ANN PETRY AND "THE STREET"

“Negroes are “lynched” every day in Harlem, not by masked men in frenzied mobs but by the slow, steady pressure of crowded, unsanitary living conditions,” wrote the reporter who had interviewed novelist Ann Petry for the Sunday Herald Tribune. Petry, author of the novel The Street, then moving up the bestseller list, was a featured speaker at the Play Schools Association luncheon, which was covered in the news section of the paper that day. In her talk, Petry “stressed the importance of civic support for play schools,” which was what after-school programs were called at this time.

The "tall, tawny-skinned writer,” who was 34 at this time, lived in a small apartment on Bronx Park East in the former Allerton Coops, which had been founded by Communists and was known as the “coops” as in chicken coops to its tenants and “Little Moscow” to the cops. The Tudor-style complex housed 700 families, mostly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, but according to the article also 50 African American families, or Negroes as they were called then. Because the ideologically rigid tenants refused to pay a modest rent increase to meet the mortgage payments, the complex went bankrupt and was sold to private landlords in 1943.

Petry was born in Old Saybrook, CT to a marginally middle class black family. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother worked in a factory, later becoming a businesswoman. Her aunts were domestics. The family struggled financially at times but they had escaped the poverty of the ghetto and Deep South as well as the more extreme forms of discrimination and prejudice found elsewhere. At her family’s insistence, Ann graduated with a degree in pharmacology from the University of Connecticut but harbored a dream to be a writer.

When Petry came to New York in 1938 with her husband, not mentioned in the interview, she sought out the experiences that she hoped could serve a writing career. She went to work on Adam Clayton Powell's newspaper The People's Voice, acted with the American Negro Theater, taught clerking at the YWCA trade school and organized Negro Women Inc., a non-political civic group. In 1943 she joined the Harlem after school project, sponsored by the Board of Education, as a recreation specialist. The community program, targeting residents of “problem areas,” operated for two years at three Harlem schools. The staff was racially mixed but the children were “nearly all Negro,” according to Petry. Petry was not sure why the Board ended the program which had been directed by Ernest F. Osborne of the Teachers College.

Petry saw herself as someone who had received the educational opportunities that allowed her to be the voice of the people she had met in her reportorial and social work endeavors in Harlem. After submitting the first five chapters and a synopsis of The Street, Petry was awarded the $2,400 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. “I wanted to show how individuals react to pressure and to constant fear,” Petry said of her novel in the interview.

The protagonist of The Street was a young single mother with a clerical job who was looking to escape the dismal conditions of West 116th Street. At a time when most African American female characters in novels and plays were either “loose women” or “types,” Petry strove to make her Lutie Johnson “a real woman striving to give her son a decent life.” She said “I tried to show through her why the Negro in the North has a high crime rate, a high death rate and no family unit.”