Another visitor from Philidelphia, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, art connoisseur and foremost authority in America on primitive Negro art, sketched the growing interest in this art which had had such tremendous influence on the entire modern art movement.
Miss Jessie Fauset was given a place of distinction on the program. She paid her respects to those friends who had contributed to her accomplishment, acknowledging a particular debt to her “best friend and severest critic” Dr. Du Bois.
The original poems read by Countee Cullen were received with tremendous ovation. Miss Gwendolyn Bennett’s poem, dedicated to the occasion, is reproduced. It is called
“To Usward”
Let us be still
As ginger jars are still
Upon a Chinese shelf,
And let us be contained
By entities of Self. . . .
Not still with lethargy and sloth,
But quiet with the pushing of our growth;
Not self-contained with smug identity,
But conscious of the strength in entity.
THE FIRE!
THE BLAZING ENERGY that emerged from the Civic Club Dinner set the Harlem literary scene on fire. Younger writers — such as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larson, and Zora Neale Hurston — left the event feeling that they would now find the interest and support to pursue their work, while older artists had their efforts affirmed by the powerful editors and publishers of the New York book and magazine world. This excitement translated into a number of new publications that celebrated the men and women of the Harlem Renaissance.
Paul Kellogg, the white editor of the white publication Survey Graphic, lingered after the dinner to talk with Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, and others. Out of this conversation came the idea for a special black cultural issue of Survey Graphic, which billed itself as a monthly magazine for professionals who “want to know of the living contributions of other professions where they overlap yours in the realm of common welfare.” Kellogg quickly offered Charles S. Johnson control of the March 1925 issue, which would be devoted entirely to black culture. Johnson wrote Ethel Ray Nance, a woman whom he wanted to move to New York to be his secretary, “A big plug was bitten off. Now it’s a question of living up to the reputation. Yes, I should have added, a stream of manuscripts has started into my office . . .”
Johnson quickly enlisted critic and essayist Alain Locke as the editor of this special issue, which was titled Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro. Nearly every writer of importance to the Harlem Renaissance was included.
Johnson didn’t stop with the publication of one anthology. He went on to edit another one, Ebony and Topaz. As well, he badgered writers and artists all over the country to move to New York so that Harlem would truly be the “Mecca of the New Negro.” He convinced both poet Arna Bontemps and novelist Wallace Thurman to leave their jobs at the Los Angeles post office. He encouraged novelist and folklore anthologist Zora Neale Hurston, then a sophomore at Howard University, to come. The artist Aaron Douglas was on the fast track to becoming a principal at a segregated high school in Kansas City when Johnson got word of Douglas’s talent. Harlem was plentiful with writers, but there were few visual artists. Johnson instructed his secretary, Ethel Ray Nance, to insist on Douglas’s moving to Harlem. “Better to be a dishwasher in New York than to be head of a high school in Kansas City,” she cajoled after several of her more polite entreaties were ignored. How could Douglas resist? Harlem was the center of the world for the African-American arts. If he had any ambition to be a working artist, he would have to come to Harlem. Consequently, he did and he worked on the Survey Graphic issue with German artist Winold Reiss.
THE NEW NEGRO
EDITED BY ALAIN LOCKE
CONTENTS
PART I: THE NEGRO RENAISSANCE
The New Negro . . . . . . . . . . . . Alain Locke
Negro Art in America . . . . Albert C. Barnes
The Negro in American Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .William Stanley Braithwaite
Negro Youth Speaks . . . . . . . . Alain Locke
FICTION:
The City of Refuge . . . . . Rudolph Fisher
Carma, from Cane . . . . . . . Jean Toomer
Spunk . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zora Neale Hurston
Sahdji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bruce Nugent
POETRY:
Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Countee Cullen
Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Claude McKay
Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jean Toomer
The Creation . . . . . James Weldon Johnson
Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Langston Hughes
The Day-Breakers . . . . . . Arna Bontemps
Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Georgia Johnson
Lady, Lady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ann Spencer
The Black Finger . . . . . . Angelina Grimke
Enchantment . . . . . . . . . Lewis Alexander
DRAMA:
The Drama of Negro Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Montgomery Gregory
The Gift of Laughter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jessie Fauset
Compromise (A Folk Play) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Willis Richardson
MUSIC:
The Negro Spirituals . . . . . . Alain Locke
Negro Dancers . . . . . . . . . Claude McKay
Jazz at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . J. A. Rogers
Song . . . . . . . . . . . . Gwendolyn B. Bennett
Jazzonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . Langston Hughes
Nude Young Dancer . . . Langston Hughes
The Negro Digs Up His Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arthur A. Schomburg
American Negro Folk Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arthur Huff Fauset
T’appin . . . . . . . . . . . . Told by Cugo Lewis
B’rer Rabbit Folls Buzzard . . . . . . . . . . Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Countee Cullen
The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alain Locke
PART II:
THE NEW NEGRO IN A NEW WORLD
The Negro Pioneers . . . . . Paul U. Kellogg
The New Frontage on American Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles S. Johnson
The Road . . . . . . . . . . . . . Helene Johnson
THE NEW SCENE:
Harlem: The Culture Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Weldon Johnson
Howard: The National Negro
University . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kelly Miller
Hampton-Tuskegee: Missioners of the Masses . . . . . . Robert R. Moton
Durham: Capital of the Black
Middle Class . . . . . . E. Franklin Frazier
Gift of the Black Tropics . .W. A. Domingo
THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION:
The Negro’s Americanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melville J. Herskovitt
The Paradox of Color . . . . Walter White
The Task of Negro Womanhood . . . . . . . . . . . . Elise Johnson McDougald
Worlds of Color: The Negro Mind Reaches Out . . . . . . . . W. E. B. Du Bois
Next, Charles S. Johnson established the Opportunity literary awards to help the arriving artists and writers establish themselves. On the editorial page of the August 1924 issue, he announced the new prizes to be awarded:
Johnson enlisted nineteen respected white and black editors, publishers, and artists to judge the contest. These included Robert C. Benchley, novelist, drama critic, and editor of Life magazine; Alexander Woolcott, drama critic for the New York Sun; Dorothy Canfield Fisher, novelist; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century Magazine; and Montgomery Gregory, director of the Department of Dramatics at Howard University, among others. The prize money was donated by Mrs. Henry G. Leach, wife of the editor of Forum, a mainstream white journal. In May of 1925, the winners were anounced: Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” won first prize for poetry, and i
t would become the poetic emblem of the renaissance.
OPPORTUNITY LITERARY CONTEST
To stimulate creative expression among Negroes and to direct attention to the rich and unexploited sources of materials for literature in Negro life, Opportunity will offer prizes for short stories, poetry, plays, essays, and personal experience sketches to the amount of
FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS
There will be three awards for each division. . . . If you can write, this is your Opportunity.
Miguel Covarrubias’s illustration for Hughes’s first book The Weary Blues.
THE WEARY BLUES
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan —
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then sang some more —
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied —
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
—LANGSTON HUGHES
“In some places the autumn of 1924 may have been an unremarkable season. In Harlem, it was like a foretaste of paradise. A blue haze descended at night and with it strings of fairy lights on the broad avenues.”
— Poet Arna Bontemps
Charles S. Johnson was not the sole promoter of the Harlem Renaissance. The NAACP journal, the Crisis, also began offering writing awards. The March 1925Survey Graphic issue was published into an expanded anthology, The New Negro, which became the standard volume of the era. Many of the writers and artists now found themselves being published in the white mainstream publications. Poets Georgia Douglass Johnson, Frank Horne, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen saw their work appear in numerous magazines, such as Harper’s and Century, and had their books published by mainstream publishers. Championed by bestselling white novelist Fannie Hurst, anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston published several stories, plays, and collections of folklore. Walter White, a powerful member of the NAACP, wrote two novels about the horrors of the South, and also wrote Rope and Faggot, two incendiary histories about the lynching and burning of black people in America. Jessie Fauset, an editor at the Crisis, wrote novels, including There Is Confusion, while Claude McKay wrote the novel Banjo. All of this work and more was making its way into print and being distributed among white literary circles, where previously none would have had a chance at publication.
Above, Carl Van Vechten. Right, a caricature of Van Vechten by Miguel Covarrubias as an African American.
“What Mr. Van Vechten has written is just what those who do not know us think about all of us.”
— Richetta Randolph, James Weldon Johnson’s secretary
THE RIFT
SIMMERING BELOW THE surface of the renaissance’s blazing creativity was a rift that went unacknowledged until one of the most controversial novels of the age appeared on the scene — Nigger Heaven. Written by Carl Van Vechten, a white critic and Harlem enthusiast, Nigger Heaven was published in 1926 and quickly became a bestseller. Largely forgotten today, the novel wallowed in what Van Vechten believed to be the “squalor of Negro life, the vice of Negro life.” Its plot was overwrought and melodramatic in its portrayal of a young man who deserts his true love for the exotic mysteries of an older woman. When this woman rejects him for another man, the young man attempts to murder his usurper. Nigger Heaven was the first fictional treatment of Harlem and African-American urban life written by a white. As a novelty, it created a storm in the general media, but many Harlemites felt betrayed by Van Vechten, to whom they had opened their doors. Richetta Randolph, James Weldon Johnson’s secretary, summed up her shock in a letter to a vacationing Johnson: “To the very end I hoped for something which would make me feel that he had done Negro Harlem a service with his work. . . . What Mr. Van Vechten has written is just what those who do not know us think about all of us.”
Members of the Talented Tenth uniformly boycotted the book. Du Bois called it “a blow in the face” and “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and the intelligence of white.” Not simply offended by the use of “nigger” in its title, many black intellectuals were fearful that the portrayal of African Americans in what they perceived as the crudest of stereotypes would only continue to support racial biases. Their response underscored their convictions about the role of literature in African-American life — namely, that literature by and about blacks should serve primarily as propaganda. This meant that works of artistic merit should be untainted by stereotypes and embarrassing vulgarities. They believed that too much blackness, too much street culture, and too much folklore would undermine blacks’ ability to gain respect and equality in the dominant white culture. For them, art was meant to teach the white world about blacks and to convince them of the enduring value of African-American culture. Their horror at the publication of Nigger Heaven, then, was no surprise.
The true shock, however, was that not all blacks agreed with the Talented Tenth. Many of the younger generation of black writers and artists — Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes, among others — praised Van Vechten’s novel, although some bemoaned the use of “nigger” in the title. These young mavericks saw the success of Nigger Heaven as permission for them to celebrate blackness in all its manifestations, not just the portrayals approved by Talented Tenth society. This newfound freedom was so welcome that in response to the majority’s withering attacks on Van Vechten, Wallace Thurman and others suggested erecting a monument to the author. What the young writers most admired about the novel was its use of African-American slang to convey not just local color but what they believed were serious ideas. Because of this, they resisted the literary limits set by their elders. They knew the Talented Tenth represented only a small fraction of the larger black community, whereas the young writers sought to speak for the entire population of Harlem. For them, to ignore the larger Harlem was to do it injustice. Thus, works like Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” explored a wider range of experience. Although that poem won an award, much of the work about greater Harlem went unpublished and unread.
“Nigger Heaven! That’s what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of New York theatre and watch the white world sitting down below in the good seats in the orchestra. . . . It never seems to occur to them that Nigger Heaven is crowded, that there isn’t another seat, that something has to be done.”
— Carl Van Vechten, from Nigger Heaven
That is, until novelist and critic Wallace Thurman decided to create his own journal in 1926. He named the journal FIRE!! With two exclamation points in the title, there was no mistaking Thurman and his fellow editors’ stalwart intentions. In addition to staking out their own artistic p
rinciples, they wanted to confront the establishment aggressively. FIRE!! expressed and celebrated those aspects of Harlem that the Talented Tenth were afraid of: sex; color-consciousness; racism; self-hatred among blacks; and the perception of blacks as “primitive,” “decadent,” wild, colorful, and dangerous “Negroes.” One of the first and most vocal writers to join in Thurman’s call to arms was Zora Neale Hurston. She was fearless in recording the rural folktales and sermons that embarrassed the Talented Tenth, and she portrayed low-class blacks in her fiction. The following passage comes from Hurston’s story “Sweat,” which first appeared in FIRE!! It is one of the first pieces Hurston published and it examines the lives of black laborers in authentic circumstances.
“Vivid, hot designs upon an ebony bordered loom . . . satisfy pagan thirst for beauty unadorned.”
It was eleven o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a washwoman, and Monday morning meant a great deal to her. So she collected the soiled clothes on Saturday when she returned the clean things. Sunday night after church, she sorted them and put the white things to soak. It saved her almost a half day’s start. A great hamper in the bedroom held the clothes that she brought home. It was so much neater than a number of bundles lying around.
She squatted in the kitchen floor beside the great pile of clothes, sorting them into small heaps according to color, and humming a song in a mournful key, but wondering through it all where Sykes, her husband, had gone with her horse and buckboard.
Just then something long, round, limp and black fell upon her shoulders and slithered to the floor beside her. A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full minute before she could cry out or move. Then she saw that it was the big bull whip her husband liked to carry when he drove.
She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright. She screamed at him.
Harlem Stomp! Page 7
