[Peace] Brian Dolinar's book talk this Saturday, Feb 15 at 2pm / The finished WPA papers: The Negro in Illinois

[Karen Medina]

*After sifting through thousands of documents, Brian Dolinar finished a
book started over 70 years ago. The work he helped to complete? "The Negro
in Illinois: The WPA Papers."*

Brian Dolinar will give a book talk at the Urbana Free Library on Saturday,
February 15 at 2 p.m.

The question: What was life like for black Americans in Illinois during the
1930s?

Before World War II, President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration
funded a special division of the Illinois Writer’s Project that employed
black writers living in Illinois. The special program, which was led by
Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps and white writer Jack Conroy,
encouraged major black voices who lived in Chicago in the 1930s to write
about everything from aspects of domestic life to politics, literature and
religion. Novelists Richard Wright and Frank Yerby, and dancer and
choreographer Katherine Dunham were among those who wrote or did research
for a projected volume on African-American history in Illinois.

When funding for the project was diverted to the war, the papers written by
those voices were put into a box and set aside – until Brian Dolinar
uncovered them and complied them into a new book “The Negro in Illinois:
The WPA Papers.” This hour on Focus, Jim Meadows talks with Brian Dolinar
about discovering those lost writings after all these years.

See Brian Dolinar's webpage: http://briandolinar.com/
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