The_New_Negro_----_(Introduction) (1).pdf

Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 1 of 7 INTRODUCTION To many scholars and critics of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—that dramatic upsurge of creativity in literature, music, and art within black America that reached its zenith in the...

Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 1 of 7 INTRODUCTION To many scholars and critics of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—that dramatic upsurge of creativity in literature, music, and art within black America that reached its zenith in the second half of the 1920s—The New Negro is its definitive text, its Bible. Most of the participants in the movement probably held the book in similar regard. Conceived and edited by Alain Locke, illustrated by Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas, and published by the then prominent firm of Albert and Charles Boni, The New Negro alerted the world in 1925 that something approaching a cultural revolution was taking place among blacks in New York, as well as elsewhere in the United States and perhaps around the world. The book also attempted in a fairly ambitious, expansive way to offer a definition of this cultural movement. The story of the making of The New Negro is complicated and, in certain aspects, paradoxical. The book, an anthology, represents the triumph of its compiler’s vision of a community and a nation changing before his eyes. And yet this man, Alain Locke, never lived in Harlem and was not himself either an artist or an editor. The book emphasized achievements by blacks in the arts, but it had its origins in a magazine that had no special interest whatsoever in writing, painting, or music. Virtually from the moment it appeared in 1925, The New Negro was widely hailed as a definitive anthology; yet it also immediately drew fire from certain of its contributors and was soon in effect, if not in words, repudiated in crucial ways by others. Prophetic of the future of black America in some aspects, it has also proved to have been decidedly misleading in others. As a venture in publishing, the story of The New Negro is above all the story of Survey magazine and its special monthly number called the Survey Graphic. (The “graphic” or heavily illustrated number of the magazine appeared on the first of each month; the more mundane Survey came out in the middle of the month.) The book was based—it is important to note that there were significant changes from the briefer, magazine version—on the contents of the Survey Graphic of March 1925. This number was devoted to the district of Harlem in Manhattan. The emphasis on the arts in the special number was unusual because the main readership of Survey, which had a relatively small circulation, mainly comprised persons and organizations involved in social work, including philanthropy; Survey had originated in part as an organ of an association devoted to charity work. Its editor in chief since 1912 was Paul Underwood Kellogg, and the renowned social worker Jane Addams had served as associate editor. Special numbers were a feature of the magazine. For example, one such number in 1921 had examined conditions in mines and oil fields, and another, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Soviet Union, had come out in 1922. Around 1925, a special number on Harlem and black Americans was a natural step. In less than a generation the population of Harlem had changed its complexion from lily-white to heavily black, as it absorbed waves of black immigrants from the South and the Caribbean. In spite of the hope, even the euphoria, that came with this migration, problems involving health and housing, unemployment and crime, had begun to surface. Moreover, these problems existed side by side with a burgeoning renaissance of the arts. A rival magazine, The World Tomorrow, had published a special “Negro” issue in 1923, in which work by the two major young poets of the Renaissance, Countée Cullen and Langston Hughes, had appeared. Nevertheless, it was a public “coming out” dinner honoring young black artists, writers, and intellectuals in New York, held at the Civic Club in November 1924, and organized largely as a publicity ploy by the enterprising Charles S. Johnson, the editor of Opportunity magazine (organ of the National Urban League), that led to the special number on Harlem. In attendance, along with several other carefully chosen white editors, writers, and publishers, was Paul Kellogg of Survey. In turn, Kellogg was so impressed by the blacks there, young and old, that he decided to commission a Harlem number. To edit it, Locke, Alain. The New Negro, Touchstone, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=5678624. Created from uaz on 2024-01-10 01:58:17. Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 2 of 7 he turned to the man who bad, been openly hailed by Charles S. Johnson as none other than the “dean” of the New Negro movement, Alain Leroy Locke. (Although the term “New Negro” had been used from time to time in the late 1890s, it quickly became the term of choice to describe the spirit of the 1920s among many black Americans.) Subsequent generations have continued to see Locke in this central role in the Harlem Renaissance. “Locke’s editing of and contribution to this volume,” the historian Nathan I. Huggins has written in his landmark volume The Harlem Renaissance (1971), “and his energetic championing of the intellectual achievement of Negroes in the 1920s made him the father of the New Negro and the so-called Harlem Renaisssance.” However, a contemporary observer in a better position to know, Langston Hughes, described Locke only as one of the three “midwives” of the movement, along with Charles S. Johnson and the literary editor of The Crisis magazine, Jessie Fauset. Other observers were less praising of Locke’s performance in this respect. Indeed, for various reasons, Locke was an improbable though by no means illogical choice as “dean” of the movement, or as editor of a volume designed to define its spirit. Thirty-nine years old in 1924, and an assistant professor of philosophy at historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., Locke was a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, to which he had gone in 1907 on a Rhodes scholarship. There and at the University of Berlin and the Collège de France in Paris, he had studied philosophy, Greek, and modern literature. He was also devoted to the study of German culture and philosophy. Joining the faculty at Howard in 1912, he eventually moved from teaching English to teaching philosophy, but was prevented from teaching a subject of increasing importance to him—race, and especially the interaction of races affected by what is called the African diaspora. Blocking Locke’s efforts here were not only the reactionary university trustees but also the fact that he had published little on the subject. In fact, by the time of the Civic Club dinner in 1924, Locke had published little on any subject. In a way, in spite of his fine education and intellectual gifts, he was drifting until he found the Harlem Renaissance—or until the Harlem Renaissance found him. A comparison with an older figure, W.E.B. Du Bois, who had also studied at Harvard and Berlin, is instructive. Admiring German culture, both men saw a similarity between black America and Germany in their struggles to achieve unity and power. They deeply respected the German intellectual tradition, notably the work of Herder on the transcendent power of folk culture and Fichte in his nationalistic Addresses to the German Nation. But Locke did not have Du Bois’ background in rigorously empirical sociology, and had never lived or taught in the South, where the overwhelming majority of black Americans lived at the turn of the century; his sense of the folk was mainly theoretical. He had nothing approaching Du Bois’ almost obsessive determination to be a force in the shaping of their people’s future. By Locke’s age in 1924, Du Bois had already published three major books and edited over a dozen studies. He had also quit the university in 1910 for the job of crusading editor of The Crisis magazine, the organ of the aggressive new civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Locke, on the other hand, although unhappy with the Howard administration, had done almost nothing to foment change except to read and reflect on the question of the meaning of race in the twentieth century. Once chosen to edit the special number, however, he acted with the daring and vision of a man who had been awaiting his chance. A frequent visitor to New York, he knew virtually all the older black writers and intellectuals, such as Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. And Locke let neither difference in age nor social or professional standing keep him from making friends with artists such as Countée Cullen and Langston Hughes, who were almost twenty years his junior. He would go virtually anywhere to meet anyone who might have anything to contribute. Learned on a variety of topics, he was as persistent in seeking friendships and professional contacts as he was in pursuing knowledge. Eventually, several of the contributors to The New Negro broke with Locke. Before doing so, however, they surrendered to his charm and rare intelligence, and helped to make his special number, and the volume that followed, a landmark in African-American cultural history. Liberal and cosmopolitan in his views, Locke made sure that his list of contributors included men and women, blacks and whites, young and old. Outnumbered by male writers, six women are represented in The New Negro; however, only two offered essays—Jessie Fauset on drama, and Elise Johnson McDougald on “The Task of Negro Womanhood.” The whites were Albert C. Barnes, the eccentric millionaire art collector from Pennsylvania, who would eventually leave his extraordinary collection in the Locke, Alain. The New Negro, Touchstone, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=5678624. Created from uaz on 2024-01-10 01:58:17. Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 3 of 7 control of predominantly black Lincoln University; Paul Kellogg of Survey magazine; and Melville J. Herskovits, one of the leading students and associates of the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University and future author of The Myth of the Negro Past (1941). Several of the poets, including Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, and Bruce Nugent, were under twenty-five years of age; men like Du Bois and Kelly Miller were close to or just past sixty. Locke brought them all together. His contributors amounted almost to a Who’s Who among black American artists, intellectuals, and scholars. Perhaps the only notable absentee was the independent historian Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and Culture in Washington, D.C. Among the younger writers Locke missed virtually no one who had published with any distinction thus far, and virtually all of those selected went on to achieve a measure of fame. He was too early for Arna Bontemps, Wallace Thurman, and Nella Larsen, but just in time for the fledgling Zora Neale Hurston. Among the older writers he included virtually everyone of the old guard, from William Stanley Braithwaite, the poet, critic, and anthologist; James Weldon Johnson, poet, novelist, lyricist; the educator Kelly Miller; and the renowned Du Bois, whose accomplishments as historian, sociologist, novelist, biographer, and crusading editor made him almost without question the preeminent African-American intellectual of his age—or perhaps any age. Du Bois’ presence was important. In many respects, The New Negro was the first literary attempt to revise the collective portrait of black America painted by him in his own epochal collection The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Uniting these men and women was their growing sense of certainty that black America was on the verge of something like a second Emancipation—this time not by government mandate but by the will and accomplishments of the people, especially the artists and intellectuals. The migration away from the hated South, with its bitter legacy of slavery and segregation, to the greatest city in the nation, and the settlement of blacks in an excellently located district that boasted the finest housing stock that blacks had ever been allowed to inhabit (according to James Weldon Johnson), seemed to augur a new day for AfricanAmericans. Sharing in the prosperity of the nation as a whole, and enjoying many of the freedoms of the era that followed World War I, blacks responded with a new confidence in themselves and their abilities. As reflected in magazines and newspapers, as well as on the stage and in nightclubs, literature, music, and the other arts began to flourish virtually as never before. The national success on Broadway of the all-black musical play Shuffle Along in 1921 brought black song and dance into a new prominence. In 1923 came the first novel (if Jean Toomer’s blend of fiction, poetry, and drama in Cane can be called a novel) by an African-American to appear from a major publishing house in over ten years. Efforts by organizations such as the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Urban League underscored the quest for a degree of progress that would transform the situation of blacks in the United States. Few people were unaware of the mountainous task ahead of those who would lead blacks to greater freedom and independence. With pressures exacerbated by the return of soldiers, black and white, from Europe, and by black migrants coming north in search of jobs, the summer of 1919 had been marked by some of the bloodiest anti-black riots in American history. Blacks had fought for their country in Europe, but discrimination and de facto segregation was the order of the day almost everywhere. Lynching of blacks continued even as attempts to secure a Federal antilynching bill failed to gain legislative support. For a movement such as the burgeoning renaissance, however, the deepest challenge, in many respects, lay in the poisoned intellectual and cultural climate of ideas in the United States concerning the origins, abilities, and potential of people of African descent. Race, and the idea of white racial supremacy, enjoyed the lofty status of a science at the turn of the century and down into the 1920s. The New Negro would have to accept this lofty status even as it sought to dispel the prevailing notion among most whites of blacks as not only physically and culturally inferior but without much hope of improvement. The significance of The New Negro cannot be grasped without some knowledge of the long history of the vilification of black American and African culture and racial ability in books built on this assumption of the irremediable inferiority of blacks. Although the anthology deliberately avoids racial polemics, it raises a clear note of protest sounded against the assumptions about blacks in influential racist works such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (published in translation in the Locke, Alain. The New Negro, Touchstone, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=5678624. Created from uaz on 2024-01-10 01:58:17. Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 4 of 7 United States in 1911); Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Races (a shortened version appeared in translation in the United States in 1912); D. W. Griffith’s landmark film of 1915, Birth of a Nation, based on Thomas Dixon’s bigoted novel The Clansman; Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916); Charles W. Gould, America a Family Matter (1922); Clinton Stoddard Burr’s America’s Race Heritage (1922); Charles Conant Josey’s Race and National Solidarity (1923); and Lothrop Stoddard’ s The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (1923). These are only a token of the extensive literature of the period which advanced the notion of white superiority, black inferiority, and the threat to civilization posed by inferior peoples—including those who were white but in some way inferior to “Nordic” or “Aryan” nations. It is fair to say that, in the face of racial “science,” most of the contributors to the volume accepted the notion of black racial and cultural inferiority compared to the highest standards of European civilization. Most also believed, however, that the African race was on the move forward, that politically, economically, and culturally, peoples of African descent around the world were engaged in the first stages of a transformation that would eventually lead to independence from Europe. Africa, now colonized by Europe, would eventually be free. Blacks in the United States and the Caribbean, the major centers of the African diaspora, would liberate themselves from the consequences of centuries of slavery and quasi-slavery. Liberal whites would aid in this movement. Whites were probably the major target of The New Negro and efforts like it. Through the display of black sensitivity, intelligence, and artistic versatility, it was believed, whites would come to a new understanding of the humanity of African-Americans and help to accelerate social change. Accordingly, Locke’s central aim was to produce a book, as he says in his “Foreword,” that would be “of’ rather than “about” the Negro. Thus he decided to concentrate not on statistics of sociology or treatises on history but on “self-expression and the forces and motives of self-determination. So far as he is culturally articulate, we shall let the Negro speak for himself.” In moving from the magazine to the book version, he was aware of a fundamental expansion in intent: “Entering this stage we are now presenting the New Negro in a national and even international scope.” Harlem had few rivals as urban centers of black culture, but “the full significance of that even is a racial awakening on a national and perhaps even a world scale.” He went further in trying to establish Harlem in the context of world events: “As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico, we are witnessing the resurgence of a people.” Carefully designed by Locke, The New Negro is divided into three parts. The first, and the most important, is “The Negro Renaissance.” Its primacy of importance may be judged by the last words of Locke’s “Foreword”: “We speak of the offerings of this book embodying the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance.” Here may be found, following a definitive article by Locke himself on the phenomenon of the “New Negro,” historical essays on African-American art and literature and on the younger artists, as well as a generous sample of the fiction, poetry, and drama composed by the leading young writers. In addition, there is a section on music—notably an essay by Locke on the spirituals and by J. A. Rogers on jazz; and a section on the black past, including folklore, as seen in connections to, or cultural legacies from, Africa. The second part, “The New Negro is a New World,” shifts the focus from the arts toward what loosely might be called the social sciences, especially sociology. Clearly Locke wanted, and received from his contributors, social studies of a particular kind; The New Negro fastidiously eschews statistics in favor of artful, reflective, anecdotal essays. Appropriately enough, the first essay in this part is by Paul Kellogg, the editor of Survey magazine, on black migration to the North. The single largest section links the renaissance in Harlem to similar phenomena in other parts of the United States (Washington, D.C., Hampton, Tuskegee, and Durham, N.C.), then concludes with an essay, “Gift of the Black Tropics,” addressing the topic of West Indian migration to the United States, especially to New York. After essays by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits on the Americanism of the New Negro, by Walter White on color prejudice, and Elise McDougald on black women, the venerable W.E.B. Du Bois is entrusted with the task of linking the movement in the New World to events and trends in Africa. He traces the global implications of the New Negro movement, especially as it relates to colonialism and the struggle for freedom in Africa. (Herskovits’ essay is a token of the pervasive influence of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his ideas Locke, Alain. The New Negro, Touchstone, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=5678624. Created from uaz on 2024-01-10 01:58:17. Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 5 of 7 concerning cultural relativism on this volume and the movement. Leading the intellectual fight against doctrines of white supremacy, Boas’ work, especially The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), was an indispensable part of the movement to reappraise African-American culture.) Last of all, and yet also important, is a section of bibliography that attempts to document the significant books and other studies written by and about black Americans and, to a lesser extent, Africa. The section also provides invaluable biographical material on the contributors, including the artists Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas. As in the case of all the sections, Locke drew on outstanding talents for this section, including the remarkable Puerto Rican-born black bibliophile Arthur A. Schomburg, whose collection would later form the nucleus of the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library. In addition to these three parts, the role of the illustrations by Winold Reiss cannot be underestimated. The Bavarian-born Reiss set about depicting the faces and figures of Harlem blacks as they had never been drawn before but for a few exceptions. At a time when creams to facilitate the lightening of skin color were widely advertised even in politically conscious magazines, Reiss looked for and found beauty and dignity in all complexions and in both European and non-European facial features. Not surprisingly, his artwork disturbed many blacks. However, Locke was entirely on his side in this matter. As carefully produced and as influential as The New Negro was, the volume is in no way exempt from criticism. In recent years, several of Locke’s editorial decisions and predispositions, not to say prejudices, have been called into question by critics and scholars. In his highly regarded study of the Harlem Renaissance When Harlem Was In Vogue (1981), David Levering Lewis has challenged not only the idea of Locke’s centrality to the movement but also the general wisdom of what Lewis identifies as Locke’s key assumption—that the race’s “more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective.” Calling this idea “irresponsibly delusional,” Lewis traces its impact on Locke’s design. “Eurocentric to the tip of his cane,” he sums up, “Locke sought to graft abstractions from German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Slovakian nationalisms to Afro-America. . . . It was heady stuff, but the times were intoxicated with optimism.” The decision to emphasize the arts at the expense of sociology and history remains controversial. Soliciting poems for the special number in 1924 from Langston Hughes, Locke had taken pains to explain that his special number of the Survey Graphic would not be as deadly dull and sociological as he had found other special numbers of the magazine. The book that resulted certainly gained in a certain way by its emphasis on literature and painting; however, it probably forfeited at once, for the same reason, its implied claims to speak definitively about African-American culture, its past, present, and future. A sense of the economic underpinnings of society is lacking, as is a sense of history as being in large part economic history. Du Bois is allowed to raise this point in his essay “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” where he remarks that the major problem of the century was not race, as he had once claimed, but “what we call Labor, the problem of allocating work and income in the tremendous and increasingly intricate worldembracing industrial machine that our civilization built.” But this point of view is seldom seen elsewhere in The New Negro. In spite of its successes, the volume did not prepare its readers for the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression, which effectively destroyed the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro also papers over serious differences over substantive issues concerning culture, politics, sexuality, and related matters between the younger and the older generation of the Renaissance. To the young journalist George Schuyler, for example, Locke was the “high priest of the intellectual snobbocracy.” Locke’s elitist vision of culture may be seen in the treatment of music in The New Negro. In his essay on the spirituals, he shows respect for only these religious songs, which are said to be the “very kernel” of Negro folk music—an identification that was controversial even when he made it. Citing a recent criticism of the certain “concertized” settings of the spirituals as being too European, Locke first approves the criticism, then warns that “we must be careful not to confine this wonderfully potential music to the narrow confines of ‘simple versions’ and musically primitive molds.” Later, he wonders why the black folk song has not yet contributed “something vitally new” to modern “musical development”; and he hoped that some master would do so: “A genius that would organize [black music’s] distinctive elements would be the musical giant of his age.” Locke, Alain. The New Negro, Touchstone, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=5678624. Created from uaz on 2024-01-10 01:58:17. Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 6 of 7 Locke thus chose to ignore the lowly blues; in fact, he acted as if that they did not exst. Thus he ignored not only the increasing poetic emphasis of his friend Langston Hughes but also the work of W. C. Handy, author of “St. Louis Blues” and other compositions, and of George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue had its premiere in February 1924 in New York. Most important of all, he ignored the tremendous new interest in the blues as shown by the enormous sales of blues records that started with Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues, which sold 75,000 copies in one month in 1920, and was followed by the work of Bessie Smith and Clara Smith, both of whom began recording in 1923. The blues is mentioned only in passing in The New Negro in the essay “Jazz at Home” by the historian J. A. Rogers. Indeed, the portrait of jazz there is noteworthy. Jazz is a vehicle for fun, with “a great future” but little intellectual content, and associated with vice. “Where at present it vulgarizes,” Rogers notes, “with more wholesome growth in the future, it may on the contrary truly democratize.” Instead of opposing it, we should “try to lift and divert it into nobler channels.” The New Negro exudes a sense of racial pride and yet also ignores the most important mass movement in black America of the 1920s, which was led by Marcus Garvey. How one could write about a new spirit of Negro assertiveness in the 1920s without extended reference to Garvey is a puzzle. But one could not imagine Garvey and Du Bois, bitter public antagonists, coexisting in the same book; and Locke’s loyalties, such as they were, lay with the N.A.A.C.P., with its integrated but largely white leadership at that time, and not with the defiantly black Universal Negro Improvement Association of Garvey, with its Back-to-Africa slogan. Moreover, New Negroes did not go to jail, but in February, 1925, Garvey had entered the Atlanta Penitentiary to begin serving his sentence of a maximum of five years in prison for alleged mail fraud. Ironically, and to Garvey’s credit, the May Survey Graphic carried this gallant message from him about the Harlem number: “The effort you have made to present partially the life of the race as it strikes you in Harlem is commendable. Your motive is of the nature that will bring about the better understanding that the world needs.” Garvey’s organization, with its colorful processions and controversial claims and promises, as well as its roots in the working poor, was clearly seen as inherently disreputable and a force to be ignored, if not disdained. Radical socialism, too, is given short shrift in The New Negro. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, for example, who had edited the monthly magazine The Messenger since 1917, and who certainly had helped to get the new movement started by publishing poetry and fiction remarkably like that in The Crisis and Opportunity, were also not included. As David Lewis has written, “Harlem was turning its back on Garveyism and socialism to gawk in perplexed admiration at Phi Beta Kappa poets [a reference to Countée Cullen], university-trained painters [such as Aaron Douglas], concertizing musicians [Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes], and novel-writing civil rights officials [Walter White].” The New Negro helped Harlem turn its back even more firmly on radical social movements. Important, too, is the process of smoothening required to make all these artists and intellectuals conform to Locke’s perception of a new breed of Negroes in a brave new world of Negro-ness. In many ways, the avant-garde Jean Toomer was out of place in The New Negro—certainly Toomer himself thought so, having already protested to a number of people that (despite his black ancestry) he was not a Negro and resented being referred to as one. Bruce Nugent was far more concerned with his gay identity than with his sense of race or ethnicity; but the question of homosexuality is never raised in this text—the age would not have permitted it. And the definition of New Negroism that would include both Langston Hughes and Countée Cullen would have to be elastic. In 1925, Cullen, conservative in his techniques and a conscious imitator of British romantic poets, had already formed the basic antipathy that would lead him to question the achievement of Hughes’ jazz and blues poems in The Weary Blues (1926). In turn, in June 1926, Hughes would open his most powerful essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” with a thinly veiled attack on Cullen for wishing to be known as a poet who happened to be Negro, rather than a Negro poet. Locke’s editing practices and his craftiness infuriated some of his contributors. Jean Toomer would write that Locke “tricked and misused me” in making the book. Claude McKay declared that the editor’s treatment of him “destroyed every vestige of intellectual and fraternal understanding” between them. Locke, Alain. The New Negro, Touchstone, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=5678624. Created from uaz on 2024-01-10 01:58:17. Copyright © 1999. Touchstone. All rights reserved. Ebook pages 10-23 | Printed page 7 of 7 (McKay was incensed, for example, when Locke timidly, and without permission, changed the title of his poem “The White House” to “White Houses” in order to avoid possible repercussions.) Perhaps the most aggrieved contributor was Jessie Fauset. The pivotal Civic Club dinner in 1924 had been arranged to mark the publication of her first novel, There Is Confusion. However, she had seen her achievement glossed over, and Locke hailed as the dean of the movement although she had done far more, as literary editor of The Crisis, than he to discover and nurture the younger writers. And the commission to edit the special number had gone to him. In the aftermath of The New Negro would come events and personalities who would illustrate the ways in which it missed significant elements of the movement. In 1926, for example, the most gifted of the younger writers, including Hughes, Cullen, and Hurston, would produce their own magazine, Fire!!. Locke was not among the nine patrons listed in the first—and only—number; he was clearly peripheral to these younger writers less than one year after the appearance of The New Negro. The students had dispensed with their dean. The same year would see the publication of the white writer Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven which caught something of the spirit of Locke’s book but also revealed a seamy underside to Harlem which Locke had carefully avoided. Still later would come vitriolic attacks by Du Bois in The Crisis on novels by McKay and Arna Bontemps, underscoring the extent to which the unity suggested by The New Negro was mainly a front presented to the world. In spite of its shortcomings, however, the achievement of the The New Negro was real. In this way it reflects the mixed record of the Harlem Renaissance itself. In spite of the fact that the movement was short lived, and many of its works and talents of less than stellar quality, the Renaissance succeeded in laying the foundations for all subsequent depictions in poetry, fiction, and drama of the modern African-American experience; and the same claim can be made even more strongly of its music, in the compositions and performances of artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith. The central success of the anthology is its creation of a noble but credible portrait of black America just as black America was entering the modern world (modernism was one of Locke’s many interests). Drawing on earlier imputations, even by some racist observers, of special artistic gifts in blacks, Locke capitalized on them but linked them also to political and cultural action. Such action was not of a vague, impulsive sort, he argued, but part of a world movement. The New Negro exudes more than energy—it exudes a quality suspiciously like joy, the great quality that J. A. Rogers sees in jazz. This quality of youthful energy and joy is in contrast to the lassitude described in the greatest poem of the age, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which purported to measure the spirituality and dynamism of European civilization after the war. The energy and joy in The New Negro have political purposes; they are subversive, and thus come tinged with a quality not unlike a thrilling psychological neuroticism, which serves to authenticate the modernist identity of the New Negro. Whatever one may say of the book, one does not find it antiquarian, or a period piece. Even today, it remains a reliable index to the black American sensibility at that point where art and politics meet, as well as to the events in Harlem and elsewhere among blacks in the 1920s. —ARNOLD RAMPERSAD Princeton University Locke, Alain. The New Negro, Touchstone, 1999. 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