The_New_Negro.pdf

^SYLV4a. ■vTW HARRISBURG, PA. PISL-1A 5DM 5-67 COMMONWEALTH DEPARTMENT OF OP PENNSYLVANIA PUBLIC INSTRUCTION STATE LIBRARY HARRISBURQ In case of failure original price of the last borrower is held Return this book APR 3 0 « 189 to return the books the borrower agrees to pay the same,...

^SYLV4a. ■vTW HARRISBURG, PA. PISL-1A 5DM 5-67 COMMONWEALTH DEPARTMENT OF OP PENNSYLVANIA PUBLIC INSTRUCTION STATE LIBRARY HARRISBURQ In case of failure original price of the last borrower is held Return this book APR 3 0 « 189 to return the books the borrower agrees to pay the same, or to replace them with other copies. The responsible for any mutilation. on or before the last date stamped below. r)A JUL 3 0 1984 , iKiiis aiiiiia Mailman mniiiiiiiigHimiiitaii 0 1 6 1 3 4 8 V/': ' Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from This project is made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services as administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Education through the Office of Commonwealth Libraries https://archive.org/details/newnegrointerpreOOunse J ^ j j.j ) 1 i 0 J , > > J 3 I > > i > J > J > 3 J j 3 > ) i ) J JO » • -> • J * * • • J • • ’ 1 • • i > J 1 J * • » • * • •. ••...• :’/: * * »• * * i j, »• • i • »J ”*•••• • • • * » > J 1 • •: >,,» > > > > j > > > > > > j j J The Brown Madonna c c c c c C t c THE NEW NEGRO AN INTERPRETATION ►►►►►►►►>► EDITED BTALAIN LOCKE BOOK DECODATION AND PORTTDAITr BY WINOLD DEI^ ALBERTANDCHARLE/ BONI NEWYORK 1925 Copyright, 1925, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. Published, December, 1925 Second printing, March, 1927 % ^. \ vv'- 7-ffi ■vn |||f . W n ^ I Printed in the 'United States of America This Volume Is Dedicated To THE YOUNGER GENERATION O, rise, shine for Thy Light is a’ com-ing. (Traditional.) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks are due and acknowledgment made by the Editor and Pub¬ lishers for the kind permission of the authors and publishers listed for the use of copyright material in the preparation of this volume. Especial acknowledgment is made to the Survey Associates and the Editors of the Survey Graphic for the assignment of the material of the Harlem Number, March, 1925, of Survey Graf hie, the bulk of which, with much additional new material, has been incorporated. The Atlantic Monthly Co.: The City of Refugey by Rudolph Fisher. Boni and Liveright: Carma and Fern and two poems from Cane, by Jean Toomer. Harcourt, Brace & Co.: Baftism and the Harlem Dancer from “Har¬ lem Shadows”, by Claude McKay, and Creation from “The Book of American Negro Verse”, by James W. Johnson. G. Schirmer Co.: for the text and music of Father Abraham from “Afro-American Folk Songs”, by H. E. Krehbiel, and Listen to the Lambs from “Negro Folk Songs”, by Nathalie Curtis Burlin. The New Age: the Balm Porchy by Eric Walrond. The Survey and Harper Bros.: Seven Poems of Harlem Life and Heritage from “Color”, by Countee Cullen. Vanity Fair: for Drawings, by Miguel Covarrubias. The Barnes Foundation: for reproductions of African Art objects. Foreign Affairs: for Color Worlds, by W. E. B. Du Bois. The Crisis: for The Negro in American Literature, by Wm. Stanley Braithwaite; Jaxxoniay by Langston Hughes, Escafe by Georgia D. Johnson. The Brimmer Co.: for two Poems from “Bronze”, by Georgia Doug¬ las Johnson. The Liberator: for Negro Dancersy by Claude McKay. The Bookman: To a Brown Boyy by Countee Cullen. Harper’s Magazine: Fruit of the Flower, by Countee Cullen. Opportunity: Fogy by John Matheus; Sfunky by Zora Hurston; Black Finger, by Angelina Grimke, Riddle by Georgia D. Johnson. Survey Graphic and Alfred A. Knopf: for five poems from “The Weary Blues”y by Langston Hughes. Survey Graphic: for Tuskegee} Hamfton and Points North, by Robert R. Moton. Winold Reiss: for his series of Negro Portrait Studies. • • Vll o This volume aims to document the New Negro culturally and socially,—to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years. There is ample evidence of a New Negro in the latest phases of social change and prog¬ ress, but still more in the internal world of the Negro mind and spirit. Here in the very heart of the folk-spirit are the essential forces, and folk interpretation is truly vital and rep¬ resentative only in terms of these. Of all the voluminous literature on the Negro, so much is mere external view and commentary that we may warrantably say that nine-tenths of it is about the Negro rather than of him, so that it is the Negro problem rather than the Negro that is known and mooted in the general mind. We turn therefore in the other direction to the elements of truest social portraiture, and discover in the artistic self-expression of the Negro to-day a new figure on the national canvas and a new force in the foreground of affairs. Whoever wishes to see the Negro in his essential traits, in the full perspective of his achievement and possibilities, must seek the enlightenment of that self-portraiture which the present developments of Negro culture are offering. In these pages, without ignoring either the fact that there are important interactions between the national and the race life, or that the attitude of America toward the Negro is as important a factor as the attitude of the Negro toward America, we have nevertheless concentrated upon 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. Yet the New Negro must be seen in the perspective of a New World, and especially of a New America. Europe seeth¬ ing in a dozen centers with emergent nationalities, Palestine full of renascent Judaism—these are no more alive with the X FOREWORD progressive forces of our era than the quickened centers of the lives of black folk. America seeking a new spiritual expansion and artistic maturity, trying to found an American literature, a national art, and national music implies a Negro-American culture seeking the same satisfactions and objectives. Separate as it may be in color and substance, the culture of the Negro is of a pattern integral with the times and with its cultural setting. The achievements of the present generation have eventually made this apparent. Liberal minds to-day cannot be asked to peer with sympathetic curiosity into the darkened Ghetto of a segregated race life. That was yesterday. Nor must they expect to find a mind and soul bizarre and alien as the mind of a savage, or even as naive and refreshing as the mind of the peasant or the child. That too was yesterday, and the day before. Now that there is cultural adolescence and the approach to maturity,—there has come a development that makes these phases of Negro life only an interesting and significant segment of the general American scene. Until recently, except for occasional discoveries of isolated talent here and there, the main stream of this development has run in the special channels of “race literature” and “race journalism.” Particularly as a literary movement, it has grad¬ ually gathered momentum in the effort and output of such progressive race periodicals as the Crisis under the editorship of Dr. Du Bois and more lately, through the quickening en¬ couragement of Charles Johnson, in the brilliant pages of Opportunity, a Journal of Negro Life. But more and more the creative talents of the race have been taken up into the general journalistic, literary and artistic agencies, as the wide range of the acknowledgments of the material here collected will in itself be sufficient to demonstrate. Recently in a project of The Survey Graphic, whose Harlem Number of March, 1925, has been taken by kind permission as the nucleus of this book, the whole movement was presented as it is epitomized in the progressive Negro community of the American metrop¬ olis. Enlarging this stage we are now presenting the New Negro in a national and even international scope. Although there are few centers that can be pointed out approximating FOREWORD XI Harlem’s significance, the full significance of that even is a racial awakening on a national and perhaps even a world scale. That is why our comparison is taken with those nascent movements of folk-expression and self-determination which are playing a creative part in the world to-day. The galvaniz¬ ing shocks and reactions of the last few years are making by subtle processes of internal reorganization a race out of its own disunited and apathetic elements. A race experience penetrated in this way invariably flowers. As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico, we are wit¬ nessing the resurgence of a people: it has aptly been said,— “For all who read the signs aright, such a dramatic flowering of a new race-spirit is taking place close at home—among American Negroes.” Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and found¬ ing new centers, it is finding a new soul. There is a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing. We have, as the heralding sign, an unusual outburst of creative expression. There is a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart. Justifiably then, we speak of the offerings of this book embodying these ripening forces as culled from the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance. Alain Locke. Washington, D. C. November, IQ25. PAGE ix Foreword Part I: The Negro Renaissance The New Negro Alain Locke .... Negro in American ture. Speaks 19 Litera- William Stanley Braithwaite Negro Youth 3 Albert C. Barnes . Negro Art and America The . 29 .... Alain Locke . 47 fiction : The City of Refuge Rudolph Fisher Vestiges Rudolph Fisher 57 75 Fog. John Matheus 85 Carma, Jean Toomer . 96 Fern, from Cane Jean Toomer . 99 Spunk Zora Neale Hurston .... from Cane . . 105 Sahdji. Bruce Nugent 113 The Palm Porch Eric Walrond “5 Poems. Countee Cullen 129 Poems. Claude McKay J33 Poems. Jean Toomer . 136 The Creation James Weldon Johnson 138 Poems. Langston Hughes . 141 The Day-Breakers Arna Bontemps 145 Poems Georgia Johnson . 146 Lady, Lady Anne Spencer 148 The Black Finger . A ngelina Grimke 148 Enchantment Lewis Alexander . 149 poetry: .... CONTENTS XIV PAGE drama: The Drama of Negro Life Montgomery Gregory 153 The Gift of Laughter Jessie Fauset Compromise (A Folk Play) Willis Richardson 161 168 . music: Langston Hughes 199 214 216 225 226 227 Arthur A. Schomburg 231 Arthur Huff Fauset . 238 Told by Cugo Lewis 245 The Negro Spirituals . Alain To eke . Negro Dancers Claude McKay Jazz at Home J. A. Rogers . Song. Gwendolyn B. Bennett Jazzonia Langston Hughes . Nude Young Dancer . The Negro Digs up His Past American Negro Folk Literature. T’appin. B’rer Rabbit Fools Buzzard . • Heritage. • • • • Countee Cullen • . 248 250 The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts. Part II: Alain Locke . 254 The New Negro in a New World The Negro Pioneers .... Paul U. Kellogg 271 The New Frontage on American The Road. Charles S. Johnson Helene Johnson 00 Life. 3°o The New Scene: Harlem: the Culture Capital . James Weldon Johnson 301 Howard: The National Negro University. Kelly Miller . 312 Robert R. Moton 323 Hampton-Tuskegee: Missioners of the Masses .... i: 4 CONTENTS XV PACE Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class ... Gift of the Black Tropics . E. Franklin Frazier . 333 W. A. Domingo . 34i The Negro and the American Tradition The Negro’s Americanism The Paradox of Color Melville J. Herskovits 353 . Walter White 361 The Task of Negro Woman¬ hood . Elise Johnson McDougald 369 Worlds of Color: The Negro Mind Reaches Out W. E. B. DuBois 385 Bibliography Who’s Who of the Contributors. 4i5 A Selected List of Negro Americana and Africana . 421 The Negro in Literature. 427 Negro Drama. 432 Negro Music. 434 Negro Folk Lore. 442 The Negro Race Problems. 449 I ILLUSTRATIONS Cover design and book decorations by Winold Reiss Drawings by Winold Reiss The Brown Madonna. Portrait Sketch: Alain Locke .... Frontispiece • facing page (< cc CC cc cc cc cc cc CC cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc cc Type Sketch: “From the Tropic Isles” . cc cc Portrait Sketch: Elise Johnson McDougald cc cc Portrait: Mary McLeod Bethune cc cc Portrait: W. E. Burghardt Du Bois cc cc Type Sketch: “The Librarian” cc u Type Sketch: “The School Teachers” (C cc Portrait: Jean Toomer. Portrait: Countee Cullen. Study: Paul Robeson as “Emperor Jones” Portrait: Roland Hayes. African Phantasie: Awakening .... Type Sketch: “Ancestral”. Portrait: Charles S. Johnson .... Portrait: James Weldon Johnson Portrait: Robert Russa Moton .... * * * 6 IOO 132 166 208 232 242 278 306 324 342 370 378 386 394 * . 410 * Drawings and Decorative Designs by Aaron Douglas Meditation. • page Rebirth. cc Sahdji. cc The Poet. cc The Sun-God. cc “Emperor Jones”. cc “Roll, Jordan, Roll”. cc “And the Stars began to Fall”. cc xvii 54 56 11 2 128 138 152 196 198 1LLUSTRATIONS XV111 Music. page 216 The Spirit of Africa “ 228 “ 270 U 46 “From the New World” . W. V. Ruckterschell: Young Negro . Drawings by Miguel Covarrubias Jazz. Blues Singer 'page 225 “ 227 Negro-Americana: Title Pages from the Schomburg Collection Title Page—Jupiter Hammon (C “ u a —Jacobus Capitein —Slave Narrative page 26 (( 28 « 230 African Sculptures From the Barnes Foundation Collection: Baoule Mask.Page Bushongo Mask. « Soudan-Niger Mask. (( 244 255 257 Yabouba Mask. (( 258 Ceremonial Mask (Ivory Coast) (( 259 it 260 page 256 .... Dahomey Bronze.. . . From other Collections: Bronze Mask (Guillaume Collection) Congo Portrait Statue (Tervuren Museum) . Benin Bronze (Berlin Ethnological Museum) a 263 (C 265 it 268 Ceremonial Mask,—Dahomey (Frankford Museum). Part I THE NEGRO RENAISSANCE THE NEW NEGRO V f THE NEW NEGRO 1 Alain Locke In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro and the three norns who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem have a changeling in their laps. The Sociolo¬ gist, the Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulas. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the profes¬ sional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life. Could such a metamorphosis have taken place as suddenly as it has appeared to? The answer is no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remem¬ ber, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reaction¬ ism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence. So for genera¬ tions in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, 4 THE C^E W U^EGRO to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional posi¬ tions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation. But while the minds of most of us, black and white, have thus burrowed in the trenches of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the actual march of development has simply flanked these posi¬ tions, necessitating a sudden reorientation of view. We have not been watching in the right direction; set North and South on a sectional axis, we have not noticed the East till the sun has us blinking. Recall how suddenly the Negro spirituals revealed them¬ selves; suppressed for generations under the stereotypes of Wesleyan hymn harmony, secretive, half-ashamed, until the courage of being natural brought them out—and behold, there was folk-music. Similarly the mind of the Negro seems sud¬ denly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimi¬ dation and to be shaking oflF the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation. Until recently, lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others. But the decade that found us with a problem has left us with only a task. The multitude perhaps feels as yet only a strange relief and a new vague urge, but the thinking few know that in the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken. With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle sev¬ eral generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and THE O^EW NiEGRO 5 self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership. As one of them has discerningly put it: We have tomorrow Bright before us Like a flame. Yesterday, a night-gone thing A sun-down name. And dawn today Broad arch above the road we came. We march! This is what, even more than any “most creditable record of fifty years of freedom,” requires that the Negro of to-day be seen through other than the dusty spectacles of past contro¬ versy. The day of “aunties,” “uncles” and “mammies” is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on, and even the “Colonel” and “George” play barnstorm roles from which they escape with relief when the public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts. First we must observe some of the changes which since the traditional lines of opinion were drawn have rendered these quite obsolete. A main change has been, of course, that shifting of the Negro population which has made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even predominantly Southern. Why should our minds remain sectionalized, when the problem itself no longer is? Then the trend of migration has not only been toward the North and the Central Midwest, but city-ward and to the great centers of industry—the problems of adjustment are new, practical, local and not peculiarly racial. Rather they are an integral part of the large industrial and social problems of our presentday democracy. And finally, with the Negro rapidly in process 6 THE 5SCEW C^EGRO of class differentiation, if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous. In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is becoming transformed. The tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest. Neither labor demand, the bollweevil nor the Ku Klux Klan is a basic factor, however con¬ tributory any or all of them may have been. The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each suc¬ cessive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern. Take Harlem as an instance of this. Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South j the man from the city and the man from the town and village \ the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experi¬ ence has been the finding of one another. Proscription and prejudice have thrown these dissimilar elements into a common area of contact and interaction. Within this area, race sympa¬ thy and unity have determined a further fusing of sentiment WINOLP PEI// -V Alain Locke THE 3^EW U^EGRO 7 and experience. So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race-welding. Hitherto, it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common con¬ dition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in com¬ mon rather than a life in common. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and selfdetermination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. That is why our comparison is taken with those nascent centers of folk-expression and self-determination which are playing a creative part in the world to-day. Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia. Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic. No sane observer, however sympathetic to the new trend, would contend that the great masses are articulate as yet, but they stir, they move, they are more than physically restless. The challenge of the new intellectuals among them is clear enough—the “race radicals” and realists who have broken with the old epoch of philanthropic guidance, senti¬ mental appeal and protest. But are we after all only reading into the stirrings of a sleeping giant the dreams of an agitator? The answer is in the migrating peasant. It is the “man farthest down” who is most active in getting up. One of the most characteristic symptoms of this is the professional man, himself migrating to recapture his constituency after a vain effort to maintain in some Southern corner what for years back seemed an established living and clientele. The clergyman following his errant flock, the physician or lawyer trailing his clients, sup¬ ply the true clues. In a real sense it is the rank and file who are leading, and the leaders who are following. A transformed and transforming psychology permeates the masses. When the racial leaders of twenty years ago spoke of de¬ veloping race-pride and stimulating race-consciousness, and of the desirability of race solidarity, they could not in any accurate g ?HE JiEW NIEGRO degree have anticipated the abrupt feeling that has surged up and now pervades the awakened centers. Some of the recog¬ nized Negro leaders and a powerful section of white opinion identified with “race work” of the older order have indeed attempted to discount this feeling as a “passing phase, an attack of “race nerves” so to speak, an “aftermath of the war,” and the like. It has not abated, however, if we are to gauge by the present tone and temper of the Negro press, or by the shift in popular support from the officially recognized and orthodox spokesmen to those of the independent, popular, and often radical type who are unmistakable symptoms of a new order. It is a social disservice to blunt the fact that the Negro of the Northern centers has reached a stage where tutelage, even of the most interested and well-intentioned sort, must give place to new relationships, where positive self-direction must be reckoned with in ever increasing measure. The Amer¬ ican mind must reckon with a fundamentally changed Negro. The Negro too, for his part, has idols of the tribe to smash. If on the one hand the white man has erred in making the Negro appear to be that which would excuse or extenuate his treatment of him, the Negro, in turn, has too often un¬ necessarily excused himself because of the way he has been treated. The intelligent Negro of to-day.is resolved.not to make discrimination an extenuation for his shortcomings, in performance, individual or collective; he is trying to hold him¬ self at par, neither inflated by sentimental allowances nor de¬ preciated by current social discounts. For this he must know himself and be known for precisely what he is, and for that reason he welcomes the new scientific rather than the old senti¬ mental interest. Sentimental interest in the Negro, has ebbed. We used to lament this as the falling off of our friends; now we rejoice and pray to be delivered both from self-pity and condescension. The mind of each racial group has had. a bitter weaning, apathy or hatred on one side matching disillusionment or resentment on the other; but they face each other to-day with the possibility at least of entirely new mutual attitudes. It does not follow that if the Negro were better known, he would be better liked or better treated. But mutual under- THE C^EW C^EGRO 9 standing is basic for any subsequent cooperation and adjust¬ ment. The effort toward this will at least have the effect of remedying in large part what has been the most unsatisfactory feature of our present stage of race relationships in America, namely the fact that the more intelligent and representative elements of the two race groups have at so many points got quite out of vital touch with one another. The fiction is that the life of the races is separate, and increasingly so. The fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels. While inter-racial councils have sprung up in the South, drawing on forward elements of both races, in the Northern cities manual laborers may brush elbows in their everyday work, but the community and business leaders have experienced no such interplay or far too little of it. These segments must achieve contact or the race situation in America becomes des¬ perate. Fortunately this is happening. There is a growing realization that in social effort the co-operative basis must sup¬ plant long-distance philanthropy, and that the only safeguard for mass relations in the future must be provided in the care¬ fully maintained contacts of the enlightened minorities of both race groups. In the intellectual realm a renewed and keen curiosity is replacing the recent apathy 5 the Negro is being carefully studied, not just talked about and discussed. In art and letters, instead of being wholly caricatured, he is being seriously portrayed and painted. To all of this the New Negro is keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in American culture. He is con¬ tributing his share to the new social understanding. But the desire to be understood would never in itself have been suffi¬ cient to have opened so completely the protectively closed por¬ tals of the thinking Negro’s mind. There is still too much possibility of being snubbed or patronized for that. It was rather the necessity for fuller, truer self-expression, the realiza¬ tion of the unwisdom of allowing social discrimination to segregate him mentally, and a counter-attitude to cramp and fetter his own living—and so the “spLte-wall” that the intel¬ lectuals built over the “color-line” has happily been taken 10 THE ViEW ^CEGRO down. Much of this reopening of intellectual contacts has centered in New York and has been richly fruitful not merely in the enlarging of personal experience, but in the definite en¬ richment of American art and letters and in the clarifying of our common vision of the social tasks ahead. The particular significance in the re-establishment of contact between the more advanced and representative classes is that it promises to offset some of the unfavorable reactions of the past, or at least to re-surface race contacts somewhat for the future. Subtly the conditions that are molding a New Negro are molding a new American attitude. However, this new phase of things is delicate; it will call for less charity but more justice; less help, but infinitely closer understanding. This is indeed a critical stage of race relation¬ ships because of the likelihood, if the new temper is not under¬ stood, of engendering sharp group antagonism and a second crop of more calculated prejudice. In some quarters, it has already done so. Having weaned the Negro, public opinion cannot continue to paternalize. The Negro to-day is inevitably moving forward under the control largely of his own objectives. What are these objectives? Those of his outer life are hap¬ pily already well and finally formulated, for they are none other than the ideals of American institutions and democracy. Those of his inner life are yet in process of formation, for the new psychology at present is more of a consensus of feeling than of opinion, of attitude rather than of program. Still some points seem to have crystallized. Up to the present one may adequately describe the Negro’s “inner objectives” as an attempt to repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective. Their realization has required a new mentality for the American Negro. And as it matures we begin to see its effects; at first, negative, iconoclastic, and then positive and constructive. In this new group psychology we note the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and “touchy” nerves, the repudiation of the double standard of THE O^EW CNiEGRO II judgment with its special philanthropic allowances and then the sturdier desire for objective and scientific appraisal; and finally the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of social debt to the responsibilities of social contri¬ bution, and offsetting the necessary working and commonsense acceptance of restricted conditions, the belief in ultimate esteem and recognition. Therefore the Negro to-day wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seem¬ ing to be what he is not. He resents being spoken of as a social ward or minor, even by his own, and to being regarded a chronic patient for the sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy. For the same reasons, he himself is through with those social nostrums and panaceas, the so-called solutions of his “problem,” with which he and the country have been so liberally dosed in the past. Religion, freedom, education, money—in turn, he has ardently hoped for and pe¬ culiarly trusted these things; he still believes in them, but not in blind trust that they alone will solve his life-problem. Each generation, however, will have its creed, and that of the present is the belief in the efficacy of collective effort, in race co-operation. This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of Negro life. It seems to be the outcome of the reaction to proscription and prejudice; an attempt, fairly suc¬ cessful on the whole, to convert a defensive into an offensive position, a handicap into an incentive. It is radical in tone, but not in purpose and only the most stupid forms of opposi¬ tion, misunderstanding or persecution could make it otherwise. Of course, the thinking Negro has shifted a little toward the left with the world-trend, and there is an increasing group who affiliate with radical and liberal movements. But fundamen¬ tally for the present the Negro is radical on race matters, con¬ servative on others, in other words, a “forced radical,” a social protestant rather than a genuine radical. Yet under further pressure and injustice iconoclastic thought and motives will in¬ evitably increase. Harlem’s quixotic radicalisms call for their ounce of democracy to-day lest to-morrow they be beyond cure. The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American I2 THE U^EW 5SCEGRO wants, American ideas. But this forced attempt to build his Americanism on race values is a unique social experiment, and its ultimate success is impossible except through the fullest shar¬ ing of American culture and institutions. There should be no delusion about this. American nerves in sections unstrung with race hysteria are often fed the opiate that the trend of Negro advance is wholly separatist, and that the effect of its operation will be to encyst the Negro as a benign foreign body in the body politic. This cannot be—even if it were desirable. The racialism of the Negro is no limitation or reservation with respect to American life ^ it is only a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of his progress into an efficient dam of social energy and power. Democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are closed. Indeed they cannot be selectively closed. So the choice is not be¬ tween one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other. There is, of course, a warrantably comfortable feeling in being on the right side of the country’s professed ideals. We realize that we cannot be undone without America’s undoing. It is within the gamut of this attitude that the thinking Negro faces America, but with variations of mood that are if anything more significant than the attitude itself. Sometimes we have it taken with the defiant ironic challenge of McKay: Mine is the future grinding down to-day Like a great landslip moving to the sea, Bearing its freight of debris far away Where the green hungry waters restlessly Heave mammoth pyramids, and break and roar Their eerie challenge to the crumbling shore. Sometimes, perhaps more frequently as yet, it is taken in the fervent and almost filial appeal and counsel of Weldon John¬ son’s: O Southland, dear Southland! Then why do you still cling To an idle age and a musty page, To a dead and useless thing? THE TiEW S^EGRO *3 But between defiance and appeal, midway almost between cyni¬ cism and hope, the prevailing mind stands in the mood of the same author’s To America, an attitude of sober query and stoical challenge: How would you have us, as we are? Or sinking ’neath the load we bear, Our eyes fixed forward on a star, Or gazing empty at despair? Rising or falling? Men or things? With dragging pace or footsteps fleet? Strong, willing sinews in your wings, Or tightening chains about your feet? More and more, however, an intelligent realization of the great discrepancy between the American social creed and the American social practice forces upon the Negro the taking of the moral advantage that is his. Only the steadying and sobering effect of a truly characteristic gentleness of spirit prevents the rapid rise of a definite cynicism and counter-hate and a defiant superiority feeling. Human as this reaction would be, the majority still deprecate its advent, and would gladly see it forestalled by the speedy amelioration of its causes. We wish our race pride to be a healthier, more positive achievement than a feeling based upon a realization of the shortcomings of others. But all paths toward the attainment of a sound social attitude have been difficult $ only a relatively few en¬ lightened minds have been able as the phrase puts it “to rise above” prejudice. The ordinary man has had until recently only a hard choice between the alternatives of supine and humiliating submission and stimulating but hurtful countersrejudice. Fortunately from some inner, desperate resource¬ fulness has recently sprung up the simple expedient of fighting arejudice by mental passive resistance, in other words by trying 0 ignore it. For the few, this manna may perhaps be effective, nit the masses cannot thrive upon it. Fortunately there are constructive channels opening out into I4 THE T{EW Ci_EGRO which the balked social feelings of the American Negro can flow freely. , , Without them there would be much more pressure and dan¬ ger than there is. These compensating interests are racial but in a new and enlarged way. One is the consciousness of acting as the advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization; the other, the sense of a mis¬ sion of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible. Harlem, as we shall see is the center of both these movements; she is the home of the Negro s “Zionism.” The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news material in English, French and Spanish, gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for over five years. Two important magazines both edited from New York, maintain their news and circulation consistently on a cosmopolitan scale. Under American auspices and backing, three pan-African congresses have been held abroad for the discussion of common interests, colonial ques¬ tions and the future co-operative development of Africa. In terms of the race question as a world problem, the Negro mind has leapt, so to speak, upon the parapets of PreJu“c and extended its cramped horizons. In so doing it has linked up with the growing group consciousness of the dark-peoples and is gradually learning their common interests. As* one of our writers has recently put it: “It is imperative that we understand the white world in its relations to the non-white world.” As with the Jew, persecution is making the Negro international. As a world phenomenon this wider race consciousness a different thing from the much asserted rising tide of color. Its inevitable causes are not of our making. The consequences are not necessarily damaging to the best interests of civilization Whether it actually brings into being new Armadas of conflict or argosies of cultural exchange and enlightenment can only be decided by the attitude of the dominant races in an era of critical change. With the American Negro, his new inter THE CJ^EW ViEGRO 15 nationalism is primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation. Garveyism may be a transient, if spectacular, phenomenon, but the possible role of the American Negro in the future development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions that any modern people can lay claim to. Constructive participation in such causes cannot help giving the Negro valuable group incentives, as well as increased pres¬ tige at home and abroad. Our greatest rehabilitation may pos¬ sibly come through such channels, but for the present, 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. It must be in¬ creasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music espe¬ cially, which has always found appreciation, but in larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a genera¬ tion it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source. A second crop of the Negro’s gifts promises still more largely. He now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civiliza¬ tion. The great social gain in this is the releasing of our tal¬ ented group from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression. The especially cultural recognition they win should in turn prove the key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accom¬ pany any considerable further betterment of race relationships. But whatever the general effect, the present generation will have added the motives of self-expression and spiritual devel¬ opment to the old and still unfinished task of making material 16 THE Vi EW D^EGRO headway and progress. No one who understandingly faces the situation with its substantial accomplishment or views the new scene with its still more abundant promise can be entirely without hope. And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age. NEGRO ART AND AMERICA NEGRO ART AND AMERICA Albert C. Barnes That there should have developed a distinctively Negro art in America was natural and inevitable. A primitive race, transported into an Anglo-Saxon environment and held in sub¬ jection to that fundamentally alien influence, was bound to undergo the soul-stirring experiences which always find their expression in great art. The contributions of the American Negro to art are representative because they come from the hearts of the masses of a people held together by like yearnings and stirred by the same causes. It is a sound art because it comes from a primitive nature upon which a white man’s education has never been harnessed. It is a great art because it embodies the Negroes’ individual traits and reflects their suffering, aspira¬ tions and joys during a long period of acute oppression and distress. The most important element to be considered is the psycho¬ logical complexion of the Negro as he inherited it from his primitive ancestors and which he maintains to this day. The outstanding characteristics are his tremendous emotional en¬ dowment, his luxuriant and free imagination and a truly great power of individual expression. He has in superlative measure that fire and light which, coming from within, bathes his whole world, colors his images and impels him to expression. The Negro is a poet by birth. In the masses, that poetry ex¬ presses itself in religion which acquires a distinction by extraor¬ dinary fervor, by simple and picturesque rituals and by a surrender to emotion so complete that ecstasy, amounting to automatisms, is the rule when he worships in groups. The outburst may be started by any unlettered person provided 20 THE U^EW S^EGRO with the average Negro’s normal endowment of eloquence and vivid imagery. It begins with a song or a wail which spreads like fire and soon becomes a spectacle of a harmony of rhythmic movement and rhythmic sound unequalled in the ceremonies of any other race. Poetry is religion brought down to earth and it is of the essence of the Negro soul. He carries it with him always and everywhere; he lives it in the field, the shop, the factory. His daily habits of thought, speech and movement are flavored with the picturesque, the rhythmic, the euphonious. T The white man in the mass cannot compete with the Negro in spiritual endowment. Many centuries of civilization have attenuated his original gifts and have made his mind dominate his spirit. He has wandered too far from the elementary human needs and their easy means of natural satisfaction. The deep and satisfying harmony which the soul requires no longer arises from the incidents of daily life. The requirements for practical efficiency in a world alien to his spirit have worn thin his religion and devitalized his art. His art and his life are no longer one and the same as they were in primitive man. Art has become exotic, a thing apart, an indulgence, a some¬ thing to be possessed. When art is real and vital it effects the harmony between ourselves and nature which means happiness. Modern life has forced art into being a mere adherent upon the practical affairs of life which offer it no sustenance. The result has been that hopeless confusion of values which mis¬ takes sentimentalism and irrational day-dreaming for art. The Negro has kept nearer to the ideal of man’s harmony with nature and that, his blessing, has made him a vagrant in our arid, practical American life. But his art is so deeply rooted in his nature that it has thrived in a foreign soil where the traditions and practices tend to stamp out and starve out both the plant and its flowers. It has lived because it was an achievement, not an indulgence. It has been his. happiness through that mere self-expression which is its own immediate and rich reward. Its power converted adverse material con¬ ditions into nutriment for his soul and it made a new world in which his soul has been free. Adversity has always been his O^EGRO <ART A' N D ^AMERICA 21 lot but he converted it into a thing of beauty in his songs. When he was the abject, down-trodden slave, he burst forth into songs which constitute America’s only great music—the spirituals. These wild chants are the natural, naive, untutored, spontaneous utterance of the suffering, yearning, prayerful hu¬ man soul. In their mighty roll there is a nobility truly superb. Idea and emotion are fused in an art which ranks with the Psalms and the songs of Zion in their compelling, universal appeal. The emancipation of the Negro slave in America gave him only a nominal freedom. Like all other human beings he is a creature of habits which tie him to his past 5 equally set are his white brothers’ habits toward him. The relationship of master and slave has changed but little in the sixty years of freedom. He is still a slave to the ignorance, the prejudice, the cruelty which were the fate of his forefathers. To-day he has not yet found a place of equality in the social, educa¬ tional or industrial world of the white man. But he has the same singing soul as the ancestors who created the single form of great art which America can claim as her own. Of the tremendous growth and prosperity achieved by America since emancipation day, the Negro has had scarcely a pittance. The changed times did, however, give him an opportunity to de¬ velop and strengthen the native, indomitable courage and the keen powers of mind which were not suspected during the days of slavery. The character of his song changed under the new civilization and his mental and moral stature now stands meas¬ urement with those of the white man of equal educational and civilizing opportunities. That growth he owes chiefly to his own efforts j the attendant strife has left unspoiled his native gift of song. We have in his poetry and music a true, infallible record of what the struggle has meant to his inner life. It is art of which America can well be proud. The renascence of Negro art is one of the events of our age which no seeker for beauty can afford to overlook. It is as characteristically Negro as are the primitive African sculptures. As art forms, each bears comparison with the great art ex¬ pressions of any race or civilization. In both ancient and mod- 22 THE C^EW ViEGRO ern Negro art we find a faithful expression of a people and of an epoch in the world’s evolution. The Negro renascence dates from about 1895 when two men, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Booker T. Washington, began to attract the world’s attention. Dunbar was a poet, Washington an educator in the practical business of life. They lived in widely-distant parts of America, each working independently of the other. The leavening power of each upon the Negro spirit was tremendous; each fitted into and reinforced the other; their combined influences brought to birth a new epoch for the American Negro. Washington showed that by a new kind of education the Negro could attain to an economic con¬ dition that enables him to preserve his identity, free his soul and make himself an important factor in American life. Dun¬ bar revealed the virgin field which the Negro’s own talents and conditions of life offered for creating new forms of beauty. The race became self-conscious and pride of race supplanted the bitter wail of unjust persecution. The Negro saw and followed the path that was to lead him out of the wilderness and back to his own heritage through the means of his own endowments. Many new poets were discovered, while educa¬ tion had a tremendous quickening. The yield to art was a new expression of Negro genius in a form of poetry which con¬ noisseurs place in the class reserved for the disciplined art of all races. Intellect and culture of a high order became the goals for which they fought, and with a marked degree of success. Only through bitter and long travail has Negro poetry at¬ tained to its present high level as an art form and the struggle has produced much writing which, while less perfect in form, is no less important as poetry. We find nursery rhymes, dances, love-songs, pxans of joy, lamentations, all revealing uner¬ ringly the spirit of the race in its varied contacts with life. There has grown a fine tradition which is fundamentally Negro in character. Every phase of that growth in alien surroundings is marked with reflections of the multitudinous vicissitudes that cumbered the path from slavery to culture. Each record is loaded with feeling, powerfully expressed in uniquely Negro y(EGRO <ART <AND AMERICA 23 forms. The old chants, known as spirituals, were pure soul, their sadness untouched by vindictiveness. After the release from slavery, bitterness crept into their songs. Later, as times changed, we find self-assertion, lofty aspirations and only a scattered cry for vengeance. As he grew in culture, there came expressions of the deep consolation of resignation which is born of the wisdom that the Negro race is its own, all-sufficient justification. Naturally, sadness is the note most often struck; but the frequently-expressed joy, blithesome, carefree, over¬ flowing joy, reveals what an enviable creature the Negro is in his happy moods. No less evident is that native understanding and wisdom which—from the homely and crude expressions of their slaves, to the scholarly and cultured contributions of to-day—we know go with the Negro’s endowment. The black scholar, seer, sage, prophet sings his message; that explains why the Negro tradition is so rich and is so firmly implanted in the soul of the race. The Negro tradition has been slow in forming but it rests upon the firmest of foundations. Their great men and women of the past—Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Douglass, Dunbar, Washington—have each laid a personal and imperishable stone in that foundation. A host of living Negroes, better educated and unalterably faithful to their race, are still building, and each with some human value which is an added guarantee that the tradition will be strengthened and made serviceable for the new era that is sure to come when more of the principles of humanity and rationality become the white man’s guides. Many living Negroes—Du Bois, Cotter, Grimke, Braithwaite, Burleigh, the Johnsons, McKay, Dett, Locke, Hayes, and many others—know the Negro soul and lead it to richer fields by their own ideals of culture, art and citizenship. It is a healthy development, free from that pseudo-culture which stifles the soul and misses rational happiness as the goal of human life. Through the compelling powers of his poetry and music the American Negro is revealing to the rest of the world the essential oneness of all human beings. The cultured white race owes to the soul-expressions of its black brother too many moments of happiness not to acknowl- 24 THE 3\tEW J^EGRO edge ungrudgingly the significant fact that what the Negro has achieved is of tremendous civilizing value. We see that in certain qualities of soul essential to happiness our own endow¬ ment is comparatively deficient. We have to acknowledge not only that our civilization has done practically nothing to help the Negro create his art but that our unjust oppression has been powerless to prevent the black man from realizing in a rich measure the expressions of his own rare gifts. We have begun to imagine that a better education and a greater social and economic equality for the Negro might produce something of true importance for a richer and fuller Ameri¬ can life. The unlettered black singers have taught us to live music that rakes our souls and gives us moments of exquisite joy. The later Negro has made us feel the majesty of Nature, the ineffable peace of the woods and the great open spaces. He has shown us that the events of our every-day American life contain for him a poetry, rhythm and charm which we ourselves had never discovered. Through him we have seen the pathos, comedy, affection, joy of his own daily life, unified into humorous dialect verse or perfected sonnet that is a work of exquisite art. He has taught us to respect the sheer manly greatness of the fiber which has kept his inward light burning with an effulgence that shines through the darkness in which we have tried to keep him. All these visions, and more, he has revealed to us. His insight into realities has been given to us in vivid images loaded with poignancy and passion. His message has been lyrical, rhythmic, colorful. In short, the elements of beauty he has controlled to the ends of art. This mystic whom we have treated as a vagrant has proved his possession of a power to create out of his own soul and our own America, moving beauty of an individual character whose existence we never knew. We are beginning to recognize that what the Negro singers and sages have said is only what the ordinary Negro feels and thinks, in his own measure, every day of his life. We have paid more attention to that every¬ day Negro and have been surprised to learn that nearly all of his activities are shot through and through with music and poetry. When we take to heart the obvious fact that what our 5\CEGRO <ART <A N D ^AMERICA 25 prosaic civilization needs most is precisely the poetry which the average Negro actually lives, it is incredible that we should not offer the consideration which we have consistently denied to him. If at that time, he is the simple, ingenuous, forgiving, good-natured, wise and obliging person that he has been in the past, he may consent to form a working alliance with us for the development of a richer American civilization to which he will contribute his full share. A x▼ A f. A N. ADDRESS T 0 T H B negroes In the State of NEW-YORK, Br JUPITER HAMMOK, Setat at Jo"> turns. jV «P °< <*“ ** * Qu«»’i VSbgt.- ■■ Or».tnali J per«i« dutGoJh jx>nfptAtr at “ PiTi, •* wwkrtii Kulod, h. U.u A&! *, 54, *5* wrt® ' .N £ W - Y O R K: hrMi t>, C A R *0 LI. ttJPATTERSOS X». js. M*i4»-Lu«. THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN LITERATURE THE I HEROIC SLAVE,* Ia^thrilijnc roiWAmOTRss of § MADISON WASHINCTOM, | js mwi « u»sm. PUBLISH SC pSO PIUOBJ 10 W <?T*^ / THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN LITERATURE William Stanley Braithwaite True to his origin on this continent, the Negro was pro¬ jected into literature by an over-mastering and exploiting hand. In the generations that he has been so voluminously written and talked about he has been accorded as little artistic justice as social justice. Ante-bellum literature imposed the distortions of moralistic controversy and made the Negro a wax-figure of the market place: post-bellum literature retali¬ ated with the condescending reactions of sentiment and cari¬ cature, and made the Negro a genre stereotype. Sustained, serious or deep study of Negro life and character has thus been entirely below the horizons of our national art. Only gradually through the dull purgatory of the Age of Discus¬ sion, has Negro life eventually issued forth to an Age of Expression. Perhaps I ought to qualify this last statement that the Negro was in American literature generations before he was part of it as a creator. From his very beginning in this coun¬ try the Negro has been, without the formal recognition of literature and art, creative. During more than two centuries of an enslaved peasantry, the race has been giving evidence, in song and story lore, of an artistic temperament and psychology precious for itself as well as for its potential use and promise in the sophisticated forms of cultural expression. Expressing itself with poignancy and a symbolic imagery unsurpassed, in¬ deed, often unmatched, by any folk-group, the race in servi¬ tude was at the same time the finest national expression of 29 30 THE 3i_EW TiEGRO emotion and imagination and the most precious mass of raw material for literature America was producing. Quoting these stanzas of James Weldon Johnson’s O Black and Unknown Bards, I want you to catch the real point of its assertion of the Negro’s way into domain of art: O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How, in your darkness, did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre? Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes? Who first from out the still watch, lone and long, Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song? There is a wide, wide wonder in it all, That from degraded rest and servile toil The fiery spirit of the seer should call These simple children of the sun and soil. O black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed, you—you, alone, of all the long, long line Of those who’ve sung untaught, unknown, unnamed, Have stretched out upward, seeking the divine. How misdirected was the American imagination, how blinded by the dust of controversy and the pall of social hatred and oppression, not to have found it irresistibly urgent to make literary use of the imagination