Arna Bontemps (1902-1972) grew up in Louisiana and California, and attended Pacific Union College Jessie Fauset published some of his poems in The Crisis, and he went to Harlem in 1924. He became a lifelong friend of Langston Hughes, and his poem "Golgatha is a Mountain" was awarded the Pushkin Prize by Opportunity in 1926. He worked for the Federal writers Project (in Illinois) during the Depression, and assumed the position as head librarian at Fisk in 1943. David Levering Lewis writes that "His collaboration with Countee Cullen in 1943 resulted in the musical adaptation of their dramatic work by Harold Arlen as St. Louis Woman, which was an enormous Broadway success." Bontemps and Langston Hughes collaborated on two anthologies of "Negro" poetry, and Bontemps later years were spent as curator of the James Weldon Johnson memorial Collection at Yale University. He wrote God Sends Sunday (1931) and The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). His poems include "A Summer Tragedy" and "Nocturne at Bethesda."

Sterling Brown (1901-1989) was a poet and folklorist. He was born in Washington, DC. And attended the academically demanding Dunbar (M Street) School. Much of the African American elite in DC sent its children here. He attended Williams College in New England (Phi beta Kappa, 1923) and earned a M.A. in English at Harvard (1924). He joined the faculty at Howard in 1929, and remained there until 1969. He published Southern Road in 1932. He served as Negro Affairs editor for the Federal Writers project (1936-1939) and published The Negro in American Fiction (1937). His poems reflect themes relating to the everyday life of ordinary rural southern people, including dialect and vernacular speech. (see Lewis, Portable HR Reader, p. 227-237).

LESSER KNOWN WRITERS OF THE RENAISSANCE

There are also a number of writers from the Harlem Renaissance who are not as well known.

Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-1981) was both a writer and a painter. She attended the Teacher's College at Columbia University and studied art in France in 1925-26. Some of her work was published in The Crisis and Opportunity. Her poems include "Song" (Lewis, Portable HR Reader, p. 221) and "Hatred" (p. 223). Her story "Wedding Day" is in the Portable HR Reader, p. 363-369.

Fenton Johnson (1888-1958) was a poet, playwright and editor, born in Chicago. He attended the U. of Chicago and Northwestern Univ, and "spent time at the Columbia University School of Journalism." James Weldon Johnson included some of his poems in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Fenton Johnson published three volumes of poetry: A Little Dreaming (1912), Visions of Dusk (1915), and Songs of the Soil (1916). His poems include "Children of the Sun" (Lewis, Portable HR Reader, p. 271) and "The Banjo Player" (p. 272).

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886-1966) was a poet, playwright and teacher. She was born in Atlanta, GA. Her collections of poetry include The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), and An Autumn Cycle (1928). Her play Plumes-A Folk Tragedy won first prize in the 1927 opportunity literary contest. Her husband, Henry Johnson, was a significant African American figure in the Republican Party. She was famous for her literary club in Washington DC, called The Saturday Nighters. Participants included the poet of lesbian prose Angelina Weld Grimke (1880-1958), Alain Locke, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Du Bois, Fauset, Hughes and other luminaries of the Renaissance. She gained a reputation as a feminist poet, and her poems include "Let Me Not Lose My Dream," "Old Black Men." "Black Woman," and "The Heart of a Woman" (Lewis, Portable HR Reader, p. 273-275)

Helene Johnson was born in 1907, Boston. She attended Boston University, and the Columbia University Extension in 1926. Her poems were published in Opportunity, Vanity Fair, and Fire!! Alain Locke included her work in The New Negro. She was willing to depict ghetto life at a time when the Talented Tenth did not consider this "respectable." Two of her poems are "Sonnet To a Negro in Harlem" and "Poem." Lewis, Portable HR Reader, p. 277-278).

Dorothy West (born 1908) was born in Boston, and was a poet, playwright. She attended Boston Univ. and the Columbia School of Journalism. Her story "The Typewriter" was published in Opportunity. Her story "The Typewriter" is included in The Portable HR Reader, p.501-509). David Levering Lewis indicates that she was a close friend of Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, Paul Robeson and Gwendolyn Bennett.

Some of the other, more obscure writers include Mae Cowdery, Joseph Cotter, Waring Cuney, and Anne Spencer.

EVALUATION OF THE RENAISSANCE

David Levering Lewis tend to be critical of it, and portray it as a "failure" in the sense that it did not achieve what Alain Locke, Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, and the NAACP-Urban League/Talented Tenth hoped. This is to say, a demonstration of artistic, .literary and cultural talent did not bring about a transformation in "race relations." The African American Renaissance did not utterly change the negative image and stereotypes that many Caucasians had of or about African Americans. A breakthrough in civil rights did NOT occur. The walls of prejudice and white supremacy did not come tumbling down. The color line was not erased. Art and literature did not "save the race." The Stock market crash in 1929 took a lot of wind out of the sails of the Renaissance and everything else. It took the glow off of the Renaissance. By 1932 half of the families in Harlem were unemployed. The tuberculosis rate was five times greater for AAs than for Caucasians in Harlem, pneumonia and typhoid rates were twice as high. Harlem General Hospital, the ONLY public hospital in Harlem, served 200,000 AAs with 273 beds. (Lewis, Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, xxxvii). By 1935 it was clear to almost everyone that the high hopes of the Talented Tenth had been mistaken or misguided or naïve or exceedingly optimistic or just plain out of touch with reality.

According to Lewis, Nathan Huggins, Harold Cruse and Addison Gayle, in varying ways (Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, xxiii) suggest that the AA Renaissance failed in the sense that it was inspired, controlled and corrupted by Caucasians. Afterall, Caucasians owned and controlled the publishing firms, and decided what to publish and what not to publish. Patrons such as Charlotte Osgood Mason provided money to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, and "Godmother" cut Hughes off financially. The Renaissance took place "in rented space--in a Harlem they did not own." And to some people it seems frivolous, superfluous and bizarre that some African Americans were indulging in poetry and ornamentation at a time when the masses were oppressed and AAs were still being lynched. However, as Lewis observes, perhaps the members of the Talented Tenth took the "arts and letters" road because at the time these were the only two roads open to them.

Ann Douglass (Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s) suggests that Lewis and others are too harsh or dismissive in their judgment of the effort "to achieve political ends through literary means."(xxiii). Houston Baker (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance) disputes the notion that the AA Renaissance "failed," and urges us to redefine or reconceptualize what "success" and "failure" mean for a subordinated group that has been labeled and stigmatized as inferior and incapable, as opposed to what success and failure mean for the dominant ethnic or racial group. The AA Renaissance is a failure only if one ASSUMES that it was somehow supposed to achieve a political transformation or breakthrough of the type that Martin Luther King achieved with the legislative victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (that ended segregation in public places and ended discrimination on the basis of race and sex in unions and employment); or the Voting Rights Act (1965); or the Fair Housing Act (1968).

GLASKER'S SUGGESTION

But a case can be made that the AA Renaissance was a brilliant event when one considers that AAs were only 50 years removed from slavery, and the masses of AA people were impoverished sharecroppers in the South. It is incredible that an ethnic group so persecuted; so deprived of education; so exploited, victimized, downtrodden, violated and abused; herded into the ghettos and left to die, could produce works of beauty under such cruel circumstances and oppressive conditions. Perhaps we should not EXPECT that a literary or artistic or cultural movement could do the work of an organized mass POLITICAL movement. Maybe culture can help political action, and help prepare the ground, and give nurturance and support and inspiration--but culture cannot be a SUBSTITUTE for political action. The songs that the civil rights activists sang raised their spirits and their morale, but the songs were not a substitute for marches, protests, pickets, boycotts, mass action. We should not expect culture to be a substitute for political action or advocacy.. We should not ask culture to do more than culture can do, we should not ask more of culture than culture can give. So we should appreciate the Renaissance for its good intentions, and see it as a stepping stone that provided an example and a source of inspiration to later generations. Millions of people, over generations, have been touched by the poetry of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes or the novels of Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston. They helped pave the way for those who came after them. The gift was not only for that generation. It was for all of us who have followed after. The artists of the Renaissance were laying a foundation for the FUTURE. The Renaissance was a rung on a ladder, and a link in a chain, and a transition step that contributed to a cumulative process that still has not ended.

The Renaissance was NOT a failure. It sowed many seeds. And those seeds are still growing and maturing and raising up a better horizon of possibility for the future. The significance of the Renaissance was that if offered a picture of what we had and have the potential to BECOME. The AA Renaissancea offered a glimpse of a different and better FUTURE. It showed us the prophecy, and the vision, and the hope of America not as it was but as it could be.**

Finally, the civil rights "breakthrough" came at a time when African Americans utilized the one institution within the AA ethnic group that AAs own, lead, run, finance, and control--the AA church. King carried the "Word" out of the church and into the streets. He used the church to organize people for mass mobilization. The AA community used the church to mobilize the community (as in the Montgomery bus boycott). The church led the community in a MORAL crusade against segregation and "racism." King made "politics" a question of morality. And the children of the AA middle class and the working class put their bodies on the line. King worked with progressive Caucasians to bring about political change. King followed in the footsteps of A. Philip Randolph, who had planned a mass march on Washington in 1941. In the end King, a child of the Talented Tenth AA middle-class, joined WITH the 9/10ths so that the 9/10ths could uplift THEMSELVES. The Talented Tenth did not pull the 9/10ths up.The 9/10ths pulled themselves up. King went down to the 9/10ths and met the 9/10ths where the 9/10ths were, and they got together to take collective action. It took the MASSES to act, not a few Harvard educated elite intellectuals. King had a way to reach and mobilize the masses for collective action. Du Bois had no way to reach the masses, except for the pages of The Crisis. But he had no organization that he owned and controlled. The Crisis did not belong to him. The Crisis was owned by the NAACP and the NAACP paid Du Bois's salary. And the NAACP had little capacity to mobilize the masses. Du Bois had ideas. King had an organization that could mobilize hundreds and thousands of people and get them to act in unison.