by Imani Perry
Chapter Two. The Sound and Fury of a Renaissance
Art and Activism in the Early Twentieth Century
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
—CLAUDE MCKAY, “If We Must Die”
I have commonly found printed or typewritten copies of the words pasted in the back of hymnals and the song books used in Sunday schools, Y.M.C.A.s and similar institutions and I think that is the manner by which it gets its widest circulation. . . . Nothing I have done has paid me back so fully as being part creator of this song.
—JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation. . . . With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without.
—ALAIN LOCKE, “Enter the New Negro”
Alain Locke’s 1925 essay “Enter the New Negro” is a classic in African American letters.1 In it, Locke describes a shift in black cultural and political life, a step toward greater boldness and unfettered imagination. But by the time the essay was published, black America was already a decade into the movement he described. During the years of World War I, and in its aftermath, black Americans, with their institutions now solidified, began mobilizing widely and creating more. Locke described this transition toward “the New Negro” by focusing on the work of artists and activists centered in Harlem, and in particular on black efforts to be included in American electoral politics, and the rise of black modernist art and literature. But in truth, notwithstanding the brilliance of many of Locke’s insights, the scope of the New Negro extended far beyond his account.
In the midst of this period of social, cultural, and political transformation, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” became even more deeply entrenched in black life. The song not only journeyed with migrants and strivers but it also gave voice to their aspirations and became a part of the canon upon which the artists and intellectuals drew as they boldly asserted their blackness. In particular, the embrace of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as the official song of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and its ultimate rejection by Marcus Garvey and other critics, signaled both the song’s importance in the articulation of black politics and the fact that it was already cherished by the time new and expanding political organizations were grappling with what to do with it. Therefore it is unsurprising that in the art and public culture that were so critical in this period, the song was used as a universal signifier of black identity. This chapter will proceed by first providing a foundational account of the transformations of the New Negro era and then elaborating on how the anthem fit within that transformation—at times as a ground of contention and conflict—setting the stage for its role in black politics and culture through the subsequent decades.
Between 1910 and 1930, 1.6 million African Americans moved from the rural South to southern, midwestern, and northern cities.2 The pace of this migration quickly accelerated at the beginning of World War I and stayed steady until the stock market crash of 1929. Black migrants were seekers, pushing past the roadblocks set up by Jim Crow injustice. Locke astutely noted that the New Negro wasn’t all that dramatically different from preceding generations. Black people had always been strivers, resisters, and creators. But, he argued, now black Americans were assertively shedding the erroneous stereotypes that had been applied to the “Old Negro” (docility, complacency, obedience) and entering into public, political, and artistic arenas with heretofore unseen boldness. Migrants sought greater economic and political opportunity, and simply more freedom, all of which usually proved elusive. They nevertheless set off on faith and sought their fortunes in new places. And they kept searching when the promise of a destination didn’t pan out. “The migrant masses,” Locke wrote, “shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life—attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about.”3
Locke’s anthology, which bore the same title as his featured essay, was an important document of the 1920s. But the age of the New Negro, which by some accounts dates as far back as the earliest years of the twentieth century, was an intellectual and political project articulated most powerfully through the black press. There were over 1,000 black newspapers and magazines in the United States by 1910.4 This remarkable quantity reflects both the passionate struggle for literacy following emancipation, and its achievement.5 In these papers the promises of migration were touted. But perhaps even more salient, black political life and thought, as revealed in their pages, was international in scope. Black Americans were encouraged to see themselves as part of a global racial community of people who were both Jim Crowed and colonized. They also saw themselves as being, overwhelmingly, exploited workers. Therefore, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the rise of leftist politics internationally were meaningful and instructive for readers.
Even the structure of capitalism was shifting, and so dedicated capitalists were as well. Western societies became less oligarchic in the wake of the second industrial revolution. That is to say that although the bosses of this gilded age were as exploitative as any economic elites, their leadership was volatile and fortunes were rapidly made and lost. As businesses rose and fell, even capitalism had a populist luster.
At the same time, while African Americans were witnessing the fall of European empires and the victory of the Mexican Revolution, they watched in horror as European powers grabbed the land of Africa. Between the 1870s and World War I, 85 percent of the globe was gobbled up by colonialism.6 In a time at once harrowing and marked by change, it is no wonder that black political organizing thrived. The political imagination and the need and calls for black self-defense were heightened. Two organizations in particular became dramatically representative of the political energy of the period: Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the NAACP.
As a young man, Garvey, a native of St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, was inspired and influenced by Booker T. Washington’s memoir Up from Slavery. Washington’s gospel of economic development and self-improvement appealed to Garvey, who formed the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914. Finding the development of his organization challenging, he decided to travel to the United States to meet with Booker T. Washington. By the time he arrived in 1916, however, Washington had died (with a statesman-like funeral that featured the singing of “Lift Every Voice”). Garvey remained for a time and traveled around the United States. He was incensed to find that black soldiers who had served in the World War were not treated with appreciation or respect when they returned home but often encountered racist violence instead. He saw that Jim Crow was not simply a matter of southern racial domination but that it extended north as well, impacting where and how black people lived and worked all over the nation.7 Garvey began to distinguish himself philosophically from Washington, skeptical that economic development and self-improvement by themselves would soften white racism against black people, or lead to full citizenship. He became nationalistic, more in the vein of Martin Delany than Washington.8 Garvey built his platform touting the greatness of African culture and insisting that black people across the globe should pursue independence and the creation of a black empire. Under this philosophy, Garvey established the UNIA headquarters in New York in 1917. The ultimate goal of the organization was for the descendants of the African diaspora to return to Afric
a and build the great black nation. While this goal wasn’t met, Garvey was incredibly successful in nurturing and developing explicit racial pride and cultural nationalism among people of the African diaspora. The UNIA grew rapidly and by the early 1920s had 700 chapters in thirty-eight U.S. states in addition to several in Canada and the Caribbean. Members were urban and rural, local and global. The UNIA claimed to have 6 million members by 1921. Even the more conservative estimate of 1 million members was extraordinary.9
Although ultimately they would share a commitment to return to Africa (though only one of the two was successful) and both placed a premium on economic development and cultural affirmation for people of African descent, Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois, the preeminent African American scholar and intellectual, had an antagonistic relationship in the 1910s and 1920s. Garvey made the first overture to DuBois by going to visit him at his NAACP office in New York, from which DuBois edited The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. Garvey was astonished and dismayed that the staff of the Crisis was overwhelmingly white.10 He also didn’t like the way DuBois rebuffed him. Garvey accused the NAACP and DuBois of being too white, and DuBois responded with nativist and colorist insults to Garvey’s heritage and flesh. They went back and forth for years. DuBois ultimately exposed the UNIA’s troubled and troublesome finances and, with his NAACP colleagues, worked to undermine Garvey’s popularity.11
Beyond the personal attacks were substantive disagreements that give a sense of the era’s politics. DuBois was becoming a Marxist, Garvey a capitalist. DuBois’s racial logic considered the color line internationally, to include Asian and indigenous people. He saw the line, as sociologist Albert Memmi would later deem it, as one that distinguished between the colonizer and the colonized. Garvey was explicitly devoted to Africans, although he understood that term internationally as well. Within the NAACP, DuBois chafed under white leadership and was often at odds with the organization’s moderate and cautious board.12 Garvey’s charges regarding the NAACP’s “whiteness” unquestionably struck a nerve. That said, there is some irony in the fact that while Garvey saw himself following in the footsteps of Washington, and DuBois had always been to the political left of Washington, Garvey’s work resonated more deeply with the black everywoman and everyman.
Garvey’s reaction to the racial composition of the NAACP was, in fact, shared by many black organizers and activists.13 The organization’s reluctance to invite politically radical and outspoken black people to serve in key positions increased general black skepticism of the NAACP. However, the organization changed in the 1910s in some critical ways. The Crisis, a monthly magazine first published by the NAACP in 1910, began with a circulation of 1,000. A year later, the circulation was 9,000. By 1912 it was 27,000, and by 1918 it was 100,000.14 While the numbers of NAACP members and Crisis subscribers were dwarfed by those of the UNIA, the Crisis had immense influence on black sociopolitical thought. Its circulation, in fact, is likely to have been several times greater than the number of issues sold, because issues were widely shared within communities. In its pages DuBois and his fellow authors offered passionate critiques of Jim Crow, economic exploitation, and colonialism, as well as white supremacy generally. The Crisis established a network of knowledge, as well as a common body of written work, that was both creative and journalistic for black Americans. Further, it deepened the information provided by local or regional black newspapers. The Crisis documented the work of its parent organization as well. Writings recounted how the NAACP challenged segregation in the Woodrow Wilson administration and effectively lobbied against segregationist bills in D.C. This activism, which produced tangible results, elicited approval and increased interest from black people.
In 1916, the NAACP issued a call for a conference of black leaders in the aftermath of Booker T. Washington’s death. The goal was to unite activists who had too often fallen into two camps: pro- or anti-Washington. The conference was held from August 24 to 26 in Troutbeck, New York, at Joel Spingarn’s estate, “Amenia.” The fifty attendees adopted what they termed a “Unity Platform” that focused upon both education and political rights. They pledged to undo old hurts and enmities.15 Garvey, still new to black American politics, was not present at Amenia and probably would have demurred even if he had been invited, as it was held at the home of one of the white NAACP founders and there were many white people in attendance. However, there were also many notable African Americans present, including the president of Morehouse college, John Hope; lawyer, journalist, and novelist Charles Waddell Chestnut; NACW and YWCA activist Addie Hunton (one of only two black women assigned to work with American troops during World War I); NACW president and NAACP cofounder Mary Church Terrell; and antilynching activist and suffragist Mary B. Talbert. DuBois would write in retrospect, “I doubt if ever before so small a conference of American Negroes had so many colored men [sic] of distinction who represented at the same time so complete a picture of all phases of Negro thought. Its very completeness was its salvation.”16
That number also included James Weldon Johnson. Over the weekend Johnson and Dubois bonded as friends and brothers in struggle, so much so that they talked of forming their own secret civil rights organization.17 Johnson was one of those who had once been associated with Booker T. Washington, but his political writings over the twenty years preceding the Amenia meeting had been closer to DuBois. Johnson once commented wryly that Washington, who advocated industrial education for African Americans, had himself benefited from a liberal education.18 And as an Atlanta University graduate, Johnson knew firsthand the benefits of a classical education. Moreover, over the years he had developed a strong critique of colonialism, particularly during his years as an ambassador. He was not willing to leave politics to whites and merely focus on economic development like Washington. However, he also knew that a good part of the reason he was granted consular positions in Venezuela and Nicaragua was due to Washington’s advocacy for him with the State Department, and so he acted with appropriate gratitude. However, Washington’s 1915 death opened up space for Johnson to emerge fully as a political activist.
After Amenia, Johnson was hired as a field secretary for the NAACP. At that point, he’d already had a distinguished career. He had served as U.S. ambassador to Puerto Caballo, Venezuela, beginning in 1906, with a salary of $2,000, when many black men and women, trapped in cycles of debt peonage, were making nothing and the average annual salary across the races was between $200 and $400. In 1909 he was promoted to a post in Corinto, Nicaragua, with a salary of $3,000. In 1912 Johnson was nominated to a post in the Azores by President Howard Taft, but when the Woodrow Wilson administration took over, with its notoriously racist practices, he was denied the post. Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson, whom he had married in 1909, then went back to Jacksonville for a while, before returning in 1914 to New York, where he served as the director of the editorial staff of the New York Age, the city’s oldest black newspaper. His work for the Age, as well as his poetry and prose, are what drew him to the attention of the NAACP in the first place.
In 1916, having taken a position as an NAACP field secretary, Johnson began an organizing tour of the South. He addressed conferences in every major city to which he traveled, and he started NAACP branches in black communities large and small. Walter White, one of his colleagues, described an Atlanta meeting where Johnson gave one of his organizing speeches as “so packed with eager faced Negroes and even a few whites that we had difficulty wedging the platform party through the crowd to enter the auditorium. Mr. Johnson, calm, slender, and immaculate, stood hazardously between the footlights and a painted backdrop. . . . There was none of the sonorous flamboyant oratory of that era in the meeting . . . only the quiet irrefutable presentation of the facts and the need to wipe out race prejudice before the hate.”19
The steady pace at which Johnson and his colleagues pursued organizational growth would effectively change the racial composition and even the character of the NAACP. Between Johnson and others in th
e field and DuBois at the Crisis, the NAACP effectively became a black organization rather than simply an organization advocating for black people. By 1919 there were 155 southern branches.20
The work they faced was daunting. Black servicemen returning from war had been met with racist violence, with 1919 the bloodiest year in recent history: seventy black people were lynched, and eleven were burned to death. For black Americans, it was also their 300th year on American shores, and their 300th year of exclusion. White mobs attacked African Americans in over three-dozen American cities. Johnson referred to it as the “Red Summer.”
In the midst of that summer, DuBois and Ida Gibbs Hunt organized the second Pan-African Congress in Paris (the first had been held in 1900). Hunt had taught at the M. Street School (soon to be known as the Dunbar School) in Washington, D.C., as well as Florida A&M College, and was living in Paris at the time with her husband, the diplomat William Henry Hunt.21 She and DuBois brought together leaders from across the black world. Their congress was scheduled to coincide with the Versailles Peace Conference, a gathering of the allied powers in the aftermath of World War I. The Pan-African Congress delegates planned to petition the Allies to begin a process of allowing “home rule” for Africans. In Paris as well as New York, DuBois, Johnson, and their collaborators strategized about how to resist the expansion of European domination, how to escape being made pawns in the struggle over global hegemony, how to achieve black self-determination, and how to end the bloodshed.
That year, the NAACP declared “Lift Every Voice and Sing” its official song. And in 1920, Johnson was named the organization’s executive secretary, the highest staff position in the NAACP. His appointment coincided with the NAACP’s publishing copies of “Lift Every Voice” to be nationally distributed with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” another beloved song in African American communities, printed on the reverse side. It was a brilliant move, serving as an assertion that the NAACP was a black organization—that is, one that claimed the popularly recognized black American anthem as its own. New chapters, new leadership, a robust publication, and a new song combined to enable the NAACP to refashion itself as an institution that would be controlled and developed by black political actors and black agency.