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William Alexander Attaway was born November 19, 1911, in Greenville, Mississippi, and died June 17, 1986, in Los Angeles, California. He was one of the first African Americans to write about the Great Migration and the impact of the new economic environment and industrialization on rural life and the spirit of minorities and the poor in America. His novels are peopled with the marginalized, not only African Americans but also Mexican Americans and migrant whites. Attaway’s novels about these groups include Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939) and Blood on the Forge (1941). His treatment of the disenfranchised and the racial climate in which they lived has been likened in some ways to the works of Richard Wright, with whom he became acquainted when they worked together on the Federal Writers Project during the Great Depression. Like many other African American writers, he found that polemical writings about the disenfranchised were not well received; following the publication of the novels and one short story, he therefore turned his attention to other genres. His second novel, Blood on the Forge, is his best known and most discussed work; it explores the causes and results of migration. It follows three African American half-brothers who flee a lynch mob in 1919 in Kentucky for the safety and security of the North, the Promised Land, only to find there are numerous forms of lynching and that the North has its own pitfalls. The brothers become trapped by the steel mills and racial tensions of Pennsylvania. Attaway participated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March and continued his involvement in the fight for civil rights in his writing, emphasizing the black experience in works for television, radio, and motion pictures.

Baldwin was ever mindful of the need for the unity of humankind.

Helen R. Houston