Plum Bun
Page 29
Books
Marcus Garvey: Philosophy and Opinion of Marcus Garvey (Universal Publishing House)
Jean Toomer: Cane (Boni & Liveright)
1924
March: The Civic Club dinner, held in honor of Jessie Redmon Fauset on publishing her first novel There Is Confusion, is sponsored by Opportunity and Charles S. Johnson. Those in attendance include Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Gwendolyn Bennett, and such representatives of the New York publishing world as Alfred A. Knopf and Horace Liveright. (In retrospect the occasion is often taken to mark the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance.) May: W.E.B. Du Bois attacks Marcus Garvey in The Crisis article “A Lunatic or a Traitor.” Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun Got Wings, starring Paul Robeson and controversial for its theme of miscegenation, opens. Autumn: Countee Cullen is the first recipient of Witter Bynner Poetry Competition. September: René Maran publishes poems by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer in his Paris newspaper, Les Continents. Louis Armstrong comes to New York from Chicago to join Fletcher Henderson’s band at the Roseland Ballroom.
Books
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Stratford)
Jessie Redmon Fauset: There Is Confusion (Boni & Liveright)
Walter White: The Fire in the Flint (Knopf)
1925
February: After his appeals are denied, Marcus Garvey begins serving his sentence for mail fraud at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. March: Howard Philosophy Professor Alain Locke edits a special issue of The Survey Graphic titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”; in November The New Negro, an expanded book version, is published by Albert and Charles Boni. The volume features six pages of painter Aaron Douglas’s African-inspired illustrations, and includes writing by Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Richard Bruce Nugent, Anne Spencer, Claude McKay, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Arthur Schomburg, Charles S. Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and E. Franklin Frazier. May: Opportunity holds its first awards dinner, recognizing, among others, Langston Hughes (“The Weary Blues,” first prize), Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, and Sterling Brown. Paul Robeson appears at Greenwich Village Theatre in a concert entirely devoted to spirituals, accompanied by Lawrence Brown. August: A. Phillip Randolph organizes the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. October: The American Negro Labor Congress is founded in Chicago. November: First prize of The Crisis awards goes to poet Countee Cullen. Paul Robeson stars in Oscar Micheaux’s film Body and Soul. December: Marita Bonner publishes essay “On Being Young—A Woman—And Colored” in The Crisis, about the predicament and possibilities of the educated black woman.
Books
Countee Cullen: Color (Harper)
James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, editors: The Book of American Negro Spirituals (Viking Press)
Alain Locke, editor: The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert and Charles Boni)
1926
January: The Harmon Foundation announces its first awards for artistic achievement by African Americans. Palmer Hayden, a World War I veteran and menial laborer, wins the gold medal for painting. February: Jessie Redmon Fauset steps down as editor of The Crisis. The play Lulu Belle, starring Lenore Ulric in blackface as well as the African American actress Edna Thomas, opens to great success on Broadway; it helps create a vogue of whites frequenting Harlem nightspots. March: The Savoy Ballroom opens on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets. June: Successive issues of The Nation feature Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and George S. Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum.” July: W.E.B. Du Bois founds Krigwa Players, Harlem theater group devoted to plays depicting African American life. August: Carl Van Vechten, white novelist and close friend to many Negro Renaissance figures, publishes his roman à clef, Nigger Heaven, with Knopf. Although many of his friends—including James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes—are supportive, the book is widely disliked by African American readers, and notably condemned by W.E.B. Du Bois. October: Arthur Schomburg’s collection of thousands of books, manuscripts, and artworks is purchased for the New York Public Library by the Carnegie Corporation; it will form the basis of what will become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. November: Fire!!, a journal edited by Wallace Thurman, makes its sole appearance. Contributors include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Bennett, among others. “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” a short story by Richard Bruce Nugent published in Fire!!, shocks many by its delineation of a homosexual liaison as well as by Nugent’s suggestive line drawings. Most copies are accidentally destroyed in a fire. December: Countee Cullen begins contributing a column, “The Dark Tower,” to Opportunity. (It will run until September 1928.)
Books
W. C. Handy, editor: Blues: An Anthology (Boni & Boni)
Langston Hughes: The Weary Blues (Knopf)
Alain Locke, editor: Four Negro Poets (Simon & Schuster)
Carl Van Vechten: Nigger Heaven (Knopf)
Eric Walrond: Tropic Death (Boni & Liveright; story collection)
Walter White: Flight (Knopf)
1927
July: Ethel Waters stars on Broadway in the revue Africana. August: Rudolph Fisher’s essay “The Caucasian Storms Harlem” is published in The American Mercury. September: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, first published anonymously in 1912, is republished by Knopf. October: A’Lelia Walker, cosmetics heiress and Harlem socialite, opens The Dark Tower, a tearoom intended as a cultural gathering place, at her home on West 130th Street: “We dedicate this tower to the aesthetes. That cultural group of young Negro writers, sculptors, painters, music artists, composers, and their friends.” The Theatre Guild production of DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy, with an African American cast, opens to great success. December: Marcus Garvey, pardoned by Calvin Coolidge after serving more than half of five-year sentence for mail fraud, is deported. Duke Ellington and his orchestra begin what will prove a years-long engagement at the Cotton Club of Harlem.
Books
Countee Cullen: Copper Sun (Harper)
Countee Cullen, editor: Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (Harper)
Langston Hughes: Fine Clothes to the Jew (Knopf)
Charles S. Johnson, editor: Ebony and Topaz (Journal of Negro Life/National Urban League)
James Weldon Johnson: God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (Knopf)
Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory, editors: Plays of Negro Life (Harper)
1928
January: The first Harmon Foundation art exhibition opens at New York’s International House. April 9: Countee Cullen marries Nina Yolande, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois; the wedding is a major social event, attended by thousands of people. (The marriage breaks up several months later.) May: Bill “Bojangles” Robinson appears on Broadway in the revue Blackbirds of 1928. June: The Messenger ceases publication when the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters can no longer financially support the journal. November: Wallace Thurman publishes the first and only issue of the magazine Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life.
Books
W.E.B. Du Bois: Dark Princess: A Romance (Harcourt, Brace)
Jessie Redmon Fauset: Plum Bun (Frederick Stokes)
Rudolph Fisher: The Walls of Jericho (Knopf)
Georgia Douglas Johnson: An Autumn Love Cycle (Harold Vinal)
Nella Larsen: Quicksand (Knopf)
Claude McKay: Home to Harlem (Harper)
1929
February: Harlem, co-authored by Wallace Thurman and William Rapp, opens on Broadway to mixed reviews. Archibald Motley, Jr. wins gold medal for painting from the Harmon Foundation. October 29: The New York stock market plunges, eliminating much of the funding powering “New Negro” literature and arts.
Books
Countee Cullen: The Black Christ and Oth
er Poems (Harper)
Nella Larsen: Passing (Knopf)
Claude McKay: Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (Harper)
Wallace Thurman: The Blacker the Berry (Macaulay)
Walter White: Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (Knopf)
1930
February: The Green Pastures, a play by Marc Connelly, based on Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928), opens on Broadway with an all-black cast; it will be one of the most successful plays of its era. July: The Nation of Islam, colloquially known as the Black Muslims, founded by W. D. Fard in Detroit at the Islam Temple. Dancer and anthropology student Katharine Dunham founds Ballet Nègre in Chicago. James Weldon Johnson publishes a limited edition of “Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,” a poem protesting the insulting treatment accorded to African American Gold Star Mothers visiting American cemeteries in Europe.
Books
Langston Hughes: Not Without Laughter (Macmillan)
Charles S. Johnson: The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations (Henry Holt)
James Weldon Johnson: Black Manhattan (Knopf)
James Weldon Johnson: Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day (Viking Press)
1931
April–July: The “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of young African American men accused of raping two white women, are tried and convicted; a massive, lengthy, and only partly successful campaign to free them begins. Sculptor Augusta Savage, whose real-life rebuff by the white art establishment becomes part of the back story for Plum Bun, establishes the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem.
Books
Arna Bontemps: God Sends Sunday (Harcourt, Brace)
Sterling Brown: Outline for the Study of Poetry of American Negroes (Harcourt, Brace)
Countee Cullen: One Way to Heaven (Harper)
Jessie Redmon Fauset: The Chinaberry Tree (Frederick Stokes)
Langston Hughes: Dear Lovely Death (Troutbeck Press)
George S. Schuyler: Black No More (Macaulay)
Jean Toomer: Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms (Lakeside Press)
1932
June: Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, Louise Thompson, and more than a dozen other African Americans travel to the Soviet Union to film Black and White, a movie about American racism. (Due to shifting Soviet policies, the movie will never be made.)
Books
Sterling Brown: Southern Road (Harcourt, Brace)
Rudolph Fisher: The Conjure-Man Dies (Covici-Friede)
Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper (Knopf)
Claude McKay: Gingertown (Harper; story collection)
George S. Schuyler: Slaves Today (Brewer, Warren, and Putnam)
Wallace Thurman: Infants of the Spring (Macaulay)
Wallace Thurman and Abraham Furman: Interne (Macaulay)
1933
Books
Jessie Redmon Fauset: Comedy: American Style (Frederick A. Stokes)
James Weldon Johnson: Along This Way (Knopf)
Alain Locke: The Negro in America (American Library Association)
Claude McKay: Banana Bottom (Harper)
1934
January: The Apollo Theater opens. February: Negro, an anthology of work by and about African Americans, edited by Nancy Cunard, is published by Wishart in London. March: Dorothy West founds the magazine Challenge. May: W.E.B. Du Bois resigns from the NAACP; he is replaced as editor of The Crisis by Roy Wilkins. November: Aaron Douglas completes Aspects of Negro Life, four murals commissioned by the New York Public Library. December: Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher die within days of one another. Richard Wright writes the initial draft of his first novel, Lawd Today, published posthumously in 1963. M. B. Tolson completes sequence of poems A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, published posthumously in 1979.
Books
Langston Hughes: The Ways of White Folks (Knopf; story collection)
Zora Neale Hurston: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Lippincott)
James Weldon Johnson: Negro Americans, What Now? (Viking Press)
1935
March 19: A riot sparked by rumors of white violence against a Puerto Rican youth results in three African American deaths and millions of dollars in damage to white-owned properties. April: In “Harlem Runs Wild,” published in The Nation, Claude McKay asserts that the riot is “the gesture of despair of a bewildered, baffled, and disillusioned people.” The Works Progress Administration (WPA) established by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; writers and artists who will eventually find employment under its aegis include Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, Margaret Walker, Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. October: Langston Hughes’s play Mulatto and George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess open on Broadway.
Books
Countee Cullen: The Medea and Some Poems (Harper)
Frank Marshall Davis: Black Man’s Verse (Black Cat Press)
W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Harcourt, Brace)
Zora Neale Hurston: Mules and Men (Lippincott)
James Weldon Johnson: Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (Viking Press)
1936
February: The National Negro Congress, representing some 600 organizations, holds its first meeting in Chicago. June: Mary McLeod Bethune is appointed Director of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, becoming the highest-ranking African American official of the Roosevelt administration.
Books
Arna Bontemps: Black Thunder (Macmillan)
Alain Locke: Negro Art—Past and Present (Associates in Negro Folk Education)
Alain Locke: The Negro and His Music (Associates in Negro Folk Education)
Biographical Note
Jessie Redmon Fauset Born Jessie Redmon Fauset in Camden County, New Jersey, near Philadelphia, on April 27, 1882, the seventh child of African Methodist Episcopal minister Redmon Fauset and Annie Seamon Fauset, who died when Fauset was still a young girl. After her father’s remarriage to Bella Huff, Fauset moved to Philadelphia, where she attended the predominantly white Philadelphia High School for Girls. Having been denied admission to Bryn Mawr on the basis of race, she attended Cornell University, 1901–05, and received an undergraduate degree in classical languages. She began corresponding with W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, and with his help secured a summer teaching position at Fisk University in 1904. After graduating from Cornell, and unable to find employment in Philadelphia’s segregated high school system, she taught for fourteen years at M Street High School (renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in 1916) in Washington, D.C., the educational home of the District of Columbia’s black elite. Fauset earned a master’s degree in French at the University of Pennsylvania in 1919. That same year Du Bois offered her the opportunity to move to New York City as literary editor of the NAACP publication The Crisis, to which she had been contributing articles, stories, and poems since 1912. As editor she encouraged the work of Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Countee Cullen, George S. Schuyler, and other emerging African American writers. With fellow Crisis staff member Augustus Granville Dill, Fauset edited the NAACP’s children’s publication, The Brownie’s Book, 1920–21. She continued to contribute prolifically to The Crisis; her essay “The Gift of Laughter” was included in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925); and her Sunday teas and literary soirées became gathering places for writers and intellectuals. (Langston Hughes would comment about these occasions: “A good time was shared by talking literature and reading poetry aloud and perhaps enjoying some conversation in French. White people were seldom present unless they were very distinguished white people, because Jessie Fauset did not feel like opening her home to mere sightseers, or faddists momentarily in love with Negro life.”) In 1921 she attended the Second Pan-African Congress in Brussels as a delegate of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. The publication of her first novel, There Is Confusion, by Boni and Liveright was c
elebrated by a dinner at the Civic Club on March 21, 1924, widely attended by African American writers and by representatives of mainstream publishing houses, and was afterward taken as an inaugural event of the Harlem Renaissance. She traveled again in Europe, 1924–25. A second novel, Plum Bun (1928), was followed by The Chinaberry Tree (1931) and Comedy: American Style (1933), all published by Frederick A. Stokes. Fauset left The Crisis in 1927 and returned to teaching at New York City’s DeWitt Clinton High School (where she may have taught the young James Baldwin). In 1929 she married Herbert Harris, an insurance agent. She gave up teaching in 1944 and moved with her husband to Montclair, New Jersey; she had little involvement in literary circles in her later years. After her husband’s death in 1958 she moved to Philadelphia, where she died on April 30, 1961.
Note on the Text
This e-Book is drawn from the Library of America’s Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s, which collects five novels—Cane (1923), by Jean Toomer; Home to Harlem (1928), by Claude McKay; Quicksand (1928), by Nella Larsen; Plum Bun (1928), by Jessie Redmon Fauset; and The Blacker the Berry (1929), by Wallace Thurman—associated with what has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, a period of great creativity and change in African American cultural life, with its epicenter in New York’s Harlem neighborhood. A companion volume in The Library of America series, Harlem Renaissance: Four Novels of the 1930s, includes four later novels: Not Without Laughter (1930), by Langston Hughes; Black No More (1931), by George S. Schuyler; The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), by Rudolph Fisher; and Black Thunder (1936), by Arna Bontemps. The texts of all of these novels have been taken from the first printings of the first editions.