After twenty years or so of continuous discussion, this subject of the cultural contribution of the Negro as a racial group has become trite and well-nigh threadbare. Having undergone much critical wear and tear, and having passed in the process from intriguing novelty to tawdry commonplace and from careful critical delineation to careless propaganda, the whole subject now obviously needs, even to the layman’s eye, thoroughgoing renovation. Before we proceed to any further documentation, then, of the Negro’s cultural contributions, let us address ourselves to this more difficult and more important task of its critical evaluation.
The crux of the whole issue from the critical point of view is basically the question of the propriety of applying race concepts to cultural products. What makes a work of art Negro, its theme or its idiom? What constitutes a “Negro contribution to culture,” its authorship or its cultural base? Is there or should there be any such set of categories in our critical thinking or our creative living? Seldom do we ask such basic questions, and when we do, we too often run off, like Pontius Pilate, without waiting for an answer. Yet by and on some unequivocal answers to questions like these must our whole philosophy and practise of culture be judged and justified.
As an instance of this dilemma, we find James Weldon Johnson in his anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry, cautiously accepting Negro authorship as the criterion of Negro cultural contribution in this field excluding both the folk poetry and the large body of American verse on the Negro theme,1 but in his celebrated preface to the same, boldly claiming as Negro “contributions” Uncle Remus, with titular white authorship, jazz ragtime and American popular dance forms to the extent they are the derivatives of Negro idioms or source originals. Obviously here is a paradox. Which is the sound position? What is the proper and consistent claim?
Obviously culture politics has a good deal to do with the situation, often forcing both majority and minority partisans into strange and untenable positions. Granted even that the very notion of “Negro art” and of “Negro cultural contributions” is a sequel of minority status, and an unfortunate by-product of racial discrimination and prejudice, it by no means follows that an uncritical acceptance of the situation is necessary or advisable.
There is, in fact, a fallacy in both of the extreme positions in this cultural dilemma. Although there is in the very nature of the social situation an unavoidable tendency for the use of literature and art as instruments of minority group expression and counter-assertion, there is a dangerous falacy of the minority position involved in cultural racialism. Cultural chauvinism is not unique in a racial situation, however; a national literature and art too arbitrarily interpreted has the same unpardonable flaws. However, where as in the case of the Negro there are no group differentials of language or basic culture patterns between the majority and the minority, cultural chauvinism is all the more ridiculous and contrary to fact. Consistently applied it would shut the minority art up in a spiritual ghetto and deny vital and unrestricted creative participation in the general culture.
On the other hand, there is the majority fallacy of regarding the cultural situation of a group like the Negro after the analogy of a “nation within a nation,” implying a situation of different culture levels or traditions, a system of cultural bulkheads, so to speak, each racially compartmentalized and water-tight. Like most fallacies, in explicit statement, they reveal their own inner self-contradiction and absurdities. However, hidden taint of both these fallacious positions is very common in our popular and critical thinking on this issue of Negro cultural expression and contribution.
Cultural racialism and chauvinism flatter the minority group ego; cultural biracialism not only flatters the majority group ego, but is the extension of discrimination into cultural prejudices and bigotry.2 Both are contrary to fact, and particularly so in the case of the American Negro. What is “racial” for the American Negro resides merely in the overtones to certain fundamental elements of culture common to white and black and his by adoption and acculturation. What is distinctively Negro in culture usually passes over by rapid osmosis to the general culture, and often as in the case of Negro folklore and folk music and jazz becomes nationally current and representative. Incidentally, it is by the same logic and process that the English language, Anglo-Saxon institutions and mores, including English literary and art forms and traditions have become by differential acculturation what we style “American.” In culture, it is the slightly but characteristically divergent that counts, and in most cases racial and nationalist distinctions are only shades of degrees apart. The Negro cultural product we find to be in every instance itself a composite, partaking often of the nationally typical and characteristic as well, and thus something which if styled Negro for short, is more accurately to be described as “Afro-American.” In spite, then, of the ready tendency of many to draw contrary conclusions, there is little if any evidence and justification for biracialism in the cultural field, if closely scrutinized and carefully interpreted. The subtle interpenetration of the “national” and the “racial” traits is interesting evidence of cultural cross-fertilization and the wide general vogue and often national representativeness of the “racial contribution” is similar evidence of the effective charm and potency of certain cultural hybrids.
And so, we end up by being able to ferret out no other reliable criterion for what we style typically or characteristically “Negro,” culturally speaking, than that cultural compounding and variation which has produced what we style “American” out of what was historically and basically English or Anglo-Saxon. This, if sound, destroys completely the “nation within a nation” analogy which has been so overworked a parallel, and makes Negro literature and art a vital, integral part of American cultural expression. Not even the notion of a cultural province will fit the facts, for the Negro variants have wide distribution and partake of the regional characteristics according to geographical distribution. The cultural products of the Negro are distinctive hybrids; culturally “mulatto” generations ahead of the mixed physical condition and ultimate biological destiny, perhaps, of the human stock.
This makes what is Negro in the truest sense, apart from the arbitrary criterion of Negro authorship, hard to define, no doubt; but fortunately in practise, it is easy enough to discriminate on close contact and comparison. Like rum in the punch, that although far from being the bulk ingredient, still dominates the mixture, the Negro elements have in most instances very typical and dominating flavors, so to speak. I know only one racial idiom with equal versatility combined with equally distinctive potency,—and even that with narrower cultural range since it has been almost exclusively musical; the idioms of Gipsy music and dance which blending with as diverse strains as Russian, Hungarian, Roumanian, Spanish, and even Oriental music, yet succeed in maintaining their own distinctive flavor. The Negro cultural influence, most obvious, too, in music and dance, has a still wider range,—in linguistic influence, in folklore and literary imagery, and in rhythm, the tempo and the emotional overtones of almost any typically Negro version of other cultural art forms. Let us consider a typical, perhaps an extreme instance of this characteristic dominance and its transforming force. Suppose we do laboriously prove the cultural ancestor of the Negro spiritual to be the evangelical hymn forms and themes of white Protestantism; suppose we even find, as the proponents of “White Spirituals” do, interesting parallels and close equivalents, that by no means counters or counteracts the uniqueness in style and appeal of the Negro spiritual, either as folk poetry or folk music. Indeed the formula analysis, showing so many common ingredients, only adds to the wonder and credit of the almost immeasurable difference in total effect. We need scarcely go further to the acid test of comparing the continued spontaneity and fresh creativeness of the one strain with the comparative sterility and stereotyped character of the other. The one hardly moved its own immediate devotees and barely survives culturally; the other has been creatively potent at all musical levels—folk, popular and classical, has been vital out of its original context in instrumental as well as vocal forms, and has moved the whole world.
If this were a single exceptional instance, no weighty issue would be involved. But creative vitality and versatility, this contagious dominance seems in so many cases to be a characteristic trait of the Negro cultural product. This disproportionality of effect in culture contacts and fusions is becoming more and more obvious as we study the ramified influence of Negro cultural strains. Weldon Johnson no doubt had this in mind when he characterized the Negro genius as having great “emotional endowment, originality in artistic conception, and what is more important, the power of creating that which has universal appeal and influence.” This truth will become axiomatic, I take it, when we broaden the scope of our studies of the influence of Negro cultural admixture geographically as is now beginning to develop. For the American Negro elements are but one small segment of the whole gamut of Negro cultural influence; there is the very pronounced Afro-Cuban, the Afro-Brazilean, the Caribbean Creole, the Jamaican, the Trinidadian, the Bahamian, the Louisiana Creole together with those better known to us,—the Southern Lowlands Carolinian, the Lower and Upper South and the urbanized or “Harlem” idiom, which it will be noted is in many respects the most hybrid and attenuated of all. In addition to a new perspective on the range and force of Negro culture contacts, such future study may give us important clues as to the basic African common denominators and some explanation of their unusual vitality and versatility.
It seems reasonable to maintain, therefore, that tracing an arbitrary strand of Negro authorship and narrowly construed race productivity not only does not do the Negro group cultural justice, but that more importantly, it does not disclose the cultural exchanges and interactions which are vital to the process. Following the latter pattern, criticism would teach us to view the cultural scene more in terms of what it actually is, and in addition cut under the superficial bases of the cultural partisanships and chauvinisms of both sides. An increasing number of critical studies and analyses are taking this more modern and more scientific point of view and approach; and a particular series3 has recently taken as its basic viewpoint the analysis of the Negro idiom and the Negro theme in the various art fields as a gradually widening field of collaboration and interaction between the white and the Negro creative artists. Two schools or recent trends of American letters and criticism have also taken the same composite theory and practise, the one, regionalism—a growing school of critical thought, and Proletarian realism, also a popular and increasing vogue in fiction, drama, and criticism. The former of course is more congenial to the retention of the notion of racial idioms; the latter, over-simplifying the situation in my judgment, discounts and ignores almost completely in its emphasis on class status and class psychology, the idioms of race.
With this background, and with the now almost traditional precedents of claims like that of “Uncle Remus” (with titular white authorship) and jazz music, with its elaborate biracial production, it is to be hoped there will be little or no surprise, as we review rapidly the epochs of Negro cultural activity, in having drama like The Emperor Jones, The Green Pastures and Stevedore, novels like Green Thursday and Porgy, poems like Lindsay’s Congo or Bodenheim’s Jazz Kaleidoscope, though by white authors, referred to in the context of the cultural influence of the Negro theme and idiom. In art, it is color, not the color-line that counts; and that not so much the hue of the author as the complexion of the idiom.
The cultural history of the Negro himself in America may be broadly traced as falling into two periods,—a long period of creative but unsophisticated expression at the folk level, dating almost from his introduction to this country up to half a generation after Emancipation, and a shorter period of expression at the cultural, articulate level, stretching back in exceptional, sporadic instances to Phillis Wheatley in 1787, but becoming semi-literary with the anti-slavery controversy from 1835–1860, and literary in the full sense only since 1890.
Between these two levels there is a gap, transitional only in the historical sense, when the main line of Negro expression was motivated by conscious imitation of general American standards and forms, and reacted away from distinctive racial elements in an effort at cultural conformity. This was inevitable and under the circumstances normal; most other literatures and art have passed through such imitative phases; even French and German literature and art; and of course American art itself in the colonial period. But in Negro expression the position of cultural conformity and the suppression of racial emphasis has since been reversed,—first by the dialect school of Negro expression of which Paul Laurence Dunbar was the leading exponent, and more lately still by the younger contemporary school of “racial self-expression,” the so-called “New Negro Movement” which since 1917 or thereabouts has produced the most outstanding formal contributions of the Negro to American literature and art.
The importance of this latter movement is not to be underestimated; for, apart from its own creative impulse, it has effected a transformation of race spirit and group attitude, and acted like the creation of a national literature in the vernacular reacted upon the educated classes of other peoples who, also, at one or another stage of their cultural history, were not integrated with their own particular tradition and folk-background.
There is a division of critical opinion about this so-called “Negro renaissance.” In one view, it was a cultural awakening and “coming of age” pivoted on a newly galvanized intelligentsia; according to the other, it was a mass movement of the urban migration of Negroes during the war period, projected on the plane of an increasingly articulate elite. Both interpretations have their share of truth. What is more important than the interpretation is the fact of a new group dynamic acquired at this time and a steadily increasing maturity coming into the Negro’s formal self-expression in the arts. The breadth of the cultural stream increased with its depth; for the traditional arts of music, poetry, and oratory were rapidly supplemented by increased productivity in drama, fiction, criticism, painting, and sculpture.
Cultural racialism, with its stirring dynamic and at times its partisan fanaticism, was the keynote of the Negro renaissance. In its first phase, it was naïve, sentimental, and almost provincial; later, under the influence of the World War principles of self-determination and the rise of other cultural nationalisms (Irish, Czecho-Slovakian, etc.) it was to become sophisticated and grounded in a deliberate revival of folk traditions and a cult of African historical origins. Poems, stories, novels, plays emphasizing such themes and glorifying race pride, race solidarity, folk-origins came in a crescendo of creative effort with the rising talents of Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Rudolph Fisher, Jessie Fauset, Eric Walrond, Wallace Thurman, Zora Hurston, and others. This was the first generation of “New Negro” writers. They had their artistic, musical, and dramatic counterparts in Harry Burleigh, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Charles Gilpin, Rose McClendon, the painters Archibald Motley, Aaron Douglas, Laura Wheeler, Edward Harleston, Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, the sculptors—Meta Fuller, May Jackson, Augusta Savage, Sargent Johnson, Richmond Barthe,—to mention just the outstanding names.
But we have little time or space for names; what concerns us more are trends of style and schools of artistic thought. It was this significant decade,—1920–1930, that witnessed the collaboration of white dramatists like Ridgeley Torrence, Eugene O’Neill, Paul Green, and DuBose Heyward, with Negro acting talent like Cooper, Gilpin and Robeson which gave Negro drama its present vital position in serious native American drama; that saw the parallel developments of the new realistic and regional fiction of the liberal “New South” and the development of the Negro novel of both the Harlem and the folk-lore school; that from the world-wide recognition of the serious Negro singers from Roland Hayes to Marion Anderson threaded through first the vocal folk-song arrangements of Negro composers like Burleigh, Diton, Dett, Brown, Boatner, Hall Johnson and then gained audience for the orchestral and chamber music compositions of Coleridge Taylor, William Dawson, Dett and Grant Still. Comparable strides took Negro popular music on an upswing of popularity and influence, carrying the occasionally successful “rag-time composer” to the assured dominance of Negro dance and music in the jazz period. Here, too, was a collaboration and interchange of talent and effort,—perhaps the closest of all the cultural collaborations to date, and one profoundly influential on public opinion as well as upon the professional circles immediately involved. Indeed the competitive use, and sometimes exploitation, of the jazz idioms by the Whitemans, Gershwins and Goodmans on the one side and Fletcher Hendersons, Duke Ellingtons, Count Basies (over the common denominator, often as not, of the Negro jazz “arranger,” the true composer for the non-improvising type of jazz orchestra) have made a demonstration of cultural reciprocity and mutual reenforcement that may be prophetic of similar developments in other artistic fields.
But to return to our tracing of literary trends; between 1925 and the present three schools of Negro cultural expression have in succession appeared. But they have overlapped and each has even at the moment its exponents and adherents, though of course with successively diminishing vogue. The first started the Negro renaissance with an enthusiastic cult of idealistic racialism. It made a point of the stressing of special traits of “race temperament,” of a group philosophy of life, of the re-expression on the cultural level of the folk-spirit and folk history, including the half-forgotten African background. Many of this school were devoted, if slightly, too romantic Africanists. Toomer’s Cane, Countee Cullen’s Color, Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues, McKay’s Harlem Shadows were produced in the heyday of this enthusiasm. Social protest and ironic challenge had already had some embodiment, especially with Claude McKay and Fenton Johnson, but romantic and jazz exoticism still were dominant notes. As Harlem became a fashionable fad a certain amount of irresponsible individualism and eccentric exhibitionism inevitably followed, and some of the brightest of these younger talents were warped and diverted from the sounder courses of serious work and development.
Meanwhile, even before the disillusion of the depression became effective, a more serious trend of folk realism was gaining ground. It followed the general trend of American realism in poetry and fiction, and began to develop on the basis of serious local color portraiture the native distinctiveness of Negro life, first in the urban and then in the Southland settings. Hughes’ soberer second book of verse Fine Clothes to the Jew,4 McKay’s Banjo and Gingertown, Sterling Brown’s realistic and ironic folk poetry in Southern Road are typical of this latter trend. This was a more soberly toned and prosaic racialism, delineating the grimmer side of the Harlem scene, painting the Southern peasant in careful genre studies, exposing the paradoxes and injustices of race prejudice. A few problem novels saw the light,—not too successful because of lack of objectivity and too obvious indignation and indictment, but in drama and poetry some of the best folk portraiture by Negro writers was being produced.
Though not completely diverted, a good deal of this maturing realism has been channeled off, partly by the vogue of proletarian realism and partly by the deepening disillusionment of the Negro’s sad economic plight, into a rising school of iconoclast protest fiction, poetry, and drama. Stevedore and Erskine Caldwell’s novels and stories set the pace for this latest school of Negro expression, which closely parallels the general vogue in style, theme, and social philosophy. However, in poetry like that of Frank Marshall Davis, the latest work of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, and particularly in the brilliant fiction of Richard Wright, the Negro literature of social protest has some distinctive qualities of local color and idiom, quizzical irony, dashing satire, and freedom from unrelieved drabness, all of which make it somewhat distinctive in comparison with the parallel white authors. But the common factors of social reformism and relentless indictment are also there, as characteristic no doubt of the youngest trend in our serious literature.
Enough has been said to show clearly that Negro art follows no peculiar path of its own, but is with slight differences of emphasis or pace, in step with the general aesthetic and social trends of contemporary American art and literature. As aestheticism, realism, regionalism, proletarianism become the general vogue, Negro art is apt to reflect it. But always, as might be expected, these reflections are caught up in the texture of a racially-determined phase of agreement with a difference, sometimes a difference of emphasis, sometimes of motivation, often also a difference of emotional temper and stylistic idiom. It is this that saves a good deal of our art from being a feebly echoed repetition of general situations and attitudes. At times, however, this is not the case, and then in reversion to the subservient imitativeness which it has so largely outgrown, the minority literature and art becomes really minor.
As for the counter-influence, an increasing vogue for Negro themes and materials has certainly been a characteristic feature of the unfinished decade in which we now are, in fiction, drama, and the classical use of Negro musical idioms particularly. A whole generation of younger Southern novelists, Robert Rylee, Hamilton Basso, William March, James Childers, Josephine Johnson, Julian Meade have succeeded the pathbreaking realists, Clement Wood, Stribling, Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner and Caldwell, with telling documentation recanting the Bourbon tradition and the contrary to fact romance of Gone with the Wind and So Red the Rose. A realistically portrayed and fairly humanized Negro is one of the vital pivots of this new Southern fiction; just as a new economic and social reconstruction is one of its basic creeds. In drama the folk realism of Paul Green and of DuBose Heyward has continued to give moving portraiture of Negro life, though no such level of truth or moving beauty has been reached in drama as has already been attained in fiction on the Negro themes. Jazz music has reached a level of serious cultivation and analysis unprecedented for any previous form of popular music, and in classical jazz, the great talents of Negro composers like Ellington, Dett, Still, Hall Johnson, Reginald Forsythe have been seriously challenged by Grofé, Gershwin, Gruenberg, Cesana, Lamar, Stringfield, and Morton Gould. Indeed the vogue and use of Negro themes and materials by white creative artists has grown so steadily as quite to challenge the Negro creative artist’s natural spokesmanship for his own cultural materials. But this challenge should be stimulating, and the net result in event of any fair competition will doubtless be an enforced maturity of the Negro artist in several fields where he is yet immature, partly from lack of full cultural opportunity, partly through too little objectivity toward his subject-matter. It is to be frankly admitted that in the more objective fields of fiction, playwriting, descriptive portraiture, the white artist working in Negro materials has on the whole an advantage of objective control and technical maturity, while in the more intimately subjective and emotional activities of poetry, acting, music, and dance, the Negro creators and interpreters have their turn of the advantage. Such generalizations have, of course, their exceptions on both sides, but in passing they are typical of the present moment and tentatively true.
Benefiting, even because of the depression, by the Federal Arts Projects and their reasonably democratic inclusion of the Negro artists of various sorts, the growth and geographic spread of Negro art has been materially enhanced. Particularly a whole younger generation of promising painters and sculptors has been incubated by the Federal Art Project, almost too numerous for individual mention. Three Negro dramas, the Macbeth, Haiti, and the Swing Mikado, have been among the ranking successes of the Federal Theatre, a tribute to noncommercial management and in the case of the Macbeth and Mikado as refreshing and revealing “Negro versions” of familiar classics, almost living texts for the corroboration of the central theme of this discussion;—the compound gain of the distinctive cultural hybrid. Proof also, these experimental ventures of the powerful appeal of Negro idioms in dignified and unstereotyped contexts,—a lesson Broadway and Hollywood have yet to learn. Hollywood particularly, in spite of a new medium, is still snared in a reactionary groove and prostitutes genuine Negro talent to the perpetuation among the masses of reactionary social and racial stereotypes of character and situation. If the persuasiveness of the new art or the pressure of its new social creeds ever leaps the barricades and fences of the “movies” and the popular novel and the popular entertainment stage, as there is faint reason to hope, a revolutionizing force for liberalizing culture will have been set in irresistible motion. Up to this point we have been dealing mainly with the artistic cultural significance of Negro art, but here we sight what is probably the next objective and the next crusade in the ascending path of Negro art, its use as an instrument for social enlightenment and constructive social reform. This, too, is no racially exclusive job and has no racially partisan objective. It is perhaps, since it is the ultimate goal of cultural democracy, the capstone of the historic process of American acculturation. To be a crucial factor in so vital a general matter will be a cultural contribution of supreme importance.
1. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature includes the folk poetry, and Sterling Brown’s Vegro Poetry and Drama treats the literature of the Negro theme by both white and Negro Poets and dramatists.
2. For a particularly trenchant analysis and criticism of this culture prejudice, see Buell Gallagher’s American caste and the Negro College, pp. 368–71.
3. The Bronze Booklets, Published by Associates in Negro Folk Education, Washington, D.C.
4. [sic] Fine Clothes for the Jew [Editor’s note].