Yet, while these eloquent spokespersons are able to affect those who read their carefully crafted words, it is usually up to the artists to rally people to the cause in numbers large enough to effect real change. The movie and TV series MASH (set during the Korean War) probably did more to end the Vietnam War than any outraged speeches by impassioned activists. The spokespersons for the women’s movement made a clear and articulate case for women’s rights, but more men and women were brought to the ranks through the best-selling novels of Marilyn French (The Women’s Room) and Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) and the TV series Maude than through de Beauvoir’s political treatise, The Second Sex. In the final analysis, the effectiveness of any social message is only as strong as the artists who carry that message to the everyday people who spend most of their day earning a living.
The Harlem Renaissance was especially blessed in that it had a plethora of enormously talented spokespersons. Many of the best and brightest African-American writers, performers, artists, and activists came to Harlem to be part of a movement that had its mind set on changing America for the better. Like the Founding Fathers who had gathered 150 years before them to set this country on an irrevocable course, these creative and talented Harlemites were also dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal and were, one way or another, going to get the equal opportunities that went with that.
The Changing of the Old Guard:
Booker T. Washington
vs. W. E. B. Du Bois
The architects of the Harlem Renaissance couldn’t very well promote a New Negro unless they had an Old Negro they wanted to replace. For them, the Old Negro had outdated attitudes about who African-Americans were, what their goals should be, and how they should go about achieving those goals. In his essay “The New Negro,” which became a quasi road map for much of the direction of the Harlem Renaissance, philosophy professor Alain Locke warned, “The Negro too, for his part, has idols of the tribe to smash.”
The specific “idol” of the tribe they were intent on smashing was acclaimed African-American leader Booker T. Washington (1856–1915). For twenty years, author and educator Washington was the preeminent spokesperson for the African-American community. As such, his advice was sought by presidents and members of Congress concerning all things having to do with African-Americans. Since the death of abolitionist, feminist, and newspaper publisher Frederick Douglass in 1895, Washington was perhaps the most famous, and influential, black man in America. Yet, the Harlem Renaissance meant to build their New Negro on his ashes.
On the surface, Washington would appear to be the perfect model for the New Negro. Born into slavery in Virginia, he was freed when he was nine years old. At sixteen he attended college to become a teacher and nine years later became the first black head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His rise to prominence came as a result of his 1895 Atlanta Compromise address, given at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. This is where he laid out to a mostly white audience his principal political philosophy regarding the advancement of black Americans: “I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race.” This avowed policy of “patient, sympathetic help” and the promise to endure “severe and constant struggle” included the acceptance of Jim Crow laws of segregation. Though Washington privately fought against segregation laws by funding legal challenges, publicly he amassed much financial and political support from wealthy whites to help fund schools for black children because of his nonthreatening political policies. His autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), inspired many African-Americans to endure the struggle while at the same time made many whites more sympathetic to the black cause.
However sincere Washington’s intentions and laudable his accomplishments, W. E. B. Du Bois saw an inherent danger in his policies and labeled him the Great Accommodator. Whereas Washington emphasized industrial and agricultural training for young blacks, Du Bois pushed for more classical, liberal arts education. Washington’s approach was more vocational, based on his familiarity with rural Southern states. Du Bois thought that approach limiting, wanting instead to educate blacks into the white-collar professions. While Washington urged a passive conciliatory attitude toward whites, Du Bois advocated a more aggressive approach.
Clearly, each man’s political philosophy was greatly influenced by his own geographical background. Washington grew up in the South, where nearly all blacks lived rural, agricultural lives. His plan to improve African-American lives focused on, taking into account their limited education, helping them gain vocational skills. Du Bois, however, believed the Great Migration had shifted the future of black culture to the cities and so focused his plan on making blacks both urban and urbane. Like himself.
Unlike Washington, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) had not been born into slavery, nor even in the South. He was born in Massachusetts to a prominent black family, eventually graduating cum laude from Harvard University, where he later became only the second African-American to receive a Harvard Ph.D. Like Washington, Du Bois, too, was an educator, founding the first sociology department in the United States while teaching at Atlanta University. Before his participation in the Harlem Renaissance, he published several significant books, including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and John Brown (1909). The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays about African-American life in America, became particularly influential in establishing the philosophical basis for the Harlem Renaissance. In one of the book’s essays, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” Du Bois details the damage done to black Americans because of Washington’s policies and urges a bold new course: “Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission…. Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races…. The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader.”
In so adamantly opposing “their greatest leader” Washington, Du Bois became one of the men who replaced him—some historians claim the most important and influential one for the next twenty years. There could certainly be no disputing Du Bois’s credentials as a leader. In 1905, he cofounded the Niagara Movement, a group of thirty-two African-Americans dedicated to advancing civil rights and ending racial discrimination. The group’s name came from the place of their inaugural meeting, the Canadian side of the Niagara River. Together they condemned the submissive philosophy of Booker T. Washington and issued a Declaration of Principles: “Of the above grievances we do not hesitate to complain, and to complain loudly and insistently. To ignore, overlook, or apologize for these wrongs is to prove ourselves unworthy of freedom. Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty, and toward this goal the Niagara Movement has started and asks the cooperation of all men of all races.”
But in 1909, when a policy disagreement developed over whether to include whites in the group, Du Bois and others who thought whites should be included quit to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Because of his weekly columns for prominent African-American newspapers in New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, as well as for the white San Francisco Chronicle, Du Bois’s views were now being read by blacks—and whites—across the entire country. Du Bois also became the editor in chief of the NAACP publication, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, the circulation of which rose from one thousand in 1910 to one hundred thousand by 1920, making it one of the dominant black periodicals in the country. From the editor’s chair of the Crisis, where he sat for twenty-five years, Du Bois articulated and promoted the ideals that formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance manifesto as well as published other prominent Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer.
W. E. B. Du Bois gave the Harlem Renaissance two things it needed
most to achieve international recognition: undeniable intellectual depth and a compelling evangelical voice. His book The Souls of Black Folk was especially instrumental both in focusing national attention of the plight of African-Americans as well as in “recruiting” many of the seminal writers and artists who followed the promise in his voice to Harlem. If men like this lived in Harlem, they reasoned, surely that was the place to go. Historian David Levering Lewis wrote in the first of his two Pulitzer Prize–winning biographies of Du Bois that the book was “one of those events epochally dividing history into a before and an after. Like fireworks going off in a cemetery, its 14 essays were sound and light enlivening the inert and despairing. It was an electrifying manifesto, mobilizing a people for bitter, prolonged struggle to win a place in history.” In the book’s introduction, Du Bois explains the main issue of identity for African-Americans: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Though his tone is mild and moderate, the reaction was anything but. A Tennessee newspaper feared that “this book is dangerous for the negro to read, for it will only excite discontent and fill his imagination with things that do not exist, or things that should not bear upon his mind.” The New York Commercial Advertiser wrote, “At a time when racial prejudice has suddenly taken on an aggravated form, when almost every day witnesses a new outburst in some unexpected quarter, a volume of this sort, written by a negro with unwavering faith in the inherent possibilities of his race, cannot be otherwise than wholesome and inspiring.”
More important than the reaction of the press, was the effect The Souls of Black Folk had on young blacks around the country. Poet Langston Hughes said, “My earliest memories of written words were those of W. E. B. Du Bois and the Bible.” Novelist Claude McKay confessed, “The book shook me like an earthquake.” This was the reaction Du Bois sought in all of his writings, for he saw the primary function of art was to persuade the reader, saying, “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.” He argued of the importance of using art to promote the cause of African-Americans. Pleased with the impact blues and jazz were having across the country, Du Bois deliberately set about promoting black writers to achieve the same impact, stating, “A renaissance of American Negro literature is due; the material about us in the strange, heart-rending race tangle is rich beyond dream and only we can tell the tale and sing the song from the heart.”
One of Du Bois’s most famous and controversial essays, “The Talented Tenth,” published in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of Today (1903), advocated his belief that an elite group of educated blacks would lead the rest of the black population to a better life. This would occur because (1) these exceptional individuals would prove to white society how much blacks could accomplish when given equal educational opportunities, and (2) this accomplished 10 percent of the black population (amounting to about 1 million African-Americans) would provide a solid infrastructure to allow future generations easier access to these opportunities. Du Bois’s essay explains his theory: “All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training…. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”
Some critics found this approach either impractical or too undemocratically elitist, the haughty belief of an Ivy League snob. But Du Bois was firm in his conviction that these men and women of color would be “an advanced guard” who would formulate and propagate a new ideology of racial assertiveness. For Du Bois, the Talented Tenth were the Great Black Hope.
Du Bois’s efforts to unify both native Africans and descendants of the African diaspora into a global community fighting for a common cause earned him the nickname Father of Pan-Africanism. Eventually, his increasing radicalism brought him in conflict with other NAACP leaders until, in 1934, as the Harlem Renaissance was beginning to wind down, Du Bois quit the Crisis to return to teaching at Atlanta University. He remained active in politics, acting as a consultant to the U.S. delegation during the founding of the United Nations.
However, as his politics continued toward the left, his influence began to wane. He ran for U.S. Senate on the Labor Party ticket and lost. He was fired from his job as special research director at the NAACP. In 1961, when he was ninety-three, he joined the Communist Party. His increasing radicalism brought him under careful scrutiny from the U.S. government. Disappointed at being marginalized by both blacks and whites in America, Du Bois said, “I would have been hailed with approval if I had died at fifty. At seventy-five my death was practically requested.” Then in 1962, the president of Ghana invited Du Bois to oversee the completion of the Encyclopedia Africana, but the United States refused to grant him and his wife new passports. As a result, the Du Boises renounced their U.S. citizenships and became citizens of Ghana. When he died the following year at age ninety-five, the United States sent no one to attend the state funeral Ghana provided in his honor. Du Bois once said, “I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done will live long and justify my life.” In 1992, nearly thirty years after his death, the United States issued a postage stamp featuring Du Bois’s portrait.
Charles S. Johnson: The Arts
as Weapons of Mass Persuasion
Du Bois’s advocacy of a messianic Talented Tenth found an ally in prominent black sociologist Charles S. Johnson (1893–1956), who was referred to as the Dean of the Renaissance. As research director for the National Urban League, a civil rights organization, and the editor of its influential periodical, Opportunity, Johnson used his editorial powers to promote young black writers not only by publishing them, but by arranging literary prizes that launched their careers into more prominence. Famed poet Langston Hughes, one of the writers that Johnson promoted, praised Johnson as the person who “did more to encourage and develop Negro writers during the 1920s than anyone else in America.” Novelist Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) said that the Renaissance was quite simply Johnson’s “work, and only his hushmouth nature has caused it to be attributed to many others.”
Johnson displayed an unwavering belief that the writers and artists would lead African-Americans to their rightful place in American society, one work of art at a time. Johnson was convinced that African-Americans could provoke sympathy and empathy in the rest of the world “by sheer force of the humanness and beauty of [their] own story.” In When Harlem Was in Vogue, author David Levering Lewis describes Johnson’s belief:
If the road to the ballot box and jobs was blocked, Johnson saw that the door to Carnegie Hall and New York publishers was ajar. Each book, play, poem, or canvas by an Afro-American would become a weapon against the old racial stereotypes. Johnson was certain that “If these beliefs, prejudices, and faulty deductions can be made accessible for examination, many of them will be corrected.”…In the bleakness of the present, it was left to the Afro-American elite to win what assimilation it could through copyrights, concerts, and exhibitions.
Always the sociologist, Johnson researched the growth of the African-American professional class, concluding that this Talented Tenth grew by 69 percent between 1920 and 1930, justifying his and Du Bois’s faith. Black-owned banks and life-insurance companies sprang up in every black community. Unfortunately, the stock market crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, crushed many of these businesses, sending highly educated African-Americans to work in stockrooms and elevators. Despite the financ
ial setback, the propaganda part of the plan was still sound: great works of literature and art were being thrust into the world, and white America was responding with enthusiasm.
The Shipping News: Marcus Garvey and the Back-to-Africa Movement
Not everyone in Harlem during the Renaissance was optimistic about the future of blacks in America. To some, especially those blue-collar workers who weren’t part of the Talented Tenth, the New Negro was still just another black person dressed up to go to a party to which he was neither invited nor welcome. Even if he was eventually allowed into the big house, rather than being treated as a respected guest, he would be seen as a mere curiosity, like a precocious child who could recite all the state capitals. Being an Old or New Negro wasn’t the problem, being a Negro in America was the problem. And the only practical solution to that problem was for blacks to leave America. So argued Jamaican immigrant Marcus Moziah Garvey (1887–1940), whose back-to-Africa movement based in the heart of Harlem contradicted the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, bringing him into bitter conflict with W. E. B. Du Bois and the rest of the Talented Tenth.
Garvey was not an enthusiast of the Harlem Renaissance, yet it was the renaissance atmosphere in Harlem that gave him the inspiration and platform to launch his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). His educational background kept him from being part of the Talented Tenth (he claimed to have a doctor of civil law degree from Birkbeck College in England, though it seems that he only audited classes there), but his charisma and drive made him a popular leader among much of the other “untalented” nine-tenths of African-Americans. One Harlem observer described the barrel-bodied Garvey as “a little sawed-off, hammered down black man, with determination written all over his face, and an engaging smile that caught you and compelled you to listen to his story.”
On the Shoulders of Giants Page 8
