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alden Bland (1911–1992) Joyce hope scott In the early 1930s, as the famed Harlem Renaissance of black cultural achievement was winding down, a new surge of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship began to flower in the South Side Chicago district. This new “Chicago Renaissance” was fueled by two unprecedented social and economic conditions: the “Great Migration,” mass movement of Southern blacks to Chicago in search of economic opportunity and perceived safety from lynch mob rule, and the crisis of the Great Depression that followed. They were fleeing the pervasive white violence and racism of the South, which kept African Americans endangered, impoverished, and dispossessed. Over the preceding two decades, Chicago’s black population had soared; from 44,000 in 1910, the community grew to more than 230,000 by 1930. For the most part, the new migrants were confined to a rigidly segregated zone. Richard Wright called its miserable, overcrowded housing “the world of the kitchenettes.” The migrants went to work in meatpacking plants and steel mills, garment shops and private homes. After 1929, however, many people lost their jobs as the Great Depression hit the African American community hard. Out of this crisis emerged new ideas and institutions, new political activism, and a revitalized community spirit. By the early 1930s, the South Side black community began to call itself by a new name, “Bronzeville.” Alden Bland was one of the thousands of migrants who came to Chicago from the South. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1911. Alden, his brother Edward, and his mother migrated north at the end of WW I when his father, Edward Bland Sr. brought the family to Chicago in order to evade the draft. According to Alden’s nephew, Edward Bland III (son of Edward Bland Jr. who reports having known his uncle Alden better than he knew his own father), Alden, and Edward’s mother, Philomene Murray Bland, came from a New Orleans family that passed for white. Philomene, being too dark to pass, was given to Edward Bland Sr. in a marriage arranged between her family and the Bland family. Philomene’s family origins were rarely mentioned in the Bland 70 • Joyce hoPe scott households, but Edward Bland III remembers his grandmother as being an extremely intelligent and resourceful woman (Interview with Edward Bland III of Smithfield, Virginia, June 20, 2005). Alden Bland attended the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago but did not graduate from either. After the Depression, he got a job as a postal inspector, his only job but one that he hated because “it stole time from [his] writing.” However, he was well respected in his position and even honored at the White House, along with other postal inspectors, during the Johnson administration (Edward Bland III). The whole Bland family was “quite dysfunctional,” according to Edward Bland III. Alden wrote to his editor in December of 1946 that he was “married with one son, Alden Jr.” However, he gained a reputation as quite a womanizer and was married seven times during his lifetime. There was talk as well of his having fathered an illegitimate child. His last marriage was to Dr. Alma Jones Bland, now a retired teacher and school principal living in Chicago. His son, Alden Jr. also lives in Chicago, but remains aloof from the family (Edward Bland III). Alden and his brother, Edward Bland, were members of the South Side Writers Group “organized by Richard Wright in 1936,” of which Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, and Margaret Walker, among others, were members. In his biographical work on her, George Kent points out that Gwendolyn Brooks knew both Alden Bland and his brother Edward , a poet and critic: “Alden and Edward . . . patiently helped teach Henry [her husband] and me to think.” Edward Bland III remembers visits to his home from South Side artists such as Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright, and that Gwendolyn Brooks was a very good friend to his uncle Alden and his father, to whom Brooks dedicated the poem in the Introduction to Annie Allen. Behold A Cry (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947) was Bland’s first and only published work. It was written, as Bland says, “in streetcars, on elevated trains, in wash rooms and public libraries” during the Depression while Bland worked as a porter, street-sweeper, dishwasher, salesman, and accountant. Bland took the title for the book from the Bible, Isaiah: “and he looked for judgment, but...

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