Harlem Writers Guild

After funding for an organization active in the late 1940s called "The Committee for the Negro in the Arts" ended, these writers felt excluded from the mainstream literary culture of New York City.

[4] Other writers who have been associated with the HWG include Lonne Elder III, Douglas Turner Ward, Ossie Davis, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou and Sarah E.

The Harlem Writers Guild thus began expanding, with new authors writing and publishing work emphasizing topics such as racism, oppression, and welfare.

During the 1960s, the group supported Malcolm X, conflicts of independent rights in Angola and Mozambique and organized to dismantle racist policies established in South Africa.

[2] In 1986, John O. Killens estimated that members of the Harlem Writers Guild had produced more than 300 published works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, and screenplays.

The anthology Beloved Harlem: A Literary Tribute to Black America's Most Famous Neighborhood (Random House, 2005), edited by William H. Banks Jr., former executive director of HWG, featured work by HWG members including Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Grace F. Edwards, Rosa Guy, Rachel DeAragon, John Oliver Killens, Walter Dean Myers, Louise Meriwether, Funmi Osoba, Diane Richards, Karen Robinson, Dr. Olubansile Abbas Mimiko and Sarah E. Wright.

[12] Members of the Harlem Writers Guild and the Black nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, are credited for the demonstration of protest in front of the United Nations following the assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961.