New York is a city of culture and commerce, skyscrapers and bustling crowds, opportunity and deferred dreams. There are many ways to know this city, but being acquainted with its artists, especially if they are artists who are concerned with the complex lives of ordinary people, is particularly illuminating. Such artists help us understand New York’s particularities while also giving voice and vision to universal feelings: fear and longing, trepidation and possibility. Through them we experience the city: navigate its crowds, walk its streets, and ride its subways. We see how they relate to those who share their environment and how they address—or ignore—the social and political concerns of the day. Attending to the artists and their work helps us to remember that people are always bigger than the theories, narratives, and histories that seek to explain, define, narrate, and contain them.
The generation of artists who lived and worked in New York, especially in Harlem, during and immediately following World War II understood that people could not be contained or fully explained by academic or political theories. The stories of three such artists drive the narrative of Harlem Nocturne, an exploration of politics and culture in New York during the 1940s: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, writer Ann Petry, and composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams. Although they are not well known to contemporary readers, Primus, Petry, and Williams were among the city’s most celebrated artists in that decade. Each was inspired by her times to produce highly innovative art that communicated the aspirations of everyday people.
None of these women were native New Yorkers. Petry, a fourth-generation New Englander, was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1908. Williams was born in Atlanta in 1910 and migrated with her family to Pittsburgh when she was a girl. Primus was born in Trinidad in 1919 and came with her family to New York when she was three years old. Primus spent her teenage years in Harlem. Petry arrived there as a newlywed in 1938. Williams settled in Harlem in 1943, after over a decade on the road.
Primus and Williams would become friends and collaborators while both were working at Café Society, the politically leftist jazz club that presented some of New York’s most important and exciting talent. Surely Petry, the loner, was aware of them, but there is no evidence that she knew them personally. However, this is not a group biography. Primus, Petry, and Williams are bound together by a place and a time, and together they give us an understanding of the relationship between artistic endeavor and political aspiration. During the 1940s all three women were producing celebrated art, actively promoting progressive causes, and working to merge their political and aesthetic concerns. Each sought to expand the contours of the American ideal of democracy to include the most marginalized peoples. Each commented upon and critiqued the limited practice of American democracy. And each strove to contribute to American culture by bringing to it the perspective, history, and traditions of its citizens of African descent.
Importantly, all three women were recognized by their peers and by the arts establishment as significant artists. They also shared an extraordinary sense of themselves, a belief in their capacity and a willingness to build upon their natural talent through intense preparation, practice, and learning. In addition to being artists and activists, each was also an intellectual who critically engaged questions about her chosen art form.
The first half of the decade offered these women unprecedented opportunity. This would change by decade’s end. By that time in each woman’s experience, the range of opportunities was narrowing, the result of changing politics and shifting aesthetic sensibilities. By the early 1950s, Petry, Primus, and Williams had all left New York. Primus, who had been traveling in West Africa, returned to the United States to find herself under investigation by the FBI. Williams toured Europe and wouldn’t return for two years; it would be decades before she reached heights similar to those of the earlier years. Petry spent the rest of her life in New England. Still, they all continued to be productive artists in spite of these changes.
Although Harlem Nocturne focuses on individual women, it also seeks to place them in the context of the city and the organizations and institutions that helped to shape them and their art. The war years offered a brief period of possibility and hope for many, especially for white women and black Americans of both genders. These years tested the capacity of the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. During this time, a new group of gutsy, confident, and insistent black people joined a generation of progressive whites who were committed to a vision of their nation as a place of potential, a place capable of change and worth fighting for. Many of this generation would later be challenged and silenced by Cold War politics, or would capitulate to those politics, but not before laying the groundwork for the militant activism that exploded in later decades. Tactics that we most often associate with the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties—sit-ins, freedom rides, economic boycotts, and mass marches—originated in the forties. The first March on Washington was to have taken place in 1941, and the plans for it became the blueprint for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The forties are a period of great importance in American history and culture. In popular history, it is the time of “the Greatest Generation”—those young men who served their country in the armed services and in so doing helped to free the world for democracy. But the idolization of these young men also highlighted a central contradiction: as the “Greatest Generation” was fighting for freedom abroad, women and African Americans were still lobbying for equality at home. So for American women, it was also the era of Rosie the Riveter and the emergence of the “woman’s film,” when women’s narratives first hit the silver screen. For African Americans, it was the age of Double V—or Double Victory—where black Americans fought not only overseas for their country but also to be recognized as citizens at home (Victory at Home and Abroad). In American music, it was the time when the swing era gave way to bebop and rhythm and blues.
Throughout the 1940s, Primus, Petry, and Williams experienced a particularly fecund period of creativity, taking advantage of a brief era of openness and opportunity. Four factors contributed to creating the conditions for the social and artistic movement of which these women were a part: World War II, the Double V Campaign, the Second Great Migration of African Americans, and the Popular Front in politics, art, and culture that first coalesced during the Great Depression, but continued through the war years.
Because of the absence of men, many US women were afforded greater opportunity during the war years than they had seen in earlier times—or would see in the times immediately thereafter. This flowering of opportunity reached black women, too. Though most black women continued to work as domestic servants, some began to find work as clerks, nurses, teachers, and seamstresses. Those who entered the war industry were relegated to the most menial, labor-intensive tasks. A few black women in the skilled trades fought their way into newly integrated unions.
Petry, Primus, and Williams were profoundly influenced by the Double V Campaign. Through Double V, African Americans insisted upon their social and civil rights while at the same time committing themselves to the war effort. For black people, the war provided an opportunity to accelerate their demands for equality. As the nation fought a war against fascism, a war for democracy, it also sought to present itself as a land of equality and opportunity for all of its citizens. Black Americans highlighted the distance between this ideal of America and the reality of ongoing racial inequality, often through the black press and civil rights organizations.
The Double V Campaign was part of a larger social movement whose ultimate goal was the destruction of Jim Crow and the dismantling of the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which legalized and helped to institutionalize racial segregation in public accommodations. The movement focused on segregation in the armed services and reached its apex with the March on Washington movement in 1941, organized by civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, and political strategist and organizer Bayard Rustin. The march, which was planned in order to protest discrimination in the defense industries, had its beginnings in May of that year when Randolph issued a “Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense” on July 1, 1941. Within a month it was estimated that 100,000 protesters would attend. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to Randolph and Rustin to call the march off, hoping to avoid the embarrassment of a mass protest against racism in the midst of a war against Nazism. When they refused, he issued Executive Order 8802, establishing the President’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, which barred discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus. Only then did Randolph call off the proposed march. But even though the march never happened, Randolph and Rustin’s proposal marked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, the long, slow road to Brown v. Board of Education and beyond. For while the Double V Campaign used the war to focus on the armed services, it also concerned itself with segregation and discrimination in housing and employment.
The political activism evident in the Double V Campaign was undergirded by the tremendous growth of black urban populations during the war years. Between 1916 and 1930, approximately 1.5 million African Americans moved to northern cities in response to the call for industrial laborers. The Second Great Migration was larger and more sustained than the first. Between 1940 and 1970, over 5 million black southerners migrated north and west. By the end of World War II, the majority of African Americans were urban, and they were transforming the face of American cities politically, economically, and culturally. The migrants were often the subjects of Primus’s and Petry’s art, and they provided a significant portion of Primus’s and Williams’s audiences. Each woman aligned her art with the aspirations of migrants: the desire for equal citizenship, for adequate housing, for access to educational and economic opportunity, and for freedom from racial violence and police brutality.
Finally, the political and aesthetic sensibilities of these women were encouraged by a number of left-leaning organizations and institutions. The Popular Front was a program initiated by the Communist Party in response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. At its Seventh World Congress in 1935, the Comintern—the international association of Communist organizations created by V. I. Lenin in 1917—replaced its call for a proletariat-led global revolution with a call for a “broad People’s Front” coalition of liberals, radicals, trade unionists, farmers, socialists, blacks and whites, anti colonialists and colonized. In an effort to unify this broad constituency, the party simultaneously inaugurated a campaign to promote what it had come to call “people’s culture.” On February 14, 1936, a coalition of black groups met in Chicago at the National Negro Congress and vowed to support black artists who challenged stereotypical representations of black people. This effort, called the Negro People’s Front, included a number of organizations, individuals, and institutions from diverse ideological beliefs: churches, civil rights organizations, black women’s clubs, fraternal groups, politicians, students, union members, and the black press. Although 1939 marked the official end of the party’s Popular Front period, the idea of a Popular Front would continue throughout the war years. Without Popular Front venues like the Café Society, or publications such as PM, a leftist newspaper, it is doubtful that Petry, Primus, and Williams could have met with such success. Popular Front initiatives focused on culture as an especially important forum for educating and mobilizing audiences in support of an antifascist agenda.1
Ann Petry and Mary Lou Williams were part of what one of America’s most important philosophers, Richard Rorty, identified as the Reformist Left, though he did not name either of them as being members of that group. According to Rorty, the Reformist Left included a diverse array of Americans who fought within the framework of constitutional democracy to ensure the rights of the nation’s weakest citizens. Such activists represented a broad range of progressive stances, from those calling themselves communists and socialists to those who eschewed political labels altogether.2
Borrowing a phrase from writer James Baldwin, Rorty used the term “achieving our country” to explain the work of the Reformist Left. This group of progressive intellectuals, artists, and activists sought to make the nation live up to its founding principles of liberty and equality for all. While they did not forget the brutality of our nation’s past, they maintained that it was a continuous work in progress, one that had demonstrated and would continue to demonstrate its ability to become a better place.3
The three women of Harlem Nocturne sought to achieve America by directly confronting its legacy of white supremacy. Primus, Petry, and Williams consistently confronted the darkness of our nation’s soul. They were critical of white supremacy and the excesses of American capitalism. Yet, their art and their activism also denoted a firm belief in the transformative nature of social change. They were agents, not spectators. They advocated for access to education, jobs, and adequate food and shelter. They were concerned with both racial and economic equality. They walked the streets of Harlem during the time that a young Baldwin walked those same streets. They saw what he saw, were angered and inspired by the people, forces, and sensibilities that would give rise to his own sense of rage, purpose, and justice. As with Baldwin, these women were not willing to forget or wholly forgive America’s historical transgressions, but they were devoted to helping this nation “achieve” itself. They did so in a variety of ways and in a variety of contexts.4
The Communist Party was one venue through which some Americans tried to help their nation “achieve” itself. Pearl Primus was a member of the Communist Party. Of the three women, she was the most articulate about the struggle to make the United States a true democracy; for her the racial problem in America was a problem of democracy. All three women were politically engaged, though to differing degrees and along different points of the spectrum. Primus was the most politically radical of the three, sitting at the nexus of the Reformist Left and the Black Radical tradition. Although she worked for change within US borders, her concerns were always transnational, extending beyond the boundaries of the United States to include Africa and the Caribbean.5
Williams was rumored to have hosted Communist meetings in her apartment; she often offered her home up as a kind of intellectual and artistic salon to the people and causes she loved, admired, and supported. She was never a member of the party. Williams, long before her conversion to Catholicism, was instead largely driven by spiritual concerns that informed her strong sense of social justice. Petry was an editor of the People’s Voice, and in that position she was surrounded by Communists. While she had respect and admiration for individual Communists, she protested any attempt to categorize her as such. She discounted the centrality of Marx to her own thinking, noting instead that biblical ethics informed her sensibilities. Whereas Williams sincerely sought meaning in her sense of spirituality, Petry may have been seeking to demonstrate the way her political views were steeped in values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that preceded Marxism, and would have distanced herself from the kind of radical politics that eventually fell out of favor.
Although each of these women lived in Harlem at some point during the period under consideration, their work took them throughout the entire city and ultimately throughout the nation and the world. By following them as they navigate Manhattan, we acquire a unique vision of the city during and immediately following World War II. New York sits at the center of this narrative. The city enabled and influenced their creativity. It facilitated their emergence as significant artists. It provided the social, cultural, and political context that laid the foundation for their careers.
In the 1940s, Harlem and New York were vibrant, glamorous, and exciting places, brimming with creativity. A new generation of artists ushered the transition from swing to bebop, tended the birth of rhythm and blues, questioned the continuing significance of social realism, experimented with abstraction, and sought a seat at the center of the national narrative. The forties differed from the better-known Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in a number of important ways. Although the Harlem Renaissance produced Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Bessie Smith, and Josephine Baker, among others, each of these women found her voice—or her stride—in an earlier time, and black women never received as much attention and acclaim for their work as they did during World War II. Furthermore, many of the women who emerged during the forties more explicitly linked their art and their public profile to a political movement.
Other women’s voices contributed to this generational shift as well: the poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker, entertainers Hazel Scott and Lena Horne, and dancer Katherine Dunham, for instance. Lady Day was the Queen of 52nd Street, and Ella Fitzgerald was “Flying Home.” Sarah Vaughan, first hired as a pianist for Earl “Fatha” Hines, soon left to join Billy Eckstine’s band with Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey, Lucky Thompson, Gene Ammons, and Dexter Gordon. And then there was the new queen of the blues, queen of the black jukebox, Miss D herself—Dinah Washington, whose Chicago-inflected, Harlem-based sound reflected the national postwar optimism and a newfound African American confidence. Through their art, Ann Petry, Mary Lou Williams, and Pearl Primus documented these times and in so doing helped to shape the history of a city and its people by presenting perspectives that were absent from official records.
New York fed each woman’s art, providing inspiration, material, and venues for performance and publication. However, the city was no utopia; nor was it free of obstacles to black freedom. As late as 1940, 90 percent of New York State’s defense plants refused to hire black workers. The nearby Fox Hills Army Camp in Staten Island was a segregated military base. Furthermore, a number of restaurants and bars did not serve black patrons. Though subjected to these laws and customs, none of the women examined in this book lived racially segregated lives. Each claimed black and white friends, and Primus and Williams especially operated in racially integrated milieus. The tension between these restrictions and the sense of possibility with which they lived their own lives made them acutely aware of and committed to fighting against racial injustice.6
Despite the obstacles they endured in New York, these women were prominent artists. Through major works they also gave back to the city that enabled their art. Pearl Primus danced for soldiers and students. She became a favorite of New York Times dance critic John Martin, who covered all of her performances and, as a respected arbiter of taste, helped to cement her reputation. Among black dancers, only Katherine Dunham rivaled her. Ann Petry sits alongside Richard Wright and before Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; through her work she presented complex, engaging, working-class black women in American fiction for the first time. She provided one of the first fully imagined portrayals of working-class Harlem in her 1946 novel The Street, which became the first book by a black woman to sell 1 million copies; it was widely reviewed in the black, left, and mainstream press. Mary Lou Williams became a major figure in the birth of bebop and challenged notions that women contributed to jazz only as vocalists. She was not simply the nurturing “godmother” of younger musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. In 1945, she had her own weekly radio broadcast, Mary Lou Williams’s Piano Workshop, and premiered her Zodiac Suite to diverse audiences at two of the city’s most prestigious venues: Town Hall and Carnegie Hall.
All three women volunteered for causes they believed in, organized people and events, and taught younger artists. Their art was driven by a fierce passion for social justice and an insistent drive to create. Petry, Primus, and Williams were also included in anthologies and performances with some of the brightest talents of their generation. Their names frequently appeared in the press, and they were well known to culturally literate New York audiences.
Who were these women? Where did they acquire their confidence and their ambition? As was the case with many other American women, their youth, their marital statuses, and the absence of children gave them the freedom to focus on their careers. Petry and Williams were both in their early thirties during the war years, while Primus was in her early twenties. During this time none of them had children. Both Petry and Primus later became mothers, with one child each, but Williams remained childless throughout her life. Petry was married, but her husband was away at war for most of the time under consideration. Williams was separated from her second husband, the trumpeter Harold Baker, and Primus would not marry until the end of the decade.
Each of these women was highly intellectual and had prepared well for the path she pursued. Petry and Primus had gone to college. Williams, a child prodigy who began playing piano by ear at age two, went on the road before completing her formal education, but as the pianist, composer, and arranger for one of the most famous swing bands of the day (the Andy Kirk Orchestra), she was highly trained in her medium. All were avid readers and deep thinkers. In many ways each benefited from the struggles to open doors of opportunity for women and African Americans that had taken place during the earlier decades of the twentieth century. They all were cosmopolitan sophisticates, and before the end of their lives, they all had international reputations (Williams and Primus even lived outside of the United States for extended periods). They were recognized for their contributions to the arts. Unlike so many women artists, none of them died unappreciated and unknown. This is largely due to the efforts of members of younger generations, themselves inspired by the social movements of the sixties, especially the Black Power and Black Arts movements and the feminist movement, who, in their own search for foremothers, rediscovered these three pioneers.
By the early 1950s, the window of opportunity that had given these women the freedom to flourish had been shut, as Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor took aim at the institutions that had supported them. Faced with these new limitations, each woman eventually left New York. Petry returned to Old Saybrook with her husband to raise her daughter. She would write two more novels, a number of short stories, and several books for children and young adults. Mary Lou Williams went to Paris, where, following a religious conversion, she gave up playing and composing music until she was encouraged to do these things again by her spiritual mentors. She returned to New York in the mid-1950s and eventually experienced a career resurgence in the 1970s. Williams continued to be involved with the most innovative forms of music until her death. With the rise of McCarthyism, Primus came under governmental surveillance. A grant from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation allowed her to travel to West Africa, and for the rest of her career she devoted her efforts to bringing West African dance to the world stage.
While the anti-Communist furor did not target Petry or Williams, by targeting the institutions, venues, and individuals supporting their art, it nevertheless helped to destroy the milieu that nurtured them. However, during the war years and the years immediately thereafter, each woman produced vibrant, creative, and important work that spoke to the centrality of humanity, documented its suffering and striving, and insisted upon a world where both justice and beauty could thrive.
Herein, these three women’s stories are told in terms of “movement” in its multiple meanings. Literally, it means a change in position or place, as in the movement of those black and Latino people who were migrating to New York in record numbers. “Movement” is also an important concept in the arts, one that applies to diverse art forms. In dance it may simply mean a change of position or posture, a step or a figure. In music it signifies the transition from note to note or passage to passage, or it may refer to a division of a longer work. In literature, “movement” signals the progression or development of a plot or a story line. Finally, there is the “political movement,” defined as a series of actions on the part of a group of people working toward a common goal. Black people were on the move in the 1940s, migrating, marching, protesting, walking, dancing. These artists sought to imbue their work with this sense of mobility as well.
Harlem Nocturne moves through time by opening each chapter with an event from the year 1943 and following each woman through decade’s end. The year 1943 was pivotal for many reasons in the lives of the women and in the life of the nation. Each woman experienced a major event that year: Primus appeared before thousands of spectators at the Negro Freedom Rally, Petry lived through the Harlem Riots, and Williams moved to New York. It was also the year that saw race riots in Los Angeles; Beaumont, Texas; and Detroit and coincided with the height of World War II. Each chapter focuses on one representative work of the period and closes with the artist’s departure from New York, as late as 1952 when Williams set sail for Europe. Throughout, we walk, ride the subway, and dance with them.
And yet, oddly enough, as much as the times and the women themselves experienced multiple meanings of movement, there was also a sense of confinement that was evident in their lives and their work. Primus and Petry both confronted and challenged the debilitating limits of Jim Crow. The social movements of which they were a part faded away. In the case of Primus, she was constantly under surveillance, and her passport was revoked, thus severely limiting her own freedom of movement. This was a central paradox of the times: confinement within mobility—a frustrating tension that characterizes the narrative of black life in the United States.
Nonetheless, the benefit of hindsight shows us that though slow and incremental, the change for which Primus, Petry, and Williams fought and yearned continued to unfold. Hindsight also teaches us of the continued need for the kind of commitment, dedication, and discipline demonstrated by the women of Harlem Nocturne.