A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118494158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that address the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s.

• Represents the most comprehensive coverage of themes and unique new perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance available
• Features original contributions from both emerging scholars of the Harlem Renaissance and established academic "stars" in the field
• Offers a variety of interdisciplinary features, such as the section on visual and expressive arts, that emphasize the collaborative nature of the era
• Includes "Spotlight Readings" featuring lesser known figures of the Harlem Renaissance and newly discovered or undervalued writings by canonical figures

Part I
Foundations

1
What Renaissance?: A Deep Genealogy of Black Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Carla L. Peterson

Harlem Renaissance. Two words that hang in the air, begging for more…

Renaissance. The word signifies rebirth. But of what?

Harlem. Which Harlem? Since its founding by the Dutch in 1637, Harlem has existed in many incarnations. From Dutch possession, it was taken over by the British in 1664 and became American at the time of Independence; then transformed from a prosperous agricultural village in the seventeenth century to a site of Irish squatters in the mid nineteenth; annexed to New York City in 1877; and finally emerged as a site of black political and cultural activity around 1910. If the term “Harlem Renaissance” is meant to refer to this latter Harlem born at the beginning of the twentieth century, then how could it already be undergoing a rebirth in the 1920s?

These questions might seem naïve. After all, everybody knows what the Harlem Renaissance is. In the introductory essay to his seminal volume, The New Negro (1925), Alain Locke defined Harlem as the site of an early-twentieth-century New Negro culture whose originality and uniqueness he himself was helping to birth. Out of all the urban centers in the North, Locke asserted, Harlem had benefited the most from the ongoing “tide of Negro migration northward and city-ward” such that it now constituted “not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life” (Locke 1969, 6). As a result, it was only in Harlem that the transformation of the Negro could take place: “In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination” (1969, 7).

According to Locke, a cadre of “new intellectuals” nurtured this emergent group expression by encouraging both “artistic endowments and cultural contributions” and radical political action, thus transforming Harlem into “a race capital” (Locke 1969, 7, 15). Writing was their weapon of choice. Recently settled in New York, W.E.B. Du Bois founded The Crisis in 1911 as the monthly publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with the express purpose of promoting black artistic production and political activism. In his early editorials, Du Bois insisted that the magazine would “record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of interracial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American,” and also further “show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested to-day toward colored people” (qtd in Carroll 2005, 22–23). Some 15 years later, Locke compiled The New Negro as an exemplary anthology of black fiction, poetry, literary criticism, art history, music commentary, historical reflections on early cultural manifestations, and sociological observations on present conditions.

The Harlem Renaissance’s agenda encapsulated both propaganda and aesthetics. The purpose of propaganda was clear: to detail the wrongs done to African descended peoples and insist that they be corrected. Aesthetics was a more complex issue. Renaissance spokespersons argued that black artists needed to represent the race through authentic literary and cultural representations, illuminating, in Du Bois’s terms, the special gifts and destiny of the Negro for an ignorant world. But definitions of the Negro’s special gifts and of proper forms of representation were up for debate. Did black authenticity reside in the elite or the folk? Should black artists insert themselves into western high cultural traditions or work to articulate a black vernacular tradition? Should they consider themselves Negro, American, or cosmopolitan?

All these questions had been asked before. Indeed, the Harlem Renaissance has a long prehistory, a deep genealogy that stretches back at least a full century and challenges Locke’s assertion of the originality of Harlem and its “group expression.” Rather than employ the term “renaissance” to connote the birth of a first, new, and unique artistic movement, Locke could have adhered to the word’s literal meaning of rebirth, the reappearance of earlier cultural formations. And rather than focus exclusively on early-twentieth-century Harlem, he could have considered some of the city’s earlier neighborhoods that had been home to black New Yorkers and their institutions.

Before Harlem, there was New York. As Du Bois noted in “The Black North: A Social Study,” a 1901 series for the New York Times, blacks were present in the city from its very beginnings. In the colonial period, New York’s black population was small—growing from 630 in 1703 to 3100 in 1771—then waxed (and sometimes waned) throughout the antebellum period reaching a high of 16,300 in 1840 (Hodges 1999, 271, 274, 279). From the 1870s on, however, its numbers increased steadily: in 1880, there were approximately 20,000 blacks living in Manhattan, and 36,000 by 1910 (Du Bois 1901, November 17). After consolidation, in 1910 the entire metropolitan area included over 91,000 (Osofsky 1971, 17). Many found their way to Harlem.

Locke gave one single explanation for the rapid increase of New York’s black population and the creation of Harlem as a black metropolis: immigration. Of the 60,500 blacks in Manhattan in 1910 only 14,300 were born in New York State (Osofsky 1971, 18). The majority came from the South or the Caribbean. Their reasons for coming north were many, varying from vagrancy and idle tourism to escape from Jim Crow laws in the South and hope for a better life in the big city. Many Harlem Renaissance figures were part of this pattern of immigration, non-native New Yorkers who came to the city as young adults. Zora Neale Hurston trekked north from Florida. Nella Larsen arrived from Chicago, Langston Hughes from Missouri, and Wallace Thurman from Salt Lake City. Others traveled from closer locations, Jean Toomer from Washington, DC, Alain Locke from Philadelphia, and Jessie Fauset from Camden, NJ. Still others hailed from countries of the African diaspora: Claude McKay from Jamaica and Eric Walrond from Guyana.

Before Harlem, however, there had already been waves of northward and city-ward black migration. As Du Bois asserted in “The Black North,” the influx of blacks into Harlem was not new, but simply the most recent historical iteration of the infiltration of immigrants into native populations of cities like New York and Philadelphia. “The history of the Negro in Northern cities,” he wrote, “is the history of the rise of a small group growing by accretions from without, but at the same time periodically overwhelmed by them and compelled to start again when once the new material has been assimilated” (Du Bois 1901, December 15). As early as the post-revolutionary war period, for example, migration from the surrounding countryside and the Caribbean had resulted in a seven-fold increase of New York’s black population between 1790 and 1810 (White 1991, 153; Hodges 1999, 278).

The northward migration to New York, Du Bois continued, was followed by the internal movement of blacks within the city. “The Black North” traced migratory patterns later expanded upon in James Weldon Johnson’s 1930 history, Black Manhattan, and 1933 autobiography, Along this Way. Before Harlem, both men noted, black New Yorkers—much like other immigrant groups—settled at the tip of Manhattan, and moved slowly north—to the Five Points area (around Mulberry Street) in the 1820s, and then to what is now Soho and Greenwich Village by mid-century. These neighborhoods were the ground from which diverse political, literary, and cultural formations emanated. In Black Manhattan, Johnson continued tracking the northward march of black New Yorkers after the civil war. From Bleecker and Grove Streets, they worked their way up Sixth and Seventh Avenues to the West Twenties and Thirties by 1890, and to the West Forties and Fifties by 1900 (Johnson 1972, 58–59).

In these later decades, according to Johnson, the city witnessed the birth of not one, but of two, black New Yorks, comprised of groups that were socially and geographically distinct: Brooklyn, home to the postbellum black elite, and across the East River, a black bohemia emerging on Manhattan’s West Side. Together, these two groups gave rise to a new New York reflected in the richness and diversity of its cultural, social, and economic activity: “During the last quarter of the last century,” Johnson wrote, “in New York the Negro now began to function and express himself on a different plane, in a different sphere,” although Johnson could have used the plural “spheres” (Johnson 1972, 59).

It was these several antebellum and postbellum New Yorks that provided the fertile ground from which the Harlem Renaissance sprang. Indeed, Johnson observed that although the Renaissance seemed “rather like a sudden awakening, like an instantaneous change,” it was not. “The story of it, as of almost every experience relating to the Negro in America, goes back a long way,” by which he meant not merely decades but a century or more (Johnson 1972, 260). The misperception of the Harlem Renaissance as sudden and instantaneous, Johnson concluded, lay in the fact that “the Harlem group” was simply the first in African American history to succeed in disseminating Negro work to a broad public and making America “aware that there are Negro authors with something interesting to say and the skill to say it” (1972, 262–63).

Johnson and Du Bois were transitional figures who helped Negro culture enter the twentieth century. Yet, if their writings look forward to the new, they also look back to the old to provide us with a deep, century-long prehistory of black life in New York City.

Antebellum Black Manhattan

In Black Manhattan, Johnson adopted a historian’s perspective to argue two related points: that the “literary and artistic emergence” of the Negro American “goes back a long way,” and that “New York has been, almost exclusively, the place where that emergence has taken place” (Johnson 1972, 260). Johnson placed these beginnings in Lower Manhattan at the moment of Emancipation in New York State on July 4, 1827. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to suggest that a “race capital” was already in formation. Indeed, although New York’s black population was spread throughout the city, its geographic nucleus was the Five Points in today’s Chinatown, from where it stretched east and north through Little Italy, Soho, Tribeca, and Greenwich Village. But, unlike the later Harlem, race, ethnic, and class prejudices threw African Americans—elite and bohemian—as well as poor whites—native born as well as Irish and German immigrants, Catholics and Protestants—together into these dense and compact neighborhoods. It was from this site that New York’s earliest black cultural formations and institutions emerged: churches, schools, mutual aid and literary societies, but also theaters, dance halls, taverns, and quite simply the street.

One central institution in the area was Freedom’s Journal, the country’s first black newspaper and progenitor of The Crisis. In Black Manhattan, Johnson noted the paper’s crucial role as a site of radical political activity in its championing of black Americans’ dignity as human beings, their intellectual capacity, and their rights to citizenship (Johnson 1972, 14). Anticipating later mass immigration movements, founder John Russwurm came to New York from Jamaica. With the help of co-editor Samuel Cornish, he established Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and managed to keep it afloat for two years. After a several-year hiatus, the Colored A...