White-man’s land.
Niggers, sing.
Burn, bear black children
Till poor rivers bring
Rest, and sweet glory
In Camp Ground.
Kabnis’ thin hair is streaked on the pillow. His hand strokes the slim silk of his mustache. His thumb, pressed under his chin, seems to be trying to give squareness and projection to it. Brown eyes stare from a lemon face. Moisture gathers beneath his arm-pits. He slides down beneath the cover, seeking release.
Kabnis: Near me. Now. Whoever you are, my warm glowing sweetheart, do not think that the face that rests beside you is the real Kabnis. Ralph Kabnis is a dream. And dreams are faces with large eyes and weak chins and broad brows that get smashed by the fists of square faces. The body of the world is bull-necked. A dream is a soft face that fits uncertainly upon it . . . God, if I could develop that in words. Give what I know a bull-neck and a heaving body, all would go well with me, wouldn’t it, sweetheart? If I could feel that I came to the South to face it. If I, the dream (not what is weak and afraid in me) could become the face of the South. How my lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of its soul. Soul. Soul hell. There aint no such thing. What in hell was that?
THE FLOWERING OF THE RENAISSANCE
BETWEEN THE END of World War I and 1924, serious works by African Americans were published and laid the foundation for more to come. W. E. B. Du Bois published Darkwater, a collection of essays, in 1920, and in 1921 Benjamin Brawley’s groundbreaking A Social History of the American Negro appeared in print. But the renaissance truly began with the publication of a book of poems, Harlem Shadows, by Claude McKay in 1922. This collection contains his most famous sonnets, “If We Must Die,” “The White House,” “America,” and “The Lynching.” That same year poet Georgia Douglass Johnson’s Bronze and James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry appeared. James Weldon Johnson explained the importance of these works in the introduction to his Book of American Negro Poetry:
No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior. . . . The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.
Johnson’s bold assertions characterized the sentiment among African-American writers in the early twenties. Their impulse was toward either a “raceless” literature that demonstrated just how little blacks differed from whites, or a literature of “uplift” that would raise African Americans’ intellectual status to a level of parity with whites. The most notable of this group was Du Bois’s protégé Jessie Redmond Fauset. Her novel There Is Confusion explored how blacks in large cities, such as New York, could find their identity amid the myths and social constructs of the dominant white culture. Black critic George S. Schuyler took Johnson’s argument about “intellectual parity” even further. Schuyler made a famous defense of “universal” literature in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum,” in which he argued that blacks and whites live in the same culture, not in two separate ones, and thus their literature should not be different from one another.
Details from “Drawing for Mulattoes – Number 4” by Richard Bruce in Ebony and Topaz.
[W]hen he responds to the same political, social, moral, and economic stimuli in precisely the same manner as his white neighbor, it is sheer nonsense to talk about “racial differences” as between the American black man and the American white man. Glance over a Negro newspaper (it is printed in good Americanese) and you will find the usual quota of crime news, scandal, personals, and uplift to be found in the average white newspaper — which, by the way, is more widely read by the Negroes than is the Negro press. In order to satisfy the cravings of an inferiority complex engendered by the colorphobia of the mob, the readers of the Negro newspapers are given a slight dash of racialistic seasoning. In the homes of black and white Americans of the same cultural and economic level one finds similar furniture, literature, and conversation. How, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?
Schuyler and others were correct in asserting that African Americans are no different than whites, but they were mistaken in deeming similar the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual — in short, universal — experiences of all Americans in the same socioeconomic class. Without question, the black experience in a white culture is profoundly different than the white experience. Blacks simply did not have the same freedom and opportunity. Consequently, what made writers such as Jean Toomer and Claude McKay so powerful was their ability to express an authentic black experience that was simultaneously rooted in the particulars of black life and involved in themes universal to all humankind. The notion of a “raceless” literature is limited to universal themes that affect all people, thus it cannot address cultural minutiae of a particular community.
“In the homes of black and white Americans of the same cultural and economic level one finds similar furniture, literature, and conversation. How, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?”
Detail of Aaron Douglas cover illustration for FIRE!!
FIRE!!
AN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY
FIRE . . . a cry of conquest in the night warning
those who sleep and revitalizing those who
linger in the quiet places dozing. . . .
“Fy-ah,
Fy-ah, Lawd,
Fy-ah gonna burn ma soul!”
— Foreword to the literary magazine FIRE!!
THE MATCH
STRIKE A MATCH and the white-hot flame will crackle and pop. The intense light will blind and dazzle. The fierce heat will burn and singe. Its spark will give energy where only dormant matter existed before. In 1923, Harlem was a match ready to be ignited. All that was needed was the right person, at the right time, to strike it. That person had to be someone who would not simply light the match but also feed the fire. Harlem was now crowded with explosive talent and creativity, but the fuse hadn’t been lit. That is, until Charles Spurgeon Johnson moved to Harlem from Chicago.
CHARLES SPURGEON JOHNSON 1893–1956
Born in 1893 in Bristol, Virginia, Charles Spurgeon Johnson was the son of a Baptist minister and grew up in a secure middle-class family. Later in life he described his father as an atypical black minister because of the elder Johnson’s “quality and security of his education.” From an early age Johnson was required to study the classics of Western literature, theology, and history. Before he left home at fourteen to attend Wayland Academy in Richmond, Virginia, he had been reading — “though not necessarily always absorbing” — such works as the Lives of the Saints, the sermons of Spurgeon, Greek mythology, Gibbons’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and countless dimestore mysteries and adventure novels. In 1916 Johnson graduated from Virginia Union University, finishing in three years. From there he moved to the University of Chicago, where he did graduate work in sociology. His studies were interrupted by World War I, where he saw action as a regimental sergeant major in the 103rd Pioneer Infantry. After the war he was a major contributor to the 1922 book The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. From there, he went to New York to work for the National Urban League, where he directed economic and sociological research. At this time he also edited the National Urban League’s magazine, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which became one of the era’s biggest supporters of African-American literature and arts. After organizing the famous Civic Club Dinner, Johnson edited an anthology of renaissance prose and poetry titled Ebony and Topaz, published in 1927. By the next year Johnson felt that the momentum of the renaissance was assured, so he left New York for Nashville and Fisk University’s sociology department. Johnson eventual
ly became Fisk’s first African-American president, and over the next few decades he became one of America’s most respected and honored sociologists.
Johnson wasn’t an artist himself. He was a sociologist who had made a name for himself in Chicago for his groundbreaking work on racism. In 1923 he left a promising career as a scholar to come to Harlem not simply to study but to put into practice his ideas about combating racism — ideas that were considered radical at the time. From his earlier studies Johnson had become convinced that blacks and whites would someday live in equality. He believed that blacks and whites would finally “cut across and eventually undermine all barriers of racial segregation and caste.” He had the visionary idea that whites would accept and appreciate blacks simply by hanging out with them in the same places — sharing ideas, meals, and work. Johnson dedicated himself tirelessly to this mission by promoting and publishing black artists during the renaissance and afterward.
According to Langston Hughes, Johnson “did more to encourage and develop Negro writers during the 1920s than anyone else in America.” As founder and editor of the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, Johnson was determined to help African-American writers and artists gain recognition beyond the boundaries of Harlem and the small black communities scattered across America. The initial mission of Opportunity was to “depict Negro life as it is with no exaggerations. We shall try to set down interestingly but without sugar-coating or generalization the findings of careful scientific surveys and the facts gathered from research.” Johnson expanded that purpose in the next issue to reach beyond cold, hard facts and figures to include “the cultural side of Negro life that has been long neglected.” He knew that people would need to see the souls of African Americans in order to understand them, and that that could only be done through the arts. His mission for the journal, and himself, was to make public the exciting poems, stories, essays, photographs, and artwork of African Americans who explored authentic black cultural life.
Johnson found that publishing the work of African Americans in Opportunity and waiting for readers to discover them was too slow a process. He wanted results right away, and with good reason. Johnson knew that an author’s publication in Opportunity would never guarantee mainstream literary success, much less break down the barriers of the white publishing world. He’d also been observing the writers he published struggle to get by with low-paying jobs as busboys, bellhops, porters, and maids. In fact, the most famous writer of the renaissance, Langston Hughes, made his living as a busboy while his poems appeared in such acclaimed publications as Harper’s magazine, Opportunity, and the Crisis. Novelist Wallace Thurman and poet Arna Bontemps worked for the Los Angeles post office. Artist Aaron Douglas was a poorly paid teacher in a segregated Kansas City school. Johnson knew that there were many other talented African Americans who had to sacrifice their gifts to make the rent and put food on the table. He worried that it would be just a matter of time before their spirits would be broken just like the generation before and the generation before that.
He knew that people would need to see the souls of African Americans in order to understand them, and that that could only be done through the arts.
“What American literature needs at this moment is color, If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. I do not know what Americans are.”
— Carl Van Doren, editor of Century Magazine, at the Civic Club Dinner
With the weight of the Urban League and Opportunity behind him, Johnson fought this tragedy-in-the-making every way he could. He started contests with substantial prizes of $100 or more. At the time this was a considerable amount of money, when most blacks made much less than that in a month. These prizes brought publicity to the Harlem writers, but more was needed to establish them as important authors in the minds — and pocketbooks — of the larger, more powerful white community. A “coming-out party” was Johnson’s answer. He calculated that if he could get influential editors and publishers in the same room with Harlem’s literati, he could persuade them to recognize the immense talent in the black community. With that recognition, black writers and artists could gain the widespread publication and financial support they deserved. At the beginning of 1924 Johnson began planning a literary extravaganza, the likes of which had never been seen in New York before. He initially used the publication of Jessie Redmond Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confusion, as the reason for the event. Fauset was the literary editor of the Crisis and one of the most respected writers among the more established artists.
Jessie Fauset
The event, however, quickly evolved beyond one author’s book party and into a full-scale celebration of African-American literature called the Civic Club Dinner. Johnson enlisted the help of white railroad heir and Urban League board member William H. Baldwin III, who took to the task with enthusiasm. Baldwin appealed to numerous movers and shakers of the downtown publishing world, especially Frederick Lewis Allen, the Harper & Brothers editor. Baldwin later wrote, “Allen invited a ‘small but representative group from his field,’ and Charles S. Johnson ‘supplied an equally representative group of Negroes.’”
Portrait of Countee Cullen by Winold Reiss.
THE TINDERBOX
A group of the younger writers, which includes Eric Walrond, Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and some others [would be at the Civic Club]. . . . I think you might find this group interesting at least enough to draw you away for a few hours from your work on your next book.
SO READ CHARLES S. Johnson’s invitation to Jean Toomer. The dinner was planned for March 21, 1924, at New York’s only integrated upper-crust club, the Civic Club, on Twelfth Street near Fifth Avenue, and all the Harlem literati were invited.
A report of the celebrated dinner appeared shortly after in Opportunity
THE DEBUT OF THE YOUNGER SCHOOL OF NEGRO WRITERS
Interest among the literati of New York in the emerging group of younger Negro writers found an expression in a recent meeting of the Writers’ Guild, an informal group whose membership includes Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, Harold Jackman, Regina Anderson, and a few others. The occasion was a “coming out party,” at the Civic Club, on March 21 — a date selected around the appearance of the novel “There Is Confusion” by Jessie Fauset. The responses to the invitations sent out were immediate and enthusiastic and the few regrets that came in were genuine.
Although there was no formal, prearranged program, the occasion provoked a surprising spontaneity of expression from both the members of the writers’ group and from the distinguished visitors present.
A brief interpretation of the object of the Guild was given by Charles S. Johnson, Editor of Opportunity, who introduced Alain Locke, virtual don of the movement, who had been selected to act as Master of Ceremonies and to interpret the new currents manifest in the literature of this younger school. Alain Locke has been one of the most resolute stimulators of this group, and although he has been writing longer than most of them, he is distinctly a part of the movement. One excerpt reflects the tenor of his remarks. He said: “They sense within their group — meaning the Negro group — a spiritual wealth which if they can properly expound will be ample for a new judgment and re-appraisal of the race.”
Horace Liveright, publisher, told about the difficulties, even yet, of marketing books of admitted merit. The value of a book cannot be gauged by the sales. He regarded Jean Toomer’s “Cane” as one of the most interesting that he had handled and yet, less than 500 copies had been sold. In his exhortations to the younger group he warned against the danger of reflecting in one’s own writings the “inferiority complex” which is so insistently and frequently apparent in an overbalanced emphasis on “impossibly good” fiction types. He felt that to do the best writing it was necessary to give a rounded picture which included bad types as well a
s good ones since both of these go to make up life.
Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois made his first public appearance and address since his return to this country from Africa. He was introduced by the chairman with soft seriousness as a representative of the “older school.” Dr. Du Bois explained that the Negro writers of a few years back were of necessity pioneers, and much of their style was forced upon them by the barriers against publication of literature about Negroes of any sort.
James Weldon Johnson was introduced as an anthologist of Negro verse and one who had given invaluable encouragement to the work of this younger group.
Carl Van Doren, Editor of the Century, spoke on the future of imaginative writing among Negroes. His remarks are given in full elsewhere in this issue.
Another young Negro writer, Walter F. White, whose novel “Fire in Flint” has been accepted for publication, also spoke and made reference to the passing of the stereotypes of the Negroes of fiction.
Professor Montgomery Gregory of Howard University, who came from Washington for the meeting, talked about the possibilities of Negroes in drama and told of the work of several talented Negro writers in this field, some of whose plays were just coming into recognition.
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