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In
the atmosphere of nativism and xenophobia that followed
the war, it was perhaps not surprising that the American
Negro continued to be victimized by the social, political,
and economic exclusion that had increasingly been his
lot since the end of Reconstruction. The Negro was savagely
persecuted in the 1920s and the prosperity of the
period passed him by.
Nonetheless, Negroes, began to make their presence
felt in the cultural life of the nation:
in literature, drama, and the concert stage. James Weldon Johnson,
poet, professor, and secretary from 1916 to 1930 of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
argued, in an article that is reprinted here in part,
that this renaissance had softened the prejudice
that many Americans felt toward Negroes.
What
Americans call the Negro
problem is almost as old as America itself. For three centuries the
Negro in this country has been tagged with an interrogation point;
the question propounded, however, has not always been the same. Indeed, the question has run
all the way from whether or not the Negro was a human being, down—or
up—to whether or not the Negro shall be accorded full and unlimited
American citizenship.
Therefore, the Negro problem is not a problem in the sense of
being a fixed
proposition involving certain invariable factors and waiting
to be worked out according to certain defined rules.
It is not a static
condition; rather, it is and always has been a series of shifting
interracial situations, never precisely the same in any two
generations. As these
situations have shifted, the methods and manners of dealing with
them have constantly changed.
And never has there been such a swift and vital shift as the
one which is taking place at the present moment; and never was there
a more revolutionary change in attitudes than the one which is now
going on.
The question of
the races—white and black—has occupied much of America’s time
and thought. Many
methods for a solution of the problem have been tried—most of them
tried on the Negro, for one
of the mistakes commonly made in dealing with this matter has been
the failure of white America to take into account the Negro himself
and the forces he was generating and sending out. The question repeated
generation after generation has been: what shall we do with the
Negro?—ignoring completely the power of the Negro to do
something for himself, and even something to America.
It is a new
thought that the Negro has helped to shape and mold and make
America. It is,
perhaps, a startling thought that America would not be precisely the
America it is today except for the powerful, if silent, influence
the Negro has exerted upon it—both positively and negatively. It is a certainty that the
nation would be shocked by a contemplation of the effects which have
been wrought upon its inherent character by the negative power which
the Negro has involuntarily and unwittingly wielded.
A number of
approaches to the heart of the race problem have been tried: religious, educational,
political, industrial, ethical, economic, sociological. Along several of these
approaches considerable progress has been made. Today a newer approach is
being tried, an approach which discards most of the older
methods. It requires a
minimum of pleas, or propaganda, or philanthropy. It depends more upon what
someone does for him.
It is the approach along the line of intellectual and
artistic achievement by Negroes and may be called the art
approach to the Negro problem.
This method of
approaching a solution of the race question has the advantage of
affording great and rapid progress with least friction and of
providing a common platform upon which most people are willing to
stand. The results of
this method seem to carry a high degree of finality, to be the thing
itself that was to be demonstrated.
I have said that
this is a newer approach to the race problem; that is only in a
sense true. The Negro
has been using this method for a very long time; for a longer time
than he has used any other method, and, perhaps, with
farther-reaching effectiveness. For more than a century his
great folk-art contributions have been exerting an
ameliorating effect, slight and perhaps, in any one period,
imperceptible,, nevertheless, cumulative.
In countless and
diverse situations song and dance have been both a sword and a
shield for the Negro.
Take the spirituals: for sixty years, beginning
with their introduction to the world by the Fisk Jubilee
Singers, these songs have touched and stirred the hearts of
people and brought about a smoothing down of the rougher edges of
prejudice against the Negro.
Indeed, nobody can hear Negroes sing this wonderful music in
its primitive beauty without a softening of feeling toward
them.
What is there,
then, that is new? What
is new consists largely in the changing attitude of the American
people. There is a
coming to light and notice of efforts that have been going on for a
long while, and a public appreciation of their results. Note, for example, the
change in the reaction to the spirituals. Fifty years ago white people
who heard the spirituals were touched and moved with sympathy
and pity for the “poor Negro.”
Today, the effect is not one of pity for the Negro’s
condition but admiration for the creative genius of the race.
All of the Negro
folk-art creations have undergone a new evaluation. His sacred music—the
spirituals; his secular music—ragtime,
blues, jazz, and the work songs; his
folklore—the Uncle Remus plantation tales; and his dances
have received a new higher appreciation. Indeed, I dare to say that
it is now more or less generally acknowledged that the only things
artistic that have sprung from American products, are the folk
creations of the Negro.
The only thing that may be termed artistic, by which the
United States is known the world over, is its Negro-derived
popular music. The
folk creations of the Negro have not only received a new
appreciation; they have—the spirituals excepted—been taken over and
assimilated. They are
no longer racial; they are national; they have become a part
of our common cultural fund.
Negro secular
music has been developed into American popular music; Negro
dances have been made into our national art of dancing; even the
plantation tales have been transformed and have come out as popular
bedtime stories. The
spirituals are still distinct Negro folk songs, but sooner or
later our serious composers will take them as material to go into
the making of the great American music” that has so long been looked
for.
But the story does
not halt at this point.
The Negro has done a great deal through his folk-art
creations to change the national attitudes toward him; and now
the efforts of the race have been reinforced and magnified by the
individual Negro artist, the conscious artist. It is fortunate that the
individual Negro artist has emerged; for it is more than probable
that with the ending of the creative period of blues, which seems to
be at hand, the whole folk creative effort of the Negro in the
United States will come to a close. All the psychological and
environmental forces are working to the end.
At any rate, it is
the individual Negro artist that is now doing most to effect
a crumbling of the inner walls of race prejudice; there are outer
and inner walls. The
emergence of the individual artist is the result of the same
phenomenon that brought about the new evaluation and appreciation of
the folk-art creations.
But it should be borne in mind that the conscious Aframerican
artist is not an entirely new thing. What is new about him is
chiefly the evaluation and public recognition of the work.
When and how did
this happen? The entire
change, which is marked by the shedding of a new light on the
artistic and intellectual achievements of the Negro, the whole
period which has become ineptly known as “the Negro renaissance,” is
the matter of a decade, it has all taken place within the last ten
years. More forces than
anyone can name have been at work to create the existing state;
however, several of them may be pointed out.
What took place
had no appearance of a development; it seems more like a sudden
awakening, an almost instantaneous change. There was nothing that
immediately preceded it which foreshadowed what was to follow. Those who were in the midst
of the movement were as much astonished as anyone else to see the
transformation.
Overnight, as it were, America became aware that there were
Negro artists and that they had something worthwhile to offer. This awareness first
manifested itself in black America, for, strange as it may seem,
Negroes themselves, as a mass, had had little or no consciousness of
their own individual artists.
Black America
awoke first to the fact that it possessed poets. The awakening followed the
entry of the United States into the Great War. Before this country had been
in the war very long there was bitter disillusionment on the part of
American Negroes—on the part both of those working at home and those
fighting in France to make the world safe for democracy. The disappointment and
bitterness were taken up and voiced by a group of seven or eight
Negro poets. They
expressed what the race felt, what the race wanted to hear. They made the group at large
articulate. Some of
this poetry was the poetry of despair, but most of it was the poetry
of protest and rebellion.
Fenton Johnson wrote of civilization:
I am tired of work; I am tired of
building up somebody else’s civilization.
Let us take a rest, M’lissy Jane.
You will let the old shanty go to rot,
the white people’s clothes turn to dust, and the Calvary Baptist
Church sink to the bottomless pit.
Throw the children into the river;
civilization has given us too many. It is better to die than it
is to grow up and find out that you are colored.
Pluck the stars out of the heavens. The stars mark our
destiny. The stars
marked my destiny.
I am tired of civilization.
Joseph Cotter, a youth of
twenty, inquired plaintively from the invalid’s bed to which he was
confined:
Brother, come!
And
let us go unto our God.
And
when we stand before Him
I
shall say,
“Lord, I do not hate
I am
hated.
I
scourge no one,
I am
scourged.
I
covet no lands,
My
hands are coveted.
I
mock no peoples,
My
peoples are mocked.”
And,
brother, what shall you say?
But among
this whole group the voice that was most powerful was
that of Claude McKay. Here was a true poet of great
skill and wide range, who turned from creating the mood
of poetic beauty in the absolute, as he had so fully done
in such poems as “Spring in New Hampshire,” “The Harlem
Dancer,” and “Flame Heart,” for example, and began pouring
out cynicism, bitterness, and invective.
For this purpose, incongruous as it may seem, he
took the sonnet form as his medium.
There is nothing in American literature that strikes
a more portentous note than these sonnet-tragedies of
McKay.
Here is the sestet of his sonnet, “The Lynching”:
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds
came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun;
The women thronged to look, but never a
one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely
blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to
be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in
fiendish glee.
The summer
of 1919 was a terrifying period for the American Negro. There were race riots for
the American Negro.
There were race riots in Chicago and in Washington
and in Omaha and in Phillips County, Arkansas; and in
Longview, Texas, and in Knoxville, Tennessee; and in Norfolk,
Virginia; and in other communities.
Colored men and women, by dozens and by scores,
were chased and beaten and killed in the streets.
And from Claude McKay
came this cry of defiant despair, sounded from the last
ditch:
If we must die—let it not be like
hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious
spot.
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common
foe.
Though far outnumbered, let us still be
brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one
deathblow!
What though before us lies the open
grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous,
cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting
back!
But not all the terror
of the time could smother the poet beauty and universality
in McKay.
In “America,” which opens with these lines
Although she feeds me bread of
bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s
tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will
confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my
youth
He fused these elements of fear
and bitterness and hate into verse which by every test is true
poetry and a fine sonnet.
The poems of the
Negro poets of the immediate post-war period were widely printed in
Negro periodicals; they were committed to memory; they were recited
at school exercises and public meetings; and were discussed at
private gatherings.
Now, Negro poets were not new; their line goes back a long
way in Aframerican history.
Between Phillis Wheatley, who as a girl of eight or
nine was landed in Boston from an African slave ship, in 1761, and
who published a volume of poems in 1773, and Paul Laurence
Dunbar, who died in 1906, there were more than thirty Negroes
who published volume of verse—some of it good, most of it
mediocre, and much of it bad.
The new thing was
the effect produced by these poets who sprang up out of the war
period. Negro poets had
sounded similar notes in setting up a reverberating response, even
in their own group. But
the effect was not limited to black America; several of these later
poets in some subtle way affected white America. In any event, at just this
time, white America began to become aware and to awaken. In the correlation of forces
that brought about this result it might be pointed out that the
culminating effect of the folk-art creations had gone far toward
inducing a favorable state of mind.
Doubtless it is
also true that the new knowledge and opinions about the Negro in
Africa—that he was not just a howling savage, that he had
a culture, that he had produced a vital art—had directly
affected opinion about the Negro in America. However it may have been,
the Negro poets growing out of the war period were the forerunners
of the individuals whose work is now being assayed and is receiving
recognition in accordance with its worth.
And yet,
contemporaneously with the work of these poets, a significant effort
was made in another field of art—an effort which might have gone
much farther at the time had it not been cut off by our entry into
the War, but which, nevertheless, had its effect. Early in 1917, in fact on
the very day we entered the War, Mrs. Emily Hapgood produced at the
Madison Square Garden Theater three plays of Negro life by
Ridgley Torrence, staged by Robert Edmond Jones, and played
by an all-Negro cast.
This was the first time that Negro actors in drama commanded
the serious attention of the critics and the general public
Two of the
players, Opal Cooper and Inez Clough, were listed by
George Jean Nathan among the ten actors giving the most
distinguished performances of the year. No one who heard Opal Cooper
chant the dream in the Rider of Dreams can ever forget the thrill of it. A sensational feature of the
production was the singing orchestra of Negro performers under the
direction of J. Rosamond Johnson—singing orchestras in
theaters have since become common. The plays moved from the
Garden Theater to the Garrick, but the stress of war crushed them
out.
In 1920,
Charles Gilpin was enthusiastically and universally acclaimed
for his acting in The Emperor Jones.
The American stage has seldom seen such an outburst of
acclamation. Mr. Gilpin
was one of the ten persons voted by the Drama League as having done
most for the American theater during the year. Most of the readers of these
pages will remember the almost national crisis caused by his
invitation to the Drama League Dinner.
And along
came Shuffle Along;
and all of New York flocked to an out-of-the-way theater
in West Sixty-third Street to hear the most joyous singing
and see the most exhilarating dancing to be found on any
stage in the city. The dancing steps originally
used by the “policeman” in Shuffle Along furnished new material for hundreds of
dancing men. Shuffle
Along was actually an
epoch-making musical comedy. Out of Shuffle Along
came Florence Mills,
who, unfortunately, died so young but lived long enough
to be acknowledged here and in Europe as one of the finest
singing comediennes the stage had ever seen an artist
of positive genius.
In 1923 Roland
Hayes stepped out on the American stage in a blaze of glory,
making his first appearances as soloist with the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, and later with the Philharmonic. Few single artists have
packed such crowds into Carnegie Hall and the finest concert halls
throughout the country as has Roland Hayes, and
notwithstanding the éclat with which America first received him, his
reputation has continued to increase and, besides, he is rated as
one of the best box-office attractions in the whole concert
field. Miss Marian
Anderson appeared as soloist with the Philadelphia Symphony
Orchestra and in concert at the Lewisohn Stadium at New York City
College. Paul
Robeson and J. Rosamond Johnson and Taylor Gordon
sang spirituals to large and appreciative audiences in New York
and other the country, giving to those songs a fresh interpretation
and a new vogue.
Paul
Robeson—the most versatile of men, who has made a national
reputation as athlete, singer, and actor—played in Eugene
O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun and added to his reputation on the
stage, and, moreover, put to the test an ancient taboo; he played
the principal role opposite a white woman. This feature of the play
gave rise to a more acute crisis than did Gilpin’s invitation to the
Drama League Dinner.
Some sensational newspapers predicted race riots and others
dire disasters, but nothing of the sort happened; the played the
title role in a revival of The Emperor Jones and almost duplicated the
sensation produced by Gilpin in the original presentation.
There
followed on the stage Julius Bledsoe, Rose McClendon,
Frank Wilson, and Abbie Mitchell, all of
whom gained recognition.
At the time of this writing each of these four
is playing in a Broadway production.
Paradoxical it may seem, but no Negro comedian
gained recognition in this decade.
Negro comedians have long been a recognized American
institution and there are several now before the public
who are well known, but their reputations were made before
this period. The only new reputations made
on the comedy stage were made by women, Florence Mills
and Ethel Waters.
In addition there are the two famous Smiths,
Bessie and Clara, singers of blues and favorites
of vaudeville, phonograph, and radio audiences. …
During the present
decade the individual Negro artist has definitely emerged in three
fields, in literature, in the theater, and on the concert stage; in
other fields he has not won marked distinction. To point to any achievement
of distinction in painting, the Negro must go back of this decade,
back to H. O. Tanner, who has lived in Europe for the past
thirty-five years; or farther back to E. M. Bannister, who
gained considerable recognition a half century ago.
Nevertheless,
there is the work of W. E. Scott, a mural painter, who lives
in Chicago and has done a number of public buildings in the Middle
West; and of Archibald J. Motley, who recently held a one-man
exhibit in New York which attracted very favorable attention. The drawings of Aaron
Douglass have won for him a place among American illustrators.
To point to any
work of acknowledged excellence in sculpture the Negro must go back
of this decade to the work of two women, Edmonia Lewis and
Meta Warrick Fuller, both of whom received chiefly in Europe
such recognition as they gained. There are several young
painters and sculptors who are winning recognition.
But the strangest
lack is that with all the great native music endowment he is
conceded to possess, the Negro has not in this most propitious time
produced a single outstanding composer. There are competent
musicians and talented composers of songs and detached bits of
music, but no original composer who, in amount and standard of work
and in recognition achieved, is at all comparable with S.
Coleridge-Taylor, the English Negro composer. Nor can the Negro in the
United States point back of this decade to even one such
artist. It is a curious
fact that the American Negro through his whole history has done more
highly sustained and more fully recognized work in the composition
of letters than in the composition of music. It is the more curious when
we consider that music is so innately a characteristic method of
expression for the Negro.
What, now, is the
significance of this artistic activity on the part of the Negro and
of its reactions on the American people? I think it is twofold. In the first place, the
Negro is making some distinctive contributions to our common
cultural store. I do
not claim it is possible for these individual artists to produce
anything comparable to the folk-art in distinctive values, but I do
believe they are bringing something from the store of their own
racial genius—warmth, color, movement,
rhythm, and abandon; depth and swiftness of
emotion and the beauty of sensuousness.
I believe American
art will be richer because of these elements in fuller
quantity.
But what is of
deeper significance for the Negro himself is the effect that this
artistic activity is producing upon his condition and status as a
man and citizen. I do
not believe it an overstatement to say the “race problem” is fast
reaching the stage of being more a question of national mental
attitudes toward the Negro than a question of his actual
condition. That is to
say, it is not at all the problem of a moribund people sinking into
a slough of ignorance, poverty, and decay in the very midst of our
civilization and despite all our efforts to save them; that would
indeed be a problem.
Rather is the
problem coming to consist in the hesitation and refusal to open new
doors of opportunity at which these people are constantly
knocking. In other
words, the problem for the Negro is reaching the plane where it is
becoming less a matter of dealing with what he is and more a
matter of dealing with what America thinks he is.
Now, the truth is
that the great majority of Americans have not thought about the
Negro at all, except in a vague sort of way and in the forms of
traditional and erroneous stereotypes. Some of these stereotyped
forms of thought are quite absurd, yet they have had serious
effects. Millions of
Americans have had their opinions and attitudes regarding their
fellow colored citizens determined by such a phrase as, “A nigger
will steal,” or “Niggers are lazy,” or “Niggers are
dirty.”
But there is a
common widespread, and persistent stereotyped idea regarding the
Negro, and it is that he is here only to receive; to be shaped
into something new and unquestionably better. The common idea is that the
Negro reached America intellectually, culturally, and morally
empty, and that he is here to be filled—filled with morality,
filled with culture. In
a word, the stereotype is that the Negro is nothing more than a
beggar at the gate of the nation, waiting to be thrown crumbs of
civilization.
Through his
artistic efforts the Negro is smashing this immemorial
stereotype faster than he has ever done through any other method
he has been able to use.
He is making it realized that he is the possessor of a wealth
of natural endowments and that he has long been a generous giver to
America. He is
impressing upon the national mind the conviction that he is an
active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as
well as a creature; that he has given as well as received; that
he is the potential giver of larger and richer contributions.
In this way the
Negro is bringing about an entirely new national conception of
himself, he has placed himself in an entirely new light before the
American people. I do
not think it too much to say that through artistic achievement the
Negro has found a means of getting at the very core of the prejudice
against him by challenging the Nordic superiority
complex. A great
deal has been accomplished in this decade of
“renaissance.”
Enough has been accomplished to make it seem almost amazing
when we realize that there are less than twenty-five Negro
artists who have more or less of national recognition; and that
it is they who have chiefly done the work.
A great part of
what they have accomplished has been done through the sort of
publicity they have been secured for the race. A generation ago the Negro
was receiving lots of publicity, but nearly all it was bad. There were front page
stories with such headings as, “Negro Criminal,” “Negro
Brute.” Today, one
may see undesirable stories, but one may also read stories about
Negro singers, Negro actors, Negro authors,
Negro poets. The
connotations of the very word “Negro” have been changed. A generation ago many
Negroes were half or wholly ashamed of the term. Today, they have every
reason to be proud of it.
For many years and
by many methods the Negro has been overcoming the coarser
prejudices against him; and when we consider how many of the
subtler prejudices have crumbled, and crumbled rapidly under the
process of art creation by the Negro, we are justified in taking a
hopeful outlook toward the effect that the increase of recognized
individual artists fivefold, tenfold, twentyfold, will have on this
most perplexing and vital question before the American
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