Harlem Renaissance: The Vogue of the New Negro

The Harlem Renaissance was a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations in a time of extreme national backlash, caused in large part by economic gains won by African Americans during World War I.

The Talented Tenth

W. E. B. Du Bois, in a seminal 1903 essay, labeled this mobilizing elite the “Talented Tenth.” He fleshed out the concept that same year in “The Advance Guard of the Race,” a piece in Booklover's Magazine in which he identified the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the novelist Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and the painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, among a small number of other well-educated professionals, as representatives of this class. The Talented Tenth formulated and propagated a new ideology of racial assertiveness that was to be embraced by the physicians, dentists, educators, preachers, businesspeople, lawyers, and morticians who comprised the bulk of the African American affluent and influential—some 10,000 men and women out of a total population in 1920 of more than 10,000,000. (In 1917, traditionally cited as the natal year of the Harlem Renaissance, there were 2,132 African Americans in colleges and universities, probably no more than fifty of them attending “white” institutions.) This minuscule vanguard of a minority—only 0.001 percent of the racial total—jump-started the New Negro Arts Movement, using as its vehicles the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL), and their respective publications, The Crisis and Opportunity magazine.

The Harlem Renaissance was not all-inclusive of the early twentieth-century African American urban experience. The potent mass movement founded and led by the charismatic Marcus Moziah Garvey was a parallel but socially different force related primarily through dialectical confrontation. Equally different from the institutional ethos and purpose of the Renaissance was the Black Church. Although an occasional minister (such as the father of poet Countee Cullen) or exceptional Garveyites (such as Yale-Harvard man William H. Ferris) might move in both worlds, black evangelism and its cultist manifestations, such as Black Zionism, represented emotional and cultural retrogression in the eyes of the principal actors in the Renaissance.

When Du Bois wrote a few years after the beginning of the New Negro movement in arts and letters that “until the art of the black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human,” he, like most of his Renaissance peers, fully intended to exclude the Blues of Bessie Smith and the Jazz of Joseph (“King”) Oliver. As board members of the Pace Phonograph Company, Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others banned “funky” artists from the Black Swan Records list of recordings, thereby contributing to the demise of the African American-owned firm. But the wild Broadway success of Miller and Lyles's musical Shuffle Along (which helped to popularize the Charleston) or Florence Mill's Blackbirds revue flouted such artistic fastidiousness. The very centrality of music in black life, as well as of black musical stereotypes in white minds, caused popular musical forms to impinge inescapably on Renaissance high culture. Eventually, the Renaissance deans made a virtue out of necessity; they applauded the concert-hall ragtime of “Big Jim” Europe and the “educated” jazz of Atlanta University graduate and big-band leader Fletcher Hamilton Henderson, Jr., and took to hiring Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington or Cabell (Cab) Calloway as drawing cards for fund-raising socials. Still, their relationship to music remained beset by paradox. New York Ragtime, with its Ferdinand Joseph (“Jelly Roll”) Morton strifes and Joplinesque elegance, had as much in common with Chicago jazz as Mozart did with Thomas Wright (“Fats”) Waller.

Although the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance seems much more sudden and dramatic in retrospect than the historic reality, its institutional elaboration was, in fact, relatively quick. Because so little fiction or poetry had been produced by African Americans in the years immediately prior to the Harlem Renaissance, the appearance of a dozen or more poets and novelists and essayists seemed all the more striking and improbable. Death from tuberculosis had silenced poet-novelist Dunbar in 1906, and poor royalties had done the same for novelist Chesnutt after publication the previous year of The Colonel's Dream. Since then, no more than five African Americans had published significant works of fiction and verse. This relative silence was finally to be broken in 1922 by Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows, the first book of poetry since Dunbar.

Stages of Development

Altogether, the Harlem Renaissance evolved through three stages. The first phase, ending in 1923 with the publication of Jean Toomer's unique prose poem, Cane, was deeply influenced by white artists and writers—bohemians and revolutionaries—fascinated for a variety of reasons with the life of black people. The second phase, from early 1924 to mid-1926, was presided over by the civil rights establishment of the NUL and the NAACP, a period of interracial collaboration between Zora Neale Hurston's “Negrotarian” whites and the African American Talented Tenth. The last phase, from mid-1926 to the Harlem Riot of March 1935, was increasingly dominated by the African American artists themselves—the “Niggerati,” in Hurston's pungent phrase. The movement, then, was above all literary and self-consciously an enterprise of high culture well into its middle years. When Charles Spurgeon Johnson, new editor of Opportunity, sent invitations to some dozen young and mostly unknown African American poets and writers to attend a celebration of the sudden outpouring of “Negro” writing, at Manhattan's Civic Club on March 21, 1924, the Renaissance shifted into high gear. “A group of the younger writers, which includes Eric Derwent Walrond, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and some others,” would be present, Johnson promised each invitee. In addition to the younger writers, some fifty luminaries were expected: “Eugene O'Neill, H. L. Mencken, Oswald Garrison Villard, Mary Johnston, Zona Gale, Robert Morss Lovett, Carl Van Doren, Ridgely Torrence, and about twenty more of this type. I think you might find this group interesting enough to draw you away for a few hours from your work on your next book,” Johnson wrote almost coyly to the recently published Jean Toomer. Although both Toomer and Langston Hughes were in Europe at the time, approximately 110 celebrants and honorees assembled that evening; included among them were Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and the young NAACP officer Walter Francis White, the energetic literary entrepreneur. Locke, a professor of philosophy at Howard University and the first African American Rhodes scholar, served as master of ceremonies.

Two compelling messages emerged from the Civic Club gathering: Du Bois's that the literature of apology and the denial to his generation of its authentic voice were now ending; Van Doren's that African American artists were developing at a uniquely propitious moment. They were “in a remarkable strategic position with reference to the new literary age which seems to be impending,” Van Doren predicted. “What American literature decidedly needs at this moment,” he continued, “is color, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items,” Van Doren could not imagine who else could.

White Artist and New Negro: World War I and Its Aftermath

The African American had indisputably moved to the center of mainstream imagination with the end of the Great War, a development nurtured in the chrysalis of the Lost Generation—Greenwich Village Bohemia. Ready conversance with the essentials of Freud and Marx became the measure of serious conversation in MacDougal Street coffeehouses, Albert Boni's Washington Square Book Shop, or the Hotel Brevoort's restaurant, where Floyd Dell, Robert Minor, Matthew Josephson, Max Eastman, and others denounced the social system, the Great War to which it had ineluctably led, and the soul-dead world created in its aftermath, with McKay and Toomer, two of the first stars of the Renaissance, participating. Waldo Frank, Toomer's close friend and literary mentor, foresaw a revolutionary new America emerging “out of our terrifying welter of steel and scarlet.”

Among the so-called Lyrical Left writers gathered around Broom, S4N, and Seven Arts, and the political radicals associated with Liberator, there was a shared reaction against the ruling Anglo-Saxon cultural paradigm. Bourne's concept of a “trans-national” America, democratically respectful of its ethnic, racial, and religious constituents, complemented Du Bois's earlier concept of divided racial identity in The Souls of Black Folk. From such conceptions, the Village's discovery of Harlem followed both logically and, more compellingly, psychologically. The African American, largely excluded because of race from all of the above, was a perfect symbol of cultural innocence and regeneration. He was perceived as an integral, indispensable part of the hoped-for design, somehow destined to aid in the reclamation of a diseased, desiccated civilization.

Theatrical Debut

Public annunciation of the rediscovered Negro came in the fall of 1917 with Emily Hapgood's production of three one-act plays by her husband, Ridgely Torrence, at the old Garden Street Theatre. The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenian, and Granny Maumee were considered daring because the cast was black and the roles were dignified. From this watershed flowed a number of dramatic productions, musicals, and several successful novels by whites—yet also, with great significance, Shuffle Along, a cathartic musical by the African Americans Aubry Lyles and Flournoy Miller. Theodore Dreiser grappled with the explosive subject of Lynching in his 1918 short story “Nigger Jeff.” Two years later, the magnetic African American actor Charles Sidney Gilpin energized O'Neill's Emperor Jones in the 150-seat theater in a MacDougal Street brownstone taken over by the Provincetown Players.

In 1921 Shuffle Along came to the 63rd Street Theatre, with music, lyrics, choreography, cast, and production uniquely in African American hands; composer James Hubert (“Eubie”) Blake's “I'm Just Wild about Harry” and “Love Will Find a Way” entered the list of all-time favorites; and Paul Robeson made his theatrical debut in Mary Hoyt Wiborg's Taboo. In 1922 Clement Wood's sociological novel Nigger sympathetically tracked a beleaguered African American family from slavery through the Great War into urban adversity. T. S. Stribling's Birthright portrayed an African American male protagonist of superior education (a Harvard-educated physician) martyred for his ideals after returning to the South. In e. e. cummings's The Enormous Room, the black character, “Jean Le Negre,” was another “noble savage” paradigm observed through a Freudian prism.

Striving toward a Black Aesthetic

But Village artists and intellectuals were aware and unhappy that they were theorizing about black America and spinning out African American fictional characters in a vacuum—that they had almost no firsthand knowledge about these subjects. Sherwood Anderson's letter to H. L. Mencken (June, 1922) spoke for much of the Lost Generation: “Damn it, man, if I could really get inside the niggers and write about them with some intelligence, I'd be willing to be hanged later and perhaps would be.” After he chanced to read a Jean Toomer short story in Double-Dealer magazine, Anderson helped Toomer get his stories published in the magazines of the Lyrical Left and the Marxists—Dial, S4N, Broom, and Liberator. Anderson's 1925 novel Dark Laughter bore unmistakable signs of indebtedness to Toomer, whose work, Anderson readily admitted, had given him a true insight into the cultural energies that could be harnessed to pull America back from the abyss of fatal materialism. Celebrity in the Village brought Toomer into Waldo Frank's circle.

Black Art and the American Mainstream

This was part of the background to the Talented Tenth's abrupt, enthusiastic, and programmatic embrace of arts and letters after the First World War. With white Broadway audiences flocking to O'Neill plays and shrieking with delight at Liza, Runnin' Wild, and other imitations of Shuffle Along, Charles Johnson and James Weldon Johnson, Du Bois, Fauset, White, Locke, and others saw a unique opportunity to tap into the American mainstream. Harlem, the Negro Capital of the World, filled up with successful bootleggers and racketeers, political and religious charlatans, cults of exotic character (“Black Jews”), street-corner pundits and health practitioners (Hubert Harrison, “Black Herman”), beauty culturists and distinguished professionals (Sarah (“Madame C. J.”) Walker, Louis Tompkins Wright), religious and civil rights notables (Reverends Cullen and Powell, Du Bois, Johnson, White), and hard-pressed, hardworking families determined to make decent lives for their children. Memories of the nightspots in “The Jungle” (133rd Street), of Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson demonstrating his footwork on Lenox Avenue, of raucous shows at the Lafayette that gave Florenz Ziegfeld some of his ideas, of the Tree of Hope outside Connie's Inn where musicians gathered as at a labor exchange, have been vividly set down by Arthur P. Davis, Regina Andrews, Arna Bontemps, and Langston Hughes.

While Bohemia and the Lost Generation suggested to the Talented Tenth the new approach to the old problem of race relations, their shared premise about art and society obscured the diametrically opposite conclusions white and black intellectuals and artists drew from them. For the whites, art was the means to change society before they would accept it. For the blacks, art was the means to change society in order to be accepted into it. For this reason, many of the Harlem intellectuals found the white vogue in Afro-Americana troubling, although they usually feigned enthusiasm about the new dramatic and literary themes. The Talented Tenth convinced itself that the civil rights dividends were potentially greater than the liabilities. As Benjamin Brawley told James Weldon Johnson: “We have a tremendous opportunity to boost the NAACP, letters, and art; and anything else that calls attention to our development along the higher lines.”

Johnson's preface to his best-selling anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) proclaimed that nothing could “do more to change the mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through his production of literature and art.” Jessie Fauset and her peers reasoned: “Here is an audience waiting to hear the truth about us. Let us, who are better qualified to present that truth than any white writer, try to do so.” Fauset's There Is Confusion and Walter White's The Fire in the Flint (1924) were the first two novels of the Renaissance. Meanwhile, Langston Hughes published several poems in The Crisis that would later appear in the collection The Weary Blues. The euphonious “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (dedicated to Du Bois) ran in The Crisis in 1921. With the appearance of McKay's Harlem Shadows and Toomer's Cane the next year, 1923, the African American officers of the NAACP and the NUL saw how a theory could be put into action. The young New York University prodigy Countee Cullen, already published in The Crisis and Opportunity, had his mainstream breakthrough in 1923 in Harper's and Century magazines. Two years later, with Carl Sandburg as one of the three judges, Cullen won the prestigious Witter Bynner poetry prize. Meanwhile, Paul Kellogg's Survey Graphic project moved apace under the editorship of Locke.

World War I and the New Negro

Two preconditions made this unprecedented mobilization of talent and group support in the service of a racial arts-and-letters movement possible—demography and repression. The Great Migration from the rural South to the industrial North produced the metropolitan dynamism undergirding the Renaissance. The Red Summer of 1919, a period of socialist agitation and conservative backlash following the Russian revolution, produced the trauma that led to the cultural sublimation of civil rights. In pressure-cooker fashion, the increase in its African American population caused Harlem to pulsate as it pushed its racial boundaries south below 135th Street to Central Park and north beyond 139th (so-called Strivers' Row). In the first flush of Harlem's realization and of general African American exuberance, the summer of 1919 had a cruelly decompressing impact on Harlem and black America in general. Charleston, South Carolina erupted in riot in May, followed by Longview, Texas in July, and Washington, D.C., later in the month. Chicago exploded on July 27. Lynchings of returning African American soldiers and expulsion of African American workers from unions abounded. In the North, the white working classes struck out against perceived and manipulated threats to job security and unionism from blacks streaming north. In Helena, Arkansas, where a pogrom was unleashed against black farmers organizing a cotton cooperative, and outside Atlanta, where the Ku Klux Klan was reconstituted, the message of the white South to African Americans was that the racial status quo ante bellum was in force again, with a vengeance. Twenty-six race riots in towns, cities, and counties swept across the nation all the way to Nebraska. The “race problem” became definitively an American dilemma in that summer, and no longer a peculiar complexity in the exotic South.

Garveyism

The term New Negro entered the vocabulary in reaction to the Red Summer, along with McKay's poetic catechism—“Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” There was a groundswell of support for Marcus Garvey's UNIA. Until his imprisonment for mail fraud in 1924, the Jamaican immigrant's message of African Zionism, anti-integrationism, working-class assertiveness, and Bookerite business enterprise increasingly threatened the hegemony of the Talented Tenth and its major organizations, the NAACP and NUL, among people of color in America (much of Garvey's support came from West Indians).

The Negro World, Garvey's multilingual newspaper, circulated throughout Latin America and the African empires of Britain and France. Locke spoke for the alarmed “respectable” civil rights leadership when he wrote, in his introductory remarks to the special issue of Survey Graphic, that, although “the thinking Negro has shifted a little to the left with the world trend,” black separatism “cannot be—even if it were desirable.” Although the movement was its own worst enemy, the Talented Tenth was pleased to help the Justice Department speed its demise.

Architects of the Harlem Renaissance

Du Bois, initially a Renaissance enthusiast, vividly expressed the farfetched nature of the arts-and-letters movement as early as 1926: “How is it that an organization of this kind [the NAACP] can turn aside to talk about art? After all, what have we who are slaves and black to do with art?” It was the brilliant insight of the men and women associated with the NAACP and NUL that, although the road to the ballot box, the union hall, decent neighborhoods, and the office was blocked, the small cracks in the wall of racism that could be widened through the production of exemplary racial images in collaboration with liberal white philanthropy, the robust culture industry primarily located in New York City, and artists from white Bohemia. If, in retrospect, then, the New Negro Arts Movement has been interpreted as a natural phase in the cultural evolution of another American group, such an interpretation sacrifices causation to appearance. The Renaissance was, in fact, a generation-skipping phenomenon in which a vanguard of the Talented Tenth elite recruited, organized, supported, and guided an unevenly endowed cohort of artists and writers to make statements that advanced a certain conception of the race, a cohort of men and women, most of whom would never have imagined the possibility of artistic and literary careers.

Charles Johnson and his allies were able to make the critical Renaissance mass possible. Johnson assembled files on prospective recruits throughout the country, going so far as to cajole Aaron Douglas, the artist from Kansas, and others into coming to Harlem, where a network manned by his secretary, Ethel Ray Nance, and her friends Regina Anderson and Louella Tucker (assisted by gifted Trinidadian short-story writer Eric Walrond) looked after them until a salary or a fellowship could be secured. White, the assistant secretary of the NAACP, urged Paul Robeson to abandon law for an acting career, encouraged Nella Larsen to follow his own example as a novelist, and passed the hat for artist Hale Aspacio Woodruff. Fauset continued to discover and publish short stories and verse, such as those of Wallace Thurman and Arna Bontemps. Shortly after the Civic Club evening, both the NAACP and the NUL announced the creation of annual awards ceremonies bearing the titles of their respective publications, Crisis and Opportunity.

Opportunity Awards

The awarding of the first Opportunity prizes came in May, 1925 in an elaborate ceremony at the Fifth Avenue Restaurant with some 300 participants attending. Twenty-four distinguished judges (among them Carl Van Doren, Zona Gale, Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, and Van Wyck Brooks) had ruled on the worthiness of entries in five categories. The awards ceremony was interracial, but white capital and influence were crucial to its success, and the white presence was pervasive, at first, setting the outer boundaries for what was creatively normative. Money to start the Crisis prize program had come from Amy Spingarn, an accomplished artist and poet, and wife of Joel Spingarn, chairman of the NAACP's board of directors. The wife of the influential attorney, Fisk University trustee, and Urban League Board chairman, L. Hollingsworth Wood, had made a similar contribution to initiate the Opportunity prizes. These were the people who Zora Neal Hurston, one of the first Opportunity prize winners, memorably dubbed “Negrotarians.” The Opportunity gala showcased the steadily augmenting talent in the Renaissance—what Hurston characterized as the “Niggerati.” Most of those whose talent had staying power were introduced that night: Edward Franklin Frazier, who won the first prize for an essay on social equality; Sterling Allen Brown, who took second prize for an essay on the singer Roland Willsie Hayes; Hurston, awarded second prize for the short story “Spunk”; and Eric Walrond, third-prize winner for his short story “Voodoo's Revenge.” James Weldon Johnson read the poem that took first prize—“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes—a turning-point poem that combined the gift of a superior artist and the enduring, music-encased spirit of the black migrant.

Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro

The measures of Charles S. Johnson's success included the announcement of a second Opportunity contest to be underwritten by Harlem “businessman” (and numbers king) Caspar Holstein; New York Times music critic Carl Van Vechten's enthusiasm over Hughes led to a contract with Knopf for the publication of Hughes's first volume of poetry; and a prediction by the New York Herald Tribune that the country was “on the edge, if not already in the midst of, what might not improperly be called a Negro renaissance”—thereby giving the movement its name. Priming the public for the Fifth Avenue Restaurant occasion, the special edition of Survey Graphic, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” edited by Locke, had reached an unprecedented 42,000 readers in March, 1926. The ideology of cultural nationalism at the heart of the Renaissance was crisply delineated in Locke's opening essay, in which he stated that “without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.” There was little amiss about America that interracial elitism could not set right, Locke and the others believed. Despite historic discrimination and the Red Summer, the Rhodes scholar assured readers that the increasing radicalism among African Americans was superficial. At year's end, Albert and Charles Boni published Locke's The New Negro, an expanded and polished edition of the poetry and prose from the Opportunity contest and the special Survey Graphic.

The New Negro carried several memorable works, such as the short story “The South Lingers On” by Rudolph Fisher, a graduate of Brown University and Howard College of Medicine; the acid poem “White House(s)” and the euphonic “The Tropics in New York” by McKay, now in European self-exile; and several poetic vignettes from Toomer's Cane. Although the objective conditions confronting most African Americans in Harlem and elsewhere were deteriorating, optimism remained high. Harlem recoiled from Garveyism and socialism to applaud Phi Beta Kappa poets, university-trained painters, concretizing musicians, and novel-writing officers of civil rights organizations. “Everywhere we heard the sighs of wonder, amazement, and sometimes admiration when it was whispered or announced that here was one of the ‘New Negroes’,” Arna Bontemps recalled.

The second Opportunity awards banquet, in April 1926, was another artistic and interracial success. At the beginning of the year, the William E. Harmon Foundation announced seven annual prizes for literature, music, fine arts, industry, science, education, and race relations, with George Edmund Haynes, African American official in the Federal Council of Churches, and Locke as chief advisers. That same year, the publishers Boni & Liveright offered a $1,000 prize for the “best novel on Negro life” by an African American. Casper Holstein contributed $1,000 that year to endow Opportunity prizes. Van Vechten made a smaller contribution to the same cause. Amy Spingarn provided $600 toward The Crisis awards. Otto Kanh underwrote two years in France for the young artist Hale Woodruff, and Louis Rodman Wanamaker provided prizes for music composition.

The third Opportunity awards dinner was a vintage one for poetry, with entries by Bontemps, Sterling Brown, Hughes, Helene Johnson, and Jonathan H. Brooks. Eric Walrond's lush, impressionistic collection of short stories Tropic Death, published by Boni & Liveright at the end of 1926, provided the most probing exploration of the psychology of cultural underdevelopment since Toomer's Cane. If Cane recaptured in a string of glowing vignettes (most of them about women) the sunset beauty and agony of a preindustrial culture, Tropic Death did much the same for the Antilles.

McKay, viewing the scene from abroad, spoke derisively of the artistic and literary autocracy of “that NAACP crowd.” The Ministry mounted a movable feast to which the anointed were invited, sometimes to Walter and Gladys White's apartment at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, where they might share cocktails with Sinclair Lewis or H. L. Mencken; often (after 1928) to the famous 136th Street “Dark Tower” salon maintained by beauty culture heiress A'Lelia Walker, where guests might include Sir Osbert Sitwell, the Crown Prince of Sweden, or Lady Mountbatten; and very frequently to the home of Carl and Fania Van Vechten, to imbibe the host's sidecars and listen to Robeson sing, or to Jim Johnson recite from “God's Trombones,” or to George Gershwin play the piano. Meanwhile, Harlem's appeal to white revellers inspired the young physician Rudolph Fisher to write “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” a satiric piece in the August 1927 issue of American Mercury.

Ascendancy of Black Artists

The third phase of the Harlem Renaissance began even as the second had only just gotten under way. The second phase (1924 to mid-1926) was dominated by the officialdom of the two major civil rights organizations, with its ideology of civil rights advancement of African Americans through the creation and mobilization of an artistic-literary movement. The third phase, from mid-1926 to the end of 1934, was marked by rebellion against the civil rights establishment on the part of many of the artists and writers whom that establishment had assembled and promoted. Three publications during 1926 formed a watershed between the genteel and the demonic Renaissance. Hughes's “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which appeared in the June 1926 issue of the Nation, served as manifesto of the breakaway from the arts-and-letters party line. Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, released by Knopf that August, drove much of literate black America into a dichotomy of approval and apoplexy over “authentic” versus “proper” cultural expression. Wallace Thurman's Fire!!, which appeared in November, assembled the rebels for a major assault against the Civil Rights Ministry of Culture.

Hughes's turning-point essay had been provoked by Schuyler's essay in the Nation, “The Negro-Art Hokum,” ridiculing “eager apostles from Greenwich Village, Harlem, and environs” who made claims for a special African American artistic vision distinct from that of white Americans. In a famous peroration, Hughes responded that he and his fellow artists intended to express their “individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad … If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.” There was considerable African American displeasure; and it was complex. Much of the condemnation of the license for expression Hughes, Thurman, Hurston, and other artists arrogated to themselves was generational or puritanical, and usually both.

But much of the condemnation also stemmed from racial sensitivity, from sheer mortification at seeing uneducated, crude, and scrappy black men and women depicted without tinsel and soap. Thurman and associate editors John Davis, Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Bennett, Arthur Huff Fauset, Hughes, Hurston, and Richard Bruce Nugent took the Renaissance out of the parlor, the editorial office, and the banquet room. The focus shifted to Locke's “peasant matrix,” to the sorrows and joys of those outside the Talented Tenth. “Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith … penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals,” Hughes exhorted in “The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain.” Meanwhile the deeper objections of the sophisticated to Nigger Heaven lay in its message that the Talented Tenth's preoccupation with cultural improvement was a misguided affectation that would cost the race its vitality. It was the “archaic Negroes” who were at ease in their skins and capable of action, Van Vechten's characters demonstrated.

The younger artists embraced Van Vechten's fiction as a worthy model because of its ribald iconoclasm and iteration that the future of African American arts and letters lay in the culture of the working poor and even of the underclass—in bottom-up drama, fiction, music, and poetry, and painting. Regularly convening at the notorious “267 House,” the brownstone an indulgent landlady provided Thurman rent-free on 136th Street (alternately known as “Niggerati Manor”), the group that came to produce Fire!!, saw art not as politics by other means—civil rights between covers or from a stage or an easel—but as an expression of the intrinsic conditions most men and women of African descent were experiencing. They spoke of the need “for a truly Negroid note,” for empathy with “those elements within the race which are still too potent for easy assimilation,” and they openly mocked the premise of the civil rights establishment that (as a Hughes character says in The Ways of White Folks) “art would break down color lines, art would save the race and prevent lynchings! Bunk!” Finally, like creative agents in society from time immemorial, they were impelled to insult their patrons and to defy conventions.

Criteria of Negro Art: A Symposium

To put the Renaissance back on track, W. E. B. Du Bois sponsored a symposium in late 1926, “The Criteria of Negro Art,” inviting a spectrum of views about the appropriate course the arts should take. In a further effort to restore direction, Du Bois's Dark Princess appeared in 1928 from Harcourt, Brace. It is a large, serious novel in which the “problem of the twentieth century” is taken in charge by a Talented Tenth International whose prime mover is a princess from India. But the momentum stayed firmly with the rebels.

Home to Harlem

Respectable black America was unable to ignore the novel that embodied the values of the Niggerati—the first Renaissance best seller by a black author—McKay's Home to Harlem, released by Harper & Brothers in the spring of 1928. Its milieu is wholly plebeian. The protagonist, Jake, is a Lenox Avenue “noble savage” who demonstrates (in marked contrast to the book-reading Ray) the superiority of the Negro mind uncorrupted by European learning. Home to Harlem finally shattered the enforced literary code of the civil rights establishment. Du Bois confessed to feeling “distinctly like needing a bath” after reading McKay's novel about the “debauched tenth.” Rudolph Fisher's The Walls of Jericho, appearing that year from Knopf, was a brilliant, deftly executed satire that upset Du Bois as much as it heartened Thurman. Fisher, a successful Harlem physician with solid Talented Tenth family credentials, satirized the NAACP, the Negrotarians, Harlem high society, and easily recognized Renaissance notables, while entering convincingly into the world of the working classes, organized crime, and romance across classes.

Charles Johnson, preparing to leave the editorship of Opportunity for a professorship in sociology at Fisk University, observed that Renaissance artists were “now less self-conscious, less interested in proving that they are just like white people … Relief from the stifling consciousness of being a problem has brought a certain superiority” to the Harlem Renaissance. McKay's and Fisher's fiction inspired the Niggerati to publish the magazine, Harlem, in November 1928. Editor Thurman announced portentously, “The time has now come when the Negro artist can be his true self and pander to the stupidities of no one, wither white or black.” Harlem won the collaboration of Locke and White, and lasted two issues. Roy de Coverly, George W. Little, and George S. Schuyler signed on, and Hughes contributed one of the finest short stories, based on his travels down the West Coast of Africa: “Luani of the Jungles,” a polished genre piece on the seductions of the civilized and the primitives.

Quicksand

The other Renaissance novel that year, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, published by Knopf, achieved the distinction of being praised by Du Bois, Locke, and Hughes. Larsen would remain something of a mystery woman, helped in her career by Van Vechten and White, but somehow always receding, and finally disappearing altogether from the Harlem scene. Still, Quicksand was a triumph of vivid, yet economic, writing and rich allegory. Its very modern heroine experiences misfortunes and ultimate destruction from causes that are both racial and individual. She is not a tragic mulatto, but a mulatto who is tragic for reasons that are both sociological and existential. Helga Crane, Larsen's protagonist, was the Virginia Slim of Renaissance fiction. Angela Murray (Angela, in her white persona), the heroine of Fauset's second novel, was the Gibson Girl of Renaissance fiction.

The Blacker the Berry

Thurman's The Blacker the Berry, published by Macaulay in early 1929, was a breakthrough novel. For the first time in African American fiction, color prejudice within the race was the central theme of a novel. Emma Lou, its heroine (like the author very dark and conventionally unattractive), is obsessed with respectability as well as tortured by her pigment, for Thurman makes the point on every page that black America's aesthetic and spiritual center resides in the unaffected, unblended, noisome common folk and the liberated, unconventional artists. With the unprecedented Broadway success of Harlem, Thurman's sensationalized romp through the underside of Harlem, the triumph of Niggerati aesthetics over civil rights arts-and-letters was impressively confirmed. Another equally sharp smell of reality irritated establishment nostrils that same year, with the publication of McKay's second novel, Banjo, appearing only weeks after The Blacker the Berry. “The Negroes are writing against themselves,” lamented the reviewer for the Amsterdam News. Set among the human flotsam and jetsam of Marseilles and West Africa, the message of McKay's novel was again that European civilization was inimical to Africans everywhere.

Twilight Years: The Great Depression

The stock market collapsed, but reverberations from the Harlem Renaissance seemed stronger than ever. Larsen's second novel, Passing, appeared. Its theme, like Fauset's, was the burden of mixed racial ancestry. But, although Passing was less successful than Quicksand, Larsen's novel again evaded the trap of writing another tragic-mulatto novel by opposing the richness of African American life to the material advantages afforded by the option of “passing.” In February 1930, Marc Connelly's dramatization of Roark Bradford's short stories opened on Broadway as The Green Pastures. The Hall Johnson Choir sang in it, Richard Harrison played “De Lawd,” and scores of Harlemites found parts during 557 performances at the Mansfield tour across the country. Sterling Brown, the demanding young critic and professor of English at Howard University, pronounced the play a “miracle.” After The Green Pastures came Not Without Laughter, Hughes's glowing novel from Knopf. Financed by Charlotte Osgood Mason (the often tyrannical bestower of artistic largesse nicknamed “Godmother”) and Amy Spingarn, Hughes had resumed his college education at Lincoln University and completed Not Without Laughter during his senior year. The beleaguered family at the center of the novel represents black America in transition in white America. Hughes's young male protagonist learns that proving his equality means affirming his distinctive racial qualities. Not only did Locke admire Not Without Laughter, but the New Masses reviewer embraced it as “our novel.” The Ministry of Culture decreed Hughes worthy of the Harmon gold medal for 1930. The year ended with Schuyler's ribald, sprawling satire, Black No More, an unsparing demolition of every personality and institution in black America. Little wonder that Locke titled his retrospective piece in the February 1931 Opportunity “The Year of Grace.”

The Great Depression notwithstanding, the health of the Renaissance appeared to be more robust than ever. The first Rosenwald fellowships for African Americans had been secured largely due to James Weldon Johnson's influence the previous year. Since 1928, advised by Locke, the Harmon Foundation had mounted an annual traveling exhibition of drawings, paintings, and sculpture by African Americans. The 1930 show included the generally unsuspected talent and genius of Palmer Hayden, William Henry Johnson, Archibald Motley Jr., James Amos Porter, and Laura Wheeler Waring in painting. Sargent Johnson, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and Augusta Christine Fells Savage were the outstanding sculptors of the show.

Black Manhattan

Superficially, Harlem itself appeared to be in fair health well into 1931. James Weldon Johnson's celebration of the community's strengths, Black Manhattan, was published near the end of 1930. “Harlem is still in the process of making,” the book proclaimed, and the author's confidence in the power of the “recent literary and artistic emergence” to ameliorate race relations was unshaken. In Johnson's Harlem, redcaps and cooks cheered when Renaissance talents won Guggenheim and Rosenwald fellowships; they rushed to newsstands whenever the American Mercury or New Republic mentioned activities north of Central Park. It was much too easy for Talented Tenth notables like Johnson, White, and Locke not to notice in the second year of the Great Depression that, for the great majority of the population, Harlem was in the process of “unmaking.”

The 1931 Report on Negro Housing, presented to President Hoover, was a document starkly in contrast to the optimism in Black Manhattan. Nearly 50 percent of Harlem's families would be unemployed by the end of 1932. The syphilis rate was nine times higher in Harlem than in white Manhattan; the tuberculosis rate was five times greater; pneumonia and typhoid cases were twice that of whites. Two African American mothers and two babies died for every white mother and child. Harlem General Hospital, the single public facility in the neighborhood, served 200,000 African Americans with 273 beds. A Harlem family paid twice as much of their income for rent than a white family. Meanwhile, median family income in Harlem dropped 43.6 percent by 1932. The ending of Prohibition would devastate scores of marginal speakeasies, as well as prove fatal to theaters like the Lafayette. In Locke's letters to Charlotte Osgood most of his news was distinctly downbeat.

The writing partnership of two of Locke's proteges, Hughes and Hurston, their material needs underwritten in a New Jersey township by “Godmother” Charlotte Mason, collapsed in acrimonious dispute. Marxism had a deep influence on Hughes in the aftermath of his painful breakup with Mason, Locke, and Hurston. Beginning with “Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria” published in New Masses in December 1931, Hughes's poetry became markedly political. “Elderly Race Leaders” and “Goodbye Christ,” as well as the play “Scottsboro, Limited,” were irreverent, staccato offerings to the coming triumph of the proletariat. The poet's departure for Moscow in June 1932, along with eighteen others, ostensibly to act in Black and White, a Soviet film about American race relations, symbolized the shift in patronage and accompanying politicization of Renaissance artists. An impatient Du Bois, already deeply alienated from the Renaissance, called for a second Amenia Conference to radicalize the movement's ideology and renew its personnel. James Weldon Johnson's autobiography, Along This Way, an elegantly written review of his unique public career as archetypal renaissance man in both meanings of the word, was the publishing event of the year. McKay's final novel also appeared that year; Banana Bottom represented a philosophical advance over Home to Harlem and Banjo in its reconciliation through the protagonist, Bita Plant, of the previously destructive tension in McKay between the natural and the artificial—soul and civilization.

The publication of Thurman's last novel, Infants of the Spring, at the beginning of 1932, had already announced the end of the Harlem Renaissance. The action of Thurman's novel is in the ideas of the characters, in their incessant talk about themselves, Booker Taliaferro Washington, Du Bois, racism, and the destiny of the race. Its ending is conceptually poignant. Paul Arbian (Richard Bruce Nugent) commits suicide in a full tub of water, which splashes over and obliterates the pages of Arbian's unfinished novel on the bathroom floor. A still legible page, however, contains this paragraph, which was, in effect, an epitaph: “He had drawn a distorted, inky black skyscraper, modeled after Niggerati Manor, and on which were focused an array of blindingly white beams of light. The foundation of this building was composed of crumbling stone. At first glance it could be ascertained that the skyscraper would soon crumple and fall, leaving the dominating white lights in full possession of the sky.”

The literary energies of the Renaissance finally slumped. McKay returned to Harlem in February 1934 after a twelve-year sojourn abroad, but his creative powers were spent. The last novel of the movement, Hurston's beautifully written Jonah's Gourd Vine, went on sale in May 1934. Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and Locke applauded Hurston's allegorical story of her immediate family (especially her father) and the mores of an African American town in Florida called Eatonville. Thurman died a few days before Christmas 1934, soon after his return from an abortive Hollywood film project. Ignoring his physician's advice, he hemorrhaged after drinking to excess while hosting a party in the notorious house at 267 West 136th Street. Four days later, Fisher expired from intestinal cancer.

Locke's New Negro anthology had been crucial to the formation of the Renaissance. As the movement ran down, another anthology—Negro, by English heiress Nancy Cunard—far more massive in scope than previous works, recharged the Renaissance for a brief period, enlisting the contributions of most of the principals (though McKay and Walrond declined, and Toomer no longer acknowledged his African American roots), and captured its essence in the manner of expert taxidermy. A grieving Locke wrote Charlotte Mason from Howard University, “It is hard to see the collapse of things you have labored to raise on a sound base.”

Arthur Fauset, Jessie's perceptive brother, attempted to explain the collapse to Locke and the readers of Opportunity at the beginning of 1934. He foresaw “a socio-political-economic setback from which it may take decades to recover.” The Renaissance had left the race unprepared, Fauset charged, because of its unrealistic belief, “that social and economic recognition will be inevitable when once the race has produced a sufficiently large number of persons who have properly qualified themselves in the arts.” Du Bois had not only turned his back on the movement, he had left the NAACP and Harlem for a university professorship in Atlanta after an enormous row over civil rights policy.

As the 1933 essay “Marxism and the Negro Problem” had made abundantly clear, Du Bois ruled out collaboration with American Marxists because they were much too racist. James Weldon Johnson's philosophical tour d'horizon appearing in 1934, Negro Americans, What Now?, asked precisely the question of the decade. Most Harlemites were certain that the riot exploding on the evening of March 19, 1935, taking three lives and costing two million dollars in property damage, was not an answer. By then, the Works Progress Administration had become the major patron of African American artists and writers. Writers William Attaway, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, and Frank Yerby would emerge under its aegis, as would painters Romare Bearden, Jacob Armstead Lawrence, Charles Sebree, Lois Mailou Jones, and Charles White. The Communist Party was another patron, notably for Richard Wright, whose 1937 essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing” would materially contribute to the premise of Hughes's “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” For thousands of ordinary Harlemites who had looked to Garvey's UNIA for inspiration, then to the Renaissance, there was now Father Divine and his “heavens.”

In the ensuing years much was renounced, more was lost or forgotten, yet the Renaissance, however artificial and overreaching, left a positive mark. Locke's New Negro anthology featured thirty of the movement's thirty-five stars. They and a small number of less gifted collaborators generated twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, five Broadway plays, numerous essays and short stories, three performed ballets and concerti, and a considerable output of canvas and sculpture. If the achievement was less than the titanic expectations of the Ministry of Culture, it was an arts-and-letters legacy, nevertheless, of which a beleaguered and belittled black America could be proud, and by which it could be sustained. If more by osmosis than conscious attention, mainstream America was also richer for the color, emotion, humanity, and cautionary vision produced by Harlem during its Golden Age.

“If I had supposed that all Negroes were illiterate brutes, I might be astonished to discover that they can write good third rate poetry, readable and unreadable magazine fiction,” wrote one contemporary white Marxist. Nevertheless there were many white Americans—perhaps the majority—who found the African American artistic and literary ferment of the period wholly unexpected and little short of incredible. If the judgment of the Marxist observer soon became commonplace, it was because the Harlem Renaissance demonstrated—finally, irrefutably, during slightly more than a decade—the considerable creative capacities of the best and brightest of a disadvantaged racial minority.

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