Harlem: Capital of the Black World PDF

1 Harlem: Capital of the Black World What made Harlem special was not that it was bawdy and tended to epitomize the most sordid aspects of the Jazz Age. While that was true enough, so had numerous other “colored districts” of American cities. New York had similar black centers in earlier years. Jame...

1 Harlem: Capital of the Black World What made Harlem special was not that it was bawdy and tended to epitomize the most sordid aspects of the Jazz Age. While that was true enough, so had numerous other “colored districts” of American cities. New York had similar black centers in earlier years. James Weldon Johnson recalled one such district on West 35th Street that thrived around the turn of the century. Ike Hines’s place, which Johnson described, had all of the qualities of the cabaret and “sporting life” that were later to characterize Harlem for many. Ike Hines’s had collected black musicians and entertainers, and they, in turn, attracted scores of white pleasure-seekers and white heirs of the minstrel tradition in search of material for their blackfaced theatrical acts. There seem always to have been “darktowns.” They were a bit spicy because of community indulgence. The respectable white citizenry sought pleasure in their brothels and cabarets. And their patronage shielded the extra-legal life of Negroes from police harassment. Harlem, before World War I and the years following, had all of these features. But the time and the circumstances of its creation made Harlem symbolize the Afro-American’s coming of age.1 It is easy enough to understand why people saw more in Harlem than was there. It was the historic moment, among other things. Half a century had passed since the emancipation of slaves when black Harlem came into existence. What better point at which to declare the past of slavery and servility dead and to proclaim the new day of the liberated and independent black man? It was the twentieth century now after all, a time for new beginnings. Black Americans, like white Americans, were becoming an urban rather than a rural people. Large numbers of blacks had streamed into the northern cities in the first years of the new century, forced out by the poverty of southern agriculture and the mean brutality of southern racial bigotry. Harlem gained from that migration, as shortly after, in World War I, it gained from the waves of blacks who came to fill the war industries’ labor needs that had been aggravated by the war-severed European immigration. Great numbers of blacks seemed to mean new power. It was the power of numbers after all, and the astute, economic aggressiveness of black businessmen that had snatched Harlem’s newly developed real estate from white middle-class hands and converted it into the biggest and most elegant black community in the Western world. Harlem had thus freshly become a great concentration of blacks—not peasant but urban—within the most urbane of American cities then just feeling its youthful strength and posturing in self-conscious sophistication. No wonder Harlemites felt that they and their community were something special; not just another darktown. And when black soldiers paraded up Lenox Avenue to a jazz step —returning from a war that had ended war and guaranteed to all men the right of self-determination—it is not surprising that black men’s dreams would find in Harlem a capital for the race, a platform from which the new black voice would be heard around the world, and an intellectual center of the New Negro.2 Afro-Americans, of course, were not the only ones in the first decades of this century to be deceived by their dreams and their innocence. That was common with Americans. But Negroes—up from slavery—had more to hope for than others, more of a dream to be deferred and then denied. The flourishing of Harlem came at just the right moment to indulge innocence and make it all seem possible. It was just that sense of possibility and power that persuaded many black men and women to come to Harlem in the years around the Great War. Blacks who wanted to be where they could reach the widest audience—to organize and inspire blacks throughout the world, to cajole whites to reform. Those Negroes who had pretensions of talent and intellect wanted to be where, to greatest effect, they might convert their skills and minds into personal and racial success. Many saw Harlem as the retort where the best achievement of colored people would be crystallized into the hard, permanent stuff of the race’s positive future. And, of course, as more selfconfident, sophisticated, and articulate Negroes came to Harlem, the more attractive it became for others who wanted to make their way. By the end of the 1920s there v/as a discernible old and new guard of black intellectuals in New York. But whether old or young, Harlem had pulled them all the same. When James Weldon Johnson moved to Harlem in 1914, he was actually coming to New York for a second time, following a young manhood of wide experience. His decision to establish himself in Harlem was, in fact, a final commitment to a life’s work as an intellectual (a writer and poet), and as an organizer and propagandist for the Afro-American cause. Johnson had been successful at almost everything he touched as a young man. He had been a high school principal as well as a lawyer in his native Jacksonville, Florida. With his brother, J. Rosamund Johnson, and Bob Cole he had had enormous success writing songs and plays for the New York musical stage in the first years of the century. This team excited Tin Pan Alley with such hits as “A Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes,” “Nobody’s Lookin’ but the Owl and the Moon,” “Under the Bamboo Tree,” and “The Congo Love Song”; they were among the most popular songwriters of the period. Because he had been active in Republican party politics Johnson was appointed to the consular service, serving during the Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft administrations in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and Corinto, Nicaragua. A very high intelligence, a strong command of Spanish, and a conciliatory temperament served to make Johnson an excellent consul. It was mainly through his intelligence and skill that the United States was able to place troops in Corinto during an insurrection in 1912. While in Latin America, Johnson extended his literary talent. He published two poems, with excellent critical reception: “After Fifty Years” and “O Black and Unknown Bards.” In addition to poetry, Johnson anonymously published his novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. So by the time Johnson came to Harlem, he had tasted success in several fields.3 Johnson’s decision to leave the consular service was prompted by the political change that brought Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats to Washington. A career in the foreign service that would be severely limited for Negroes under the Republicans would surely be even more circumscribed under a southern-dominated Democratic administration. One suspects, however, that even under liberal circumstances, the consular service would not for long have satisfied a man of Johnson’s wide range of talents and interests. But his decision to come to New York was not automatic upon leaving the foreign service. He had at first thought of returning to Jacksonville. His father had died in the years he was in the Caribbean, and his mother hoped that one of her sons would remain home. But the deterioration of race relations in the town had gone so far as to make it impossible for him to stay. Perhaps the deterioration had not been so great, but his long experience outside the South made Johnson see it differently. Also, he had married a Brooklyn girl and now he had to see Jacksonville through her eyes. White men whom he had known from his boyhood seemed different now. Trivialities were annoying. White men, who had been his friends, were now embarrassed to greet him on the street, frightened away from all the courtesies like tipping their hats to his wife as they passed. Jacksonville was not a large town, everyone knew everyone else by name and reputation; the little courtesies were important. The trivial slights stung, and Johnson could no longer find a common ground with men who could not treat him as a man. The New York that Johnson moved to in 1914 was strangely different from the city he had known before. The center of Negro entertainment and night life had moved uptown from the old Marshall Hotel on West 53rd Street, the place that he remembered. The trek had already begun to Harlem. J. Rosamund Johnson had been one of the first Negroes to buy a home west of Lenox Avenue, on 136th Street; James Weldon followed his brother’s move. In 1917, James Weldon Johnson was asked to be the first Negro executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he accepted. He served in that position until 1931, just seven years before his accidental death. His appointment in 1931 to the Adam K. Spence Chair of Creative Literature at Fisk University made it possible for him to devote full time to lecturing and writing. But through the 1920s he contributed strongly to the intellectual life of Harlem. He wrote editorials for the New York Age and published many poems, including God’s Trombones (1927). In addition, he and J. Rosamund edited a collection of Negro spirituals. The city encouraged creative work. He was, in his words, “materializing the intangible.” He had “minted some rather inconsequential dreams, and the process seemed to possess an element of magic.” As an official of the NAACP, he succeeded in giving national organization and strength to the Association. He attacked the brutality of white Americans, the crippling limitations on Negro opportunity imposed by a race-conscious society, and he lobbied forcefully and effectively for federal legislation that would remedy these evils. Johnson’s establishment in Harlem, then, was really a part of a final definition of his purpose and career. Harlem seemed to provide the place and the opportunity for this black man of talent and experience to have a real and broad-ranging impact on his world. Actually a member of an older generation, Johnson in the 1920s was a compeer with what people began to call the “New Negro.” The circumstances that made Harlem and New York appear a viable center of Negro cultural, intellectual, and political life were in part the result of the large migration of talented blacks to the city in the years before the war. But, more important, what distinguished Harlem from the several other burgeoning black metropolises were changes, seemingly centered in Harlem, in the character of Negro protest and thought. These changes resonated in the formation of the NAACP and resulted in the migration of W. E. Burghardt DuBois to New York. DuBois, like Johnson, was part of an older generation than the one that was to personify the New Negro. He, like Johnson, had grown up in the critical years of Reconstruction. Like Johnson’s, his family had not personally felt slavery. But Du-Bois, unlike Johnson, was not to know the South until his adult years. Born 1868 in Great Barrington, a small Massachusetts town in the Berkshires on the Housatonic River, DuBois could feel his family roots going down into this soil which was both Hudson River Dutch and New England Puritan. Although he was forced because of his race to make detours, DuBois received the kind of education that any exceptionally bright Yankee would have taken: Great Barrington public school, A.B. at Fisk University, A.B. and Ph.D. at Harvard, and postdoctoral study in Berlin. While at Fisk, he had taught in the rural schools of Tennessee, and after his return from Europe he took a position at Negro colleges—Wilberforce in Pennsylvania and then at Atlanta University.4 Atlanta had been James Weldon Johnson’s college, and when Johnson returned, fresh from his success on the New York stage, for the tenth reunion of his class, he had in his hands Souls of Black Folk, just published by a brilliant Yankee Negro from Harvard and Europe. DuBois’s book was enormously important, not merely because it dignified the Negro through some of the finest prose of the period, but because it laid bare a rift that had been widening between young Negro intellectuals like DuBois and the established Negro leadership under Booker T. Washington. Washington had stressed industrial and agricultural training for Negroes, thus he tended to be anti-intellectual and he saw problems from a rural and small town perspective. His counsel was for conciliation and patience on the part of Negroes; therefore in DuBois’s eyes he was ignoring the reality of white force and violence against Negro citizenship. He depended on the white good will in the South and upon white philanthropy in the North; therefore his ability to be a spokesman for Negro aspirations could be doubted. He had built around him an efficient machine which channeled white good-will and philanthropy as well as Republican patronage to selected Negroes; thus he could stifle criticism, militancy, and threats to his power. Militant black antagonism against Washington was very deep. DuBois’s criticism in Souls of Black Folk was measured and respectful; nevertheless the book signaled the break, and DuBois thus became the leader and spokesman of the anti-Washington forces. DuBois brought the militants together in a conference held July 11–13, 1905, at Buffalo, New York. The “Niagara Movement” issued a direct challenge to the philosophy and leadership of Booker T. Washington. Having been subjected to the tyranny of the Washington machine, the conferees asked that free speech and the right to criticize be honored in the fact. In response to what they saw as Washington’s sell-out of the Negro’s political and social rights, they insisted on the principle of manhood suffrage and demanded the abolition of all caste distinctions based on race or color. While they were willing to concede to Washington’s concern for the training of the Negro common man, the conferees rejected his anti-intellectual position against higher education for the Negro man of ability. Souls of Black Folk had anticipated all this, crystalizing inchoate Negro thought, creating a commanding argument against the black conservative establishment. It was the glaring failure of Washington’s model for black advancement that had galvanized blacks into action. Washington’s notions were questionable and anachronistic on a number of grounds. He encouraged training in obsolete crafts, based the Negro’s economic future on a sick and dying southern agriculture, ignored the future urban role of AfroAmericans, and relied completely on whites in the North and South. But nothing equaled his public blindness to the growing horror of racial violence against blacks. It was in response to this that blacks and whites organized, independent of him. Indeed, in 1909, Mary White Ovington, observing the rise in violence against the Negro throughout the country, issued a call to whites and Negroes for a new conference. Along with Miss Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, Jane Addams, John Dewey, Florence Kelley, Rabbi Stephen Fine, and William Dean Howells answered the call. The conference in May 1910 brought together the Negroes of the Niagara Movement and these white reformers to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.5 DuBois, who had given the initial nudge to this direction of Negro protest, was appointed editor of the Crisis, a monthly publication of the Association. So he left Atlanta, moved to New York, and began to make his name almost synonymous with Negro militancy. And so, too, DuBois, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and New York City became identified with the spirit of Negro protest and selfassertion in the minds of the magazine’s wide national readership. DuBois’s editorials were trenchant—his language was often acid. He was aware that his mind was superior to most men’s, and not tolerating fools gladly, he could not hide his contempt for whites simple enough to be condescending. With his high forehead—his head was bald except for a rim of short-cropped graying hair—trimmed mustache, pointed beard, and sharp features, this brown man was imperious. He personified a new manner. He did not hide his bitterness to whites and would fit no philanthropist’s conception of a good Negro. It was through his prodding that James Weldon Johnson was appointed executive secretary of the Association after a succession of white administrators. DuBois and Johnson, very different in training and temperament, became the active agents of the Association. By the 1920s when Negroes thought of the Association and Negro protest, it would be these two names that would come to mind. They were the old guard. By the time the 1920s had begun, Johnson and DuBois were well established in New York, and a new generation of Negroes considered them leaders. Without perhaps knowing it, they were attracting young Negroes to New York because they symbolized the new spirit that the postwar generation felt. They, New York, and Harlem had come to mean a future of great possibility to the Negro. The same characteristics of Harlem that could cause men like James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois to center their lives and the Negro’s future there would bring others with different political messages. Marcus Garvey was tuned to different chords in Booker T. Washington’s message. Garvey heard self-help and racial independence, and his mind transformed that into militancy and aggressive black nationalism. A Jamaican, Marcus Garvey had an imagination that was captured by a fantastic dream: black men re-establishing themselves in Africa, being a real people, becoming a real nation. His dream captured some reality after he based his Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem, which he made his temporary capital, and from there touched the hopes of hundreds of thousands of black people throughout the world. Garvey, who had come to New York in 1916, found in men like DuBois and Johnson great antagonists; but he gave more than he took in vitriolic rhetoric. He made their self-conscious aggressiveness seem conservative. Even after Garvey’s failure, his conviction for fraud, and expulsion from the country, he was still able to appeal to people who had never been so affected by any other political leader (or dreamer). Garvey’s coming to Harlem helped make it seem a capital for an international black race.6 Men like DuBois, Johnson, and Garvey made their headquarters in New York in the years before America’s entry into World War I. It did not matter that these political leaders and intellectuals were often antagonistic; that merely suggested an openness, variety, and sophistication that had never existed for Afro-Americans before. What did matter was that these men were in New York, their manner and style was forceful, and they were being heard. It is not surprising, then, that Harlem drew young black intellectuals who wanted to find themselves and their own voices. The effect was cumulative: the more who came, the more who followed in their wake. With Louise Thompson, an identity quest, a desire for intellectual challenge, and a compelling urge to do something important were the motive forces behind migration. Louise Thomspon’s family had moved as domestic help through numberless far western towns, each much like the last. Towns, even cities, in Oregon and California had few Negroes in those early years of the twentieth century. Afro-Americans there found jobs more available the more they were able to change, to become something else, to take on the coloration and ethnic identity that each white community found tolerable. Louise and her mother were sometimes white, sometimes Mexican, and sometimes it did not matter. What kind of ego could survive such effacement? Masks always, the constant denial of self. And, of course, one had to remember to forget Negro friends in public when it was necessary.7 But humiliation only fed a longing for race identity within Louise Thompson. She felt the quiver and exaltation of race pride when, as a student at the University of California, she heard and saw, from an audience filled with whites, a brilliant brown man named DuBois. No denial or selfeffacement here. DuBois, Crisis, the NAACP, and Harlem—there was superiority and self-respect. After taking her degree in business administration, Louise Thompson took a teaching position at Hampton Institute. There she supported a student strike against the school’s philosophy of paternalism and “uplift,” which reflected its white philanthropic control. She sensed here another kind of humiliation of race, and she wrote DuBois about it. Her letter was published anonymously in Crisis. She and Hampton agreed to part. The school’s management thought that she did not fit, and she wanted something more womanly than a conservative, southern Negro college would allow. Of course, she went to Harlem to become a part of those young intellectuals who were asserting their race. The new postwar generation of Negro intellectuals might have been attracted to Harlem by the lures of older greats, but they also brought with them the spirit of the Jazz Age. They, along with their white contemporaries, ushered in the liberation of the 1920s. Harlem for blacks, like New York for whites, was synonymous with opportunity, the release of the individual spirit. For some, it meant the possibility to write or to be near those who did. Not a few quickened to the excitement of the musical stage and the effervescence of sophisticated and ribald nightlife. For all—black and white—New York was the occasion for breaking away from small town life, the restrictions of family control, and for growing up. Langston Hughes belonged to Harlem even before he came. In the June 1921 issue of Crisis there appeared Hughes’s first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Hughes had been writing since his high school days in Cleveland, but his literary beginnings were in Crisis. After high school, Hughes lived in Mexico with his father, a wealthy rancher and miner who had little sympathy for the arts. What is more, the elder Hughes had a quite violent hatred of Negroes. It was perhaps in defiance of his father that Langston Hughes nurtured his warm and deep interest in the Negro common people and an art that would speak their spirit. Langston’s father wanted him to go to Switzerland to be trained in engineering, but the young man had heard of the famous musical Shuffle Along and he wanted to go to Harlem. “More than Paris, or the Shakespeare country, or Berlin, or the Alps, I wanted to see Harlem, the greatest Negro city in the world.” So he convinced his father that Columbia University could train him as well as any European school. He never liked Columbia, but Harlem made him glad.8 For Hughes, Harlem was to be the center of his life, the black people there the main source of his literary inspiration. Another poet, Claude McKay, used Harlem in a different way, but used it nonetheless. McKay had grown up in the rural hills of Jamaica, and worked in the constabulary as a young man in Kingston. His first literary success was with poems written in the West Indian dialect. But his native island was too small a field for him. A traveling troupe of Negro theater people turned McKay’s eyes to New York and Harlem. McKay spent a time working in railroad dining cars, but New York and the black city within New York continued to pull him. While much of his writing was intensely expressive of Harlem, he nevertheless managed to remain outside and independent of it. White intellectuals were his main support and his primary intellectual association. Frank Harris of Pearsons gave him his first real support in this country. During much of the 1920s he was on the editorial staff of Max Eastman’s Liberator, where he worked with Crystal Eastman and clashed with Michael Gold. And, later, although he remained in Europe for much of the late 1920s and 1930s, Harlem continued to be an important focus for his writing. He was to be one of those who would try to describe the essentials of Harlem in a novel.9 Liberation was the magnet that drew Regina Andrews, a pert oliveskinned girl, who escaped from Chicago to discover her race and her womanhood. Her father was a lawyer in Chicago, and Regina found it difficult to fit into the comfortable and complacent middle-class society that was expected of Negro young ladies. It was not that New York was more congenial than Chicago to Negroes. A librarian with experience in the Chicago public libraries, she had found it even more difficult in New York until she was placed in the 135th Street branch of the New York City system. Not that New York was kinder; rather, Harlem was filled with young Negro men and women who were writing and singing and dancing and painting and acting, and she was in the midst of it all. Her place at the library put her in close touch with the young artists. She made her apartment an uptown salon where all of the intellectuals came. (Her apartment, indeed, was described in Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven.) As to many a young girl, white or black, New York offered womanhood to Regina Andrews. But Harlem offered something more. While there, she was on the crest of a creative wave that would surely define the New Negro, and let her know her self through her race.10 Harlem meant still another kind of opportunity. With such a large concentration of Negroes it provided a market for business and professional men. Negro lawyers, doctors, and dentists could anticipate for the first time a large potential clientele. Of course, it was not easy for the professions. Negro doctors found it impossible to use white hospitals until the Harlem hospital was built on 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Lawyers’ cases with Negro clients were not the most rewarding, and the field was too crowded for good business. Yet there was the chance. Prohibition opened great possibilities for the cabaret owner, and prostitution, “numbers,” and other gambling thrived during the 1920s. One illiterate woman, through the sale of cooked pigs’ feet from a cart and shrewd investment in real estate, became rich. And as early as 1918, Madame C. J. Walker had become a millionaire, and had bought a mansion at Irvington-on–the-Hudson, as a result of her processing and treatment of the hair of Negro women. Harlem meant opportunity and promise for all kinds. Understandably, thinking Harlem was the nerve center of Afro-American life and the capital of the international black man, its intellectuals who wanted to affect political change had to raise their voices and speak to broad, general, and principled issues. These spokesmen would be different from the ward heelers and “bosses” who were part and parcel of city politics during that period. Like their white reformer counterparts— mugwumps and progressives—black intellectuals tended to see significant politics as above the muscle of mechanism. Thus, the ward, the constituency, the manipulation of small increments of power, the compromise—the only realities for the political practitioner—were ignored by Harlem’s political spokesmen. Like other progressives, Harlem intellectuals saw political issues and reform in moral terms and assumed a high moral tone. Racial problems were social aberrations due to moral corruption, fear, or ignorance. They offered no radical solutions therefore; the system was basically sound. The techniques they chose were familiar enough. The evil of racial injustice in all its varieties was exposed through a muckraking journalism that matched the best of that time. The assumption was that the moral weight of good would win once evil was exposed. The unreason, the illogic, the craven corruption that barred blacks from a fair chance in society could not stand, for men of good will, under the harsh light of right reason. And if reason could lay bare the evils and anomalies of American race practice, the same discipline and logic of mind could plot out remedies by means of the social sciences. And this exposure and rationality were not simply negative. A doubting and skeptical world had to be shown evidence of Negro ability, especially achievements in the arts and literature which all progressives equated with civilization. This program of propaganda and persuasion was propagated by three Harlem magazines that had considerable influence among black people. The NAACP’s Crisis was founded in 1910 and edited by W. E. B. DuBois. Seven years after its founding, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen began publishing the Messenger, which claimed to be “The Only Radical Negro Magazine in America.” The editors of the Messenger wanted to vie with DuBois as the most forthright and uncompromising in the AfroAmerican cause. In time, however, the Messenger abandoned its militant tone and became the organ of Randolph’s larger enterprise, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In 1923, the Urban League’s magazine, Opportunity, came into being. It reflected that organization’s debt to the charity organization movement’s doctrines of self-help and uplift. Each of these magazines manifested the Harlem intellectuals’ commitment to progressive reform. Show the problem to the readers, that was thought to be the first task. In regard to violence and injustice against the Negro, no one was a more ruthless muckraker than DuBois. Crisis focused on lynching, a public and national scandal. Every issue carried a statistical breakdown of violence against blacks. When the magazine would report an NAACP investigation of a lynching, its pages almost smelled of burned flesh. DuBois sketched in unrelieved sharpness how sub-human the white American was, once he was in a mob. And DuBois was quick to expose official duplicity, as when Woodrow Wilson refused to reverse the policy of government segregation that his administration had introduced to Washington. The Messenger prided itself on being unrelenting. It criticized DuBois for urging Negro military service in the war, claiming that he had sold out the black man’s cause. Rather, Randolph and Owen wanted to persuade Negroes not to enlist in the army; they were arrested for their pains, and the Messenger joined the elite of American periodicals, those confiscated by the Post Office under suspicion of sedition. Opportunity exposed the race problem, but in a more studied and academic style than the others. The executive secretary of the Urban League, Eugene Kinckle Jones, wanted the magazine to “set down interestingly but without sugarcoating or generalization the findings of careful scientific surveys and facts gathered from research, undertaken not to prove preconceived notions but to lay bare Negro life as it is.” Its pages were filled with scholarly studies by young social scientists such as Ira De A. Reid, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche. Articles by Melville Herskovits and Franz Boas also appeared. Charles S. Johnson, the editor, who was himself a sociologist, had contributed to that early massive study on civil disorders, The Negro in Chicago (1919). It was much easier to expose corruption and evil than to find effective remedies. This was especially true for DuBois, whose mind seemed always to grasp the ultimate impossibility and to see the essential paradox of the Negro’s position. His readers had to follow him from his demand for Negro political independence of the major parties to his anguished search for some meaningful political power for the race. They read of race as an international issue and experienced DuBois’s frustrations with PanAfricanism. But while DuBois shifted his ground under the torture of paradox, his argument, wherever he stood, was always literate and forceful. Readers of the Messenger found solutions and programs much easier to come by. The editors were socialists and found their answers in the support of that party and the labor movement, never recognizing the bigotry in both groups. Randolph and Owen put their faith in reason and planning. Their guide was Lester Ward, whose Dynamic Sociology had tried to harness Darwinism to the purposive ends of social reconstruction. And for the editors of Messenger the answers would be clear enough once skilled social analysts defined the dimensions of the problem. Each of these magazines saw as part of its role the encouragement of Negroes’ work in the arts and the publishing of their achievement for blacks and whites to see. Langston Hughes’s first published poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” appeared in Crisis. Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” was published in the Messenger after first appearing in the Liberator. And, even more than the others, Opportunity believed its motto—“Not Alms but Opportunity”—to apply to the arts. It sponsored a literary contest in the 1920s that became a major generating force for the renaissance. Perhaps it was all shadow boxing. Did anyone out in that vague American white world read it? Did the blows tell? Were the points really made? What good would it do to expose President Wilson’s racism? Even if he read it, he had a self-righteousness that was a match for any other progressive. All of that did not matter. The tone and the self-assurance of these magazines were the important thing. They gave a sense of importance to blacks who read them. They gave answers that had always failed the porter, the barber, the maid, the teacher, the handyman. They were the Negro’s voice against the insult that America gave him. In the October 1925 issue of the Messenger, George S. Schuyler wrote, “Today I believe it fair to say, Negro America looks to New York for advanced leadership and opinion.” It was fair to say that, and that is what gave Harlem and its intellectuals a sense of importance. But were they deceived? It seemed clear enough that the past was dead, but had a new Negro day been born in Harlem? Did the circumstances promise more than they would deliver? That was the deception of Harlem. The leadership to whom Negro America looked turned out to be fairly impotent. Its failure exposed the irrelevancy of progressive reform to the Afro-American predicament. The problem is best illustrated in the several issues to which DuBois attempted to give forceful leadership. From the beginnings of his editorship of Crisis DuBois had tried to give focus to Negro political energies, to make the Negro vote count. With America’s entry into World War I, DuBois tried to use the Negro’s participation in it as a lever to win democracy at home. And after the war he provided America’s race problem with an international stage, placing the Afro-American behind the Pan-African movement. In all of these efforts he had to contend with the strong opposition of other Negro pundits. All of his efforts failed—as did those of others—because of the peculiar character of black leadership. How could the Negro make his vote count in a political arena in which no major contender seemed to care much whether he won the black vote or not? The presidential election of 1912 illustrates this point. With four candidates in the field, the Negro vote should have meant a great deal. But President Taft showed little interest; having promised to appoint no federal officials whom white southerners found obnoxious, he effectively removed Negro Republicans from patronage lists. Both Taft and Roosevelt had shown indifference to Negroes and justice in the so-called Brownsville Affray. When the townspeople of Brownsville, Texas directed violence against Negro troops stationed there in August 1906, although there was little evidence that the soldiers responded violently, both Presidents Taft and Roosevelt colluded in their unjust prosecutions and dismissals from the army. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Progressives proved to be no better than the Republicans. DuBois proposed a platform plank that would have the Progressive party recognize “that distinctions of race or class in political life have no place in democracy.” It asked for the “repeal of unfair discriminatory laws and the right to vote [for Negroes] on the same terms . . . other citizens vote.” Joel Spingarn and Jane Addams struggled to get the plank accepted by the party, but Theodore Roosevelt would have none of it. Roosevelt saw some promise in wooing southern votes, and as a man much influenced by Booker T. Washington’s Tus-kegee Machine, he found DuBois dangerous. DuBois was not so much an idealist that he could support Eugene V. Debs merely because that candidate and the Socialist party were closer to being right in principle and program. He had resigned from the Socialist party in order to avoid support of the ticket. It was a practical matter. “I could not let Negroes throw away votes.”11 DuBois refused to believe that the Negro vote counted for nothing. Of course, it had been the captive of the Republican party since the Civil War. That was understandable enough since the Republicans were the party of emancipation and Abraham Lincoln. But DuBois recalled that it was also the party that ultimately surrendered Black Reconstruction, leaving the southern Negro to southern white power. Anyway, no party deserved a people’s unswerving support. The Negro could gain more if the major parties had to woo him than if his vote were sure. And the Democratic party was showing some evidence of liberalization through the influence of its growing urban support. So DuBois’s mind was open to the idea of Negro support for the Democratic party when Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Zion Church claimed to have influenced Woodrow Wilson in the Negro’s behalf. In October 1912 Bishop Walters presented a letter from Wilson expressing his “earnest wish to see justice done the colored people in every matter; and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling. . . . I want to assure them that should I become President of the United States they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing, for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interests of their race in the United States.” This was enough for DuBois to fly in the face of traditional Negro politics and to use his influence and Crisis to persuade Negroes to vote for the party of slavery and black oppression. Running counter to most Negro spokesmen and conflicting with almost the entire Negro press, DuBois supported Wood-row Wilson in 1912. He estimated that Wilson received one hundred thousand northern black votes, contributing significantly to his election.12 Yet it was hard to sense in the years that followed that Wilson recognized any debt to Negro voters, and he did not seem to want to keep their support. As many of DuBois’s critics had predicted, the Negro suffered politically from Wilson’s administration. Even if the President’s intentions were most benevolent, his party had its greatest and most consistent support in the white South, and the party had been out of power since the Cleveland administration in 1896. There were many job-hungry party faithfuls to be rewarded. Petty southern Democratic bureaucrats were surely not going to appoint Negroes to federal jobs which were now open to their own constituents. Even James Weldon Johnson, who was consul to Corinto, Nicaragua, and protected by the civil service system, found himself up against what he termed “politics plus race prejudice” when he consulted Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan about a much earned promotion and transfer. His job could not be taken from him, but he could not advance. So he was eased out of the foreign service.13 Negroes who remained in Washington in the federal service were humiliated by Wilson’s executive order establishing segregated dining and toilet facilities. Monroe Trotter, whose Boston Guardian had supported Wilson in the election, pleaded in an audience with the President that the administration’s segregationist policies would make it impossible for Negro leaders to continue to urge support for the Democrats. Wilson claimed that segregation was for the Negro’s own good, despite the fact that blacks and whites had shared facilities in Washington offices since the Civil War. Wilson was offended by Trotter’s presumption of being able to barter votes; Trotter was humiliated as were most Negro spokesmen who had supported Wilson’s election.14 The Negro press that had endorsed the Republican ticket made capital of the Democrats’ embarrassment, and DuBois had to suffer along with the rest. The New York Age, for instance, wanted to make sure that the “Wilsonian Democrats” squirmed for their naivete. But it was not only the black Republicans. A. Philip Randolph’s Messenger, true to its radical image, far after the event took DuBois to task for his failure to support the Socialist candidate. If the incident proved nothing else, the Messenger editors were convinced that Negroes could see the foolishness of support for either major party, since both were hopelessly wedded to a corrupt and exploitative system. DuBois, who had objected to the Negro’s throwing away his vote on Debs who could not win, had indeed encouraged his readers to vote for a man and party that had contempt for their votes. Was it not better to vote for a loser whom you agreed with, than a victor, a lesser of evils, who would pay for your support with insult? DuBois was chastened by the experience, but he did not give up the hope of making the Negro an effective political weight. He continued to believe that Afro-Americans could act as a “swing” in American politics, if they could support first one major party and then another as it suited their interests. This way, he believed, the Negro would have to be courted and served. He persisted in this view throughout the 1920s, urging Negroes to aid individual candidates who proved to be friends of the race and to punish those who were enemies. DuBois had taken an American way out. But political pragmatism to one man is opportunism to another; the Messenger insisted that DuBois’s approach was the latter. After all, there was no principle or ideal involved, only convenience. And what was worse, there was very little evidence that the policy paid off—the true test of pragmatism. Of course, DuBois’s position made sense. The Negro could not expect the social rewards of politics as long as his vote was unquestioned; he had to be politically free to bargain. And the Socialist party—itself not free of racism—was no viable alternative. DuBois’s political ineffectiveness was not simply an error in his thought. He shared with other progressives a faith in the efficacy of good government to bring about fundamental social change. Like the progressives, he could not take the machine alternative to democratic politics. Unlike Marcus Garvey, for instance, DuBois was unable, as well as unwilling, to mold the black masses into the kind of political constituency that might give him the true power of leadership. Black progressives, doubtless more than whites, were plagued by the fact that effective politics in America often demanded the very kind of corruption that they abhorred. The ultimate goal of DuBois’s reform was a condition of social justice in which every man would be accepted on his merits as a man. A man with ability and talent would rise, and those without would not. Society would be color-blind; race would be of no account in the equation of human worth. Yet the realities of American life and politics demanded that the tactics to realize that goal exploit the race consciousness it hoped to deny. For the Negro to use politics to his ends, he had to do so as part of a Negro pressure group, not as a high-minded independent. But how could one attain a society of race denial with methods which were racially assertive? To organize effectively to use black power in politics seemed, even then, selfdefeating. The dilemma was tortuous for DuBois. It explains much of the contradiction in his writings: sometimes supporting self-segregation for Negroes, sometimes asserting Negro superiority, sometimes demanding the extinction of racial distinctions. This quandary confounded any effort at an effective political program. Actually, “black power politics” had to be illusory because no Negro leader could have “delivered” the Negro vote to any candidate. Again, Marcus Garvey was a special case because he avoided the political paradox by advocating escape.15 The question of Negro participation in World War I illustrates further the perplexing character of Negro leadership. At a time when great violence was being done to Negroes through white mob action, when the Negro’s life was being cramped and confined by laws and the custom of Jim Crow, when the American society seemed to choose every occasion to humiliate blacks, at the nadir of American race relations, the nation chose to lead the Western world’s peoples toward social justice, democracy, and selfdetermination. The irony escaped no one. Most Negroes saw the wartime emergency as an opportunity to bargain for improvement in official policies toward black citizens. They were a bit encouraged as war industries opened to Negroes jobs that had been closed to them. Yet the War Department showed no eagerness to make full use of black citizens. Segregation in the armed services, of course, was taken for granted. But officials balked at granting new commissions to Negroes, promoting black commissioned officers, and assigning black units to combat status. There could have been no question of the Negro’s ability to fight; recent army history in the Civil War, the Indian wars, and the Spanish-American War could hardly encourage such doubt. But martial virtues were not consistent with the Negro stereotype that white Americans cherished. There was also fear that the Negro could not remain docile once he had been battle-tested against the Germans. The Negro leader was left with hard alternatives. He could advise against Afro-American participation in a racist war effort which even questioned their right to fight—risking charges of sedition—or he could plead for the Negro to be allowed to serve as other Americans, as combatants as well as service soldiers. The latter choice was, in effect, to plead for the right of black men to die for their country. Joel Spingarn, chairman of the board of the NAACP, believed that the war offered Negroes the chance to prove their capacity for leadership and courage. Spingarn succeeded in persuading DuBois to take this position too. Along with others, these men and the Association put great pressure on the War Department and succeeded in winning what they thought to be a significant concession—a segregated officers training camp at Des Moines, Iowa. Spingarn and the Association were troubled about the segregation— their proclaimed policy was to fight against all kinds of official discrimination—yet the Des Moines camp did assure that Negro officers would be commissioned; this was the best they could get. No less compromised, DuBois accepted even this arrangement as a regrettable but practical bargain. DuBois wavered of course. He was angered that Negroes were forced to beg to give their lives to their country. We should worry, he charged, the Negro stood to win by the war, whatever the white man did. If he was not allowed to fight, the Negro would work in those jobs left by the white fighting man. “Will we be ousted when the white soldiers come back? THEY WON’T COME BACK!” If blacks were allowed in combat, on the other hand, DuBois knew that they would return different men. They would not be so easily lynched. DuBois was heartened when, despite its reluctance, the army awarded commissions to hundreds of Negroes who had trained at the Des Moines camp. But, then, in 1918 the execution of Negro soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment who were involved in the Houston race riot caused him to remind his readers of the oppressive conditions of society that produced such violence. And he took the occasion to attack the white political leadership, from President Wilson down, who assumed that black humiliation was normal and to be expected. He began to doubt whether the Negro’s sacrifice in the war would be worth it.16 The Justice Department began to threaten; DuBois’s critical tone might be considered seditious. The NAACP was anxious lest the Association be dragged by the Crisis into charges of radicalism and disloyalty. Doubtless, the combined pressure from these two sources helped tone down DuBois’s editorials, but his ultimate position is reflective of his own ambivalence: he really wanted to be loyal to the United States. In the July 1918 issue of Crisis, he published “Close Ranks,” which remained his position until the armistice. He voiced the same idealism that had won most intellectuals to Wilson’s position on the war. The ultimate aims of civilization and democracy should command everyone’s loyalty; its cause was the Negro’s as much as anyone’s. Then he urged, “Let us . . . forget our special grievances and close ranks . . . with our fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” It was an unfortunate choice of language, for it embroiled him with other Negro spokesmen for years into the future.17 DuBois’s critics were quick to note the similarity between this argument and the old Booker T. Washington kind of conciliation. Rather than forget, they insisted, the Negro should remember grievances now more than ever and make the adjudication of them the price of his full participation in the war effort. The War Department and the Committee on Public Information, anxious about hints of black sedition, had called a conference of Negro editors in June 1918 to urge unified Negro support of the war effort. The statement which these editors unanimously adopted insisted on minimal compliance with Negro demands as a price for their support. Conditions of public travel, lynchings, and Red Cross discrimination headed their list of complaints. Rhetorically, at least, they were not prepared to forget their grievances even for a little while. It was more a gesture and pose than a real complaint, however, for the vast majority of these editors supported the war without the slightest suggestion of possible defection. Their wrath was generally directed against DuBois and his “close ranks” position. Some even accused him of selling out for an army commission. The Messenger’s editors, true to their radicalism, urged Negroes against the war. The nation had not earned the race’s loyalty, and a war among capitalist, exploitative, and colonizing nations was surely not in the Negro’s interest. Owen and Randolph were consistent and unmitigating in their criticism of the war. For their efforts they were jailed in Cleveland, and the magazine’s second class mailing privilege suspended. According to Randolph, it was only the judge’s doubt that black men were able to write such militant prose that saved them from long jail sentences.18 But how viable was this alternative to DuBois’s “close ranks”? As attractive as bargaining might have seemed, the government was not so much in need of (or worried about) Negro participation that it was willing to make bargains. Despite many requests and pleas, the government made no effort to eliminate Jim Crow in its own facilities or in interstate commerce. Secretary of War Newton Baker told DuBois that we “are not trying by this War to settle the Negro problem.” The government might have accomplished a great deal; the railroads, for instance, were nationalized during the war. Nor did it work in any way to protect the Negro from lynch mobs. Indeed, in the Houston riot cases, the Army allowed its own courts-martial to placate southern white opinion as it had earlier in the Brownsville Affray. Apparently, the Negro leaders had nothing to sell. On the other hand, as high-minded and consistent as the boycott of the war might have appeared, it was no better a choice. For that, too, depended on the willingness of ordinary Negro men to refuse to go into the service and to accept punishment as draft-dodgers. No Negro spokesman, at that time, had the influence to make such civil disobedience work. This alternative was especially harsh for a leader like DuBois. For had he urged Negro resistance to the war, he would have exposed the essentially unreal character of his leadership. With no real following, he had to urge compliance in order to maintain the illusion of leadership.19 DuBois’s predicament was not a new thing, nor was it personal. He might well have remembered the tortured conscience of Frederick Douglass during the Civil War when he urged black men to enlist in the Massachusetts 54th and 55th Regiments with the assurance that the Union government would treat them fairly, only to be disappointed in that faith. Even Douglass’ amiable audience with President Lincoln failed to secure redress of grievances: unequal pay to black soldiers, Union indifference to the mutilation and enslavement of those Negro Union soldiers captured by the Confederacy, the military’s failure to honor black soldiers’ valor and deeds. Even then it was clear that logic, dignified argument, and the urgent need of the Union for soldiers could not convince the goven-ment to risk racist criticism. Lincoln had merely insisted that the opportunity for Negroes to fight, support their cause, and prove their valor and manhood was enough to compensate them for inequities. Douglass, despite his misgivings and disillusionment, could do little else but continue to encourage Negroes to enlist as his three sons had. At least he could argue that they would be fighting, whatever the humiliating circumstances, to free their enslaved brothers. DuBois did not even have that comfort.20 Many years later, writing in Rayford Logan’s What the Negro Wants, DuBois remembered the paradox before him. “I was . . . in a mad fight to make Negroes Americans.” It was not easy. “I was fighting to let the Negroes fight; I, who for a generation had been a professional pacifist; I was fighting for a separate training camp for Negro officers; I, who was devoting a career to opposing race segregation; I was seeing the Germany which taught me the human brotherhood of white and black, pitted against America which was for me the essence of Jim Crow; and yet I was ‘rooting’ for America; and I had to, even before my own conscience, so utterly crazy had the whole world become and I with it.” The problem was made no easier for him by the postwar reality which made it apparent that American racism had not even been touched by the war. If anything, the racists were more virulent. Even Negro combat troops, returning in triumph, had to swallow humiliation and violence against their persons from American military police in France.21 But the war had made evident to all Americans the realities of the world outside. And W. E. B. DuBois was one of the first American Negroes to take a new world-view. He helped to organize Pan-African Congresses in 1919, 1921, and 1923. The Pan-African leaders wanted to influence the peace conference, and later the League of Nations, toward the international protection of African blacks. It was an opening wedge to place race issues, including ultimately those in the United States, before a world forum and to pressure Negroes themselves to ameliorate their condition. Although DuBois never lost his interest in Africa, he was to be disappointed in the congresses. He discovered that some important Africans, such as Blaise Diagne, Senegalese representative to the French Chamber of Deputies, could be as conservative a defender of colonialism as any white man. American Negroes, too, had their own ambivalences about blackness and Africa, nor was it easy for some to understand how identification with Africa would win them acceptance as full American citizens; regardless of appeals of race, American citizenship had been the consistent goal. Was not Pan-Africanism another kind of racism? DuBois found it impossible to keep free of the taint of Marcus Garvey. Even in his efforts to lead AfroAmericans toward a world-view of race—away from their provincialism— he was thwarted on the one hand by the complexities of international politics and on the other by the restraints imposed by his American progressivism. The post-war effort to thrust Negro social thought into an international arena brings us to consider the Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, who taunted an exasperated W. E. B. DuBois perhaps more than anyone else in these years. A spectacular man, Garvey can no longer be considered an anomaly of American politics. First attracted to the United States to learn from the Booker T. Washington self-help school, he never abandoned this traditional American virtue, transforming it instead into a program which doubtless would have left Washington breathless. His style contained the flamboyant, the grandiloquent, which had always captured the imaginations of white and black Americans, whose addiction to lodge organizations and colorful parades is well known. His flair and rhetoric, despite vestiges of the accent of the British-style schools in Jamaica, suggested the political demagogue, it is true; but it was the style and manner of the popular preacher too. Even his promise of a future return to a powerful African nation echoed a traditional theme in Afro-American ideas. And, indeed, it secularized the strong “next world” character of Afro-American thought. Marcus Garvey and his program fitted neatly into the American setting.22 From 1917, when he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem, until his forced exile ten years later, Garvey was able to capture the imaginations and loyalties of countless blacks in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. It was as if black common men the world over had been waiting for a Messiah; they were to follow Garvey as if he were one, some long after his imprisonment for fraud in 1925. And it was to the common man he made his appeal through his newspaper, Negro World, established in 1918. His message was simple and unambiguous: black people were a good and noble race. They were beautiful people with a grand history which had been hidden from them by their white oppressors. They were an enslaved people, true enough, but theirs was a servility of the mind—the effects of the brain-washing of the colonial system—not of nature. Once black men and women learned their true value, rid themselves of self-hatred, and asserted their natural nobility, they would overwhelm white oppression and come into their just inheritance. Their destiny was grand: to return Africa to the Africans. It was a dream, of course. But Garvey’s genius (and failure) was that he always provided a tangible and visible reality. What standard American lodges—Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, etc.—did with elaborate hierarchies and colorful pagentries to give substance to their “mysteries,” the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) did to give the African dream its sense of reality. The members became a nation in exile. They carried titles such as the Duke of Nigeria and the Overlord of Uganda. And all of the offices had appropriate uniforms and paraphernalia. Subscribers were decorated with bronze, silver, or gold crosses—depending on the size of their contribution. There were uniforms for everyone, enough to satisfy any taste in a parade. In a parade, Garvey—uniformed in purple, green, and black with a hat of white feathered plumes—like any other potentate, would wave from his car to