“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,” or so said a reporter who had interviewed novelist Ann Petry for the Sunday Herald Tribune. Petry, author of the novel The Street, then moving up the best seller list, was a featured speaker at the Play Schools Association luncheon, also covered in the main news section of the paper that day. In her talk, she “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, lived in a small apartment on Bronx Park East in the former Allerton Coops, founded by Communists and known as the “coops,” pronounced as in chicken coops. 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 African Americans were almost always called then, at least in polite company. 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.
Petry was born in Old Saybrook, CT, to middle class parents and graduated with a degree in pharmacology from the University of Connecticut. She came to New York in 1938 seeking the experiences that 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 1941. In 1943 she joined the Harlem after school project, sponsored by the Board of Education, as a recreation specialist. The community program, aimed at parents and children in “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.
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. The protagonist was a young single mother with a clerical job looking to escape conditions on West 116th Street where she lived. 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.”