The Negro Exodus from North Carolina—Scene at the Railway Station. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 15, 1890. Library of Congress.
Garvey was hugely popular—and hugely controversial. With the slogan “One Aim, One God, One Destiny” and his emphasis on black solidarity, the UNIA appealed to millions of poor and working-class people. At the same time, his separatist views and belief that Africa was the black man’s destiny sharply divided the African American community. Garvey’s many detractors felt that he was undoing decades of progress toward integration. Virtually every other black leader of the day opposed him, and almost all publicly excoriated Garvey’s overture to the Ku Klux Klan in 1922. The following year, in the September issue of The Negro World, Garvey went so far as to proclaim that openly racist and separatist organizations such as the Klan were “better friends of the race than all other hypocritical whites put together.”31
As shocking as his statements were, there was, sadly, more than an element of truth in Garvey’s inflammatory words—not specifically about the Klan, of course, but in their general meaning. With racial segregation an unwelcome fact of American life, African Americans built separate institutions that allowed their communities not only to survive, but to thrive. To do this, they could not stay where they were, and many looked west.
As we learned earlier, the Great Migration began in about 1890 and assumed several forms: First, many black people moved from rural areas to urban areas within the South; second, migrants from the South began moving to urban areas in the North; and third, many set out for cities in the American West, such as Los Angeles and Denver. But the Great Migration was foreshadowed by the Exoduster movement, during which tens of thousands of black migrants fled the South, searching for economic opportunity in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado in the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s. Then, between 1890 and 1910, along with tens of thousands of white settlers, African Americans took advantage of the U.S. government’s division and selling off of the land that is now the state of Oklahoma. Just as the western frontier called to white Americans, the apparent freedom it afforded spoke loudly to African Americans as well. In 1890, a preeminent African American citizen of Oklahoma heaped the loftiest praise on the territory, calling it a “paradise of Eden and the garden of the Gods.”32
For a time, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, seemed just such a place; it was the country’s richest African American community. And so it still seemed to be in 1921. Black dentists, doctors, lawyers, and businesses catered to the prosperous, segregated enclave, popularly known as the “Negro Wall Street.” Black self-sufficiency, the residents of Greenwood understood, was no guarantee against the risk of racial violence; indeed, to many whites, black prosperity—a violation of the racial order that placed blacks at the bottom—was itself a provocation.
The trouble in Tulsa started, as it did in so many other cities, with an unsubstantiated accusation that a black man had sexually assaulted a white woman. The result was the Tulsa race riot, one of the worst in American history. Over two horrific days, May 31 and June 1, 1921, rampaging mobs destroyed block after block of black middle-class homes, with property damage running into the millions of dollars. As many as 68 African Americans were killed, while thousands of black residents were rounded up, interned, and tried for inciting the riot. While violent reactions against black economic prosperity were common in this era, such as the riots in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906, the riots in Tulsa were particularly damaging and deadly.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riot, June 1, 1921. Photograph. Associated Press, Press Association Images. White National Guard members rounded up African American citizens of Tulsa and held them in a fairground, convention hall, and baseball stadium, while their 35-block neighborhood was incinerated.
Despite the dangers still inherent to black life, as was so cruelly evinced by the events in Tulsa, all-black enclaves continued to provide many African Americans a welcome chance to live and create beyond the reach of white control. The scholar Darlene Clark Hine described the black and white world as “parallel universes.” “During Jim Crow,” she explained, “blacks built an internal, self-sufficient world that existed as if in a parallel universe to the white world. Blacks founded hospitals, nurse training schools, medical schools, pharmacy schools, drug stores, agricultural businesses, banks, private schools, nursery schools, dressmaking, culinary shops, newspapers, music schools, theaters, night clubs. There were places where the majority of black people were able to live reasonable lives that included minimum contact with the larger white community.”33
One artist emerged from a similarly insular, seemingly unlikely world: South Dakota. From his vantage point on the black side of the color line, he explored a robust and complicated world that few white people knew existed.
Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) plumbed his experience as a black homesteader in South Dakota for the subject matter for his early novels. From farming and writing, Micheaux turned to filmmaking, and in 1919, despite a total lack of experience, he launched the Micheaux Book and Film Company with his first silent film, The Homesteader. Micheaux, with an outsize talent for promotion, stressed to potential white investors that the novelty of his film would make it a goldmine: “… [T]welve million Negro people will have their first opportunity to see their race in stellar role. Their patronage, which can be expected in immense numbers, will mean in [itself] alone a fortune.”34 Micheaux did indeed draw this new audience, and he went on to have a prolific career, producing an average of two “race movies” a year, telling stories about black characters from a black perspective, for a black audience. His films were low budget and often controversial, focusing on taboo subjects like rape, church corruption, and miscegenation. While he came under sharp criticism for his poor production values and his “intraracial color fetishism”—a term used in 1930 in the New York Amsterdam News by reviewer Theophilus Lewis, who complained, “All of the noble characters are high yellows; all the ignoble ones are black”—Micheaux offered black audiences complex portrayals of their lives, on film, at a time when they were not available anywhere else.35
IT IS ONE OF THE ABIDING CONTRADICTIONS OF THE JIM CROW ERA THAT IT FEATURED BOTH BRUTAL RACIAL OPPRESSION AND AN UNPRECEDENTED FLOWERING OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL CREATIVITY. Some of that creativity blossomed overseas in Paris in the early 1920s, where Josephine Baker’s Le Revue Nègre cabaret show was a continental sensation. While Paris would continue to be the destination of many black artists and intellectuals, who felt they enjoyed greater respect and creative freedom abroad, the epicenter of African American culture was here at home, in the capital of black urban life, Harlem.
The Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance (the names were used interchangeably) was a uniquely rich and vibrant cultural movement in the 1920s, when talented black artists came together and produced an unmatched outpouring of creative work in literature, art, theater, and music. And although metaphorically centered in Harlem, similar artistic movements emerged simultaneously in Washington and Chicago. Black leaders believed that this national ascendance of black culture could redefine how white Americans and the world thought of African Americans, and how African Americans saw themselves. Instead of being seen as a racial underclass, inferior to other races and cultures, they could now be viewed as genuine cultural innovators—members of a community of artistic and intellectual achievers, with a strong identity and sense of pride. The poet Langston Hughes (1902–1967) coined the phrase that came to describe the movement: “The Negro,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Big Sea, “was in vogue.”36
It can be said that the Harlem Renaissance had its roots in some unlikely places: in the music of a Czech composer and in the visual innovation of a legendary Spanish painter. Antonín Dvořák is the musician at the heart of this discussion. One of the greatest composers of classical music at the turn of the century, Dvořák used the folk music of his native culture in Bohemia as the basis for symphonic music and chamber music. While serving as the
director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, from 1892 to 1895, he met the early African American composer Harry Burleigh (1866–1949). Through Burleigh, Dvořák was introduced to the spirituals, the body of music created by the slaves, which Du Bois called “The Sorrow Songs” in The Souls of Black Folk.
In 1893, in the midst of the very decade in which Jim Crow became the law of the land, Dvořák composed his most famous piece of music, Symphony no. 9: From the New World—and it was inspired by those very spirituals that had been composed anonymously in the cotton fields of the American South by African slaves. In 1895, the trailblazing black feminist journalist Victoria Earle Matthews penned a groundbreaking essay, “The Value of Race Literature.” Just two years after Dvořák created Symphony no. 9, Matthews used the composer’s words to support her own call for a new “race literature.” “‘I am now confident that the future music of this continent must be founded upon what are the called the Negro melodies,’” she quoted Dvořák as saying. “‘In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music…. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot find a thematic source there.’”37
From this, Matthews concluded, “What is bright, hopeful and encouraging is in reality the source of an original school of race literature, of racial psychology, of potent possibilities, an amalgam needed for this great American race of the future.” Matthews’s words laid the foundation for the coming Harlem Renaissance, which would happen 30 years after she published this article. But there was a problem, one that would not be solved by art or literature or music, no matter how grand. Matthews called for this new, elevated race literature to “drive out the traditional Negro in dialect,—the subordinate, the servant as the type representing a race whose numbers are now far into the millions.”38 So, nearly a decade before Du Bois made famous the term Talented Tenth, and a year before it first appeared in print in Morehouse’s essay, Victoria Earle Matthews was advocating that the elite must be the representatives of the race. Once again, we see that divide between the Old Negro and the New Negro. At times it seemed that the New Negroes themselves thought there was something wrong with the Old Negroes, and that some of those stereotypical, racist depictions of them were in some way true.
But in 1907, 14 years after Dvořák’s discovery of the spirituals, another European made a discovery that would allow the world—not just the white world, but African Americans themselves—to see Africans and their art as beautiful and worthwhile, something to be celebrated and praised alongside all other art. Pablo Picasso, on a visit to the old Trocadero in Paris, found his way into a room (essentially tucked away behind a closet) full of African sculpture and masks. From this chance discovery, Picasso invented an entirely new way of representing the human form in the visual arts. Called Cubism or Modernism today, it was manifested in Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The impact of the masks on the faces of the female figures was unmistakable. African masks, until then thought to be ugly and primitive, of anthropological value only and not the least bit artistic, now formed the structuring principle for new ways of seeing and representing the human figure within European art. With the stroke of a brush, the supposedly ugliest and most devalued thing in the world—black Africans and their art—had become beautiful and worthy. This revaluation of African art produced an electric effect on African American writers, critics, and artists, who in the New Negro movement would call for a genuine artistic renaissance, one that would remove the stigmas connoted by the words Negro and African that had corrupted the words for as long as they were in use. Black, they would announce to the world, was indeed beautiful.
Of all the art forms, however, it was literature that launched the Harlem Renaissance. Its place was paramount, with Langston Hughes the most famous name to emerge from the period, although artists such as Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) and Augusta Savage (1892–1962), singers like Roland Hayes (1887–1977), and actors such as Paul Robeson (1898–1976) were also hailed as exemplars of this emerging genius of the race. The manifesto of the movement, which we’ve already touched on briefly, was published in 1925, when the scholar and philosopher Alain Locke (1886–1954) celebrated New York’s up-and-coming African American writers in his magnificently edited anthology, The New Negro. Yet for all their undeniable talents, the Harlem writers were not the transformative force that their champions claimed. Many of these representatives of the cultured and upper-class portion of the African American community—which they insisted stood for the potential of the community as a whole—adapted white cultural forms while claiming to have realized an unprecedented form of Negro self-expression.
In fact, it was not Harlem’s elite writers but rather its popular musicians—men and women who were not likely to be invited to Harlem’s New Negro salons—who made the era’s most lasting cultural contributions. Jazz and blues, fortified not by the Talented Tenth but by the black working class, transformed Western music and became an international sensation. Locke either underestimated or simply misunderstood the importance of jazz: In the 400-some pages of The New Negro, only one essay, J. A. Rogers’s “Jazz at Home,” addressed the new phenomenon, a telling omission and one reflecting the class tensions dividing the black community. To be fair, Jean Toomer (1894–1967), Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown (1901–1989), Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), and a few of the younger writers embraced the emerging vernacular cultural forms, both theoretically and in their own works, while James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) sought to recuperate older vernacular forms such as the spirituals in his magnificent poetry collection God’s Trombones, but they were against the tide.
One could argue, in retrospect, that the aesthetics of a “New Negro Renaissance” in the 1920s should well have been constructed upon a foundation of the blues and jazz, if that cultural movement were to have the lasting, transformative impact that it so urgently sought to have. But the Renaissance did not fashion itself in this way, at least officially. And that was unfortunate. It’s true that classics such as the novel Cane, by Jean Toomer, and books of poetry such as The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew, by Langston Hughes, and Southern Road, by Sterling Brown, along with God’s Trombones, remain hallmarks of the best of the black tradition. (Hurston’s stunningly brilliant novel Their Eyes Were Watching God would not be published until 1937, long after the Harlem Renaissance had ended.) The works of art that most brilliantly characterize the spirit of the black 1920s, however, were those by musical geniuses such as the trumpeter Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), the pianist and composer Duke Ellington (1899–1974), and the singers Mamie Smith (1883–1946), Bessie Smith (1894–1937), and Ethel Waters (1896–1977). This fissure in taste was based in class differences, rooted in the history of slavery and Jim Crow. Armstrong and Ellington were inarguably the most influential African American musical artists of this period, but Waters and the Smiths were right alongside them in their remarkable ability to transcend the seemingly unbridgeable gap between high and low culture.
Zora Neale Hurston, by Carl Van Vechten, April 3, 1938. Photograph. Library of Congress.
Langston Hughes, by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information, 1942. Photograph. Library of Congress.
Bessie Smith, by Carl Van Vechten, February 3, 1936. Photograph. Library of Congress.
In the 1930s, as the Depression hit Harlem and the rest of black America especially hard, African Americans remained divided about the way forward in a deeply segregated and sometimes violently repressive America. Some black leaders urged patience, while others organized to push back against Jim Crow. Many argued that the African American community should turn inward and focus on black self-sufficiency during hard times.
Confronted with a new round of troubles, many African Americans turned to their religious leaders, as they had for generations before. In response, some members of the black clergy combined spiritual guidance with political activism. In 1934, as the breadlines in Harlem grew lon
ger, the Reverend John H. Johnson (1897–1995), pastor of the Protestant Episcopal St. Martin’s Church, launched a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, aimed at the Harlem department store Blumstein’s, which did not hire black people as clerks or cashiers. (Some years earlier, the store had hired African American porters and elevator operators.) With African American customers accounting for an estimated 75 percent of sales, according to the New York Age, the boycott of the store was financially crippling—and ultimately successful. The store owner William Blumstein softened his stance and agreed to hire some blacks to fill these positions, which would have African Americans dealing with customers and money and essentially acting as the public face of a store that until then had hired blacks only in jobs traditionally thought to be acceptable for African Americans. Less than a decade later, Blumstein’s department store would have the country’s first black Santa Claus and would pioneer the use of black models and mannequins.39
Louis Armstrong, by William P. Gottlieb, New York, summer 1946. Photograph. Library of Congress.
Across town at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a charismatic preacher would stand to inherit the largest Protestant congregation in the country from his father. The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (1908–1972), would turn his religious flock into the basis of a political constituency and would go on to serve in the U.S. Congress from 1945 to 1971.
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