Aaron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance: Harlem Renaissance Connections to UNC-Chapel Hill

Some Harlem Renaissance artists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright had connections to UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina. During Jim Crow, Chapel Hill was just like every other Southern municipality where segregation was the law of the land and also a domineering cultural expectation. Although welcomed by many and invited into white spaces, their presence was also met with surprise, suspicion, and at times hostility.

Hurston at O'Kelly Stadium by Alexander M. Rivera, Jr. in the North Carolina Central University Faculty and Staff Photograph Records, 1910-2005, University Archives, Records and History Center in the James E. Shepard Memorial Library, North Carolina Central University.

Zora Neale Hurston was faculty and head of the Dramatic Arts Department at the North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham, NC from 1939-1940. She had a collaborative working relationship with Paul Green and Fred Koch of PlayMakers at UNC-Chapel Hill and participated in some of Green's seminars in Chapel Hill during that year. She lectured and performed on campus throughout the school year, as The Daily Tar Heel newspaper and other sources confirm.

For more information, see “Proving a Secret is Difficult”: Zora Neale Hurston at UNC.

Clipping from The Carolina Times of Durham, June 3, 1939

Clipping from The Daily Tar Heel October 8, 1939

photograph: Hughes and Buttitta on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, in Contempo Records, 1930-1934, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

Contempo was a short-lived literary magazine published out of Chapel Hill by one-time UNC-Chapel Hill students Anthony Buttitta and Milton "Ab" Abernethy. Buttitta and Abernethy devoted their December 1931 issue to the Scottsboro Boys trial, inviting Langston Hughes to contribute. Hughes submitted two pieces, "Christ in Alabama" (which appeared with a drawing called, “Black Christ," by artist Zell Ingram), and an essay called, "Southern Gentlemen, White Prostitutes, Mill-Owners, and Negroes."

Hughes was also invited by Buttitta and Abernethy to Chapel Hill for a public reading to accompany the issue release that December. He would give the reading at Gerard Hall despite protests directed at President Frank Porter Graham.

For more information, see "A Sacrilegious Poem and a Sensational Article: Langston Hughes published in Contempo."

Paul Green and Richard Wright, in the Portrait Collection #P0002, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In the Summer of 1940, author Richard Wright joined UNC-Chapel Hill Professor and playwright Paul Green in Chapel Hill to collaborate on adapting Native Son to the stage.

I been talking to Richard Wright and he would like you to dramatize this story of his. Of all the writers, he's picked you.

-- Paul Reynolds, Wright's agent, according to Paul Green in Interview with Paul Green by Rhoda Wynn, February 8, 1974 B-0005-4, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Wright finally got up here. He'd been in Mexico and when he came he said he'd had quite some difficulties getting across the border. They had him down as a Communist—actually he was a member of the Communist party, I learned later. I didn't know it at that time. And so we met and Bob House, the chancellor here, was very nice. He gave us an office in Bynum Hall to work. And we started. And Wright would come—I got Wright a place to stay where the school teachers out at the High School here, the Negro High School. My secretary, a girl named Ouida Campbell, she would come by every morning and pick him up and come to the office and then in the afternoon she'd take him home. We worked very hard and I had it dramatized in about four weeks and I got a lot of help out of Wright. I asked him once would he like to write a scene and so he went off and he wrote a scene, very beautifully written but pure novel, just novelistic. But he was such a help that when we sort of finished I suggested that, why don't we sign the script together. And he said, "Well, you've written it," and I said, "It's your book." And he said, "Well, that's fine." And so we signed it together. In the meantime, I don't know how it happened, but Orson Welles and John Houseman got interested in producing it.

-- Paul Green from Interview with Paul Green by Rhoda Wynn, February 8, 1974 B-0005-4, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Richard Wright came to Chapel Hill to work with Paul Green to dramatize Native Son. 'Paul (Green) got him a room in a nice Negro person's home.' And he came to the book shop (The Intimate Bookshop), because the students were very eager to talk to him. At night, 'he'd come over to our house.' 'Ab (Milton Abernethy, Minna's husband) even had the nerve to take him into the cafeteria on the corner, and they were so taken aback they just let him go right through the line and pick up his meal.' Ab didn't even have second thoughts about it. [After reading over this index, Ms. Abernethy added, 'It's hard to remember now how daring that was in the '30s and '40s.']

-- Minna Abernethy, from Interview with Minna Abernethy by Steve Estes, 19 December 1997 L-0108, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

UNC campus police officer John D. Blake reports who attended an off-campus party for Richard Wright, at the request of William D. Carmichael, Jr., comptroller for the consolidated University of North Carolina. From the Office of President of the University of North Carolina (System): Frank Porter Graham Records, 1932-1949

For more information see Paul Green Papers 1880-2009 and "Richard Wright's Collaboration with Paul Green." Paul Green was also interviewed a number of times for the Southern Oral History Program.