers Guild

Influential African American writers' group based in Harlem, New York City.

Poet and essayist Maya Angelou, mystery writer Walter Mosley, and novelist Terry McMillan are only three of the dozens of writers who have been part of the Harlem Writers Guild over the last five decades. Its first members, Rosa Cuthbert Guy, John Oliver Killens, Walter Christmas, and John Henrik Clarke, began meeting in a Harlem, New York storefront in the late 1940s to critique one another's stories. At that time, the mainstream American literary world had just started to take notice of black authors. Richard Wright's novel Native Son had been a best seller a few years earlier, and many young African American writers who wanted to follow his lead created their own forums to discuss their work. The Harlem Writers Guild became one of these forums, and the membership soon outgrew the first storefront.

The Guild's members also shared a commitment to social change, and many of them were interested in incorporating political ideas into their art. The first novel published by a Guild member, Killens's Youngblood (1954), depicted four characters fighting for dignity in the segregated American South. Other novelists, including Paule Marshall wrote about the black experience in the West Indies and other parts of the African diaspora. Guild writers also identified with other political organizations and causes that were not focused only on race—for example, Christmas and Clarke both wrote for Communist periodicals, and other members were union organizers and Progressive Party supporters.

The Guild's focus on the connection between political action and art was an example of the philosophy that became the basis for the Black Arts Movement. The Black Arts Movement, which is usually identified with the 1960s, emphasized the importance of social engagement for African American literature. These were the same kinds of ideas that the Harlem Writers Guild had already been exploring for over a decade, and the Guild soon became identified with the larger movement.

In 1965, the Guild and the New School for Social Research in New York City cosponsored a conference on the “The Negro Writer's Vision of America” that more than a thousand people attended. The conference's widely publicized highlight was a debate between Guild founders Killens and Clarke and white scholars Herbert Aptheker and Walter Lowenfels on what role, if any, artists should play in the fight against racism. This was the exact question that Guild members and writers like them were trying to answer in their own careers, and they believed that artists did have a responsibility to include social issues in their work. Members during the 1960s included Maya Angelou, whose first published book, the autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, became a best seller in 1970; novelist Chester Himes, known for his detective fiction set in Harlem; and Walter Dean Myers, an award-winning writer for children and young adults.

The Black Arts Movement declined in the 1970s, but the Guild continued as a forum for yet another generation of writers. Since 1988, Guild workshops have met at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. In 1991, Guild director William H. Banks Jr. began hosting “In Our Own Words,” a weekly show featuring Guild members, for New York television station WNYE. The show was carried in six viewing areas in the United States and Canada, and this gave the Guild's latest writers a new forum. Former members Terry McMillan and Walter Moseley both became best-selling authors in the 1980s and 1990s, and in 1993 Maya Angelou was asked to compose and read a poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” for the inauguration of U.S. President Bill Clinton.

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