“We want you to take a certain role in the movement,” wrote Charles S. Johnson to Alain Locke on March 4, 1924, and thereby changed his life and the future of Negro literature forever. “I may have spoken to you of a little group,” Johnson continued, “which meets here [at the offices of Opportunity] with some degree of regularity, to talk informally about ‘books and things.’ ”1 That group included a number of young people Locke already knew well: Countee Cullen, Jamaican-born aesthete Eric Walrond, budding Symbolist poet Gwendolyn Bennett, and Cullen confidant Harold Jackman, as well as Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset, her friends Eloise Bibb Thompson and New York City Librarian Regina Anderson, along with Johnson himself. On one level, such meetings were little more than a New York version of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Saturday Nighters.” But because Charles S. Johnson hosted the New York meetings, they were something more. Johnson saw the literary group as a new answer to the question, what should the Negro do? Write—without propaganda or special pleading for the Negro cause—but with confidence that creative writing by Black people would ultimately help liberate a people. One way to instill such confidence was to meet regularly.
There have been some very interesting sessions and at the last one it was proposed that something be done to mark the growing self-consciousness of this newer school of writers and as a desirable time the date of the appearance of Jessie Fauset’s book [There Is Confusion] was selected, that is, around the twentieth of March. The idea has grown somewhat and it is the present purpose to include as many of the newer school of writers as possible,—Walter White (who in a sense is connected with this group), Jean Toomer, and yourself.2
The collection of participants reflected the cleavages of the early Harlem Renaissance: the real members of the “new school” in New York were Hughes, Cullen, Walrond, and Bennett, while Toomer and Locke were Washingtonians, and thus slightly removed. Locke and Fauset were also a half generation older in age than the rest. Locke must have been flattered to learn that he was included in the “new school” of writers when he had not published a poem or novel.
“But our plans for you were a bit more complicated,” Johnson continued. He wanted Locke to serve as “master of ceremonies” at “a dinner meeting, probably at the Civic Club, to which about fifty persons will be invited: Carl Van Doren, H. L. Mencken, Robert Morse Lovett, Clement Wood, Oswald Garrison Villard, Mary Johnston, Ridgely Torrence, Zona Gale, and about twenty more of this type. Practically all of these are known to some of us, and we can get them. We are also including persons like Dr. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Robeson, Montgomery Gregory, Georgia Douglas Johnson.”3 Interestingly, neither the group nor the meeting had been noted on the list Locke carried away from his January meeting with Johnson. Most likely, the idea to have the Civic Club meeting or Johnson’s decision to use Locke at the occasion had materialized later.
Johnson asked Locke to perform the most important role at a dinner that was the first of its kind—an interracial communion between Black writers and White custodians of American culture to break bread and try to find a common language to talk about a literary awakening in America built around Negroes writing poems, short stories, and novels about the Black experience in America. Johnson needed Locke to be more than simply an emcee for a dinner. In truth these young Black writers were not yet a school or a movement of thought, but a younger generation of writers who, though less talented and untested, resembled the younger generation of White American writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, who were defining a new American literature independent of European models. United less by ideology than by a sense that as Negro writers they had something to say if only their race and their inexperience were not held against them, their reigning metaphor was the “new,” that they had something “new” to say, even if what that was remained a mystery. Johnson was asking Locke to come up with an interpretation acceptable to young writers, old race leaders, and tentative White literary allies so that they could find common language to talk about the prospects for a vital Negro literature. Locke’s academic credentials allowed him to validate the potential of these young writers to contribute valuably to American civilization.
Of course, the 1920s generation of writers was far from the first collection of Black writers to command national attention, which had begun in the eighteenth century with Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon and continued through the nineteenth with William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Francis Harper, and Charles Chestnutt. By the beginning of the twentieth century, some writers, such as Locke’s favorite, Paul Laurence Dunbar, had brought not only distinction to the race, but also promised to supply a new American language of the soul. But for the most part, these young writers of the early 1920s rejected Dunbar’s dialect poetry and were uncomfortable increasingly with the expectations of Black progressives like Du Bois that Black literature should be “representative” and bring “credit” to the race. Writing with a consciousness of the race responsibility felt like a burden to these young writers, which is one reason they gravitated to Johnson rather than Du Bois. Locke was sympathetic to their desires as well. Modernist literature in the 1920s was gritty, urban, sexually and psychologically complicated, and filled with unsavory characters—especially the literature emerging from Hemingway and Fitzgerald. If Blacks in America were to make an impact in literature, they had to be in step with modernism in literature, but also free to create something new out of the mix of race, culture, and experimental fiction that was coming to the fore in 1924. Although it was unlikely that Johnson was aware of all of the literary subplots in his little group, he knew that moralizing control of Black literature was weakened and almost dead. Indeed, as he revealed in his letter to V. F. Calverton at the Modern Quarterly praising Locke: “He believes as I do,” Johnson wrote, “that the frank and unapologetic discussion of subjects long tabooed will be a distinct step in the direction of creating respect for ideas which is necessary to any sort of living together.”4
Johnson’s agenda for the evening was to position Opportunity as the forum for this new “frankness.” But his decision to hand the master of ceremonies role over to Locke signaled Johnson’s sense of his own limitations and the riskiness of the role. He felt more comfortable orchestrating the evening from the wings and needed someone he could trust as its conductor. To assert this new freedom within the African American narrative could expose the writers to criticism, either from White literati, who might claim these young Black writers were not ready, or from the Du Bois intellectual camp at the Crisis, who would be jealous of Opportunity’s growing influence over the writers. Locke was sensitive to the romantic aspirations of the younger writers coming to maturity in the 1920s, but concerned as well to uphold the Christian-Enlightenment project of their elders that art had meaning as part of society’s need to thwart racism. Locke was aesthetically ambiguous enough to be acceptable to the young artists and credentialed enough to have the respect of the White literati invited—at least in theory. For the other intangible personality ingredient that Johnson had taken into account was Locke’s temperament: he would have no problem standing in front of the White and Black intellectual elite of New York and asserting with wit and hauteur that this was the coming new wave in American literature.
Though flattered by the invitation, Locke demurred. Though his response has disappeared, Johnson’s reply indicates that Locke had misgivings, especially if it was a dinner to honor Fauset and her novel. “Walrond was in this morning and I conveyed to him the gist of your letter, and he agreed that we never conceived of the dinner as a tribute to Fauset in particular or anyone else, but as a mechanism to honor the movement of younger writers. There seems to be a strong sentiment to have you serve as masters of ceremonies for the evening. I regard you as a virtual dean of the movement.”5 Something in Locke’s antennae had picked up that this party was to be for Jessie Fauset and her novel of bourgeois manners, which he detested but favorably reviewed, and he wanted nothing to do with representing her novel as exemplary of the new literature. Once Johnson silenced that anyone in the Writers Guild might see it as a celebration of Fauset, Locke went along willingly, because Locke was an outsider and had been asked to be the leader in the arena he cared about deeply. After six months abroad and years of disconnect from the American scene, here was a chance to publicly identify himself with the new literary movement in a role conferred on him by Johnson, one of the few male leaders to ever have that kind of confidence in him.
Locke threw himself into the project now that the dinner was his “coming out party” as well. He reviewed Johnson’s invitation list and reminded him to invite Du Bois, who had been left off the list of invitees. Johnson explained the oversight as the result of there being two invitation lists, one for the Civic Club dinner and the other for “a dinner for Dr. Du Bois, which Miss Fauset is getting up.” Locke went on to try to get Jean Toomer to attend the dinner—without success. Johnson also relied on Locke to select the two people to be asked to give formal remarks at the dinner and most likely he was the one who suggested that Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen read their poems. Locke also recommended Johnson secure a note taker to record the remarks made on the occasion. Johnson then sent an invitation to Albert Barnes, the eccentric Philadelphia millionaire chemist and African art collector, who agreed to attend.
As March 21 approached, participants became nervous. A week before the dinner, Bennett wrote Locke, “I am so glad that you have agreed to come. I feel the utter necessity of your being there.” Bennett was even more grateful he would be out front when the day of the event arrived. “You are particularly appreciated,” she wrote to Locke, “because of the tremendous and unswerving confidence that you have in us. Your faith in our utter necessity is particularly helpful as I find that my mind is not clear on the eve of this momentous event.”6 Even Johnson seemed nervous. After confiding in Locke that “the thing has gone over big, nothing can be allowed to go wrong now,” Johnson asked him to come up early that day to help him finalize the evening’s program. “I would like to see you as early as possible to have the first talk about plans, and probably, we shall have to do most of the arranging of the program then.”7 After a short introduction by Johnson, Locke would discuss the significance of these new writers, and then introduce Carl Van Doren who would outline his hopes for the Negro writer. Then, Horace Liveright, the publisher of Cane and There Is Confusion, would make a few remarks about the publishing scene for Negro books, a market-reassuring strategy most likely recommended by Johnson. After, Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, and a few others would read poems and give testimonials. Jessie Fauset would give the closing remarks.
Work on the program concluded, two of the smallest African Americans—Johnson was only 5´2˝—proceeded to the Civic Club dinner, dressed to the nines that Friday evening. Locke began his remarks by arguing that a new sense of hope and promise energized the young writers assembled, because they “sense within their group—meaning the Negro group—a spiritual wealth which if they properly expound will be ample for a new judgment and re-appraisal of the race.”8 Although Locke’s optimism has led critics to claim that he promised Black literature would solve the race problem, his language was actually quite cautious. Negro literature would “be ample,” that is, sufficient, to contradict those Whites who claimed Blacks were intellectually inferior “if they [i.e., the Black writers] properly expound [it].” Their success would allow “for a new judgment … of the race” if Whites were willing to render it.9 But there are no guarantees.
More powerfully expressed was Locke’s belief that by avoiding a literature of racial harangue, the new group of writers could make a broader contribution than those who had come before them. Locke advanced a new concept, that of generation, to suggest this was a new cohort of Black writers possessed of a devotion to literary values that set them apart from their forerunners. For example, Locke introduced Du Bois “with soft seriousness as a representative of the ‘older school’ ” of writing. That seemed to put Du Bois slightly on the defensive and felt called upon to justify writers of the past as “of necessity pioneers and much of their style was forced upon them by the barriers against publication of literature about Negroes of any sort.” Locke introduced James Weldon Johnson—a writer of poetry, music lyrics, and a novel—“as an anthologist of Negro verse”—another dig, since Johnson was a novelist, a lyricist, and a poet, in addition to editing The Book of American Negro Poetry and writing a powerful introductory essay. Locke did acknowledge him for having “given invaluable encouragement to the work of this younger group.”10 By defining these NAACP literary scions as elderly fathers and uncles, Locke implied their virtual sons and daughters were Oedipal rebels whose writings rejected the stodginess of their literary parents. Against the backdrop of an ornate Civic Club dinner, with its fine china, polished silverware, and formally attired White patrons, Locke issued a generational declaration of independence for the emerging literary lions of the race.
Carl Van Doren then laid out what the White literary press wanted from the younger Negroes: art not anger. Gingerly but tellingly, Van Doren ventured that the literary temperament of the African American, whether produced by African or American conditions, was distinguished by its emotional transcendence, its reputed ability to avoid haranguing White America for its obvious wrongs and turning suffering into works of unparalleled beauty. Young Black writers had to sit and listen to Van Doren declare that “long oppressed and handicapped, [Negro artists] have gathered stores of emotion and are ready to burst forth with a new eloquence once they discover adequate mediums. Being, however, as a race not given to self-destroying bitterness, they will, I think, strike a happy balance between rage and complacency—that balance in which passion and humor are somehow united in the best of all possible amalgams for the creative artist.”11 A certain amount of condescension was the cost of liberal White support.
To illustrate the newer emphasis in the younger writers, Gwendolyn Bennett then read a poem, “To Usward,” she had written expressly for the evening.
And some of us have songs to sing
Of jungle heat and fires;
And some of us are solemn grown
With pitiful desires;
And there are those who feel the pull
Of seas beneath the skies;
And some there are who want to croon
Of Negro lullabies.
We claim no part with racial dearth,
We want to sing the songs of birth.
Bennett’s poem reinforced Locke’s theme for the “newer school,” that of a new “birth” and, in particular, a generational rebellion to break “the seal” of a Black Victorian tradition that had strangled self-expression.
And so we stand like ginger jars,
Like ginger jars bound round
With dust and age;
Like jars of ginger we are sealed
By nature’s heritage.
But let us break the seal of years.
This “seal” was “the seal of years,” that is, of tradition, that privileged race—“nature’s heritage”—in the writing of the “older school.” Bennett ended with a collective call to arms, which is probably why Johnson selected it to be published in the May issue of Opportunity in an article on the dinner.
But let us break the seal of years
With pungent thrusts of song,
For there is joy in long dried tears,
For whetted passions of a throng!12
Next followed Horace Liveright, stating even more forcefully that the younger writers must avoid the pitfalls of minority literature, especially the “inferiority complex” he had detected in the writings of oppressed peoples who tried to counter negative mainstream stereotypes with saccharin portraits of their own people. For Negro writers “to do the best writing it was necessary to give a rounded picture which included bad types as well as good ones since both of these go to make up life.” Remarkably, Liveright did not mention Fauset’s novel, but enthused instead over Toomer’s, with its mix of middle-class intellectuals, racy southern women, and Symbolist stream of consciousness. Liveright did mention that the book had sold only five hundred copies to date. Such remarks could not have been better for Locke and Johnson than if they had scripted them, for they reinforced their message that young Black writers were going to have to avoid the racial harangue of earlier Negro creative writers if this generation wanted to get published. Although Van Doren acknowledged “Negro writers must long continue to be propagandists,” their future promised something more—the prospect of a Negro art that was open, honest, vulnerable, and self-critical.13
Perhaps to compensate for the challenge to Du Bois and Crisis, but also to acknowledge her intellectual and emotional dependency, Fauset spent her speaking time thanking Du Bois for the support she had received from him. Fauset also mentioned that another publisher had rejected her novel initially on the ground that “the cultured Negro forms so small a portion of the community that the book would be of little social interest.”14 That remark sanctioned Du Bois’s belief that White publishers would not publish good novels about middle-class Black people. After her remarks, the dinner concluded, but not the debate that had been broached.
The dinner was a modest success. Bringing Black and White literati together in one room, Johnson had facilitated the kinds of interactions that made publishing contracts and critical recognition more likely for the youngsters. Albert Barnes, who had also spoken briefly, later wrote to the philosopher John Dewey: “I don’t care how you spent Friday night, you could not have spent it as wonderfully as I did. I met a young man, Walrond, who is really first rate, and I want him to look you up as he aspires to enter Columbia University in the fall.”15 Those kinds of recommendations advanced careers. The dinner drew attention to the magazine as unique in fostering interracial contact and exchange over literature. Johnson and Locke had helped African American literature seem more marketable than it was before the dinner and gave a sense of recognition to a group of young writers testing the publishing waters with their first products. Negro literature now appeared to be as marketable as music and other cultural commodities that could be purchased by a growing White, largely urban public. Not surprisingly, Locke and Johnson were pleased with the outcome of the dinner.
Jessie Fauset was not. Eight years later, in response to Locke’s critical review of her novel, Comedy, American Style, Fauset reflected on that evening:
I have always disliked your attitude toward my work dating from the time years ago when you went out of your way to tell my brother that the dinner given at the Civic Club for “There Is Confusion” wasn’t for me. Incidentally I may tell you now that that idea originated with Regina Anderson and Gwendolyn Bennett both members of a little literary club with which I was then associated. How you and one or two others sought to distort the idea and veil its original graciousness I in common with one or two others have known for years. And I still remember the consummate cleverness with which you that night as toastmaster strove to keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was meant.16
Clearly, Fauset was under the impression that it was to be a celebration of her accomplishment and had to sit through an ordeal of self-congratulation before any direct acknowledgment came to her at the end. Arnold Rampersad suggests that this was particularly egregious, not only because of her novel but also because of the role she had played as a midwife of the movement. She deserved more credit than Locke as a “midwife” to this younger group of writers, since, as literary editor of the Crisis, she had been the first to publish Langston Hughes, among others. Historian Thadious Davis also argues that the dinner was a watershed in Fauset’s influence in the renaissance. Afterward, younger women writers like Nella Larsen looked to Charles Johnson for support and contacts, rather than Fauset. By minimizing her at the dinner, Johnson and Locke decentered Black women as leaders of the Harlem Renaissance movement, and Locke is generally seen as primarily responsible for it.17
Locke deserves to be criticized, but it’s worth remembering that he accepted the role of “master of ceremonies” only after Johnson and Walrond assured him Fauset was not the reason for the dinner. If the dinner originated to mark the publication of Fauset’s novel, then Johnson transformed it into a coming-out party for Opportunity and a new generation of Negro writers. Interestingly, one of the originators of the group, according to Fauset, was Gwendolyn Bennett, who, beyond showing enthusiasm for Locke’s participation, narrated the dinner as a celebration of the “new school of writers.” Indeed, she felt buoyed after the dinner by the attention given her on the program. Would it have made sense for Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, to host and pay for a dinner to celebrate Fauset, the literary editor at the Crisis? Obviously not. But Johnson probably knew that Fauset expected to be the center of attention, recognizing the role she and the Crisis had played in advancing Negro literature. Perhaps that explains why Johnson was so eager to have Locke play the role out front as “master of ceremonies.” If Johnson’s not-too-subtle plan to displace Fauset and the Crisis crowd backfired, Locke would take the blame, as has been the case. As a gay Black aesthete alienated from the Philadelphia Black bourgeoisie, Locke was perfect for the job of displacing Fauset, the not-so-secret lover of Du Bois, and the Crisis from their positions of leadership in the new literary movement.
But imagine how Johnson must have felt when he picked up the New York World on Saturday morning and read the headline: “Negress Novelist Honored at Dinner. Miss Jessie Fauset, A.B., M.A., Is Guest at Celebration of Publication of Work.” Johnson had specifically recruited the World’s editor Louis Weitzenkorn to the dinner to get favorable publicity for the evening, but Fauset had trumped Johnson. Weitzenkorn’s article recounted, “Miss Jessie Fauset … was principal guest at a dinner given in the Civic Club … by other writers, musicians and publicists of her own race. Her publisher, Horace Liveright, head of Boni & Liveright, was nearly the second guest of honor.” The World article made no mention of Opportunity magazine, Charles S. Johnson, or Locke. From the standpoint of the New York White press, the event had been for Fauset and she had been well honored. Indeed, that is the same impression that surfaces from the popular Black press that covered the event. According to the New York Age, “An interesting event was the dinner tendered by the Writer’s Guild, a group of the younger element of Negro writers and creative artists at the Civic Club, West 12th street on Friday evening, March 21, in honor of one of its members, Miss Jessie Fauset, celebrating, in a measure, the publication of her last book, There Is Confusion, recently issued from the press.” Again there was no mention of Locke or Johnson, but there was a registering of Locke’s generational discourse:
Among the 125 guests present, many of whom were distinguished literary lights of both races, were exemplars of both the old and the new schools of writing, and many good-natured quips and witty sallies were bandied back and forth among those who won their literary spurs in the old fashioned world of literary purity and those of the modern intelligentsia who have discarded the candlelight for electricity.18
Here was evidence of Locke’s “consummate cleverness … that night as toastmaster” expressed in the “many good natured quips and witty sallies” that irritated Fauset, but that announced the writers assembled as a “modern intelligentsia.” At the very least, the World and Age reports suggest the personal and gender conflict was relatively invisible to outsiders since the banter was recorded as “good-natured.” That view was also shared by Countee Cullen, certainly an insider, who, when he wrote to Hughes about the event, recalled it as a celebration of Fauset’s book. Whatever else one can say about the dinner, Jessie Fauset certainly won the contemporary media contest.
So furious was Johnson about the media coverage of the dinner that he set Eric Walrond, a contributing editor to the World, the task of writing another review of the dinner. But it never appeared. Indeed, the lack of an article communicating Opportunity’s interpretation of the dinner’s significance led Johnson ultimately to write his own unsigned review of the dinner, “The Debut of the Younger School of Negro Writers,” printed in the May issue of Opportunity. Walrond, no fan of Fauset, finally got a chance to express his opinion of her when he penned a review of There Is Confusion in the July issue of the World. Walrond wrote: “This is not a book for the old or the young. It is rather awful.” That review so angered Langston Hughes that he threatened to punch Walrond in the nose. What the review, the dinner, and the blame apportioned to Locke shows is that the dinner was “momentous,” as Bennett put it, the perfect emblem of the gender and ego conflicts of the renaissance.
Locke’s attempt to steer the evening and the White publishers away from Jessie Fauset makes sense if we recognize that, for Locke, the Civic Club dinner was his opportunity to fashion a New Negro literary identity that was queer (in both the sexual and modernist senses of the word) and disturbing to the Black bourgeoisie. In other words, an incipient war over the taste of the literature being written by these younger writers was taking place because of the gender and class conflicts in the movement. As literary editor of the Crisis, Fauset was already beginning to reject some of the newer poetry and short fiction of Langston Hughes and other close friends, including even poems Du Bois thought were acceptable, because they conflicted with her Victorian taste in literature. After the March 21 dinner it was not so much that women could not be part of the movement or that every man would be promoted, but that a certain type of man and woman—a sexually ambiguous Black writer such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston became dominant in the renaissance that followed largely because of the taste of literary men like Locke, Johnson, Van Doren, and even Liveright, who was clearly more enthused by Cane than There Is Confusion. Modernism was seizing the day, and those Black books that conveyed it were celebrated, along with their authors.
But another factor was evident as well. The March 21 dinner was also a coup d’état for the gay writers of the Black movement. Historically, the out-group, the gay and bisexual authors were now in. The dinner may have been a watershed for Fauset, but it was also a turning point for homosexual and bisexual artists and critics—Cullen, Walrond, and Zora Neale Hurston, the latter who startled the assembled guest by yelling “color struck” when she entered the room late. Outrageous, unpredictable, sexually uncategorized male and female writers and personalities had stolen the White gaze away from the staid and predictable heterosexual bourgeoisie. In a movement takeover by gay and sexually ambiguous Black men, a Victorian, like Fauset would lose out.
There may have been other reasons why Locke went along with Johnson’s plan to marginalize Jessie Fauset. In an interview, Arthur Fauset, her brother and a close friend of Locke, explained that another source of tension between Alain and Jessie was color. Located in Philadelphia, the Fauset family was really two families divided somewhat along color lines—Arthur from the darker, less accomplished side of the family; Jessie from the lighter, more respectable relations. Locke knew that Jessie Fauset disparaged the darker side of her family, which incensed Locke, who abhorred color consciousness among African Americans. Jessie Fauset epitomized for Locke the obsessive class and color consciousness of the Philadelphia Negro elite that he believed crippled the possibility of great Negro writing. She further symbolized the condescending ways in which the Philadelphia bourgeoisie treated sensitive, aesthetic men. Even if Locke was “sorely uninformed” about the early Harlem Renaissance movement, as Jessie Fauset claimed in her letter about the incident in the 1930s, he was very well informed about how the bourgeoisie of Black Philadelphia used color prejudice to undermine the sense of belonging that he believed was essential to the reconstructed or New Negro community he hoped to build.
But in the final analysis, none of these considerations excuse what Locke did to her at the dinner. Something about his identity as an outsider gave Locke the entitlement to be mean and cruel. Even if he was seriously annoyed with her book or believed that the new school of writers needed to turn its back on her moralizing attitude, he should have realized that a dinner, especially coinciding with the publication of her first book, was hardly the place for a put-down.
Sexuality obviously was a factor in this conflict—the years of subtle sexual tension between Locke and Fauset from his Harvard days until now, his distaste for her as an exemplar of all that he hated about the Philadelphia bourgeoisie, his rivalry, perhaps, with her for the affections of Langston Hughes. But in taking out on her his class and sex frustrations in a public forum, he robbed the Negro Renaissance of a chance to form the kind of beloved community his mentor at Harvard, Josiah Royce, called for. By diminishing her, he diminished himself and his capacity to get others to follow his lead as the new voice of the movement—especially the group of women writers who honored her with the dinner idea. His action exposed the possibility that the Black aesthete takeover of Negro literature in the 1920s would stumble by reproducing the same hierarchies and travesties of silencing that mainstream American literature visited on the Negro writer at large.
Locke should have recognized that Johnson had manipulated him into doing his dirty work. Locke could have pivoted his remarks so that he would not be pegged by history as the spoiler of the occasion. But Johnson had counted on Locke’s enmity toward Fauset to do what Johnson wanted done. And when Locke saw that she was weak enough that evening to be displaced, he took the bait, and enjoyed doing it. A more generous approach to her at the dinner would have allowed Locke to recruit Fauset as an ally. In September 1924, she decided to take a leave of absence from her job at the Crisis and go to Europe to work on her second novel. The real reason for her hiatus was that her relationship with Du Bois had deteriorated, and Du Bois was ready to take over her duties now that the literary renaissance had gathered steam under Opportunity. A more gracious approach to her at the dinner might have allowed Locke to become more influential with the entire group of young writers than either Du Bois or Charles Johnson.
The Opportunity dinner symbolized the success and failure of the Negro Renaissance. Through brilliant scheming, Locke and Johnson created a context for the young writers of the 1920s that was unique in American history—an interracial dinner that convinced its participants that Black writing mattered to the rest of America. But the manipulative strategies behind the event ultimately doomed the movement to being something smaller than it could have been. Rather than putting down an ally, what the movement needed was an ethics of collaboration that buoyed one another. That did not require silencing of serious criticism of literary work, but refraining from reproducing inside a Black literary movement the old masters’ trick of pitting the slaves against one another to maintain control. Diminishment of one another meant, in effect, that the “younger generation of Negro writers” had not solved the problem of how to collaborate as a group and maximize their meager resources.
Locke’s competitive approach to his role at the dinner defined the limits of his capacity to lead. Despite the loftiness of his vision, he would be held back as a creator of community by his failure of empathy. It limited his ability to get people to follow him. They never knew for sure when he would turn on them, as Fauset must have felt after the dinner was over. He was often perplexed when people held grudges against him for this type of behavior. Indeed, he probably was surprised to learn in 1933 that Jessie Fauset was still hurt by how he had treated her that Friday night nearly ten years ago.