by Carla Kaplan
xxi
“New Negroes” . . . “return fighting”: Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” 13.
xxi
“far outnumbered” . . . “fighting back”: McKay, “If We Must Die.” “If We Must Die” was reprinted in The Messenger in September 1919 and in McKay’s Harlem Shadows in 1922. See also Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance, 33.
xxi
“The New Negro has arrived”: W. A. Domingo, “If We Must Die,” first published in The Messenger, reprinted in Wilson, ed., The Messenger Reader, 336. On the derivation of “The New Negro,” see especially Gates, “The Trope of a New Negro,” and Gates and Jarrett, eds., The New Negro.
xxi
“the mainspring of Negro life”: Locke, “The New Negro,” in Locke, ed., The New Negro, 11.
xxi
Negrotarians: This is Hurston’s term, widely circulated throughout the Harlem Renaissance.
xxi
antilynching activists: See especially Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry; Gilmore, Defying Dixie; Brown, Eradicating This Evil.
xxi
“Negrotarians . . . came in almost”: Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 98. See, e.g., Ascoli, Julius Rosenwald, and Mjagkij, “A Peculiar Alliance.”
xxii
“I have found”: Ovington, Black and White, 1.
xxiii
But no photos of the dinners survive: I am grateful to the archivists at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for assisting my long search for such a photo.
xxiii
“for many of the contestants”: Holbrook, “The Opportunity Dinner,” 177.
xxiv
It was “a novel sight”: “A Negro Renaissance,” 16.
xxiv
The dinner was free: Charles S. Johnson, to Alain Locke, “2nd letter” [undated], Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. (hereafter abbreviated MSRC), as cited in Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 392.
xxv
“colored people always”: Moryck, “A Point of View,” 246.
xxv
“a new race differently endowed”: Edna Worthley Underwood, responding to Charles Johnson’s invitation to be a contest judge. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 115. These attitudes did not die out after the twenties and thirties. They persisted into the 1950s, in writings such as Norman Mailer’s notorious essay “The White Negro,” and they persist today in some aspects of “Wigger” culture.
xxv
“a band of justice-loving white women”: Gelhorn, “But of Course—No Social Equality,” 14.
xxvi
race is a social construction: On whiteness, see, e.g., Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Painter, The History of White People; Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness; Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters; Roediger, Colored White; Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.
xxvii
“I did what I wanted to”: Ovington, Black and White, 50.
xxvii
Negrophobia and Negrophilia: In his introduction to Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir of cross-racial passing, from white to black, Bernard Wolfe notes that Negrophilia and Negrophobia may be related “dialectically” as they are “polar opposites.” Mezzrow and Wolfe, Really the Blues, 403.
xxviii
“racism is ordinary”: Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 3. Excellent treatments of the everyday life of racism include: Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists; Davis, Women, Race & Class; Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Shipler, A Country of Strangers; Terkel, Race; Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future and The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Many of the best illuminations of everyday racism and its workings are found in literature, from slave narratives to Invisible Man, Beloved, and beyond. The literature of the Harlem Renaissance—both white and black—offers many depictions of how saturated everyday American life has been with racism.
xxviii
“especially happy”: Als, “Queen Jane, Approximately,” 55.
xxviii
the Harlem Renaissance as interracial: Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. See also Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem.
xxxi
Miss Anne’s love of blackness: My thinking here has been broadly influenced by “affect studies” and especially the study of how so-called private emotions and feelings, seemingly inchoate longings and desires, can be understood as a form of political resistance and political critique, a form of resistance to the status quo that does not always rise to the level of legitimate political protest and that therefore has often flown beneath the radar of political and historical analysis. On affect as political, see, e.g., Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Clough, The Affective Turn; Protevi, Political Affect; Staiger, Cvetkovich, and Reynolds, eds., Political Emotions; Gregg and Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader.
Chapter 1: Black and White Identity Politics
3 “The black-white relationship”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 84–85.
4 “the color line”: According to Brent Edwards, W. E. B. Du Bois first used this phrase in 1900. It gained social currency in 1903 when he stated that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” See Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, and Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.
4 “race traitor”: This term has recently been reclaimed by the “New Abolitionists.” See Ignatiev and Garvey, eds., Race Traitor, and Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor.
4 “General Purchasing Agents”: Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 169.
4 “the scandal of the decade”: Lewis and Ardizzone, Love on Trial, xi.
5 Jones and Rhinelander met in 1921: Leonard suffered from a fragile constitution, stuttering, and stammering. His father sent him to The Orchards, a Connecticut institute for nervous and mental disorders, where he befriended Carl.
5 his trust fund: Smith-Pryor, Property Rites.
6 “into a long line of women”: Thaggert, “Racial Etiquette” in Nella Larsen, Passing, ed. Kaplan, 511.
6 “persecute, ridicule and strip naked”: Du Bois, “Rhinelander,” 112–13.
6 The New York Times alone: Madigan, “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class,’” in Larsen, Passing, 389.
6 the spectators struggling: “Rhinelander Admits Pursuit,” 1.
6 “enslaved” . . . “there is not a mother”: “Rhinelander’s Suit,” 4.
7 a lump sum: Smith-Pryor, Property Rites, 248.
7 Alice’s victory was pyrrhic: Smith-Pryor, Property Rites, 234.
8 dozens of black homes: The most famous such case, involving the family of Ossian Sweet in Detroit, Michigan, is expertly recounted in Boyle, Arc of Justice.
8 “instrument of social discipline . . . spectacularized”: Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 44, 50.
8 “We want and need”: Pencak, For God and Country, 8.
9 Newspapers treated her life . . . “‘hate me’”: New York World, September 13, 1912; The New York Times, September 12, 1912; Chicago Examiner, September 12, 1912; The New York Times, September 14, 1912; Cleveland Gazette, September 21, 1912; The Chicago Defender, September 21, 1912; Broad Ax [Chicago], September 21, 1912.
9 “not of temporary madness”: Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 294.
9 “crossing the color line”: Hahn, “Crossing the Color Line.”
9 Others estimated twenty thousand: The novelist Jessie Fauset, as quoted in Vincent, “There are 20,000 PPassing,” A1.
9 One put the number as unrealistically high: “75,000 Pass in Philadelphia Every Day.”
10 Sociologist Charles S. Johnson: Johnson, editorial, Opportunity, 3, no. 34 (October 1925): 291.
10 “when . . . a Caucasian [is] not”: “When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian?,” 478.
10 relatives lynched: “Careful Lyncher! He May Be Your Brother.”
10 “pure white” wives revealed as “colored”: “Blonde Girl Was ‘Passing.’”
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br /> 10 Editorials suggested: Remove “the prime [economic] incentive”; in Baldwin, From Negro to Caucasian, 4.
10 “telltales”: Nella Larsen, Passing.
10 In the hands of white writers: See Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson.
10 “one-drop rule,” which held: From 1910 on, various states enacted laws based on this notion.
11 The “one-drop rule”: Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color Blind,’” cited in Lopez, White by Law, 27.
11 That forced every American to choose: See, e.g., Sollors, Neither Black nor White, Yet Both.
11 Since greater numbers of people: “New ‘one drop of blood’ rules in the early twentieth century, meant to make it more difficult for mixed-race individuals to pass as white, in some cases actually created more possibilities for individuals by making it harder to prove that a grandparent was African.” Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 13.
11 “race pride” and “racial solidarity”: Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, ed. Stewart, 96–97.
11 “opposition to race mixture”: Smith-Pryor, Property Rites, 33.
11 Garvey’s insistence on “the racial purity”: “Essays on Race Purity by Marcus Garvey,” in The Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, ed. Hill, cited in Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 183.
12 discouraged interracial marriages: According to Catherine R. Squires, most black newspapers hewed closely to the NAACP’s view in this regard. “Black newspapers spoke out against antimiscegenation law, but this did not translate into wholehearted support for interracial marriage or intimacy.” Squires, Dispatches from the Color Line, 40.
12 “traitor”: Du Bois, “A Lunatic or a Traitor,” 8–9.
12 “superstitions”: George Schuyler, Black and Conservative.
12 for “men and women”: Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 174.
12 “Voluntary Negroes”: Among others, George Schuyler used the phrase “voluntary Negro” to refer to someone “almost white” who elects to be black. See George Schuyler, “At the Darktown Charity Ball.” The jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow also referred to himself as a “voluntary Negro”—a telling white misunderstanding of the meaning of the term. Mezzrow was a white musician who often passed for black in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. The “secret” to sloughing off whiteness, Mezzrow wrote, is to “live close to the Negro, see through his eyes, laugh and cry with him, soak up his spirit.” He was pleased to say that after spending “my life fighting to get back to the source . . . I became a Negro.” Mezzrow and Wolfe, Really the Blues, 371, 372, 208. See also Wald, “Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues,” in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, eds. Stecopoulos and Uebel, republished in Wald, Crossing the Line.
12 socialize interracially: Mrs. Sherwood Anderson, Adele Astaire, Tallulah Bankhead, Ethel Barrymore, Pearl Buck, Ina Claire, Joan Crawford, Mrs. E. E. Cummings, Mabel Dodge, Muriel Draper, Jeanne Eagels, Zelda Fitzgerald, Peggy Guggenheim, Libby Holman, Blanche Knopf, Beatrice Lillie, Fania Marinoff, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marilyn Miller, Lady Mountbatten, Princess Violette Murat, Dorothy Parker, Julia Peterkin, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Helena Rubenstein, Irita Van Doren, Emily Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Rebecca West, and Elinor Wylie and others.
12 support or organize black communities: Jane Addams, Ethel Barrymore, Louise Bryant, Freda Diamond, Crystal Eastman, Helen Worden Erskine, Hallie Flanagan, Dorothy Fields, Martha Gruening, Peggy Guggenheim, Blanche Knopf, Mrs. Henry Goddard Leach, Leslie Lew, Annie Nathan Meyer, Harriet Monroe, Belle Moskowitz, Margaret Naumberg, Mary White Ovington, Sylvia Pankurst, Julia Peterkin, Idella Purnell, Ernestine Rose, Amy Spingarn, Irita Van Doren, Amy Vanderbilt, Lillian Wald, Virginia Welles, and others.
12 represent blacks in literature and the arts: Pearl Buck, Freda Diamond, Helen Worden Erskine, Hallie Flanagan, Dorothy Fields, Dorothy Heyward, Fannie Hurst, Blanche Knopf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary White Ovington, Dorothy Parker, Anne Pennington, Julia Peterkin, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Amy Spingarn, Gertrude Stein, Florine Stettheimer, Rebecca West, and others.
12 be intimate with black men: Lucille Cameron, Mabel Dodge, Etta Duryea, Bella Fauset, Uta Hagen, Yolande Jackson, Margery Latimer, Nina McKinney, Margaret Naumberg, Jane Newton, Irene Paneau, Clara Rockmore, Helen Rosen, Merrill Work, Helen Lee Worthing, Ellen Wright, and others.
12 pass as black: Irene Paneau, Lillian E. Wood, Helen Lee Worthing, and others.
13 “implacable Negrophobia”: White, Flight, 72.
13 “crossover”: Roediger’s term for whites who seek to cross into black culture. See his Colored White, 212–40.
14 “I was only an American Negro”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 325.
14 “I Was African”: Nancy Cunard to Alfred M. Cruickshank, “The People,” February 15, 1941, clipping, Box 27, Folder 5, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin (hereafter abbreviated HRC).
14 “usable past”: Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 337–41.
14 On the one hand, Africa represented: See Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 4.
14 “tom-toms” . . . “song”: Hughes, “Danse Africaine” and “Afro-American Fragment,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Rampersad, 28, 129.
14 “There is little evidence”: Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro, ed. Locke.
14 “hokum . . . just plain American”: George Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum,” 662.
15 “I want to see”: from Bennett, “Heritage,” 371:
I want to see the slim palm-trees,
Pulling at the clouds
With little pointed fingers . . .
I want to see lithe Negro girls,
Etched dark against the sky
While sunset lingers.
. . .
I want to hear the chanting
Around a heathen fire
Of a strange black race.
. . .
I want to feel the surging
Of my sad people’s soul
Hidden by a minstrel-smile.
16 “So I lie, who find no peace”: Cullen, Color. “Heritage” was dedicated to Cullen’s companion Harold Jackman, with whom Cullen decamped to France two months after his celebrated wedding to Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois. More than a thousand guests attended the gala wedding.
16 “It has attracted the African”: Locke, “The New Negro,” 6.
17 “revaluation”: Locke, “The New Negro,” 15.
17 The nation’s folklore craze: See especially Filene, Romancing the Folk.
17 natural people: On the nineteenth-century roots of “romantic racialism” especially, see Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind.
17 “friends of the Negro”: Used sincerely during Reconstruction and into the early 1900s by writers ranging from Charles Chesnutt on the one hand to Grover Cleveland on the other, the phrase “friend of the Negro” was in common use throughout the Harlem Renaissance, often with a slightly ironic tone, or a weary sense of resignation. During Reconstruction, the Republican Party called itself the “friend of the Negro.” See Chesnutt, “The Disenfranchisement of the Negro,” and “Friend of the Negro,” 1. Zora Neale Hurston also used this phrase in her Dust Tracks on a Road.
18 “The white people are pushing themselves”: Owen, “The Black and Tan Cabaret,” 97.
18 “promoted poetry”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 9.
18 “the final measure of the greatness”: Johnson, preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, 9; Johnson, “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” quoted in Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 193.
19 white writers: With the exception of Charlotte Osgood Mason, who simply claimed legal and spiritual authorship of every word her black protégés turned out, all of the white women whose stories are uncovered here tried their hand at black literature. Cunard’s greatest success in interracial collaboration was as a publisher and editor of black literature. Mary White Ovington wrote constantly, and in
almost every genre. Josephine Cogdell Schuyler never stopped writing, even when she felt she could no longer write under her own name. Annie Nathan Meyer’s play Black Souls, partly cowritten with Hurston, was one of the most successful pieces she ever wrote; it was certainly the most controversial. Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life: remains, to this day, the literary work for which Hurst is best known. The white educator Lillian E. Wood used black fiction to slip out of the white world and be known as a black writer.
19 “wealth of novel”: These statements come from the multi-month symposium “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed,” for which Van Vechten helped pen the questions.
19 “a sort of Mecca”: Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 49.
19 “Glossary of Negro words”: “‘Arnchy’: a person who puts on airs. ‘Bolito’: a gambling game highly popular in contemporary Harlem. The winning numbers each day are derived from the New York Clearing House bank exchanges and balances as they are published in the newspapers, the seventh and eighth digits, reading from the right, of the exchanges, and the seventh of the balances. In bolito one wagers on two figures only. ‘Bulldiker’: lesbian. ‘Creeper’: a man who invades another’s marital rights. ‘Dicties’: swells, in the slang sense of the word. ‘High yellow’: mulatto or lighter. ‘Jigchaser’: a white person who seeks the company of Negroes. ‘Miss Annie’: a white girl. ‘Ofay’: a white person (pig Latin for ‘foe’). ‘Pink-chaser’: a Negro who seeks the company of whites.”
19 “a primitive birthright”: Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 89.
19 “To say that Carl Van Vechten”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 272.
