The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Although The Negro in Illinois reached completion, it did not reach publication in its day, and the final manuscript has not been discovered. According to correspondence, Jack Conroy finished the manuscript some time during the second half of 1942. In the version presented in this volume, I have attempted to adhere as closely as possible to what we today can only imagine was the final version. To assemble this work I have culled chapters from collections at three different libraries —the Illinois Writers’ Project/“The Negro in Illinois” Papers at the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library (hereinafter referred to as the IWP papers); the Jack Conroy Papers at Newberry Library; and the Arna Bontemps Papers at Syracuse University Library. The chapter order was based on a copy of the table of contents located in the IWP papers at the Harsh Research Collection. Titles of chapters were commonly written in Arna Bontemps’s handwriting on the upper left corner of the front page of source materials corresponding with the chapters in the outline. There is repetitious material in some chapters and incorrect information in others that may have been corrected in a final manuscript. The reader will notice the absence of an introduction or conclusion by the editors. I have preferred to preserve the surviving manuscripts rather than intervene in the narrative myself. I have provided headers for each chapter telling which library it came from and who was its author. In the headers I also explain the editorial process of selecting which draft is the most recent for each chapter. I did this by examining the editorial comments in the handwriting of Bontemps and Conroy, or by reading correspondence letters and internal memos. In some cases chapter drafts were dated; in others, dates in the narrative help to identify when the essay was written. The editors typically preferred short chapters to long ones. One example is the chapter on the black press. This is also the only case wherein I departed from the chapter outline. A forty-eight-page draft of chapter 22, “Newspapers ,” written in 1941, covered black newspapers throughout the state. I replaced it with a fourteen-page essay, “Defender,” dated May 1942 (just before Bontemps left the project), which focuses on the history of the Chicago Defender. Dolinar_Text.indd 45 3/14/13 9:59 AM xlvi Editor’s Note The Negro in Illinois, like other works of the Federal Writers’ Project, is unique inAmerican letters, as it was collectively written by a large staff of writers, some of them already well established and others who remain unknown. It was standard practice to acknowledge the supervisors of the state projects, but the names of the thousands of federal workers who contributed as writers and researchers were omitted. It is unfair to say that a work like The Negro in Illinois was written only by Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy. There were more than one hundred men and women who worked on the study. Some of the early chapter drafts have names on them. On others the name has been crossed out by the editor. Yet most of the final drafts have no name on them. From letters, internal memos, and early drafts, I attempted to best identify the author of each chapter. The reader will notice that chapters by Bontemps often end with a witty commentary. In reconstructing the manuscript, I have tried to alter it as little as possible. If handwritten corrections were not yet incorporated, I made the changes myself. It was the policy of the Federal Writers’ Project not to include footnotes to make their publications more accessible to the general public. I have eliminated all of the original footnotes, if they had not already been removed by Bontemps and Conroy—yet I have added some notes to convey the breadth of the project and show how many people worked on it. While drafts for the twenty-nine chapters were all found either at the Harsh Research Collection, Newberry Library, or Syracuse University Library, there are many important materials at the Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois, and at the Library of Congress and National Archives in Washington, D.C., where copies of documents were often sent. There was also useful information in the John T. Frederick Papers at the Iowa University Special Collections, Louis Wirth Papers at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, and Claude Barnett Papers at the...