Arna Bontemps Home

This turn-of-the-20th-century wood frame house serves as a memorial to the incredible life and work of Arnaud “Arna” Wendell Bontemps, one of the nation’s most prolific African American writers.

Although his family left Alexandria while he was still a boy, much of Bontemps’ writing dealt with Black life in Louisiana and the South, and as a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, librarian and historian, he continually opposed the injustices of segregation. A leading member of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s, he later went on to serve as the head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, one of the nation’s premier all-Black colleges.

While the Arna Bontemps Museum is now closed, visitors can see the exterior of the author's restored home and observe the marker detailing the artist's life.