It was 31 years and two days after her famous husband died.

Gwendolyn Y. Elmore, director of the Arna Bontemps African-American-Museum, said Alberta Bontemps was supportive of the museum since its inception.

Elmore said Alberta Bontemps was always supportive of her husband's connection to Alexandria including when it came time to identify his childhood home on the National Register of Historic Places.

"She said no other place should take precedence over the home where he was born and where he lived in Alexandria," Elmore said.

According to Professor Charles L. James, who teaches American literature at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College, Alberta Bontemps was born in 1906 in DuPont, Ga.

James, who was a friend of the Bontemps family, is writing an obituary and plans to attend her funeral this weekend.

James said Alberta Bontemps attended school in Waycross, Ga., until the eighth grade. Because blacks weren't offered schooling after that grade and because she was a Seventh-Day Adventist, she had the opportunity to move to New York and attend Harlem Academy, which was a Seventh-Day Adventist school.

It was while attending school there that Alberta Bontemps met a young teacher named Arna Bontemps, James said.

Much later, James struck up a relationship with Arna Bontemps and his wife. This included spending time with their family in Nashville and while Arna Bontemps was teaching at Yale University.

"We struck up a pretty good friendship," James said. They adopted me as part of the family."

And regarding Alberta Bontemps, James said she was a spiritual person and "on the one hand shy but also bubbly and effusive."

She was never self-promoting. Kind of apprehensive about the public, she always became quite relaxed and comfortable when it came to public speaking," James said. "She had a manner that made her easy to hear. She was kind of self-effacing in some ways."

"She called herself a simple shake-n-bake grandma," James said. "Children loved her and she talked a lot about the Harlem Renaissance."

James said Alberta Bontemps also wrote some of her own reflective meditations that were "very richly thoughtful that reflected her temperament at that time."

When contacted, James said he was working on the obituary and planning for the trip to Nashville on Friday morning.

"I'm sort of numbed right now," James said.

Dr. L.M. Collins, professor emeritus of Fisk University in Nashville was a lifelong friend of Bontemps.

Arna Bontemps spent 22 years as the chief librarian at Fisk after he and his wife participated in a circle of creative thinkers who defined the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's in New York's Harlem neighborhood.

"Mrs. Bontemps is remembered for her quiet compassion, gentle nature and steady wisdom," Collins said. "A book lover, she not only was informed regarding authors, who was stimulated at a critics level by trends in plot and characters."

Dr. T.J. Anderson and his wife Lois Anderson live in Chapel Hill, N.C., but once lived in Nashville and knew the Bontemps family.

"Arna Bontemps was the chief librarian at Fisk and I was a librarian by profession and he hired me," Lois Anderson said. "That's how we first met."

Through her professional relationship with Arna Bontemps, Anderson and her husband, who was then a composer and teaching at Tennessee State University, got to know both Arna and Alberta Bontemps on a personal level.

"They welcomed us to Nashville. It was the '60s and there was a lot going on with the civil rights movement," Lois Anderson said. "She was very welcoming. They invited us to dinner and she was a very warm and gracious person. She was very active in the Nashville community. She was very well-known and a very popular person."

T.J. Anderson said that in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Fisk University in 1966, he and Arna Bontemps collaborated on a cantata called "Personals." Anderson composed the music and Arna Bontemps wrote the words.

Through that relationship he met Arna Bontemps' wife.

"We got to know her through her husband," T.J. Anderson said. "She wasn't a personal friend, but we were close."

T.J. Anderson said his encounters with Alberta Bontemps were always very positive.

"I think of her very pleasantly," T.J. Anderson said. "We (visited their home for) dinner on several occasions. She was very gracious and I remember her being a beautiful woman," T.J. Anderson said.

Both remember Alberta Bontemps as a good mother and that "she was a good listener like Arna."

The Andersons said they plan to come to Alexandria in October to hear "Talk to the Music: Arna Bontemps and the Spirit of Central Louisiana," which is being composed by Dr. William Banfield of Continental Harmony in honor of Bontemps and his legacy.

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF THE TOWN TALK
AUTHOR: ANDREW GRIFFIN, JUNE 11,2004

Mrs. Bontemps and their children.

In Memoriam: Mrs. Alberta Bontemps

Mrs. Bontemps was a most gracious lady who embraced Alexandria on her first visit in 1990. When she saw the birth home of her husband at the corner of Ninth and Winn Streets, she reminisced about the great impact that the home and Alexandria made on him and his writings.

My first contact with Mrs. Bontemps was in the early 1970’s when I taught African American Literature at Alexandria Senior High which included the works of Arna Bontemps. Our communication was renewed in 1988 with the founding of the Arna Bontemps Foundation Incorporated, which led to the establishing of the Bontemps birthplace home as the first African American museum in Louisiana. Her connection with and support of the Museum remained constant. She attended two literary symposiums and was present at the dedication of the Museum.

Many of the artifacts and memorabilia housed in the Museum as a part of the preservation exhibit, were donated by Mrs. Bontemps and her family. Including one of the Museum’s most prized possessions, Mr. Bontemps’ first typewriter. When the home was nominated for the National Register of Historic Places, it was her observation that “no other home should have precedence over his home in Alexandria, for his roots are here.” That statement did indeed make a difference.

We at the Arna Bontemps African American Museum will always have fond memories of Mrs. Bontemps. A woman with her own unique and distinguished legacy. We shall keep her spirit alive as with that of her husband’s.

Gwendolyn Y. Elmore
President & Executive  Director of the Arna Bontemps African American Museum