by Philipp Blom
Father figure: W. E. B. Du Bois was a towering figure among African American civil rights activists and advocates.
Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity, founded in 1922 as the mouthpiece for the National Urban League and also still published today, served much the same role, providing, in Johnson’s words, “an outlet for young Negro writers and scholars whose work was not acceptable to other established media because it could not be believed to be of standard quality despite the superior quality of much of it.”6 Though, like The Crisis, in general it sought to showcase a well-educated and well-behaved black America—the “new Negro” in his Sunday best, as it were—Opportunity also provided a platform for black defiance.
The young Langston Hughes—the future poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance—was a perfect example of Du Bois’s talented tenth. Grandson of Mary Langston, the first black woman to graduate from Oberlin College in Ohio, Hughes was a star pupil at his Cleveland high school, had already worked as an English teacher in Mexico, and was now a student of mining engineering at New York’s prestigious Columbia University. But though Du Bois had provided a vital conduit for his first literary efforts, Hughes chafed at the restraints of his expectations: Du Bois, like many of his generation, expected Hughes and other rising stars to subordinate artistic imperatives to the political needs of the wider movement for black equality and, specifically, racial integration. By contrast, Hughes and his contemporaries regarded themselves as artists first and political activists second, and even emphasized differences between the races rather than seeking to lessen or downplay them. By 1926, a new, more radical magazine was on the stands: Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!
Thurman was just twenty-four years old when he quit his position as editor of The Messenger, a black socialist magazine, to start Fire!! Rather than presenting an impressive and unexceptionable—essentially middle-class—black elite, as The Crisis and Opportunity were seeking to do, the new journal unapologetically introduced what Thurman regarded as a more genuine picture of black America: “uneducated, crude, and scrappy black men and women depicted without tinsel or soap.”7 Thurman had recruited his contributors from the ranks of the older journals; they included Hughes, Du Bois’s future son-in-law Countee Cullen, writers Gwendolyn Bennett and Zora Neale Hurston, journalist John P. Davis, painter and illustrator Aaron Douglas, and writer and painter Richard Bruce Nugent.
Though their subject matter could be daring (Nugent’s short story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” is believed to have been the first open depiction of black homosexuality), all seven were, like Thurman himself, university-educated and very far from crude. Hurston, known as the “Queen of the Renaissance,” was particularly keen on the tinseled aspects of Harlem life. She confidently referred to herself and other black intellectuals and artists as “the niggerati.” Rebuked for coining such a racially charged term, she replied, “I am not tragically colored. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood. . . . I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”8
Hurston had grown up in the entirely black community of Eatonville, Florida, where all positions of authority and responsibility were filled by black people and discrimination was unknown, to the point that she was able to declare in a 1928 essay, “I remember the very day that I became colored”—namely, in 1904, at the age of thirteen, when she was sent to high school in Jacksonville, a Jim Crow stronghold. (The Massachusetts-born Du Bois had experienced a similar shock upon his arrival in Tennessee in 1885.) New York City, to which Hurston moved in 1925, was not Jacksonville, but it was not Eatonville, either. “Beside the waters of the Hudson,” she admitted in the same essay, “I feel my race. . . . Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”9
Hurston’s dismissive urbanity, a witty pretense that there was no problem anyway, was an unusual line of opposition to the efforts of Du Bois and other older blacks for social respectability and racial integration. More common was the view of Hurston’s close friend Hughes, who, in a celebrated 1926 essay, described “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”10
Some young intellectuals were prepared to go further. Artist Aaron Douglas, in tones reminiscent of the black separatist Marcus Garvey, went so far as to declare: “We believe that the Negro is fundamentally, essentially different from their Nordic neighbors. We are proud of that difference. We believe these differences to be greater spiritual endowment, greater sensitivity, greater power for artistic expression and appreciation. We believe Negro art should be trained and developed rather than capitalized and exploited.”11
Douglas created several powerful illustrations for the first issue of Fire!! in November 1926, and it helped to make his name as the leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. But this was to be the only issue that made it to the stands—the journal quickly folded for lack of financial support.
Not that there were no backers for the talented tenth, even if they rejected that epithet. Having fallen out with his wealthy father, Hughes, for example, would soon benefit for several years from the largesse of Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white heiress in her seventies, known to her many Harlem beneficiaries as “Mother.” Though herself a long-term recipient of their help, the irrepressible Zora Neale Hurston cheekily dubbed Mason and other white supporters of the Harlem Renaissance “negrotarians.”
Identity Games
IN THE WIDER WORLD, the prolific output of black writers was easily overshadowed by the publication of Carl Van Vechten’s controversial 1926 roman à clef, Nigger Heaven. Van Vechten, a photographer as well as a journalist and writer, was one of Hurston’s “negrotarians”; his novel described a love affair between a prim young black librarian and an aspiring but undisciplined black writer in “the great black walled city” of Harlem.
A white, middle-class boy with a taste for opera, modern dance, beautiful young men, and artistic rebellion, Van Vechten was attracted to outsiders and soon began to play an important part in the Harlem Renaissance. As black writers had done before him, Van Vechten made use of the idiom and rhythms of black speech among the young “sheiks” and “shebas”: “Dis place,” says Rose, who both pays and is paid for sex, “where Ah met you—Harlem. Ah calls et, specherly tonight, Ah calls et Nigger Heaven! I jes’ nacherly think dis heah is Nigger Heaven!”12
But Van Vechten did not spend much time describing the lives of the working poor or any kind of underclass; instead, he dwelled on the black rich, or rather two distinct groups of them: on the one hand, the hard-drinking, cocaine-sniffing decadent rich, and their sordid and often violent world; and on the other, those of the bourgeois “blue vein club,” well-educated, lighter-skinned blacks who distanced themselves from the darker-skinned, even occasionally passing for white.
Despite some supportive characters, lack of black solidarity was a marked feature of Van Vechten’s novel. “Don’t [Negroes] want a member of their race to get on?” asks the would-be writer, Byron. “Where have you been living?” answers his fair-skinned black friend Dick, who is about to “cross the line” and live as a white man. “They do not. You’ll have to fight your own race harder than you do the other. . . . If they’re in trouble they go to white lawyers, and they go to white banks and white insurance companies. . . . Most of ’em . . . pray to a white God. You won’t get much help from the race.”13 As for white people, “I believe,” says the prim young librarian, “that they actually prefer us when we’re not respectable.”14
Du Bois, always anxious to present a “respectable” picture of his race, slammed Van Vechten’s book as “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of whites.”15 Other black intellectuals, however, defended it as a product of artistic freedom and anyway true to life,
and white middle-class readers responded enthusiastically, with the book igniting a fashionable interest in Harlem culture, both high and low.
Though Du Bois was taking a more and more conservative stance toward literary Harlem, his political stance was moving further to the left. In 1927, increasingly interested in the economics of class distinctions, he paid a visit to Soviet Russia.
THE BLACK CULTURAL REVIVAL had many facets. There was Du Bois with his Pan-African Congress, petitioning major powers not only to grant a greater number of enforceable civil rights to blacks everywhere but also to decolonize Africa; there was Marcus Garvey, a forceful Jamaican orator and politician who sought to repatriate all African Americans to Africa in a movement appropriately named Black Zionism; and there was everything in between. It was a climate marked by bitterness and determination to break out of the racial boundaries set by white America—but, most important, it featured an incredible optimism that a new beginning might be possible. “For generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden,” wrote Alain Locke, one of the greatest exponents of the spiritual rebirth of black culture, in an essay entitled “Enter the New Negro.” “Harlem, as we shall see, is . . . the home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism.’ The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.”16
The majority of the inhabitants of the new Harlem, however, simply wanted a decent life without the humiliating daily experiences constantly meted out to people of color. They also wanted to have fun, and it was this aspect of the great Harlem Renaissance that was to make it famous beyond the boundaries of the district and a small circle of literature lovers who admired young black poets whose works were only just beginning to hit the literary mainstream.
For most whites, Harlem meant entertainment, and principally jazz, “the most significant, the most indigenous and unprecedented American music of the 1920s.”17 Before the 1920s, jazz, like blues, had existed as black music only, almost unknown to white Americans. But at the beginning of the decade commercial radio stations spread the new sound, with popular white entertainers such as bandleader Paul Whiteman, the “King of Jazz,” helping to bring it a little closer to the mainstream. (It was Whiteman who, in 1923, was to commission George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.)
White audiences were ready to pay to see black musicals, too. And when the theaters closed, they streamed uptown into the late-night bars and clubs of Harlem to feel the beat, however muffled in their presence, of the Negro pulse. By 1923 many were heading for the Cotton Club, a whites-only establishment run from his cell in Sing Sing prison by the English-born gangster Owney “The Killer” Madden. All the waiters and most of the entertainers at the Cotton Club were black, though the leggy chorus girls were expected to be lighter-skinned (“tall, tan and terrific”), and some whites, including Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Mae West, and Judy Garland, did perform on “celebrity Sunday nights.”
Standard fare for the white guests, however, were reassuring scenes from the “Old South” or “darkest Africa”: a cheerful band of “darkies” on the veranda of a cotton baron’s mansion, their slave quarters painted into the backdrop, or a troupe of painted “savages” gyrating to frenzied drums. But beneath the crystal chandeliers, among the tables covered with red-and-white gingham, first-rate entertainment was also to be had: Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, and a whole firmament of other black stars made their show business debut, or their name, at the Cotton Club—and made its owner a fortune into the bargain.
With the opening of the Savoy Ballroom in 1926, black music took another step forward. The now familiar Cotton Club “hot jazz”—which “vomited, neighed, barked, and snorted”—was metamorphosing.18 The dancing it accompanied, ever less restrained, turned into jitterbugging or Lindy Hopping—the latter named, surprisingly enough, for the aviator Charles Lindbergh. It was at the elegant, pink-walled Savoy that the new style was to find its most enthusiastic exponents, including pianist and composer Duke Ellington, drummer Chick Webb, and, later, singer Ella Fitzgerald and pianist and orchestra leader Count Basie. With his 1931 hit “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” Ellington was to give the new music its lasting name: swing.
Unlike the Cotton Club, the Savoy was not segregated; under white ownership (reputedly that of Chicago mobster Al Capone) but black management, it welcomed patrons of both races. The only restricted area of its vast ballroom, which could accommodate up to four thousand people, was the famed northeast corner, where the very best dancers, most of them black professionals, competed for the laurels of the evening, cheered on by hundreds of the less proficient. “The music shivered and broke, cracked and smashed. Jungle land. Hottentots and Bantus under the amber moon.”19
Despite the lack of formal segregation, the young poet Langston Hughes had nothing but contempt for the “corner” phenomenon of exceptional black dancers being gaped at, as he saw it, by white onlookers, as if they were visiting a zoo: “The lindy-hoppers at the Savoy even began to practice acrobatic routines,” he wrote, “and to do absurd things for the entertainment of the whites, that probably never would have entered their heads to attempt for their own effortless amusement. Some of the lindy-hoppers had cards printed with their names on them and became dance professors teaching the tourists. Then Harlem nights became show nights for the Nordics.”20
Hughes, himself the son of a well-to-do family, may have been overlooking the importance of the “show nights” as a source of income for the Harlem dancers. But it was impossible to escape the intrinsic ambivalence, if not outright hostility, at the base of race relations in almost every walk of life.
Harlem Shadows
A YOUNGER GENERATION OF BLACKS was tired of staying where white prejudice had put them, and 1922 witnessed articulations of a newly confident African American culture, among them the publication of Harlem Shadows, a slim book of poetry. It was one of the first books by a black author to bear the imprint of a prestigious mainstream publisher, Harcourt, Brace, whose authors included T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. The author’s name was Claude McKay.
The poem that gave the collection its title described the author’s deep ambivalence about life in Negro Harlem, where young black women reduced to prostitution were wearily haunting the streets at night in their “slippered feet” in search of clients, distraction, and perhaps redemption. It culminated in an indictment of the society that gave them no other choice:
Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay.
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.
McKay was one of the thousands of recent arrivals in Harlem who had come to make a different life for himself, but he was more fortunate than most. The youngest of a comfortable farming family in Clarendon, Jamaica, he had not been subject to the savagery of southern racism as a child. In 1912, at age twenty-three, he had come to the United States to study agronomy at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a former teachers’ college founded by Booker T. Washington in the previous century as part of the drive for higher education for black Americans.
Rebelling against the regimented teaching style at Tuskegee, and shocked by the experience of racial segregation and daily discrimination in Alabama and other American states, McKay had eventually abandoned his university studies and had moved north. In New York he had opened a restaurant, and closed it, bankrupt; he had worked as a waiter on the railways; and he had become involved in left-wing politics. All the while he had been writing poetry. His lyric gift and the passion evident in his writing brought McKay quick recognition as one of the most promising voices of his generation.
; The poet, meanwhile, had decided not to stay in a country in which black people like himself could be hunted through the streets. McKay sailed for Britain, armed with a letter of introduction to George Bernard Shaw. In London, however, he encountered a different but still pervasive form of social exclusion. He found it difficult to make a connection with white British society, whose members he described as “a strangely unsympathetic people, as coldly chilling as their English fog.”21
McKay quickly found that as a dark-skinned foreigner he was more or less explicitly expected to remain among his kind, and he found company in a club for “Coloured Servicemen” whose members, many of them from Britain’s colonies, related stories that sharpened his own outlook on the British Empire and the position of its subjects. Eventually McKay found other welcoming niches in the vast edifice of London society. Even in the United States, he had been keenly interested in left-wing politics. Now, at the International Socialist Club, he became immersed in the fervent ideological debates between British Communists and Russians or Poles of Jewish descent, “dogmatists and doctrinaires of radical left ideas: Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, one-big-unionists, and trade unionists, soap-boxers, poetasters, scribblers, editors of little radical sheets which flourish in London.”22
Once back from England, Claude McKay had intensified his political activism. He briefly became co-editor of the Marxist magazine The Liberator but soon left the job because of political differences with other members of the staff. He was also restless, and in 1922, the year of the publication of his collection Harlem Shadows, he set off again, this time bound for Moscow, where he was to meet Trotsky and attend the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.