Of the many ways of defining the provinces, after all there is none more reliable than this—capitals are always creative centers, and where living beauty is the provinces are not. Not that capitals are always beautiful, but they are always, at the least, the meccas of the beauty seekers and the workshops of the beauty-makers. Between capital and province, many draw the distinction merely of pomp and power: for them it is where the king lives, where the money barons thrive, where the beaumonde struts. While this is superficially true, after all a capital that is not a center of culture is no capital at all, and must look to its laurels if it cannot buy or borrow sufficient talent to become so. One of the first missions of a new metropolis is the quest for genius; it is as inevitable as the passion of sudden wealth for jewels. In a country like ours that still lives primarily on borrowed culture, the metropolis becomes the market-place for genius and its wares, and with its tentacles of trade and traffic captures and holds the prize.
It was those same forces that have made New York the culture-capital of America, which made Harlem the mecca of the New Negro and the first creative center of the Negro Renaissance. Older centers of what was thought to be culture resented the parvenu glory of careless, congested, hectic Harlem. But though many a home-town ached to be robbed of the credit for its village Homer, it was inevitable. It was also just. For oftener than not genius was starved, despised and even crucified in the home-town, but by the more discerning judgment and quickened sensibilities of the capital was recognized, stimulated, imitated, even though still perhaps half starved. In this way more than one Negro community has been forced to pay its quota of talent as tribute, and then smart under the slur of being lumped with the provinces. There has been only one way out—and that, to compete for creative talent and light a candle from the central torch. Even the hill towns of Italy, veritable nests of genius, had to yield first to Florence and then to Rome.
The current cultural development of Negro life has been no exception. But now as the movement spreads and beauty invades the provinces, it can be told—at least without offense. Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Nashville, Atlanta—is this the order, or shall we leave it to the historian?—have in turn had their awakening after nightmares of envy and self-delusion. For culture, in last analysis, is a matter not of consumption but of production. It is not a matter of degrees and diplomas, or even of ability to follow and appreciate. It is the capacity to discover and to create. Thereby came the illusion which has duped so many who cannot distinguish between dead and living culture, between appreciation and creativeness, between borrowed spiritual clothes and living beauty—even if living beauty be a bit more naked.
For the moment, we are only concerned with Washington—that capital of the nation’s body which is not the capital of its mind or soul. That conglomeration of Negro folk which basks in the borrowed satisfactions of white Washington must some day awake to realize in how limited a degree Washington is the capital of the nation. A double tragedy, this of the city of magnificent distances, tragically holding to its bosom the illusion that it is not provincial. In spite of its title, its coteries, its avenues, it is only a candidate for metropolitan life, a magnificent body awaiting a soul. And but for the stultification of borrowed illusions, Negro Washington would have realized that it contains more of the elements of an intellectual race capital proportionately than the Washington of political fame and power. It is in its way a greater and more representative aggregation of intellectual and cultural talent. Had this possibility been fully realized by the Washington Negro intelligentsia a decade or so ago, and constructively striven after, Washington would have out-distanced Harlem and won the palm of pioneering instead of having merely yielded a small exodus of genius that went out of the smug city with passports of persecution and returned with visas of metropolitan acclaim.
One may pardonably point with pride—with collective pride and not too ironic satisfaction—to certain exceptions, among them the pioneer work of Howard University in the development of the drama of Negro life and the Negro Theater. Close beside it should be bracketed the faith of which this little magazine is a renewed offshoot—the pioneer foundation at Howard University in 1913 of The Stylus, a group for creative writing, with the explicit aim at that comparative early date of building literature and art on the foundation of the folk-roots and the race tradition. Since then over a score of such drama and writing groups have sprung up—the Writers Guild of New York, Krigwa of New York and elsewhere, the Scribblers of Baltimore, the Gilpins of Cleveland, the Quill Club of Boston, the Philadelphia group that so creditably publishes Black Opals, the several Chicago groups from the Ethiopian Folk Theater to the most promising drama group of the present “Cube Theater,” the Writers’ Guild of Fisk, the Dixwell Group of New Haven, the Ethiopian Guild of Indianapolis, the recently organized Negro company of the Dallas players in far Texas. The very enumeration indicates what has been accomplished in little more than a decade. The provinces are waking up, and a new cult of beauty stirs throughout the land.
But it is not enough merely to have been a pioneer. The Stylus and the Howard Players must carry on—vitally, creatively. The University, at least, can be—should be—a living center of culture; both of that culture which is the common academic heritage and of that which alone can vitalize it, the constant conversion of our individual and group experiences in creative thought, and the active distillation of our hearts and minds in beauty and art. The path of progress passes through a series of vital centers whose succession is the most significant line of human advance. A province conscious of its provinciality has its face turned in the right direction, and if it follows through with effort can swerve the line of progress to its very heart.