The Story Scarcely Mentioned: Race, Education, and Arna Bontemps, 1931-1948

“The Story Scarcely Mentioned” takes as its objects of study both the representation of education in the black literary tradition and the effects of schooling on the construction of literate traditions of black history and culture. By examining how schools shaped black writers' articulations of race in the first half of the twentieth century, I explore the involvement of educational institutions and practices in the perpetuation of American racial ideology. Black writers contributed to an emerging discourse that emphasized the school's role in the construction of racial identity and prefigured an intellectual engagement with contemporary multiculturalism and identity politics. My primary mode of analysis is what I am calling critical life study. Based on extensive archival research, my dissertation focuses on the African American poet, novelist, children's author, and librarian-archivist Arna Bontemps (1902–1973), whose career produced a wealth of material for scholars interested in race and schooling in early twentieth-century America. To foreground the educational themes of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, I offer readings of texts by Bontemps and others, including Bontemps's own Black Thunder, Langston Hughes's The Big Sea, Claude McKay's Banana Bottom, and Jessie Fauset's There Is Confusion. Bontemps's writings suggest his own theories of race and schooling and also elucidate the effects of education on class stratification within the black community. While distancing black intellectuals from the everyday existence of the folk, the process of schooling fueled educated blacks' almost paradoxical desires to honor their less-educated counterparts by studying black folk culture. The impulse to write about black history and culture, born out of Bontemps's own scholastic experiences, intersected with the demands of a reading public with a growing taste for African American subject matter—a taste itself related to the expansion of the educational system. Schooling influenced the cultural productions of black intellectuals, and the intellectuals and their cultural productions in their turn influenced the school by expressing and reinforcing the identity politics of formal education.