Refusing to Forget: Remembering Ann Petry and Lutie Johnson’s Arrivals, Receptions, and Departures

Abstract

This thesis simultaneously tracks the lives of Ann Petry and her protagonist Lutie Johnson from Petry’s 1946 bestseller The Street. Through incorporating the themes of migration, class, gaze, value, anger, and riots, I create a parallel analysis of their frequently ignored paths to and from Harlem in the 1940s. While interrogating how Petry and Lutie were inaccurately remembered and currently are often forgotten, I argue that we must immediately transport these two Black women into our public memory in a positive and errorless fashion.