In African American history the period immediately following World War I is called the Harlem Renaissance. This can be thought of as 1920-1935, although this period overlaps at the end with the onset of the Great Depression 1929-1939. A renaissance is a rebirth. It was a cultural reawakening, especially in music, art and literature. This was made possible by the mass migration of African Americans to the North during World War I; and by the creation of an African American consumer market; and by the greater freedom from segregation and violence in the North.

The 1920s were a period in which there was intense pressure to conform. But there were equal and opposite pressures in American culture that sought to break out of this prison of conformity, and sought freedom of expression.

AFRICAN AMERICANS COME TO HARLEM

But one thing had changed for African Americans during World War I, and it proved impossible to reverse or undo. Some 450,000 African Americans had moved to the North, and the North could not or would not drive them out. In the 1890s Jews and Germans had lived in Harlem. In 1905, during an economic downturn, Philip Payton filled an apartment building on 133^rd Street with African Americans (Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, p. 25). This location was near the Lenox Avenue stop of the subway. As the African Americans moved in, Caucasians were filled with panic and stampeded out. However the realtors could get African Americans to pay more than Caucasians would, and once one African American moved onto a block the Caucasians would take alarm and then the realtors would suggest that if they (homeowners) didn't sell then the values would go down and they would get even less money later. By manipulating racial fears, real estate agents could frighten Caucasians into selling their properties and then turn around and sell or rent the property, at a profit, to African Americans. When the influx of African Americans from the South arrived during World War I, Harlem became more than 60% African American. And the African Americans from the South brought jazz and the blues with them. St. Philip's Episcopal Church built a new church on West 134^th Street, and bought $640,000 worth of apartment buildings in 1911. Black or African American Harlem referred to the mid-130s between Fifth and Seventh Avenues. Harlem became the cultural capital of Afro-America in the 1920s.

OVERVIEW OF THE RENAISSANCE: THREE PHASES

David Levering Lewis suggests on p. xxiv of his Preface (When Harlem Was in Vogue), that the Renaissance passed through three periods.

The first phase, from roughly 1919 to 1923, was much influenced by Caucasians. The first phase ended with the publication of Cane, by Jean Toomer.

The second phase, from 1924 to mid 1926, was presided over by the Civil Rights Establishment, consisting of the National Urban League (NUL) and the NAACP, and the pillars of the Talented Tenth. The NUL and NAACP recruited writers, and selected what to publish and promote. By means of this selection process, the civil rights establishment/ self-appointed Talented Tenth "guardians" exercised a degree of censorship over what would be published and what subjects were deemed "respectable." In this period there was a collaboration of "Negrotarian" Caucasians with the Talented Tenth.

The third phase overlaps a little bit with the end of the second phase, and runs from mid-1926 to the Harlem riot of 1935, and was increasingly dominated by the African American artists and writers themselves.

PREMISE: THE POWER OF ARTS AND LETTERS TO TRANSFORM SOCIETY

Lewis argues that the Renaissance was built, in part, on a premise. A segment of the Caucasian community and a segment of the African American community shared this optimistic premise. The hope was that arts and letters had the power to transform a society in which there was no place for them, except at the margins (xvi).

AMERICAN SOCIETY IS LOSING ITS VITALITY

There were some Caucasian writers and intellectuals who were alienated from what they regarded as a society that was lost in materialism and money-seeking. They found mainstream Caucasian American society mechanical and empty. The factory, office, campus and corporation were dehumanizing, stifling, predatory. There was no creativity or expression or originality. Caucasian civilization was wealthy, but the process of accumulating wealth choked the life out of life. It was deadening. They felt that the Caucasian race was dying because it had lost touch with emotion, feeling, joy (xvi-xvii). This society was over-educated and anemic. This society needed to be regenerated. The Caucasians who felt this way tended to gather in Greenwich Village, their own "bohemia" of nonconformity. They could be the "hippies" of the 1920s. These writers were referred to as the "Lost Generation." Their alienation from the mainstream caused them to criticize the mainstream. In the 1950s and 1960s writers would make a similar point by talking about "corporation men" and "men in gray suits." These critical writers included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, Edna Worthley Underwood, Malcolm Cowley, Gorham Munson, Waldo Frank. And there were Caucasian Marxists who also criticized the dominant, capitalist, corporate culture. Max Eastman was a prominent member of the Marxist Left. Some of these alienated Caucasians saw African Americans as noble savages, as primitive "innocents" who had not yet lost the ability to feel emotion and express it, to be creative, to love sex and their bodies, to sing and dance, and not feel shame about what was natural. In some ways, maybe what the Caucasians saw (or thought they saw) was a stereotype.

European Christianity taught people to be ashamed. Sex is sinful. Good Christians don't sing, dance, do anything. So much of what passes as civility and refinement and being cultivated and professional and decent and sober and serious is built on the control and repression of feeling and emotion. But this deadens life. The conventions of upper-class, middle-class, British American culture place life in a straight jacket, and many people yearn for some escape from it. Thus, to use Freudian terms, Caucasians suffered from an overdeveloped superego, while African Americans supposedly continued to enjoy the pleasure principle and the libidinous id. Through contact with the African Americans, "uptight" Caucasians would get back in touch with their id--in Harlem.

For some people, Harlem was a place where they could be "free" from the judgement and inhibitions and constraints of the corporate world, "main street," and conventional respectability. A person could just be a "person." They did not have to live up to someone's image of who they were supposed to be or how they were supposed to behave (the family, relatives, neighbors, church, synagogue, co-workers, the boss).

For some other Caucasian people Harlem, in a way, and African American ghettos elsewhere, became the playgrounds or resorts that they could escape to for a night or a weekend of partying, drinking, and rest and relaxation. And a little sex and marijuana and cocaine might be thrown in too.

Carl van Doren was the editor of Century magazine. He said, at the Civic Club Gala on March 24, 1924, "what American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are." (Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue, p. xxi).

CULTURE TO ADVANCE A POLITICAL AGENDA

African Americans were coming at all of this from a completely different angle. Charles S. Johnson was a sociologist and the editor of a magazine called Opportunity, published by the Urban League. Johnson did not buy into the stereotype that African Americans were noble savages, so innocent, so uncorrupted, so primitive, so exotic, so fascinating, with so much rhythm and music and joy. Instead, he hoped to EXPLOIT the fascination that Caucasians suddenly seemed to have for African Americans, for POLITICAL REASONS; for his own POLITICAL PURPOSES. Johnson saw that the path to civil rights was blocked by segregation, disenfranchisement, and overt and covert discrimination, and ghettoization. He saw (Lewis, p. xx) that the roads to the ballot box, union hall, decent neighborhoods and the corporate office were blocked. But there remained two paths that were not blocked: these were arts and letters.

The civil rights establishment, men such as Charles Johnson, James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois, to varying degrees, as members of the Talented Tenth, hoped that a display of artistic talent could achieve some of the civil rights denied to African Americans. If only African Americans could put their best foot forward and show that they had brains and talent; that they could write poetry and novels and sing opera and arias, and prove that they were just as cultured as white people, then they could earn respect, and white people would look at black people differently; and then white people would respect black people; and they would treat black people differently; and accord black people the rights and simple human decency and courtesy that they as black people had been denied for so long…

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was the secretary of the NAACP, had studied literature at Columbia. He published his Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922. There he proclaimed:

The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people are great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior….And nothing will do more to change the mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art. (Quoted in Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, p. 149; in orig., p. 9).

Alain Locke (1885-1954) was professor of philosophy at Howard Univ. in Washington, DC. His father (Pliny Locke) held a law degree from Howard. Alain Locke had attended Central High School in Phila. graduated magna cum laude from Harvard (1907) and been Phi Beta Kappa, and had been the first African American Rhodes Scholar (1907-1910). He received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1918. He hoped that the Harlem literary movement would do for African Americans what Dublin had done for New Ireland and what Prague had done for the New Czechoslovakia. (xxi) In his collection of works entitled The New Negro, in 1925, Alain Locke wrote:

[The race's] more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective." (Lewis, p. 117).

Benjamin Brawley told Walter White of the NAACP "we have a tremendous opportunity to boost the NAACP, letters and arts, and anything else that calls attention to our development along the higher lines." (Lewis, p. 92).

The civil rights leaders of the 1920s imagined that if the "higher sort" or "higher type" of Negro, the Talented Tenth Negroes, who were college-educated, white-collar, and middle-class, showed how cultured and assimilated they were, then somehow they could create a breakthrough in the battle against racism or white supremacy. They could use culture for political purposes. They would use culture as a political weapon. Culture would be a means to the end of achieving civil rights. If only they could show that they were almost white, or just like white people, and really no different from white people…The realm of arts and letters was a small crack in the wall of racism. Each book, play, poem or canvas would become a weapon against the old racial stereotypes (Lewis, p. 48).

But this was an illusion. These cultural achievements would not improve the lot of the masses of southern sharecroppers or northern laborers. They would not put bread on the table for the masses. Instead, the African American elite was trying to win what assimilation it could through copyrights, concerts and exhibitions (Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, p. 49).

THE LIMITS OF CULTURE, AND THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

This use of culture was a double-edged sword. First, it asked too much of culture. It asked far more than culture alone could deliver. Second, if Caucasians were curious about African Americans and interested in African Americans, which kind of African Americans were they interested in? As it turned out, men such as Carl Van Vechten and some of the other Caucasians who were willing to pay to sponsor literature and music were not especially interested in the assimilated, "cultured," "whitened" African Americans. Charlotte Osgood Mason ("Godmother"), who sponsored Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and many others, disliked the cultured African Americans because she felt they were too "white." In contrast, she preferred the "primitive" ones. To her, and many other Caucasians, the primitive ones were the REAL Negroes. They were exotic, unrestrained, uninhibited, natural, raw. And the more primitive that they were, the better Caucasians liked them. Primitive and exotic was entertaining. It restored the "joy of life" and "zest for life" that these Caucasians found so lacking in their own lives.

At the very outset, then, we have to understand that the Renaissance was a many-sided tug of war. There were competing agendas. Different people were "in it" for different reasons. What the "lyrical left" of Caucasians alienated from the anemic Caucasian world wanted was a bit different from what the Talented Tenth and the early civil rights establishment of the NAACP and Urban League wanted. Or their reasons for wanting it were different. And for some of the writers themselves, they just wanted money so that they could write or paint. They were "on the make." They saw an opportunity to make money, and they exploited. If Godmother wanted primitive, colorful, exotic material, that was what she would get.

The Talented Tenth faction that wanted to "prove" that the "higher class" of African Americans was almost white, and cultured and refined and assimilated, was scandalized by writings by or about the "lower class" African Americans who listened to jazz or blues, or danced at cabarets, or drank gin or illegal moonshine or corn liquor, or went to rent parties and danced real close in the dark, or spoke improper English, or ate watermelon, or had babies out of wedlock. It also happened that the "cultured" Talented Tenth "Negroes" tended to be light brown or biracial, while the "low class Negroes" so often happened to be dark.

BASIC CHRONOLOGY

In 1917 Ridgely Torrence and Emily Hapgood presented three one-act plays with all-black casts at the Provincetown Playhouse. The plays were The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenean, and Granny Maumee. This was the first time that the world of Caucasian American plays had taken an interest in African Americans.

Phase One of the Renaissance: 1917-1923

In the year 1919 there were 25 race riots in the US, many of them in the North. In response, the Jamaican-born Festus Claudius McKay, better known as Claude McKay wrote "If We Must Deny." It was a summons to African Americans, poetically, to stand up and fight back against white supremacy. This is a poem with a political message, not "art for art's sake." It reflects a new mood of assertiveness. (go to poem).

In 1920 there was a production of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones, in New York, starring the African American actor Charles Gilpin. This was the first time that an African American had played the leading role. Bear in mind that Eugene O'Neill was Caucasian. In 1922 the play was revived, and Paul Robeson played the lead role.

In 1922 the Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles musical Shuffle Along was staged on Broadway. It was a sensation, and the song "I'm Just Wild About Harry," by Eubie Blake, was a smash hit. Florence Mills became a "star."

Claude McKay's volume of poetry entitled Harlem Shadows was published in 1922, and the Book of American Negro Poetry by James Weldon Johnson; and the novel Birthright by T. S. Stribling. Stribling, of course, was Caucasian. But he wrote a novel about an African American protagonist of superior education (Harvard-educated physician) who returns to the South and is "martyred" for his ideals (Lewis, Intro to Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, xix). Caucasians were becoming intensely interested in African American subject matter, but realized that they knew very little about the subject.

In 1923 the lyrical Cane, by Jean Toomer, was published by the publishing house of Boni and Liveright, as encouraged by Sherwood Anderson and other Caucasian authors. Cane was a sensation. Boston anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite, one of Afro-America's severest critics, said that it was a book of gold and bronze, dusk and flame, ecstasy and pain." Toomer was "the bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature." (Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, p. 59). Hart Crane praised him. Part of the significance of Cane is that it was about African Americans, by an African American--or at least a man who had a small fraction of African American ancestry.

Nathan Eugene Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, DC.. He was better known as Jean Toomer. His maternal grandfather was Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, better known as PBS Pinchback. Pinchback was the biracial son of a wealthy white Mississippi planter named William Pinchback, and Eliza Stewart, an African American slave woman. The father had ten children with her, and PBS was the eighth child (born in 1837). William Pinchback took her to Philadelphia before Pinckney was born, and set her and her children free. Pinckney was born free, by some accounts in Macon, Georgia, and educated in Ohio. The family moved to Cincinnati because of fears that the white relatives might attempt to re-enslave them after the father, William, died (1848). PBS Pinchback served as the lieutenant governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, when Governor Henry Warmouth was impeached in the winter of 1872. For 43 days or so in the winter of 1872-73 (Dec. 9, 1972 to Jan. 13, 1873) PBS Pinchback served as the acting governor of Louisiana. The impeachment was taking place during this time, and pending the election of a new governor Pinchback was the acting governor. His daughter Nina married an illegitimate mulatto from North Carolina named Nathan Toomer. Nathan Toomer passed as white, and once owned a farm in Georgia. The marriage was over the objections of PBS Pinchback, and Nathan Toomer soon left her (Nina), and debts to the Pinchbacks (Lewis, p. 60). Nina then remarried, this time to a poor white man named Toombs. PBS Pinchback lost a fortune in gambling, and the Pinchbacks ended up becoming downwardly mobile. They fell out of the white world and into the upper echelons of the African American world in Washington, DC. Jean Toomer was light enough to pass for white, but his family no longer had the money. They lived close to Howard University and Toomer attended Dunbar High School.

But Jean Toomer was, in a sense, caught between two worlds. With respect to color or phenotype, he was Caucasian. With respect to ancestry, or genotype, he was mixed. He didn't fit entirely in either world. He ran a school in Sparta, Georgia for a friend of his grandfather's in fall 1921, and for the first time Jean Toomer encountered the sharecroppers and the South. He found the sharecroppers crude, but "strangely rich and beautiful." (Lewis, p. 64). Like Du Bois attending Fisk in the 1880s, Toomer for the first time discovered the part of his past that was missing. From the cabins of the sharecroppers he heard the Negro spirituals and the folk songs. This music moved him deeply, for its pathos and its feeling. It was a tremendous discovery for him. He now discovered the black or African American or Negro roots that he vaguely knew he had but had never experienced. Before Sparta, Georgia, Jean Toomer was confused. He did not know who he was. He was suspended between the Caucasian world and the African American world. He did not know who he was because he did not know where he came from. A part of himself was missing. In Sparta, Georgia, in 1921, with the former slaves, Jean Toomer found that missing part. Lewis argues, on p. 64-65, that for that brief moment, he came down to earth for the first time in his life. Toomer's life was confusing because of its duality. He was like a chameleon. When he was with white people he felt white, or like a foreigner. When he was with blacks, he too was black. He was both. But how could one be both? This was what puzzled and confused him.

The Southern sharecroppers, the former slaves and the children of slaves, helped Toomer to come to grips with his tangled ancestry. But while this helped him to understand his past, it was not the same thing as his future.

The editor Liveright referred to Toomer, in a letter to him, as a promising Negro writer. Toomer replied, "I must insist that you never use such a word, such a thought, again." (Lewis, p. 71). Toomer was friends with the Caucasian writer Waldo Frank, a "lapsed Jew." But in 1923 Frank invited Toomer to spend a few days at his home in Conn. There Toomer met and fell in love with Frank's wife, Margaret Naumburg Frank. Frank had talked of no one else for months. When Margaret met Toomer, she found him "lean and splendid." Waldo Frank was sick with an intestinal disorder, and hard to live with. He went away to Europe six weeks later. Toomer and Naumburg had an affair, and in time Naumburg demanded a divorce from her husband. But in 1923 Toomer, in turn, left for France to study mysticism with the Russian holyman Georgi Gurdjieff. Upon Toomer's return in 1924 he met Mabel Dodge, who was married to a Pueblo Indian named Tony Luhan. She fell in love with Toomer, and the three of them went off to Taos, New Mexico.

After all of this Toomer renounced his African American heritage, insisted that he was really Caucasian, and took the view that he was simply an American, and that race did not matter. He refused to be labeled by race, and invented the fiction that his grandfather PBS Pinchback had simply pretended to be part black in order to take advantage of opportunities in Reconstruction. The mysticism of Gurdjieff promised a world of salvation and transcendence. The mystic said that "If all men were to become too intelligent they would not want to be eaten by the moon." (Lewis, p. 72). Here Toomer found relief from the divided world of race. In a supreme irony, one of the first lights of the Harlem Renaissance was a man of mixed racial ancestry who renounced his African ancestry soon after writing Cane.

PHASE TWO: THE TALENTED TENTH RENAISSANCE (1924-1926)

In March 1924 Jessie Redmon Fauset published her novel There Is Confusion, published by Boni and Liveright. An informal gathering would assemble for dinner on March 21, 1924 at the exclusive Civic Club in New York to honor the publication of her book. Charles Johnson, editor of Opportunity, turned the gathering into a literary symposium. Alain Locke was the master of ceremonies. Carl Van Doren declared that American literature needed color, music and gusto. The NAACP announced the establishment of literary prizes by The Crisis. The editor Paul Kellogg offered a special issue of the Survey Graphic to showcase Harlem talent. Later, in March 1926 Locke pulled together more than thirty contributors to the special issue of the Graphic, entitled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." The collection included work by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Walter White, Eric Walrond, and Georgia Douglas Johnson.

David Levering Lewis writes, "A week after the Opportunity banquet the New York Herald Tribune gave this literary ferment its name, referring to a "Negro renaissance." (Lewis, xxi).

In 1925, Countee Cullen's first volume of poetry, entitled Color, was published by Harper and Brothers. And in May 1925 the first Opportunity Awards banquet was held.

PHASE THREE: THE NEGRO RENAISSANCE  (1926-1935)

Phase two blends into phase three: permeable boundary, not bright red line.

March 1926, special issue of Survey Graphic published, edited by Alain Locke.
Publication of The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes
Publication of Tropic Death, by Eric Walrond
Publication of Flight, by Walter White
Publication of The New Negro, by Alain Locke

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes, in The Nation (June 1926)
"The Negro-Art Hokum," by George Schuyler, in The Nation (June 1926)
Publication of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten
Publication of Fire!!, by Wallace Thurman (November 1926)

1927

Publication of Fine Clothes to the Jew, by Langston Hughes
Publication of Copper Sun, second collection of poems, by Countee Cullen

1928

Quicksand, by Nella Larsen
Home to Harlem, by Claude McKay
The Walls of Jericho, by Rudolph Fisher (a satire)
Dark Princess, by W.E.B. Du Bois
Harlem, (magazine) by Wallace Thurman

1929

Plum Bun, by Jessie Fauset
The Blacker the Berry, by Wallace Thurman
Passing, by Nella Larsen
Banjo, by Claude McKay
The Black Christ (poetry), by Countee Cullen

1930

The Green Pastures , by Marc Connelly, opens on Broadway
Not Without Laughter (novel), by Langston Hughes

1931

Black No More, by George Schuyler
Black Manhattan, by James Weldon Johnson
Death of A'Lelia Walker
God Sends Sunday, by Arna Bontemps
The Chinaberry, by Jessie Fauset

1932

Infants of the Spring, by Wallace Thurman
The Conjure-Man Dies, by Rudolph Fisher
One Way to Heaven (novel) by Countee Cullen

1933

Banana Bottom, novel, by Claude McKay
Comedy: American Style, by Jessie Fauset

1934

Jonah's Vine Gourd, first novel by Zora Neale Hurston
The Ways of White Folks, by Langston Hughes
Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman die, December 1934

1935

Harlem Race Riot (March 19)

1936

Black Thunder, by Arna Bontemps