Introduction - Harlem Renaissance - Nathan Huggins.pdf

Introduction It is a rare and intriguing moment when a people decide that they are the instruments of history-making and race-building. It is common enough to think of oneself as part of some larger meaning in the sweep of history, a part of some grand design. But to presume to be an actor and creat...

Introduction It is a rare and intriguing moment when a people decide that they are the instruments of history-making and race-building. It is common enough to think of oneself as part of some larger meaning in the sweep of history, a part of some grand design. But to presume to be an actor and creator in the special occurrence of a people’s birth (or rebirth) requires a singular selfconsciousness. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, down into the first years of the Great Depression, black intellectuals in Harlem had just such a self-concept. These Harlemites were so convinced that they were evoking their people’s “Dusk of Dawn” that they believed that they marked a renaissance. Historians have liked to use that word to characterize some moment when a “culture,” once dormant, has been reawakened. But even the most conventional of them will confess the concept is a historical fiction, a contrivance of imaginations steeped in resurrections and similar rites of spring. Seldom, however, have the people—the subjects of such historyknowing their roles, inquired of themselves, “how goes the Renaissance?” While not so exaggerated, that was what Harlem men of culture were doing in the 1920s. Of course, our own moment of history has given us preoccupations of our own. Harlem now connotes violence, crime, and poverty. For many, it represents a source of militancy, radical social change, and black community culture. “Ghetto” and “Harlem” have become, to most, interchangeable words. Whether we see the ghetto as a center of despair or source of hope, we tend to read back into the past our assumptions, perceptions, and expectations. But the 1920s were almost a half-century ago, and we may miss more than we learn when we force upon that time our own frustrations. Recent histories of that “Black Metropolis” have tended to treat it as always having been a ghetto in the making. Because of our compelling interest in the morphology of the economically deprived, we are likely to be insensitive to the fact that to Harlemites in an earlier decade the concept of Harlem becoming a ghetto would have seemed absurd. James Weldon Johnson believed that Harlem promised a future of “greater and greater things” for the Afro-American; he wrote as much in Black Manhattan, notably published in 1930.1 Johnson’s optimism, and that of the renaissance generation, had not been soured by an economic depression which drove home the special vulnerability of Negroes, a war which informed the world of pathological racism, and promises and dreams which were glibly announced and rudely deferred. The generation which Johnson spoke to, which this book is about, was optimistic and progressive. It would take more defeat than they had yet known for them to believe that what they were building would, in time, imprison them. All of the ingredients for ghetto-making were in evidence in the 1920s. Yet, in those years few Harlem intellectuals addressed themselves to issues related to tenements, crime, violence, and poverty. Even Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban League and social work among Negroes, did not discuss urban problems as much as it announced the Negro’s coming of age. In part this was due, no doubt, to the desire of black leaders to stress black achievement rather than black problems. A positive self-image—there was cause for one—was considered the best starting point for a better chance. Inequities due to race might best be removed when reasonable men saw that black men were thinkers, strivers, doers, and were cultured, like themselves. Harlem intellectuals, with their progressive assumptions, saw themselves as the ones most likely to make this demonstration. They were on the threshold of a new day. Present-day readers are likely to be annoyed with what they will see to be the naivete of men like Johnson. Some would call them elitists when it comes to culture. With notable exceptions, like Langston Hughes, most Harlem intellectuals aspired to high culture as opposed to that of the common man, which they hoped to mine for novels, poems, plays, and symphonies. They saw art and letters as a bridge across the chasm between the races. Artists of both races, they thought, were more likely to be free of superstition, prejudice, and fear than ordinary men. They might meet on the common ground of shared beauty and artistic passion. It was thought that this alliance “at the top” would be the agency to bring the races together over the fissures of ignorance, suspicion, and fear. Despite a history that had divided them, art and culture would re-form the brotherhood in a common humanity. This was an attitude of cultural elitism. But it is wrong to assume that these black intellectuals, because of it, were not related to the black common man in Harlem. I think that in the early decades of this century most Negroes were apt to agree that it was a good thing to have Negroes writing “good” novels, poems, plays, and symphonies. Not always because they could read, listen, and understand them, but because the fact that these works were written was a remarkable achievement. And such achievement, because it was elite in character, was a source of race pride and an argument against continued discrimination. While many Afro-Americans might call Harlem intellectuals “dicty niggers” and laugh at their pretensions, they would also glow in the reflection of their honor. Many of our generation, alienated by what are thought to be corrupt middle-class values, may be impatient with the unquestioned bourgeois assumptions of these men, especially because they were black men. This, too, is more our problem than theirs. The people from affluent homes (white and black) who have come to maturity in the 1950s and 1980s have been disillusioned by the spiritual emptiness at the top of the upward-mobility escalator. And we have all been a bit inclined to romanticize the honesty and the relevancy of the man at the bottom. Again, we must remember, however, for Afro-Americans in the 1920s individual achievement connoted more than personal comfort and ease. The future of the race seemed to depend on men and women making it in America. Doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, poets, writers, and actors were essential, in their achievement, because they showed that it could be done, and they leveled barriers for others—so it was thought. So, what may appear to us to be attitudes of bourgeois naïvetá were very often highly race-conscious and aggressive. Our problem here, as in any history, is to see men and women of another era in their own terms and not our own. And that will require of us a humanism that will modulate our own egos and self-consciousness enough to perceive theirs. Their world was different from ours. We must start there. Like others of that generation whose collective experience was World War I, Harlemites were caught up in its wake. Surely the ethnocentrism that generated self-determination as an Allied aim in that war informed a new racial awareness among blacks throughout the world. The war also forced a reevaluation of Western civilization and encouraged non-Europeans to esteem their own cultures as being as valid and civilized as Europe’s. Wardisillusioned white men (American and European), on the other hand, helped enhance a black self-concept through their own search for valid, authentic experience. Even before the war, Freud and the new psychology caused sophisticated people to deny the artifices of civility and manner and to seek the true self through spontaneity and the indulgence of impulse. In so far as Afro-Americans could see their own lives as being more natural and immediate than their countrymen’s, they could be convinced that the mere accentuation of their characteristic spontaneity would work toward the creation of a new Negro, a new man. Indeed, if anyone doubted that the black man’s time had come, he needed only look at the awakening of Mother Africa as evidenced in the recent European discoveries and appreciation of African culture and civilization. Such elements of the spirit of the age contributed to the Harlemites’ view of themselves and their historic role. While their world was different from ours—their attitudes and assumptions different—it is nevertheless familiar to us. I discovered, when I looked through the eyes of those men who thought themselves the harbingers of the “New Negro,” analogues to our own age of black selfconsciousness which were compelling. Their assertion of the militant self, their search for ethnic identity and heritage in folk and African culture, and their promotion of the arts as the agent which was to define and to fuse racial integrity resonate what we hear about us now, fifty years later. Black men of the 1920s, as easily as our own Afro-American contemporaries, talked of the end of Negro accommodation, of the importance of ethnic identity, of the new day a’ dawning when black men would have and would wield power. Such similarities between now and then suggest fundamental characteristics of American racial lifs that have provoked the same questions and responses time and again. For, as all who have studied the story of the African in America will know (and as those Harlemites seemed not to know), the formulations of racial identity and culture in the 1920s were variations on earlier themes which have persisted into our own time. What I have wanted to do in this book is to illuminate, through a searching look at this one instance of Negro self-consciousness, that essential condition of American life which has caused such periodic racial identity crises. But even to speak of racial identity crisis is to distort, I have come to think. For, looking outside the confines of race, looking at the general American culture, one finds a no less persistent and recurrent demand to define American character and American culture. From Hector St. John Crevecoeur to Max Lerner, the effort to characterize “this American, this new man” has been an intense and serious national sport. Students of “American civilization” will also be familiar with the equally persistent (and compulsive) announcements of the “coming of age” of American culture. Such definitions of American character and trumpetings of cultural maturity seem necessarily repeated time after time, as if they had never occurred before. The simple matter is that Americans have been a provincial people, forever self-conscious of themselves and their society in the making, and pulled by the powerful gravity of the European civilization to which they are heir and, despite claims to independence, which they emulate. Negroes, no less than other Americans, have suffered this same condition. Even more so, in fact, for Afro-Americans have inhabited a special ethnic province within provincial America. They have been perplexed by the desire to emulate the European-entranced white American and by the equally appealing dream of self-definition through the claiming of their inheritance of African culture. But from the perspective of their ethnic province it has been impossible for black men to see how American their predicament is. White Americans and white American culture have had no more claim to self-confidence than black. The Negro has been unable to see the beam in the white man’s eye for the mote in his own. For both black and white Americans, art has been the more problematic because of these provincial uncertainties. It was commonly thought, in those decades around World War I, that culture (literature, art, music, etc.) was the true measure of civilization. Harlem intellectuals, sharing in that belief and seeing themselves as living out the moment of their race’s rebirth, naturally marked off their achievement by such artistic production. Thus they promoted poetry, prose, painting, and music as if their lives depended on it. Most of us who have looked at this episode have merely accepted those same assumptions and applauded this self-styled Harlem Renaissance because it was a period of considerable artistic activity. I have chosen, rather, to probe into the pretensions of some of the artists and their works and by doing so place them within the context of American cultural history. Because this book does not simply remark and congratulate, some readers may be disappointed. For in questioning the quality of the works—the artistic achievement—I necessarily challenge the success of the “renaissance” in delivering what it claimed for itself. Some will argue that in our day of crisis of black identity it is harmful to question any Afro-American achievement; positive self-concept needs pure black poets as well as pure black heroes. I have chosen, however, to avoid that condescension which judges all Negro art as required evidence of a black cultural contribution. Who really needs such proof? I have preferred to use the works that I discuss to expose peculiarites of Afro-American expression. Such critical analysis is necessary to any true understanding of black identity in America. Harlem intellectuals promoted Negro art, but one thing is very curious, except for Langston Hughes, none of them took jazz—the new music— seriously. Of course, they all mentioned it as background, as descriptive of Harlem life. All said it was important in the definition of the New Negro. But none thought enough about it to try and figure out what was happening. They tended to view it as a folk art—like the spirituals and the dance—the unrefined source for the new art. Men like James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke expected some race genius to appear who would transform that source into high culture. That was, after all, the dream of Johnson’s protagonist in Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man as he fancied symphonic scores based on ragtime. The same improbable will-o’–the-wisp entranced white musicians like Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin. It perplexed black musicians like James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. We now know better, but some would have said that Duke Ellington was mesmerised as well. Anyway, the promoters of the Harlem Renaissance were so fixed on a vision of high culture that they did not look very hard or well at jazz. It is a real pity, because it would have been wonderful to have had contemporary accounts of jazz in the making from curious and intelligent non-musicians. We know that various versions of ragtime, New Orleans music, and the blues were being welded into a fresh musical idiom within earshot of all Harlemites. Louis Armstrong (occasionally in New York City), Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, etc., were at the prime of their creative lives. Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Don Redman were already learning to give orchestral form to a music of improvisation and virtuosity. It is clear enough, now, that the blues were more than sad, bawdy, and entertaining songs. They were (not like spirituals) the ironic voice of free men, conscious of the un-mitigating paradox of being free men and black men. Were it not for Langston Hughes, we would have almost no specific notice of that art from the Harlem writers. It is very ironic that a generation that was searching for a new Negro and his distinctive cultural expression would have passed up the only really creative thing that was going on. But then, it is not too surprising. The jazzmen were too busy creating a cultural renaissance to think about the implications of what they were doing. The black intellectuals were searching for their own identity, but they were bound up in a more general American experience than a “Harlem Renaissance” would suggest. For black and white Americans have been so long and so intimately a part of one another’s experience that, will it or not, they cannot be understood independently. Each has needed the other to help define himself. The creation of Harlem as a place of exotic culture was as much a service to white need as it was to black. So essential has been the Negro personality to the white American psyche that black theatrical masks had become, by the twentieth century, a standard way for whites to explore dimensions of themselves that seemed impossible through their own personae. The blackface minstrel show stylized a Negro character type that black men used to serve as a passport through white America. Yet, the mask demeaned them while it hid them. Thus the strands of identity for AfroAmericans in the 1920s were confounded in a tradition of white/black selfconcept that could not be unraveled by simple proclamations of the birth of the New Negro. In order to trace out some of these lines into the American psychic past, I have ventured in the last chapter beyond the limits of Harlem in the 1920s and have looked into the origins of such cultural phenomena as the minstrel show. I hope that the reader is not impatient with such forays. I think that they are necessary to expose facets of the Negro self-concept. I think that the readers’ indulgence will be rewarded with a fuller understanding of American character and the black man within it. In such ways, I hope that this book demonstrates something that I firmly believe: the study of the interplay between white and black in American life, the illumination of the Afro-American experience within American culture will serve to expand and infinitely enrich our sense of that “civilization.” I say this not merely to confess my bias, but to alert the reader to the kind of questions he should ask of this book as he reads it. For I have wanted Harlem in the 1920s not to be the focus of this book, but rather a lens through which one might see a new view: white men and black men unknowingly dependent in their work to shape American character and culture. Whenever Americans do come of age, they will have gained true insight into themselves by the claiming of that dependence.