Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) - Novelist, poet, short story writer, biographer, essayist, and literary critic. Faucet was the literary editor of the Crisis from 1919-1926; she published three important novels. Here is an example of Fauset’s poetry:
“La Vie C'est la Vie”
On summer afternoons I sit
Quiescent by you in the park,
And idly watch the sunbeams gild
And tint the ash-trees' bark.
Or else I watch the squirrels frisk
And chaffer in the grassy lane;
And all the while I mark your voice
Breaking with love and pain.
I know a woman who would give
Her chance of heaven to take my place;
To see the love-light in your eyes,
The love-glow on your face!
And there's a man whose lightest word
Can set my chilly blood afire;
Fulfillment of his least behest
Defines my life's desire.
But he will none of me, nor I
Of you. Nor you of her. 'Tis said
The world is full of jests like these--
I wish that I were dead.
Faucet mentored and “mothered” many of the younger Renaissance poets. Claude McKay and Langston Hughes particularly lauded her in their essays as being incredibly influential to young Black authors.
Angelina W. Grimke (1880-1958) – she wrote and staged (1916) the famous play Rachel, “believed to be the first instance of African American ‘uplift’ propaganda ever staged, as well as the first successful drama by a black American writer” (Carbado, et al 39). Grimke was eventually abandoned by her white mother and raised by her Black father and his family. Wrote 173 poems and published 31 of them in her lifetime. She was published in most of the major Black journals and books.
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) – Jackson and Rubin say Hughes was the genius “New Negro” (51). Hughes reacted to DuBois’ “Talented Tenth” by saying the “low-down folks” are “the majority—may the Lord be praised!” (qtd in Black Like Us 2). In an essay, Hughes observed that “perhaps these common people will give the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself” (2). First book of poetry was published in 1926 – The Weary Blues.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) – published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937. Hurston pretended to be ten years younger than she was, had an outrageous sense of humor, and was an anthropologist (Kramer and Russ 306). Hurston published her autobiography in 1942, only devoting a paragraph to the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston and Hughes had a falling out, and Hughes described her (somewhat ironically) like this:
In her youth, she was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy
white people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them, she did it in such a racy fashion. She was full of side-splitting anecdotes, humorous tales, and tragicomic stories, remembered out of her life in the South as the daughter of a traveling minister of God. She could make you laugh one moment and cry the next. To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect “darkie,” in the nice meaning they give the term – that is a naïve, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro” (309).
This is not so unlike the stereotypes that dogged all the Negro writers of the time, and is relatively destructive sexist, anti-Southern bias. Hurston wrote a little poetry, quite a bit of short fiction, and seven novels, published during her lifetime.
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) – edited The Book of American Negro Poetry, an incredibly influential early text. The book contained 177 works by 31 poets, and was published in 1922. Johnson was a songwriter, poet, attorney, novelist, journalist, critic, and autobiographer. In 1895, Johnson founded the Daily American, a newspaper devoted to reporting on issues pertinent to the black community. Though the paper only lasted a year before it succumbed to financial hardship, it addressed racial injustice and, in keeping with Johnson's upbringing, asserted a self-help philosophy that echoed Booker T. Washington. Johnson was an attorney and composer, and successfully did both in Florida, before moving to New York in 1914. He worked as Field Director for the NAACP, and published his autobiography in 1933. Johnson attempted to discredit Negro dialect, a literary convention characterized by misspellings and malapropisms, which in Johnson's view was capable of conveying only pathos or humor. Though writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling A. Brown would challenge this viewpoint, Johnson's point must be understood within the context of his life as a public figure (Beavers).
Nella Larsen (1891-1964) - Quicksand and Passing (1928, 1929)
Larsen's importance as a writer is based upon her two novels; she was unable to complete a third one. She spent her last thirty years as a supervising nurse at a Brooklyn hospital. Both Quicksand and Passing are admired for their use of irony and symbolism dealing in themes of identity, `passing,' marginality, race consciousness, sexuality, and class distinction. Larsen became the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing. Her novels place her as one of the best fiction writers of the 1920s.
Claude McKay (1889-1948) – besides poetry, published a great novel named Home to Harlem (1928), the most popular black-authored novel of its time. McKay called primitivism, “the conscious and studied illumination of a black folk-art tradition whose central themes would be the indestructible vitality of the primitive black man and the inextricable dilemma of the educated Negro” (qtd by E. Johnson 97).
Anne Spencer (1882-1975) – Spencer befriended many Harlem Renaissance luminaries, and her most fruitful relationship was with James Weldon Johnson. Johnson discovered her and gave Anne her pen name, Anne Spencer. Also, Johnson introduced her to H. L. Mencken who, like Carl Van Vechten, aided black writers. While Mencken helped Anne publish her first poem, "Before the Feast at Shushan," but she later declined his patronage. While Spencer's poems convey a romantic concern with the human search for beauty and meaning in a sordid universe, she cannot be viewed solely as a "nature" or "religious" poet, for her complex work resists such facile categorizations. "Black Man O' Mine" fuses erotic imagery to celebrate black love. Anne was aware of white oppression; the persona of "White Things" addresses racism metaphorically: "They [white things] turned the blood in a ruby rose/To a poor white poppy-flower." In addition she worked fervently with NAACP secretary Johnson and helped establish the Lynchburg chapter of that organization in 1918. -- from the Modern American Poetry site (Cary Nelson).
Melvin Tolson (1898-1966) – wrote four books of poetry and authored a newspaper column in the Washington Tribune. He also wrote a very important book (originally his Master’s Thesis) called The Harlem Group of Negro Writers (1940).
Jean Toomer (1894-1967) – Cane (1923) marked the beginning of Harlem Renaissance. Like his parents, Toomer could easily pass for white, his heritage comprising several European and African bloodlines. Indeed, throughout his formative years until age eighteen, he lived alternately as white and as African American. Between 1918 and 1923 Toomer wrote the short stories "Bona and Paul" and "Withered Skin of Berries," the plays Natalie Mann (1922) and Balo (1922), and many poems such as "Five Vignettes," "Skyline," "Poem in C," "Gum," "Banking Coal," and "The First American." The works "Brown River Smile,"The Blue Meridian, and "The First American" are expressions of his racial and democratic idealism.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) – Created the Alpha Suffrage Club in 1912 in Chicago, the first Black suffrage organization (Carbado 6). In 1898, Wells revived the Afro-American League.
Eric Walrond (1898-1966) – published Tropic Death, a collection of ten stories, in 1926.
Dramatists –
Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston wrote Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts in 1930. Unfortunately, it never made the stage in their lifetimes. Quite a scuffle between Hughes and Hurston – never repaired.
Essayists and non-fiction authors –
W.E.B. Dubois (1868-1963) – “The Talented Tenth.” Eloise Johnson, author of Rediscovering the Harlem Renaissance, quotes DuBois on the Talented Tenth: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth” (14). Johnson says the Tenth was comprised of the college-educated students who were empowered to contribute to the Harlem Renaissance, and who were the ones who reacted to the Phelps-Stokes Fund’s 724-page report that said that vocational education was the paramount to the success of Blacks in America (15). DuBois wrote in an article for the Crisis that, “The statement that woman is weaker than man is sheer rot: It is the same thing we hear about ‘darker races’ and ‘lower classes’” (Carbado, et al 9).
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) – fostered the “Garvey Movement” – Garvey started the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), in Jamaica, his home. He was influenced by Booker T. and the book Up From Slavery. In 1917, using the fear or hysteria created by lynchings, beatings, and the murder of Blacks, Marcus Garvey “walked upon the scene, as if destiny had signaled his entrance” (Mullen 110). His movement was a “Back to Africa” plan, and according to Mullen, many thousands of Blacks signed up for the plan, and European governments, including France and Great Britain, worried about their African possessions and “became alarmed.” Garvey’s plan might have worked (to repatriate Blacks and restore their identity and lost pride, perhaps), if he did not display too much hubris. He proclaimed himself the Provisional President of Africa, surrounded himself with Knight-Commanders of the Distinguished Order of Ethiopia, Knight-Commanders of the Sublime Order of the Nile, etc. In The Harlem Group of Negro Writers, Melvin Tolson writes of Garvey’s downfall,
In a wild burst of enthusiasm, he bought a palace in Harlem, gave lucrative positions to black dukes and barons, and appointed high-salaried generals for imaginary African armies. He held vociferous mass meetings in Carnegie Hall, stormed Madison Square Garden with uniformed delegates from all corners of the world, purchased discarded government ships and placed on them black sailors who knew little about nautical things. He rode in regal splendor through Harlem and held high court in a manner comparable to that of an oriental potentate…” (Mullen 111).
In 1922, the United States government arrested and imprisoned Garvey for mail fraud, for not following through on his plans to transport Blacks to Africa, among other crimes. Obviously, the U.S. government wanted this agitator off the streets, whether his plan was to be enacted or not. The Jamaican government has a website with their heroes on it, and Garvey is one of them:
Alain Locke (1886-1954) – mentored young Black authors, and gained fame when he published his collection of stories, poetry, and essays by the most promising and famous Blacks of the time, The New Negro (1925). Locke was the first Black Rhodes Scholar (Carbado 13). Carbado says, “Locke’s position on artistic expression was that blacks should rely on their African past as a source of art, illustrating how New Negro artists could take up a much maligned ancestry and elevate it to the level of high art” (13-14). In Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, Bruce Kellner describes Locke’s political power with Van Vechten and other patrons, and how Locke wanted to be an editor for all artistic Black expression (122-123).
Artists –
William H. Johnson (1901-1970) – began as a realist and impressionist, but changed to become more like Georges Roualt and Paul Cezanne. He later became a very talented Impressionist (E. Johnson 58).
Other Renaissance artists:
Lois Mailou Jones
William H. Johnson
Hale Woodruff
John T. Biggers
Jacob Lawrence
Edward Burra
Aaron Douglas
Periodicals/Newspapers of the Harlem Renaissance:
Fire – the “first Negro journal of artistic expression, for the other journals had been devoted to social and political problems” (Mullen 46). Even though the magazine only came out with one issue, it sparked much debate and drew attention to topics that Talented Tenth leaders had ignored: jazz and blues, homosexuality, free-form verse, and a concept of black beauty independent of Western ideals. An example in the only issue: an artist satirized Madam Walker's popular hair straightener by drawing figures with Nordic features and African hair. Although Fire!! was a thought-provoking collection of great works, many African-American critics—predictably and particularly, the Talented Tenth—viewed the effort as decadent and vulgar.
Crisis – W. E. B. DuBois’ journal, edited by Jessie Redmon Faucet for some time. Crisis was the official journal of the NAACP. While a highly political journal, Crisis also explored and championed an emerging black intellectual culture: poetry, fiction, and art that reflected the new race consciousness of "The New Negro." Topics included the African American condition, and love, hope, death, racial injustice, and dreams, among others.
The Survey Graphic – (articles and poetry – big, big names)
THE Survey is seeking, month by month and year by year; to follow the subtle traces of race growth and interaction through the shifting outline of social organization and by the flickering light of individual achievement. There are times when these forces that work so slowly and so delicately seem suddenly to flower and we become aware that the curtain has lifted on a new act in the drama of part or all of us. Such, we believe, was the case with Ireland on the threshold of political emancipation, and the New Ireland spoke for itself in our issue of November 1921; with the New Russ which was to some degree interpreted in March 1923; and with the newly awakened Mexico, in May 1924. If The Survey reads the signs aright, such a dramatic flowering of a new racespirit is taking place close at home among American Negroes, and the stage of that new episode is Harlem. --Taken from the March 1925 issue (Volume 6, #6).
Opportunity – The journal of the Urban League of Chicago, launched by Charles S. Johnson after he joined the organization. Opportunity was intended to showcase new black writers and compete with the Crisis. It focused on sociological studies of working and housing conditions in black areas, and discussed African art, Caribbean communities, and all the talented blacks of the time. Opportunity attracted most Harlem Renaissance writers because it offered prizes and sponsored activities. The editors of Opportunity were known for writing apologetic letters of rejection; they were always very encouraging to submitters. In 1927, Johnson collected various essays and illustrations published in years of Opportunity and anthologized them in Ebony and Topaz.
Odds and Ends:
Christa Schwarz asserts that the Harlem Renaissance was as much about homosexual male talent as it was about Black uplift. She quotes Henry Louis Gates as saying the Harlem Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was black” (1). Schwarz lists Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent as her four main gay Harlem Renaissance figures.
Emmanuel Egar’s book, Black Women Poets of Harlem Renaissance, discusses how “The women poets of this movement are either deliberately or inadvertently omitted or ignored” (ix). Egar says “the women seemed to be more interested in writing poetry for poetry, full of passion, spirit, soul and emotions,” while “men were using poetry as war songs for freedom” (ix). Egar discusses the work of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Helen Johnson, Gwen Bennett, and Angelina Grimke.
Are the Harlem Renaissance artists Modernists? Eloise Johnson says so, but that they typify the Modernist aesthetic (68). Wolfgang Karrer’s article in Fabre and Feith’s book, Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, argues that Toomer and McKay are not Modernists. He says that they only share a certain type of primitivism with the Modernists, and are too steeped in local color to be called otherwise (129-130).
Works Cited
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Carbado, Devon W, Dwight A. McBride, and Donald Weise, eds. Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002.
Early, Gerald Lyn. My Soul’s High Song. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Egar, Emmanuel. Black Women Poets of Harlem Renaissance. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2003.
Jackson, Blyden, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.
Johnson, Eloise E. Rediscovering the Harlem Renaissance: The Politics of Exclusion. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.
Karrer, Wolfgang. “Black Modernism? The Early Poetry of Jean Toomer and Claude McKay.” Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith, eds. Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Kellner, Bruce. “’Refined Racism’: White Patronage in the Harlem Renaissance.” Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. Victor Kramer and Robert Russ, eds. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1997.
Mitchell, Verner D., ed. This Waiting for Love. Helene Johnson: Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
Mullen, Edward J., ed. The Harlem Group of Negro Writers by Melvin B. Tolson. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Rodgers, Marie. The Harlem Renaissance. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1998.
Schwarz, Christa. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Wintz, Cary D., ed. The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
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