SATCHMO MIGHT STILL HAVE LIVED in New Orleans, but his music continued to be on the move, as some of his emissaries in Chicago had since departed for New York. They began playing in Greenwich Village. They played in a few places in midtown, which wasn’t nearly the wealth-riddled corporate neighborhood it is today. And they played in Harlem, where it seemed the whole world was spinning blissfully off its axis.
Armstrong himself was finally able to spread his new, jazzed-up jazz in 1920, as he took a break from playing his hometown clubs and whorehouses to take lead cornet for the Fate Marable Band on some Mississippi River steamboat excursions. “Fate was a very serious musician,” Armstrong later said of the man who taught him how to read music. “He defied anybody to play more difficult than he did. Every musician in New Orleans respected him.” Still, the cruises he played with Marable were the first times Armstrong had played so far from home, the boat paddling its way from the Delta to the Mississippi’s headwaters in Minnesota. And it was the first time he had played before so many people from different parts of the country.
The boat, the S.S. Sidney, rode the currents through ten states, and on quiet nights the music landed on banks where lovers strolled, and wafted inland toward the nearby cities and towns. Sometimes the breezes did not carry that far, but sometimes you could hear it on the outskirts of Minneapolis and next door in St. Paul, where Fitzgerald was writing his short stories that themselves seemed to have a horn wailing in the background. And the Fate Marable Band might have been heard in Dubuque, Iowa; Galena, Illinois; St. Louis; Memphis; and in Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi. An ad for the boat advertised the “Best dance music in the United States, 1500 couples can dance on the dance floor at one time.”
Armstrong enjoyed his time with Marable, but he knew Chicago was coming, and he was growing impatient. The city on Lake Michigan was for him what the green light at the end of the dock was for Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby.
He tried not to let his eagerness get the better of him and for the most part succeeded. He knew, as many people told him, that he was too good to be playing in whorehouses and on riverboats, even if Fate Marable was the bandleader. But why make a fuss? This was the way things happened, not only in music but in America’s big corporations: Andrew Carnegie, after all, had started off as a telegraph boy at $2.50 a week. Of course, he was only fifteen at the time, while the trumpeter, aging fast, had recently celebrated his nineteenth birthday. When he finally went up north again, it would be a one-way trip, and it would be time for the transfer of power to begin. From Joe “King” Oliver to Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. As he later said:
Knowin’ that my tone was stronger than his [Oliver’s], see, I would never play over [i.e., higher than] Joe. That’s the respect I had for him, you know? But if he would have thought of it, he would have let me play the lead. You notice, all these records you hear more harmony … Joe’s lead is overshadowed.
IN TIME, AND NOT MUCH of it, the twenties would come to be known as “The Jazz Age,” with Satchmo on lead cornet and the libretto courtesy of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott Joplin was dead, his previously popular ragtime was dying; some musical historians believe that his music’s “ragged”—which is to say syncopated—melodies helped pave the way for the even more innovative sounds of jazz.
The word, like “profiteer,” was another new coinage of 1920, at least in polite, white society, where it was roundly scorned and “widely held to be a springboard for drug taking and promiscuity.” An article in the Ladies Home Journal asked: “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” The answer was in the righteous affirmative.
The derivation of the term is not certain. It may be the product of “a non-musical nineteenth century slang word, jasm, meaning energy, vigour or liveliness.” Historian Ethan Mordden, however, believes the word descended from a particular kind of liveliness, that it came “from black patois (to jass: to copulate).” Mordden not only traced the etymology of the word but defined the music as well as anyone could. He wrote that jazz
as popularly applied broadened out to include just about anything that one heard with a bass fiddle stalking below and a saxophone prancing above, the hot lick of musicians who hoisted “axes” (their word for their instruments). … They were soloists, these musicians, gadflies of tone living a code as hit or miss as that of the gangsters. Drugged, alcoholic, down and out when they weren’t on the band—they respected only one truce, that of keeping to a steady tempo for the benefit of the dancers. No matter what the intention of a composer or lyricist—no matter how chaste or sophisticated—two seconds into any song they played, every song was jazz. That’s how it was. … Jazz, it was said, made one lose control, but no: jazz was just something to hear while one lost the control that one was determined to lose anyway.
It was music for the lost generation, as Mordden explains, in that it broke all the rules—a mere two seconds into the tune and it became something different from what anyone had expected, unrelated to either the popular or classical music of the past. Jazz was a dirge with an upbeat. It seemed to stand outside of history, in music’s parallel universe.
Yet even those who disdained the very notion of a lost generation, who much preferred jassing to whining, the shadows of the Great War be damned!—even they found the new music irresistible. They could not ignore what they perceived as the infectious, improvisational merriment of the sounds—the energy sometimes so frantic that it seemed the instruments would break into pieces. To them, as to the members of the lost generation, it was the perfect accompaniment to the era, but for an entirely different reason. The former wanted to drown their sorrows in the music; the latter wanted to blast the very notion of sorrow out of existence. Somehow, depending on your vantage point, jazz was capable of doing both.
BUT CHICAGO WOULD NOT REMAIN the capital of jazz for long. It might not even have still been the capital in 1920. The judgment, of course, is subjective, but the capital might in 1920 have been some 790 miles to the east, in Harlem, a city of almost 200,000 black men and women within the five largely white boroughs of New York City, population 5,621,000. Residents of the African-American enclave came from all over the world, running the gamut from high yellow to gleaming ebony. In 1920, the Harlem Renaissance is thought to have officially begun among them, and nothing like it had ever happened before. If the arts were exploding in the United States, Harlem was the epicenter, although geographically it was on the fringe, comprising the northern boundary of Manhattan.
The location had something to do with the musical outburst. John Kouwenhoven, a college professor and specialist in American popular culture, “trying to explain jazz, used an urban metaphor: the city’s grid is comparable to jazz’s basic 4/4 or 2/4 beat, and the skyscrapers are its solo improvisations … Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and many others left Chicago for short or long periods of time to gig with New York bands and artists. … What better acoustic chamber could they have had than a city built of solid stone and on solid stone? (Chicago rests on mud …) Sounding much like [jazz musician and composer] Bix Beiderbecke, [New York architect] Raymond Hood pledged not ‘to build the same building twice.’”
Marcus Garvey had something to do with it. It was in Harlem that he settled when first coming to the United States, and it was because of him that biographer Elton C. Fax could write about the first day of August 1920:
Never before had that black community whirled with such excitement as, on the following day, it played host to a parade to end all parades. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, President of the Provisional Republic of Africa and President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, had called his organization’s first International Convention.
Fifty thousand black delegates strutted along sun-drenched Lenox Avenue to the syncopated rhythms of twelve bands. Representing twenty-five lands, the marchers hailed from every state in the Union, from the West Indies, Central and South America, and Africa.
Further, believes historian Nathan Miller, it was part of Garvey’s insistence on black pride that “Harlem was clean, it was prosperous, it was largely law-abiding. As a unique black city, it was shown off as an example of American democratic success.” And, as a result, it attracted not just the top jazz musicians to its nightspots, but audiences both black and white to revel in their innovative performances.
And Crisis magazine had something to do with the Harlem Renaissance. Founded by W. E. B. Du Bois, who was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the magazine was the first significant forum of its kind. Historian Michael E. Parrish writes that “Du Bois encouraged Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and countless other young black artists, who, lionized by wealthy white patrons, were said to represent the spirit of ‘the New Negro,’ a somewhat condescending phrase which suggested that African-Americans had never before displayed intellectual distinction.”
BUT IT IS MUSIC THAT first comes to mind when one thinks of the Harlem Renaissance, the music that was played at places like Connie’s Inn, Small’s Paradise, or the Savoy, later to be memorialized in the song “Stompin’ at the Savoy”—and the neighbors weren’t happy about any of it. According to the Amsterdam News, “The idea of taking a residential community and making it the raging hell it is after dark is something that should arrest the attention of even ministers of the gospel.” Years later, Edward Kennedy Ellington, known to all as “Duke,” would concede the point that Harlem could get noisy late at night, but “there was another part of it that was wonderful. That was the part out of which came so much of the only true American art—jazz music.”
The premier Harlem night spot was the Cotton Club, whose principal owner was Owney “The Killer” Madden, perhaps Prohibition’s most vicious, soulless gun for hire. But also, somehow, one of its most tasteful impresarios of after-hours entertainment. First purchased in 1920 by the controversial black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson and known then as the Club Deluxe, it passed into Madden’s hands three years later. Under “The Killer,” it quickly became “synonymous,” said entertainer Cab Calloway, “with the greatest Negro entertainment of the twenties and thirties.” For four years, beginning in 1927, after rising from the basement of a tiny midtown bistro in 1920, Ellington and his band were the house musicians at Chez Madden, and the Duke stood apart from the crowd before he even sat at the piano. He was “[e]legant, reserved without being stiff, articulate even in his evasions, well mannered to the point of ostentation, elitist despite his populist tendencies.”
All of which meant that person and place were a perfect match. “This was no ordinary nightclub,” writes Ellington biographer John Edward Hasse. “Printed programs announced the musical songs and sketches and identified the vocal and dance soloists. In time, the programs grew more high toned in their language. One from 1931 noted, ‘Entr’acte: Dance to the strains of the incomparable Duke Ellington and His Record Artists.’”
The artists sat on a stage that was made to look like the veranda of a Southern plantation from a century or more earlier. There was even “a backdrop painted with weeping willows and slave quarters.” The appropriateness was eerie. For although black faces filled the stage, white faces, and white faces only, comprised the audience at the Cotton Club. Madden and his partners allowed no African-Americans to enter, stationing “brutes at the door” to make sure of it. And Ellington, generally regarded as more a gentleman’s gentleman than a black activist, was slow to anger about the policy when Madden’s representatives first approached him. Says biographer Hasse:
However Ellington felt about it, he must have decided that the advantages of working there outweighed the disadvantages. He was always a practical man who maintained his personal dignity and realized when to play the sly fox. After all, the Cotton Club promised a prestigious venue with steady work, good money, new kinds of experiences from which to learn, lots of opportunities for exposure to the press and other influential people, not to mention pretty young women who danced and sang in the show. How could he not accept [Madden’s] offer?
But within months of accepting the offer, Ellington began to reach his full bloom as an artist, a man with gifts so unique as a composer and arranger that they are hard to categorize, and crowd appeal so great that he became the leading musical figure of the Harlem Renaissance. As a result, he was able in time to use “his influence to have the owners admit light-complexioned blacks, local black entertainers, and his own mother and father, after they moved to Harlem.”
SOME OF THE WHITE CLIENTELE who initially made up the entire audience of the Cotton Club, and partial audiences of other clubs nearby, were Jewish investors who, in 1920, sensed the rise of black culture as it was beginning to stir, and as a result were most responsible for the refurbishing of Harlem, its rise from ghetto to hot spot. It was they, more than anyone else, to whom Garvey owed his gratitude for the neighborhoods he found so appealing. Most of the investors were surely more interested in the return on their money than in increasing prominence for black art, but in the end it didn’t matter. In the end the effect was the same.
Most notable among Harlem’s Jewish benefactors were members of the Spingarn family, among the greatest of American philanthropists at the time, and whose paterfamilias, the notoriously aloof Joel Elias Spingarn, served for a while as the chairman of the board of the NAACP. After having lost his bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican four years earlier, Spingarn served in 1912 as a delegate to the Progressive Party convention. That was the year when the group was also known as the Bull Moose Party, named after their presidential candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, who claimed he was “feeling like a bull moose” despite having been denied the Republican nomination a month or so earlier. It was also a year in which Spingarn tried to add a statement condemning racial discrimination to the Progressive platform. He failed. A delegate again in 1916, and reading the zeitgeist more pragmatically, he didn’t even try. Still, by himself, he succeeded nobly in battling racism.
The other major financier behind the cause of a thriving Harlem was Julius Rosenwald. The head of Sears, Roebuck and Company, his primary philanthropic interest was the establishment of schools for African-American children in the South, to which he donated millions of dollars of matching funds. Rosenwald also contributed more than $5 million to build Chicago’s grand Museum of Science and Industry and spent five years as its president. As for his Harlem funding, the exact total is not known, but it too is in the millions.
The result of primarily Jewish funding was that Lenox and Seventh Avenues in Harlem became “the nightclub capital of the world.” According to historian Lloyd Morris, “Long after the cascading lights of Times Square had flickered out, these boulevards were ablaze. Lines of taxis and private cars kept driving up to the glaring entrances of the nightclubs. Until nearly dawn the subway kiosks poured crowds on the sidewalks. The legend of Harlem by night—exhilarating and sensuous, throbbing to the beating of drums and the waling [sic] of saxophones, cosmopolitan in its peculiar sophistications—crossed the continent and the ocean.”
AMONG THOSE OF SHALLOWER POCKETS than Spingarn and Rosenwald, but whose contributions still proved significant, were many who not only invested their money in Harlem but spent it there several nights a week. Seeking relief from days of unyielding stress on Wall Street, they found it where they had least expected: in the exotic presence of another race and the sultry jazz that always seemed to accompany the dark, elegant women gliding around them, sometimes making eye contact, sometimes not bothering. The men who accompanied them, or just looked longingly at them, were lean and handsome, attired like visiting dignitaries. It might almost have been another country, the night a short vacation in a culturally remote land.
Perhaps the majority of Harlem-frequenting whites were young jivesters and homosexuals, who felt more welcome among the openly gay artists of northern Manhattan, especially the elite writers, than they did anywhere else in New York. They might have to save their money for a night on the town, and it might take a few weeks to do so, but their pleasure in having a place like Harlem in which to dispense it made all the scrimping worthwhile.
If they were lucky, they might have seen Bessie Smith, who made her name in Harlem before she made it even bigger on the radio. Blessed with a voice as powerful as it was versatile, she was to female jazz singers what Louis Armstrong was to male vocalists—as he would occasionally put aside his horn and make that distinctly graveled voice of his into an instrument. The uniqueness of his sound on the trumpet and the sound of his vocal cords made an unparalleled combination.
But the packed audiences would also have been lucky to hear Mamie Smith, no relation. In 1920, most popular music was banal and unmemorable. Among the more successful tunes were “Daddy, You’ve Been a Mother to Me,” “When the Moon Shines on the Moonshine,” and “Who Ate Napoleons with Josephine When Bonaparte Was Away,”—and the lack of sophistication in the titles is a perfect complement to the melodies. All of these songs enjoyed brief spurts of popularity before descending to the oblivion that was their fate from the beginning.
But somehow, Mamie Smith, African-American through and through, became the first of her race to find a place on the very top of the charts. Starring in a musical revue in Harlem that summer, she found a spare afternoon to cut a record with her favorite background group, the Jazz Hounds. Their song, “Crazy Blues,” is regarded as the first jazz record ever released, instrumental or vocal. It went on sale on August 20 and somehow broke through the morass of hokum melodies and bunkum lyrics to become the top-selling number of the entire year, with more than 100,000 copies eventually being purchased. Not only did the song not later pass into oblivion, but in 1994 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. A year later it was chosen to be permanently preserved in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. That it achieved its stature in a year like 1920 was something of a miracle.
Mamie Smith, who would later star in a number of films, sang with restraint, but it was hard-won, and her tones were those of a woman who had been undeniably wronged.
Now I can read his letters
I sure can’t read his mind
I thought he’s lovin’ me
He’s leavin’ all the time
Now I see my poor love was blind.
Now I got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t got no time to lose
I must find him today.
THE FEW PEOPLE WHO WANTED to see Paul Robeson perform in 1920 were not so lucky. He was acting then, not singing, and doing little of the former.
Robeson was one of the first blacks to attend law school at Columbia University, which stands on the southern edge of Harlem. A poor young man, he could afford the tuition only by playing professional football on the weekends: “for the Hammond (Indiana) Pros in 1920, the Akron Pros in 1920 and 1921, and the Milwaukee Badgers in 1922. He was paid between $50 and $200 per game. Although Robeson was one of the pioneer players of the National Football League, his career as a professional football player has been largely ignored by professional-football historians.”
But a few months before the 1920 football season began, when the new Harlem YMCA opened, Robeson was asked to take part in the commemoration ceremony, starring in Simon the Cyrenian, by Ridgely Torrence, a white man strongly supportive of African-American art. “The play was about an Ethiopian who steps out of a crowd to help a tired and haggard Jesus Christ carry his cross up Calvary Hill to be crucified,” writes Eugene H. Robinson, not a biographer of Robeson but a student of his work. “His role in this play was symbolic of his commitment to just causes and to oppressed people the world over, a dominant dimension of his life.”
By the time the twenties ended, thanks in part to starring in one of many successful productions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Robeson was on his way to becoming the leading black male performer of his generation, singer as well as actor. In the 1936 film version of Show Boat, the classic musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, Robeson played the dock worker Joe, who gave audiences of all races chills and heartache when he sang the show’s most famously wrenching song, “Ol’ Man River.” Later, Robeson would record an inferior rendition of the number—in dance tempo, of all things—with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, which might best be categorized as a group of semi-jazz musicians. For some reason, it was the Robeson version with Whiteman that was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006, two years after “Crazy Love” had arrived. But, under Whiteman’s baton, Robeson sounds as if he is singing a soulful cha-cha, assuming there could ever be such a thing.
One of the most extraordinary public figures of the twentieth century, Paul Robeson was as controversial as he was talented. Openly a communist, he insisted that the reason for his affiliation was capitalism’s treatment of the African-American. In 1942, he met privately but forcefully with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of major league baseball, a meeting “that ultimately led to Jackie Robinson’s breaking down the barrier of Jim Crow and unleashing events that were to change the face of sports—and the nation.”
A later meeting with President Truman did not go as well. Robeson demanded anti-lynching laws. Truman replied, in effect, that no one was in a position to make demands to the Chief Executive of the United States, no matter what the cause; and at that point a White House guard was summoned to show Robeson the door. He did not need the escort, departing with head held high, shoulders back, his belief that he was in the right unchallenged.
Robeson held to his politically incorrect positions on the Spanish Civil war, fascism, and imperialism—held to them, insisted on them, spoke out for them. He was not a shouter, not a posturer, and did not need to be; when he spoke, his presence alone was enough to command attention. In the McCarthy era, he would be blacklisted for his politics but remained uncowed, his dignity intact. He was the white man’s most looming nightmare: a powerful, talented, and intelligent African-American who would not back down from anyone who stood in the way of his people’s progress.
Later, during the most controversial war of the twentieth century, it was Muhammad Ali who became famous, and eventually imprisoned, for refusing military service by saying: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” But thirteen years earlier, in 1954, several years before the Vietnam War began, with French participation rather than American, Robeson had expressed the same sentiment more elegantly. Perhaps it was he who gave Ali the idea. “Shall Negro sharecroppers from Mississippi,” Robeson asked, “be sent to shoot down brown-skinned peasants in Vietnam—to serve the interests of those who oppose Negro liberation at home and colonial freedom abroad?”
Even though he died in 1976, Robeson continues to be punished for his intransigence, his role in the history books continually diminished even though there has never been anyone like him in our nation: a superb athlete who played baseball and basketball in college as well as football; a glorious singer; a skilled actor in both light and serious roles, yet never accepting a role that made the black man a caricature; a trained lawyer; and a leading man in the fields of racial and political reform. At the height of American segregation, one of the country’s few “Renaissance” men was black.
NO LESS ENDURING THAN THE music of the Harlem Renaissance has been the writing, in which such authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Walter White, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes, among others, did precisely what the white man and woman of letters were doing at the same time: remaking their literature. They produced work that was bolder, more personal, and more voluminous than it used to be. And, in their case, more distinctly African-American. But it was a white man, and an unlikely one at that, who played a major role, often unacknowledged, in legitimizing the black literary sensibility of the twenties.
H. L. Mencken, who frequently gave off the scent of anti-Semitism while including many Jews among his closest friends, was similarly contradictory about African-Americans. Those biographers of Mencken who defend his attitude toward blacks, despite the many racist comments he uttered in his lifetime, adopt a believe-what-he-did-not-what-he-said attitude toward their subject—and what he did was serious, sleeves-rolled-up, suspenders-yanked-off-the-shoulders editing and advising. “Long before Native Son established Richard Wright as a Pulitzer prize-winning author,” writes Mencken scholar Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, “he had discovered what members of the Harlem Renaissance, already in full swing by 1926, had recognized for themselves: that H. L. Mencken was a force in their own literary movement. That year, [novelist] Carl Van Vechten’s best-selling Nigger Heaven paid Mencken homage by identifying him as the editor responsible for the success of black literature.”
Like all gifted critics, Mencken knew what would happen before it started, because he knew where to look, what to feel; he could sense the growth and energy that would soon be apparent to all; and starting in 1920, when he was editing the fashionable magazine The Smart Set, Mencken began to spend more and more of his time encouraging African-American writers and social commentators. Among them was James Weldon Johnson. “Mencken had made a sharper impression on my mind than any American then writing,” Johnson later said. “I had never been so fascinated at hearing anyone talk. He talked about literature, about Negro literature, the Negro problem, and Negro music.” Johnson said that after his conversation, he felt “buoyed up … as though I had taken a mental cocktail.”
Perhaps what is most remarkable about Mencken as an editor of African-American prose and poetry was the time he devoted to it, dedicating himself to authors who had never really been able to call themselves that before, men and women who had never previously been published. But a black writer, Mencken believed, had a sense of hope that had grown out of his centuries of sorrow, a view of himself of being integral to the world around him, even a part of it. The white author, according to Mencken, had neither. It was these qualities that he sought to encourage, the sentiment even more than the conventional notions of literary skill.
Mencken, however, had nothing to do with what might be called the magnum opus of the Harlem Renaissance, a collection of essays which in sum were a cultural history, called The Gift of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociologist and historian who himself might be called the magnum intellect of the Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, and his scholarship is evident through the more than 350 pages of his book. As is his passion for the black man’s contribution to American culture. “The Negro is primarily an artist,” he wrote, and then tried to explain, with admitted difficulty, near the book’s end.
Above and beyond all that we have mentioned, perhaps least tangible but just as true, is the peculiar spiritual quality which the Negro has injected into American life and civilization. It is hard to define or characterize it—a certain spiritual joyousness; a sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the cool and cautious New England reason; a slow and dreamful conception of the universe, a drawling and slurring of speech, an intense sensitiveness to spiritual values—all these things and others like them, tell of the imprint of Africa on Europe. There is no gainsaying or explaining away this tremendous influence of the contact of the north and south, of black and white, of Anglo Saxon and Negro.
ANOTHER WHITE MAN WITH A strong yet unlikely relationship to the artistic arousal of African-Americans was T. S. Eliot, or so cultural historian Ann Douglas believes, relating that
English contemporaries [of Eliot] like Wyndham Lewis and Clive Bell saw [Eliot’s 1922 modernist epic] The Waste Land as a form of “jazz,” and the comparison bespeaks not only a loose use of the word but an important cultural connection. Eliot’s hometown, St. Louis, with its large black population and rich Negro musical culture, was in many ways a Southern metropolis, and the young Eliot described his own accent as that of “a Southern boy with a nigger drawl.” … He once signed himself (on a postcard to Ezra Pound) “Tar Baby.” … Tom Eliot had dreamed of donning darker guises, of shaping his image by the blackface in the mirror, and he experimented with minstrel personae and language as he was perfecting his craft in the years after the Great War. [He insisted] that his poetic instrument was not the lute, with its classical and romantic connotations, but the jazz-harmonica of African American music.
To me, this seems evidence of an aberrant wistfulness, if not even perversity, by Eliot the boy more than it does true kinship to the Harlem Renaissance by Eliot the man. In the seventeen years that he edited The Criterion, a British literary magazine he founded in 1922, never once did Eliot publish the work of a black American. Seldom, in fact, did he publish an article in support of the Harlem Renaissance or even acknowledge its influence in places outside New York. Mencken, on the other hand, often printed the works of black writers in The Smart Set and in a later journal that he co-founded, American Mercury.
And such esteemed white writers as Hart Crane, Waldo Frank, and Sherwood Anderson also shared Mencken’s attitude. Not only did they support the artistic haven that Harlem had become; they were virtual students of it, especially of Jean Toomer, a male despite his name and one of Harlem’s leading poets and novelists. What the three famed white American artists “hoped to get from their friendship with black moderns like Toomer,” Douglas tells us, “was the Negro genius for religious feeling, the saving expressiveness that American Calvinism in their view had conspicuously lacked.”
For instance, in Jean Toomer’s “Conversion”:
African guardian of souls,
Drunk with rum,
Feasting on strange cassava,
Yielding to new words and a weak palabra
Of a white-faced, sardonic god—
Grins, cries
Amen,
Shouts hosanna.
Langston Hughes, however, was the most exceptional of the Harlem literati, not to mention the most versatile—a novelist and newspaper columnist, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, short stories, and works of nonfiction about the black experience in the United States. But, as if that were not enough, Hughes is best known, and most accomplished, as a poet. At the age of twenty-two, having dropped out of Columbia because he thought it racially prejudiced, he somehow landed a job as personal assistant to the eminent Carter G. Woodson. Hughes was thrilled. Like so many bright young black men, Hughes respected Woodson, admired his work ethic, looked up to his intellectual attainments, and was determined to equal them.
He began assisting Woodson as soon as he was able, less than a month later, with a burst of enthusiasm, a glow of pride.
A few days after that, he quit.
Woodson, although not visibly upset, was surprised. Hughes explained to him that although the work was edifying and Woodson himself an inspiration, the hours were too long, leaving him no time to develop his own writing skills. He told Woodson, with unwavering determination, that he had reached the point in his life at which he needed to concentrate on those skills to the exclusion of all else. Woodson had already seen the artist in Hughes, heard it when Hughes spoke, knew that it must find expression—and so he said he understood. Woodson wished the young man well; they parted with mutual good wishes.
Hughes immediately started looking for other work and had no trouble finding it. It did not, however, have quite the same cachet as the position he had left. In fact, what it had were dirty dishes, half-filled mugs of cold coffee, and napkins balled up and sticky. Within a week or two, Langston Hughes had found employment as a busboy, and he walked happily to and from a less-than-elegant restaurant for his daily duties.
His friends were stunned, disbelieving. A busboy? Hughes smiled at their consternation and tried to explain. A position as a busboy made fewer demands on his time. The restaurant was not open in the morning; he arose early and wrote until close to noon. The new job also made fewer demands on his mind: he could clear tables at the same time that he quietly recited lines of verse he would jot down on a notepad in the kitchen when he had a spare moment.
Hughes’s earliest poems, not surprisingly, were heavily influenced by jazz. Note, not just the title or even the words, but the short, syncopated lines. “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” for instance, reads like song lyrics more than conventional poetry.
Play that thing,
Jazz band!
Play it for the lords and ladies,
For the dukes and counts,
For the whores and gigolos,
For the American millionaires,
And the school teachers
Out for a spree.
Play it,
Jazz band!
You know that tune
That laughs and cries at the same time.
You know it.
Similarly, there was “Song for a Banjo Dance.”
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake your brown feet, chile,
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake ’em swift and wil’—
Get way back, honey,
Do that rockin’ step.
Slide on over, darling,
Now! Come out
With your left.
Shake your brown feet, honey.
Shake ’em, honey chile.
Hughes’s musically inspired poetry was a phase, his first; he was playing with tempo, not yet confident enough for serious content. Most of the latter came in such collections as Scottsboro Limited, Montage of a Dream Deferred, and the often inspiring Let America Be America Again.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indians, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand in the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America! …
Out of the wrack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people must redeem
The lands, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain.
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
Countee Cullen, on the other hand, never had a musical phase. A student of the classics, he began his career as a writer by emulating the English poets of centuries past and never stopped, although in time his own voice would emerge from the quiet din of his long-ago mentors. Cullen was Hughes’s friend, but his opposite in style. Cullen writes below “On the Mediterranean Sea”:
That weaver of words, the poet who
First named this sullen sea the blue,
And left off painting there, he knew
How rash a man would be to try
Precise defining of such a dye
As lurks within this colored spume.
And for retelling little room
He willed to singers yet unborn
But destined later years, at morn,
High noon, twilight, or night to view. …
Hughes would never have produced such a piece.
Cullen also wrote a short poem about Sacco and Vanzetti, seeming to sympathize with them, to blame their fate on “a slumbering but awful God.” But his shorter poem, another epitaph, this one “For an Anarchist,” makes his position more difficult to understand.
What matters that I stormed and swore?
Not Samson with an ass’s jaw,
Not through a forest of hair he wore,
Could break death’s adamantine law.
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE TOOK PLACE in academia as well, where its leader was the small, cerebral Alain Locke. A Harvard graduate, he became the first African-American Rhodes scholar, after which he joined the faculty at the all-black Howard University as an assistant professor of literature.
Like Du Bois, Locke would never have been found at a Jim Crow establishment like the Cotton Club. And like Du Bois, Locke would be unhappy with a landmark in American theatre, about which there was much gossip during rehearsals in 1920. Opening the following year, Shuffle Along was the first all-black musical revue to claim a Broadway stage. No matter that it ran for 504 performances, and no matter that it made stars out of Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker; both Du Bois and Locke thought Shuffle Along perpetuated the most humiliating of racial stereotypes, beginning with the title. It was, after all, written by a white man. Black theatre, Du Bois insisted, should be just that—black, entirely black, starting with the producer and playwright. And even though Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, both African-Americans, were responsible for Shuffle Along’s music and lyrics, Du Bois believed that they, too, were conforming to stereotypes, giving no indication of the artistic growth of which his people were capable. Locke agreed.
The latter was “a pillar of the Harlem intellectual community, [who] urged African American composers to create ‘jazz classics,’ not the ‘trashy type’ of jazz played in clubs and cabarets. Hot jazz and blues would never be viewed as ‘great Negro music,’ he confidently predicted.”
Shortly after taking up residence at Howard, Locke found that he had attracted a groupie in the student Langston Hughes, who had not yet worked for Woodson, not yet begun to bus tables. One summer, Hughes and Locke went to Europe, and the student ended up following the professor everywhere, learning all that he could from his polymathic idol. Locke enjoyed the adoration; it is not every man of his vocation who becomes a Valentino to a student. Historian and researcher David Levering Lewis informs us that
Locke was as much in his element in Paris as on the Howard campus. He turned the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume into classrooms for Hughes. Seated in the Parc Monceau, his favorite, or strolling through the Luxembourg gardens, discoursing in French with hyper-literate Frenchmen and Francophone colonials, the little professor mesmerized his long-pursued companion with what seemed an incomparable display of learning, urbanity, and empathy. They had a “glorious time,” and later in the summer met again in Venice.
When he wasn’t enlightening Hughes, Locke was writing some of the most influential essays of the Harlem Renaissance. As historian Lewis notes, Locke “observed that European artists had already been rejuvenated at the African fountain. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque found in African sculpture the insight that led them into cubism. And sculptors like Constantin Brâncu
i and Wilhelm Lehmbruck were liberated through African sculpture to powerful restatements of human form. If they can, why can’t we? Locke asked.”
It was a few years later, in 1920 or close to it, that a controversial phrase entered the African-American vocabulary: “the new Negro.” It was he who was most responsible for the Harlem Renaissance. It was he whose example would inspire and thereby elevate the old Negro. And it was he who must, through his demeanor and accomplishments, lead to the new Caucasian, inspire him to accept the black man as an equal, not just artistically but in all ways.
Did Alain Locke coin the phrase? Probably not; at least, he never claimed to have done so. But he certainly made frequent use of it, as it suited his purposes to perfection. In his widely read essay “Enter the New Negro,” Locke first offered a plaint for the scarcity of black culture—“The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American events, American ideas”—and then followed with a prescient warning about what might happen if the scarcity did not become a plenitude—“The only safeguard for mass relations in the future must be provided in the carefully maintained contacts of the enlightened minorities of both race groups.”
The essay was all the talk among enlightened minorities of both races, who believed in carefully maintaining contacts. But they were, as Locke acknowledged, only minorities, and too small in number in 1920 to influence the violence and injustice that lay ahead for the races.
It was partway through a later, equally controversial essay that Locke found it appropriate to quote a few lines of poetry.
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.
Yesterday, a night-gone thing
A sun-down name.
And dawn today
Broad arch above the road we came.
We march!
Langston Hughes could not have been more proud.
AMONG OTHERS, THE NATION’S LEADING philosopher, William James, brother of the novelist Henry, kept an eye on Harlem in 1920, trying to understand the significance of events beyond the obvious. He succeeded to a remarkable extent. In fact, believes Ann Douglas, it might be said that James
laid the philosophical basis for the American preference for popular culture over elite and self-consciously difficult art, for the choice of culture of politics that gave the Harlem Renaissance its point of origin. His notion of American culture of a plural and heterogeneous affair of simultaneous affects, collaboratively improvised out of what he called “the will to personate,” was a viewpoint congenial to black aims and achievements; what the syncopated black ragtime music of the 1890s and 1900s was to Euro-American classical music, the quicksilver and irregular Jamesian discourse was to traditional Western thought.
IT WAS NOT THE GREAT migration of African-Americans from Southern cotton fields to Northern industry that first improved relations between blacks and whites in the United States. It was not the integration of baseball that deserves the credit. Nor was it the Brown v. Board of Education decision or Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act a decade later. It was, rather, the black musicians and other artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance and the white audiences who paid ever more attention to what was being sung and played and written that planted the seeds, admittedly slow to grow, for the civil-rights movement—all the way back in 1920. Art was the common denominator between the races: different kinds of art, surely, but causing the same basic impulses, the same tugs of humanity between black and white, the same responses to life at its most basic, the same pumping of juices from head to toe, the same responses to the primitive and the civilized alike. The music, the novels, the poems, the essays—they were the start of it all. The Harlem Renaissance is remembered by too few Americans today, but the feelings that radiated from it are still a monument that stands in the center of our cultural square.
All that is missing is the name of Paul Robeson carved into the base.