by Imani Perry
Apparently, according to Daykin, any ambition that moved black people beyond the status of abject second-class citizenship was threatening. Likewise, any and all organizers and activists who pursued such goals were dangerous.
Scholar Thomas Gilbert Standing similarly offered a wary taxonomy:
Associated with the DuBois point of view is a group of somewhat less widely known individuals which with the exception of the Washington group includes most of those commonly recognized as race leaders. Of these James Weldon Johnson is perhaps nearest to DuBois in ability and spirit. Both have identified with the militant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, DuBois as editor of its official organ, the Crisis, and Johnson is the author of what has come to be known as “The Negro National Anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is frequently heard in Negro gatherings throughout the United States. Alain LeRoy Locke, professor of philosophy at Howard University, should be included in this group, as also should Walter White, assistant executive secretary for the NAACP. Kelly Miller, dean of Howard University, is one of the most competent and objectively minded of the DuBois school. There are other Negro writers, particularly among the younger poets, who might properly be classified in the group under discussion. Of these, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes are among the more outstanding.66
Even Kelly Miller and Walter White, men who were unquestionably politically moderate, were classified as “of the DuBois school.” They were all, according to Standing, black nationalists. The common thread of identity within the range of political ideologies that made black political life so rich and robust was grounds for condemnation by white sociologists. That Standing contrasted them to the “Washington school” in the 1930s was also something of an obfuscation. After Washington’s death, the fault lines of black political life were no longer accommodation to segregation and industrial education, on the one side, and demands for political participation and liberal education, on the other. Rather, the political positions of black activists and thinkers ranged from an effort at inclusion along the terms of the current nation-state, to political and civil rights, to revolution (domestic and/or global). Rather than treat them as serious political thinkers, these white scholars imagined them as “artificial Negroes,” as it were. Standing argued that the opposition of the members of the DuBois school to the conciliatory policies of Booker Washington, and their emphatic emphasis on the necessary leadership of the “Talented Tenth” was in large degree a rationalization of their own social position:
Their general interests, tastes, and ambitions are such as would identify them with the most cultured society. But to full participation in the life of the inclusive society their color is an effectual barrier. It is an acute awareness of this fact that has tended to embitter them and has induced a somewhat reluctant identification with the socially inferior group. Naturally they are most concerned with the development of a cultured minority which will serve as a substitute for the larger society from which they are excluded. Yet, while the members of this group are working for the creation of an intelligent and distinctive Negro society, they are bitterly attacking the shortcomings of a democracy which makes such a course psychologically desirable. Their race consciousness and extreme sensitivity to the slightest suggestion of differential treatment on the basis of color, their demands for flat footed equality, imply the acceptance of universal rather than racial norms, yet they are constantly thinking and writing in terms of race.67
The depiction of middle-class African Americans as bitter, and as somehow misplaced in the context of the Great Depression, was analogous to the depiction of mixed-race African Americans as impotent and impossibly hybridized in the antebellum period. In both instances the characterization of “betwixt and between” black people as “damaged” justified the maintenance of the color line. And, further, it dismissed black aspiration and political imagination. Though the larger society recognized the “higher status” of a subcategory of black people, that status was also imagined as fundamentally deficient because it was incommensurable with the racial order. Undeniably, class conflict and elitism was present in black life, but the generalization of black elites as incommensurable with both the larger society and the black world due to their tastes and aspirations gave short shrift to the lifeworlds of the working-class, collective black cultural practices that marked common identity for members of all social classes, and the serious demands for equality being waged across the class spectrum.
An examination of characterizations offered by writers like Daykin and Standing also suggests that conventional assessments of the class cleavages in black life that were put forward in twentieth-century sociological literature might merit reconsideration, or at least serious interrogation. Perhaps the rift between the middle class and the working poor was not as deep as we’ve been led to believe. Perhaps it wasn’t a rift at all but rather a product of the limitations of the white imagination when it came to black people. Moreover, the deep skepticism white thinkers felt toward black activism in that period, regardless of the political leanings of the actors, helps us understand the repeated efforts of black people at forging unity across ideological differences. There was no justice but rather “just us,” as the saying went.
In March 1939, consistent with the sociologists’ panic, the Associated Negro Press (ANP) reported that “Lift Every Voice” was under attack by people who thought it could be evidence of Communist Party influence. The ANP quoted an unnamed Glendale, California, publication: “Many people are puzzled about the Negro National Anthem. . . . Is the Negro national anthem a part of the theme of communists who have been telling the Negro that he will have a Negro Republic in the South as soon as the Soviet Regime is established in America? . . . Such propaganda flowing through the malls has found its way into the capital and into the hands of people who in the past gave little thought to such stories.”68 Although some communists embraced the anthem, this was a sign of their efforts to attach themselves to black people, and the influence was black culture on communists, rather than the other way around. The editorial foreshadows the McCarthy era, but it also gives deeper meaning to the concept of “linked fate.” Black activists and organizers were under attack together, even when they couldn’t stand each other or had vastly different political ideologies. It also helps explain the salience and appeal of some signs and symbols of consensus among black people, such as sharing “Lift Every Voice.” All activism on behalf of black people, no matter where it sat on the ideological spectrum, meant putting one’s neck on the line. Literally.
Chauncey Spencer, who came of age in Lynchburg, Virginia, during the 1930s as the son of Harlem Renaissance poet and race woman Anne Spencer, recalls, “Our home was always filled with distinguished guests who stopped for an overnight stay and sometimes even longer; W. E. B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, and Howard Thurman. When our visitors were ready to depart, our family joined them on our front porch where we held hands and sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ The song served as a prayer because we knew there was a strong possibility that some catastrophe like death could be waiting on the road for our departing friends as they headed south.”69 The leading black intellectuals DuBois and Frazier, along with Fisk University president Charles Spurgeon Johnson and one of the most celebrated black ministers in U.S. history, Howard Thurman, joined hands with Spencer and family and sang the anthem as a spiritual bulwark before going out into a society that was vicious to black people.
One arena of black life in the 1930s was unquestionably flourishing even in the midst of political and economic vulnerability. During the Depression, the federal government’s WPA, in part fueled by competition with the writers groups and arts collectives of the Left, provided numerous venues for African American artists to work full-time on their art in far greater numbers than previously possible. It further institutionalized and funded the cultural production fostered by the Communist Party, and numerous black institutions at the beginning o
f the New Negro era, especially the NAACP and the Urban League, which both created space for black artistic production in their magazines: the Crisis and Opportunity.
The cultural policies of the New Deal, which included supporting writers clubs, art associations, and a range of opportunities to engage in creative expression, were critical for African Americans. So much so that they demonstrate that scholars can and should reperiodize the Harlem Renaissance. Arguably, the renaissance lasted well into the 1930s and existed in major cities other than New York, especially Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. In the midst of this flourishing cultural life, “Lift Every Voice” served as both inspiration and trope for black artists who increasingly had time and space to create.
In Chicago, Alabama-born and Dillard College–educated writer Margaret Walker worked full-time for the Federal Writers Project. In that community she developed friendships with the celebrated writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Yerby, and Richard Wright, as well as the groundbreaking modern dancer Katherine Dunham. In 1937 Walker published a poem titled “For My People” in Poetry magazine. It would become one of her most famous pieces and over the subsequent decades was often likened to and partnered with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” not unlike the way “If We Must Die” was in the prior decade. Several of the lines are as follows:
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding.70
Like “Lift Every Voice,” “For My People” is an ode to the historic journey and struggles of black Americans. But, appropriate for the times, it situates labor and the fleshiness of black living in “Afro-American modernist” aesthetics, as defined by Houston Baker in his discussion of Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” as a “mastery of form and a deformation of mastery” that coalesced “mass and class . . . standard dialect and black vernacular, aesthetic and political concerns.”71 As I have suggested, this blend was already apparent in the theatricality of black formalism. But Baker notes the growing intimacy of the blend that appeared within the individual artistic productions produced by professional artists.
This “Afro-American modernism” appeared in the visual arts as well. Art historian Richard Powell describes artists of this period as embracing “a visually conservative but politically radical figurative art.”72 Indeed, the black figure or body, in art, at once transgressed the popular caricature of black form (such as Sambo and Mammy) and was situated in contexts rife with social meaning. One such work was produced by one of the most important black visual artists of the 1930s, who also found work in the New Deal and inspiration in “Lift Every Voice.”
Augusta Savage, who grew up near Jacksonville in Green Cove, Florida, was one of James Weldon Johnson’s many protégés. As a child, she made figurines out of the red clay of her native region. Despite her father’s censure (her small sculptures seemed to him to violate the Bible’s prohibition against graven images), she continued to model clay as she matured. Eventually, Savage was selling her pieces at a Palm Beach County fair. Winning a fair prize encouraged Savage to apply to the distinguished Cooper Union School of Art in New York. She matriculated there and began her formal art training in 1921. Though her talent was well recognized, in 1923 she was rejected by a summer art program sponsored by the French government because of her race. Black newspapers and magazines, in particular the Crisis, decried the discrimination.
Like many other black women, Savage’s day job through the 1920s was working as a laundress. She supported her nine-person extended family in a small Manhattan apartment, cleaning clothes and steadily creating art. Over the decade, she received commissions to do busts of both DuBois and Garvey. Later on, she sculpted Frederick Douglass, W. C. Handy, and Walter Gray. After the Glory, her antiwar sculpture, was placed in a park at Seventh Avenue and 155th Street in New York City. And, in a touching example of the collective impulse toward excellence, black New Yorkers and black women’s groups in Florida raised money for her to continue her studies in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Savage also received a grant to support her study from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. After spending two years in Europe, from 1929 to 1931, Savage returned to New York and founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. This eventually became the Harlem Community Art Center, which was funded by the WPA. The Harlem Community Art Center was a vibrant, nurturing institution under Savage’s guidance. She trained a host of future art luminaries there, including Jacob Lawrence, William Artis, Norman Lewis, and Gwendolyn Lawrence. Eleanor Roosevelt attended the opening ceremonies for the center on December 20, 1936, and the attention generated by that visit inspired the interest of Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson, among others. Savage proved to be a successful institution-builder in addition to a superior artist and teacher. Under Savage’s directorship, the center “was heralded throughout the nation” as a model for WPA art centers.73
In 1937, Savage was offered a professional commission by the Board of Design of the New York World’s Fair, to be held in 1939. She was one of only four women selected to present work at the fair, and one of only two black people (the other was composer William Grant Still). Savage was asked to create a sculpture based on the theme “The American Negro’s Contribution to Music.” She produced a work titled Lift Every Voice and Sing.74 It was a sixteen-foot-tall plaster sculpture of a series of open-mouthed and round, fleshy-featured black people with bodies adjoined in the shape of a harp. In the front, a kneeling man held a plaque upon which the notes of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” were inscribed. Despite this clear tribute to the Negro National Anthem, the fair jury decided to change the title of the sculpture to The Harp. Savage was greatly upset by this decision and wrote to James Weldon Johnson’s widow, Grace Nail Johnson, about her frustration: “I resent the name as much as you do . . . and I am going tomorrow to see Mr. Rubin of the Fair to protest the use of [it]. . . . On the day that the design was accepted they even had me sing the ‘The National Negro Anthem’ for them; but they seem to feel that the title is too long and so they call it ‘The Harp.’”75 Rallies were organized in support of Savage’s original title, and several newspapers issued objections in their pages. The Associated Negro Press reported that “admirers of the work last week were emphatic in declaring that ‘The Harp’ . . . falls far short of conveying the poetic response of the ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ theme responsible for Miss Savage’s great work of art. They declared the shorter title inadequate for a work designed to express in material form the contributions of the Negro to the musical cultures of America.”76 But the fair organizers weren’t swayed.
Augusta Savage, a native of Green Cove, Florida, who would become a celebrated sculptor, was one of James Weldon Johnson’s protégés. She was commissioned to create a piece for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Here she is pictured next to the sculpture that she titled Lift Every Voice. In it, a group of African American singers are melded into the form of a harp, and the lyrics to the first verse of the Johnsons’ anthem are inscribed on the bottom. Fair organizers, however, rejected the name Savage chose and called it The Harp instead. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1935–45, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8–80d0-d471-e040-e00a180654d7.
Savage’s sculpture, however, was a great success. It was the most popular and most photographed work at the fair. Small metal souvenir copies and postcards depicting it were sold. Those are the only remnants of the sculpture remaining today. At the conclusion of the fair, because Savage had no funds with which to cast the sculpture, it was destroyed. To add in
sult to injury, because of the time she had taken off in order to create her landmark work, she was displaced as the director of the Harlem Community Arts Center, with the position turned over to fellow artist Gwendolyn Bennett.
Nevertheless, great collective pride was taken in Savage’s display of black identity in art, and images of the sculpture circulated widely in the black press. Savage was heralded as an example of black excellence, and her use of the anthem stood as powerful evidence of its continued centrality in black cultural and artistic life. Moreover, the work of a black woman at the World’s Fair was a display of black excellence to the “white world.” While most black formalist practices took place within black communities, there were moments when it was on display for the larger society, taking the shape of political argument for inclusion in the body politic on the basis of such excellence. This dimension of the practice was closely related to Higginbotham’s “politics of respectability,” in which black people placed a “best foot forward” for the cause of racial equality. But this was not the heart of what black formalism entailed. Because the vast majority of black formalism existed in nearly exclusively black spheres, in church and schools and concerts and lectures, that zone must be recognized as its foundation. Hence, its externalization for the whole world to see was, for lack of a better word, unquestionably authentic, even as it was strategic. The argument presented for inclusion was on the basis of what black people truly were, not on what they were caricatured to be, or on what white people thought they should be.
At the end of the 1930s, a decade brimming with political and artistic activity, and yet also a time of sustained racial injustice, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) entered its twenty-fifth year. James and Rosamond had both been founding members of the organization. James Weldon Johnson had died in a car accident in Maine a year prior, but Rosamond was on hand for the festivities celebrating the organization. ASCAP was the body that enabled American musicians to own the rights to their compositions. It was an important organ for black composers like the Johnson brothers, although it became a double-edged sword in the mid-twentieth century, as white composers often copyrighted and grew wealthy based upon their mimicry of black blues and folk musicians, who often died penniless.