THE TALENTED TENTH AND THE RENAISSANCE

Charles Johnson, (1893-1956) the editor of Opportunity, the magazine of the National Urban League, was one of the foremost promoters of the Harlem Renaissance for the Talented Tenth and the civil rights "establishment" of that time. He was born in Virginia, and earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1918, and studied with Robert Park. He came to NY was director of research for the Urban League in 1921., and then in 1923 went on to edit its magazine, Opportunity. Beginning in 1925, Opportunity sponsored an annual literary competition and awarded prizes, and steered promising talent to Caucasian publishing houses. The wife of Urban League chairman L. Hollingsworth Wood provided money for the initial Opportunity award. Charles Johnson also turned to Caspar Holstein for money for awards. Holstein was a "businessman" and the "king" of the numbers racket in Harlem at the time, and he was from the Danish West Indies. The US purchased these islands from Denmark in 1917, during World War I, and today they are usually called the US Virgin Islands. He departed for Fisk in 1926, where he served as chairman of the sociology department. In 1946 he became the first African American president of Fisk Univ.

Likewise the NAACP sponsored a literary contest, and the money to give the NAACP award came from Amy Spingarn, wife of Joel Springarn.

Because the NUL and NAACP sponsored the literary contests and awarded the prizes, they were in a position to select what got published in the literary sections of Opportunity and Crisis and to select the literature that they approved of. But this also put them in a position to screen out or filter or censor literature that they did not like or approve of.

Likewise, when Alain Locke served as editor of the special edition of the Survey Graphic, in March 1926, he got to select which poems and stories he would include. He even took it upon himself to change the titles of some of the poems, over the protest of the poets. For example, Claude McKay wrote a poem called "The White House." This title suggested the home of the American president. Locke, ever the soul of discretion, changed the title to "White Houses," so as not to be so direct. McKay was furious. Locke was also in the position to select and exclude when he published the collection The New Negro, in 1926.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an important figure in the Renaissance. He was the son of educated parents who had prospered in the Bahamas. He earned a B.A. at Atlanta U. in 1894, headed a segregated grammar school in Jacksonville, Florida, and passed the bar exam in Florida in 1897. He was of light complexion and moved to NY. He and his brother Rosamund Johnson published the a collection of "Negro songs," and James Weldon Johnson wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Johnson supported Booker T. Washington and Washington recommended him to Teddy Roosevelt for a diplomatic post. Johnson served as US consult to Venezuela (1906-1908) and Nicaragua (1909-1912). He anonymously published The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in 1912. He was 'light enough to pass." Johnson had tied his fortunes to the Republicans, and so when the Democrat Woodrow Wilson became president at the inauguration in March 1913 Johnson's diplomatic career came to an end. Johnson then took up a career as an editor for a NY newspaper, mended his fences with the NAACP, and in published Fifty Years and Other Poems in 1917. Du Bois and Joel Spingarn liked him, and in 1917 he became the field organizer for the NAACP. Soon thereafter he became executive secretary for the NAACP. In 1922 he published The Book of American Negro Poetry, much approved by the NAACP and the Talented Tenth. The NAACP would fall on hard times after the stock market crash of 1929. James Weldon Johnson left the NAACP in 1931, and took a position as professor of literature at Fisk.

Jessie Fauset (1882-1961) and Nella Larsen were examples of authors who wrote the kinds of novels that the NUL and NAACP, the Talented Tenth/civil rights establishment approved of.

Jessie Fauset was a light complected African American from an old-line family in Phila. She graduated with honors from Cornell, and earned a M.A. in Romance languages from the U. of Penn. From 1909 to 1919 she taught Latin and French at the elite, public Dunbar School in Washington, DC. She became the full-time literary editor for The Crisis in 1924, and her surviving letters seem to suggest that at one time she and Du Bois were involved in a love affair. Eventually, however, they had a falling out. She helped to identify and publish Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. Fauset's novel There Is Confusion (1924) is about genteel, light skinned, well born, old Philadelphians, not the lowly, rude, unmannered, illiterate sharecroppers from the south or the crude roughnecks from the ghetto. If only one will push through the racism and white supremacy, one will overcome in the end. But in the meantime people can feel defeated and feel as if there is no way that they can win. Her later novels would continue with this same preoccupation with light skinned, almost white, genteel, well bred, cultured people struggling against undeserved adversity. Her theme was always the pain and paradox of racial admixture.

Nella Larsen (1891-1963) claimed that her mother had been Danish, and that her father had been African American from the Danish West Indies. She claimed to have been born in Chicago. In reality, it seems that her father was a chauffeur who lived in New York, and she was born in NY. She took courses at Fisk for one year, and did not, as she claimed, pursue studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her novel, Quicksand,( 1928) is about a biracial (mulatto) heroine who meets a tragic end. She is light enough to pass for white, and so she is a "voluntary Negro." She goes to college in Denmark, but then goes to the South. Her second novel, Passing, (1929) is also about mulatto women. The two women are light enough to pass for white, and are childhood friends. One, Clare, does pass, and marries a white man who does not know that she has "black" or African ancestry. The other biracial woman, Irene, owns up to her African ancestry and marries a black man (Brian) Irene keeps Clare's secret, but the novel is about what happens when people live a lie by "passing as white," and it is about the "burden of choice" that biracial people face; and the consequences of those choices. What will happen if Clare's husband learns the truth?! This novel was like a soap opera. It won the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal for literature. In 1929 Larsen became the first African American woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. She went through a bitter divorce with her Fisk professor husband (Elmer Imes) in 1933.

Another titan of the Talented Tenth was Walter Francis White (1893-1955). Walter White was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a "voluntary Negro." His parents were both light enough to pass for white. Walter had blond hair and blue eyes. The horrors of the Atlanta race riot of 1906 made him determined to identify with the unfortunate African Americans. He graduated from Atlanta Univ. in 1916 and went to work for an African American life insurance company, the Atlanta Life Insurance Co. In 1918 James Weldon Johnson, also an alumnus of Atlanta Univ., offered white a position as assistant executive director of the NAACP. Walter White's complexion was invaluable. He was able to pass as a white man (Caucasian), and go into meetings with Caucasians (even the Klan) and learn inside information. In this way he investigated the lynching of African Americans in Arkansas in 1919. Walter White worked tirelessly to promote the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and was friends with Carl Van Vechten and the publisher Alfred Knopf. He urged Paul Robeson to give up his law career to become an actor. White published Fire in the Flint, a protest novel against white supremacy, in 1924. Walter White preferred the more elevated literature that showed that African Americans could be just like white or Caucasian people. However, increasingly he found Du Bois too cantankerous and radical. Their egos clashed. Walter White served as executive secretary of the NAACP from 1930 to his death in 1955, and during that time the title changed to executive director.

Likewise, the Talented Tenth approved of the lyrical Cane, and the poetry of Countee Cullen in Color (1925). Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was the adoptive son of Reverend Frederick Cullen. Gossip in Harlem suggested that Reverend Cullen was rather fond of some of the young men in his choir. Countee Cullen attended the De Witt Clinton School (high school), and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from New York University in 1925. He won the Gold Medal in the Harmon Foundation literary contest in 1928 and a Guggenheim Fellowship. But gossip in certain circles in Harlem suggested that Countee Cullen was a homosexual, and in love with his good friend Harold Jackman. But Yolande Du Bois was very fond of Countee Cullen, and Dr. Du Bois liked him, and Countee and Yolande were married in April 1928. Everyone said that the soft-spoken Countee Cullen was a perfect gentleman. Harold was the best man at the wedding. But in June, with Guggenheim stipend in hand, Countee sailed off to France with his father and Harold. Supposedly Reverend Cullen was not well, and needed the two younger, stronger men to help him get around. Yolande was left behind. Supposedly, by coming later in the summer, there would be more money so that she could travel first class. When she arrived in Paris (August or so) the marriage promptly broke up, and the formality of a divorce took place in 1930.

The literature that the NUL and NAACP, and the Talented Tenth liked and promoted was a literature about near-white people who were cultured and assimilated, who proved that colored people could be just like Caucasians. It was a literature that was fixated with the dilemma of passing or the pain of being discriminated against when you were light enough to pass for white. It was a literature about the African American aristocracy, the genteel, cultured people from well-bred, elite families. It was a view of African Americans from the top down.

THE GENERATION GAP OPENS UP: 1926

But the younger generation rebelled against the limitations of this picture of African Americans, and African American life. Where were the southern blacks? Where were the sharecroppers? Where were the people busting their tails to make a dollar in the ghetto? Where was the reality of the masses of African American people. The younger generation of writers rebelled against their elders and the Talented tenth. By 1926 a generation gap opened up in the Harlem Renaissance. The younger writers were not ashamed of poor black people, or Southern sharecroppers, or jazz or spirituals or the blues. They were not ashamed of the ghetto. They were not trying t prove how white (culturally assimilated) they could be. They were not trying to prove that black people could be just like white people. They didn''t give a damn about passing. In fact, they accused some of the light-skinned "near white" African Americans of being colorstruck snobs themselves--against dark skinned black people. The "young bucks" who tore up the conventions of the Talanted Tenth were writers like Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The wrote about African American life from the "bottom-up."

Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) was a dark-skinned black man, born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He attended the University of Southern California. He found work at the post office in Los Angeles, then in 1925 moved to NY and edited The Messenger for A. Philip Randolph. In 1926 he published a magazine called Fire!! It was a sensation. It included material about ghetto life, prostitutes, gambling, even homoerotic behavior. The selection "Cordelia the Crude" was about a prostitute. Thurman published The Blacker the Berry in 1929. It is the story of a dark-skinned black woman who is ridiculed by her own light complected family, and scorned and ridiculed and shunned by light-skinned African Americans at school, in college, and when she goes to find jobs. This gives her low self-esteem, and she becomes involved with a light brown, yellow almost Chinese looking man who pays attention to her and spends time with her romantically, but he keeps her away from his friends who are light like he is. And actually she is supporting him financially, and he is cheating on her. In the end she has to go through a lot of heartache to find self worth. This was the first novel of the Renaissance to expose the dirty little secret of color stratification within the African American community itself, at a time when upwardly mobile men were advised to marry light--in other words, to marry a light skinned woman but never a dark-skinned woman. Thurman's book is specifically about dark skinned women. Thurman put up a lot of his own money to publish Fire!!, and in an incredible irony many of the copies burned up in a fire in the warehouse where the copies were being stored! Unfortunately, he contracted tuberculosis and drank heavily against his doctor's orders, and died of a hemorrhage in December 1934. This book was like a hand grenade hurled against the pieties of the Talented Tenth.

Someone who shared the disenchantment of Wallace Thurman was the Jamaican-born Claude McKay (1889-1948). McKay was nauseated by American racism or white supremacy, and equally nauseated by the pretensions of the light-skinned Talented Tenth and the NAACP crowd. He left Tuskegee after two years and went to Kansas State college. By 1927 he was in Greenwich Village. His great "break" came with the poem "If We Must Die," in 1919. He went to London, encountered Marxism and communism, and returned to the US in 1920. In 1922 he published Harlem Shadows, a collection of poetry. When he went with white friends to a restaurant in north Jersey, they had to eat in the kitchen because they didn't serve "niggers." McKay was sickened by American race relations and in 1922 went to Russia, and then France, and did not return to the US until 1934. From France, he wrote home to Home to Harlem in 1928. Whereas Thurman mocked the Talented Tenth at home, McKay did so from abroad.

Another writer who shared the iconoclasm of Wallace Thurman was his good friend Langston Hughes (1902-1967). He was born James Mercer Langston Hughes in Joplin, Missouri. He would become the poet laureate of the Renaissance. His maternal grandfather was Charles Langston, a black abolitionist who fought with John Brown at Harper's Ferry (1859). Charles Langston was the half-brother of John Mercer Langston, who became a US Congressman from Virginia in 1888. John Mercer Langston had attended Oberlin, served as the first dean of the Howard Univ. Law school, and served as minister (ambassador) to Haiti. Hughes's father, Nathaniel Hughes, a lawyer, hated the "poor, despised African Americans" (Lewis, Vogue, p. 78). His parents (Carrie and Nathaniel) argued bitterly until their divorce in 1912 or 1913, and his biological father was a successful businessman in Mexico. As a consequence of growing up in Mexico, Langston Hughes could speak Spanish. He was a light-complected African American, but reacted against the example of snobbery set by his father. The mother re-married, but the new husband was not as successful financially. Hughes's father wanted him to pursue mining engineering at a Swiss or German school. The compromise between father and son was engineering at Columbia. After two semesters Hughes gave this up (1921), and he never received another penny from his father or saw him again (Lewis, Vogue, p. 80). Jessie Fauset adored Langston Hughes. Du Bois liked him. In 1921 Fauset published "I've Known Rivers" in The Crisis, and Hughes dedicated the poem to Du Bois. He became good friends with Countee Cullen, and Alain Locke tried to interest him in coming to Howard University. Letters passed back and forth between Hughes and Cullen, and in one of them Hughes asked Cullen if Mr. Locke was married (Lewis, Vogue, p. 81). Of course, Locke was a bachelor. Hughes, instead of meeting with Locke, sailed to Africa as a steward on a freighter. He was a "common man," the "average Joe." He was "down with the people, the masses." While traveling in Africa, Hughes talked with Africans about Marcus Garvey. They liked Garvey's ideas, but they laughed at Hughes. With his light brown color and wavy hair, they said to him "You [a] white man, you white man." He returned to America, and in 1924 he won the second prize in poetry the Opportunity literary contest.

In 1926 he was able to return to college, at Lincoln Univ. in Pennsylvania, with the financial assistance of Caucasian patrons such as Amy Spingarn and Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason ("Godmother"). At the same time, however, the Caucasian Carl Van Vechten had "discovered" Hughes, and recommended his work to the publisher Alfred Knopf. Knopf published Hughes's collection of poetry The Weary Blues in 1926, and Fine Clothes to the Jew, in 1927; and would publish his novel Not Without Laughter in 1930-31.

In June 1926 Hughes published "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," in The Nation. Hughes proclaimed that the younger artists would express their dark-skinned selves without fear or shame, and if white people are glad then we are pleased but if they are not, it doesn't matter. And if colored people are glad we are pleased, and if they are not then that doesn't matter either." It was a declaration of independence by the younger generation, rejecting the boundaries set by their Talented Tenth elders. Charlotte Osgood Mason "cut him off" about 1931. After 1932 Hughes moved more to the "left," toward Marxism, and his work became even more political.

Another voice of the younger generation was Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934). He was good friends with Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes. He was a Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University (1919), and received a MD from Howard Univ. Medical School. He also had specialized medical training at Columbia and in 1925 began a dual career in Harlem as a physician and novelist. He published "City of Refuge" in 1925, about an African American wanted for a crime in the South who comes to the North. This of course was not putting the "best foot" of the race forward. He also published "The Caucasian Storms Harlem" in 1927, and The Walls of Jericho in 1928. His work was humorous and satirical, and poked fun at the Talented Tenth and the Caucasians who were so fascinated by the "primitive" and exotic black people. Unfortunately he did not wear a protective vest often enough when he utilized the x-ray equipment in his laboratory, and he developed stomach cancer and died in December 1934, the same month as Wallace Thurman.

Another concomformist voice was Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987). Many people thought that he was "gay," and his writings do mention homosexual or bisexual subjects. He was light in complexion, handsome, "decadent." He delighted in defying the conventions of respectability. He was a protégé of Alain Locke and an "intimate" friend of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Wallace Thurman. He left home at age 14, and lateer, in 1926, published a homoerotic story in Fire!! Du Bois criticized it as decadence. Brawley fumed that "vulgarity has been mistaken for art." (Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, p. xxx). Yet, although people speculated about Nugent's sexual orientation, he was married (see photograph with his wife, Grace, following p. 272, Vogue).

Eric Walrond (1898-1956) was Trinidadian, born in Guyana. He grew up in Barbados and Panama, educated in both English and Spanish. He came to NY in 1918 and took courses at City College and Columbia. He worked on the staff of Garvey's paper The Negro World. He is best known for Tropic Death (1926) and uses Caribbean dialect and describes the Creole cultures and the points of contact between African and New World cultures and religions. His work pays attention to the role of superstition in Caribbean cultures, with themes such as Voodoo, conjuring, and Obeah.

Carl Van Vechten scandalized the Talented Tenth with his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. In some ways it is two novels in one. One involves a description of the Talented Tenth, who come of as awfully "whitened" black folks imitating Caucasians. The second aspect involves a Carmenesque love triangle gone bad between with a gangster figure. Du Bois complained that it was all about riff-raff and low-life dives and cabarets and gin and women trying to cut each other because somebody tried to take "mah man." Van Vechten loved to go to parties in Harlem. He loved to see the dancing, hear the blues and jazz, drink the liquor. He was fascinated by 'blacks" because to him they were so exotic and uninhibited and unrestrained. Vicariously, through them, he enjoyed life. He even went to the transvestite balls.

Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) also blasted away the puritanical image of respectability that the Talented Tenth approved of. McKay's novel was about ghetto blacks, and was said to have "outniggered Mr. Van Vechten." (Lewis, Vogue, p. 224). The novel was so full of "primitive" people, who were happy and who partied and danced. Du Bois did not approve at all, and wrote in The Crisis, that "after reading the book [he] felt distinctly like taking a bath." (Lewis, Vogue, p. 225).

The younger generation was rocked by "scandalous" behavior, too, when Louise Thompson sued her husband, Wallace Thurman, for divorce, and alleged that he was a homosexual (1932). Thurman was an alcoholic, and Louise soon became close with Langston Hughes, and then married the communist William Patterson.

Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960) was born in Florida and studied anthropology and folklore at Morgan State college, Howard, and Barnard College (Columbia). She received her B.A. from Barnard in 1927. She won the Opportunity second prize for a short story, for "Spunk," in 1924. Hurston was a colorful character who saw the funny side of everything. She coined the term "bodacious," and "Negrotarian" and "Niggerati." Bodacious is a blend of bold and audacious. Negrotarian refers to well-meaning Caucasians (like proletarian) who want to help uplift the African Americans (like white liberals). The term literati refers to those people who are literate and well-read, very intelligent, educated and "in the know." Hurston's play on words for the super-educated and intelligent Talented Tenth black literati was "niggerati." She was poking fun at them.

Hurston had a wicked sense of humor, and saw the airs of the Talented Tenth as so much pretense. She liked to caricature them or parody them. She wrote about down to earth, Southern, "country" black people who did not speak proper English; and ate chitlins and collard greens; and believed in superstitions; and were not educated and "dignified." These stories embarrassed the Talented Tenth. But Godmother, who was paying Hurston's bills, loved "primitives," and so Hurston played the role for all that it was worth. She collected folktales, and used them in her writing.

She and Langston Hughes had a falling out in 1931 over the authorship of "MuleBone." Godmother and Alain Locke took her side against Langston Hughes. Hurston is remembered for Jonah's Vine Gourd (1934), and later, Moses: Man of the Mountain, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Mules and Men.

Du Bose and Dorothy Heyward were a Caucasian couple who were fascinated with African American life. In 1925 they published Porgy, about Porgy and Bess, on Catfish Row, with the famous song "Summertime!" The story was transformed into a play, and staged to great applause in Oct. 1927 (Lewis, Vogue, 206).

George Schuyler (1895-1977) ridiculed the Renaissance and the pretensions of the African American elite. He married a Caucasian woman. Schuyler thought that it was absurd that gullible Caucasians imagined that every black waiter in Harlem could write poetry, or that every African American had a spear and a tom-tom at home. His satirical novel Black No More (1931) is about an African American who invents a formula for a medication that turns black people white. Suddenly black people stop being carefree, and stop laughing and dancing, and become as serious and sober and hardworking and grimly determined as Caucasians in order to save enough money to but the formula. ** The novel parodies and mocks many of the personalities of the Renaissance in the form of thinly disguised caricatures.

A'Lelia Walker ( 1885-1931) was the daughter of Madame C.J. Walker, who had become a self-made millionaire by developing a "scalp conditioning and healing formula"  that helped to "grow hair." This conditioner was used with a straightening comb (that some sources say Madame Walker did NOT invent) that could be heated, and it straightened the hair of African American women. She had a chain of beauty salons nationwide, and became successful between 1905 and 1910.  A'Lelia, the dark-skinned daughter, inherited this fortune and an estate on the Hudson. She was a patroness of the Renaissance, and gave lavish inter-racial parties. Lady Mountbatten (wife of the uncle of the king of England), and Princess Murat, and the crown prince of Sweden were among the dignitaries who came to her functions (or tried to). According to legend, on one occasion elite African Americans were observed eating caviar and drinking champagne while curious Caucasians sampled the chitlins and "bathtub gin" (Vogue, p. 166). A'Lelia was married and divorced twice, and subsequently, it was said, had intimate female companions. She died in 1931.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938), better known as Arthur Schomburg, was a Puerto Rican patron of the Renaissance. He was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and attended St. Thomas College in the (Danish) Virgin Islands. He came to the US in 1891 and worked for a law firm and devoted himself to the cause of Puerto Rican independence from Spain. He collected literature, art and material on Africa and Africans in the New World. In 1911 he helped to establish the Society for Historical Research. Over time he collected more than 5,000 books, 3,000 manuscripts, and several thousand etchings, drawings and pamphlets. In 1926 the Carnegie Foundation gave the NY public Library ten-thousand dollars to purchase the Schomburg Collection, and Schomburg served as curator of the collection until his death. Today the Schomburg Center is a major resource for research on the life, history and culture of African Americans.

Paul Robeson (1898-1976) graduated from Rutgers in 1919 and from Columbia Law School (1921). The Caucasian secretaries at a law firm where he worked objected to taking dictation from him. He turned to the stage, and left law altogether in 1922. In 1921 he played in the play Simon the Cyrenean, for the Harlem YMCA. In 1923 he played in All God's Chillun Got Wings, a play by Eugene O'Neill about miscegenation (inter-racial marriage or coupling). In 1924 he starred in the silent film Body and Soul, written, produced and developed by Oscar Micheaux. In 1925 Robeson starred in the Broadway revival of O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones. He played in Porgy (1928) and Showboat (1928). In 1930 he played Othello in London. He was famous as a dramatic actor and singer of spirituals.