Posted: Mon 13 Jun 2005 16:57 Post subject: the Harlem Renaissance: Architect Julian Abele *
The Art of Romare Bearden
______________________________________
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
__________________________________
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.
I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind the curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box1 for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?" Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-our-state" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.
During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn’t know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county—everybody’s Zora.
But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!"; and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.
The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira.2 I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is lust as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret3 with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai4 above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce5 on the Boule Mich6 with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?
Posted to OneDropRule by Frank W. Sweet. Notice particularly the three paragraphs about her emotional response to jazz. I will come back to this in my next post about Zora Neale.
I think that everyone who reads the previous post can understand why Mary Lee hears Zora Neale as speaking personally one-on-one to her. Hurston was the quintessential American woman: outspoken, educated, smart, assertive, self-confident. She was the very same sort of woman who perplexed and even frightened Alexis d’Tocqueville when he visited the United States nearly a century earlier.
But let me draw your attention to the three paragraphs about her emotional response to jazz. I call this passage, “Zora Neale’s jungle drums.” (My label enables Mary Lee to know exactly what I mean and retrieve the passage instantly from her library.) One can easily over-intellectualize this passage. Music’s appeal is universal precisely because it speaks to all of us in the same way. Zora Neale’s talent for articulating her emotional response says more about her superb craftsmanship as a writer than about cultural differences between Black and White. And the fact that skill at percussion (as either musician or dancer) is unrelated to skin tone is immediately obvious to anyone who has ever watched a Carioca escola de samba during Rio’s Carnaval.
No, the point is not that Zora Neale racializes emotional response to music, a universal phenomenon. It is that her “white friend” who smoked calmly, “drumming the table with his fingertips” was probably one of the Black writers of the Renaissance. Although their subject matter depended on the U.S. color line, the form, structure, tone, and nuance employed by the Black male writers of the Renaissance was modeled on Western mainstream (White) sensibilities. They strove to portray the Black intelligentsia as competing successfully with white artists on their own ground. They were uncomfortable with Zora Neale’s in-your-face Blackness.
Other Black writers of the time felt that Zora Neale exacerbated race relations by contributing to the Black stereotype. Her Blacks are emotional, unpredictable, vain, preening, and vaguely threatening. In short, Zora’s characters are hot and humid and drawn with vivid colors, where the characters of the male Black writers of the time are as cold, dry, and shades-of-gray as the stereotypical White.
That is probably why Zora Neale’s work received so little recognition during her lifetime (she died in poverty and was buried in an unknown grave). Black intellectuals of the time portrayed Blacks as simply White folks in dark skins, striving to earn sympathetic response from Whites. Zora Neale mocked this pretension with the arrogant Blackness of her characters. This divergence between the concept of Blackness as culture-free genetics versus Blackness as defiant ethnicity also probably explains her popularity today. Although her work repelled the critics of her time, it strikes a responsive chord among Americans who grew up after the “Black is beautiful” wave.
Predictably, her reaction to such criticism was to mock her critics. Recall that Mary Lee’s favorite passage is the one I call “jungle drums,” in the previous post. Well, my favorite Zora Neale passage is the following one, where she punches out James Weldon Johnson.
From Zora Neale Hurston and Cheryl A. Wall, Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), pages 774-775.
====
White people have come running to me with a deep wrinkle between the eyes asking me things. They have heard talk going around about this passing, so they are trying to get some information so they can know. So since I have been asked, that gives me leave to talk right out of my mouth.
In the first place, this passing business works both ways. All the passing is not passing for white. We have white folks among us passing for colored. They just happen to be born with a tinge of brown in the skin and took up being colored as a profession. Take James Weldon Johnson for instance.
There's a man white enough to suit Hitler and he's been passing for colored for years.
Now, don't get the idea that he is not welcome among us. He certainly is. He has more than paid his way. But he just is not a Negro. You take a look at him and ask why I talk like that. But you know, I told you back there not to depend too much on skin. You'll certainly get mis-put on your road if you put too much weight on that. Look at James Weldon Johnson from head to foot, but don't let that skin color and that oskobolic hair fool you. Watch him! Does he parade when he walks? No, James Weldon Johnson proceeds. Did anybody ever, ever see him grin? No, he smiles. He couldn't give a grin if he tried. He can't even Uncle Tom. Not that I complain of "Tomming" if it's done right.
"Tomming" is not an aggressive act, it is true, but it has its uses like feinting in the prize ring. But James Weldon Johnson can't Tom. He has been seen trying it, but it was sad. Let him look around at some of the other large Negroes and hand over the dice.
No, I never expect to see James Weldon Johnson a success in the strictly Negro Arts, but I would not at all be surprised to see him crowned. The man is just full of that old monarch material. If some day I looked out of my window on Seventh Avenue and saw him in an ermine robe and a great procession going to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to be crowned I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Maybe he'd make a mighty fine king at that. He's tried all he knew how to pass for colored, but he just hasn't made it. His own brother is scared in his presence. He bows and scrapes and calls him The Duke.
So now you say "Well, if you can't tell who My People are by skin color, how are you going to know?" There's more ways than one of telling, and I'm going to point them out right now. ...
By Zora Neale Huston
From Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
Posted: Sun 24 Jul 2005 19:49 Post subject: Zora Neale Hurston and the Mulatto Elite
Quote:
Other Black writers of the time felt that Zora Neale exacerbated race relations by contributing to the Black stereotype. Her Blacks are emotional, unpredictable, vain, preening, and vaguely threatening. In short, Zora’s characters are hot and humid and drawn with vivid colors, where the characters of the male Black writers of the time are as cold, dry, and shades-of-gray as the stereotypical White.
That is probably why Zora Neale’s work received so little recognition during her lifetime (she died in poverty and was buried in an unknown grave). Black intellectuals of the time portrayed Blacks as simply White folks in dark skins, striving to earn sympathetic response from Whites. Zora Neale mocked this pretension with the arrogant Blackness of her characters. This divergence between the concept of Blackness as culture-free genetics versus Blackness as defiant ethnicity also probably explains her popularity today. Although her work repelled the critics of her time, it strikes a responsive chord among Americans who grew up after the “Black is beautiful” wave.
The "Mulatto Elite" were, and still are to a great extent, slightly darker-skinned "whites" (and some of them aren't even darker-skinned). This is also why white members of the Muatto Elite who reject that status for a white identity don't have to learn a separate "white" culture. Culturally, they ARE "white." The problem arose when the Mulatto Elite (unlike tri-racial isolate communities, who never stopped fighting) leaders decided that they would bow to Jim Crow and share the name of "The Negro" with people who were culturally and "racially" distinct from them. "Mulatto Elites" wanted "whites" to think of them when the word "Negro" was mentioned (as opposed to the REAL "Negroes").
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.
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!"; and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.
These 2 paragraphs are really powerful words. She's looking at her past her heritage her ethnicity as an asset as as something to share and enjoy. I really connected with this part, this is how my parents raised us.
Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005 13:54 Post subject: Re: Zora Neale Hurston and Jazz
fwsweet wrote:
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.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is lust as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret3 with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai4 above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce5 on the Boule Mich6 with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
Yes, this expression about Jazz, while reading it my insides began to stand up, I started to remember some jazz pieces that made me dance...
I've found the Jazz is a place where many ethnic groups meet and mixed -friendship & romantic and it seems natural. I noticed this at the many jazz festivals I've attended. It's interesting that the only 'white' people who ahhh ...dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai4 above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! are the hippie's which is cool, everyone responds differently, I also at times just sit there a pat my feet.
Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005 14:03 Post subject: Re: Zora Neale Hurston and the Mulatto Elite
Powell wrote:
Quote:
Other Black writers of the time felt that Zora Neale exacerbated race relations by contributing to the Black stereotype. Her Blacks are emotional, unpredictable, vain, preening, and vaguely threatening. In short, Zora’s characters are hot and humid and drawn with vivid colors, where the characters of the male Black writers of the time are as cold, dry, and shades-of-gray as the stereotypical White.
That is probably why Zora Neale’s work received so little recognition during her lifetime (she died in poverty and was buried in an unknown grave). Black intellectuals of the time portrayed Blacks as simply White folks in dark skins, striving to earn sympathetic response from Whites. Zora Neale mocked this pretension with the arrogant Blackness of her characters. This divergence between the concept of Blackness as culture-free genetics versus Blackness as defiant ethnicity also probably explains her popularity today. Although her work repelled the critics of her time, it strikes a responsive chord among Americans who grew up after the “Black is beautiful” wave.
The "Mulatto Elite" were, and still are to a great extent, slightly darker-skinned "whites" (and some of them aren't even darker-skinned). This is also why white members of the Muatto Elite who reject that status for a white identity don't have to learn a separate "white" culture. Culturally, they ARE "white." The problem arose when the Mulatto Elite (unlike tri-racial isolate communities, who never stopped fighting) leaders decided that they would bow to Jim Crow and share the name of "The Negro" with people who were culturally and "racially" distinct from them. "Mulatto Elites" wanted "whites" to think of them when the word "Negro" was mentioned (as opposed to the REAL "Negroes").
What do you think of Zora as a woman?
This paragraph also stood out to me, what do you get from it?
At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce5 on the Boule Mich6 with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005 17:14 Post subject: Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) Painter
Henry Ossawa Tanner
(Born June 21, 1859, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—Died May 25, 1937, Paris, France)
American painter who gained international acclaim for his depiction of landscapes and biblical themes.
After a childhood spent largely in Philadelphia, Tanner began an art career in earnest in 1876, painting harbour scenes, landscapes, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. In 1880 Tanner began two years of formal study under Thomas Eakins at Philadelphia's prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he was the only African American. In 1888 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to open a photography studio, but the venture failed. With the help of Joseph C. Hartzell, a bishop from Cincinnati, Ohio, Tanner secured a teaching position at Clark University in Atlanta. In 1890 Hartzell arranged an exhibition of Tanner's works in Cincinnati and, when no paintings sold, Hartzell purchased the entire collection himself.
Through these earnings, Tanner traveled to Paris in 1891 to enroll at the Académie Julian. During this period he lightened his palette, favouring blues and blue-greens, and began to manipulate light and shadow for a dramatic and inspirational effect. He returned to the United States in 1893, in part to deliver a paper on African Americans and art at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By 1894 his paintings were being exhibited at the annual Paris Salons, at which, in 1896, he was awarded an honourable mention for Daniel in the Lions' Den (1895). The Raising of Lazarus (c. 1897), also biblical in theme, won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1897, a rare achievement for an American artist. Later that year the French government purchased the painting.
After touring the Holy Land in 1897–98, Tanner painted Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (c. 1898), which in 1900 won the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' Lippincott Prize. That same year he received a medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris. He remained an expatriate in France, routinely exhibiting in Paris as well as the United States, and winning several awards. During World War I he served with the American Red Cross in France.
In 1923 the French government made Tanner a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1927 he became the first African American to be granted full membership in the National Academy of Design. Among his other works are The Annunciation (1898), Abraham's Oak (1905), and The Two Disciples at the Tomb (c. 1905).
After his death, Tanner's artistic stature declined until 1969, when the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., exhibited several of his works. This was the first major solo exhibition of a black artist in the United States. In 1991 the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted a touring retrospective of his works.
Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, 1897.
Oil on canvas.
Partial and Promised Gift of
Eddie C. Brown, C. Sylvia Brown,
and their Children,
Tonya Y. Brown Ingersol and
Jennifer L. Brown, Baltimore.
BMA 2002.561
Fig. 1 Henry Ossawa Tanner, Nicodemus Visiting Jesus, 1899. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Joseph E. Temple Fund
Nicodemus and the Complexion of Christ
Encouraged by the 1897 Salon triumph of his Lazarus and its purchase by the French government, Tanner decided while in Jerusalem in 1899 to paint Nicodemus Visiting Jesus, a work that proved equally successful. In addition to winning the Lippincott Prize and being purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy, Nicodemus recapitulated the Lazarus in a broadly iconographic sense by addressing the theme of resurrection or rebirth. As told in the Gospel of John:
There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.23
Looking closely at the Nicodemus, we see that Tanner depicted Jesus with unconventionally dark skin, especially in the figure's left hand, which extends in a gesture at once elocutionary and beckoning. With his black beard, moustache, and dark brown eyes, Jesus provides a stark visual contrast to the elderly Nicodemus, whose hair, beard, and skin echo the cool gray colors of the architectural surfaces surrounding him. Tanner further accentuated the darkness of Christ's features through a vivid contrast between them and the white drapery worn by the Savior under his brown cloak. Unlike Nicodemus, the figure of Jesus has been illuminated by no fewer than three light sources: the moonlight, an implied lamp glowing warmly orange beneath the foreground stairs, and a mysterious inner light emanating from Christ's own breast. Despite this profusion of lights, however, the Savior's face and beard remain obscure.
Fig. 5 Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Savior, ca. 1900-1905. Oil on canvas mounted to plywood. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian American Art Museum / Art Resource, N.Y.
Fig. 6 James Jacques Joseph Tissot, Baptism of Jesus Christ, 1886-1894. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum of Art, Purchased by Public Subscription
Similarly darkened, enigmatic figures of Christ appear in other works by Tanner at the turn of the twentieth century, such as The Savior (fig. 5) and Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha (1905, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). With their long dark hair and uncertain features veiled in shadows, Tanner's depictions of Jesus departed noticeably from those by James Tissot, the French academic painter whose famous and copiously illustrated book La vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ of 1896-97 (English translation, The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, 1899) established the dominant transatlantic mode at the time (fig. 6).24 Tissot's travels to the Holy Land in 1885, 1889, and 1896 secured his reputation as the foremost biblical archaeologist among painters, a fact that in turn promoted a prodigious market for his works and earned him a fortune.25 In The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, a profusion of authenticating Palestinian landscapes, architectural details, and local human "types" served to naturalize Tissot's essentially Victorian vision of Christ, whose light-skinned Anglo-Saxon appearance contrasted sharply with the sinister, stereotypically hook-nosed Jewish figures also pictured therein (as well as with some of the dark-haired Apostles).26 One contemporary reviewer praised Tissot's Christ for his "apartness," his "luminous" appearance, "an immaculateness strangely touching," "incandescence," and "a certain awfulness of light and whiteness"—terms that certainly encouraged many Northern Europeans (and Euro-Americans) to interpret the Savior racially in their own image.27
Tanner knew and undoubtedly admired Tissot's The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, but he diverged from the French painter's example by constructing a visibly darker Christ in the Nicodemus and other works circa 1900.28 It might be tempting here to think that Tanner, an artist with African ancestry, deliberately set out to present a "black" Christ as an anti-racist gesture akin to those detected by many art historians in his earlier genre paintings like The Banjo Lesson. Assertions of Christ's blackness or "Negro" identity, after all, were not rare in African-American religious discourse of the period. For example, in 1898 a minister named Henry McNeal Turner declared the following in one of his sermons:
Every race of people since time began, who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or carvings, or by any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destiny was symbolized by themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much as any other people?29
Speculation about the blackness of Christ and his biblical ancestors also appeared in publications such as Jesus Christ Had Negro Blood in His Veins: The Wonder of the Twentieth Century (1901) by an author named W. L. Hunter as well as The Color of Solomon—What? (1895), written by Tanner's father, Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner.30 In 1875, another author named Kersey Graves averred, "There is as much evidence that the Christian Savior was a black man, or at least a dark man, as there is of his being the son of the Virgin Mary, or that he once lived and moved upon the earth."31
And yet, the visual evidence in Tanner's Nicodemus does not really support an interpretation of Christ as distinctly "black," since the face of the savior here looks too generic and obscure to accommodate any specific racial reading. Though certainly "dark" in the vague sense articulated by Graves, Tanner's Jesus lacks the common ethnographic signifiers of "blackness," "whiteness," or "Jewishness" circulating at the time.32 The preponderance of shadows and conflicting light sources in the Nicodemus even look deliberately calculated by the artist to obfuscate the figure's appearance. Cool lavender moonlight above, reflected on Christ's forehead and left cheek, competes with the warm orange glow of a lamp below, illuminating his right cheek and breast, creating not just an element of mystery but also illegibility regarding skin color. Such effects of illegibility and invisibility aptly interpret the gospel passage in question, which states one "cannot see the kingdom of God" without being born again. In other words, Tanner's obscure and racially unspecific Christ functions less as a representation than as an enticing vehicle of salvation, through which the beholder may imagine the holy kingdom. Only after embracing God and experiencing spiritual rebirth through a leap of faith will the beholder see Christ in his plenitude, the precise nature of which Tanner strategically left unclear. Until making that leap, the beholder remains confronted with a beckoning enigma.
Significantly, Tanner recorded a statement about the Savior's enigmatic identity when he commented obliquely on turn-of-the-century debates regarding the historical Jesus. In one of a series of illustrated short articles on the "Mothers of the Bible" that he produced for Ladies Home Journal in 1902-1903, Tanner wrote the following about the young Christ:
The physical characteristics of the child Jesus will always remain a point of discussion. No artist has ever produced a type, nor ever will, that has in it all that the varying minds of all time will acknowledge as complete. It was my chance in Jerusalem to run across a little Yemenite Jew. Where could a better type be found than this swarthy child of Arabia, of purest Jewish blood—nurtured in the same land, under the same sun, and never neither he nor his ancestors, having quitted its (at times) inhospitable shores.33
Most ODR members undoubtedly know the following two items of trivia, but for guests who appreciate help:
1. Zora Neal wrote: "[James Weldon Johnson's] own brother is scared in his presence. He bows and scrapes and calls him The Duke." FYI, the brothers James Weldon and John Rosamond Johnson wrote, respectively, the lyrics and melody of Lift Every Voice and Sing."
2. Zora Neale wrote: "I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored." FYI, this disputes W.E.B. Du Bois's claim, in The Souls of Black Folk, that African Americans are torn between those two contradictory self images.
Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005 17:28 Post subject: Zora Jungle Drums & James Weldon Johnson
fwsweet wrote:
I think that everyone who reads the previous post can understand why Mary Lee hears Zora Neale as speaking personally one-on-one to her. Hurston was the quintessential American woman: outspoken, educated, smart, assertive, self-confident. She was the very same sort of woman who perplexed and even frightened Alexis d’Tocqueville when he visited the United States nearly a century earlier.
Yes, she was definetely a confident "Independant Woman"
But let me draw your attention to the three paragraphs about her emotional response to jazz. I call this passage, “Zora Neale’s jungle drums.” (My label enables Mary Lee to know exactly what I mean and retrieve the passage instantly from her library.) One can easily over-intellectualize this passage. Music’s appeal is universal precisely because it speaks to all of us in the same way. Zora Neale’s talent for articulating her emotional response says more about her superb craftsmanship as a writer than about cultural differences between Black and White. And the fact that skill at percussion (as either musician or dancer) is unrelated to skin tone is immediately obvious to anyone who has ever watched a Carioca escola de samba during Rio’s Carnaval.
No, the point is not that Zora Neale racializes emotional response to music, a universal phenomenon. It is that her “white friend” who smoked calmly, “drumming the table with his fingertips” was probably one of the Black writers of the Renaissance. Although their subject matter depended on the U.S. color line, the form, structure, tone, and nuance employed by the Black male writers of the Renaissance was modeled on Western mainstream (White) sensibilities. They strove to portray the Black intelligentsia as competing successfully with white artists on their own ground. They were uncomfortable with Zora Neale’s in-your-face Blackness.
Other Black writers of the time felt that Zora Neale exacerbated race relations by contributing to the Black stereotype. Her Blacks are emotional, unpredictable, vain, preening, and vaguely threatening. In short, Zora’s characters are hot and humid and drawn with vivid colors, where the characters of the male Black writers of the time are as cold, dry, and shades-of-gray as the stereotypical White.
That is probably why Zora Neale’s work received so little recognition during her lifetime (she died in poverty and was buried in an unknown grave). Black intellectuals of the time portrayed Blacks as simply White folks in dark skins, striving to earn sympathetic response from Whites. Zora Neale mocked this pretension with the arrogant Blackness of her characters. This divergence between the concept of Blackness as culture-free genetics versus Blackness as defiant ethnicity also probably explains her popularity today. Although her work repelled the critics of her time, it strikes a responsive chord among Americans who grew up after the “Black is beautiful” wave.
Predictably, her reaction to such criticism was to mock her critics. Recall that Mary Lee’s favorite passage is the one I call “jungle drums,” in the previous post. Well, my favorite Zora Neale passage is the following one, where she punches out James Weldon Johnson.
Great analysis Frank
From Zora Neale Hurston and Cheryl A. Wall, Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), pages 774-775.
====
White people have come running to me with a deep wrinkle between the eyes asking me things. They have heard talk going around about this passing, so they are trying to get some information so they can know. So since I have been asked, that gives me leave to talk right out of my mouth.
In the first place, this passing business works both ways. All the passing is not passing for white. We have white folks among us passing for colored. They just happen to be born with a tinge of brown in the skin and took up being colored as a profession. Take James Weldon Johnson for instance.
There's a man white enough to suit Hitler and he's been passing for colored for years.
Now, don't get the idea that he is not welcome among us. He certainly is. He has more than paid his way. But he just is not a Negro. You take a look at him and ask why I talk like that. But you know, I told you back there not to depend too much on skin. You'll certainly get mis-put on your road if you put too much weight on that. Look at James Weldon Johnson from head to foot, but don't let that skin color and that oskobolic hair fool you. Watch him! Does he parade when he walks? No, James Weldon Johnson proceeds. Did anybody ever, ever see him grin? No, he smiles. He couldn't give a grin if he tried. He can't even Uncle Tom. Not that I complain of "Tomming" if it's done right.
"Tomming" is not an aggressive act, it is true, but it has its uses like feinting in the prize ring. But James Weldon Johnson can't Tom. He has been seen trying it, but it was sad. Let him look around at some of the other large Negroes and hand over the dice.
No, I never expect to see James Weldon Johnson a success in the strictly Negro Arts, but I would not at all be surprised to see him crowned. The man is just full of that old monarch material. If some day I looked out of my window on Seventh Avenue and saw him in an ermine robe and a great procession going to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to be crowned I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Maybe he'd make a mighty fine king at that. He's tried all he knew how to pass for colored, but he just hasn't made it. His own brother is scared in his presence. He bows and scrapes and calls him The Duke.
So now you say "Well, if you can't tell who My People are by skin color, how are you going to know?" There's more ways than one of telling, and I'm going to point them out right now. ...
that was very sharp and funny, It was interesting reading this and picturing J W Johnson and knowing some things of his mannerisms.
By Zora Neale Huston
From Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
Posted: Mon 25 Jul 2005 18:05 Post subject: Sterling Brown (1901-1989) author, critic, professor, poet
Sterling Allen Brown (1901-1989), author, critic, professor, Poet Laureate for Washington, DC, and "the Dean of American Poets," was born on Howard University's campus at the site where Cook Hall Dormitory now stands. He was educated in the District of Columbia Public Schools and received his Bachelor's degree from Williams College (Williamstown, MA) in 1922 with honors as a Phi Beta Kappa. Brown entered graduate school and received his Master's degree from Harvard University in 1923. He taught at Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee; and Lincoln University in Missouri. He was a visiting lecturer at Atlanta University, New York University and Vassar College. Sterling Brown joined the Howard University faculty in 1929 and remained associated with Howard for almost sixty years.
Professor Brown devoted his life to the development of an authentic black folk literature. He was one of the first scholars to identify folklore as a vital component of the black aesthetic and to recognize its validity as a form of artistic expression. He worked to legitimatize this genre in several ways. As a critic, Brown exposed the shortcomings of white literature that stereotyped blacks and demonstrated why black authors are best suited to describe the Negro experience. As a poet, he mined the rich vein of black Southern culture, replacing primitive or sentimental caricatures with authentic folk heroes drawn from Afro-American sources. As a teacher, Brown encouraged self-confidence among his students, urging them to find their own literary voices and to educate themselves to be an audience worthy of receiving the special gifts of black literature. Among his students were actor/playwright Ossie Davis, political activist Stokley Carmichael, and the Nobel prize winning novelist, Toni Morrison.
Overall, Brown's influence in the field of Afro-American literature has been so great that scholar Darwin T. Turner told Ebony Magazine: "I discovered that all trails led, at some point to Sterling Brown. His Negro Caravan was the anthology of Afro-American. His unpublished study of Afro-American theater was the major work in the field. His study of images of Afro-Americans in American literature was a pioneer work. His essays on folk literature and folklore were preeminent. He was not always the best critic…but Brown was the literary historian who wrote the Bible for the study of Afro-American literature." Brown's dedication to his field was unflinching, but it was not until he was in his late sixties that the author received wide spread public acclaim. In 1968 the Black Consciousness movement revived an interest in his work. ("Sterling Brown." Contemporary Authors. CD-ROM. Detroit: Gale, 1996.)
During the 1970s, after years of neglect, Brown's career took an upturn. In 1979 the City Council of the District of Columbia declared his birthday, May 1, Sterling A. Brown Day. "I've been rediscovered, reinstituted, regenerated and recovered," he said in a 1979 interview with The Washington Post. He published The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown in 1980 which won the Lenore Marshall Prize in the early 1980s as the best book of poetry published that year. In 1984 he was named Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia, a position which, The Washington Post wrote, "[he had] held informally for most of his 83 years."
In 1991, following a University-wide contest to name the Howard University Libraries' Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), the name "Sterling" was selected to commemorate the unique contributions and far-reaching impact of Sterling Allen Brown.
This selected bibliography is a compilation of some of Professor Brown's well known works. It is intended to cover a broad perspective of his writings. Call numbers are included for books located in The Founders Library and Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) at Howard University.
WORKS BY STERLING A. BROWN
POETRY
The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Ed. Michael S. Harper. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. (Founders PS 3503 R833 R17/MSRC M811.5 B815c)
The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975. (Founders PS 3503 R833 L3)
Southern Road. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932. (MSRC M811.5 B815)
COLLECTED WORKS
"Athletics and the Arts." The Integration of the Negro in American Society. Ed. E. Franklin Frazier. Washington, D.C: Howard University Press, 1951. 117-147. (MSRC H M378HM H83so)
"The Blues as Folk Poetry." Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany. Ed. Benjamin A. Botkin. Vol. 1. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930. (MSRC M398 F71)
The Book of Negro Folklore. Ed. Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes. New York: Dodd Mead, 1958. (MRSC M398 H87B)
Negro Caravan: Writings by American Negroes. Ed. Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee. New York: Citadel Press, 1941, 1987. (Founders PS 508 N3 B75/MSRC 810.8 B81n2)
"Negro in the American Theatre." Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Ed. Phyllis Hartnoll. New York: Oxford Press, 1951. 565-572.
"A Son's Return: 'Oh, Didn't He Ramble'." Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro- American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Ed. John Hope Franklin and Michael S. Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
CRITICISM
"A Century of Negro Portraiture in American Literature." Massachusetts Review 7.4 (1966): 63-96.
The Negro in American Fiction. Negro Poetry and Drama. New York: Arno Press, 1969. (Founders PS 153 N5 B678/ MSRC M810.9 B81a2)
Negro Poetry and Drama and the Negro in American Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1969. (Founders PS 153 N5 B68)
"Negro Character as Seen by White Authors." Journal of Negro Education 2 (1933): 179-203.
"Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads, and Worksongs." Phylon 14. 4 (1953): 45-61.
"On Dialect Usage." The Slave's Narrative. Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 3-22.
"Our Literary Audience." Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism fromthe Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Ed. Angelyn Mitchell. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 69-78.
Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931.
"Seventy-Five Years of the Negro in Literature." Jackson Bulletin 2 (1953): 26-30.
WORKS ABOUT STERLING BROWN
BIOGRAPHY
Current Biography Yearbook 1989. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1990. (Founders Ref. CT 100 C
Dictionary of Literary Biography 48, 51, 63. Detroit: Gale (Founders Ref. PS 153 D542)
"Obituary." New York Times 17 Jan. 1989, early city ed.: B11.
"Obituary." Washington Post 16 Jan. 1989: B6.
"Sterling Allen Brown." Editorial. Washington Post 19 Jan. 1989: A26.
Trescott, Jacqueline. "Appreciation: Sterling Brown’s Enlightened Example." Washington Post 16 Jan. 1989: D1+.
Gabbin, Joanne V. Sterling Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985. (Founders PS 3503 R833 Z66)
Smith, Gary. "The Literary Ballads of Sterling A. Brown." CLA Journal 33.4 (1989): 393-409.
Stepto, Robert. "Sterling Brown : Outsider in the Harlem Renaissance." The Harlem Renaissance Revaluation. New York: Garland, 1989.
Tidwell, John Edgar. "Sterling A. Brown Tribute." Black American Literature Forum 23.1 (1989): 89-112.
Wright, John S. "The New Poet and the Nachal Man: Sterling A. Brown's Folk Odyssey." Black American Forum 23.1 (1989): 95-105.
FURTHER INFORMATION AND SOURCES
Black Literature Criticism, Vol. 1; Black Writers; Contemporary Authors 85-88; Contemporary Literary Criticism 1, 23, 26, 59.
Sterling Brown Papers. Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC). Howard University.
Consult indexes and abstracts such as Abstracts of English Studies; Dissertation Abstracts International, Humanities Index, and MLA International Bibliography to locate additional information.
Researched and Compiled by Imogene Zachery
Sterling A. Brown Residence
1222 Kearney Street, NE
Sterling A. Brown was a central figure of the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Sterling Allen Brown was born on May 1901 into some have called the "smug" or even "affected" respectability of Washington’s African American middle class. He grew up in the Washington world of official segregation, which engendered a contradiction between full citizenship and marginalized existence. The son of a distinguished pastor and theologian, Brown graduated with honors from the prestigious Dunbar High School in 1918. That fall, he entered Williams College on a scholarship set aside for minority students. By the time he left in 1922, he had performed spectacularly: election to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, the Graves Prize for his essay "The Comic Spirit in Shakespeare and Moliére," the only student awarded "Final Honors" in English, and cum laude graduation with an AB degree.
At Harvard University from 1922 to 1923, Brown took an MA degree in English. In retrospect, he always talked about his fortuitous discovery of Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry (1921). This anthology, more than any other single work he read, radically altered his view of art by introducing him to the New American Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and other experimenters in melding vernacular language, democratic values, and "the extraordinary in ordinary life." When he left, however, he left knowing what the illustrator of Southern Road (1932) would later observe about him: "Harvard only gave you the way to put it down, not how to feel about things."
The sensitivity to the philosophical and poetic potential in African American folk life, lore, and language was developed in Brown during a series of teaching assignments in Negro colleges, including Virginia Seminary and College (1923-1926), Lincoln University in Missouri (1926-1928), and Fisk University (1928-1929). In each of these locations, he set about absorbing the cultural and aesthetic influences that would define the folk-based metaphysic of his art. On numerous "folklore collecting trips" into "jook-joints," barbershops, and isolated farms, Brown absorbed the wit and wisdom of Mrs. Bibby, Calvin "Big Boy" Davis, Slim Greer, and many more actual persons who are refashioned into the many memorable folk characters of his poetry.
The poetry collected into Southern Road challenges James Weldon Johnson's dictum that the that the poetic and philosophical range of Black speech and dialect is limited to pathos and humor. Although the minstrel and plantation traditions had heavily burdened African American speech with the yoke of racial stereotypes, Brown, along with Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, admirably demonstrated the aesthetic potential of that speech when it is centered in careful study of the folk themselves. Brown came to this conclusion, as he said in a 1942 speech, when he discovered the way folklore became a lens through which to view African American vernacular language. Taking the approach of a creative writer to folklore, he said: "I was first attracted by certain qualities that I thought the speech of the people had, and I wanted to get for my own writing a flavor, a color, a pungency of speech. Then later, I came to something more important--I wanted to get an understanding of people, to acquire an accuracy in the portrayal of their lives."Brown found support for his vision of "folk" in the work of Benjamin A. Botkin, whose term "folk-say" suggested a profound shift in folklore studies that Brown knew and approved of. Folklore, as Botkin pointed out, was something more than collecting, verifying, indexing, and annotating sources; it was people talking, doing, and describing themselves. To underscore this new emphasis, Botkin published a series of regional miscellanies under the name Folk-Say beginning in 1929. Brown contributed eighteen poems and two essays to editions two through four of Folk-Say.
The success of Brown's "theory" of folklore is revealed in its implementation. Brown's poetry received its motivation from a need to reveal the humanity that lies below the surface racial stereotypes only skim. There he found qualities erased by racial stereotype: "tonic shrewdness, the ability to take it, and the double-edged humor built up of irony and shrewd observation." Structurally, he made use of, as he said, "the clipped line, the blues form, and the refrain poem." Those folk forms were complemented by his astute experiments with traditional forms, such as the sonnet, villanelle, and ballad. Brown's frequent allusions to Black folk heroes such as John Henry, Stackolee, and Casey Jones also raised ordinary experience to mythic proportions.
Recently, literary historians have acknowledged the persistence of Brown's folk-based aesthetic in his critical and editorial work, too. But despite its coherence, his approach has received little study. Beginning in 1931-1932, when he returned to Harvard for doctoral study, Brown focused his critical writing on examinations of representational issues. The result was "Plays of the Irish Character: A Study in Reinterpretation" (an unpublished 1932 course thesis), "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors" (1933), The Negro in American Fiction (1937), and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). The connecting link in Brown’s editorial and research work for the Federal Writers' Project, the Carnegie-Myrdal Study, and The Negro Caravan (1941), the most comprehensive literary anthology of Black writing of its time, is also his folk-based aesthetic. Collectively, this work points to Brown's need to demonstrate the diversity as well as the complexity of African American life. Against the conclusion of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) that Black life was a "distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American condition," Brown presented evidence that African American folk humor functioned as a strategy for exerting control in an often hostile world. Or when the specious argument was made accusing African Americans of having contributed very little to American literature, Brown, with coeditors Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, presented The Negro Caravan as irrefutable proof of Black literary achievement.
Brown also attempts to correct the myopic lens used to view African Americans by writing a number of prose sketches that were to be collected and published as "A Negro Looks at the South." These pieces included "Out of Their Mouths," "Words on a Bus," "The Muted South," and several more. The shared reference to speech tells us much about Brown's view of language as a vehicle for determining cultural authenticity. That Brown admits to viewing these pieces as poems reveals more about his aesthetic, too. Each dialogue or conversation was a unit of speech and thus needed, as he said, "counterpoint, cadence, rhyming, timing, etc. for impact and truth." Therefore, if cuts had to be made, whole units of dialogue should be cut, not cuts within the unit.
The careful reconsideration of Black speech as a viable medium of artistic expression became for Brown the predominant means for reclaiming the humanity of African Americans. This pursuit, of course, had social implications. Brown and others shared the view that "art is a handmaiden to social policy." Although a staunch believer in the promises of the Constitution, Brown was aware that such provisions as the infamous "three-fifths compromise" began a lengthy list of stumbling blocks to achieving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream meant for Brown the addition of two-fifths more, making a whole number. The root word in "integration" is "integer," which means "whole or complete." As literary historians and cultural critics reexamine the value of the vernacular in their respective pursuits, Brown's daring efforts to make Black folk speech claim a rightful place for him and his people will be properly acknowledged.
MEMPHIS BLUESNineveh, Tyre
Babylon,
Not much lef'
Of either one.
All dese cities
Ashes and rust,
De win' sing sperrichals
Through deir dus'....
Was another Memphis
Mongst de olden days,
Done been destroyed
In many ways...
Dis here Memphis
It may go
Floods may drown it;
Tornado blow;
Mississippi wash it
Down to sea---
Like de other Memphis in
History.
2
Watcha gonna do when Memphis on fire,
Memphis on fire, Mistah Preachin' Man?
Gonna pray to Jesus and nebber tire,
Gonna pray to Jesus, loud as I can,
Gonna pray to my Jesus, oh, my Lawd!
Watcha gonna do when de tall flames roar,
Tall flames roar, Mistah Lovin' Man?
Gonna love my brwonskin better'n before--
Gonna love my baby lak a do right man,
Gonna love my brown baby, oh, my Lawd
Whatcha gonna do when Memphis falls down,
Memphis falls down, Mistah Music Man?
Gonna plunk on dat box as long as it soun'
Gonna plunk dat box fo' to beat de ban',
Gonna tickle dem ivories, oh, my Lawd!
Watcha gonna do in de hurrican,
In de hurricane, Mistah Workin' Man?
Gonna put dem buildings up again,
Gonna put em up dis time to stan',
Gonna push a wicked wheelbarrow, oh, my Lawd!
Watcha gonna do when Memphis near gone,
Memphis near gone, Mistah Drinkin' Man?
Gonna grab a pint bottle of Mountain Corn,
Gonna keep de stopper in my han',
Gonna get a mean jag on, oh, my Lawd!
Watcha gonna do when de flood roll fas',
Flood roll fas', Mistah Gamblin' Man?
Gonna pick up my dice fo' one las' pass---
Gonna fade my way to de lucky lan',
Gonna throw my las' seven---oh, my Lawd!
3
Memphis go
By Flood or Flame;
Nigger won't worry
All de same---
Memphis go
Memphis come back,
Ain' no skin
Off de nigger's back.
All dese cities
Ashes, rust....
De win' sing sperrichals
Through deir dus'.
Last edited by gemini072 on Fri 12 Aug 2005 18:05; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Fri 12 Aug 2005 18:00 Post subject: actress Fredi Washington
December 23
Fredi
Washington
*On this date in 1903, Fredi Washington was born. She was an American actress, writer, dancer, and singer.
From Savannah, Georgia, Fredericka Carolyn Washington’s education began at St. Elizabeth Convent in Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania. She then attended the Egri School of Dramatic Writing and the Christopher School of Languages, where her attractions included casting, writing, dancing, singing, and civil rights. Washington’s career began dancing in nightclubs. From 1922 to 1926, she toured with Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along.
Assuming the stage name Edith Warren, she was cast as the lead in Black Boy with Paul Robeson in 1926. With work hard to find in America she toured Europe, some of her engagements included Gaumount Palace and Chateau Madrid (Paris), Casino Nice, Green Park Hotel (London), Trocadero and Floria Palast (Berlin). Washington was cast in Sweet Chariot (1930) in New York, Singin’ the Blues (1931, and Run, Little Chillun (1933).
Her film career began concurrently with performances in Black and Tan Fantasy (1929), The Old Man and the Mountain, and The Emperor Jones (1933); she married Lawrence Brown of the Duke Ellington Band later that year. One of Washington’s primary concerns was the relationship between Black and White women. She brought to the medium a new conception of African-American women in general and no where was this better displayed than her role in the film Imitation of Life (1934). So convincing was Washington’s portrayal of the tragic Mulatto, that many felt she was (in real life) anti-Black.
Friends like Bobby Short and her sister’s husband, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell said that she never hid behind the lightness of her complexion. Washington’s commitment to civil rights was just as strong as her professionalism in the theater and cinema arts. She was one of the founders of the Negro Actors Guild and from 1937 to 1938 was the organization’s secretary. She was administrative secretary for the Joint Actors Equity-Theater League Committee on Hotel Accommodations for Negro Actors throughout the United States.
Washington was on radio in the Jewish immigrant comedy The Goldbergs, and performed specials for the National Urban League on CBS radio. Other films include Drums of the Jungle (1935) and One Mile From Heaven (1937). She also appeared in the stage production of Lysistra (1946), A Long Way From Home (1948) and How Long Till Summer (1949). In 1952, she married Anthony Bell, a dentist, and was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975. Fredi Washington died in 1994.
After giving a commanding performance in Imitation of Life it would seem certain that her film career would soar. However this was not the case. Because of her light skin, she had a hard time fitting in anywhere. She was not "black" enough to take off as an African American actress, but white audiences would not accept her in lead roles where there was any romance with a white actor because she was black. It is rumored that Studio Executives encouraged her to try to pass for white. But, unlike her Imitation Of Life character Peola, she refused to do it. She had no desire to deny the fact that she was black, she was proud of her heritage.
After Imitation Of Life," she starred in Ouanga (1936) as a plantation owner who decides to seek revenge in the form of voodoo spells when her boyfriend leaves her to marry a white woman. Her last film role was One Mile from Heaven(1937), a 20th Century Fox drama about a reporter who thinks she has a major story when she hears about a black woman who has a white daughter with blonde hair. She devoted the rest of her life to civil rights causes co-founding the Negro Actors Guild of America and writing theater reviews for The People's Voice, published by her sister's husband Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Fredi finally did get to work in Hollywood films again but not as an actress but as a casting consultant on the Dorothy Dandridge-starring films Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess. The talented actress, and activist died on June 28, 1994 in Stamford, Connecticut.
One Mile From Heaven (1937) .... Flora Jackson
Ouanga (1936) .... Klili Gordon
Imitation of Life (1934) .... Peola Johnson, Age 19
'
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
