One clear sign that the community of black writers was not quite as unified as Locke wanted the world to believe was the publication the following year of Fire!!, a magazine produced by Wallace Thurman and including the work of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas. They saw Locke’s work as more of a public relations publication and wanted to create one that dealt with the real-life issues of Harlem blacks generally ignored by the more genteel Talented Tenth, including jazz and homosexuality. Thurman later described the purpose of his magazine in “Negro Artists and the Negro”: “Fire, like Mr. Hughes’ poetry, was experimental. It was not interested in sociological problems or propaganda. It was purely artistic in intent and conception. Its contributors went to the proletariat rather than to the bourgeois for characters and material. They were interested in people who still retained some individual race qualities and who were not totally white American in every respect save color of skin.”
The magazine pointedly did not list Locke as one of the nine patrons, signaling a clear break from Locke’s vision. However, Fire!! failed to capture the public’s interest, folding after only one issue. In contrast, Locke’s The New Negro continues to be read, not merely as a cold and dusty historical document, but for its vibrant style and hopeful attitude. In his introduction to the 1992 edition of The New Negro, author Arnold Rampersad assesses the book’s impact: “The New Negro exudes more than energy—it exudes a quality suspiciously like joy, the great quality that J. A. Rogers [a contributor to the anthology] sees in jazz…. Even today it remains a reliable index to the black American sensibility at that point where art and politics meet, as well as to the events in Harlem and elsewhere among blacks in the 1920s.”
One might think producing the so-called bible of the Harlem Renaissance would be contribution enough, but Locke’s influence was even more significant in his role as guardian at the gates of eccentric philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason. Mason, in her seventies and white, had money to give to worthy black writers and artists to help support them while they produced their works. Locke selected those he deemed worthy of such support and introduced them to Mason, who insisted upon being called “Godmother” to those she helped. Mason’s gifts, however, came with the knowledge that she would have considerable say in one’s career, even going so far as to edit one’s works. Mason had a clear, though clearly patronizing, agenda for the kind of art she would support. She saw blacks as a spiritually superior people because their primitiveness had been uncorrupted by Western culture. Ironically, some of the quintessential works of the Harlem Renaissance were funded and guided by this elderly woman from her Park Avenue penthouse. She paid for Langston Hughes to attend Lincoln University in 1926, then urged him to write the novel Not Without Laughter. Years later, after an argument, Hughes broke from her. Zora Neale Hurston also received Mason’s money—and editorial influence. In Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, she describes, with some affection, Mason’s editorial process: “Godmother could be as tender as mother-love when she felt that you had been right spiritually. But anything in you, however clever, that felt like insincerity to her, called forth her well-known ‘This is nothing! It has no soul in it. You have broken the law!’”
Artist Aaron Douglas was also unable to refuse the Godmother’s offer—to his regret. Mason forced Douglas to turn down or withdraw from lucrative commissions whenever she felt they weren’t what she deemed “proper Negro art.” Douglas, too, eventually broke away. Yet, Locke remained, ushering new artists to her lair, convincing her to subsidize them, trying to balance his personal and racial integrity with the knowledge that many of these artists’ works might not ever come to fruition without her financial support.
Writers on the Storm:
The Great Eight
Though Du Bois, Johnson, and Locke published important works regarding black culture, they were smart enough to realize the limited appeal of their academic works. They were preaching to the choir, but the choir was small. To reach the larger audience that could help improve life for African-Americans, skilled literary writers of prose, poetry, and fiction would be required. Through their respective magazines, Du Bois (The Crisis), Johnson (Opportunity), and Locke (Survey Graphic) were able to maintain relatively tight control over whose voices would be heard.
Black intellectual and author Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) wrote, “Each generation out of relative obscurity must discover their mission, fulfill it or betray it.” Certainly most of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance came from obscurity and were handpicked because of their talents and dedication to fulfill the mission. Du Bois laid out the spiritual message in his essay “Strivings of the Negro People”:
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
From statements such as this, Harlem Renaissance writer Sterling Brown (Southern Road) categorized five major literary themes of the Renaissance writers: (1) Africa as a source of race pride, (2) black American heroes, (3) racial political propaganda, (4) the black folk tradition, and (5) candid self-revelation. Following these rough guidelines, serious literary writers would give Harlem the cultural heft and gravitas necessary to make it not only a geographical location but also to imbue it with the sheen of hope and historical context.
In the short story “City of Refuge,” Harlem writer Rudolph Fisher does just that. Upon first seeing Harlem, the protagonist, a naive immigrant from the rural South, exclaims, “Done died and woke up in Heaven.” As he looks around at the bustling black residents of Lenox Avenue, he concludes, “In Harlem black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by the law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money.” Of course, this romanticized vision of Harlem was only partially true. Many hopefuls did first see Harlem that way; but most Harlemites did not have the money or prestige that some writers described. That became one of the controversies among the writers—and other artists—of the Renaissance: Was their art to be used merely as a propaganda tool to promote the ideals of the black intelligentsia, or did they have a responsibility to portray the grittier warts-and-all Harlem life—and of African-Americans in general?
Ironically, one of the first novels to portray the more realistic and gritty side of Harlem, Nigger Heaven (1926), was written by a white man, Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), who had frequented Harlem and was friends with many black writers. The controversial title is a slang phrase for movie theater balconies where blacks were forced to sit. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel portrays a rather simplistic love story between a black couple. The book divided the black literary circles, with Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman supporting it, and Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke arguing that it was an “affront to the hospitality of black folk.” Despite its lack of literary ambition, and detractors among some black leaders, the novel became a huge best seller, succeeding at fulfilling the mandate of the Renaissance intellects: it introduced blacks as intelligent, talented, and sympathetic characters to a mostly white audience. Though it must have stung some to have a white man come in and seemingly steal their material to write a best seller, black writers were also heartened to see, and have white publishers see, that there was a paying market for their stories. They wasted no time setting about to tell those stories.
It would be a mistake to think that just because these talented writers, whom Zora Neale Hurston referred to as the Niggerati, share
d the same skin color they also shared the same ideals and beliefs. Nor were they above criticizing each other for reasons both intellectual and petty. Like any large family, there was a lot of competing for attention. Nor were their targets only the injustices of the white society. They also attacked the complacent upper-class African-Americans, whom they called “dicty blacks.” And they pointed out the rampant racism within their own community, as light-skinned blacks looked down on those with dark skins.
While many significant writers came out of the Harlem Renaissance, eight giants stand out as having contributed the most. Brief descriptions of each are presented below in order of date of birth because, in most cases, that dictated when they joined the literary circles of the Renaissance.
1. “Lift Every Voice and Sing”:
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) was an accomplished renaissance man long before there was any kind of movement in Harlem. His staggering list of accomplishments made him the perfect mentor to many of Harlem’s writers. At twenty-four he’d founded a high school for African-Americans; he edited the United States’ first black-oriented daily newspaper, the Daily American (1895–96); he was the first black admitted to the Florida bar; as a result of writing a popular campaign song for Teddy Roosevelt, he was appointed the American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua (1906–12); he cowrote over two hundred songs, including the unofficial “Negro national anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing”; he’d written the successful novel The Autobiography of an ExColored Man (1912), published anonymously and with great influence on upcoming young black writers. Booker T. Washington was so impressed with Johnson that he hired him to write editorials for the New York Age. But W. E. B. Du Bois, seeing in Johnson a kindred Talented Tenth, persuaded him to come to the NAACP, where Johnson was its chief executive officer until he left in 1931 to teach at Fisk University.
Johnson’s breadth of life experiences had brought him in contact with the elite of both the white and black communities. Recognizing that Jews and blacks shared a common struggle against discrimination, he enlisted the help of several wealthy Jewish philanthropists to help finance the fight against racism. His contacts with white publishers made it easier for young black writers to be published. In his 1922 preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, Johnson defined the goals of the Harlem Renaissance as well as presented a manifesto for writers to follow:
A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.
Though Johnson’s impact can clearly be seen in the pages of many of the writers he influenced, his real impact upon African-Americans is clearer in this reminiscence by literary critic Amin Sharif:
I am old enough to remember when every black child was required to memorize and recite the poems of Langston Hughes or James Weldon Johnson. The recitation of these works usually took place at church or in school. And these occasions came as close to a rite of passage as anything possessed by the Black Community in those days. Each child practiced for weeks to stand before parents and friends to recite the words of these two great poets. And woe unto the child who forgot his lines or who gave a recitation that did not move those assembled. For the younger children, Langston Hughes was more than appropriate. But for those in the upper grades, James Weldon Johnson’s works were the only ones that would suffice.
2. Without Confusion: Jessie Redmon Fauset
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was unique in being both an editor to many of Harlem’s best writers as well as a successful novelist in her own right. Not only was she the most published novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but she published the first novel of the Renaissance, There Is Confusion (1924). As with many of the Talented Tenth, she excelled at academics, becoming the first black woman at Cornell University to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa and later attending the Sorbonne in Paris. Feeling that her abilities and ambitions were slowly being siphoned away as a high school French teacher, she wrote letters to her hero, W. E. B. Du Bois, explaining, “I have had to let people know that we too possess some of the best, or else allow my own personality to be submerged.”
Impressed by her intellect and passion, Du Bois offered the thirty-seven-year-old Fauset the position of literary editor at the Crisis, where she served from 1919 to 1926. During this time she nurtured and guided such literary talents as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, while beginning the writing of what would be seventy-seven published works, including the novels Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life (1931), and Comedy: American Style (1933). Du Bois also assigned her to edit the magazine Brownies’ Book, an NAACP publication aimed at instilling racial pride in children. Du Bois felt that black children were inundated with images of white people being successful and rarely with black people as role models. Said Du Bois, “The result is that all of the Negro child’s idealism, all his sense of the good, the great and the beautiful is associated entirely with white people.” Fauset set about to change all that by providing African-American children with stories, poems, plays, songs, and images of heroic and admirable blacks.
Fauset’s own adult fiction focused on the more genteel strata of black society and often brought the criticism that she was comparable to Jane Austen or Edith Wharton rather than having a more distinctive black voice. Alain Locke was one of her harshest critics, which she reciprocated by describing his essays in The New Negro as being “stuffed with pedantry which fails to conceal their poverty of thought.” This animosity may also have sprung from Locke’s having used the Civic Club party celebrating the publication of There Is Confusion to promote The New Negro.
After leaving the Crisis in 1926, Fauset devoted herself to writing and teaching, both professions that she felt would elevate African-Americans.
3. Real-World Harlem: Claude Mckay
Claude McKay (1889–1948) represented a group of the Talented Tenth—including Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman—that bristled under that self-important title. Like some critics, they found both the term and the ideology too elitist and exclusive. Though they agreed with the fundamental goal of elevating the image of African-Americans, they didn’t want to gloss the image. Black was beautiful, even if every black was not. Plus, they wanted to include the average African-American as an active participant in the struggle. This put these writers at odds with the old guard of Du Bois, Locke, and Charles S. Johnson, but it made them popular among the younger readers.
McKay struggled greatly with the balance between his art and his political polemics. Born and raised in Jamaica, he published his first volume of poetry there at the age of twenty-three (Songs of Jamaica, 1912). His second volume, Constab Ballads, published the same year, featured poems about his experiences as a Jamaican police officer. He traveled to the United States to study at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but was shocked at the level of racism he encountered in the South. McKay left the South to study at Kansas State University, but the lure of Harlem, inspired in part by reading Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, pulled him away before he could finish his degree. About his abrupt departure from school, he wrote, “If I would not graduate as a bachelor of arts, I would graduate as a poet.”
In Harlem, McKay worked as a waiter on the railways while continuing to write and occasionally publish his poetry. “Harlem was my first positive reaction to American life,” he wrote. “…It was like entering a paradise of my own people.” McKay’s exposure to American racism had radicalized his politics to the degree that he rejected both Marcus Garvey and the elitism of his hero Du Bois and the NAACP. Instead, he embraced communism, helping found the re
volutionary group the African Blood Brotherhood. He began to write for the radical socialist magazine the Liberator, which published his poem “If We Must Die” (see the chapter “ ‘Some Technicolor Bazaar’: How Harlem Became the Center of the Universe”), his response to the rash of race riots across the country in the summer of 1919. His poem articulated the rage that most blacks felt, instantly thrusting McKay into the forefront as both a writer and spokesperson for disillusioned African-Americans. “That one grand outburst,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is their sole standard of appraising my poetry.”
McKay then traveled to London, England, where he studied Marx more closely. He became a paid journalist for the socialist newspaper the Workers’ Dreadnought, which some historians claim made him England’s first black journalist. After a year, he returned to Harlem, ready to take his place among the literary greats that fostered awareness of the Harlem Renaissance. He quickly published his first American book of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922). His interaction with the master intellects of the Renaissance left him ill at ease. “And now that I was legging along with the intellectual gang,” he recounted, “Harlem for me did not hold quite the same thrill and glamour as before.” Still conflicted between his literary success and his commitment to revolutionary politics, he decided to travel to the Soviet Union to attend the Third Communist International. He did not return to the United States for twelve years. He explained his need to travel in his autobiography: “Color consciousness was the fundamental of my restlessness…. My white fellow-expatriates could sympathize but…they could not altogether understand…. Unable to see deep into the profundity of blackness, some even thought…I might have preferred to be white like them…. They couldn’t understand the instinctive…pride of a black person resolute in being himself and yet living a simple civilized life like themselves.”
On the Shoulders of Giants Page 10