Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, then a primitive little port town on the east coast of Florida. His mother, who was part French and a schoolteacher, was from the Bahamas; his father, a Virginia-born freeman, also had Caribbean roots. Both were musically talented and drawn to books, though the elder Johnson, a hotel waiter, had no formal education. James and his younger brother Rosamond remembered their childhood years as a serene and happy time unclouded by any complications of poverty or segregation. They went as children on trips by sea to visit relatives in New York, and sat anywhere on trains without restrictions in the pre–Jim Crow days, and they grew up with as many white friends as black. It was not until he was seventeen and a freshman at Atlanta University that Jim Johnson was rudely awakened to the harsh realities of racism.

  In Atlanta, two things stood out to him: a hostile and menacing climate of white supremacy in a drab, landlocked sea of red clay, and an island of black intellectual refinement in the middle of that—the latter a heady concentration of class and culture embodied in a multicolored black elite. Johnson chafed against the sea, but thrived on the island. When he graduated in 1894, after six years of combined study and work, he was primed mentally and temperamentally for a career of creative achievement. Cool and clever, stylish and sporty, tall, tan, gray-eyed, and handsome, he seemed bound for a life of visibility that no amount of discrimination could obscure.

  First, though, he went back to Jacksonville and spent seven years as principal of a school for black children, living with his parents and exploring a variety of creative ventures in his spare time. He and others started a newspaper, and he contributed articles and poems to it; he studied law independently, and passed the exam admitting him to the Florida bar; he and Rosamond wrote tunes and lyrics together (among their accomplishments by the turn of the century, besides many songs for Broadway plays, was “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” commonly referred to as the Negro national anthem).

  All along the way, James Weldon Johnson seemed to have a knack for rising above the stings and cuts of racism, floating past and escaping them with a smile and a clever turn of phrase. When he moved to New York early in the new century, he looked forward to a career in music with his brother and a good-humored, free-spirited life of productivity and pleasure.

  It was just then, though, that segregation and white supremacy were being imposed with malice across the South, and the virus reached out into the country. On the road in cities of the North and Midwest and West, Johnson was enraged to find petty discrimination and gratuitous insults on the rise; even in the restaurants and theaters of Manhattan these things were happening to him, and he reacted with uncharacteristic bitterness and rage. He met W. E. B. Du Bois during these years, and was inspired by the force of his ideas. He campaigned for Teddy Roosevelt’s election in 1904, and was rewarded with a series of appointments as a U. S. consul in Latin America, during which time he wrote a novel (The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man) and a long poem commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

  Then, briefly back in Jacksonville while Woodrow Wilson was in office, Johnson was forcefully struck by the iron grip of Jim Crow and the violence that was readily used to enforce it. By the fall of 1916 he had moved again to New York, hoping to establish himself as a writer. The travails of the African-American population troubled him deeply, though, and so he was predisposed psychologically to say yes when Joel E. Spingarn, chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, asked him to join the staff as field secretary.

  For the next fifteen years, Johnson was the NAACP’s leading staff officer. He organized almost 250 new chapters around the country in his first three years on the job; the South, which had only three local branches when he started, had close to fifty by the end of 1919. One of the newest and strongest was in Atlanta, and it was through it that Johnson met Walter White and recruited him for the national staff. As riots and lynchings increased after the war, White proved to be an expert field investigator, posing as a white man to gather incriminating evidence on the perpetrators. Soon, Johnson replaced John R. Shilladay as executive secretary, and thus became the first black staff director of the organization, with White as his assistant.

  Throughout the 1920s, the NAACP and the National Urban League, another race-relations organization of somewhat similar origin and focus, represented the emergence of an insistent black voice of protest against white supremacy and Jim Crow discrimination. Booker T. Washington’s deferential tone of conciliation and submission seemed to have gone to the grave with him in 1915. Though they were founded in the North and led initially by whites, the NAACP and the Urban League in the twenties got most of their reformist energy and their moral outrage from black Southerners who saw the new problems of the urban North and the old problems of the rural South as two sides of a single coin. James Weldon Johnson of Florida and Walter White of Georgia were eloquent in their condemnation of racial injustice, and Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois—not a native Southerner, true, but tempered by the blue flame of segregationist heat during his Atlanta days—gave the NAACP an unmistakably black but also Southern accent. The Urban League’s magazine, Opportunity, was edited by another black Southerner, Charles S. Johnson, and it too was unequivocal in its denunciation of racial discrimination.

  Charles Spurgeon Johnson was still in his twenties when he moved to New York from Chicago in 1922 to become research director of the Urban League and editor of its magazine. His father was a Baptist minister whose mother had received rare educational advantages as a favorite slave on a Virginia plantation, and young Charles grew up in a Southern black family stimulated by books and intellectual activity. He was sent away to high school in Richmond and went on to earn degrees at Virginia Union University and the University of Chicago. First as a student and then as a valued colleague of the famed Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park, Johnson quickly made a name for himself as an outstanding social scientist. What he referred to as his “living laboratory” included, in addition to his unusual childhood and youth, a year of World War I combat service in France and directorship of a research team commissioned to investigate the disastrous 1919 Chicago race riot, in which some two dozen blacks and about fifteen whites were killed.

  When he got to New York, where he was to stay for six years, Charles Johnson found himself in the vortex of a black intellectual struggle for influence and leadership. The time was long since past when a single individual—a Frederick Douglass, a Booker T. Washington—could speak for the entire race; various factions now sought to exercise political leverage and define racial identity, and they disagreed on methods as well as objectives.

  Marcus Garvey, the flamboyant founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, had inspired a large following for his plan to lead the African-American masses out of their subservience and into liberty and freedom in Liberia. (Internal problems within his organization eventually led him instead to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and he was subsequently deported in 1927 to his native Jamaica.) The NAACP was variously seen as liberal or progressive, reasonable or radical, depending on the viewer and the point at issue; a large and multifaceted confederation of mostly middle- and upper-class blacks and their white allies, the organization sought justice for the African-American minority primarily through political and legal action. The Urban League, in its pursuit of the same basic goal of racial equality, differed more in style than substance; its approach was less confrontational than the NAACP’s, and it was generally perceived as a slightly more conservative or middle-of-the-road complement to the association.

  Charles S. Johnson was the perfect embodiment of that cooler image. Urbane and sophisticated, he was a scholar and diplomat whose quiet efficiency and unthreatening professional manner won him the admiration of his black associates and the support of many influential whites. He lacked the abrasive militancy of Du Bois, but not the stern scholar’s controlled intellect; his ego was no match fo
r Walter White’s, but his energy and courage were; he was in no sense a stylish bon vivant like James Weldon Johnson, but he understood and appreciated and promoted the value of black literature, music, and the arts. Both Johnsons, Du Bois, and White stood together opposite Marcus Garvey in the 1920s on the question of where the African-Americans would find their destiny; they stood far less united, though, on the question of how.

  While these men sought in their various ways to chart a path to equality for the black minority, events continued to demonstrate the white majority’s determination to ambush and defeat the effort. Beginning in the spring of 1921, James Weldon Johnson spent the better part of two years lobbying Congress to pass a federal anti-lynching law, only to see the attempt finally stalled by a Southern-led filibuster in the Senate. The bill was introduced in the House by Congressman L. C. Dyer of St. Louis, whose district included a large black population. After months of parliamentary maneuvering and rancorous debate, it passed there by a margin of more than a hundred votes, but the victory echoed like a warning alarm in the Senate, and there, in December 1922, a solid phalanx of Southerners aided by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and other conservative Republicans prevented the measure from coming to a vote.

  Death snatched old Tom Watson of Georgia out of the arena while that debate was going on, as it had taken South Carolina’s Ben Tillman before it started, and defeat at the polls prevented Mississippi’s James K. Vardaman from taking part. But there was no shortage of arch-conservatives still on hand to stand and fight. Pat Harrison of Mississippi, Tom Heflin of Alabama, Tom Connally of Texas, Carter Glass of Virginia, and “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina were the shock troops in a solid Southern victory, and all of the many subsequent attempts to outlaw lynching by federal statute suffered the same fate.

  Walter White wrote a blistering denunciation of the practice, entitled Rope and Faggot, in 1929, and Arthur F. Raper’s 1933 book, The Tragedy of Lynching, based on a study by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, brought sympathy to the victims and shame to the South, but changed nothing. Probably the most effective weapon against lynch mobs in the 1930s was the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, an activist network of white and black churchwomen and others organized by Jessie Daniel Ames of the CIC; paradoxically, though, even Mrs. Ames was opposed to a federal anti-lynching law, taking instead the position of most white Southerners that the problem could best be dealt with internally, without Northern interference. This was the same states’ rights argument that had been the rallying cry of secessionists in 1860; even the region’s progressive reformers seemed mesmerized by its putative power.

  There is a school of thought that says the correlation between creative ferment and parlous times is no coincidence; the former is a direct outgrowth of the latter. I’m inclined to believe that. Bad times make good literature, good art, good theater. Most of the reasons given for this anomaly are complex, but one is simple and obvious: There’s so much good material to work with.

  The 1920s are a case in point. In a time of diminishing opportunity and fading hope for black Americans and for the South, a time of depression and oppression, artistic experimentation and productivity blossomed for African-Americans in New York’s Harlem and for a white literati in several locales around the South. Both phenomena were commonly referred to as “renaissance” movements, as if they were revivals of earlier manifestations of creativity. It may be closer to the truth to think of them as original and unprecedented.

  The swelling exodus of blacks from the South more than tripled New York City’s black population (to 180,000-plus) between 1910 and 1923, and by far the majority of them lived in Harlem, a section rapidly being vacated by whites. After the rise and fall of the charismatic and ebony-hued Marcus Garvey, it was the “tan intelligentsia” of college-educated professionals—the “Talented Tenth,” as Du Bois called them—whose response to racism was not so much political or economic as it was literary and artistic. Foremost among the leaders, to no one’s surprise, were the NAACP-Urban League quartet of Johnson, Johnson, Du Bois, and White. Charles Johnson in particular fostered the movement; he was “the entrepreneur of the Harlem Renaissance,” the one, said the poet Langston Hughes, “who did more to encourage and develop Negro writers during the 1920s than anyone else in America.” He and Du Bois gave the renaissance prominence in the pages of Crisis and Opportunity. One of James Weldon Johnson’s contributions to the movement was a classic volume of sermons in verse called God’s Trombones, and Walter White found time to dash off a couple of fair-to-middling novels.

  The extent to which the South provided the raw talent for the Harlem Renaissance is remarkable, to say the least. Expatriates from the Southern and border states—migrants, refugees, exiles—were the main contributors to the outpouring of novels, poetry, nonfiction, drama, and visual art (as well as music, a movement all its own) that defined the renaissance. In addition to the quartet above, there were such talented contributors as the aforementioned Langston Hughes, who came from Missouri; novelist Jean Toomer and poet Sterling Brown, both born in the District of Columbia; poet-novelist Arna Bontemps of Louisiana; novelist-folklorist Zora Neale Hurston of Florida; visual artists Aaron Douglas of Kansas and William H. Johnson of South Carolina; and poet Countee Cullen of Baltimore. Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar of Ohio and critic-chronicler Alain Locke of Philadelphia were just about the only two pure Yankees in the lot. The South’s loss, once again, was the North’s gain. Altogether, the creative output from Harlem in the middle years of the twenties included more than forty major works of fiction, poetry, and drama, and numerous other artistic creations.

  By 1928, friction within this “New Negro” movement and economic hard times everywhere began to drain off the energy and talent of the renaissance, and Harlem slowly lost its luster as a fountain of creativity. Charles S. Johnson, still only in his mid-thirties, left for an academic career at Fisk University, and within a few years he had lured James Weldon Johnson there too, along with Aaron Douglas and Arna Bontemps and, briefly, Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. Some, like Du Bois and White, stayed in New York, but most of the others scattered across the country or went to Europe.

  Still others were gaining recognition in what might be called the music division of the renaissance: classical-concert singers Roland Hayes of Georgia and Paul Robeson of New Jersey, jazz genius Duke Ellington of Washington, D.C., blues musicians W. C. Handy and Bessie Smith up from Tennessee, and the forerunners of all these, King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton and a whole passel of New Orleans jazz musicians—the heralds of Louis Armstrong—who moved upriver to St. Louis and Chicago and then to points east, Harlem being the eventual rainbow’s end. But all of this creative energy was finally overwhelmed and tossed to the winds by much more powerful forces: the dispiriting grip of the Great Depression and the obliterating dominance of white supremacy.

  The Caucasian literary renaissance in the South was more diffuse and thus harder to describe or assess. It had to count among its losses some Southern expatriates, notably Thomas Wolfe of North Carolina, whose Look Homeward, Angel was a major American novel of 1929, and Georgia native Erskine Caldwell, who would create a sensation with two “poor white trash” Southern novels, Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, in the early 1930s. Mostly, though, the whites stayed at home—James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow in Virginia, DuBose Heyward and Julia Peterkin in South Carolina, T. S. Stribling in Tennessee, Elizabeth Madox Roberts in Kentucky, Paul Green in North Carolina. Mississippian William Faulkner enjoyed an early stretch of bohemian camaraderie in New Orleans with fellow Southerners Hamilton Basso, Lyle Saxon, Roark Bradford, and David L. Cohn; with them, too, was a Northern expatriate, Sherwood Anderson of Ohio, who would soon move to the mountains of southwest Virginia and spend the rest of his life there. Faulkner, returning to his native Oxford, came out with two novels in 1929 (Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury) and another (As I Lay Dying) in 1930.

  From these writers and ot
hers active in the South in the 1920s came some justly famous books and some Pulitzer Prize winners (not necessarily one and the same), and also several literary journals: Sewanee Review and South Atlantic Quarterly, both well established by then, and such newly launched publications as the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Reviewer, the Double Dealer, and the Southwest Review in Dallas. In this new wave of writing and criticism there was a clear break with the romantic past; although Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was yet to come, most of the Southern writers of the 1920s were more interested in realism and in contemporary themes than in the sweet magnolia moonbeam mythology of gallant colonels, delicate but headstrong ladies, and happy, obedient darkies. Several of the renaissance writers were particularly interested in probing beyond the social barriers of race and class. Heyward’s novel Porgy, Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary, Stribling’s Birthright, and Green’s plays (In Abrahams Bosom and others) all reflected this shift. Gothic realism marked Faulkner’s earliest novels, which dealt mainly with rural Mississippi whites.