South Side Writers Group.

About South Side Writers Group

The South Side Writers Group (SSWG) was a circle of African-American writers and poets formed in the 1930s in South Side, Chicago as part of the Chicago Black Renaissance. The SSWG benefitted from the Work Project Administration's artist relief efforts in the wake of the Great Depression. Debuting at a Chicago Writers Group conference in June of 1936, the SSWG included Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Fenton Johnson, Theodore Ward, Garfield Gordon, Frank Marshall Davis, Julius Weil, Dorothy Sutton, Marian Minus, Russell Marshall, Robert Davis, Marion Perkins, Arthur Bland, Fern Gayden, and Alberta Sims. Consisting of some twenty members, the group championed the New Realism movement and social realism. They met at the Abraham Lincoln Center on South Cottage Grove Avenue near the Bronzeville District.