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The Birth of the Bureau, Coupled with the Birth of J. Edgar Hoover, Ensured the FBI’s Attention to African American Literature

William J. Maxwell

in F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

This part aims to add depth and detail to less-familiar portraits of Hoover as a young militant, and to establish the character of the also young law enforcement agency he joined in the wake of World ... More

This part aims to add depth and detail to less-familiar portraits of Hoover as a young militant, and to establish the character of the also young law enforcement agency he joined in the wake of World War I. Explaining why Hoover and the Bureau began to pursue African American writing, it presents the first of five theses: namely, The birth of the Bureau, coupled with the birth of J. Edgar Hoover, ensured the FBI's attention to African American literature. Section 1 recounts how the pre-Hoover Bureau emerged amid the social divisions of early twentieth-century America, and how it cultivated both literary publicity and public anti-New Negroism to whet an undivided national appetite for federal policing. Section 2 examines how the pre-Bureau Hoover managed his surprising familiarity with Afro-America. Section 3 establishes that with Hoover's hiring by the Bureau during the first Red Scare and the dawn of Harlem's cultural rebirth, the FBI's racial and literary preoccupations only deepened. Under Hoover's watch, the earliest Harlem Renaissance writing became the common passion of Bureau anti-New Negroism and “lit.-cop federalism,” the latter defined as the effort to inject a compelling federal police presence into the U.S. print public sphere.Less

To a Brown Girl: The Poetic Discourse of Brown

Laila Haidarali

in Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II

This chapter explores a selection of writings of thirteen poets who all published in important middle-class literary journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Their works appeared in the Crisis, Messenger, ... More

This chapter explores a selection of writings of thirteen poets who all published in important middle-class literary journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Their works appeared in the Crisis, Messenger, and Opportunity, as well as in major anthologies of the era. Together, they present compelling collective expression of the frustrations, expectations, and desires of modern African American womanhood. Neither a collective movement nor an explicitly designed political expression, this range of women’s verse nonetheless showcases the contested gender politics of the era. Women’s poetry celebrated and critiqued the role of complexion in general, and brownness in particular, in determinations of women’s beauty, social worth, and sexual respectability.Less

“Dean of Afro-american Composers” or “harlem Renaissance Man”: The New Negro and the Musical Poetics of William Grant Still

Catherine Parsons Smith

in William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions

This chapter describes the relationship between Still's work and the Harlem Renaissance. It studies three style periods of Still's concert music, namely “Ultra-Modern”, “racial”, and “universal.” ... More

This chapter describes the relationship between Still's work and the Harlem Renaissance. It studies three style periods of Still's concert music, namely “Ultra-Modern”, “racial”, and “universal.” This chapter uses the connection between the Harlem Renaissance and modernism to explain Still's position in American music.Less

A New Negro from the Old South

Jeffrey Magee

in The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz

Henderson came to New York City in 1920 on the threshold of the Harlem Renaissance, an era in which the “New Negro”, as defined by writer Alain Locke, would create a new era of African American ... More

Henderson came to New York City in 1920 on the threshold of the Harlem Renaissance, an era in which the “New Negro”, as defined by writer Alain Locke, would create a new era of African American history through education and sophisticated new works in the arts and culture. Henderson's education and middle-class background reflect the values of his father, an educator and church official widely known in Georgia. Atlanta University, from which Henderson graduated in 1920, further shaped his values and helped him establish connections. Henderson moved to New York later that year, as cultural change engendered new opportunities for African Americans. Henderson's initial forays into the New York music world included plugging songs for W. C. Handy and Harry Pace, serving as music director for the race record label Black Swan, and recording and touring with blues singer Ethel Waters. The latter two experiences led Henderson closer to jazz, as he made many recordings accompanying the most popular blues singers, and as he became associated with musicians who would serve as his sidemen in future bands.Less

Representing the New Negro

Jenny Woodley

in Art for Equality: The NAACPs Cultural Campaign for Civil Rights

This chapter explores the NAACP's response to black art and literature during the 1910s and 1920s. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black artistic creativity. It was also a ... More

This chapter explores the NAACP's response to black art and literature during the 1910s and 1920s. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black artistic creativity. It was also a time when the nature and purpose of that creativity were much debated. James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois in particular had much to say about the role of the arts and, in the case of the latter, about the relationship between art and propaganda. The NAACP could be criticized for overstating the importance and value of art and literature to ordinary African Americans, but it was not alone in hoping that a demonstration of black artistic talent could begin to chip away at racial prejudice.Less

“Harlem Jazzing”: Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, and Jazz Internationalism

John Lowney

in Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music

The first chapter concentrates on the fiction of Claude McKay, which explicitly locates jazz expression within intellectual debates about black internationalism. Beginning with consideration of ... More

The first chapter concentrates on the fiction of Claude McKay, which explicitly locates jazz expression within intellectual debates about black internationalism. Beginning with consideration of McKay’s Marxist theorizing of black music, this chapter emphasizes the cultural politics of McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, which represents “Jazz Age” Harlem as a site of African diasporic interculturalism. Banjo, which had an enormous influence on the Francophone négritude movement in West Africa and the Caribbean, similarly defines Marseilles as an international site of displaced black migrant workers whose common language is the blues and jazz. As novels that reconsider the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance from a radical black internationalist perspective, Home to Harlem and Banjo interrogate the commercialization of black cultural expression as they explore the critical possibilities of jazz for the marginalized perspectives of black workers, including cultural workers.Less

“Of the Brown-Skin Type”: Madonnas, Mulattas, and Modern Women in Literary Print Culture

Laila Haidarali

in Brown Beauty: Color, Sex, and Race from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II

This chapter explores three brown-skin types that arose as a dynamic visual and literary repertoire in Harlem Renaissance print culture. The first image of the “brown Madonna” is studied as one ... More

This chapter explores three brown-skin types that arose as a dynamic visual and literary repertoire in Harlem Renaissance print culture. The first image of the “brown Madonna” is studied as one representation at odds with modern gendered identities; the second trope, the “brown-skin mulatta,” is studied as a popular device that conveyed a series of anxious distortions onto the “mixed-race” body. Lastly, the more nuanced and diverse image of modern brown womanhood appears as an uneven eruption of class, race, and national identifiers of African-descended and “other” women of color not born in the United States. All three tropes are interpreted as separate and distinctly powerful manifestations of New Negro womanhood to highlight the differently sexed, classed, and gendered meanings accorded to brown complexions in the modern environment.Less

The Historical Roots of Lesbian, Gay, and Heterosexual Black/White Intimacy

Amy C. Steinbugler

in Beyond Loving: Intimate Racework in Lesbian, Gay, and Straight Interracial Relationships

This chapter provides a context for analyzing contemporary interracial narratives by offering a brief social history of heterosexual and same-sex interracial intimacy. This history begins with the ... More

This chapter provides a context for analyzing contemporary interracial narratives by offering a brief social history of heterosexual and same-sex interracial intimacy. This history begins with the early antimiscegenation laws in Virginia and Maryland. It describes the double standard embodied in these laws that effectively outlawed “fornication” and marriage between Black men and White women, even as White men engaged in widespread rape of enslaved Black women. Sex between White men and Black women increased the former’s power, status, and property, while sex between Black men and White women often resulted in brutal beatings or lynchings. Interracial intimacy remained exceedingly rare after the Civil War, especially in the Jim Crow South. The chapter continues by examining early records of same-sex interraciality at the end of the nineteenth century. It discusses interracial sex and sociability during the Harlem Renaissance, a period when “slumming” came into vogue and White patrons crossed segregated cityscapes to visit Harlem nightclubs and speakeasies. The chapter then describes the bar and rent-party scene among gays and lesbians in the early-to-mid-twentieth century and concludes with a brief discussion of the legal case Loving v. Virginia in 1967.Less

Jessie Fauset’s Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, the Long Nineteenth Century, and the Legacy of Feminine Representation

Meredith L. Goldsmith

in American Literary History and the Turn toward Modernity

Chapter 8 responds to two prevailing arguments about the fiction of Jessie Fauset—the one labeling her work retrograde, the other regarding it as subtly subversive—by viewing the writer’s work as ... More

Chapter 8 responds to two prevailing arguments about the fiction of Jessie Fauset—the one labeling her work retrograde, the other regarding it as subtly subversive—by viewing the writer’s work as part of a history of long nineteenth-century representation. Countering the dominant perception of the Harlem Renaissance as a break from the past—a view that has shunted Fauset’s work to the sidelines—the essay argues that Fauset’s work explores the legacy of late-nineteenth-century US culture in the emergent modernity of the early twentieth century. Excavating the literary, cultural, and scientific tropes of feminine representation that burst from the pages of Fauset’s fiction, the essay identifies a recent literary past that informs Fauset’s constructions of her modern urban heroines.Less

New Negro: Paul Robeson’s Formation in Harlem

James Donald

in Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture

This chapter provides the context in which to understand Paul Robeson’s reception in Europe as both “American” and “black,” showing how the interaction between the two terms defined his intellectual, ... More

This chapter provides the context in which to understand Paul Robeson’s reception in Europe as both “American” and “black,” showing how the interaction between the two terms defined his intellectual, artistic, and professional formation in the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. It traces Robeson’s self-invention as a performer, a singer, an actor, and an exemplary “race man,” and it uses Oscar Micheaux’s treatment of Robeson in the 1925 film Body and Soul to show how his participation in controversial shows like Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1925) and Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat (1927) led to a degree of ambivalence among Harlem audiences. Also discussed are the intellectual and political determinants of the Harlem Renaissance; key figures such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Carl Van Vechten; the movement’s interracial dynamics and internationalism; Robeson’s preference for concert recitals of spirituals and folk songs and his skepticism about jazz.Less

Make Them Black and Bid Them Sing: Musical Poetry, Racial Transformation, and the Harlem Renaissance

T. Austin Graham

in The Great American Songbooks: Musical Texts, Modernism, and the Value of Popular Culture

This chapter explores the notion of a sung poetics in relation to race, turning to Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Here, twentieth-century African-American ... More

This chapter explores the notion of a sung poetics in relation to race, turning to Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Here, twentieth-century African-American verse forms are studied alongside the slave spirituals, folk songs, and blues that they so frequently saluted and emulated. Toomer and Hughes, however, are shown to be using black music not just in the service of racial affirmation (as is commonly assumed) but also as a means of complicating the very idea of racial categorization. At the time of their publication, both men's works relied on musical forms that could be recognized and sung by readers of various ethnic backgrounds, spirituals in the case of Toomer and blues in the case of Hughes. The musicality and performability of both men's texts, moreover, serve to promote interracial empathy and elide racial difference: for readers and writers of this literary tradition, to sing a race's music through the medium of poetry is to be made to identify with that race.Less

The Renaissance and the New Negro

in Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher

This chapter explores the Renaissance and, as far as Alain L. Locke was concerned, the New Negro Movement. Many others often called it the Harlem Renaissance, although some felt this neglected ... More

This chapter explores the Renaissance and, as far as Alain L. Locke was concerned, the New Negro Movement. Many others often called it the Harlem Renaissance, although some felt this neglected Chicago, Detroit, and other cities that saw cultural ferment in the 1920s. However, even Locke himself referred to it as the Renaissance on occasion. The terminological debate reflected some of the mixed opinions and conflicting commentaries that the movement elicited. Such a broad spectrum of opinion cast doubt on whether it even constituted a movement. Using his wry sense of self-presentation, Locke later called himself the “midwife” of the new attitudes and expressions that hearkened not only to the “new” culture but to a wider, more engaged sense of group identity. His philosophical bent and temperament led him, early and late, to ponder the issues of group identity and cultural legitimation in polemical and analytic terms.Less

Blues and Son from Harlem to Havana

Frank Andre Guridy

in Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

This chapter continues the theme of cross-cultural interaction by underscoring the role of promoters and audiences in the forging of the connections between the Harlem Renaissance and the ... More

This chapter continues the theme of cross-cultural interaction by underscoring the role of promoters and audiences in the forging of the connections between the Harlem Renaissance and the afrocubanismo movement. It notes that writers, musicians, and artists took up previously denigrated cultural forms, in both Cuba and the United States, such as the blues, spirituals, rumba, and the son, to create a new diasporic cultural aesthetic. The chapter interprets the immense traffic between these cultural movements as evidence of diasporization, rather than as mere background information for two distinct national movements. It notes that even when the writers and artists themselves denied or downplayed these cultural exchanges, the audiences and promoters of their work actively linked the two movements together. The chapter observes that the interactions between promoters, audiences, and artists inaugurated new understandings of Afro-diasporic cultures that celebrated, rather than rejected, the expressive cultures of the black working classes in both countries.Less

Harlem Renaissance Women and 580 St. Nicholas Avenue

Ethelene Whitmire

in Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement ... More

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement marked by increased literary, musical, and artistic creativity by African American artists who wanted to challenge the prevailing stereotypical representation of their image. Writers and artists came from all over the United States to participate. In Los Angeles, writer Wallace Thurman encouraged fellow post-office worker Arna Bontemps to go to Harlem. Opportunity editor Charles S. Johnson encouraged Zora Neale Hurston to move to New York City. All of these great thinkers, writers, and artists would pass through the 135th Street Branch, where Regina was assigned.Less

Original Gangsta Culture: Fortune Economy and the Criminal Mediation of Black Entry into Urban Modernity

in Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture

This chapter examines how and why the numbers racket (or policy) became one of the most definitive features of black Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. It explains that the heyday of the Harlem ... More

This chapter examines how and why the numbers racket (or policy) became one of the most definitive features of black Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. It explains that the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance was also the golden age of the black gangster and that black gangster enterprise held powerful significance among African Americans as an emulative modern cultural practice. The chapter also considers folklorist insights about the so-called ill-logic of the black badman in relation to the struggle against racial subordination to the space and time of the city.Less

New Negroes Forging a New World

Davarian L. Baldwin

in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem

This book investigates the Harlem Renaissance in the United States from a new vantage point in an attempt to challenge and expand our understanding of the New Negro experience. Alongside a wider ... More

This book investigates the Harlem Renaissance in the United States from a new vantage point in an attempt to challenge and expand our understanding of the New Negro experience. Alongside a wider array of cultural expressions, this book argues that the New Negro experience was just one nodal point within a dynamic and uneven circuit of black internationalism. In offering a more comprehensive vision of the New Negro experience, it elucidates what we identify as a global modernity by focusing on the relationship between industry and empire, migration and social movements, and cultural renaissance and mass consumption in the early twentieth century. It decenters Harlem, both as a physical space and as the model for an appropriate “renaissance,” and instead highlights both its geographical and expressive reach beyond New York, beyond national boundaries, across broader fields of activity, and through unconventional modes of cultural expression.Less

It Don’t Mean a Thing: The Blues Mask of Modernism

Kevin Young

in The Poetics of American Song Lyrics

The rise of modernism coincided with the emergence and reach of the blues. This chapter explores the influence of blues music on modernism, focusing on the importance, intricacies, and intimacies of ... More

The rise of modernism coincided with the emergence and reach of the blues. This chapter explores the influence of blues music on modernism, focusing on the importance, intricacies, and intimacies of Harlem or New Negro Renaissance. It argues that the achievement of African American writers (and sculptors and artists) should be considered one of the heights of modernism. The chapter also comments on the recent disregard heaped upon the notion of Africa as a popular theme in the Harlem Renaissance and how this attitude denies the power of place in the black imagination.Less

“Home to Harlem” Again: Claude McKay and the Masculine Imaginary of Black Community

Thabiti Lewis

in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem

This chapter offers a reading of Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, focusing on the predominately masculine lens through which he explores the variety and scope of black urban diasporic ... More

This chapter offers a reading of Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, focusing on the predominately masculine lens through which he explores the variety and scope of black urban diasporic life—its global and multiregional perspectives. It considers Home to Harlem as a literary depiction of the reality of an expansive African diaspora in the early twentieth century. In depicting black life and notions of community in 1920s black America, McKay examines the wonder, excitement, and limits of Harlem through recognition of alternative locations where black community thrived. His complicated and primarily masculinist presentation of modern industrial life utilizes proletarian characters that highlight the divergent diasporic routes of the New Negro reality and the Harlem Renaissance.Less

“The Eclipse”: Ballroom Dancing, Bodily Code-Switching, and the Harlem Renaissance

Danielle Robinson

in Modern Moves: Dancing Race during the Ragtime and Jazz Eras

Chapter four examines the social practice of nineteenth-century European American ballroom dancing among early twentieth-century elite African Americans, through Harlem WPA reports and articles in a ... More

Chapter four examines the social practice of nineteenth-century European American ballroom dancing among early twentieth-century elite African Americans, through Harlem WPA reports and articles in a local society magazine relating to dance teaching in Manhattan’s upwardly mobile black communities. This dancing did not simply express a desire to be white or to create a distance from blackness. Rather, understood through the scholarship of historians Kevin Gaines and Alessandra Lorini on the black elites of this period, such dancing provided opportunities for dancers to construct an elite identity that was uniquely African American—both African-derived and American in perspective. Dancers traded on the white racial signification of the dances to claim an elevated class status within black communities while also inserting moments of African American movement to make the dancing their own. In this way, social dancing enabled new black elites to firm up their social position and add their voice to debates on the nature of the “New Negro.”Less