Posted: Mon 13 Jun 2005 16:57 Post subject: the Harlem Renaissance: Architect Julian Abele *
The Art of Romare Bearden
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Romare Bearden (1911 - 1988) was one of America's great artistic innovators, blazing his own trail in a time of turbulent cultural change. While his work offers an invaluable view of mid-twentieth-century African-American experience, it has also come to occupy a significant place in the wider history of American art and speaks to the universal concerns of artists everywhere.
Born in North Carolina and coming of age in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, Bearden was surrounded from an early age by writers, musicians, artists, and intellectuals who presided over an extraordinary period of creative ferment. With keen artistic sensitivity, the insight of a philosopher, and the courage of a pioneer, Bearden absorbed images and ideas that he later wove into his colorful, complex, and imaginative art. His work is infused with the sounds, intervals, and rhythms of jazz and the blues; the majesty and mystery of popular religion and obscure ritual; echoes of European old master painting and African art; and the atmosphere of the places he loved. The Art of Romare Bearden curator Ruth Fine writes of the artist's achievement: "One great legacy of Bearden's art is its insight that what we share as a global community is equal in both interest and importance to what makes each of us unique. He did this by embracing themes and practices from diverse times and places and imbuing them with a character and physical presence that is distinctively his own. In the materiality of his expansive expression, method and message become one."
The thirty works presented on the Jerry Jazz Musician on line exhibit -- published with the cooperation of the National Gallery of Art -- include many selections from his half-century of work that reveal the experimental evolution of his collages, but also examples of his paintings in oil and gouache; watercolors and drawings; photographs, monotypes, and edition prints; designs for record album covers, book illustrations, and the ballet; and the artist's only known sculpture.
Bearden's probing curiosity and the depth of his humanistic concerns are reflected in the subjects of his art, from quotidian experiences in the northern and southern United States and the Caribbean, to classic biblical and literary motifs. While reflecting the African-American community into which he was born, the universality of Bearden's visual concerns offers a complex world-overview, fraught with contradictions and problems yet filled with hope and beauty.
- Earl A. Powell III, Director, National Gallery of Art
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The complex and colorful art of Romare Bearden (1911-1988) is autobiographical and metaphorical. Rooted in the history of western, African, and Asian art, as well as in literature and music, Bearden found his primary motifs in personal experiences and the life of his community. Born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Bearden moved as a toddler to New York City, participating with his parents in the Great Migration of African Americans to states both north and west. The Bearden home became a meeting place for Harlem Renaissance luminaries including writer Langston Hughes, painter Aaron Douglas, and musician Duke Ellington, all of whom undoubtedly would have stimulated the young artist's imagination.
Bearden maintained a lifelong interest in science and mathematics, but his formal education was mainly in art, at Boston University and New York University, from which he graduated in 1935 with a degree in education. He also studied at New York's Art Students League with the German immigrant painter George Grosz, who reinforced Bearden's interest in art as a conveyor of humanistic and political concerns. In the mid-1930s Bearden published dozens of political cartoons in journals and newspapers, including the Baltimore based Afro-American, but by the end of the decade he had shifted the emphasis of his work to painting.
During a career lasting almost half a century Bearden produced approximately two thousand works. Best known for his collages, he also completed paintings, drawings, monotypes, and edition prints; murals for public spaces, record album jackets, magazine and book illustrations, and costume and set designs for theater and ballet.
Although Bearden left Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, as a small child, he returned often through the mid-1920s to visit his paternal great-grandparents who were property owners in Charlotte. He also traveled to Pittsburgh where he attended his last two years of high school, living from 1927 through 1929 with his maternal grandparents who ran a boardinghouse for steel mill workers from the south. These two cities as well as New York offered Bearden countless motifs that were the basis for much of his art throughout his career.
From shortly after he graduated from college through the late 1960s Bearden maintained a full-time job with New York's Department of Social Services, specializing in cases within the gypsy community. Work in his studio was concentrated at night and on weekends. Nevertheless, starting in 1940 Bearden's art was represented in solo and group exhibitions, both in Harlem and downtown (below 110th Street), and it consistently received enthusiastic reviews. Religious rituals and literature played an important role in Bearden's life and art. So did music--from sights and sounds of folk musicians gathered for "the Saturday night function" in the south, to the hot tempo of Harlem clubs and dance halls.
In the early 1950s Bearden devoted considerable attention to song writing, and several of his collaborations were published as sheet music, among the most famous of which is “Seabreeze,” recorded by Billy Eckstine. In addition, throughout his life Bearden wrote essays on social and art-historical subjects, as well as three full-length books coauthored with friends: The Painter's Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting (1969) with painter Carl Holty; and Six Black Masters of American Art (1972) and A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (posthumously, 1993), both with journalist Harry Henderson.
In 1973 Bearden and his wife Nanette built a second home on her family's land in St. Martin. They subsequently spent several months in the Caribbean each year. These sojourns suggested new subjects, including festivals celebrated and rituals practiced on the island.
Posted: Mon 20 Jun 2005 15:05 Post subject: the Harlem Renaissance During the Jazz Age
The Harlem Renaissance During the Jazz Age
Overview
It was March 21, 1924. Charles S. Johnson, the influential African descendant activist, scholar, and editor of the Urban League's monthly magazine, Opportunity, had invited a group of people to dinner. They included nearly a dozen young African descendant writers and intellectuals whom Johnson hoped to nudge toward accomplishments in the arts. Leading white literary figures like Eugene O'Neill, Carl Van Doren, and an editor from Harper & Brothers publishers were there too. Speaking that evening, well-known representative of the older school of African American arts and letters, acknowledged that his generation had been denied an authentic literary voice. Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, observed: "The Negroes of the country [now] are in a remarkable strategic position with reference to the new literary age which seems to be impending. What American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, music, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods. If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are." The was poised to begin.
The Awakening
The Harlem Renaissance was a time of heightened creativity in African American literature, art, and music. Poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, and musicians flocked to Harlem, a district of New York City. Many arrived with barely a dime in their pockets, without a job, and with nowhere to stay, "but filled with hope." In the 1920s, Harlem was a place where "almost everything seemed possible."
This atmosphere of optimism and artistic vitality was tied in part to social and economic conditions in the years following World War I. After the war, a deepening sense of unity grew among African Americans, as did an increasing pride in their heritage. Along with this, African Americans shared in a limited way in the economic prosperity of the 1920s. For the first time in American history, a number of African Americans had a surplus of money and energy. And a significant few, especially in Harlem, began to channel these resources into promoting African American culture.
Changing white attitudes were awakening hope in African Americans that they might finally achieve equality in American society. In the 1920s, African American life and culture suddenly became fashionable. Some white Americans were discarding their old stereotypes of African Americans and were beginning to regard them instead as symbols of a natural life free of social restraints. Many whites, following the fashionable thinking of the time, began to reason that in order to be fully human, one had to regain the "primitive simplicity" of African American people.
Most African Americans found this new stereotype as offensive as the old one. But some also recognized that they could use it to their advantage. As literary critic Benjamin Brawley commented, "We have a tremendous opportunity to boost the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], letters, and art, and anything else that calls attention to our development along higher lines."
Encouraging African American Artists
were treated in Harlem with overwhelming encouragement and support. Blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters attracted large crowds. Often, four thousand people could be found "stompin' at the Savoy," a club where jazz great Fletcher Henderson performed with his orchestra. Wealthy Harlem hostesses vied with mid-town Manhattan socialites for the brightest new stars in Harlem. It was not unusual to find editors from New York's largest publishing houses discussing projects with African American literary greats like or at these parties. In addition, African American artists seemed to be attracting financial patronage–a previously unheard-of phenomenon in the American art scene.
But the strongest encouragement to African American artists came from within the African American community. The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, and the Urban League's Opportunity acted as the voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Most of the poets and other writers and intellectuals of the Renaissance were first published in these two periodicals. Du Bois, the force behind The Crisis, and Johnson, editor of Opportunity, both considered it of prime importance to nurture and promote the movement. It was the new African American hope for equal rights.
Writing a New Identity
The voices and visions of Harlem's artists expressed the emerging African American consciousness. Poets such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay and authors such as Jean Toomer sought to present an authentic portrayal of the African American experience. Often this reality was grim: one McKay verse spoke of "The ugly corners of the Negro belt; / The miseries and pains of these harsh days." But it was also beautiful and deeply spiritual, as in Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers": "I've known rivers: / I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins." The originality of Harlem's new literature inspired a few critics to declare that the African American voice was the only truly American voice.
Posted: Tue 12 Jul 2005 14:38 Post subject: Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
For many, the literary renaissance in Harlem began in 1923 with the publication of Toomer's Cane. It was hailed as a masterpiece, as a fresh voice from a very promising young writer. This publication also brought Toomer in contact with other black intellectuals. However, his spiritual quest took him away from race issues; he studied and converted to the spiritual thought of the Russian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff and spent his time lecturing on mystical doctrines. His racial ambivalence and involvement with mysticism could explain his inability to recapture the promise of Cane.
Primary Works
Cane, 1923; Essentials, 1931; An Interpretation of Friends Worship, 1947; The Flavor of Man, 1949; The Wayward and the Seeking (collection), 1980.
2. Cane
His southern sojourn as a school principal in Sparta, Georgia (1922) found in him the belief that he had located his ancestral roots (from Toomer's experience and influence, Sparta was popularized as an ancestral root source by many of the Harlem Renaissance intelligensia; e.g., Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes both traveled there in the summer of 1927). Thus, he began to write poems, stories, and sketches, especially about southern women whose stretch towards self-realization forced them into conflict with American societal moral attitudes. Upon return to Washington, he repeated his efforts, this time focusing on inhibited Negroes in the North. He made friends with Waldo Frank published in the most important journals. The result, for Toomer, was a book, Cane, published in 1923 and included many of the aforementioned short stories and poems.
Cane was published in 1923 together with Waldo Frank's Holiday. Frank was a mentor for Toomer, reading much of his work before publication. Toomer edited the manuscript of and actually wrote all the dialogue in Holiday. The book consists of three parts:
Part one of Cane weaves six stories with twelve poems using nature to create portraits of six southern women. "Karintha", "Becky", "Carma", and "Fern" shows the richness of a passing life, while ghost, full moons, and fire in "Esther" and "Blood-Burning Moon" represents the dissolution of life.
Part two comprises seven prose sketches and five poems. They are set in urban Washington, DC and Chicago. The black people of this section, descendants and survivors of the black southern culture and the post-civil war world, are seeking a new life and hope in the urban north.
In Part three, the longest section, "Kabnis," brings the themes of both sections one and two together. The setting shifts back to the rural South and dramatizes a portrait of an educated confused black, an artist struggling to represent the parting soul of the African-American past in art.
"Jean Toomer, ...artist of the race, ...can write about the Negro without the surrender or the compromise of the artist's vision.... He would write just as well ... about the peasants of Russia or ... Ireland, had experience given him the knowledge of their existence. Cane is a book of gold...and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature."
Thus, Cane forecast, by several years, what is now called the Harlem Renaissance and inspired an entire generation of African American writers, beginning with his contemporaries Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neal Hurston.
4. in Harlem
In the spring of 1925, he set up, with Orage's permission, a Gurdjieff group in Harlem. Toomer's appearance and his new attitude toward life and art, were treated with curiosity if not awe. Reader remember, Cane is one of the most important and seminal works in the African American canon. It is as if Toomer calculated his employment of African-American art forms, and the context of thought and action. His, in Cane , patient evocation, of other African-American works, and intense identitification with and portrayal of African-American history and experience. What Negro at that time, and in some cases now, could not know the intense bigotry experienced in Becky ? How many of us males have known a Fern ? Thus, in a measured way, the older generation of African-Americans such as W.E.B. duBois and Alaine Locke, praised Toomer for realizing a new way for the treatment of African-American subjects.
In 1925 Jean Toomer's story Easter appeared in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's avante garde literary magazine Little Review, though it received little attention inspite of Gorham Munson's assertion that it surpassed Cane. {note that Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and many others also published in the Little Review and James Joyce's Ulysses was first serialized there.}
For nearly one year, under the auspices of Orage, Toomer lectured on Gurdjieff's methods in Harlem. Toomer's appearance and his new attitude toward life and art, were treated with curiosity if not awe. The lectures attracted stars of the Harlem Renaissance including writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, Harold Jackman (a teacher and activist), Rudolph Fisher, Dorothy West (writer), Dorothy Peterson (teacher and arts patron who remained close to Toomer for 10 years), and Aaron Douglass (the painter). Langston Hughes writes in his Gurdjieff in Harlem (a chapter in The Big Sea), "He had an evolved soul and that soul made him feel that nothing mattered, not even writing."
Harlem wasn't the only site of Toomer's lectures in New York. His sharp mind, lecturing abilities, and, perhaps, good looks, brought wealthy adherents to the Gurdjieff system, many of whom were female. In the summer of 1926, Jean Toomer returned to Gurdjieff and Fountainebleau, this time in the company of longtime lover Margie Naumberg Frank.
In April of 1926, awaiting a subway train, Toomer has an out-of-body experience. It is described later in an autobiography From Exile into Being :
"I was startled by an uncommon inward event. It was as though I had been touched from within in an extraordinary quiet way that stilled my functioning and momentarily suspended me between what had been and what was to come... My body and my life were in the power of a Power....I was losing my life."
June 1926, the affair between Toomer and Waldo Frank's wife Margaret Naumberg ends. She had financed his spiritual quest. He would find others. As Gorham Munson says, "all his life he was successful in getting people to support him." Together, Toomer and Munson travel to France and are admitted into the Prieuré.
Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. One half of my family is definitely colored.... And, I alone, as far as I know, have striven for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. -Jean Toomer 1922
grandfather Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback - "Negro" Lieutenant Governor and later Acting Governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction
"Whenever the desire to know something about myself comes from a sincere source, I am always glad to meet it. For in telling other folks I invariably tell my own self something. My family is from the South. My mother's father, P B. S. Pinchback, born in Macon, Georgia, left home as a boy and worked on the Mississippi River steamers. At the beginning of the Civil War he organized and was commissioned captain of a Negro company in New Orleans. Later, in the days of Reconstruction, he utilized the Negro's vote and won offices for himself, the highest being that of lieutenant, and then acting governor of Louisiana. When his heyday was over, he left the old hunting grounds and came to Washington. Here I was born. My own father likewise came from Middle Georgia. Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of these, my position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying a single element in me, with no desire to subdue one to the other, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony. Within the last two or three years, however, my growing need for artistic expression has pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. And as my powers of receptivity increased, I found myself loving it in a way that I could never love the other. It has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent I may contain within me. A visit to Georgia last fall was the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done. I heard folk-songs come from the lips of Negro peasants. I saw the rich dusk beauty that I had heard many false accents about, and of which till then, I was somewhat skeptical. And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly to life and responded to them. Now, I cannot conceive of myself as aloof and separated. My point of view has not changed; it has deepened, it has widened. Personally, my life has been torturous and dispersed. The comparative wealth which my family once had, has now dwindled away to almost nothing. We, or rather, they, are in the unhappy position of the lowered middle-class. There seems to have been no shop-keepers or shysters among us. I have lived by turn in Washington, New York, Chicago, Sparta, Georgia, and several smaller towns. I have worked, it seems to me, at everything: selling papers, delivery boy, soda clerk, salesman, shipyard worker, librarian-assistant, physical director, school teacher, grocery clerk, and God knows what all. Neither the universities of Wisconsin or New York gave me what I wanted, so I quit them. Just how I finally found my stride in writing, is difficult to lay hold of. It has been pushing through for the past four years. For two years, now, I have been in solitude here in Washington. It may be begging hunger to say that I am staking my living on my work. So be it. The mould is cast, and I cannot turn back even if I would."
Jean Toomer (26 Dec. 1894-30 Mar. 1967), writer and philosopher, was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., the son of Nathan Toomer, a planter, and Nina Pinchback, the daughter of Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction and the first U.S. governor of African-American descent. Like his parents, Toomer could easily pass for white, his heritage comprising several European and African bloodlines. Indeed, throughout his formative years until age eighteen, he lived alternately as white and as African American. In 1895 Nathan Toomer abandoned his family, forcing Nina and her son to live with her somewhat tyrannical father in Washington. P. B. S. Pinchback agreed to support them only under the condition that the boy’s name be changed. Though his name was not legally altered, his grandparents thereafter called him Eugene Pinchback; in school he was known as Eugene Pinchback Toomer. (Later when he began writing, he shortened his name to Jean Toomer.) According to Toomer's biographers Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge, "For Jean to grow up in a house with a grandfather who had been the only black governor of any state in the Union ... could not help shaping the perceptions and attitudes of the fatherless boy." In Washington Toomer lived in a white neighborhood but attended the all-black Garnet Elementary School.
When his mother remarried in 1906, the family moved to New Rochelle, New York, where they lived in a white neighborhood and he attended an all-white school. Toomer returned to Washington in 1909, following the death of his mother, and attended the all-black Dunbar High School. After graduation in 1914, he renounced racial classifications and sought to live not as a member of any racial group but as an American.
For the next three Years Toomer studied agriculture, physical education, psychology, and literature at several colleges and universities, including the University of Wisconsin (1914-1915), the Massachusetts College of Agriculture (1915), the American College of Physical Training at Chicago (1916), the University of Chicago (1916), the City College of New York (1917), and New York University (1917), although he never took a degree. It was during these years, however, that he was preparing to be a writer, by attending off-campus lectures on naturalism, atheism, psychology, evolution and socialism and by reading numerous philosophical and literary works, such as those by William Shakespeare, George Santayana, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Sherwood Anderson, Leo Tolstoy, and all the major American poets, especially the imagists. In 1920 he met Waldo Frank, who introduced him to several literary circles and later wrote an extremely laudatory introduction to the first edition of Cane. Toomer eventually became friends with many literary critics and luminaries, including Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, and Alfred Stieglitz.
Between 1918 and 1923 Toomer wrote the short stories "Bona and Paul" and "Withered Skin of Berries," the plays Natalie Mann (1922) and Balo (1922), and many poems such as "Five Vignettes," "Skyline," "Poem in C," "Gum," "Banking Coal," and "The First American." The urtext for both "Brown River Smile" and The Blue Meridian, "The First American" was a lyrical expression of his racial and democratic idealism.
I wrote a poem called "The First American," the idea of which was that here in America we are in the process of forming a new race, that I was one of the first conscious members of this race ... I had seen the divisions, the separatisms and antagonisms ... [yet] a new type of man was arising in this country--not European, not African, not Asiatic--but American. And in this American I saw the divisions mended, the differences reconciled--saw that (1) we would in truth be a united people existing in the United States, saw that (2) we would in truth be once again members of a united human race. (Turner, ed., The Wayward and the Seeking, p. 121)
Formally introduced to the philosophy of idealism in 1920, for more, than eight months Toomer abandoned writing to study Eastern philosophy.
I came into contact with an entirely new body of ideas. Buddhist philosophy, the Eastern teachings, occultism, theosophy ... These ideas challenged and stimulated me. Despite my literary purpose, I was compelled to know something more about them ... and my religious nature, given a cruel blow by Clarence Darrow and naturalism, but not, as I found, destroyed by them--my religious nature which had been sleeping was vigorously aroused. (Turner, ed., p. 119)
As an idealist philosopher, Toomer proposed the power of the mind to reconcile and transcend the self and the world. "In life nothing is only physical," he maintained, "there is also the symbolical. White and Black. West and East. North and South. Light and Darkness. In general, the great contrasts. The pairs of opposites. And I, together with all other I's, am the reconciler" (Turner, ed., p. 54). Based on his studies in orientalism, Toomer formulated theories of being and consciousness, and when he returned to writing in 1921 he sought literary equivalents for his idealism.
Symbolist and imagist aesthetics provided those equivalents, derived from both French and American sources. Of the French symbolists Toomer's mentor was Baudelaire, whose Petits poémes en prose provided models for the prose poems and lyrical sketches in Cane; of the American symbolists it was Walt Whitman, whose democratic idealism and mystical conception of the self appealed to Toomer's idealist imagination. Symbolist idealism also figures prominently in his early fascination with imagism. In his attempts to fashion experience as a mystical moment of vision, and to create the immediacy and presentness of portraiture of literature, he found imagist aesthetics to be compatible with his own. "Their insistence on fresh vision and on the perfect clean economical line was just what I had been looking for. I began feeling that I had in my hands the tools for my own creation" (Turner, ed., p. 120). Imagist poetics thus provided for him the ideal medium to make the reader "see," almost in mystical fashion, the distilled essence of an insight or experience.
In September 1921 Toomer traveled to Sparta, Georgia, where for two months he served as interim principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute. Living as an African American in the rural South stimulated his racial consciousness, and he used this newly found identification with his racial past to create the poems, prose poems, lyrical narratives, and short stories in his lyrical novel and master-work, Cane (1923). While many critics have credited this work with ushering in the Harlem Renaissance, noting the book's representations of African-American characters and culture, others have located it within the Lost Generation, owing to its literary experimentation, its romantic primitivism, and its critiques of postwar values. Part one of the book presents portraits of six women of the rural South, in a style reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's gallery of grosteques in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Part two shifts to the urban North, using paysage moralisé settings in Washington, D.C., and Chicago to depict the modern world as a postwar wasteland. In Part three, "Kabnis," the setting shifts back to the rural South and dramatizes a portrait of an artist struggling to represent the parting soul of the African-American past in art. Robert Bone has noted that Toomer participated on equal terms with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and T S. Eliot in the creation of a new, modern idiom during the 1920s, and he ranks Cane with Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) in the tradition of the African-American novel.
Shortly after the publication of Cane, Toomer began studying the austere idealism of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and in 1924, 1926, and 1927 he attended the Gurdjieff Institute for Harmonious Development at the Château de Prieuré in Fontainebleau, France. Until 1935, when he distanced himself from Gurdjieff, Toomer preached the gospel of higher consciousness and spiritual self-development. Yet he continued his profession as a writer. Indeed, the years between 1923 and 1935 were the most productive of Toomer's literary career.
In 1925 the symbolist sketch "Easter" was published in Little Review, and in 1927 Toomer completed a burlesque novel, The Gallonwerps, and a modern morality play, The Sacred Factory. In 1928 he wrote the short story "Skillful Dr. Coville" while "Winter on Earth," another short story, was published in The Second American Caravan and the short story "Mr. Costyve Duditch" in the Dial. In 1929 he collected ten of his stories in a volume titled "Lost and Dominant" (unpublished), while the poems "White Arrow" and "Reflections" appeared in the Dial. In that same year, "Lettre D' Amérique," an essay on the election of Herbert Hoover as president and its impact on American values, was published (in French) in Bifur while his essay "Race Problems and Modern Society" appeared in Problems of Civilization. Also in 1929 York Beach, his psychological novella set in Maine, was published in The New American Caravan. In 1931 Toomer completed his long poem The Blue Meridian, a lyrical affirmation of democratic idealism modeled after Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Essentials, a book of aphorisms.
Also in 1931 Toomer conducted his highly publicized Gurdjieffian "Cottage Experiment," a summer workshop in psychological and social development held in Portage, Wisconsin. During this workshop he met and married Margery Latimer, author of This Is My Body (1930) and Guardian Angel and Other Stories (1932). They lived in an artist colony in Carmel, California. Toomer recounts this time in their lives, and the adverse publicity surrounding their interracial marriage, in his unpublished novel "Caromb" (1932). In August 1932 Latimer died while giving birth to their daughter, Margery. During this year the poem "Brown River Smile" appeared in Pagany, and the poem "As the Eagle Soars" was published in the Crisis. In 1933 he wrote a closet drama on modernism and dehumanization, Man's Home Companion. In 1934 Toomer published an essay on spiritual development, "A New Force for Cooperation," in Adelphi and an essay tribute to Stieglitz titled "The Hill" in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. In 1934 he married Marjorie Content, daughter of a Wall Street banker, and they remained together until his death. Because both of Toomer's marriages were interracial, they were highly publicized.
In 1935 Toomer dissociated himself from Gurdjieff after they argued over misappropriated funds. He and his wife then spent the summer in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote A Drama of the Southwest, a play that captures his mystical identification with the area's landscape in imagery reminiscent of Cane. Although he and Gurdjieff were estranged, Toomer never repudiated Gurdjieffian philosophy. When the Toomers moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1936, he established a Gurdjieff center, led groups modeled on Gurdjieff's teachings, and gave lectures on spiritual self-development. During this time he published three monographs called "psychologic papers," Living Is Developing (1937), Work-Ideas I (1937), and Roads, People, and Principles (1939).
In 1938 Toomer began attending meetings of the Religious Society of Friends in Doylestown. Throughout his apprenticeship with this group, he immersed himself in Quaker religious philosophy and wrote numerous essays on George Fox and Quakerism. Still engaged in his perennial quest for new forms of higher consciousness, Toomer toured India between August and December 1939. During these months he began writing The Angel Begori, a novel that allegorizes a quest for spiritual enlightenment, and The Colombo-Madras Rail, a one-act play dramatizing poverty and the decline of spiritual authority in India. Near the end of his tour, however, he admitted that this new quest for spiritual enlightenment was unsuccessful. "A life of withdrawal from the world as I have seen it lived in India is not the life for me," he declared (Kerman and Eldridge, p. 245).
When Toomer returned to Doylestown in January 1940, believing that Quakerism provided a new and radical venture into the religious idealism of "Inner Light" consciousness, he joined the Society of Friends.
The message of Quakerism is that there is that of God in every man. Indeed the message is the immediacy of God ... Quakerism says here is a way to God. Here are practices that will lead you to discover God in yourself and your fellowman. Here are means and methods that enable you to recover the indwelling divinity and realize you are part of it ... Quakerism is not unique in proclaiming that something of God is in man. Hinduism proclaims the same ... [and] Catholic mystics made the same discovery. (Toomer, "The Message of Quakerism")
He quickly became involved in various Quaker activities, serving on four Friends committees in 1941 and as clerk of the ministry and counsel committee for Bucks County in 1943. In 1943 he was appointed to the ministry and counsel executive committee at the annual Friends conference in Philadelphia, and he served on the religious life committee in 1945. In recognition of his devotion to Quaker principles, Toomer was asked to give the William Penn Lecture in Philadelphia in 1949. Notwithstanding his new religious affiliation, he continued his devotion to Gurdjieffian idealism. Indeed, in 1942 he sought to reconcile Gurdjieffian and Quaker philosophy by organizing a cooperative, comprising both lay individuals interested in spiritual self-development and Quakers. Based in an old water-powered grist mill called "Mill House," where they all worked and lived, the members of this cooperative, "Friends of Being," dedicated themselves to overcoming separations of all kinds. One Mill House resident, Frank Davenport, recalled his experiences as follows:
At the center was Jean Toomer, a gentle man with force. He was the prime mover; from him came the ideas, principles, purposes, insights, understandings.... He opened doors we were ready to walk through; he rang bells we were ready to harmonize with. ("Mill House," in BANG!, p.6)
Between 1940 and 1950 Toomer continued to write poems, such as "The Promise," "They Are Not Missed," "To Gurdjieff Dying," and "See the Heart," but his writings more often shifted away from literary works to lectures, essays, and pamphlets on Quaker religious philosophy. Many of the essays, like "Santa Claus Will Not Bring Peace" (1943), "The Presence of Love" (1944), "Keep the Inward Watch" (1945), "Authority, Inner and Outer" (1947), and "Blessing and Curse" (1950), were published in the Quaker journal Friends Intelligencer. In 1947 his Friends General Conference Lecture was published as An Interpretation of Friends Worship, while his 1949 William Penn Lecture appeared as The Flavor of Man. After 1950 Toomer produced no literary works, as he began withdrawing from public life. After attending a talk on Gurdjieff in New York City in 1952, however, he recommitted himself to promoting higher consciousness, so he conducted workshops in Doylestown until plagued by ill health in 1957. Following several years of invalidism, in and out of nursing homes and crippled by arthritis, he died in Doylestown.
While Toomer's literary reputation derives almost exclusively from his lyrical novel Cane, his eminence is further enhanced by a growing body of canon-formation scholarship that provides new perspectives on a career spanning more than three decades. Evaluating his significance is no longer difficult or problematical. He remains an enduring figure in the history and development of both the American and the African-American literary traditions.
Toomer's personal and literary archives, including several drafts of his autobiography, are located in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Beyond Cane, Toomer's major published works are contained in Darwin Turner, ed., The Wayward and the Seeking (1980); Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer, eds., The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988); Rudolph Byrd, ed., Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms by Jean Toomer (1991); Frederik L. Rusch, ed., A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings (1993); and in numerous periodicals and little magazines such as Broom, Double Dealer, Liberator, Crisis, Modern Review, Chapbook, S4N, Nomad, Dial, Adelphi, Pagany, Pembroke Magazine, Little Review, Prairie, Dubuque Dial, Friends Intelligencer, and New Mexico Sentinel. The most comprehensive bibliographies are John M. Reilly, "Jean Toomer: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism," in Resources for American Literary Study (1974), and Robert B. Jones, "Jean Toomer: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism, 1923-1993," in Resources for American Literary Study (1994).
The standard biography of Toomer is Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (1987). The best collections of critical essays on Toomer are Frank Durham, ed., The Merrill Studies in Cane (1971); Darwin Turner, ed., Cane: An Authoritative Text, Background, Criticism (1988); Therman B. O'Daniel, Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation (1988); and Robert B. Jones, ed., Critical Essays on Jean Toomer (1994). Important essays also appear in two special issues dedicated to Toomer, BANG! 2, no. 2 (1972), published by the Special Collections Library at Fisk University, and CLA Journal 17 (June 1974). The most comprehensive literary and critical assessments are Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (1965); Darwin Turner, In a Minor Chord (1971); Brian Benson and Mabel Dillard, Jean Toomer (1980); Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist (1984); Bernard Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987); Rudolph P. Byrd, Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff (1990); and Robert B. Jones, Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought (1993).
From American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.
Posted: Wed 20 Jul 2005 15:05 Post subject: Walter Francis White (1893-1955) political social activist
Walter Francis White
Walter Francis White was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on 1st July, 1893. His father was a postman and his mother a schoolteacher. Atlanta had Jim Crow laws and as a child White attended African American schools and sat in the rear of buses. When he was thirteen White experienced a race riot in Atlanta.
Although White's African American school was of a poor standard he managed to obtain a place at Atlanta University. After graduating in 1916 White worked for Standard Life, a large insurance company. He also became secretary of the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). White organized a campaign to improve African American public facilities in the city. This brought him to the attention of James Weldon Johnson, who offered him a full-time post at the NAACP.
White's main task at the NAACP was to investigate lynching and race riots. His light skin enabled him to pass as a white man and this helped him acquire information about racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. His research was eventually published in the book, Rope and Faggot (1929).
In 1929 White was appointed chief executive of the NAACP. He was seen as a moderate and clashed with those members of the organization arguing for more militant action. This included William Du Bois who eventually resigned as editor of the organization's journal, The Crisis, after White criticised his support for "non discriminatory segregation". White now appointed another moderate, Roy Wilkins, as the new editor of the journal.
White was appalled when in 1930 President Herbert Hoover selected John J. Parker of North Carolina to become a member of the Supreme Court. Parker had stated on many occasions that he was opposed to African Americans having the vote. Over the next few months White lobbied members of the Senate and was able to persuade them to reject Parker's nomination by 41 to 39.
White, a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was a supporter of the New Deal. However, he was critical of some programs such as the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). White felt that the National Labour Relations Act did not provide trade union members with enough protection and he was unable to persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt to advocate an anti-lynching bill.
In 1935 White managed to persuade the brilliant African American lawyer, Charles Houston, to head the NAACP legal department. The following year he recruited Thurgood Marshall to the department. Houston and Marshall led the challenge through the courts of issues such as segregation in transportation and publicly owned places of recreation, inequities in the segregated education system and restrictive covenants in housing.
White was an outstanding propagandist and articles that he wrote about African American civil rights appeared in a variety of journals including Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, The Nation, Harper's Magazine and the New Republic. White also wrote a regular column in the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Defender.
In 1949 White offered to resign for medical reasons. The NAACP Board of Directors wanted White to remain and so instead gave him a one-year leave of absence. While he was away he was replaced by Roy Wilkins.
Soon afterwards it was discovered that White was divorcing his African-American wife to marry a white woman named Poppy Cannon. One member of the board, Carl Murphy, wanted White fired. Others, led by William Hastie, argued that it was hypocritical for the NAACP to preach racial equality and then fire him for having an interracial marriage.
In 1950 White wanted to return to his post. Eventually it was decided to create a dyad system. Roy Wilkins took charge of all internal matters whereas White was given the post of executive secretary. Walter Francis White remained the NAACP's official spokesman until his death on 21st March, 1955.
"White's life stands as testimony to what can be achieved "in the tradition of militant democracy, seeking to enforce existing laws which promise equality and to secure further legislation in protection of the civil rights of all." - Morroe Berger, New York TImes
Major Awards
Guggenheim Fellowship Grant (1926), Spingarn Medal from NAACP (1937), the Sir James Jeans Award from New London Junior College (1943), the Haitian Order of Honor and Merit (1950), the Star of Ethiopia (1953) and an Honorary Doctor of Law Degrees from Howard University (1939) and Atlanta University (1943).
Primary Works
The Fire in the Flint (1924), Flight (1926), The American Negro and His Problems (1927),The Negro's Contribution to American Culture (1927), Rape and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), What Caused the Detroit Riot? (1943), A Rising Wind: A Report on the Negro Soldier in the European Theatre of War (1945), A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (1948), How Far the Promised Land? (1955).
| Top | Selected Bibliography
Cannon, Poppy. A Gentle Knight: My Husband, Walter White. Rinehart Publishing, 1956.
Cooney, Charles F. "Walter White and Sinclair Lewis: The History of a Literary Friendship." Prospects: Annual of American Cultural Studies . 1975, vol. 1, 63-79.
Harris, Trudier. "Afro-American Writers form the Harlem Renaissance to 1940." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research Company, vol 51
Lewis, David. When Harlem was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Scruggs, Charles W. "Alain Locke and Walter White: Their Struggle for Control of the Harlem Renaissance." Black American Literature Forum 14 (1980): 91-99.
Waldron, Edward E. Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978.
Williams, Michael. The African American Encyclopedia. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1993.
Youman, Mary Mabel. "The Other Side of Harlem: The Middle-Class Novel and the New Negro Renaissance." Dissertation Abstracts International. MI 1977, Vol. 37, 5836A
Roy Wilkins, Walter White and Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP
Thurgood Marshall poses with the two principal officers of the NAACP: Walter White, the national secretary, center, and Roy Wilkins, the assistant national secretary.
Defending Home and Hearth: Walter White Recalls the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot
by Walter White
The riots that broke out between 1898 and 1906 were part of a pattern of anti-black violence that included several hundred lynchings each year. One of the most savage race riots in these years erupted in Atlanta on September 22, 1906 after vague reports of African Americans harassing white women. Over five days at least ten black people were killed while Atlanta’s police did nothing to protect black citizens, going so far as to confiscate guns from black Atlantans while allowing whites to remain armed. In this selection from his memoirs, Walter White, the future head of the NAACP recalled how, at age 13, he and his father defended their home from white rioters.
The unseasonably oppressive heat of an Indian summer day hung like a steaming blanket over Atlanta. My sisters and I had casually commented upon the unusual quietness. It seemed to stay MotherÌs volubility and reduced Father, who was more taciturn, to monosyllables. But, as I remember it, no other sense of impending trouble impinged upon our consciousness.
I had read the inflammatory headlines in the Atlanta News and the more restrained ones in the Atlanta Constitution which reported alleged rapes and other crimes committed by Negroes. But these were so standard and familiar that they made—as I look back on it now—little impression. The stories were more frequent, however, and consisted of eight-column streamers instead of the usual two or four-column ones.
Father was a mail collector. His tour of duty was from three to eleven P.M. He made his rounds in a little cart into which one climbed from a step in the rear. I used to drive the cart for him from two until seven, leaving him at the point nearest our home on Houston Street, to return home either for study or sleep. That day Father decided that I should not go with him. I appealed to Mother, who thought it might be all right, provided Father sent me home before dark because, she said, “I donÌt think they would dare start anything before nightfall.”Father told me as we made the rounds that ominous rumors of a race riot that night were sweeping the town. But I was too young that morning to understand the background of the riot. I became much older during the next thirty-six hours, under circumstances which I now recognize as the inevitable outcome of what had preceded.
One of the most bitter political campaigns of that bloody era was reaching its climax. Hoke Smith—that amazing contradiction of courageous and intelligent opposition to the SouthÌs economic ills and at the same time advocacy of ruthless suppression of the Negro—was a candidate that year for the governorship. His opponent was Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which boasted with justification that it “covers Dixie like the dew.” Howell and his supporters held firm authority over the state Democratic machine despite the long and bitter fight Hoke Smith had made on Howell in the columns of the rival Atlanta Journal.
Hoke Smith had fought for legislation to ban child labor and railroad rate discriminations. He had denounced the corrupt practices of the railroads and the state railway commission, which, he charged, was as much owned and run by northern absentee landlords as were the railroads themselves. He had fought for direct primaries to nominate senators and other candidates by popular vote, for a corrupt practices act, for an elective railway commission, and for state ownership of railroads—issues which were destined to be still fought for nearly four decades later by Ellis Arnall. For these reforms he was hailed throughout the nation as a genuine progressive along with La Follette of Wisconsin and Folk of Missouri.
To overcome the power of the regular Democratic organization, Hoke Smith sought to heal the feud of long standing between himself and the powerful ex-radical Populist, Thomas E. Watson. Tom Watson was the strangest mixture of contradictions which rotten-borough politics of the South had ever produced. He was the brilliant leader of an agrarian movement in the South which, in alliance with the agrarian West, threatened for a time the industrial and financial power of the East. He had made fantastic strides in uniting Negro and white farmers with Negro and white industrial workers. He had advocated enfranchisement of Negroes and poor whites, the abolition of lynching, control of big business, and rights for the little man, which even today would label him in the minds of conservatives as a dangerous radical. He had fought with fists, guns, and spine-stirring oratory in a futile battle to stop the spread of an industrialized, corporate society.
His break with the Democratic Party during the Î90s and the organization of the Populist Party made the Democrats his implacable enemies. The North, busy building vast corporations and individual fortunes, was equally fearful of Tom Watson. Thus was formed between reactionary Southern Democracy and conservative Northern Republicanism the basis of cooperation whose fullest flower is to be seen in the present-day coalition of conservatives in Congress. This combination crushed Tom WatsonÌs bid for national leadership in the presidential elections of 1896 and smashed the Populist movement. Watson ran for president in 1904 and 1908, both times with abysmal failure. His defeats soured him to the point of vicious acrimony. He turned from his ideal of interracial decency to one of virulent hatred and denunciation of the “nigger.” He thus became a naturally ally for Hoke Smith in the gubernatorial election in Georgia in l906.
The two rabble-rousers stumped the state screaming,“Nigger, nigger, nigger!” Some white farmers still believed WatsonÌs abandoned doctrine that the interests of Negro and white farmers and industrial workers were identical. They feared that WatsonÌs and SmithÌs new scheme to disfranchise Negro voters would lead to disfranchisement of poor whites. Tom Watson was sent to trade on his past reputation to reassure them that such was not the case and that their own interests were best served by now hating“niggers.”
WatsonÌs oratory had been especially effective among the cotton mill workers and other poor whites in and near Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal on August 1, 1906, in heavy type, all capital letters, printed an incendiary appeal to race prejudice backing up Watson and Smith which declared:
“Political equality being thus preached to the negro in the ring papers and on the stump, what wonder that he makes no distinction between political and social equality? He grows more bumptious on the street, more impudent in his dealings with white men, and then, when he cannot achieve social equality as he wishes, with the instinct of the barbarian to destroy what he cannot attain to, he lies in wait, as that dastardly brute did yesterday near this city, and assaults the fair young girlhood of the south... ”
At the same time, a daily newspaper was attempting to wrest from the Atlanta Journal leadership in the afternoon field. The new paper, the Atlanta News, in its scramble for circulation and advertising took a lesson from the political race and began to play up in eight-column streamers stories of the raping of white women by Negroes. That every one of the stories was afterward found to be wholly without foundation was of no importance. The News circulation, particularly in street sales, leaped swiftly upward as the headlines were bawled by lusty-voiced newsboys. Atlanta became a tinder box.
Fuel was added to the fire by a dramatization of Thomas DixonÌs novel The Clansman in Atlanta. (This was later made by David Wark Griffith into The Birth of a Nation, and did more than anything else to make successful the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.) The late Ray Stannard Baker, telling the story of the Atlanta riot in Along the Color Line, characterized DixonÌs fiction and its effect on Atlanta and the South as “incendiary and cruel.” No more apt or accurate description could have been chosen.
During the afternoon preceding the riot little bands of sullen, evil-looking men talked excitedly on street corners all over downtown Atlanta. Around seven oÌclock my father and I were driving toward a mail box at the corner of Peachtree and Houston Streets when there came from near-by Pryor Street a roar the like of which I had never heard before, but which sent a sensation of mingled fear and excitement coursing through my body. I asked permission of Father to go and see what the trouble was. He bluntly ordered me to stay in the cart. A little later we drove down AtlantaÌs main business thoroughfare, Peachtree Street. Again we heard the terrifying cries, this time near at hand and coming toward us. We saw a lame Negro bootblack from HerndonÌs barber shop pathetically trying to outrun a mob of whites. Less than a hundred yards from us the chase ended. We saw clubs and fists descending to the accompaniment of savage shouting and cursing. Suddenly a voice cried, “There goes another nigger!” Its work done, the mob went after new prey. The body with the withered foot lay dead in a pool of blood on the street.
FatherÌs apprehension and mine steadily increased during the evening, although the fact that our skins were white kept us from attack. Another circumstance favored us—the mob had not yet grown violent enough to attack United States government property. But I could see FatherÌs relief when he punched the time clock at eleven P.M. and got into the cart to go home. He wanted to go the back way down Forsyth Street, but I begged him, in my childish excitement and ignorance, to drive down Marietta to Five Points, the heart of AtlantaÌs business district, where the crowds were densest and the yells loudest. No sooner had we turned into Marietta Street, however, than we saw careening toward us an undertakerÌs barouche. Crouched in the rear of the vehicle were three Negroes clinging to the sides of the carriage as it lunged and swerved. On the driverÌs seat crouched a white man, the reins held taut in his left hand. A huge whip was gripped in his right. Alternately he lashed the horses and, without looking backward, swung the whip in savage swoops in the faces of members of the mob as they lunged at the carriage determined to seize the three Negroes.
There was no time for us to get out of its path, so sudden and swift was the appearance of the vehicle. The hub cap of the right rear wheel of the barouche hit the right side of our much lighter wagon. Father and I instinctively threw our weight and kept the cart from turning completely over. Our mare was a Texas mustang which, frightened by the sudden blow, lunged in the air as Father clung to the reins. Good fortune was with us. The cart settled back on its four wheels as Father said in a voice which brooked no dissent, “We are going home the back way and not down Marietta.”
But again on Pryor Street we heard the cry of the mob. Close to us and in our direction ran a stout and elderly woman who cooked at a downtown white hotel. Fifty yards behind, a mob which filled the street from curb to curb was closing in. Father handed the reins to me and, though he was of slight stature, reached down and lifted the woman into the cart. I did not need to be told to lash the mare to the fastest speed she could muster.
The church bells tolled the next morning for Sunday service. But no one in Atlanta believed for a moment that the hatred and lust for blood had been appeased. Like skulls on a cannibalÌs hut the hats and caps of victims of the mob of the night before had been hung on the iron hooks of telegraph poles. None could tell whether each hat represented a dead Negro. But we knew that some of those who had worn the hats would never again wear any.
Late in the afternoon friends of my fatherÌs came to warn of more trouble that night. They told us that plans had been perfected for a mob to form on Peachtree Street just after nightfall to march down Houston Street to what the white people called “Darktown,” three blocks or so below our house, to “clean out the niggers.” There had never been a firearm in our house before that day. Father was reluctant even in those circumstances to violate the law, but he at last gave in at MotherÌs insistence.
We turned out the lights early, as did all our neighbors. No one removed his clothes or thought of sleep. Apprehension was tangible. We could almost touch its cold and clammy surface. Toward midnight the unnatural quiet was broken by a roar that grew steadily in volume. Even today I grow tense in remembering it.
Father told Mother to take my sisters, the youngest of them only six, to the rear of the house, which offered more protection from stones and bullets. My brother George was away, so Father and I, the only males in the house, took our places at the front windows of the parlor. The windows opened on a porch along the front side of the house, which in turn gave onto a narrow lawn that sloped down to the street and a picket fence. There was a crash as Negroes smashed the street lamp at the corner of Houston and Piedmont Avenue down the street. In a very few minutes the vanguard of the mob, some of them bearing torches, appeared. A voice which we recognized as that of the son of the grocer with whom we had traded for many years yelled, “ThatÌs where that nigger mail carrier lives! LetÌs burn it down! ItÌs too nice for a nigger to live in!” In the eerie light Father turned his drawn face toward me. In a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, he said, “Son, donÌt shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—donÌt you miss!”
The mob moved toward the lawn. I tried to aim my gun, wondering what it would feel like to kill a man. Suddenly there was a volley of shots. The mob hesitated, stopped. Some friends of my fatherÌs had barricaded themselves in a two-story brick building just below our house. It was they who had fired. Some of the mobsmen, still bloodthirsty, shouted, “LetÌs go get the nigger.” Others, afraid now for their safety, held back. Our friends, noting the hesitation, fired another volley. The mob broke and retreated up Houston Street.
In the quiet that followed I put my gun aside and tried to relax. But a tension different from anything I had ever known possessed me. I was gripped by the knowledge of my identity, and in the depths of my soul I was vaguely aware that I was glad of it. I was sick with loathing for the hatred which had flared before me that night and come so close to making me a killer; but I was glad I was not one of those who hated; I was glad I was not one of those made sick and murderous by pride.
Source: Walter White, A Man Called White (1948; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 5–12.
Last edited by gemini072 on Fri 21 Oct 2005 13:39; edited 5 times in total
Posted: Fri 22 Jul 2005 13:59 Post subject: Langston Hughes (poet of the Renaissance) 1902-1967
(February 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967)
Born in Joplin, Missouri, James Langston Hughes was a member of an abolitionist family. He was the great-great-grandson of Charles Henry Langston, brother of John Mercer Langston, who was the first Black American to be elected to public office, in 1855. Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, but began writing poetry in the eighth grade, and was selected as Class Poet. His father didn't think he would be able to make a living at writing, and encouraged him to pursue a more practical career. He paid his son's tuition to Columbia University on the grounds he study engineering. After a short time, Langston dropped out of the program with a B+ average; all the while he continued writing poetry. His first published poem was also one of his most famous, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", and it appeared in Brownie's Book. Later, his poems, short plays, essays and short stories appeared in the NAACP publication Crisis Magazine and in Opportunity Magazine and other publications.
One of Hughes' finest essays appeared in the Nation in 1926, entitled "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain". It spoke of Black writers and poets, "who would surrender racial pride in the name of a false integration," where a talented Black writer would prefer to be considered a poet, not a Black poet, which to Hughes meant he subconsciously wanted to write like a white poet. Hughes argued, "no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself." He wrote in this essay, "We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren't, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, as strong as we know how and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves."
In 1923, Hughes traveled abroad on a freighter to the Senegal, Nigeria, the Cameroons, Belgium Congo, Angola, and Guinea in Africa, and later to Italy and France, Russia and Spain. One of his favorite pastimes whether abroad or in Washington, D.C. or Harlem, New York was sitting in the clubs listening to blues, jazz and writing poetry. Through these experiences a new rhythm emerged in his writing, and a series of poems such as "The Weary Blues" were penned. He returned to Harlem, in 1924, the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. During this period, his work was frequently published and his writing flourished. In 1925 he moved to Washington, D.C., still spending more time in blues and jazz clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street...(these songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." At this same time, Hughes accepted a job with Dr. Carter G. Woodson, editor of the Journal of Negro Life and History and founder of Black History Week in 1926. He returned to his beloved Harlem later that year.
Langston Hughes received a scholarship to Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. degree in 1929. In 1943, he was awarded an honorary Lit.D by his alma mater; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 and a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1940. Based on a conversation with a man he knew in a Harlem bar, he created a character know as My Simple Minded Friend in a series of essays in the form of a dialogue. In 1950, he named this lovable character Jess B. Simple, and authored a series of books on him.
Langston Hughes was a prolific writer. In the forty-odd years between his first book in 1926 and his death in 1967, he devoted his life to writing and lecturing. He wrote sixteen books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of "editorial" and "documentary" fiction, twenty plays, children's poetry, musicals and operas, three autobiographies, a dozen radio and television scripts and dozens of magazine articles. In addition, he edited seven anthologies. The long and distinguished list of Hughes' works includes: Not Without Laughter (1930); The Big Sea (1940); I Wonder As I Wander" (1956), his autobiographies. His collections of poetry include: The Weary Blues (1926); The Negro Mother and other Dramatic Recitations (1931); The Dream Keeper (1932); Shakespeare In Harlem (1942); Fields of Wonder (1947); One Way Ticket (1947); The First Book of Jazz (1955); Tambourines To Glory (1958); and Selected Poems (1959); The Best of Simple (1961). He edited several anthologies in an attempt to popularize black authors and their works. Some of these are: An African Treasury (1960); Poems from Black Africa (1963); New Negro Poets: USA (1964) and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1967).
Published posthumously were: Five Plays By Langston Hughes (1968); The Panther and The Lash: Poems of Our Times (1969) and Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest (1973); The Sweet Flypaper of Life with Roy DeCarava (1984).
Langston Hughes died of cancer on May 22, 1967. His residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission. His block of East 127th Street was renamed "Langston Hughes Place" .
By: Andrew P. Jackson (Sekou Molefi Baako)
POEMS
MulattoMy old man's a white old man
And my old mother's black.
If ever I cursed my white old man
I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother
And wished she were in hell,
I'm sorry for that evil wish
And now I wish her well
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder were I'm going to die,
Being neither white nor black?
(Langston was not Mulatto, his granmother was 1/2 Native American)
I, Too, Sing America
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
These are really great vignettes of important Americans, Tyrone. Let me encourage you to continue them.
The Langston Hughes story reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston because the two writers tried to collaborate once. But they had such frequent and violent creative disagreements that they split and were never friends again.
Speaking of which, Mary Lee wants me to ask if you are going to do one on Zora Neale Hurston. Since Mary Lee is a folkorist and storyteller, she looks up to Hurston as exemplar. Also, I have a couple of funny Zora Neale quotes that I would like the opportunity to tell.
These are really great vignettes of important Americans, Tyrone. Let me encourage you to continue them.
The Langston Hughes story reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston because the two writers tried to collaborate once. But they had such frequent and violent creative disagreements that they split and were never friends again.
Speaking of which, Mary Lee wants me to ask if you are going to do one on Zora Neale Hurston. Since Mary Lee is a folkorist and storyteller, she looks up to Hurston as exemplar. Also, I have a couple of funny Zora Neale quotes that I would like the opportunity to tell.
Thanks, I hope everyone is enjoying them, this is one of my favorites eras of study. Sure, I just realized that I haven't included any women in this section yet, tell Mary Lee I'll get right on it.
Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960), born in Eatonville, Florida, was a noted novelist, folklorist and anthropologist who traveled throughout Florida collecting and writing stories of rural people. She was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and was part of the Federal Writers' Project in Florida in 1938. A recipient of Guggenheim and Rosenwald fellowships, her most prominent works include Mules and Men, Dust Tracks in the Road, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Eatonville annually holds the Zora Neale Hurston Festival, a tribute to Hurston’s lasting literary accomplishments.
Both praised and scorned in her day, this flamboyant writer of the Harlem Renaissance is attracting new generations of literary fans
Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most prolific of the Harlem Renaissance writers, spent her last days in a welfare home and in 1960 was laid to rest in an unmarked grave, soon to be forgotten. In her day she had been a folklorist, novelist and anthropologist. She was high-spirited, intelligent and irreverent. Her colorful stories about life in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, made her the toast of New York parties and charmed her patrons.
But Hurston was also outspoken and controversial, especially on racial issues. Fiercely proud of black folk traditions and culture, she wrote about "the Negro farthest down," a passion irksome to the 1920s Harlem literati striving to prove intellectual parity with whites. Hurston glossed over inequities between the races, refused to be part of "the sobbing school of Negrohood" and later even opposed the landmark 1954 desegregation decision. As black writers heralded a new era of realistic fiction, Hurston's aesthetic voice would be lost in the clamor.
Then, in 1973, novelist Alice Walker wrote a magazine article about finding Hurston's grave and sparked a resurgence of interest in the writer that has been growing ever since. Hurston's most popular work among today's readers is her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a feminist story of a woman's quest for self-expression. Our article chronicles the story of Hurston's meteoric rise, her decline into obscurity and her subsequent literary revival.
This is the story of Janie Starks as told by Janie to her best friend Phoebe. Janie is mulatto, raised with whites by her grandmother until it becomes too painful for Janie. Janie and her grandmother moved to a small piece of land where they lived until Janie is seen by her grandmother kissing a young man. For fear that she will make a terrible mistake and ruin her life, 16 year old Janie is forced to marry Logan Killicks, who has little to offer in the way of looks and personality but he can offer Janie security with his 60 acres of land. Despite Logan’s best attempts to please Janie, she does not love him and she runs off with Joe Starks.
Jody has big plans and the couple moves to the all black community of Eatonville. There, Jody buys up 200 acres, builds a house and a town store, and is elected mayor. As mayor Jody builds roads and buys lamps and turns the town into a functioning community. As mayor’s wife, Jody does his best to set Janie apart from the rest of the town. While Janie wishes to participate in the talk and laughter going on on the store porch, Jody forbids it deeming such activities below the mayor’s wife. As Jody gets older and more insecure he begins to insult Janie in order to draw the attention from himself. On one occasion, Jody slaps her for cooking poorly, and after this she realizes that she doesn’t love him but only the image that she had made of him. When Janie publicly humiliates Jody by talking back to him at the store, Jody moves to the guest bedroom and refuses to see Janie. Shortly after this, Jody falls ill and dies, leaving everything to Janie.
Janie continues to run the store and after a few months she meets Tea Cake. He is different from every other man Janie has ever known. He tells her stories, makes her laugh, and even teaches her to play checkers. He treats her as a person rather than as the mayor’s wife or widow. Despite the disapproval of those in the town, Janie moves to Jacksonville and marries Tea Cake. Shortly thereafter, they move to the everglades to live on the much and pick beans. Janie learns to shoot and even begins to pick beans with Tea Cake because the couple can’t bear to be apart all day. A year and a half or so after their arrival in the muck, a hurricane floods the muck and Janie and Tea Cake are forced to flee. During the journey, Teacake saves Janie from a rabid dog but is himself bitten. He falls ill and in a fit of rage tries to shoot Janie who is forced to kill him in her own self-defence. Janie is quickly acquitted of the murder and she gives Tea Cake a grand burial. After Tea Cake’s death she is too sad to be reminded of him by remaining in the muck so returns to home in Eatonville.
Parrish: Chapter 6, One Nation Divisible (114-122)
The Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire
Many native-born white Protestants were worried about the problems raised by America’s ethnic and cultural diversity during the postwar economic boom. Some of them found a solution in the recreation of the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in 1915 by William J. Simmons, a former Methodist. Simmons, who later got the title of Imperial Wizard, and some followers pledged to save America’s white Christian civilization as they burned a cross on Stone Mountain. Whereas the old Reconstruction-era Klan focused on destroying black political power in the South, the reborn Klan concentrated also on Catholics, bootleggers, atheists, adulterers, and others who offended the Klan’s principles. Between 1915 and 1924 the membership increased to over four million. From 1917 to 1920 the Klan remained popular because of the crusade against the Hun and the alien communists and the fear of the return of black veterans, especially in the south. After 1920, the modern techniques for recruitment and persuasion were important factors for the growth of membership. Due to the couple Clark and Tyler the defense of traditional moral values and Biblical fundamentalism were stressed. Hiram Wesley Evans became the new Imperial Wizard.
The Klan’s power did become an important force in local and national politics. The greatest victories took place in Oklahoma and Indiana and at the Democratic Party’s 1924 convention. The people attracted to the Klan were usually “the little people” of America because the Klan offered them a set of shared meanings and values, which was often missing from their daily lives. After 1925, the Klan lost many members because of its political scandals, indictments for bribery, election fraud, and Stephenson’s conviction of the rape and murder of a 25-year old secretary. By 1929 membership decreased to 200.000. One of the scandals is called The Shame of Birmingham. Stephenson shot father James E. Coyle because he did not agree with his daughter’s conversion to the Catholic faith. There was a long trial in which the prosecutor, Hugo Lafayette Black, suggested that the murdered priest had provoked the incident by seducing Ruth Stephenson into Catholic faith. The jury found Stephenson not guilty. The Alabama governor said that this caused a loss of faith in the state’s legal system.
The rice and fall of the Invisible Empire proved the near-impossibility of recreating tribal communities within a dynamic capitalist society.
Summary Chapter 6: One Nation, Divisible
p. 122-134
· Harlem, New York City, became the mecca of black intellectual and cultural life during postwar years. Jazz and blues became mainstream music styles.
· Ethnic self-consciousness: Marcus Garvey, leader of the black nationalist movement. He openly preached black pride, solidarity, and self-determination. W.E.B. Du Bois, however, preached the gospel of nondiscrimination. He said that blacks would achieve power and dignity when they had reclaimed Africa from the white man. On the Eve of World War I, he founded in Harlem the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). It underwrote the Negro World ,by the early 1920’s the most widely read black newspaper in America. NAACP leaders, fearing that Garvey posed a threat to their organization, denounced the Jamaican leader with a vehemence usually reserved for the Klan. Edgar J. Hoover perceived Garvey’s UNIA as a dangerous source of unity among urban blacks.For two years, his agents infiltrated the UNIA and eventually in 1923 Garvey was convicted of mail fraud. Government harassment dealt a heavy blow to Garvey’s black nationalist movement, After he left prison in 1927, his UNIA lay in ruins.
· Deeply rooted religious values colored the struggle over prohibition and immigration and shaped the outlook of the Klan. Defenders of Biblical literalism did not hesitate to support state laws that banned interpretations of human creation other than their own. Progressive theologians and civil libertarians regarded these kind of laws as a serious threat to academic freedom and the First Amendment.
The gravest challenge to fundamentalism came from other Protestant denominations. For decades, these branches tried to demonstrate the compatibility of science and religion and to turn the spiritual energies of their churches toward the alleviation of social problems. However, each step taken along this road to modernism tended to bring thunderous denunciations from fundamentalists, who preached the oldtime religion. Church membership kept on rising in the 1920’s as it had from the beginning of the century, reaching about one-half of the adult population by 1930. But the fundamentalists, not the modernists, reaped the largest gains, even in the booming cities. Reverend Billy Sunday assured the old-time religion believers that their beliefs remained America’s beliefs. He carried the banner of fundamentalism. He turned evangelism into a consumer product. His ideas appealed to many of the same people who flocked to the Klan and who believed that only a restoration of pure religious faith could halt the nation’s slide into immorality and social chaos. A similar message was delivered by Aimee Semple McPherson who fused fundamentalism with Hollywood glamour and sex appeal.
The Author, The Voodoo, The Pioneer
She was one of the most famous writers of all time doing work in the Feminist movement, the African-American movement, and many other movements. She was Zora Neale Hurston; the African-American writer, who at the height of her powers, was most known as being one of the writers, that made the Harlem Renaissance a historical movement. She wrote numerous novels; her most famous being Their Eyes Were Watching God.
What most people don’t know is that Hurston was a Voodoo practitioner. In the 20’s when the world was being introduced to the African-American movement, that was the Harlem Renaissance, she emerged as one of the top writers and visionaries.
Born in 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston’s father was a Baptist Preacher, and carpenter. At the tender age of three, Zora, and her parents moved to Eatonville, Florida, the very first incorporated black community in the United States. Her father eventually became mayor of the city.
In 1904, Lucy Hurston (Zora’s mother), died. As it usually goes, Hurston did not get along with her stepmother, leaving home, and began working for a traveling theatre company. In 1917, she attended Morgan Academy, now known as Morgan State University. Hurston then entered Howard University in 1920, and studied there for four years. Zora’s first published story appeared in Howard University’s literary magazine. When another story was accepted by Opportunity (a New York literary journal); winning second place, the editors immediately recognized her literary talent and they encouraged her to move to New York. The rest is history.
Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneer in the literary world, but also found Voodoo, history, religion, and culture, particularly interesting.
The word Voodoo is synonymous with a lot of things: passion, sex, sensuality, religion, and faith. Said to have originated in Africa, then Haiti, and becoming popular in New Orleans, Voodoo was Hurston’s religion of interest. It was said to have been started by various African tribes, and was cultivated during slavery.
In a letter to fellow writer, and legendary poet, Langston Hughes, Zora wrote: “I have landed here in the kingdom of Marie Laveau and expect to wear her crown someday - Conjure Queen as you suggested.”
In Voodoo, all of its practitioners know about Marie Laveau, the most feared, and said to be the most powerful, Voodoo queen. Her story is part myth, and part legend.
Voodoo had been secretly practiced by blacks around New Orleans since the first boat of slaves arrived. Voodoo became a practice that was rapidly spreading among slaves. Almost a third of the worshippers were white, longing for the power to destroy their enemies, or to regain a lover, or gain new lovers. The practice became a burden for white slave owners, fearing that the slaves were planning a revolt against their masters. In 1817, the New Orleans Municipal Council passed a resolution forbidding African-Americans to gather for dancing or any other purpose except on Sundays, and only in places designated by the mayor. Those Sundays became known as the Sunday Congo.
With the arrival of the 1830’s came many Voodoo queens in New Orleans, and many of them were engaged in a battle for control over the Sunday Congo dances, and secret ceremonies. When the smoke cleared, Laveau arose victorious. Legend states that the other queens fell to Laveau’s enormous and paralyzing power. Laveau, with all of the secret knowledge which she had gained from the Creole boudoirs, combined with her own considerable knowledge of spells along with her flair, became the most powerful woman in New Orleans.
Born in 1794, in Vieux Carre, Laveau’s father is said to have been a wealthy white planter, and her mother was a mulatto with a small portion of Indian blood. In 1819, she married, Jacques Paris, a free man of color. Being raised Roman Catholic, Marie married Jacques at St. Louis Cathedral, and continued to practice it devoutly. Only a short while after the wedding, Jacques disappeared and Marie began calling herself the Widow Paris. A record of his death did not appear until several years after he had been presumed dead.
Marie became the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans sometime during the 1830's, and was said to rule fairly, charging whites for her services, but servicing African-Americans free of charge. Still a devote Catholic, Marie often used influences from the Catholic religion to broaden the practice of Voodoo, utilizing holy water, incense, statues of saints, and Christian prayers.
What made Laveau, most interesting was the impact she had on Voodoo, still being remembered as the most powerful of the Voodoo queens, Marie made Voodoo profitable, by advertising the sensual prowess of the practice. Whites, as well as blacks feared her, and respected her power. Whites sought her help in various affairs, while blacks saw her as their leader.
Marie Laveau was said to have died in 1881, but sightings were said to have occurred well into the twentieth century, later it was revealed that the sightings were relatives of the Widow Paris, including one of her fifteen daughters who took her mother’s name and place in Voodoo, and became a Voodoo queen. Marie’s daughter was said to have ruled with an iron fist, craving power more than anything else.
Zora Neale Hurston researched for years the inner workings of Voodoo, specifically Laveau, the most feared and respected of the Voodoo queens. During an initiation Zora was required to lie face down, in the nude, for three days without food, and water. After Hurston completed the initiation she was crowned by the grandnephew of Laveau.
In 1935 her novel, Mules and Men, which investigated Voodoo practices in black communities in Florida & New Orleans, made the Voodoo practice more popular among African Americans. Three years later, Tell My Horse, a novel that explored Caribbean Voodoo, became published. For a long time, Voodoo was popular because of word of mouth. Voodoo became known on an intellectual level because of Hurston’s books. And because of her invaluable literary contribution to Voodoo… and her undeniable talents, Zora Neale Hurston became known as the “Literary Voodoo Priestess.”
James R. Sanders, The Flow Magazine
Posted by The Flow at April 15, 2005 10:00 AM
Mule Bone is the only collaboration between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, two stars of the Harlem Renaissance, and it holds an unparalleled place in the annals of African-American theater. Set in Eatonville, Florida--Hurston's hometown and the inspiration for much of her fiction--this
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author who wrote stories, novels, anthropological folklore and an autobiography. She died in 1960 but her works have increased in popularity and are passing the test of time with staying power. She was a unique artist and scientist who produced for us a large body of work that stands equal to any body of work in American Literature and world literature. About writing she wrote:
Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
Posted: Sun 24 Jul 2005 15:03 Post subject: Zora Neale Hurston
How it Feels to be Colored Me
by Zora Neale Hurston
from Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, I Love Myself When I am Laughing ... and Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive: a Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Old Westbury NY: Feminist Press, 1979), pages 152-155.
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.
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