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Alain Locke helped launch black modernism, but he was spurned by the artists he hoped to turn into lovers.

Alain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face. Philosophy and history, poetry and art, loneliness and longing-the face holds all of these in a melancholy balance. The eyes glimmer and the lips purse.

It was this face that appeared, one summer morning in 1924, at the Paris flat of a destitute Langston Hughes, who put the scene in his memoir " The Big Sea." " Qui est-il?" Hughes had asked through the closed door. He was stunned by the reply:

A mild and gentle voice answered: "Alain Locke."

And sure enough, there was Dr. Alain Locke of Washington, a little, brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a degree from Oxford. The same Dr. Locke who had written me about my poems, and who wanted to come to see me almost two years before on the fleet of dead ships, anchored up the Hudson. He had got my address from the Crisis in New York, to whom I had sent some poems from Paris. Now in Europe on vacation, he had come to call.

During the next two weeks, the middle-aged Locke, then a philosophy professor at Howard University, snatched the young Hughes from dingy Montmartre and took him on an extravagant march through ballet, opera, gardens, and the Louvre. This was the first time they'd met-but, after more than a year of sighing letters, Locke had come to Paris flushed with amorous feeling. The feeling was mismatched. Each man was trapped in the other's fantasy: Hughes appeared as the scruffy poet who had fled his studies at Columbia for the pleasures of la vie bohème, while Locke was the "little, brown man" with status and degrees.

Days passed in a state of dreamy ambiguity. "Locke's here," Hughes wrote to their mutual friend Countee Cullen. "We are having a glorious time. I like him a great deal." The words are grinning-and sexless. Hughes had found a use for the gallant Locke: an entrée to the bold movement in black American writing then rumbling to life. Cullen was gaining renown; the novelist Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of The Crisis; and Jean Toomer's "Cane"-a novel in jagged fragments-had trumpeted the arrival of a new black art, one chained to the fate of a roiling, bullied, "emancipated" people. "I think we have enough talent," W. E. B. Du Bois had announced in 1920, "to start a renaissance."

Locke drove it forward and is remembered, dimly, as its "dean." Whoever knows his name today likely links it to " The New Negro: An Interpretation," a 1925 anthology that planted some of the bravest black writers of the nineteen-twenties-Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston-squarely in the public eye. "The New Negro," which appeared just a year after Locke's summer visit with Hughes, launched the Negro Renaissance and marked the birth of a new style: the swank, gritty, fractious style of blackness streaking through the modern world.

Jeffrey C. Stewart's new biography bears the perhaps inevitable title " The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke." But the title makes a point: the New Negro, that lively protagonist stomping onto the proscenium of history, might also be thought of, tenderly, as a figure for Locke himself. Stewart writes,

Locke became a "mid-wife to a generation of young writers," as he labeled himself, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture had given him and make something revolutionary out of it.

Here was a man who enshrined his passions in collections, producing anthologies, exhibitions, and catalogues that refracted, according to Stewart, an abiding "need for love." But even love could be captured and slotted into a series. Stewart tells us that among Locke's posthumous effects was a shocking item that was promptly destroyed: a collection of semen samples from his lovers, stored neatly in a box.

Meticulousness was a virtue among Philadelphia's black bourgeoisie, the anxious world into which Locke was born. On September 13, 1885, Mary Locke, the wife of Pliny, delivered a feeble, sickly son at their home on South Nineteenth Street. Arthur LeRoy Locke, as the boy was christened, spent his first year seized by the rheumatic fever that he had contracted at birth. The Lockes were Black Victorians, or, as Alain later put it, "fanatically middle class," and their mores and strivings shaped his self-conception and bestowed upon him an unusual entitlement to a black intellectual life. Pliny was well educated-he was a graduate of Howard Law School-but he suffered, as a black man, from a series of wrongful firings that scrambled the family's finances.

Roy (as Alain was known in childhood) was Pliny's project. "I was indulgently but intelligently treated," Locke later recalled. "No special indulgence as to sentiment; very little kissing, little or no fairy stories, no frightening talk or games." Instead, Pliny read aloud from Virgil and Homer, but only after Roy had finished his early-morning math exercises. He was being cultivated to be a race leader: a metallic statue of polished masculinity. But he was powerfully drawn to his mother. Pliny opposed this, and worked to shred the bond. Locke later recounted that his father's death, when he was six, "threw me into the closest companionship with my mother, which remained, except for the separation of three years at college and four years abroad, close until her death at 71, when I was thirty six." Under the watchful care of the struggling Mary, Roy became a precocious aesthete. And he proceeded, with striking ambition, from Central High School to the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy to Harvard.

Alain, as he was now called, fashioned himself as a yearning man of letters. Enraptured by his white professors, he decorated his modest lodgings in punctilious imitation of their homes. Not quite five feet tall, he had bloomed into a dandy, strutting down the streets of Cambridge in a genteel ensemble-gray suit, gray gloves, elegant overcoat-while displaying a shuddering reluctance to associate with the other black students at Harvard. They weren't "gentlemen," and, when a black classmate introduced him to a group of them, he was appalled:

Of course they were colored. He took me right up into the filthy bedroom and there were 5 niggers, all Harvard men. Well, their pluck and their conceit are wonderful. Some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright. . . . They are not fit for company even if they are energetic and plodding fellows. I'm not used to that class and I don't intend to get used to them.

This is from a letter to his mother, and the bile streams so freely that one assumes that Mary indulged the young Locke's contempt. But his arrogance followed from the strangulating tension between who and what he was: blackness was limiting, oppressive, banal, a boorish hurdle in his brilliant path. "I am not a race problem," he later wrote to Mary. "I am Alain LeRoy Locke."

He'd arrived at Harvard when William James and then John Dewey had electrified philosophy in America under the banner of pragmatism, a movement that repudiated idealism and tested concepts against practice. Locke, who also became a devotee of the philosopher and belletristic aesthete George Santayana, went on to become the first black Rhodes Scholar-though as soon as he got to Oxford he was humiliated by white Americans, who shut him out of their gatherings. The scorn was instructive: the foppish Locke joined the Cosmopolitan Club, a debate society composed of colonial élites, who exposed him to the urgencies of anti-imperial struggle and, crucially, to the gratifications of racial and political solidarity. He finished a thesis-ultimately rejected by Oxford-on value theory, while slaking his sexual thirst in pre-Great War Berlin. He returned to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy, for which he submitted a more elaborate version of his Oxford thesis, before joining the faculty at Howard. Mary moved down to Washington, where she was cared for by her doting son.

Locke's other devotions were ill-fated. Much of his erotic life was a series of adroit manipulations and disastrous disappointments; Langston Hughes was just one of the younger men who fell within the blast radius of the older man's sexual voracity as they chased his prestige. He fancied himself a suitor in the Grecian style, dispensing a sentimental education to his charges, assistants, protégés, and students-but hungering for mutuality and lasting love. Locke had affairs with at least a few of the writers included in "The New Negro." His desultory sexual romps with Cullen stretched over years-though Cullen himself would flee the gay life by marrying W. E. B. Du Bois's daughter Yolanda, in a lavish service with sixteen bridesmaids and thirteen hundred guests. Her father described the spectacle in The Crisis as "the symbolic march of young black America," possessed of a "dark and shimmering beauty" and announcing "a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world." To Locke, it was a farce.

He found his own way to stay afloat in the world of the black élite. Pliny had wanted his son to be a race man, and now Alain was lecturing widely and contributing articles to Du Bois's Crisis, which was attached to the N.A.A.C.P., and Charles Johnson's Opportunity, the house organ of the National Urban League. But he stood aloof from the strenuous heroism of Negro uplift, and what he thought of as its flat-footed insistence on "political" art. Locke was a voluptuary: he worried that Du Bois and the younger, further-left members of the movement-notably Hughes and McKay-had debased Negro expression, jamming it into the crate of politics. The titles of Locke's essays on aesthetics ("Beauty Instead of Ashes," "Art or Propaganda?," "Propaganda-or Poetry?") made deflating little incisions in his contemporaries' political hopes. Black art, in Locke's view, was mutable and vast.

Not unlike blackness itself. In 1916, Locke delivered a series of lectures called "Race Contacts and Interracial Relations," in which he painstakingly disproved the narrowly "biological" understanding of race while insisting on the power of culture to distinguish, but not sunder, black from white. Armed with his pragmatist training, he hacked a path to a new philosophical vista: "cultural pluralism."

The term had surfaced in private debates with Horace Kallen, a Jewish student who overlapped with Locke at both Harvard and Oxford. Kallen declared that philosophy should, as his mentor William James insisted, concern itself only with differences that "make a difference"-which included, Kallen thought, the intractable facts of his Jewishness and Locke's blackness. Locke demurred. Race, ethnicity, the very notion of a "people": these weren't expressions of some frozen essence but were molded from that suppler stuff, tradition -to be elevated and transmuted by the force and ingenuity of human practice. He could value his people's origins without bolting them to their past.

His own past had begun to break painfully away. Mary Locke died in 1922, leaving Alain crushed and adrift. But her death also released him, psychically, from the vanished world of the fin-de-siècle black élite, with its asphyxiating diktats. As he moved into modernism, he found that his life was freer and looser; his pomp flared into camp. At Mary's wake, Locke didn't present her lying in state; rather, he installed her, alarmingly, on the parlor couch-her corpse propped like a hostess before a room of horrified guests.

"The New Negro," which appeared three years later, stood as proof, Locke insisted, of a vital new sensibility: here was a briskly modern attitude hoisted up by the race's youth. The collection, which expanded upon a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic, revelled in its eclecticism, as literature, music, scholarship, and art all jostled beside stately pronouncements by the race's patriarchs, Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. The anthology was meant to signal a gutting and remaking of the black collective spirit. Locke would feed and discipline that spirit, playing the critic, publicist, taskmaster, and impresario to the movement's most luminous figures. He was an exalted member of the squabbling clique that Hurston called "the niggerati"-and which we know, simply, as the Harlem Renaissance.

The term has a crispness that the thing itself did not. It was a movement spiked with rivalries and political hostility-not least because it ran alongside the sociological dramas of Communism, Garveyism, mob violence, and a staggering revolution in the shape and texture of black American life, as millions fled the poverty and the lynchings of the Jim Crow South. The cities of the North awaited them-as did higher wages and white police. With the Great Migration came a loud new world and a baffling new life, a chance to lunge, finally, at the transformative dream of the nation they'd been forced, at gunpoint, to build. Modernity had anointed a new hero, and invented, Locke thought, a New Negro.

But he hoped that this new figure would stride beyond politics. Radicals irked him; he regarded them with a kind of princely ennui. In his mind, the New Negro was more than mere effect: history and demography alone couldn't possibly account for the wit, chic, or thrilling force of "the younger generation" to whom he dedicated the volume. In the title essay, Locke presented a race whose inner conversion had flown past the lumbering outside world. The Negro leaped not just from country to city but, crucially, "from medieval America to modern." Previously, "the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact," he wrote, but now, "in Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is-or promises at least to be-a race capital."

Black people had snapped their moorings to servitude and arrived at the advanced subjectivity lushly evinced by their art: their poems and paintings, their novels and spirituals. Aaron Douglas had made boldly stylized drawings and designs for the anthology, which rhymed with the photographs of African sculptures that dotted its pages: masks from the Baoulé and the Bushongo; a grand Dahomey bronze. Negroes were a distinct people, with distinct traditions and values held in common. Their modern art would revive their "folk spirit," displaying a vigorous continuity with their African patrimony and an embrace of American verve. "So far as he is culturally articulate," Locke wrote in the foreword to his anthology, "we shall let the Negro speak for himself."

The sentence shines with triumph; it warms and breaks the heart. Behind Locke's bombast was the inexorable question of suffering: how it forged and brutalized the collective, forcing a desperate solidarity on people not treated as such. The task that confronted any black modernist-after a bloody emancipation, a failed Reconstruction, and the carnage of the First World War-was to decide the place, within this blazing new power, of pain. Locke preached a kind of militant poise. His New Negro would face history without drowning in it; would grasp, but never cling to, the harrowing past. In the anthology, he cheered on "the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and 'touchy' nerves." So the book's roar of modernist exuberance came to seem, in a way, strained.

But also lavish, stylish, jaunty, tart; bristling with whimsy and gleaming with sex. "The New Negro" thrust forth all the ironies of Locke's ethos: his emphatic propriety and angular vision, his bourgeois composure and libertine tastes. "What jungle tree have you slept under, / Dark brown girl of the swaying hips?" asks a Hughes poem, titled "Nude Young Dancer." Locke liked it-but was scandalized by jazz. And though he wrote an admiring essay in the anthology on the passion of Negro spirituals, he also chose to include "Spunk," a short fable by Hurston about cheating and murder.

Locke relished every titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes. Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of McKay's protest poem from "White House" to "White Houses"-an act of censorship that severed the two men's alliance. "No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects," the affronted poet wrote to Locke. "When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!"

And such a blurred line. In a gesture of editorial agnosticism, Locke brought voices to "The New Negro" that challenged his own. Among the more scholarly contributions to the anthology was "Capital of the Black Middle Class," an ambivalent study of Durham, North Carolina, by E. Franklin Frazier, a young social scientist. More than thirty years later, Frazier savaged the pretensions and the perfidies of Negro professionals in his study "The Black Bourgeoisie." A work of Marxist sociology and scalding polemic, it took a gratuitous swipe at the New Negro: the black upper class, Frazier said, had "either ignored the Negro Renaissance or, when they exhibited any interest in it, they revealed their ambivalence towards the Negro masses." Aesthetics had been reduced to an ornament for a feckless élite.

The years after "The New Negro" were marked by an agitated perplexity. Locke yearned for something solid: a home for black art, somewhere to nourish, protect, refine, and control it. He'd been formed and polished by élite institutions, and he longed to see them multiply. But the Great Depression shattered his efforts to extend the New Negro project, pressing him further into the byzantine patronage system of Charlotte Mason, an older white widow gripped by an eccentric fascination with "primitive peoples." Salvation obsessed her. She believed that black culture could rescue American society by replenishing the spiritual values that had been evaporated by modernity, but that pumped, still, through the Negro's unspoiled heart.

Mason was rich, and Locke had sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. Although the project failed (as did his plans for a Harlem Community Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously didn't align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile "mid-wife" of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers-much to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own.

The thirties also brought revelations and violent political emergencies that plunged Locke into a rapprochement with the left. Locke the glossy belletrist gave way to Locke the fellow-traveller, Locke the savvy champion of proletarian realism. There was a fitful attempt to write a biography of Frederick Douglass, and a dutiful visit to the Soviet Union. But he was never a proper Communist. After the Harlem riot of 1935, he wrote an essay titled "Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane" for Survey Graphic, in which he pronounced the failure of the state and its economic system, but congratulated Mayor LaGuardia on his response to the riot, while also cautioning against both "capitalistic exploitation on the one hand and radical exploitation on the other." Frazier thought this a mealymouthed capitulation; taking Locke on a ride around Washington in his Packard coupe, Frazier screamed denunciations at his trapped, flustered passenger.

Locke was middling as an ideologue, but remained a fiercely committed pragmatist. The rise of Fascism saw his philosophical work make crackling contact with politics. "Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace," a lecture delivered in the early nineteen-forties, took aim at the nation's enemies and their "passion for arbitrary unity and conformity." He sometimes groped clumsily for the radical language of recrimination: inching further from his earlier aestheticism, he praised Richard Wright's " Native Son" as a "Zolaesque J'accuse pointing to the danger symptoms of a self-frustrating democracy." And he remained riveted by the Negro's internal flight. One of his most gratifying contributions was his advocacy of the painter Jacob Lawrence, and his sixty-panel tribute to the Great Migration. (Inspecting a layout of Lawrence's series in the offices of Fortune, Locke exulted that " The New Masses couldn't have done this thing better.") Lawrence had expressed what Locke, with his fidgeting dignity, couldn't quite: the anger, the desolation, and the bracing thrill of a people crashing into history.

Locke was still driven by a need for order, for meticulous systems: the project that towered over his final years was "The Negro in American Culture," a book he hoped would be his summum opus. "The New Negro" anthology had been a delectably shambling sample of an era, confected from disparate styles and stuffed with conflicting positions. But "The Negro in American Culture"-he'd signed a contract for it with Random House, in 1945-was to be the lordly consummation of a life spent in the service of black expression. The book is a fixture of his later letters: either as an excuse for his absences ("It's an awful bother," he apologized to one friend, "but must turn out up to expectation in the long run") or as something to flaunt before a sexual prospect. Mason's death had sapped some of his power, so this new mission refreshed his stature and his righteous purpose.

But he couldn't finish the thing: his health was failing, he was stretched between too many obligations, and he was consumed, as ever, by the torment of unrequited love. His life was still replete with younger men to whom he was an aide and a guide-but not a sexual equal. "What I am trying to say, Alain," the young Robert E. Claybrooks wrote, "is that you excite me in every other area but a sexual one. It has nothing to do with the differences in ages. Of that I'm certain. Perhaps physical contact was precipitated too soon-I don't know. But I do know, and this I have withheld until now, an intense feeling of nausea accompanied me after the initial affair, and I know it would be repeated each time, if such were to happen again." Solomon Rosenfeld, Collins George, Hercules Armstrong: the names flit through the last chapters of Locke's life, delivering the little sting of sexual insult. By the end, he called himself "an old girl."

Yet Stewart's biography aims to heave Locke out of obscurity and prop him next to the reputations he launched. At more than nine hundred pages, it's a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances. This is touching-and strangely fitting. Stewart's research arrives at a kind of Lockean intensity. But even Stewart's vigor falters as Locke's own scholarly energies start to wane. "Locke's involvement with the race issue," Stewart finally admits about "The Negro in American Culture," "had been pragmatic, a means to advance himself-to gain recognition, to be esteemed, and ultimately to be loved by the people."

Love: the word is applied like glue, keeping this vast book in one preposterous piece. Locke's most lasting lover was Maurice Russell, who was a teen-ager when he found himself looped into Locke's affections. "You see youth is my hobby," Locke wrote him at one point. "But the sad thing is the increasing paucity of serious minded and really refined youth." Russell was there-along with a few other ex-beaux-in 1954, at Benta's Funeral Home, on 132nd Street in Harlem, after Locke's death, from congestive heart failure. W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley; Mrs. Paul Robeson; Arthur Fauset; and Charles Johnson all paid their respects to the small, noble figure lying in the coffin, who perhaps would have smiled at a line in Du Bois's eulogy: "singular in a stupid land."

The New Negro was a hero, a fetish, a polemical posture-and a blurry portrait of a flinching soul. But Locke took his place, at last, in the history he wished to redeem. "We're going to let our children know," Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in Mississippi in 1968, "that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe." Locke's class had cleaved him from the "masses"-and his desires had estranged him from his class. From this doubled alienation sprang a baffled psyche: an aesthete traipsing nimbly through an age of brutal rupture. Wincing from humiliation and romantic rejection, he tried to offer his heart to his race. "With all my sensuality and sentimentality," he wrote to Hughes after Paris, "I love sublimated things." ♦

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“the new negro: the life of alain locke”

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The Man Who Led the Harlem Renaissance-and His Hidden Hungers

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Alain Locke helped launch black modernism, but he was spurned by the artists he hoped to turn into lovers. Alain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face.

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Louis Armstrong (born August 4, 1901, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.-died July 6, 1971, New York, New York) was the leading trumpeter and one of the most influential artists in jazz history.

Early life and career

Although Armstrong claimed to be born in 1900, various documents, notably a baptismal record, indicate that 1901 was his birth year. He grew up in dire poverty in New Orleans, Louisiana, when jazz was very young. As a child he worked at odd jobs and sang in a boys' quartet. In 1913 he was sent to the Colored Waifs Home as a juvenile delinquent. There he learned to play cornet in the home's band, and playing music quickly became a passion; in his teens he learned music by listening to the pioneer jazz artists of the day, including the leading New Orleans cornetist, King Oliver. Armstrong advanced rapidly: he played in marching and jazz bands, becoming skillful enough to replace Oliver in the important Kid Ory band about 1918, and in the early 1920s he played in Mississippi riverboat dance bands.

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band

Fame beckoned in 1922 when Oliver, then leading a band in Chicago, sent for Armstrong to play second cornet. Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was the apex of the early, contrapuntal New Orleans ensemble style, and it included outstanding musicians such as the brothers Johnny and Baby Dodds and pianist Lil Hardin, who married Armstrong in 1924. The young Armstrong became popular through his ingenious ensemble lead and second cornet lines, his cornet duet passages (called "breaks") with Oliver, and his solos. He recorded his first solos as a member of the Oliver band in such pieces as "Chimes Blues" and "Tears," which Lil and Louis Armstrong composed.

Solo career

Encouraged by his wife, Armstrong quit Oliver's band to seek further fame. He played for a year in New York City in Fletcher Henderson's band and on many recordings with others before returning to Chicago and playing in large orchestras. There he created his most important early works, the Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925-28, on which he emerged as the first great jazz soloist. By then the New Orleans ensemble style, which allowed few solo opportunities, could no longer contain his explosive creativity. He retained vestiges of the style in such masterpieces as "Hotter than That," "Struttin' with Some Barbecue," "Wild Man Blues," and "Potato Head Blues" but largely abandoned it while accompanied by pianist Earl Hines ("West End Blues" and "Weather Bird"). By that time Armstrong was playing trumpet, and his technique was superior to that of all competitors. Altogether, his immensely compelling swing; his brilliant technique; his sophisticated, daring sense of harmony; his ever-mobile, expressive attack, timbre, and inflections; his gift for creating vital melodies; his dramatic, often complex sense of solo design; and his outsized musical energy and genius made these recordings major innovations in jazz.

Armstrong was a famous musician by 1929, when he moved from Chicago to New York City and performed in the theatre review Hot Chocolates. He toured America and Europe as a trumpet soloist accompanied by big bands; for several years beginning in 1935, Luis Russell's big band served as the Louis Armstrong band. During this time he abandoned the often blues-based original material of his earlier years for a remarkably fine choice of popular songs by such noted composers as Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, and Duke Ellington. With his new repertoire came a new, simplified style: he created melodic paraphrases and variations as well as chord-change-based improvisations on these songs. His trumpet range continued to expand, as demonstrated in the high-note showpieces in his repertoire. His beautiful tone and gift for structuring bravura solos with brilliant high-note climaxes led to such masterworks as "That's My Home," "Body and Soul," and "Star Dust." One of the inventors of scat singing, he began to sing lyrics on most of his recordings, varying melodies or decorating with scat phrases in a gravel voice that was immediately identifiable. Although he sang such humorous songs as "Hobo, You Can't Ride This Train," he also sang many standard songs, often with an intensity and creativity that equaled those of his trumpet playing.

Louis and Lil Armstrong separated in 1931. From 1935 to the end of his life, Armstrong's career was managed by Joe Glaser, who hired Armstrong's bands and guided his film career (beginning with Pennies from Heaven, 1936) and radio appearances. Though his own bands usually played in a more conservative style, Armstrong was the dominant influence on the swing era, when most trumpeters attempted to emulate his inclination to dramatic structure, melody, or technical virtuosity. Trombonists, too, appropriated Armstrong's phrasing, and saxophonists as different as Coleman Hawkins and Bud Freeman modeled their styles on different aspects of Armstrong's. Above all else, his swing-style trumpet playing influenced virtually all jazz horn players who followed him, and the swing and rhythmic suppleness of his vocal style were important influences on singers from Billie Holiday to Bing Crosby.

Movies and other works

In most of Armstrong's movie, radio, and television appearances, he was featured as a good-humoured entertainer. He played a rare dramatic role in the film New Orleans (1947), in which he also performed in a Dixieland band. This prompted the formation of Louis Armstrong's All-Stars, a Dixieland band that at first included such other jazz greats as Hines and trombonist Jack Teagarden. For most of the rest of Armstrong's life, he toured the world with changing All-Stars sextets; indeed, "Ambassador Satch" in his later years was noted for his almost nonstop touring schedule. It was the period of his greatest popularity; he produced hit recordings such as "Mack the Knife" and "Hello, Dolly!" and outstanding albums such as his tributes to W.C. Handy and Fats Waller. In his last years ill health curtailed his trumpet playing, but he continued as a singer. His last film appearance was in Hello, Dolly! (1969).

Legacy

More than a great trumpeter, Armstrong was a bandleader, singer, soloist, film star, and comedian. One of his most remarkable feats was his frequent conquest of the popular market with recordings that thinly disguised authentic jazz with Armstrong's contagious humour. He nonetheless made his greatest impact on the evolution of jazz itself, which at the start of his career was popularly considered to be little more than a novelty. With his great sensitivity, technique, and capacity to express emotion, Armstrong not only ensured the survival of jazz but led in its development into a fine art.

Armstrong's autobiographies included Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954). The house that he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille Wilson, in Queens, New York City, from 1943 until his death in 1971 was preserved as the Louis Armstrong House Museum, which also maintained his archives.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Louis Armstrong | Biography, Facts, What a Wonderful World, Nickname, & Songs

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Louis Armstrong, the leading trumpeter and one of the most influential artists in jazz history. He was also a bandleader, singer, film star, and comedian. With his great sensitivity, technique, and capacity to express emotion, Armstrong led in the development of jazz into a fine art.

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Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington "It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)"

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Video 1

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Jacob Lawrence brief biography and artwork. Great for kids and esl

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James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He distinguished himself equally as a man of letters and as a civil rights leader in the early decades of the 20th century. A talented poet and novelist, Johnson brought a high standard of artistry and realism to Black literature in such works as God's Trombones (1927) and The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). His pioneering studies of Black poetry, music, and theater in the 1920s introduced many white Americans to the rich African American creative spirit, hitherto known mainly through the distortions of the minstrel show and dialect poetry. Meanwhile, as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the 1920s, Johnson led determined civil rights campaigns in an effort to remove the legal, political, and social obstacles hindering Black achievement.

Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day (1930), God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), and Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), among others. He published several books of prose, including Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933), Black Manhattan (1930), and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). His multifaceted career, which also included stints as a diplomat in Latin America and a successful Tin Pan Alley songwriter, testified to his intellectual breadth, self-confidence, and deep-rooted belief that the future held unlimited new opportunities for Black Americans.

Both his father, a resort hotel headwaiter, and his mother, a schoolteacher, had lived in the North and had never been enslaved, and James and his brother John Rosamond grew up in broadly cultured and economically secure surroundings that were unusual among Southern Black families at the time. Johnson's mother stimulated his early interests in reading, drawing, and music, and he attended the segregated Stanton School, where she taught, until the eighth grade. Since high schools were closed to Blacks in Jacksonville, Johnson left home to attend both secondary school and college at Atlanta University, where he earned his BA in 1894. It was during his college years, as Johnson recalled in his autobiography, Along This Way (1933), that he first became aware of the depth of the racial problem in the United States. Race questions were vigorously debated on campus, and Johnson's experience teaching Black schoolchildren in a poor district of rural Georgia during two summers deeply impressed him with the need to improve the lives of his people. The struggles and aspirations of American Blacks form a central theme in the 30 or so poems that Johnson wrote as a student.

Returning to Jacksonville in 1894, Johnson was appointed a teacher and principal of the Stanton School and managed to expand the curriculum to include high school-level classes. He also became an active local spokesman on Black social and political issues. In 1895 he founded the Daily American, the first Black-oriented daily newspaper in the United States. During its brief life, the newspaper became a voice against racial injustice and served to encourage Black advancement through individual effort-a "self-help" position that echoed the more conservative civil rights leadership of the day. Although the newspaper folded for lack of readership the following year, Johnson's ambitious publishing effort attracted the attention of such prominent Black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.

Meanwhile, Johnson read law with the help of a local white lawyer, and in 1898 he became the first Black lawyer admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction. Johnson practiced law in Jacksonville for several years in partnership with a former Atlanta University classmate while continuing to serve as the Stanton School's principal. He also continued to write poetry and discovered his gift for songwriting in collaboration with his brother Rosamond, a talented composer. Among other songs in a spiritual-influenced popular idiom, Johnson penned the lyrics to " Lift Every Voice and Sing," a tribute to Black endurance, hope, and religious faith that was later adopted by the NAACP and dubbed "the Negro National Anthem."

In 1901, bored by Jacksonville's provincialism and disturbed by mounting incidents of racism there, the Johnson brothers set out for New York City to seek their fortune writing songs for the musical theater. In partnership with Bob Cole, they secured a publishing contract paying a monthly stipend. Over the next five years, they composed some 200 songs for Broadway and other musical productions, including such hit numbers as "Under the Bamboo Tree," "The Old Flag Never Touched the Ground," and "Didn't He Ramble." The trio, who soon became known as "Those Ebony Offenbachs," avoided writing for racially exploitative minstrel shows but often found themselves obliged to present simplified and stereotyped images of rural Black life to suit white audiences. But the Johnsons and Cole also produced works like the six-song suite titled The Evolution of Ragtime that helped document and expose important Black musical idioms.

During this time, James Weldon Johnson also studied creative literature formally for three years at Columbia University and became active in Republican party politics. He served as treasurer of New York's Colored Republican Club in 1904 and helped write two songs for Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt's successful presidential campaign that year. When the national Black civil rights leadership split into conservative and radical factions-headed by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, respectively-Johnson backed Washington, who in turn played an important role in getting the Roosevelt Administration to appoint Johnson as United States consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, in 1906. With few official duties, Johnson was able to devote much of his time in that sleepy tropical port to writing poetry, including the acclaimed sonnet "Mother Night" that was published in The Century magazine and later included in Johnson's verse collection Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917).

The consul also completed his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), during his three years in Venezuela. Published anonymously in 1912, the novel attracted little attention until it was reissued under Johnson's own name more than a decade later. Even then, the book tended to draw more comment as a sociological document than as a work of fiction. (So many readers believed it to be truly autobiographical that Johnson eventually wrote his real life story, Along This Way, to avoid confusion.)

The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man bears a superficial resemblance to other "tragic mulatto" narratives of the day that depicted, often in sentimental terms, the travails of mixed-race protagonists unable to fit into either racial culture. In Johnson's novel, the unnamed narrator is light-skinned enough to pass for white but identifies emotionally with his beloved mother's Black race. In his youth, he aspires to become a great Black American musical composer, but he fearfully renounces that ambition after watching a mob of whites set fire to a Black man in the rural South. Though horrified and repulsed by the whites' attack, the narrator feels an even deeper shame and humiliation for himself as a Black man and he subsequently allows circumstances to guide him along the easier path of "passing" as a middle-class white businessman. The protagonist finds success in this role but ends up a failure in his own terms, plagued with ambivalence over his true identity, moral values, and emotional loyalties.

Early criticism of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man tended to emphasize Johnson's frank and realistic look at Black society and race relations. Carl Van Vechten, for example, found the novel "an invaluable source-book for the study of Negro psychology," and the New Republic's Edmund Wilson judged the book "an excellent, honest piece of work" as "a human and sociological document." In the 1950s and 1960s, however, something of a critical reappraisal of the Autobiography occurred that led to a new appreciation of Johnson as a crafter of fiction. In his critical study The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone called Johnson "the only true artist among the early Negro novelists," who succeeded in "subordinating racial protest to artistic considerations." Johnson's subtle theme of moral cowardice, Bone noted, set the novel far above "the typical propaganda tract of the day." In a 1971 essay, Robert E. Fleming drew attention to Johnson's deliberate use of an unreliable narrative voice, remarking that The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man "is not so much a panoramic novel presenting race relations throughout America as it is a deeply ironic character study of a marginal man." Johnson's psychological depth and concern with aesthetic coherence anticipated the great Black literary movement of the 1920s known as the Harlem School, according to these and other critics.

In 1909, before the Autobiography had been published, Johnson was promoted to the consular post in Corinto, Nicaragua, a position that proved considerably more demanding than his Venezuelan job and left him little time for writing. His three-year term of service occurred during a period of intense political turmoil in Nicaragua, which culminated in the landing of US troops at Corinto in 1912. In 1913, seeing little future for himself under President Woodrow Wilson's Democratic administration, Johnson resigned from the foreign service and returned to New York to become an editorial writer for the New York Age, the city's oldest and most distinguished Black newspaper. The articles Johnson produced over the next ten years tended toward the conservative side, combining a strong sense of racial pride with a deep-rooted belief that Blacks could individually improve their lot by means of self-education and hard work even before discriminatory barriers had been removed. This stress on individual effort and economic independence put Johnson closer to the position of Black educator Booker T. Washington than that of the politically militant writer and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in the great leadership dispute on how to improve the status of Black Americans, but Johnson generally avoided criticizing either man by name and managed to maintain good relations with both leaders.

During this period, Johnson continued to indulge his literary love. Having mastered the Spanish language in the diplomatic service, he translated Fernando Periquet's grand opera Goyescas into English and the Metropolitan Opera produced his libretto version in 1915. In 1917, Johnson published his first verse collection, Fifty Years and Other Poems, a selection from 20 years' work that drew mixed reviews. "Fifty Years," a sonorous poem commemorating the half-century since the Emancipation Proclamation, was generally singled out for praise, but critics differed on the merits of Johnson's dialect verse written after the manner of the great Black dialect poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The dialect style was highly popular at the time, but has since been criticized for pandering to sentimental white stereotypes of rural Black life. In addition to his dialect work, Johnson's collection also included such powerful racial protest poems as "Brothers," about a lynching, and delicate lyrical verse on non-racial topics in the traditional style.

In 1916, at the urging of Du Bois, Johnson accepted the newly created post of national field secretary for the NAACP, which had grown to become the country's premier Black rights advocacy and defense organization since its founding in 1910. Johnson's duties included investigating racial incidents and organizing new NAACP branches around the country, and he succeeded in significantly raising the organization's visibility and membership through the years following World War I. In 1917, Johnson organized and led a well-publicized silent march through the streets of New York City to protest lynchings, and his on-site investigation of abuses committed by American marines against Black citizens of Haiti during the US occupation of that Caribbean nation in 1920 captured headlines and helped launch a congressional probe into the matter. Johnson's in-depth report, which was published by the Nation magazine in a four-part series titled "Self-Determining Haiti," also had an impact on the presidential race that year, helping to shift public sentiment from the interventionist policies associated with the Wilson Democrats toward the more isolationist position of the Republican victor, Warren Harding.

Johnson's successes as field secretary led to his appointment as NAACP executive secretary in 1920, a position he was to hold for the next ten years. This decade marked a critical turning point for the Black rights movement as the NAACP and other civil rights organizations sought to defend and expand the social and economic gains Blacks had achieved during the war years, when large numbers of Blacks migrated to the northern cities and found industrial and manufacturing jobs. These Black gains triggered a racist backlash in the early years of the decade that found virulent expression in a sharp rise in lynchings and the rapid growth of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan terror organization in the North as well as the South. Despite this violent reaction, Johnson was credited with substantially increasing the NAACP's membership strength and political influence during this period, although his strenuous efforts to get a federal anti-lynching bill passed proved unsuccessful.

Johnson's personal politics also underwent change during the postwar years of heightened Black expectations. Disappointed with the neglectful minority rights policies of Republican presidents Harding and Calvin Coolidge, Johnson broke with the Republican party in the early 1920s and briefly supported Robert LaFollette's Progressive party. LaFollette also lost the NAACP leader's backing, however, when he refused to include Black demands in the Progressives' 1924 campaign platform. Though frustrated in his political objectives, Johnson opposed Marcus Garvey's separatist "Back to Africa" movement and instead urged the new Black communities in the northern cities to use their potentially powerful voting strength to force racial concessions from the country's political establishment.

Even with the heavy demands of his NAACP office, the 1920s were a period of great literary productivity for Johnson. He earned critical acclaim in 1922 for editing a seminal collection of Black verse, titled The Book of American Negro Poetry. Johnson's critical introduction to this volume provided new insights into an often ignored or denigrated genre and is now considered a classic analysis of early Black contributions to American literature. Johnson went on to compile and interpret outstanding examples of the Black religious song form known as the spiritual in his pioneering The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926). These renditions of Black voices formed the background for God's Trombones (1927), a set of verse versions of rural Black folk sermons that many critics regard as Johnson's finest poetic work. Based on the poet's recollections of the fiery preachers he had heard while growing up in Florida and Georgia, Johnson's seven sermon-poems about life and death and good and evil were deemed a triumph in overcoming the thematic and technical limitations of the dialect style while capturing, according to critics, a full resonant timbre. In The Book of American Negro Poetry, Johnson had compared the traditional Dunbar-style-dialect verse to an organ having only two stops, one of humor and one of pathos, and he sought with God's Trombones to create a more flexible and dignified medium for expressing the Black religious spirit. Casting out rhyme and the dialect style's buffoonish misspellings and mispronunciations, Johnson's clear and simple verses succeeded in rendering the musical rhythms, word structure, and vocabulary of the unschooled Black orator in standard English. Critics also credited the poet with capturing the oratorical tricks and flourishes that a skilled preacher would use to sway his congregation, including hyperbole, repetition, abrupt mood juxtapositions, an expert sense of timing, and the ability to translate biblical imagery into the colorful, concrete terms of everyday life. "The sensitive reader cannot fail to hear the rantings of the fire-and-brimstone preacher; the extremely sensitive reader may even hear the unwritten 'Amens' of the congregation," declared Eugenia W. Collier in a 1960 essay for Phylon.

Johnson's efforts to preserve and win recognition for Black cultural traditions drew praise from such prominent literary figures as H.L. Mencken and Mark Van Doren and contributed to the spirit of racial pride and self-confidence that marked the efflorescence of Black music, art, and literature in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. This period of intense creative innovation forms the central subject of Black Manhattan (1930), Johnson's informal survey of Black contributions to New York's cultural life beginning as far back as the 17th century. The critically well-received volume focuses especially on Blacks in the theater but also surveys the development of the ragtime and jazz musical idioms and discusses the earthy writings of Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. "Black Manhattan is a document of the 1920s-a celebration, with reservations, of both the artistic renaissance of the era and the dream of a Black metropolis," noted critic Allan H. Spear in his preface to the 1968 edition of Johnson's book.

In December 1930, fatigued by the demands of his job and wanting more time to write, Johnson resigned from the NAACP and accepted a part-time teaching post in creative literature at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1933, he published his much-admired autobiography Along This Way, which discusses his personal career in the context of the larger social, political, and cultural movements of the times. Johnson remained active in the civil rights movement while teaching at Fisk, and in 1934 he published a book-length argument in favor of racial integration titled Negro Americans, What Now? The civil rights struggle also figures in the title poem of Johnson's last major verse collection, Saint Peter Relates an Incident: Selected Poems (1930). Inspired by an outrageous act of public discrimination by the federal government against the mothers of Black soldiers killed in action, Johnson's satirical narrative poem describes a gathering of veterans' groups to witness the Resurrection Day opening of the tomb of the unknown soldier. When this famous war casualty is finally revealed, he turns out to be Black, a circumstance that provokes bewilderment and consternation among the assembled patriots.

Johnson died tragically in June 1938, after a train struck the car he was riding in at an unguarded rail crossing in Wiscasset, Maine. The poet and civil rights leader was widely eulogized and more than 2,000 mourners attended his Harlem funeral. Known throughout his career as a generous and invariably courteous man, Johnson once summed up his personal credo as a Black American in a pamphlet published by the NAACP: "I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life. I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I shall defend and maintain its integrity against all the powers of hell." Johnson was buried in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery dressed in his favorite lounging robe and holding a copy of God's Trombones in his hand.

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James Weldon Johnson | Poetry Foundation

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James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He distinguished himself equally as a man of letters and as a civil rights leader in the early decades of the 20th century. A talented poet and novelist, Johnson brought a high standard of artistry and realism to Black literature in such works...

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Alain LeRoy Locke - Works, Quotes & Harlem Renaissance

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Alain LeRoy Locke was a philosopher best known for his writing on and support of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Black American writer Anita Scott Coleman published short stories, essays, and poems in leading magazines such as Half-Century Magazine, Crisis, The Messenger, and Opportunity during the 1920s and 1930s. Coleman's heritage is varied and unique: Born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, in 1890, her mother was a slave who was bought by her Cuban father, who fought in the Civil War on the Union side. Coleman grew up in New Mexico, where she graduated from the New Mexico Teachers College. She later taught school in Los Angeles. Married, she and her husband had four children. In Los Angeles, where she also managed a boarding house for children and pursued her writing career. Unfortunately, little else is known about Anita Scott Coleman's life.

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Black American writer Anita Scott Coleman published short stories, essays, and poems in leading magazines such as Half-Century Magazine, Crisis, The Messenger, and Opportunity during the 1920s and 1930s. Coleman's heritage is varied and unique: Born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, in 1890, her mother was a slave who was bought by her Cuban father, who fought in the Civil War on the Union side.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African American poets to gain national recognition, was born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio, to Joshua and Matilda Murphy Dunbar, both of whom were enslaved in Kentucky prior to their being emancipated. His parents separated shortly after his birth, but Dunbar would draw on their stories of enslavement and plantation life throughout his writing career. By the age of fourteen, Dunbar had poems published in the Dayton Herald. While attending Dayton Central High School, where he was the only student of color, Dunbar further distinguished himself by publishing in the high school newspaper, and then by serving as its editor-in-chief. He was also president of the school's literary society and was class poet. In his free time, he read the works of the Romantic poets, including John Keats and William Wordsworth, as well as the works of the American poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Despite being a fine student, Dunbar was financially unable to attend college and took a job as an elevator operator in the Callahan Building in downtown Dayton. In 1890, he edited the short-lived African American newspaper, the Dayton Tattler, printed by his former high school classmate, Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers. Two years later, a former teacher, the poet James Newton Matthews, invited Dunbar to read his poems at a meeting of the Western Association of Writers. Dunbar's poetry impressed the audience to such a degree that the popular poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote him a letter of encouragement. In 1893, Dunbar self-published his first collection, Oak and Ivy. To help pay the publishing costs, he sold the book for a dollar to people riding in his elevator.

Later that year, Dunbar moved to Chicago, hoping to find work at the first World's Fair. He befriended Frederick Douglass, who found him a job as a clerk, and also arranged for Dunbar to read a selection of his poems at the exposition. Douglass said of Dunbar that he was "the most promising young colored man in America."

By 1895, Dunbar's poems began appearing in major national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times. With the help of friends, he published his second collection, Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895). The poems that were written in standard English were called "majors," while those in dialect were termed "minors." Although the "major" poems outnumber those written in dialect, it was the dialect poems that brought Dunbar the most attention. The noted novelist and critic William Dean Howells gave a favorable review to the poems in Harper's Weekly.

Howells's recognition helped Dunbar gain national and international acclaim, and, in 1897, he embarked on a six-month reading tour of England. He also produced a new collection, Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1896). Upon returning to America, Dunbar received a clerkship at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter, he married the writer Alice Ruth Moore. While living in Washington, Dunbar published a short story collection, Folks from Dixie (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1898); a novel entitled The Uncalled (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1898); and two more collections of poems- Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1899) and Poems of Cabin and Field (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1899). He also contributed lyrics to a number of musical reviews.

In 1898, Dunbar's health deteriorated; he believed the dust in the library contributed to his tuberculosis. He left his job to dedicate himself full time to writing and giving readings. Over the next five years, he would produce three more novels and three short story collections. Dunbar separated from Alice Dunbar in 1902 and, soon thereafter, he suffered a nervous breakdown and a bout of pneumonia. Although ill, Dunbar continued to write poems. His collections from this time include Lyrics of Love and Laughter (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903); Howdy, Howdy, Howdy (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1905); and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903). These books confirmed his position as America's premier Black poet. Dunbar's steadily deteriorating health caused him to return to his mother's home in Dayton, Ohio, where he died on February 9, 1906, at the age of thirty-three.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar - Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in 1872 and the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, was one of the first African American poets to gain national recognition.

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Billie Holiday, birth name Elinore Harris, byname Lady Day, (born April 7, 1915, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.-died July 17, 1959, New York City, New York), American jazz singer, one of the greatest from the 1930s to the '50s.

Eleanora (her preferred spelling) Harris was the daughter of Clarence Holiday, a professional musician who for a time played guitar with the Fletcher Henderson band. She and her mother used her maternal grandfather's surname, Fagan, for a time; then in 1920 her mother married a man surnamed Gough, and both she and Eleanora adopted his name. It is probable that in neither case did her mother have Eleanora's name legally changed. The singer later adopted her natural father's last name and took the name Billie from a favourite movie actress, Billie Dove. In 1928 she moved with her mother from Baltimore, Maryland (where she had spent her childhood), to New York City, and after three years of subsisting by various means, she found a job singing in a Harlem nightclub. She had had no formal musical training, but, with an instinctive sense of musical structure and with a wealth of experience gathered at the root level of jazz and blues, she developed a singing style that was deeply moving and individual.

In 1933 Holiday made her first recordings, with Benny Goodman and others. Two years later a series of recordings with Teddy Wilson and members of Count Basie's band brought her wider recognition and launched her career as the leading jazz singer of her time. She toured with Basie and with Artie Shaw in 1937 and 1938 and in the latter year opened at the plush Café Society in New York City. About 1940 she began to perform exclusively in cabarets and in concert. Her recordings between 1936 and 1942 marked her peak years. During that period she was often associated with saxophonist Lester Young, who gave her the nickname "Lady Day."

In 1947 Holiday was arrested for a narcotics violation and spent a year in a rehabilitation centre. No longer able to obtain a cabaret license to work in New York City, Holiday nonetheless packed New York's Carnegie Hall 10 days after her release. She continued to perform in concert and in clubs outside of New York City, and she made several tours during her later years. Her constant struggle with heroin addiction ravaged her voice, although not her technique.

Holiday's dramatic intensity rendered the most banal lyric profound. Among the songs identified with her were " Strange Fruit," "Fine and Mellow," "The Man I Love," "Billie's Blues," "God Bless the Child," and "I Wished on the Moon." The vintage years of Holiday's professional and private liaison with Young were marked by some of the best recordings of the interplay between a vocal line and an instrumental obbligato. In 1956 she wrote an autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (with William Dufty), that was made into a motion picture starring Diana Ross in 1972. Holiday's health began to fail because of drug and alcohol abuse, and she died in 1959.

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Billie Holiday | Biography, Music, Movie, Death, & Facts

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Billie Holiday, one of the most famous American jazz singers from the 1930s to the '50s.

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An important western voice in The Harlem Renaissance, Coleman taught and published more than thirty short stories and poetry, appearing in The Competitor, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, and other outlets popular with Harlem Renaissance writers.

Novelist Anita Scott Coleman was an important western voice in the Harlem Renaissance, an early-twentieth-century movement of flourishing social, artistic, and political innovation among African Americans. The movement, known at the time as the "New Negro Experience," was at its peak from 1918 to 1937 with continuing influence long after. Named for its symbolic locus in Harlem, this cultural revolution reflected a larger economic and social movement that involved Black communities throughout the United States.

Coleman, an African-American woman who spent much of her childhood and young adult years in Silver City, New Mexico, was among those working outside the metropolitan centers during the Renaissance.

Coleman was born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, in 1890. She moved with her family to New Mexico when she was still a child, settling on a ranch near Silver City. After high school, Coleman enrolled at New Mexico Teachers College (now Western New Mexico University), received a teaching certificate, and earned her living as a teacher. Coleman published her first story in 1919 and went on to publish nine others before leaving New Mexico in 1926 to join her husband in Los Angeles. That same year, she published the essay "Arizona and New Mexico - The Land of Esperanza" in The Messenger, a political and literary magazine by and for African-American people in the United States. In the essay Coleman discusses Arizona and New Mexico and the conditions of Blacks there at the time:

"Boiled down to finality-these States [Arizona and New Mexico] are the mecca-land for the seeker after wealth-the land of every man to his own grubstake-and what-I-find-I-keep. And criss-crossing in and out through the medley of adventure stalk the few in number black folks. Often, it is only the happy-go-lucky, black gambler; again it is but the lone and weary black prospector-but ever and ever the intrepid, stalwart Negro homeseeker forms a small yet valiant army in the land of esperanza. And over it all the joyous freedom of the West. The unlimited resourcefulness, the boundless space-that either bids them stay-or baffles with its vastness-until it sends them scuttling to the North, the South, and East, whence-so-ever they have come. For here prevails for every man, be he white or black a hardier philosophy-and a bigger and better chance, that is not encountered elsewhere in these United States." (Anita Scott Coleman, "Land of Esperanza," 1926)

Coleman continued to write and publish short stories and poetry into the 1940s, appearing in The Competitor, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, and other outlets popular with Harlem Renaissance writers. In her lifetime, she published more than 30 short stories and numerous poems. She died in Los Angeles in 1960.

Champion, Laurie and Bruce A. Glasrud, Eds. Unfinished Masterpiece: The Harlem Renaissance Fiction of Anita Scott Coleman. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2008.

Coleman, Anita Scott. "Arizona and New Mexico - The Land of Esperanza." Reprinted in Unfinished Masterpiece, Champion, Laurie and Bruce A. Glasrud, Eds.

Glasrud, Bruce A. African American History in New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.

Glasrud, Bruce A. and Cary D. Wintz, Eds. The Harlem Renaissance in the American West: The New Negro's Western Experience. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012.

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An important western voice in The Harlem Renaissance, Coleman taught and published more than thirty short stories and poetry, appearing in The Competitor, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, and other outlets popular with Harlem Renaissance writers. Novelist Anita Scott Coleman was an important western voice in the Harlem Renaissance, an early-twentieth-century movement of flourishing social, artistic, and political innovation among African Americans.

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[Verse 1] / When it rained five days, and the sky turned dark as night / When it rained five days, and the sky turned dark as night / Then trouble’s takin’ place in the lowlands at

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Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 4, 1901. He was raised by his mother Mayann in a neighborhood so dangerous it was called "The Battlefield." He only had a fifth-grade education, dropping out of school early to go to work. An early job working for the Jewish Karnofsky family allowed Armstrong to make enough money to purchase his first cornet.

On New Year's Eve 1912, he was arrested and sent to the Colored Waif's Home for Boys. There, under the tutelage of Peter Davis, he learned how to properly play the cornet, eventually becoming the leader of the Waif's Home Brass Band. Released from the Waif's Home in 1914, Armstrong set his sights on becoming a professional musician. Mentored by the city's top cornetist, Joe "King" Oliver, Armstrong soon became one of the most in-demand cornetists in town, eventually working steadily on Mississippi riverboats.

In 1922, King Oliver sent for Armstrong to join his band in Chicago. Armstrong and Oliver became the talk of the town with their intricate two-cornet breaks and started making records together in 1923. By that point, Armstrong began dating the pianist in the band, Lillian Hardin. In 1924, Armstrong married Hardin, who urged Armstrong to leave Oliver and try to make it on his own. A year in New York with Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra proved unsatisfying so Armstrong returned to Chicago in 1925 and began making records under his own name for the first time.

Hotter Than That

The records by Louis Armstrong and His Five-and later, Hot Seven-are the most influential in jazz. Armstrong's improvised solos transformed jazz from an ensemble-based music into a soloist's art, while his expressive vocals incorporated innovative bursts of scat singing and an underlying swing feel. By the end of the decade, the popularity of the Hot Fives and Sevens was enough to send Armstrong back to New York, where he appeared in the popular Broadway revue, "Hot Chocolates." He soon began touring and never really stopped until his death in 1971.

The 1930s also found Armstrong achieving great popularity on radio, in films, and with his recordings. He performed in Europe for the first time in 1932 and returned in 1933, staying for over a year because of a damaged lip. Back in America in 1935, Armstrong hired Joe Glaser as his manager and began fronting a big band, recording pop songs for Decca, and appearing regularly in movies. He began touring the country in the 1940s.

Ambassador Satch

In 1947, the waning popularity of the big bands forced Armstrong to begin fronting a small group, Louis Armstrong and His All Stars. Personnel changed over the years but this remained Armstrong's main performing vehicle for the rest of his career. He had a string of pop hits beginning in 1949 and started making regular overseas tours, where his popularity was so great, he was dubbed "Ambassador Satch."

In America, Armstrong had been a great Civil Rights pioneer, breaking down numerous barriers as a young man. In the 1950s, he was sometimes criticized for his onstage persona and called an "Uncle Tom" but he silenced critics by speaking out against the government's handling of the "Little Rock Nine" high school integration crisis in 1957.

Armstrong continued touring the world and making records with songs like "Blueberry Hill" (1949), "Mack the Knife" (1955) and "Hello, Dolly! (1964)," the latter knocking the Beatles off the top of the pop charts at the height of Beatlemania.

Good Evening Everybody

The many years of constant touring eventually wore down Armstrong, who had his first heart attack in 1959 and returned to intensive care at Beth Israel Hospital for heart and kidney trouble in 1968. Doctors advised him not to play but Armstrong continued to practice every day in his Corona, Queens home, where he had lived with his fourth wife, Lucille, since 1943. He returned to performing in 1970 but it was too much, too soon and he passed away in his sleep on July 6, 1971, a few months after his final engagement at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.

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Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 4, 1901. He was raised by his mother Mayann in a neighborhood so dangerous it was called "The Battlefield." He only had a fifth-grade education, dropping out of school early to go to work. An early job working for the Jewish Karnofsky family allowed Armstrong [...]

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Marcus Garvey was a proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, inspiring the Nation of Islam and the Rastafarian movement.

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Bessie Smith (born April 15, 1894?, Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S.-died September 26, 1937, Clarksdale, Mississippi) American singer, one of the greatest blues vocalists.

Smith grew up in poverty and obscurity. She may have made a first public appearance at the age of eight or nine at the Ivory Theatre in her hometown. About 1913 she toured in a show with Ma Rainey, one of the first of the great blues singers, from whom she received some training. For several years Smith traveled through the South singing in tent shows and bars and theatres in small towns and in such cities as Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia. After 1920 she made her home in Philadelphia, and it was there that she was first heard by Clarence Williams, a representative of Columbia Records.

In February 1923 Smith made her first recordings, including the classic "Down Hearted Blues," which became an enormous success, selling more than two million copies. She made 160 recordings in all, in many of which she was accompanied by some of the great jazz musicians of the time, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong. Her most notable songs included "Tain't Nobody's Biz-ness If I Do," "Careless Love Blues," "Empty Bed Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," and "Gimme a Pigfoot."

Smith's subject matter was the classic material of the blues: poverty and oppression, love-betrayed or unrequited-and stoic acceptance of defeat at the hands of a cruel and indifferent world. She was known for her rich contralto voice and her breathtaking emotional intensity. The great tragedy of her career was that she outlived the topicality of her idiom. In the late 1920s her record sales and her fame diminished with the Great Depression and as social forces changed the face of popular music and bowdlerized the earthy realism of the sentiments she expressed in her music. Her gradually increasing alcoholism caused managements to become wary of engaging her, but there is no evidence that her actual singing ability ever declined.

Known in her lifetime as the "Empress of the Blues," Smith was a bold, supremely confident artist who often disdained the use of a microphone and whose art expressed the frustrations and hopes of a whole generation of Black Americans. She appeared in a short motion picture, St. Louis Blues (1929), since 2006 preserved in the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress. The film, based on the lyrics of the song, which Smith sings, is the only known footage of the singer and shows the emotional power of her performance. She died from injuries sustained in a road accident. It was said that, had she been white, she would have received medical treatment that would have saved her life, and Edward Albee made this the subject of his play The Death of Bessie Smith (1960). She was inducted into both the Blues Hall of Fame (1980), in its inaugural class, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1989).

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Bessie Smith | Biography, Songs, Music, Death, & Facts

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Bessie Smith, American singer, one of the greatest blues vocalists. Known as the 'Empress of the Blues,' she was a bold, supremely confident artist who sang with breathtaking emotional intensity on such songs as 'Down Hearted Blues,' 'Empty Bed Blues,' and 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out.'

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Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald (1958)

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Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald (1958)

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How did Jacob Lawrence impact black history?

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How did Jacob Lawrence impact black history?

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Reckoning with American History in Jacob Lawrence’s “Struggle”

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In this 1968 interview, Lawrence discusses the importance of centering Black contributions to U.S. history.

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How did Jacob Lawrence impact the Harlem Renaissance?

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How did Jacob Lawrence impact the Harlem Renaissance?

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Harlem is the queen of black belts, drawing Afroamericans together into a vast humming hive. They have swarmed from different states, from the islands of the Caribbean and from Africa. And they are still coming in spite of the grim misery that lurks behind the inviting facades. Over-crowded tenements, the harsh Northern climate and un-employment do not daunt them. Harlem remains the magnet.
Claude McKay¹

Throughout the Great Migration, one of the main destinations was Harlem, New York. Covering less than two square miles, this area was home for more than a quarter million African-American migrants.

Harlem abounded with African ancestral traditions, philosophies, culture, and religion, practiced and carried North by the newly arrived black migrants. However, life was very different in Harlem for migrants accustomed to rural life styles. Instead of living in houses on a farm, black migrants now lived in small apartments or vertically designed, densely compacted tenements. The slower pace of rural life was replaced by the accelerated speed of developing urban centers. The sounds of nature were replaced by the sounds of people, traffic, radios, and modern machines moving across concrete sidewalks and cobblestone streets and overhead on elevated trains.

Jacob Lawrence witnessed the innovative and improvised lifestyles created by the convergence of the Great Migration, the Depression, the Jazz Age, and the Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by the Harlem community's interest in the stories of its heritage, Lawrence became the storyteller or visual griot of the neighborhood.

Recalling the impact of the sights and sounds of Harlem when he first arrived there in 1930, Lawrence referred to the "endlessly fascinating patterns" of "cast-iron fire escapes and their shadows created across the brick walls." He remarked on the "variegated colors and shapes of pieces of laundry on lines stretched across the back yards...the patterns of letters on the huge billboards and the electric signs." ² Ordinary everyday tasks, events, and routines sparked Lawrence's imagination. He used what he saw around him to document the people, visual culture, movement, color, sounds, and spirit of the community.

Throughout his career, Jacob Lawrence emphasized the crucial role that the black community of Harlem played in his development as a young man and as an artist. Of special significance was his exposure to leading black intellectuals and artists of the post-Harlem Renaissance, such as Aaron Douglas, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, each of whom represented different, often opposing points of view about the position of blacks in American society and the responsibility of artists to address this topic in their work. In his images of Harlem, Lawrence painted his vision of poverty, crime, racial tensions, and police brutality based on his experience of urban life around him. He also portrayed a vibrant, thriving community and the aspirations of its people.

1. Leslie King-Hammond, "Inside-Outside, Uptown-Downtown, Jacob Lawrence and the Aesthetic Ethos of the Harlem Working-class Community," in Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle Dubois, eds.,

Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), pp. 68-69.

2. Lowery Stokes Sims, "The Structure of Narrative, Form and Content in Jacob Lawrence's Builders Paintings, 1946-1998," in Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle Dubois, eds., Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), p. 202.

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Harlem is the queen of black belts, drawing Afroamericans together into a vast humming hive. They have swarmed from different states, from the islands of the Caribbean and from Africa. And they are still coming in spite of the grim misery that lurks behind the inviting facades.

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How did Jacob Lawrence change the world 

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How did Jacob Lawrence change the world 

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"If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being." -- Jacob Lawrence quoted in Ellen Harkins Wheat, Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-40 (Hampton, Va.: Hampton University Museum; Seattle: in association with University of Washington Press, 1991), n.p.

The most widely acclaimed African American artist of this century, and one of only several whose works are included in standard survey books on American art, Jacob Lawrence has enjoyed a successful career for more than fifty years. Lawrence's paintings portray the lives and struggles of African Americans, and have found wide audiences due to their abstract, colorful style and universality of subject matter. By the time he was thirty years old, Lawrence had been labeled as the "foremost Negro artist," and since that time his career has been a series of extraordinary accomplishments. Moreover, Lawrence is one of the few painters of his generation who grew up in a black community, was taught primarily by black artists, and was influenced by black people.

Lawrence was born on September 7, 1917,* in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was the eldest child of Jacob and Rosa Lee Lawrence. The senior Lawrence worked as a railroad cook and in 1919 moved his family to Easton, Pennsylvania, where he sought work as a coal miner. Lawrence's parents separated when he was seven, and in 1924 his mother moved her children first to Philadelphia and then to Harlem when Jacob was twelve years old. He enrolled in Public School 89 located at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and at the Utopia Children's Center, a settlement house that provided an after school program in arts and crafts for Harlem children. The center was operated at that time by painter Charles Alston who immediately recognized young Lawrence'stalents.

Shortly after he began attending classes at Utopia Children's Center, Lawrence developed an interest in drawing simple geometric patterns and making diorama type paintings from corrugated cardboard boxes. Following his graduation from P.S. 89, Lawrence enrolled in Commerce High School on West 65th Street and painted intermittently on his own. As the Depression became more acute, Lawrence's mother lost her job and the family had to go on welfare. Lawrence dropped out of high school before his junior year to find odd jobs to help support his family. He enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal jobs program, and was sent to upstate New York. There he planted trees, drained swamps, and built dams. When Lawrence returned to Harlem he became associated with the Harlem Community Art Center directed by sculptor Augusta Savage, and began painting his earliest Harlem scenes.
Lawrence enjoyed playing pool at the Harlem Y.M.C.A., where he met "Professor" Seifert, a black, self styled lecturer and historian who had collected a large library of African and African American literature. Seifert encouraged Lawrence to visit the Schomburg Library in Harlem to read everything he could about African and African American culture. He also invited Lawrence to use his personal library, and to visit the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of African art in 1935.

As the Depression continued, circumstances remained financially difficult for Lawrence and his family. Through the persistence of Augusta Savage, Lawrence was assigned to an easel project with the W.P.A., and still under the influence of Seifert, Lawrence became interested in the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black revolutionary and founder of the Republic of Haiti. Lawrence felt that a single painting would not depict L'Ouverture's numerous achievements, and decided to produce a series of paintings on the general's life. Lawrence is known primarily for his series of panels on the lives of important African Americans in history and scenes of African American life. His series of paintings include: The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, 1937, (forty one panels), The Life of Frederick Douglass, 1938, (forty panels), The Life of Harriet Tubman, 1939, (thirty one panels), The Migration of the Negro,1940-41, (sixty panels), The Life of John Brown, 1941, (twenty two panels), Harlem, 1942, (thirty panels), War, 1946 47, (fourteen panels), The South, 1947, (ten panels), Hospital, 1949-50, (eleven panels), Struggle ?History of the American People, 1953-55, (thirty panels completed, sixty projected).

Lawrence's best known series is The Migration of the Negro, executed in 1940 and 1941. The panels portray the migration of over a million African Americans from the South to industrial cities in the North between 1910 and 1940. These panels, as well as others by Lawrence, are linked together by descriptive phrases, color, and design. In November 1941 Lawrence's Migration series was exhibited at the prestigious Downtown Gallery in New York. This show received wide acclaim, and at the age of twenty four Lawrence became the first African American artist to be represented by a downtown "mainstream" gallery. During the same month Fortune magazine published a lengthy article about Lawrence, and illustrated twenty six of the series' sixty panels. In 1943 the Downtown Gallery exhibited Lawrence's Harlem series, which was lauded by some critics as being even more successful than the Migration panels.

In 1937 Lawrence obtained a scholarship to the American Artists School in New York. At about the same time, he was also the recipient of a Rosenwald Grant for three consecutive years. In 1943 Lawrence joined the U.S. Coast Guard and was assigned to troop ships that sailed to Italy and India. After his discharge in 1945, Lawrence returned to painting the history of African American people. In the summer of 1947 Lawrence taught at the innovative Black Mountain College in North Carolina at the invitation of painter Josef Albers.

During the late 1940s Lawrence was the most celebrated African American painter in America. Young, gifted, and personable, Lawrence presented the image of the black artist who had truly "arrived". Lawrence was, however, somewhat overwhelmed by his own success, and deeply concerned that some of his equally talented black artist friends had not achieved a similar success. As a consequence, Lawrence became deeply depressed, and in July 1949 voluntarily entered Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York, to receive treatment. He completed the Hospital series while at Hillside.

Following his discharge from the hospital in 1950, Lawrence resumed painting with renewed enthusiasm. In 1960 he was honored with a retrospective exhibition and monograph prepared by The American Federation of Arts. He also traveled to Africa twice during the 1960s and lived primarily in Nigeria. Lawrence taught for a number of years at the Art Students League in New York, and over the years has also served on the faculties of Brandeis University, the New School for Social Research, California State College at Hayward, the Pratt Institute, and the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is currently Professor Emeritus of Art. In 1974 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a major retrospective of Lawrence's work that toured nationally, and in December 1983 Lawrence was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The most recent retrospective of Lawrence's paintings was organized by the Seattle Art Museum in 1986, and was accompanied by a major catalogue. Lawrence met his wife Gwendolyn Knight, a fellow artist, when he was a teenager. They were married in 1941, and their close and mutually supportive relationship has been an important factor in Lawrence's career.

* "Free within Ourselves" catalog lists birth date as September 17, 1917, subsequent research determined the date should be September 7, 1917.

Regenia A. Perry Free within Ourselves: African American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992)

Jacob Lawrence grew up in Harlem in the 1930s, where, despite the Depression, he found a "real vitality" among the black artists, poets, and writers in the community. He studied at the Harlem Art Workshop and joined the "306" studio, where he met his future wife, Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence never completed high school but taught himself African American history, spending hours in the library researching legendary black figures and events to use in his paintings. He worked for the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s and in 1941 was the first African American artist to be represented by a New York gallery. Lawrence created several series of paintings that documented the stories of heroes such as Harriet Tubman and John Brown. He considered his work to be celebratory and said once that his images "just deal with the social scene . . . They're how I feel about things." (Wheat, Jacob Lawrence, American Painter, 1986)

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Painter. A social realist, Lawrence documented the African American experience in several series devoted to Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, life in Harlem, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

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Summary of Jacob Lawrence

Achieving success early in his career, Jacob Lawrence combined Social Realism, modern abstraction, pared down composition, and bold color to create compelling stories of African American experiences and the history of the United States. Drawing on his own life and what he witnessed in his Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Lawrence strove to communicate human struggles and aspirations that resonated with diverse viewers. Coming to artistic maturity during the waning of the Harlem Renaissance and the waxing of Abstract Expressionism, Lawrence charted a unique path, telling poignant stories of migration, war, and mental illness, among others, and would become a powerful influence for younger African American and African artists. While often drawing on the specific experiences of African Americans, Lawrence's long-running and prolific career produced an oeuvre that speaks dramatically, graphically, and movingly to viewers of all colors and persuasions.

Accomplishments

Early in his career, Lawrence's artistic process relied on a vast amount of historical research. Spending hours at the public library pouring over historical texts, memoirs, and newspapers and attending history clubs that were then popular in Harlem, Lawrence translated these histories into images and linked them to contemporary political struggles both in the North and the Jim Crow segregated South, reinvigorating traditional history painting.

Lawrence often worked in series, creating numerous individual panels, to tell a story. Influenced by avant-garde cinema, Lawrence's series often have a montage-effect, but he used structural strategies, such as a unified color palette and recurring motifs, to connect the individual paintings into a coherent whole.

Lawrence borrowed strategies from print media to make his stories based in experiential reality as compelling as possible . He paired long, descriptive captions with his paintings as was common in photo magazines and books in the 1930s and 1940s. Additionally, Lawrence used flat, unmodulated colors in large planes that had the quality of print graphics.

Lawrence's use of abstraction in depicting the characters of his stories allow those stories, even if historically specific, to have more universal appeal, as the viewer can imagine him or herself in similar positions. Lawrence's ability to imbue the particular drama of everyday life with the gravitas of collective, or universal, humanity is one of his greatest artistic feats.

Important Art by Jacob Lawrence

Biography of Jacob Lawrence

Childhood

Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Jacob and Rosa Lee Lawrence, who separated in 1924. Lawrence's parents originally hailed from South Carolina and Virginia, and his family made their way northward to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and eventually Harlem, New York. The Lawrence family's relocation was emblematic of the World War I-era "Great Migration" of African-Americans out of the oppressive conditions of the Southern United States to the relative safety and economic opportunity promised in the Northern states.

The oldest of three siblings, Lawrence and his brother and sister were placed in foster care in Philadelphia from 1927 to 1930 while his mother worked in New York City. By 1930, at the age of thirteen, Lawrence and his siblings were reunited with their mother, who relocated the family to the Harlem. It was in Harlem that Lawrence first began to experiment with art, creating non-figurative designs and objects in an arts and crafts workshop operated by the local settlement house. Lawrence turned to art less out of a sense of creative "calling" and more as a way to keep himself occupied in the tenement neighborhood of his younger days. Though Lawrence's mother had hoped that Lawrence would become a postman, Lawrence dropped out of high school at age 17 to pursue an artistic career. He was unable to join Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA), an integral source of income to artists during the Great Depression, until the age of 21, and so supported himself and his family through turns as a printer, newspaper deliverer, and construction laborer until 1938, when he secured a position in the WPA and Federal Art Project (FAP)'s easel division.

Early Training and Work

Lawrence was, in art historian Leslie King-Hammond's words, the "first major artist of the 20 th-century who was technically trained and artistically educated within the art community in Harlem," and she described Lawrence as Harlem's "biographer." Harlem, the cultural locus of Black American life following the Harlem Renaissance, was itself an integral subject for Lawrence's work. Though Lawrence arrived in Harlem at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, Lawrence's early education represented the waning influence of its ideologies, as Lawrence's most significant teachers were Harlem Renaissance luminaries. Charles Henry Alston, Lawrence's first mentor and his teacher at the WPA's Harlem Art Workshop, who came to view Lawrence like his own son, was an artist who came of age embracing the teachings of Alain Locke, whose 1925 The New Negro articulated the Harlem Renaissance artistic philosophy whereby African-American artists should seek inspiration from an African, ancestral past. Lawrence also trained with and was significantly influenced by Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, who instructed Lawrence both at her Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts and at the Harlem Art Workshop. Lawrence's interest in depicting scenes from black American history and from the Harlem world around him, as well as the Egyptian-like angularity of his figures and his later visual references to African art, ultimately reflect the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

In his early years, Lawrence was so keen to learn about the history of art, that he would walk from his home in Harlem to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1935, Lawrence met Charles Seifert, lecturer and historian, who allowed Lawrence access to his personal library of African and African-American literature and encouraged Lawrence to seek out the textual resources on African history in the Arthur Schomburg collection at the 135 th street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Sources Lawrence studied in the Schomburg collection became the basis for his most well-known and best-regarded works: his historical works in series. In each series, such as his Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and The Migration of the Negro, Lawrence coupled panel paintings with descriptive captions which collectively narrated either the biography of a notable historical figure or a significant historical event. Lawrence maintained that neither money nor a prominent museum acquisition drove his historical panels, but rather a desire to tell, display, and celebrate the depicted historical events.

Cinema and Social Realist painting were powerful influences on Lawrence's works in series. Jay Leyda, Lawrence's friend and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York's first film curator, introduced Lawrence to Russian and German interwar cinema, and these cinematic models informed Lawrence's scenic construction of each series' narrative progression as an assemblage of dramatic moments, each crafted for heightened emotional impact. Lawrence's connections to the Works Progress Administration ( WPA), with its historical emphasis on Social Realist figuration, exemplified by the murals of Thomas Hart Benton, his admiration for Mexican Muralists, such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, and his two-year scholarship to the American Artists School in 1937 where he studied with Social Realist artist Harry Gottlieb all separately introduced Lawrence to the evocative potential of narrative paintings conceived for the purpose of social commentary, an essential strategy employed in his historical series. In particular, Lawrence's affection for Orozco and his socially-charged painting was cemented in a more personal way. Recounting a meeting between himself and Orozco in 1940 at the Museum of Modern Art, Lawrence recalled that Orozco at first wouldn't talk to him, but instead requested that Lawrence go out and get him some cherries. Their subsequent conversation began with discussions about the cherries, which eventually led to Orozco looking at and praising Lawrence's work.

In 1940, Lawrence received a $1,500 fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to complete what would become one of his most acclaimed works, his 60-panel The Migration of the Negro series (1940-1941). The Migration of the Negro was as notable for its artistic achievements and the professional opportunities it afforded Lawrence. In addition to telling the story of the African-American "Great Migration," which his own parents had undertaken, the series enabled Lawrence to deepen his relationship with his future wife, Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence had met Knight in Augusta Savage's art classes and while in Charles Alston's WPA workshops, and she was an artist assisting Lawrence with writing captions for The Migration series and preparing the gesso panels. Lawrence and Knight married in 1941.

At this stage, Lawrence was garnering mainstream art institutional support. He received a Guggenheim grant in 1946 to facilitate the completion of his War series, based on his experience as a war artist serving during the Second World War, and in 1944 he had a solo exhibition of his wartime works and The Migration of the Negro at MoMA - MoMA's first solo exhibition of an African-American artist.

Lawrence honed his compositional approach through the inspiration of Bauhaus émigré Josef Albers, who, in 1946, invited Lawrence to teach at Black Mountain College. The school was a refuge for the European avant-garde who fled the Second World War and became an integral creative incubator for the postwar generation of American Modernists like Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland. To combat the policy of Southern segregation still in effect during Lawrence's tenure at Black Mountain, Albers hired a private train car to bring Lawrence and his wife to and from the college, and the artist remained on campus for the duration of his time in North Carolina.

Following Albers' example, Lawrence embraced the emotional and symbolic potential of color juxtapositions and conceptualized pictorial space as if an architectural plane of interlocking shapes and lines. Though he generally rejected defining his work as a particular style, when pressed, Lawrence identified his work as "expressionist," referring to his desire to create artistic narratives which provoked strong emotional reactions in viewers. Art historian Patricia Hills has referred to Lawrence's style as "expressive cubism" and an "expressive flat collage cubist style."

Mature Period

In interviews, Lawrence always stressed the importance of personal experience to his creative efforts, and no work is more emblematic of this guiding principle than his 1950 Hospital series. Lawrence's career success arrived early: in 1935, at the age of eighteen, Lawrence began exhibiting his work, with a group exhibition at the Alston-Bannarn Studios on West 141 st Street. By 1936, Lawrence had his first solo exhibition. The most prominent African-American artist in the 1930s through the 1950s, Lawrence was unsettled by the emotional and psychological burden of assuming such a symbolic status at such a young age. This pressure partly contributed to his mental breakdown in 1949, when Lawrence checked himself into a mental health treatment facility at Hillside Hospital in Queens. When he completed his hospitalization in August 1950, Lawrence created the Hospital series based on his year in treatment. With their honest, emotionally rich depictions of psychological illness and its treatment, these works were praised at the time of their 1950 exhibition at the Downtown Gallery as even more socially significant than his earlier historical series like The Migration of the Negro.

At midcentury and following his hospitalization, Lawrence's artistic style reached a new level of maturity, straddling the divide between abstraction and figuration with a new and bold geometricizing approach. He was no longer interested in repeating his past successes but in breaking new compositional and narrative ground. Though Lawrence's mature period coincided with the establishment of black artist groups in New York in the 1960s and though he would later exert considerable influence on contemporary black artists, Lawrence remained outside of these art circles due to his already-prominent stature in the art world. When Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Emma Amos, and others formed the group Spiral in 1963, for instance, it was made clear to both Lawrence and Gwendolyn Lawrence that their help was not needed, as Spiral aspired to increase visibility for its own artists.

Lawrence was known as a gentle but tough artist, who, in the words of art historian Patricia Hills, "never swerved from his commitment to the struggle for a fair and just society," one which he aspired to realize through his art. The social charge of Lawrence's work is in evidence in his works of the 1960s, which responded to and critiqued police violence, racial unrest, and the backlash to school integration connected to the Civil Rights movement in America.

In 1962, Lawrence and Gwendolyn traveled to Nigeria, where his Migration series was being exhibited. While there, Lawrence lectured on African sculpture's role in the development of European and American avant-garde movements, particularly Cubism. The couple returned to Nigeria in 1964, but, upon their arrival, Lawrence and Gwendolyn were blacklisted, unable to secure housing, and under constant surveillance by the U.S. Government due to Lawrence's tangential affiliations with communist and communist-related groups back in America. Despite these circumstances, Lawrence's time in Africa was formative in his development as an artist and an educator, and Lawrence arranged for a cross-continental exchange of artistic knowledge, as Lawrence organized an exhibition of Black American artists in Senegal, and both Lawrence and Gwendolyn exhibited their works abroad.

Late Period

Lawrence's later career was marked by institutional validation, exemplified by his 1974 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective which travelled to five other cities, and by Lawrence's position as a prominent art educator. Lawrence was on faculty at Pratt Institute from 1958 to 1970, taught at the New School for Social Research from 1966 to 1969, and in 1969, the University of Washington in Seattle offered him a full professorship, which he accepted. In 1963, Lawrence served on the advisory board for the founding of the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., and, in 1976, along with Romare Bearden, Willem de Kooning, and Bill Caldwell, Lawrence co-founded the Rainbow Art Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping young printmakers from minority backgrounds. Lawrence's educational mission extended until the end of his life: in 1999, he and Gwendolyn established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation to promote and support American art.

Lawrence also took on several large-scale mural commissions in his later career. In addition to Lawrence's exposure to mural work through his admiration for the Mexican Muralists, murals had been a part of Lawrence's artistic consciousness since his early days working with Charles Alston; Alston was, at one time, director of the WPA Harlem Mural Project, and completed murals for Harlem Hospital while Lawrence was his student. In 1955, Lawrence tied with artist Stuart Davis for a competition to design a mural for the United Nations building in New York. The project, though never completed due to lack of funds, was one of Lawrence's early forays into mural design. 1979, Lawrence completed his first mural commission, Games, for Kingdome Stadium in Seattle, Washington, and executed six additional murals over the next twelve years.

Lawrence was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1998. He passed away at home in June 2000 at age 82, leaving incomplete a series which focused on higher education and the university.

The Legacy of Jacob Lawrence

Lawrence is notable both for his artistic achievements as he is for being one of the first African-American artists to achieve widespread, mainstream acclaim. Lawrence was the first African-American artist to be represented by a New York commercial gallery, the Downtown Gallery in New York, where he exhibited from 1941 to 1953.

His work had a dramatic impact on succeeding artistic generations. Kerry James Marshall is one of the more prominent artists whose works riff on Lawrence's oeuvre both in his stylistic interplays between abstracted silhouette and figuration, and in his pointed commentary on black life. In addition, Lawrence's time in Nigeria as an educator and as an exhibitor influenced the artists of the Mbari art movement, including Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Yusul Grillos.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Jacob Lawrence

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Achieving success early in his career, Jacob Lawrence combined Social Realism, modern abstraction, pared down composition, and bold color to create compelling stories of African American experiences and the history of the United States. Drawing on his own life and what he witnessed in his Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Lawrence strove to communicate human struggles and aspirations that resonated with diverse viewers.

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Jacob Lawrence’s ‘The Migration Series’ Reunited for SAM Exhibit

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“I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.”—T. R.

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Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. His philosophically ambitious fiction, including tales of Black life in both Jamaica and America, addresses instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the Black individual's efforts to cope in a racist society. He is the author of The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose (1973), The Dialectic Poetry of Claude McKay (1972), Selected Poems (1953), Harlem Shadows (1922), Constab Ballads (1912), and Songs of Jamaica (1912), among many other books of poetry and prose.

The son of peasant farmers, McKay was infused with pride in his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters-including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics-and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to write verse in Jamaican dialect.

At age 17, McKay departed from Sunny Ville to apprentice as a woodworker in Brown's Town. But he studied there only briefly before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. In Kingston he experienced and encountered extensive racism. His native Sunny Ville was predominantly Black, but in substantially white Kingston, Black people were considered inferior and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the city's bigoted society, and within one year he returned home to Sunny Ville.

During his brief stays in Brown's Town and Kingston, McKay continued writing poetry. Once back in Sunny Ville, with Jekyll's encouragement, he published the verse collections Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads in London in 1912. In these two volumes, McKay portrays opposing aspects of Black life in Jamaica. Songs of Jamaica presents an almost celebratory portrait of peasant life, with poems addressing subjects such as the peaceful death of McKay's mother and the Black people's ties to the Jamaican land. Constab Ballads, however, presents a substantially bleaker perspective on the plight of Black Jamaicans and contains several poems explicitly critical of life in urban Kingston.

For Songs of Jamaica,McKay received an award and stipend from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences. He used the money to finance a trip to America, and in 1912, he arrived in South Carolina. He then traveled to Alabama and enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute, where he studied for approximately two months before transferring to Kansas State College. In 1914 he left school entirely for New York City and worked various menial jobs. As in Kingston, McKay encountered racism in New York City, and this compelled him to continue writing poetry.

In 1917, under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, McKay published two poems in the periodical Seven Arts. Critic Frank Hattis admired his work and included some of McKay's other poems in Pearson's Magazine. Among McKay's most famous poems from this period is "To the White Fiends," a vitriolic challenge to white oppressors and bigots. A few years later, McKay befriended Max Eastman, communist sympathizer and editor of the magazine Liberator. McKay published more poems in Eastman's magazine, notably the inspirational " If We Must Die," which defended Black rights and threatened retaliation for prejudice and abuse. "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack," McKay wrote, "Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" In Black Poets of the United States, Jean Wagner noted that "If We Must Die" transcends specifics of race and is widely prized as an inspiration to persecuted people throughout the world. "Along with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses," Wagner wrote, "it voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom."

Upon publication of "If We Must Die" McKay commenced two years of travel and work abroad. He spent part of 1919 in Holland and Belgium, then moved to London and worked on the periodical Workers' Dreadnought. In 1920 he published his third verse collection, Spring in New Hampshire, which was notable for containing " Harlem Shadows," a poem about the plight of Black sex workers in the degrading urban environment.

McKay returned to the United States in 1921 and involved himself in various social causes. The next year he published Harlem Shadows, a collection from previous volumes and periodicals publications. This work contains many of his most acclaimed poems-including "If We Must Die"-and assured his stature as a leading member of the literary movement referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. He redoubled his efforts on behalf of Blacks and laborers: he became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement Association and produced several articles for its publication, Negro World. He also traveled to the Soviet Union, where he had previously visited with Eastman, and attended the Communist Party's Fourth Congress.

Eventually McKay went to Paris, where he developed a severe respiratory infection and supported himself intermittently by working as an artist's model. His infection eventually necessitated his hospitalization. After he recovered, he resumed traveling; for the next 11 years he toured Europe and portions of northern Africa. During this period he also published three novels and a short story collection. The first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), perhaps his most recognized title, concerns a Black soldier, Jake, who abruptly abandons his military duties and returns home to Harlem. Jake represents, in rather overt fashion, the instinctual aspect of the individual, and his ability to remain true to his feelings enables him to find happiness with a former sex worker, Felice. Juxtaposed with Jake's behavior is that of Ray, an aspiring writer burdened with despair. His sense of bleakness derives largely from his intellectualized perspective, and it eventually compels him to leave racist America for his homeland of Haiti.

In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that the predominantly instinctual Jake and the intellectual Ray "represent different ways of rebelling against Western civilization." The novel also provides a detailed portrait of Black urban life, and McKay was applauded for creating "a work of vivid social realism," according to Alan L. McLeod in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. However, McKay himself "stressed that he aimed at emotional realism-he wanted to highlight his characters' feelings rather than their social circumstances," McLeod continued. Nevertheless, it was his glimpse into the "unsavory aspects of New York black life" that was prized by readers-and condemned by such prominent Black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois.

Home to Harlem-with its sordid, occasionally harrowing scenes of ghetto life-proved extremely popular, and it gained recognition as the first commercially successful novel by a Black writer. McKay quickly followed it with Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), a novel about a Black vagabond living in the French port of Marseilles. Like Jake from Home to Harlem, protagonist Banjo embodies the largely instinctual way of living, though he is considerably more enterprising and quick-witted than the earlier character. Ray, the intellectual from Home to Harlem, also appears in Banjo. His plight is that of many struggling artists who are compelled by social circumstances to support themselves with conventional employment. Both Banjo and Ray are perpetually dissatisfied and disturbed by their limited roles in a racist society, and by the end of the novel the men are prepared to depart from Marseilles.

Banjo failed to match the acclaim and commercial success of Home to Harlem, but it confirmed McKay's reputation as a serious, provocative artist. "It was apparent to critics that McKay's imagination had been somewhat strained and that the novel was essentially an autobiographical exercise," McLeod remarked. Commentators have found the autobiographical thread in Home to Harlem and Banjo primarily in the character of Ray, whose peripatetic existence to some extent mirrors the author's own, as does the character's admiration for the beauty of young men's bodies. Patti Cappel Swartz digs for clues to McKay's sexuality in the author's fictional works, and points to a dream sequence in Home to Harlem and the fact that "for Ray, the bonds with men will always supersede those with women," as is shown in the conclusion of Banjo. "Like McKay, Ray is not the marrying kind, but rather the vagabond who must always travel on," Swartz continued.

In his third novel, Banana Bottom, McKay presented a more incisive exploration of his principal theme, the Black individual's quest for cultural identity in the face of racism. Banana Bottom recounts the experiences of a Jamaican peasant girl, Bita, who is adopted by white missionaries after being raped. Bita's new providers try to impose their cultural values on her by introducing her to organized Christianity and the British educational system. Their actions culminate in a horribly bungled attempt to arrange Bita's marriage to an aspiring minister. The prospective groom is exposed as a sexual aberrant, whereupon Bita flees white society. She eventually marries a drayman, Jubban, and raises their child in an idealized peasant Jamaican environment. "Bita has pride in blackness, is free of hypocrisy, and is independent and discerning in her values," remarked McLeod. "Praise for Banana Bottom has been unanimous."

Critics agree that Banana Bottom is McKay's most skillful delineation of the Black individual's predicament. Unfortunately, the novel's thematic worth was largely ignored when the book first appeared in 1933. Positive reviews of the time were related to McKay's extraordinary evocation of the Jamaican tropics and his mastery of melodrama. In the ensuing years, though, Banana Bottom gained increasing acknowledgement as McKay's finest fiction.

McKay's other noteworthy fiction publication during his final years abroad was Gingertown (1932), a collection of 12 short stories. Six of the tales are devoted to Harlem life, and they reveal McKay's preoccupation with Black exploitation. Other tales are set in Jamaica and even in North Africa, McKay's last home before he returned to the United States in the mid-1930s. Once back in Harlem, he began an autobiographical work, A Long Way from Home (1937), in which he related the challenges he faced as a Black man. The book is considered unreliable as material for his autobiography because, for example, in it McKay denies his membership in the communist party, as McLeod points out. However, A Long Way from Home does state McKay's long-held belief that Black Americans should unite in the struggle against colonialism, segregation, and oppression.

By the late 1930s, McKay had developed a keen interest in Catholicism. Through Ellen Tarry, who wrote children's books, he became active in Harlem's Friendship House. His newfound religious interest, together with his observations and experiences at the Friendship House, inspired his essay collection, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), which offers an account of the Black community in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Like Banjo, Banana Bottom, and Gingertown, Harlem: Negro Metropolis did not initially attract a broad readership. Critic McLeod offers a more recent evaluation of the work, the writing of which was based as much on scholarly inquiry as on personal observation, as McKay was absent from the country for a good deal of the period covered: "The book has been superseded by many more-scholarly studies, yet it retains value as a reexamination of Harlem by one who had established a necessary critical distance."

McKay moved to Chicago and worked as a teacher for a Catholic organization. By the mid-1940s his health had deteriorated. He endured several illnesses throughout his last years and eventually died of heart failure in 1948.

McKay has been recognized for his intense commitment to expressing the challenges faced by Black Americans and admired for devoting his art and life to social protest, and his audience continues to expand. McLeod concluded his essay in Dictionary of Literary Biography with the following accolades: "That he was able to capture a universality of sentiment in ' If We Must Die ' has been fully demonstrated; that he was able to show new directions for the black novel is now acknowledged; and that he is rightly regarded as one of the harbingers of (if not one of the participants in) the Harlem Renaissance is undisputed."

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Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems that protested racial and economic inequities. His...

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Zora Neale Hurston (born January 7, 1891, Notasulga, Alabama, U.S.-died January 28, 1960, Fort Pierce, Florida) American folklorist and writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who celebrated African American culture of the rural South.

Although Hurston claimed to be born in 1901 in Eatonville, Florida, she was, in fact, 10 years older and had moved with her family to Eatonville only as a small child. There, in the first incorporated all-Black town in the country, she attended school until age 13. After the death of her mother (1904), Hurston's home life became increasingly difficult, and at 16 she joined a traveling theatrical company, ending up in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance.

She attended Howard University from 1921 to 1924 and in 1925 won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas. She graduated from Barnard in 1928 and for two years pursued graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia University. She also conducted field studies in folklore among African Americans in the South. Her trips were funded by folklorist Charlotte Mason, who was a patron to both Hurston and Langston Hughes. For a short time Hurston was an amanuensis to novelist Fannie Hurst.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)
In 1930 Hurston collaborated with Hughes on a play (never finished) titled Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts (published posthumously 1991). In 1934 she published her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, which was well received by critics for its portrayal of African American life uncluttered by stock figures or sentimentality. Mules and Men, a study of folkways among the African American population of Florida, followed in 1935. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a novel, Tell My Horse (1938), a blend of travel writing and anthropology based on her investigations of voodoo ( Vodou) in Haiti, and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a novel, firmly established her as a major author.

For a number of years Hurston was on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham. She also was on the staff of the Library of Congress. Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an autobiography, is highly regarded. Her last book, Seraph on the Suwanee, a novel, appeared in 1948.

Despite her early promise, by the time of her death in 1960 Hurston was little remembered by the general reading public, but there was a resurgence of interest in her work in the late 20th century. In addition to Mule Bone, several other collections of her work were published posthumously; these include Spunk: The Selected Stories (1985), The Complete Stories (1995), and Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales from the South. In 1995 the Library of America published a two-volume set of Hurston's work in its series. In addition, Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" was released in 2018. Although completed in 1931, this nonfiction work was originally rejected by publishers because of its use of vernacular. It tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was believed to be the last survivor of the final ship that brought enslaved Africans to the United States. Ibram X. Kendi adapted several folktales collected by Hurston as books for children in the 2020s.

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Zora Neale Hurston | Biography, Books, Short Stories, & Facts

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Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist and writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who celebrated the African American culture of the rural South. Her notable novels include Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Moses, Man of the Mountain.

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The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby.

Today I set him in the sun and Sunbeams danced on his head.

The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby.

I toil, and I cannot always cuddle him.

I place him on the ground at my feet.

He presses the warm earth with his hands,

He lifts the sand and laughs to see

It flow through his chubby fingers.

I watch to discern which are his hands,

Lo . . . the rich loam is black like his hands.

The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby.

Today the coal-man brought me coal.

sixteen dollars a ton is the price I pay for coal.--

Costly fuel . . . though they say:

-- If it is buried deep enough and lies hidden long enough

'Twill be no longer coal but diamonds. . . .

My black baby looks at me.

They shine like diamonds.

Analysis

In Anita Scott Coleman's poem, "Black Baby", Coleman uses repetition, speaker, metaphors, and similes to convey the meaning that even though the baby is black and some see him as "coal", he has the potential to be a "diamond". historical context is very important in this poem as the Harlem Renaissance was a time when the African American community was blossoming, changing the opinions and assumptions of the Caucasian community from treating them like "coal" to "diamonds". The metaphor of the "coal - man" is later referred to in Coleman's simile "your eyes are like coals" which creates the poems image. Coleman also repeats the line "the baby I hold in my arms is a black baby". This is important because Coleman is drawing emphasis to this fact, making it known that this is the reason for the poem's composition. The narrator in this piece, while not necessarily Coleman, is referred to by the authors use of "I" and "My". This first person perspective is important as it creates pathos with the audience. Coleman's use of first person draws an emotion from the audience as we don't know the struggles of the narrator and it creates the connection of mother and child.

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Black Baby - Women of the Harlem Renaissance

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The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby. Today I set him in the sun and Sunbeams danced on his head. The baby I hold in my arms is a black baby. I toil, and I cannot always cuddle him. I place him on the ground at my feet.

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Narrator: In Spring 1940, Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist, arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina to study religious trances.

Narrator: For more than ten years Hurston had skirted danger traveling alone across the American South and Caribbean, documenting rural Black peoples' lives and collecting their stories. Educated at Howard University and Barnard, during her lifetime Zora Neale Hurston was considered the foremost authority on Black folklore.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: , Literary Scholar: She's interested in all elements of Black Folk. She allows that culture to be dynamic, to have a voice in modernity.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: The research that Zora Neale Hurston did in Beaufort, South Carolina represents someone who understands that for people to trust you, you have to be in it. And that's what she does, she joins in with them.

Charles King, Political Scientist: She's playing a drum. At the time, this seemed scandalous-that you weren't standing off to one side with your white lab coat and your clipboard, noting down what others were doing.

IIrma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Zora studied her own people, which is not something that is supported in anthropology at that moment.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: Anthropology understood itself to be a science. An aspect of scientific inquiry that's really important is to be detached-and objective. She didn't play by those rules.

Narrator: From the Jazz Age through the Great Depression, Hurston had published her extensive research in prestigious academic journals, popular magazines and ethnographic books. But it was her fiction, thick with dialect, cultural-specificity and richly-drawn characters that over time would cement her place as one of the most important writers of the 20th century.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: She was an innovator, using stylistic conventions of literature, but the content is rooted in the research that she did.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: She was driven by her own integrity. She was driven by her own passion, and she was driven by her own sense of how best to collect this folklore.

Charles King, Political Scientist: Throughout her entire life, the powerful people around her consistently thought of her as being an outsider, less than talented-a marginal figure.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: We're talking about somebody who had an incredibly creative, fierce mind.

Maria Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: Her independent streak and her iconoclasm, you could say it was both her superpower and her fatal flaw.
Eatonville
Zora (VO): I was glad when somebody told me, "You may go and collect Negro folk-lore." In a way it would not be a new experience for me. When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism.

Narrator: As a child, Zora Neale Hurston possessed a keen interest in the stories she heard about people's lives and customs while lingering at Joe Clark's general story in Eatonville, Florida, one of a handful of all-Black towns in the United States.

Zora (VO): It was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times...I'd drag out my leaving as long as possible in order to hear more...to allow whatever was being said to hang in my ear.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: She's one of those children that people would say, "Go, go away. You know, this is grown folk stuff." And the more they tell her that the more she wants to hear it.

Tiffany Patterson, Historian: Zora was nosy, pure and simple. She had questions. She, uh, wanted to see what was going on at the store.

Zora (VO): There were no discreet nuances of life on Joe Clarke's porch. There was open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, envy and its kinfolks, but all emotions were naked, and nakedly arrived at. It was a case of "make it and take it."

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: This gathering of people swapping lies, telling stories, is something that's going to attract her because there is an innate cultural anthropologist in her curiosity about people.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Eatonville shaped Zora Neale Hurston's worldview from the beginning, and what it did more than anything else is it showed that Black lives mattered.

Narrator: Hurston lived in an eight-room house on five acres of land with her parents, Lucy and John, and seven siblings. Religion and education were highly valued in a home ruled by her preacher father.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: Her father was very domineering. Zora had her own ideas. She said "No I'm going to do it this way. I see it this way." And it would drive her father bananas. [LAUGHS] She was her mother's child. Her mother gave her permission to dream, a permission to ask questions, a permission to be artistic.

Zora (VO): Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: The idea that she would strive to jump at the sun really puts into place the idea that Zora is always trying to reach someplace that may be unattainable to the ordinary person, and represents a real challenge for her-and a real opportunity.

Narrator: When Hurston was thirteen, her beloved mother became ill and died.

Zora (VO): That hour began my wanderings. Mama died at sundown and changed a world.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: That was devastating for the young Zora. She's set adrift.
The Haunted Years
Narrator: Hurston's father soon remarried and sent the shattered young teenager to join two siblings at Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville. He only paid her tuition for a short time leaving Hurston to scrub the school's floors to finish out the year-and then she was on her own.

Zora (VO): The five years following my leaving the school at Jacksonville were haunted. I was shifted from house to house of relatives and friends and found comfort nowhere.

Zora (VO): 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.

Narrator: Hurston spent another eight unaccounted years trying to find her way in the world.

Zora (VO): I wanted family love and peace and a resting place. I wanted books and school. When I saw more fortunate people of my own age on their way to and from school, I would cry inside and be depressed for days, until I learned how to mash down on my feelings and numb them for a spell. I felt crowded in on, and hope was beginning to waver.

Narrator: At twenty-six Hurston landed in Baltimore with education still on her mind. She realized, by working during the day, and shaving ten years from her age, she could attend high school for free at night. With her academic prowess evident to teachers and classmates, and sustained by jobs as a waitress, maid and manicurist, an inspired Hurston enrolled in the elite Black college prep school Morgan Academy in Baltimore and then Howard Academy in Washington, DC. By May 1919 she was a high school graduate ready to enroll in Howard University.

Charles King, Political Scientist: It's not until she becomes an undergraduate at Howard University that Hurston feels like the gears begin to turn again, and her life restarts.
Finding Her Voice
Narrator: "You have taken me in. I am a tiny bit of your greatness." Hurston vowed at her first college assembly in 1919, "I swear to you that I shall never make you ashamed of me." She had initially thought that Howard was out of her league. Chartered by the United States Congress in the late 19th century to educate Black students, Howard University, the nation's largest Black institution of higher education, often was referred to as "the Black Harvard." A part-time student secretly years older than her classmates, Hurston formed many close relationships and joined the theater company Howard Players and the so-called "brainy" sorority Zeta Phi Beta.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: It's almost like having Eatonville in one space again, because it's a Black space. It's this concentration of Black knowledge and Black talent that you're not going to find in many other places.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: She was rubbing elbows with the developing political and cultural and social ideologies that were emerging in Black thought, and it shaped her in very important ways.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: She met Alain Locke, who was a philosophy professor, but also the midwife, if you will, of the so-called "New Negro movement."

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: Everybody is really excited about what it might mean to be able to slough off that Old Negro, who is the product of enslavement.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: Black people understood themselves to be creators of culture and art and literature, and make important contributions to how American society understood, thought about and related to Black people in America. One of the major projects of the New Negro renaissance, is to write about and reframe how society thinks about Black culture.

Zora (VO): I was careful to do my classwork and be worthy to stand there under the shadow of the hovering spirit of Howard. I felt the ladder under my feet.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: At Howard University, Zora Neale Hurston was really encouraged to write and really was supported and in some respects, found her voice, her literary voice.

Narrator: When Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, the influential publication of the National Urban League, invited Hurston in 1924 to submit work, she sent a joyful, day-in-the-life short story that drew from her own childhood. Hurston's translation of rural Black experiences into literature so impressed Johnson that he suggested that the young woman join the flourishing literary scene in New York.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She had waited a long time to have her intellectual gifts recognized. At Howard, she was recognized.
Opportunity
Narrator: After five and a half years of part-time study, Hurston left Howard with an associate's degree, and moved to Harlem.

Zora (VO): Being out of school for lack of funds, and wanting to be in New York, I decided to go there and try to get back in school in that city. So the first week of January, 1925, found me in New York with $1.50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Harlem in the 1920s is a magnet. It's a satellite. It's a lightning rod. It's attracting all this great talent and energy.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: It's a musical world. It's a world of jazz. It's a literary world. It's a world of politics. And she wanted to be a part of that.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: Harlem comes to symbolize this modernity, this newness, this dynamism, this idea of change. What you see in the Harlem Renaissance is that people are very intentional in understanding what it means to write about and represent culture, and Black culture, in particular.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: That idea of the new Negro sweeps the ethos of the black imaginary, the exciting condition of black people, who are by virtue of the Great Migration moving from the rural south to urban centers-Chicago, New York, Philadelphia-moving up and participating in the 20th century revolution of modernity.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: The Opportunity Awards introduce her to the Harlem literati of New York as it's kind of developing, rising up in this mid-1920s moment.

Narrator: With over 300 guests in attendance, the event was a who's who of the Harlem Renaissance-progressive New Yorkers, Black and white, from the worlds of literature, arts, education and philanthropy. Langston Hughes, the promising twenty-four-year-old writer from Missouri won the first prize in poetry, but that evening Hurston won the most prizes-two second place awards and two honorable mentions.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: Hurston was different than others; she'd come from the South-she was funny.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: She is flamboyant. She is bodacious. She is outspoken, and she also likes to be the center of attention. At that moment in time, Harlem is also about respectability. People are wanting to sort of move away from the Southern culture because it's seen as lower class. And Zora brings her Southerness with her because she's not ashamed of it.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: She was smart. She had ideas and she was interested in other People with ideas. She fell into that world and she fit in that world.

Narrator: Prize-winner Langston Hughes later remarked, "Zora Neale Hurston is a clever girl, isn't she? I would like to know her."

Charles King, Political Scientist: It was at the prize ceremony where she first met Langston Hughes, and that relationship would continue to define the early part of her literary life.

Narrator: By evening's end, Hurston also had met and impressed two influential women who would support her academic goals. Fannie Hurst, one of the nation's most successful writers, sought out Hurston after the event to hire her as personal secretary. And Annie Nathan Meyer, a wealthy female founder of Barnard, the women's college affiliated with Columbia University, offered Hurston admittance on the spot so that she could resume her undergraduate studies.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She was unusually adaptable. She was somebody who could function in almost any milieu.

Irma Mcclaurin, Anthropologist: The fact that Zora is able to finagle a scholarship out of an event where she meets someone for the first time speaks to her prowess as someone who is able to engage people.
Fly in the Buttermilk
Music ("College on a Hilltop"):There's a college on a hilltop that's very dear to me....

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: When she enters Barnard, she enters an elite world of women's education. And as I understand she was the only African American woman there.

Music ("College on a Hilltop"): ...sing to dear old Barnard...

Irma Mcclaurin, Anthropologist: She is what my mother would call a "fly in the buttermilk" at Barnard.

Music ("College on a Hilltop"): ....And loyal be and true....

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She was not only the only black student to be at Barnard at the time, she was pretending to be eight to 10 years younger than she was-and she was there without the privileges and advantages that almost everybody else at Barnard had. She did not have family sending her money; she was working to get every cent that she needed.

Zora (VO): I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all I remain myself.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She had to make a decision about whether she was going to try to fit in or try to play up her difference. And in true Zora Neale Hurston style, it appears that she did both.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Being at Barnard I'm sure gave her both confidence as well as excitement that she was as smart as anyone in the country.

Irma Mcclaurin, Anthropologist: She's very secure in wanting to advance herself, and she will take advantage of any opportunity to do that.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: When it came to needing to be popular, or get extra things, she let the fellow students in her class see her as special, and even exotic. But she never allowed anybody to treat her as lesser than or to minimize her.

Narrator: Something of a celebrity on campus, Hurston later remarked that she was "Barnard's sacred black cow." She was a published writer, friends with Fannie Hurst and part of the ambitious younger generation of Harlem's artists which made progressive minded Barnard students eager to know her.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: She starts at Barnard looking to become a teacher, which was the expected path of an upwardly mobile African American woman at the time, except she has this brilliant creativity, and a storehouse of stories and tales from Eatonville.

Narrator: In her second semester, Hurston wrote a paper in her anthropology class that resulted in a summons from Franz Boas, the world-renowned founder of Columbia University's Anthropology Department. It was an auspicious meeting for the aspiring writer-teacher.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: It wasn't until she encountered anthropology at Barnard and Columbia, that she really began to see her culture as something that could be studied. She arrives in New York and at Barnard at exactly the perfect time. An arrival that is converging with transformations in anthropology.
Anthropology
Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: The idea of anthropology, the way that it was formed was to study the other. We were the objects of study, but we were not supposed to be the researchers.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Anthropology is an old discipline. It really became a professional discipline in the 1840s as a defense for slavery; if all men were created equal, well, we shouldn't have slavery, and so if they weren't quite men or quite human, we can justify slavery. Well, then we come into the 1890s, and we have Jim Crow after Reconstruction. Guess what? Anthropology started to support Jim Crow segregation. Anthropology in the 1890s, before Franz Boas really comes on the professional scene, construed people in terms of savage, barbarian, and civilized. There was a great deal of research trying to pigeonhole people into this evolutionary hierarchy.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: A lot of times, anthropologists didn't actually even visit the places that they were writing about, or know the people that they were writing about.

Narrator: These scientists, later referred to as "armchair anthropologists," formed their theories and the foundations of the discipline based on the biased writings of colonizers- explorers, missionaries, travelers and military men. Franz Boas, a German Jewish immigrant to the United States rejected their methods and conclusions.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: He was one of the first people that took living with indigenous people seriously. And he worked with the Inuits and other people. And when you live with someone for a year, guess what happens-you start seeing that they have a lot to say.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: Boas saw 19th century anthropology and the discourses that emerged as being biased representations of cultural others. He really wanted to bring more scientific accuracy in the description of other cultures.

Narrator: Boas landed at Columbia University. His methodology for disputing racial and cultural hierarchies gained traction, and he became known as the father of both modern and American anthropology. Columbia's Morningside Heights campus became a magnet for students eager to please "Papa Franz."

Charles King, Political Scientist: He was helping young people to explore a completely new world of ideas that he was in the process of inventing: that people don't come prepackaged in races or ethnicities; that cultures make sense on their own terms if you spend enough time trying to understand them.

Boas (Archival Footage): The mental characteristics of a race are not an expression of bodily form. They are a reflection of cultural life.

Charles King, Political Scientist: For the young people who came into his classrooms, these were revolutionary ideas.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston was excited to study anthropology at Columbia because so much of American society and the media did not value African American culture.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Franz Boas had a good eye for talent, and he didn't care if they were Black, white, women, male, or the like.

Charles King, Political Scientist: Around 1920 or so, Franz Boas said that a change had come over his seminar rooms in recent years, that as he put it, "All my best students are women."

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, Margaret Mead, and others became anthropologists under his guidance. Franz Boas becomes excited with Zora Neale Hurston because there were a number of white anthropologists that tried to understand the African-American experience, but never really got very far.

Narrator: With Boas's encouragement, Hurston eagerly enrolled in more anthropology courses.

Charles King, Political Scientist: Hurston signed on as a research assistant to go to Harlem and do some physical anthropological, "anthropometrical," as it was called at the time, measurements that the Boas community and some of his students are, are engaged in.

Zora (VO): I am being trained for Anthropometry and to do measuring. Dr. Boas says if I make good, there are more jobs in store for me and so I must learn as quickly as possible, and be quite accurate. Boas is eager for me to start.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: There were theories that the head sizes of different so-called races is something that was going to be able to tell us more about the level of intelligence, what kind of culture they had.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: As anthropology evolved, this data was then used to show the opposite, to show that Black people, White people, Indians were human beings with brains, eyes, ears and nose and all of that in the same place with the same capacity. But they're operating against a very powerful ideology of the inferiority of populations.

Narrator: Hurston dutifully headed down to Lenox Avenue in Harlem to measure heads she found interesting with what Langston Hughes described as a "strange-looking" anthropological device. He was amazed that no one bawled her out.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: Black people understand that once they start measuring your head, they're trying to prove that you're not human. So to go out on the street corners and ask Black people to let you measure their head would have been a big ask [laugh], but, because of her gregariousness, they comply.
Featherbed Resistance
Narrator: In February 1927 after Zora Neale Hurston had completed most of her undergraduate coursework, she boarded a train headed to Florida to begin six months of fieldwork in the South. Boas had convinced pre-eminent Black scholar Carter G. Woodson, director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and wealthy sociologist and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons to fund her trip.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: There was a certain amount of progressiveness in Boas' vision about training, in deputizing minoritized people in order to go into their own cultures that wasn't necessarily done. And there's a certain sense of valuing these people for what they were able to help to produce.

Narrator: Hurston's assignment: collect data on Black southerners-including their practices, beliefs, dances and storytelling ways.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: She goes off after taking a few classes in anthropology really intent on being this good Boasian anthropologist-following Boasian methods of participant observation. Participant observation required that you kind of immerse yourself in another culture in order to understand it from the inside out.

Narrator: To motor around the South, Hurston took out a car loan in Jacksonville using Boas's name for reference-a surprise he did not appreciate-and secured a chrome-plated pistol. Set with her two-seater she named "Sassy Susie," Hurston took off for Eatonville.

Charles King, Political Scientist: Florida, in the Jim Crow era, was the heart of darkness.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: Here is a Black woman traveling alone with an exposed revolver. She looks like a Black Annie Oakley. She couldn't have drawn more attention to herself at a time when one of the only ways for her to be safe is to fly underneath the radar.

Zora (VO): I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm, or danger.

Narrator: Collecting did not go as planned for one of the newest members of the American Folk-Lore Society.

Zora (VO): I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, "Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?"

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: Black people are suspicious, I think. And they're gonna look at you like, "what's wrong with you? Okay, you're acting like white people."

Zora (VO): The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores looked at me and shook their heads. "No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn't I try over there?" I did, and got the selfsame answer.

Narrator: Her reports back to Boas failed to impress; in May, he sent a stern critique: "I find that what you have obtained is largely repetition of the kind of material that has been collected so much." Hurston had come home, but her education made her an outsider. She needed a methodology that would bring her back inside.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: The assumption behind participant observation was always that you were studying, as the anthropologist, a different culture. When she approached the people as an outsider, she encountered what she called the "featherbed resistance." The idea that they'll let you in only so far, but really you're not going to get at the truth of what the culture holds.

Narrator: An unexpected encounter with Langston Hughes in Mobile, Alabama in July brightened Hurston's mood. She agreed to drive Hughes back to New York, and he accompanied her on fieldwork in Alabama and Georgia-the pair bonding over their shared interest in rural folk culture. Hughes told her he would put in a good word with his New York patron. In autumn, Hurston returned North to write her reports and face her mentor.

Zora (VO): I went back to New York with my heart beneath my knees and my knees in some lonesome valley. I stood before Papa Franz and cried salty tears. He gave me a good going over."
Godmother
Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Historically, folklore has been an integral part of anthropology because people wanted to understand individuals' worldviews. It has been a way of analyzing systematically how people make sense of the world.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: It was anthropology that really showed Hurston that she could write about her culture and imagine a career where that could really be the source of her literary imagination.

Zora (VO): Folk-lore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. I found out later that it was not because I had no talents for research, but because I did not have the right approach.

Charles King, Political Scientist: Hurston had learned that if you're trying to collect folklore, you had to get people to trust you.

Narrator: Charlotte Osgood Mason, the white, wealthy member of old New York society who was Langston Hughes's benefactor, offered Hurston a way to resume her research.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: Charlotte Osgood Mason was somebody who believed deeply that white American civilization was bankrupt and washed out, and that the key would come from what she considered "primitive peoples." That they had the childlike energies and the childlike insights that would reinvigorate white American society.

Narrator: Mason supported other writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Howard professor Alain Locke. Mason, whose grandmotherly appearance belied her imperious ways, insisted that her beneficiaries call her "Godmother."

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: Oof, Mason, ah, was a handful. She had lots of money. She liked having people of color around her. She first was very interested in Native Americans.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: She is someone who believes that she has the authentic interpretation of what Black culture, Negro culture is about.

Narrator: When Zora Neale Hurston arrived at Mason's Park Avenue penthouse on December 8, 1927 she was presented with a one-year contract. The document deemed Hurston an "independent agent" hired "to seek out, compile and collect all information possible, both written and oral, concerning the music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects relating to and existing among the North American Negroes."

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston was an employee. She was employed to collect for Charlotte Osgood Mason.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: She signs a contract that she will not share any materials with anyone or publish anything outside of Mason's approval. But she's still connected to Boas, and she still wants to stay in Papa Franz's good graces.

Narrator: Six days after signing with Mason, Hurston boarded a train heading to Alabama with a guarantee of 200 dollars a month, money to purchase a car, and a plan for year long fieldwork in the South. She also had a motion picture camera, a rare and expensive tool for anthropologists, that would allow her to capture scenes of rural Black life. Zora Neale Hurston felt excited and for once-financially secure.

Zora (VO): Godmother dearest, you have given me my first Christmas. I mean the first Yule season when reality met my dreams. The kind of Christmas that my half-starved child-hood painted. Thank you.
Capturing the Folk
Narrator: Hurston's new methodological approach was apparent once she arrived at the Alabama home of Cudjo Lewis, one of the last known surviving Africans of the Clotilda, thought to be the last American slave ship. Hurston used his African name, Oluale Kossola, to greet the man who had vivid memories of his capture.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Interviewing an enslaved person that came from Africa was compelling for her. Zora Neale Hurston was genuinely intrigued and interested in mapping and understanding the relationship between African traditions and African American traditions.

Narrator: Over several months she spent time with Lewis, who was in his late eighties, in Africatown, the community he co-founded after the Civil War with other West Africans. Hurston brought him gifts of food and drove him to complete errands. Though she captured twenty-four minutes of Lewis with her camera, it was her extensive, detailed notes of his memories and speech that were the priority for Hurston and her anthropological research.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: As an academically trained anthropologist, getting Cudjo Lewis's voice exact was very important-that ethnography should record with accuracy not with translation.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: He's created his own language. It's a fusion of both southern Negro dialect and as well as some African words thrown in there.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Hurston's intimacy and support of his African authenticity enabled him to open up to her in an authentic way.

Narrator: From Alabama, Hurston headed off to Florida where men worked at felling pine trees, manning sawmill camps, boiling turpentine and mining phosphate.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She was very interested in documenting what she called "the Negro farthest down."

Zora (VO): My search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places and adventures. My life was in danger several times.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She was often the only woman for tens of miles around with a camera, with her own car, with a gun on her hip, collecting stories.

Zora (VO): If I had not learned how to take care of myself in these circumstances, I could have been maimed or killed on most any day of the several years of my research work.

Narrator: To win the trust of the men, she made up stories about her life.

Zora (VO): I took occasion to impress the job with the fact that I was also a fugitive from justice, "bootlegging." They were hot behind me in Jacksonville and they wanted me in Miami. So I was hiding out. That sounded reasonable. Bootleggers always have cars. I was taken in.

Music (Archival, Hurston singing "Shove It Over"): Shove it over! Hey! Hey! Hey! Can't you line it? Ah shack-er-lack-er-lack-er-lack-er-lack-er-lack-er-lack! Umph! Can't you move there. Hey! Hey! Hey...

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: She realized that no one was going to share songs with her or even let her into these incredibly rich spaces where people were exchanging stories and song and card playing games, if she didn't bring something herself to the table.

Narrator: "I had to prove that I was their kind," Hurston recalled. She sang and danced with them at their bi-monthly payday parties. In return, they told her stories, sang work songs and played blues riffs on the guitar. Hurston often wrote Langston Hughes of her work from the road; the pair, with Mason's support, were supposed to be collaborating on a folk opera.

Zora (VO): July 10th 1928. Dear Langston, In every town I hold one or two story-telling contests, and at each I begin by telling them who you are and all, then I read poems from "Fine Clothes." Boy! They eat it up...You are being quoted in railroad camps, phosphate mines, turpentine still, etc.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: Folks began to respond to her, and even repeat back verses of Langston Hughes's poetry to her. They even began calling it "da party book," and asking for her to bring out the party book and read something else from it.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Not only do they like it, they pick up a guitar and they start putting it to music. That kind of spontaneous creativity is amazing given the harsh conditions in which people were working.

Zora (VO): Everybody joined in. It was the strangest & most thrilling thing. They played it well too. You'd be surprised. One man was giving the words out-lining them out as the preacher does a hymn and the others would take it up and sing. It was glorious!

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: She was using this contemporary poetry that was written up in New York, bringing it down south and then the the southern folkloric tradition would take it, turn it up on its head and make it anew, and so she was documenting how folklore and culture was actually being created in front of her eyes.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Much of the impetus for cultural anthropology, ethnography was called "salvage ethnography."

Charles King, Political Scientist: Salvage anthropology was the idea that one of the goals of the anthropologist was to rush in and collect things before they were all destroyed by modernity. On the one hand, this was a very noble pursuit, that you wanted to grab things before they disappeared. On the other hand, it could lead you to believe that you were visiting so-called primitive societies that existed in a permanent present. That they had no past; they had no future.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: And that was believed by a lot of people, but Zora Neale Hurston understood that culture was not being replaced as much as it was emerging and on a continuum. And that was super sophisticated.

Zora (VO): I am getting much more material than before because I am learning better technique. Am keeping close tab on expressions of double meaning too, also compiling lists of double words. They - to give emphasis - use the noun and put the function of the noun before it as an adjective. Example, sitting-chair, suck-bottle, cook-pot, hair-comb. I have about enough for a good volume of stories.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She may be our first Black female ethnographer documentary filmmaker. She uses that expensive and rare film equipment to document the lives of ordinary, everyday Black children, and Black women, and Black communities providing for us some of the earliest footage we have of the everyday visual lives of Black southern Americans.

Narrator: Hurston next traveled to New Orleans. With Mason's support for another year, she was able to rent a three-room house. She devoted most of her time to fieldwork on a topic that she perceived White folklorists to be sensationalizing and misrepresenting-"Hoodoo" and conjure: folk religion and practices created by enslaved African Americans.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: Hurston's the daughter of a preacher. And, I think that Hurston had a strong investment in the spiritual life of Black people and Black women, in particular.

Charles King, Political Scientist: The closest that Boas and his students had gotten to participant observation would be to sit in on, uh, a ritual or religious practice and, and watch it and note down what happened. For Hurston, you had to jump off the high dive. If you're going to study Hoodoo or Voodoo, you had to do it from the inside, and so, she went through at least four initiation rituals.

Narrator: One Hoodoo doctor asked her to chase down a Black cat in the night, boil it in a cauldron and suck on its bones. Another had her lie naked and fasting for sixty-nine hours, experiencing strange and altered dreams. The ceremony ended with the painting of a red and yellow lightning bolt down her back.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: That she succeeded is a testament to her resilience, her willingness to do whatever she had to do to get her work done.

Zora (VO): I am getting on in the conjure splendidly.I have been going to every one I hear of for the sake of thoroughness. I am knee deep in it with a long way to go.
Two Masters and the Self
Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: There was this real mismatch between the goals of Charlotte Osgood Mason and the goals of Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston was collecting folklore to demonstrate the legitimacy and the sophistication of Black vernacular, Black folk life, of African American rural culture. Charlotte Osgood Mason was employing Zora Neale Hurston for the opposite because she thought it was primitive.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Zora is collecting what she thinks Mason wants to see, and she's also collecting what she wants to get.

Narrator: Mason found Hurston's material promising and continued her patronage. Amidst her travels Hurston had been collecting love letters for a book she wanted to write about Black love which she hid from Mason. She discussed her plans with Langston Hughes, imploring him to not tell Godmother.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: There is a complex positionality that Hurston had to adopt in order to do what she wanted to do. So she does this, um, very, I would say, opportunistically.

Zora (VO): July 25th 1928. Dearest, little mother of the primitive world, take care not to overtire yourself abroad. I am attempting a volume of work songs with music for piano and guitar...I shall send you the first song as soon as I get it finished to see if you like it.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: During the period when she's collecting some of her greatest anthropological and ethnographic work, Hurston is collecting material she doesn't have legal claim to.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: Charlotte Osgood Mason also controlled Hurston's expenses. She had to list everything that she purchased with Mason's money down to feminine quote, unquote, feminine products.

Narrator: Hurston once confided in Hughes how Mason's detailed oversight and periodic angry outbursts affected her.

Zora (VO): It destroys my self respect and utterly demoralizes me for weeks. I do care for her deeply. That is why I can't endure to get at odds with her. I don't want anything but to get at my work with the least possible trouble.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: She is agreeing to certain strictures on the Osgood Mason side, and while at the same time reaching out to Boas and keeping those fires lit.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: He's a very important voice. He is the gatekeeper of anthropology who also is an influential and an important antiracist. Mason was a profoundly anti-academic person. She had these notions of folklore that it had to be kept pure and kept away from the academics.

Zora (Vo): My dear Dr. Boas, I was very proud to hear from you. I have wanted to write you but a promise was exacted of me that I would write no one. Of course I have intended from the very beginning to show you what I have, but after I had returned. Thus I could keep my word and at the same time have your guidance. The experience that I had under you was a splendid foundation. I know where to look and how.

Narrator: Four months later from a small, secluded cottage she rented in Eau Gallie, Florida, Hurston updated Boas writing, that she was "sitting down to write up" the "more than 95,000 words of story material, collection of children's games" and conjure and religious material.

Zora (VO): Dear Langston, I am just beginning to hit my stride. I not only want to present the material with all the life and color of my people, I want to leave no loop-holes for the scientific crowd to rend and tear us.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Zora also wants to write for the folk. She's thinking of how to take this data that she's collecting as part of her formal research and then translate it into a form that is then going to be accessible to the people she got it from originally.

Hurston (Archival VO): A railroad rail weighs 900 pounds. The men have to take these lining bars to get it in shape to spike it down. And while they're doing that, they have a chant. They use the rhythm to work it into place. They don't have to look at the rail 'cause that's the captain's job to see when it's right. Whatever song he starts if it has a fast rhythm then they work fast and if it's a slow one well they work you know a little slower but they get just as much work done singing somehow or another. And then the boss hollers "bring on the hammer gang" and they start to spike it down.
Bad Endings
Zora (VO): Darling Godmother, At last "Barracoon" is ready for your eyes. I pray so earnestly that I have done something that can come somewhere near your expectations.

Narrator: In 1931 with Mason's continued support, Hurston finished a book-length manuscript based on the interviews she had conducted three years before with Cudjo Lewis. Hurston began submitting Barracoon to publishers.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Zora was very committed to authenticity. She wrote that book in dialect. She tried to replicate Cudjo's own language. Publishers wanted her to translate it for white readers into Standard English, and she refused.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: That was the authenticity, that was scientifically valid and genuine. And she did not want to go against that. I think that was an important form of resistance.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: That speaks to her belief that there was value in the way that Cudjo had created his own form of communication, that value did not need to be diluted, or translated for a white audience.

Narrator: Hurston had other publishing successes. Her ethnographic writing debuted the previous year in The Journal of American Folk-Lore. With Godmother's approval, she had submitted "Dance Songs and Tales from the Bahamas" based on three months of fieldwork in the country.

Man (Archival VO): How do you learn most of your songs?

Hurston (Archival VO): I learn 'em. I just get in the crowd with the people if they're signing, and I listen as best I can and I start to join in with a phrase or two and then I finally get so I can sing a verse and then I keep on until I learn all the songs, all the verses, then I sing them back to the people until they tell me that I can sing them just like them and then I take part and try it out on different people who already know the song until they are quite satisfied with that I know it and then I carry it in my memory.

Narrator: In 1931 the Journal printed Hurston's one-hundred-page article, "Hoodoo in America," which began cementing her as the American authority on the topic.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: Most of the great artists of the Harlem Renaissance had their money in Black fiction. Hurston believed deeply that it was going to be Black drama brought to wide audiences that was going to do more to counter racism than anything else.

Hurston (Archival VO singing "Crow Dance"): Oh Mama Mama come see that crow, see how he fly, Oh mama come see that crow see how he fly, This crow this crow gonna fly tonight, See how he fly....

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston really believed that you could not just read the folklore on the page. She believed that you had to perform it, that you had to see it, you had to hear it, you had to feel it. All your senses need to be engaged in this beautiful creation.

Hurston (Archival VO): But what they're talking about is what we know in the United States as the buzzard, and they're talking about it and the buzzard comes to get something to eat and they are talking about it and they dance it.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She was running up incredible debt. Everybody was opposed to what she was trying to do.

Narrator: On January 10th 1932 The Great Day premiered on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre.

Hurston ( Archival VO singing "Halimuhfack"): You may leave and go to Halimuhfack, but my slow drag will bring you back...

Narrator: The New York Herald Tribune praised her production as "the real thing; unadulterated and not fixed and fussed up for the purposes of commerce."

Hurston ( Archival VO): Oh well you may go, but this will bring you back...

Hurston ( Archival VO singing "Crow Dance"): ...Oh Mama come see that crow, CAAAWW!

Narrator: Despite the show's promising reviews, no producer picked it up.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: It was an enormous disappointment for her-one of the heartbreaks of her life. She thought it was going to be the artistic production that told people who she was.

Narrator: Sick, exhausted and bankrupt, in April Hurston reached out to Mason for financial help as she packed up to relocate to Eatonville.

Zora (VO): One other item of expense, Godmother. I really need a pair of shoes. You remember that we discussed the matter in the fall and agreed that I should own only one pair at a time. I bought a pair in mid-December and they have held up until now. My big toe is about to burst out of my right shoe and so I must do something about it.

Narrator: Hurston's relationship with Mason-almost five years of support-had soured over time. Mason paid Hurston's theater bills and came through with six dollars for the new shoes, money for a one-way ticket and $75 in spending money.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: Charlotte Osgood Mason was unable to control Zora Neale Hurston. It would be like trying to get a shooting star into a mason jar. And Charlotte Osgood Mason could not be controlled by Zora Neale Hurston.

Narrator: Hurston's last check from Mason arrived in October 1932, just as the nation was heading toward record unemployment. The Great Depression had dashed the dreams of many Americans. Hurston had hoped for a teaching position in Florida that did not materialize. Income from periodic writings never secured her enough money on which to live.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: It wasn't just that Zora Neale Hurston lost a meal ticket. She honestly did lose somebody she saw as a kind of spiritual mother.

Narrator: Hurston had not just lost her relationship with Mason. A year earlier, her friendship with Langston Hughes had ended on very bad terms in part over their collaboration Mule Bone, a comedic play based on one of Hurston's unpublished Eatonville tales.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: He and Zora Neale Hurston were enormously important to one another in every sense: emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually. And when their relationship exploded, they were both profoundly wounded by it.
Gatekeeping
Narrator: When Hurston's mentors at Columbia failed to facilitate funding for her research, she turned to the Guggenheim Foundation. On July 25th 1933, Hurston submitted an application for a fellowship focused on "anthropology" to continue the work she had begun in New Orleans.

Zora (VO): My ultimate purpose as a student is to increase the general knowledge concerning my people, to advance science and the musical arts among my people, but in the Negro way and away from the white man's way.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: "The Negro way" means in a way that is respectful, that is set on debunking Black inferiority. I think it speaks to her, again, desire to participate in the knowledge production of anthropology.

Charles King, Political Scientist: Hurston is an early practitioner of what would later come to be called native anthropology. That is to say, she's someone from the communities that she is studying.

Narrator: Hurston chose long-time mentor and Journal of American Folk-Lore editor Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas and three others-people she felt supported her goals-to submit recommendations.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: Most of the letters in her file are extremely problematic.

Narrator: "Papa Franz" wrote, "On the whole her methods are more journalistic than scientific and I am not under the impression that she is just the right caliber for a Guggenheim Fellowship." Benedict assessed that Hurston had "neither the temperament nor the training to present this material in an orderly manner when it is gathered nor to draw valid historical conclusions from it." And added in a separate letter, "I don't think she is Guggenheim material."

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: Basically, you send her to go in and collect, but have somebody who's trained write up the material, trained, meaning credentialized. And I think that's probably the hardest hurdle that she has to get over: that she's not just a vessel for the Academy to get into these specific cultures.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She does not yet have the academic credentials that are considered appropriate for Guggenheim. Which is not to say the Guggenheims only go to people with doctorates, but it remains an issue to this day: "What kinds of credentials are assumed to have to go along with that kind of recognition?" Did Franz Boas consider her lack of a Ph.D. an issue? Probably.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Even as liberal, and as important and empowering as Franz Boas and, and some of the professors were, there was still some implicit bias that there was not equality of intellectual engagement, if you will.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: That doesn't mean whatever relationship they had was inauthentic, but I don't think that the Academy imagined Hurston as ever being part of the knowledge it produced, or a knowledge producer in her own sake.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: At the moment that Zora is claiming her space as an anthropologist, anthropology doesn't know what to do with Black folk. They didn't know what to do with Zora, and I think it was a level of gatekeeping.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She was remarkably forbearing, much more forbearing than most people could be in the circumstances she faced as a Black woman in mostly White society, in mostly sexist society, in mostly racist society, in mostly Northern and urban society.
Wrassling Up a Career
Narrator: Zora Neale Hurston was determined to have a career; "I shall wrassle me up a future or die trying," she had once written to Mason.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: Hurston worked across many different disciplines, many different fields, many different kinds of artistry. She worked in drama; she worked in writing; she worked in academia; she worked in teaching. Often she was working on her own. She was not somebody who could work well for very long for anybody else.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: She alienated a lot of people. Zora is the kind of person you either love her, or you hate her.

Charles King, Political Scientist: She could be insufferable. The truth was, she was in many ways undisciplined.

Narrator: She had once written to her friend, the poet Countee Cullen, complaining about the "regular grind at Barnard": "Don't be surprised to hear that I have suddenly taken to the woods. I hate routine."

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: Once she was done with something, or someone, often she was completely done, and she couldn't look back.

Narrator: No longer beholden to "Godmother," or "the Park Avenue dragon," as she once referred to Mason in a letter, Hurston could freely pursue fiction. She had been sketching out a story loosely based on the lives and experiences of her parents in Eatonville.

Hurston (Archival VO): I didn't even have a typewriter then. I got $20 from, ah, Story magazine for this short story. And so on the strength of that, I decided to sit down and write a novel. It took me about, uh, seven or eight weeks to write the book.

Narrator: Also that year, white, wealthy shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, a regular fixture in Harlem society, published Negro Anthology, an extensive, groundbreaking collection of ​​music, poetry, historical studies and examinations of racism. The book featured seven of Hurston's ethnographic writings.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Those pieces are evidence of her theorizing. She's really articulating a theory of how she views Negro culture at that moment in time.

Zora (VO): [T]he Negro is a very original being. While he lives and moves in the midst of white civilisation, everything that he touches is reinterpreted for his own use. He has modified the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly the religion of his new country.

Narrator: That summer Hurston wrote Boas about her manuscript for Mules and Men -a book about her early anthropological forays into the South. She hoped that he would like the ethnographic-focused work, despite her publisher's request to add additional material to appeal to a more general audience. The revisions resulted in Hurston weaving the folklore stories into a first-person narrative.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: She wanted a much more comprehensive and much more scientific sort of tone, including a lot of religion, and the children's games, and sort of almost an encyclopedia.

Zora (VO): Dear Doctor Boas, I am full of tremors, lest you decide that you do not want to write the introduction to my "Mules and Men." I have inserted the between-story conversation and business because when I offered it without it, every publisher said it was too monotonous. Now three houses want to publish it. So I hope that the unscientific matter that must be there will not keep you from writing the introduction.

Narrator: Hurston headed to Chicago in October 1934 to stage a version of her production of The Great Day, now titled Singing Steel. Her arrival was met with a blur of invitations to dinners and speaking engagements. The Daily New s advised, "The fascinating Zora Neale Hurston," is "too good to miss."

Narrator: Hurston received an early Christmas present when her production so impressed the Rosenwald Fund that the philanthropic organization, focused on African American education, offered her a scholarship to pursue a Ph.D.
Zest for a Doctorate
Zora (VO): Dear Dr. Boas, Great news! I have wanted the training very keenly and tried very hard to get Mrs. Mason to do it for me. She would give money for everything else but that. I realize that this is going to call for rigorous routine and discipline which everybody seems to feel that I need. So be it. I want to do it.

Narrator: The Rosenwald Fund had agreed to provide $3,000 over two years to support Hurston's doctorate. "The major problem...as I see it" Hurston wrote in her application, "is the collection of Negro folk material in as thorough a manner as possible, as soon as possible. In order to see it objectively one must have great preparation, that is if to be able to analyze, to evaluate what is before one." For the first time since childhood, Hurston would be able to focus on being a student.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: There was rarely a moment that she didn't have to worry about money, that she didn't have to borrow or work more than two or three jobs.

Zora (VO): I have been on my own since fourteen years old and went to high school, college and everything progressive that I have done because I wanted to. I have had people say to me, why don't you go and take a master's or a doctor's degree in Anthropology since you love it so much? They never seem to realize that it takes money to do that.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Columbia at that moment, has organized all of its courses around salvaging information about indigenous Native Americans. What Zora wants to do is create what I call an independent Ph.D. in Negro studies. We would call it Black Studies. She convinces Boas that she should do this independent Ph.D. He agrees.

Narrator: But just one month after awarding Hurston the fellowship, the Rosenwald Fund rejected the long-term plan that she and Boas developed for her study, and informed her that they would only support one semester for a total of $700. Frustrated and stressed, she lodged a soft appeal.

Zora (VO): This is not to over-persuade you in the matter of the two-year plan. I am not being trained to do a routine job. I am being trained to do what has not been done and that which cries out to be done.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: They decide, and this is the language that is in some of the correspondence, that "Zora Neale Hurston is like a rough piece of iron that needs to be honed into a fine piece of steel." And they want to insist that she follow the curriculum at Columbia, which has absolutely nothing to do with what she wants to study.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: This is after she had already been a novelist and had been a member of the American Folk-Lore Society, and the American Anthropological Association. And she had published for the American Folk-Lore Society.

Narrator: Hurston agreed to the new terms, enrolled, and began attending classes, but after a few months she reconsidered.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston did not want to be in another relationship dependent like, um, Charlotte Osgood Mason, so she was like, "Peace out. Like, we're not going to do this, because I've been there before."

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: They have already decided what she can and can't do. And she resists, as she has resisted most of her life against the conventions of gender and race-and now intellectuality. It would have been easy. She could have gone, studied those courses and everything and gotten a Ph.D. She chose not to.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: She was never going to be the nice and silent and acquiescent, ah, Black woman ever. This is not who she was.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: It's an unwillingness to be disciplined in the sense of academic disciplines-anthropology, and disciplined in the sense that she won't be contained.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: There were very few Black women with doctorates of any kind in the 1930s. And it would have drawn even more attention to her and mostly positive attention.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: Benedict and Boas went out of their way to ensure that Margaret Mead was able to get a Ph.D. So we have to ask ourselves, what other aspects of her difference played into this lack of support?

Narrator: Hurston, who was likely forty-four-years-old by then, decided to stop attending classes and focus on her own writing instead. Her book Mules and Men would soon be published. "Working like a slave and liking it," she wrote a friend in Florida. "But I have lost all my zest for a doctorate."
Mules and Men
Music (Archival VO singing/clapping): ... Catch this guy. Never come back 'til the Fourth of July... Come pay the money... Come pay the money...

Narrator: Hurston headed South mid-June 1935 to the Georgia Sea Islands, Eatonville and the Everglades on a job to collect folklore. Her latest travels were to facilitate the work of two white folklorists recording Negro folk songs for the Library of Congress, but it wasn't easy. Sensitive to Black stereotyping, at one point Hurston adamantly stopped one of her colleagues from photographing a young boy eating a watermelon. And due to segregation laws in Southern towns, Hurston frequently slept in her car while her colleagues rested in a motel.

Hurston (Archival VO singing): Blue bird, blue bird through my window...

Narrator: Sometimes the researchers captured Hurston's own singing.

Hurston (Archival VO singing): Blue bird, blue bird through my window. Blue bird, blue bird through my window. Oh...

Narrator: That Fall Mules and Men hit the stands. Hurston opened her story explaining how she had known folklore since she was a child.

Zora (VO): But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: It is Zora's first formal collection of stories, folklore, and it cements her as a native anthropologist.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: Why a text like Mules and Men is so important is that she resists the simple extraction, cultural extraction. It becomes an opportunity for her to tell what she feels to be a more authentic story of that Black experience.

Charles King, Political Scientist: Hurston is reporting on a set of experiences that she had, using the first person. Whether it's a juke joint or a turpentine camp or a lumber mill or a hoodoo initiation ritual, she's taking you as a reader into a society that she as a scientist is desperately trying to understand.

Zora (VO): I went outside to join the woofers, since I seemed to have no standing among the dancers. I stood there awkwardly, knowing that the too-ready laughter and aimless talk was a window-dressing for my benefit. His laugh has a hundred meanings.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Part of what she's trying to tell us is that your very presence changes the dynamic, and so you have to account for your presence in the data that you're collecting as well. This idea that you are objective, when you go, and observe and participate in these cultures, is really a misnomer.

Charles King, Political Scientist: And that is a way of doing social science that we now take as kind of normal. At the time, this was a revolutionary, and as Ruth Benedict would have put it, an "undisciplined" way of doing social science.

Narrator: Boas, declining to write a major introduction, submitted just three paragraphs.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: He didn't write a full scale introduction and treat her work with that kind of seriousness.

Narrator: The inclusion of Boas's text nevertheless helped the publisher promote the critically-acclaimed book.

Hurston (Archival VO singing - Mule on the Mount): Cap'n got a mule. Mule on the Mount Call him Jerry. Ha! Cap'n got a mule...

Hurston (Archival VO singing): I out had told her He must be the hell fired captain's Ha! He had blue eyes lawd lawd he had blue eyes. Oh don't you tell hear them a coo coo bird...

Zora (VO): March 7th 1936:I think I must be God's left-hand mule, because I have to work so hard. The press of new things, plus the press of old things yet unfinished keep me on the treadmill all the time.

Hurston (Archival VO singing): I got a rainbow wrapped and tied around my shoulder. Hey! I got a rainbow wrapped and tied around my shoulder. It look like rain, lawd, lawd, it look like rain.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Narrator: With the success of her books, Hurston streamlined her focus, deciding that her "life work" was literature. But she remained committed to exploring and documenting Black lives.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: She said, "I have to keep going and answer the questions about my people." And to her, she's talking about the diaspora. She's talking about Black culture, not just in the United States, but in the Caribbean, as well.

Narrator: Hurston again looked to the Guggenheim Foundation for support. In this new application, she indicated a unique description of her field of learning: "literary science." And this time, she only asked one anthropologist to serve as a recommender. Melville Herskovits, a prominent former student of Boas, wrote, "I think it is not saying too much to state that Miss Hurston probably has more intimate knowledge of Negro folk life than anyone in this country." Hurston won a Guggenheim in March-the first of two. And by the next month she was off to Jamaica and Haiti.

Movie Trailer: Join a cult whose roots go back to darkest Africa. Exotic, barbaric, the cult of voodoo!

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: She wants to remedy, to a certain extent, the sensationalism that Americans are consuming Haitian culture and voodoo. She feels like she can go in and tell a story about that religion that is free of the sensationalism.

Narrator: Zombies existed in the minds of western society as part of a forbidding, sexual and mysterious culture associated with Haiti.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: When it comes to Haiti and Jamaica, the Caribbean space, she is very much an outsider.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: It's where Zora steps into the traditional anthropology, where she's studying the other. She is not a member of that society. She doesn't belong, so she has to figure out how to get inside of it.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: I think that Hurston had an understanding that at the root of it, whether people in Haiti thought about and talked about zombies as a kind of folklore, or a phenomenon that actually existed, that at the heart of it, this kind of fascination with the zombie is really about freewill.

Charles King, Political Scientist: She's saying that if you need a category for someone who is both living and dead at the same time, that is deeply revealing about the society that you're from. And for Hurston herself, having grown up in Jim Crow Florida, she knew what that category meant for someone to be fully, wholly alive but socially dead, socially invisible to the people she was surrounded by.

Narrator: Months of fieldwork in the Caribbean had distracted Hurston from an intense romantic relationship with a younger man. But she could no longer ignore the narrative that had been welling up inside her. She mixed memory, history, personal experience, fiction, and research into a story told through the eyes of a southern Black American girl-turned-woman named Janie Crawford, who lives part of her life in Eatonville.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: It's now what we call autoethnography, because it's rooted in some of what she has lived herself, but also what she's researched in her own community.

Narrator: In September 1937, her book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was on its way to becoming a mainstream critical success. It is a "lovely book," stated a review in The New York Herald Tribune, praising Hurston as "an author that writes with her head and her heart."

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: That book is a great illustration of Zora blending her literary skills and talent as a writer, and also her skills and talent as an anthropologist and ethnographer.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: Janie's a storyteller. She has this full life experience. She's a survivor in a variety of ways, and she goes home to tell her girlfriend.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: Zora is doing a gender analysis. She's really telling us about the conditions of Black women and what they have to confront against social norms, against a patriarchal society.

Zora (VO): Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing," she was told over and again. Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn't represent a thing she wanted to know about.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: There are scenes where some of the very stories that she collected when she was doing fieldwork in Eatonville are incorporated into the plot.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: She's also depicting the ways in which people interact. That's what anthropologists do. They observe social interaction and document that, and so the novel is rich with how people gossip and how they make judgments about things. The language is so rich.

Zora (VO): The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: We call it in anthropology "thick description," which is throughout Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Zora (VO): All night now the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour. Work all day for money, fight all night for love. The rich Black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: Their Eyes Were Watching God is to me the most personal of all of her books. I think she's really laying it out there. I feel like she knows it's going to be an important book.
Tell My Horse
Narrator: Despite her publisher's robust promotional campaign and rave reviews in national publications, Their Eyes Were Watching God did not sell well. What surely did not foster African American support were negative reviews from Hurston's Black male contemporaries. Writer Richard Wright attacked Hurston's book stating that it "carries no theme, no message, no thought" and continued what he described as "the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks' laugh." And Alain Locke's critique in a one-paragraph review suggested that she was drawing on old literary traditions.

Narrator: Hurston was livid, and she wrote that Locke knew "less about Negro life than anyone in America. I will send my toe-nails to debate him and I will come personally to debate him on what he knows about literature on the subject." Her scathing response was never published.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: The critical reception of her work by the Black intelligentsia is extremely disappointing, and does smack of sexism. When the novel is dismissed as a romance or a love story, or even worse, as a kind of dialect novel in some cases, what I think is lost there is the incredibly complex vision of power and oppression and racism that is presented in that novel.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: The 30s was really understood to be the protest era, where the fiction was much more explicit in addressing questions of interracial conflict, of racism, and their impact on Black people. By the time Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937, the Harlem Renaissance had really kind of reached its peak and was on the wane.

Narrator: For Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, published the next year, Hurston drew on the material she had collected during her back-to-back Guggenheim fellowships. She filled this second ethnographic book with photographs, lists, music and essays exploring religion, history, politics and culture of Black people in both countries.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: The most compelling parts of it are the sections where she's writing about Haitian Vodou: its rituals, its cultures, its meaning in the lives of the people who are practitioners. The political commentary that she provides, the social commentary is much more problematic. Her Americanness really comes through in how she writes that work. There are so many sections of it that don't really center Haitian perspectives about their own culture in the way that she does with her ethnographies that are centered in the American South.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: I just don't think the American reading public was interested in the critical assessment of Caribbean history and history of dictatorship and colonialism. Although they were interested in the zombies.

Narrator: Though her publisher promoted the most sensationalistic aspects of her research, Hurston's Tell My Horse was not a commercial success.

Narrator: Most reviews were mixed or negative. One very positive review must have warmed Hurston's heart: "The judges who select the recipients of Guggenheim fellowships honored themselves and the purpose of the foundation they serve when they subsidized Zora Hurston's visit to Haiti. I hope the American reading public will encourage her further wanderings. She ought not to be allowed to rest."

Narrator: Back in Florida, Hurston continued writing for herself and for others-including a position with the federal Works Progress Administration's Florida Writers' Project. In 1939 she released another novel and took a job teaching theater at North Carolina College for Negroes. The next year, her friend anthropologist Jane Belo asked her to conduct research on religious trances in Beaufort, South Carolina. Hurston eagerly quit teaching mid-semester to get back into the field. At Hurston's insistence, a camera crew documented the services.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: That image of her playing the drum. You feel like she's coming around full circle. You can see her as a vivid participant observer. You can see that she is at home at this church.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: The research that Zora Neale Hurston did in Beaufort, South Carolina represents the culmination of her work as an authentic anthropologist.

Narrator: "We've been shooting, shooting, and shooting," the film crew reported. "If the gods of anthropological investigators are with us we have some swell fotos and films...Without Zora most of it would have been impossible.
Dust Tracks on a Road
Zora (VO): What will be the end? That is not for me to know. Life poses questions and that two-headed spirit that rules the beginning and end of things called Death, has all the answers.

Narrator: At first Hurston resisted her publisher's desire for her to write an autobiography.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: I think she said, "It is difficult to discuss what the soul lives by." I'm not sure she wanted to do that, was ready to do it, but she needed to write something because that's how she made money.

Narrator: In 1942 Dust Tracks on a Road was published to great fanfare. Hurston promoted the work, which helped establish her as a prominent literary figure.

Irma Mcclaurin, Anthropologist: Zora's autobiography is complex. There are those who argue that she wasn't authentic, that she didn't tell everything because the notion of an autobiography is that it traces the life from the beginning to the end. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that we really don't have access to.

Zora (VO): I am supposed to have some private business to myself. Whatever I do know, I have no intention of putting but so much in the public ears.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography is itself, "featherbed resistance": she's wearing a mask; it's a pack of lies. On the other hand, it is the truth as she saw it. It is a memoir, and you get her spirit, you get the feeling of her, her life.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: What I find really fascinating about that book is her admissions-they're very stealthy, that some of the folklore she collected, she collected actually when she was seven years old, nine years old, when she was a child growing up in Eatonville, immersed in this culture that she later collected.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Dust Tracks on a Road is highly edited. She had some biting lines about the United States and the role of freedom abroad versus freedom here. But the editors, they took it out, and I guess Zora was looking forward to that royalty check and didn't want to fight for it.

Narrator: The book with its strong sales validated the significance of her anthropological study, but success still did not translate into funding for her continued fieldwork. Though she never stopped writing articles, reviews and opinion pieces-she would get by working at a variety of jobs-sometimes as a teacher, librarian, and journalist.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: She still has a lot she wants to do. I think Hurston had a lot of courage to put her ideas out there, but she was also getting older.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: It's also the period of time where she's falsely accused of having improper relations with a minor. People abandoned Zora Neale Hurston. That accusation is dropped. It turns out that the woman had a vendetta against Zora, but the people who abandoned her never really come back into her life.

Narrator: When it was discovered in 1950 that she was serving as a maid, Hurston played it as if the work was just part of her research.

Daphne Lamothe, Literary Scholar: She's having a really difficult time finding people who are interested in publishing her work.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: She's an aging Black woman, with no children and no husband. The Negro is no longer in vogue. And so you just watch what happens to Black women who almost always live in precarity in this society.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: By the last 10 years of her life, she has all of the ailments of older Black women. high blood pressure, gaining weight. She's still desperately trying to get enough money to continue her work, and it's slipping through her fingers.

Narrator: Hurston's tendency to speak her mind entangled her in the emerging national civil rights debates. Her opinion on the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that ended legalized racial discrimination in schools put her at odds with many Americans.

Zora (VO): How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: People cite her letter to the editor where she disparages Brown versus the Board of Education as retrograde, as anti-Black. But she understood that just having proximity to White people did not make Black people smarter, better, more valuable, we needed equality and equity, and financial support.

Zora (VO): It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: She was articulating something where her investment in a particular ​​version of Blackness was not valued.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: She ends up back in the community of Black people.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: The Fort Pierce community in which she lived, loved and adored her. But her struggles as a woman and her struggles as a Black person in racist society were profound.

Narrator: Zora Neale Hurston died from heart disease after a stroke on January 28th, 1960, shortly after her 69th birthday in a segregated nursing home in Fort Pierce, Florida. She was working on at least one novel at the time. At her funeral over a hundred people, the vast majority African American, attended. One of the ministers remarked, "the Miami paper said she died poor. She died rich. She did something." Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: As the story goes, when you die in a poor house they burn your stuff. And a Black deputy sheriff comes along and he remembers that this woman was someone. And he literally snatches materials, her belongings, out of the fire and hangs on to them.

Charles King, Political Scientist: She had thrown herself into the world to try to rescue, redeem the things that were held by outsiders to be unimportant about marginal societies, and it was somehow fitting that the last act of her papers, her own legacy, was itself an act of rescue.
Epilogue
Narrator: Zora Neale Hurston fell into obscurity until the 1970s. After writer Alice Walker read Their Eyes Were Watching God, she began a journey into Hurston's life, work and death that catalyzed another Hurston rescue-this one led by literary scholars, Black women.

Irma McClaurin, Anthropologist: I think anthropology hasn't acknowledged her enough, not only for her writing style, but also the fact that she put herself into that ethnographic landscape: how she impacts, how she's impacted, how people see her as well as what she's collecting. And that's unique.

Eve Dunbar, Literary Scholar: That is what she modeled very early, and what the discipline at that point wasn't ready for. I think it gives a lot of minoritized people access and legitimacy to the work that they most value, which is to go into their own communities.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: One of the few anthropologists that were doing work in the '20s that would sort of hold up to the integrity and the ethics of contemporary anthropology is Zora Neale Hurston.

María Eugenia Cotera, Modern Thought Scholar: People are invested in saying she was a Black anthropologist, but another part of me wants to disinvite anthropology from her recuperation because there were so many moments when folks work behind the scenes not to support her, and so that is very painful.

Carla Kaplan, Literary Scholar: She's somebody who succeeded against all the odds and whose life was marred by lack of resources, who could have done five times as much if she had had the financial wherewithal she so richly deserved.

Charles King, Political Scientist: We now recognize her as being not only critical to the canon of American literature, but a figure whose work as a prose writer, as a social scientist, is closer to what we would now think of as good, self-aware, self-critical social science.

Lee D. Baker, Anthropologist: Sometimes when you're ahead of your time, you're also an outlier. You are marginalized and seen as, sometimes a little crazy, but in many respects people that are ahead of their time, are geniuses, and indeed she was a genius.

Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Historian: Hurston left us beautiful novels. She left us her vision of the legitimacy of Black people as a people, as a culture. She fought for us in her writing. She fought for Black women in her writing, in her anthropology. She believed in our worth, and she said so over and over again. She jumped at the sun.

Zora (VO): Negro reality is a hundred times more imaginative and entertaining than anything that has been hatched up over a typewriter. Go hard or go home.

Text: After 87 years, Zora Neale Hurston's book Barracoon was published in 2018 and became a bestseller.

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Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space | American Experience | PBS

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Meet the influential author and key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Also a trained anthropologist, Hurston collected folklore throughout the South and Caribbean - reclaiming, honoring and celebrating Black life on its own terms.

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Faces of the Harlem Renaissance

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson

1878-1949 / Dancer

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Bill Robinson began dancing in local saloons at the age of six. He became a popular fixture on the vaudeville circuit just two years after that. While still a child, he was given the nickname "Bojangles," although even Robinson himself was unsure of the origin of that moniker.

In 1905, Robinson forged a partnership-lifelong, it turned out-with agent Marty Forkins, who got the dancer a golden opportunity: the chance to develop a solo act.

(African-American dancers of the time appeared exclusively in pairs.) Robinson made the most of it, touring the United States and Europe until the late 1920s.

Robinson took up residence in Harlem in 1928. That was the year he landed a role in the all-black musical revue Blackbirds of 1928, which was staged by a white producer for white audiences. Robinson's popularity soared.

Tap-dancing high on his toes and moving his upper body with understated grace, Robinson displayed a lightness and finesse never seen before. He shunned the frantic style of his predecessors for a more elegant, precise form of tap.

Robinson's talent gave him entrée to two worlds-white entertainment and black-yet he was never completely accepted in either one. White audiences adored the films in which he co-starred with Shirley Temple or Will Rogers, but his commercially successful roles were modeled on racist stereotypes, such as that of the genial black servant. Though artistically satisfying, his few forays into black films-notably Harlem Is Heaven -didn't make him much money.

Robinson began performing at Harlem's Cotton Club in the mid-1930s. In 1939, he joined the Broadway cast of an African-American musical called Hot Mikado. The white establishment, meanwhile, cemented his celebrity status by naming him honorary mayor of Harlem-and mascot of the New York Giants baseball team. Many prominent African Americans, however, found these distinctions to be demeaning and paternalistic.

Despite the racial tension that dogged his career, Robinson revolutionized his art, conquered both stage and screen, and triumphed as a Harlem legend.

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1878-1949 / Dancer Born in Richmond, Virginia, Bill Robinson began dancing in local saloons at the age of six. He became a popular fixture on the vaudeville circuit just two years after that. While still a child, he was given the nickname "Bojangles," although even Robinson himself was unsure of the origin of that moniker.

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Countee Cullen is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across the African American firmament and then sank toward the horizon. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died in 1918, the 15-year-old Countee LeRoy Porter was taken into the home of the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's largest congregation. There the young Countee entered the approximate center of black politics and culture in the United States and acquired both the name and awareness of the influential clergyman who was later elected president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

During the 1920s, Harlem was an enormously stimulating milieu for African American intellectuals. The high hopes of the black community for acceptance and equality had turned to disillusionment at the end of World War I, when returning black soldiers all too often experienced unemployment and were otherwise mistreated. Resentment pulsated through black urban centers like Harlem, which had burgeoned during the war as black workers migrated there to fill jobs temporarily vacated by the diversion of white laborers into the military. For the first time in African American history, a black urban consciousness conducive to the flowering of the arts was developing. From Harlem, the largest of the new, densely populated black urban communities in which Cullen was listening and learning burst forth an outpouring of African American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance.

While Cullen's informal education was shaped by his exposure to black ideas and yearnings, his formal education derived from almost totally white influences. This dichotomy heavily influenced his creative work and his criticism, particularly because he did extremely well at the white-dominated institutions he attended and won the approbation of white academia. In high school Cullen earned academic honors that in turn garnered him the posts of vice-president of his class and editor of the school newspaper, as well as prizes for poetry and oratory. His glory continued at New York University, where he obtained first or second prizes in a number of poetry contests, including the national Witter Bynner Contests for undergraduate poetry and contests sponsored by Poetry magazine. Literary critic and Harvard professor Irving Babbitt publicly lauded Cullen's The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and in 1925, which proved a bumper year for the young man's harvest of literary prizes, Cullen graduated from New York University, was accepted into Harvard's masters program, and published his first volume of poetry: Color.

During the next four years Cullen reached his zenith. A celebrated young man about Harlem, he had in print by 1929 several books of his own poems and a collection of poetry he edited, Caroling Dusk, written by other African Americans. His letters from Harvard to his Harlem friend Harold Jackman exuded self-satisfaction and sometimes the snide intolerance of the enfant terrible. The climax of those heady years may have come in 1928. That year Cullen was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to write poetry in France, and he married Nina Yolande DuBois, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, a man who for decades was the acknowledged leader of the African American intellectual community. Few social events in Harlem rivaled the magnitude of the latter event, and much of Harlem joined in the festivities that marked the joining of the Cullen and DuBois lineages, two of its most notable families.

Because of Cullen's success in both black and white cultures, and because of his romantic temperament, he formulated an aesthetic that embraced both cultures. He came to believe that art transcended race and that it could be used as a vehicle to minimize the distance between black and white peoples. When he chose as his models poet John Keats and to a lesser extent A.E. Housman, he did so not consciously to curry favor with white America but for four logical reasons: First, though there had been African American poets, there was not yet an African American poetic tradition-in any meaningful sense of the term-to draw upon. Second, the English poetic tradition was the one that was available to him-the one that had been taught to him in schools he attended. Third, he felt challenged to demonstrate that a black poet could excel within that traditional framework. And fourth, he felt absolutely free to choose as exemplars any poets in the world with whom he sensed a temperamental affinity (and he certainly had that affinity with Housman and, especially, Keats). In addition, he shared their romantic self-involvement; he had an ego that was sensitive to the slightest tremors and that needed expression to remain whole, and like Keats he had to believe in human perfectibility.

In poems such as " Heritage" and "Atlantic City Waiter," Cullen reflects the urge to reclaim African arts-a movement called Négritude that was one of the motifs of the Harlem Renaissance. The cornerstone of his aesthetic, however, was the call for African American poets to work conservatively, as he did, within English conventions. In his 1927 foreword to Caroling Dusk, Cullen observed that "since theirs is ... the heritage of the English language, their work will not present any serious aberration from poetic tendencies of their times." Braving the wrath of less moderate peers, he further stated that "negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance." Even the subtitle of the collection, An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, reflects his belief in the essential oneness of art; it implies no distinction between white poetry and black poetry, and it assumes there is only poetry, which in the case of Caroling Dusk is simply composed by African American writers.

His dedication to oneness led Cullen to be cautious of any black writer's work that threatened to erect rather than pull down barricades between the races. Thus, in a February, 1926, "Dark Tower" column in which Cullen reviewed Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues, Cullen pressed Hughes not to be a "racial artist" and to omit jazz rhythms from his poems. In a later column he prodded black writers to censor themselves by avoiding "some things, some truths of Negro life and thought ... that all Negroes know, but take no pride in." For Cullen, showcasing unpleasant realities would "but strengthen the bitterness of our enemies" and thereby weaken the bridge of art between blacks and whites.

Such warnings, however, did not prevent the critic Cullen from praising black artists whenever he found their work meritorious, even when it was overtly racial. In another of his "Dark Tower" columns, he complimented Amy Spingarn's Pride and Humility, for example, even though he thought its "clearest notes" were to be heard "in those poems which have a racial framework." Since his primary criterion for judging a work was always aesthetic, Cullen applauded any poetry that appealed to him, without regard to the color of the writer. He had good things to say about Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.A. Robinson, and Robert Frost, but he was less favorable toward such avant-garde poets as Amy Lowell, in whose work he found little "for the hungry heart to feed upon." Generally, three principles informed his criticism: First, he tended to be more attracted to Romantic poetry. Second, he was conservative in his tastes and therefore put off by experimentation such as that of Amy Lowell. Third, although he put special effort into trying to further the interests of black artists, he was governed by a keen sense of impartiality and a commitment to bringing the races into closer harmony.

A paradox exists, however, between Cullen's philosophy and writing. While he argued that racial poetry was a detriment to the color-blindness he craved, he was at the same time so affronted by the racial injustice in America that his own best verse-indeed most of his verse-gave voice to racial protest. In fact the title of Cullen's collection, Color (1925), was not chosen unintentionally, nor did Cullen include sections with that same title in later volumes by accident. Both early and late in his career he was, in spite of himself, largely a racial poet. This is evident throughout Cullen's works from the Color pieces and the introduction of racial violence into his 1927 work The Ballad of the Brown Girl to the poems that he selected for the posthumously published On These I Stand, of which substantially more than half are racial poems.

Of the six identifiable racial themes in Cullen's poetry, the first is Négritude, a pervasive international black literary movement, which included what scholar Arthur P. Davis in a 1953 Phylon essay called "the alien-and-exile theme." Specific examples of this motif in Cullen's poetry include his attribution of descent from African kings to the girl featured in The Ballad of the Brown Girl as well as the submerged pride exhibited by the waiter in the poem "Atlantic City Waiter" whose graceful movement resulted from "Ten thousand years on jungle clues." Probably the best-known illustration of the Pan-African impulse in Cullen's poetry is found in " Heritage," where the narrator realizes that although he must suppress his African heritage, he cannot ultimately surrender his black heart and mind to white civilization. "Heritage," like most of the Négritude poems of the Harlem Renaissance and like political expression such as Marcus Garvey's popular back-to-Africa movement, powerfully suggests the duality of the black psyche-the simultaneous allegiance to America and rage at her racial inequities

Four similar themes recur in Cullen's poems, expressing other forms of racial bias. These include a kind of black chauvinism that prevailed at the time and that Cullen portrayed in both The Ballad of the Brown Girl and The Black Christ, when in those works he judged that the passion of blacks was better than that of whites. Likewise, the poem "Near White" exemplifies the author's admonition against miscegenation, and in "To a Brown Boy" Cullen propounds a racially motivated affinity toward death as a preferred escape from racial frustration and outrage. Another poem, "For a Lady I Know," presents a satirical view of whites obliviously mistreating their black counterparts as it depicts blacks in heaven doing their "celestial chores" so that upper-class whites can remain in their heavenly beds.

Using a sixth motif, Cullen exhibits a direct expression of irrepressible anger at racial unfairness. His outcry is more muted than that of some other Harlem Renaissance poets-Hughes, for example, and Claude McKay-but that is a matter of Cullen's innate and learned gentility. Those who overlook Cullen's strong indictment of racism in American society miss the main thrust of his work. His poetry throbs with anger as in "Incident" when he recalls his personal response to being called "nigger" on a Baltimore bus, or in the selection " Yet Do I Marvel," in which Cullen identifies what he regards as God's most astonishing miscue that he could "make a poet black, and bid him sing!" In addition to his own personal experiences, Cullen also focuses on public events. For instance, in "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song," he upbraids American poets, who had championed the cause of white anarchists in the controversial Sacco-Vanzetti trials, for not defending the nine black youths indicted on charges of raping two white girls in a freight car passing through Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931.

In The Book of American Negro Poetry, author James Weldon Johnson explained with acute sympathy Cullen's compulsion to write poetry that seems to fly in the face of his declarations against poetry of race. Johnson wrote: "Strangely, it is because Cullen revolts against ... racial limitations-technical and spiritual-that the best of his poetry is motivated by race. He is always seeking to free himself and his art from these bonds. He never entirely escapes, but from the very fret and chafe he brings forth poetry that contains the quintessence of race consciousness."

Cullen, then, was a forceful but genteel protest poet; yet, he was much more. He was also consistent in his intention to write good traditional poetry for the social purpose of showing what common sense should have told white Americans but what they still demanded be proven to them-that blacks could write poetry and write it as well as anyone. To that end, much of Cullen's poetry deals with such universal subjects as faith and doubt, love, and mortality.

On the subject of religion, Cullen waywardly progressed from uncertainty to Christian acceptance. Early on he was given to irony and even defiance in moments of youthful skepticism. In " Heritage," for example, he observes that a black Christ could command his faith better than the white one. When he was 24, he provided a third-person description of himself in which he commented that his "chief problem has been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination. His life so far has not convinced him that the problem is insoluble." But before very long, his grandmother Porter's influence and that of the Cullen rectory won out. Outrage over racial injustice notwithstanding, he had fairly well controlled the "pagan inclination" in favor of Christian orthodoxy by 1929, when he published The Black Christ, and Other Poems. In the opening of the book's narrative title poem, the protagonist sings of embracing God in spite of certain earthly obstacles that he summarizes as "my country's shame." The speaker's brother has been beaten to death by a white lynch mob for an innocent relationship with a white woman; the narrator's resentment toward a savior who allows such evil to occur is overcome by his mother's proclamation of her unshakable faith, and any residue of doubt disappears when the murdered brother is resurrected. At the end the family is left to prosper in its piety. Furthermore, among the few previously unpublished poems that Cullen selected for inclusion in the posthumously published collection On These I Stand is one that confirms his continuing religious commitment as a way to cope with the injustices and disappointments of his life. Written during World War I, "Christus natus est" asserts that amid all the tragedy of war "The manger still / Outshines the throne" and that "Christ must and will / Come to his own."

David Levering Lewis, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, asserted that "impotence and death run through [Cullen's] poetry like dark threads, entangling his most affirmative lines." In general, Cullen's love poetry is clearly characterized not only by misgivings about women but also by a distrust of the emotion of heterosexual love. His poems "Medusa" and "The Cat," both contained in The Medea, and Some Poems, illustrate this vision of male-female relationships. In Cullen's version of the ancient myth, it is not the hideousness of Medusa that blinds the men who gaze upon her, but rather her beauty. So great is the destructive power of the attractive female that the narrator in "The Cat" imagines in the animal "A woman with thine eyes, satanic beast / Profound and cold as scythes to mow me down." Male lovers, on the other hand are often portrayed as sickly with apprehension that a relationship is about to be ended either by a fickle partner or by death. In "If Love Be Staunch," for example, the speaker warns that love lasts no longer than "water stays in a sieve" and in "The Love Tree" Cullen portrays love as a crucifixion whereby future lovers may realize that "'Twas break of heart that made the love tree grow."

Cullen's treatment of death in his writing was shaped by his early encounters with the deaths of his parents, brother, and grandmother, as well as by a premonition of his own premature demise. Running through his poems are a sense of the brevity of life and a romantic craving for the surcease of death. In "Nocturne" and "Works to My Love," death is readily accepted as a natural element of life. "Threnody for a Brown Girl" and "In the Midst of Life" portray even warmer feelings towards death as a welcome escape. And in poems such as "Only the Polished Skeleton" death is gratefully anticipated to bring relief from racial oppression: A stripped skeleton has no race; it can but "measure the worth of all it so despised." Looking forward to death, Cullen meanwhile accepted sleep as an effective surrogate. In the poem "Sleep" he portrays slumber as "lovelier" and "kinder" than any alternative. It is both a feline killer and gentle nourisher that suckles the sleeper: "though the suck be short 'tis good." In April, 1943, less than three years before he died of uremic poisoning, Cullen related in "Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts" that "blessedly this breath departs."

After 1929 Cullen's production of verse dropped off dramatically. It was limited to his translation of Euripides' play Medea, which appeared along with some new poems in his collection The Medea, and Some Poems (1935) and later with half a dozen previously unpublished pieces that were included in his posthumously published collection, On These I Stand. A complexity of reasons contributed to the dimming of his poetic star. The Harlem Renaissance required a white audience to sustain it, and as whites became preoccupied with their own tenuous situation during the Great Depression, they lost interest in the African American arts. Also, Cullen's idealism about building a bridge of poetry between the races had been sorely tested by the time the 1920s ended. Moreover, he seemed affected by legitimate doubts concerning his growth as a poet. In "Self Criticism" he reflected whether he would go on singing a "failing note still vainly clinging / To the throat of the stricken swan."

While his supporters continued to defend him on racial rather than literary grounds, his detractors gradually increased in numbers with the publication of each successive collection of his poetry. Harry Alan Potamkin, in a 1927 New Republic review of Copper Sun, found that Cullen had not really progressed since Color and that the poet had "capitalized on the fact of race." The reviewer concluded, in fact, that Cullen's poetry "begins and ends with a epithet skill." With the appearance of The Black Christ, and Other Poems in 1929, Nation 's Granville Hicks joined the chorus of critics expressing reservations and remarked that "in general, Mr. Cullen's talents do not seem to be developing as one might wish."

For a combination of causes, then, beginning in the early 1930s Cullen largely curtailed his poetic output and channeled his creative energy into other genres. He wrote a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), but its poor critical reception made it his only novel. The book reveals a flair for satire in its secondary plot, which centers around the Harlem salon of the irrepressible hostess Constancia Brandon; one particularly effective episode features a white intellectual bigot who is invited to read his tract, "The Menace of the Negro to Our American Civilization," to an audience of mainly black intellectuals. The novel itself, however, suffers from a fatal structural flaw. Cullen never successfully integrated the secondary plot-a takeoff on his own experience in Harlem intellectual circles-with the major story line, a melodrama in which itinerant con man Sam Lucas undergoes a fake religious conversion to edge his way into a Harlem congregation; marries and then cheats on his sweet young wife; and finally, on his death bed undergoes a change of heart. The characters in the main plot are generally based on stereotypes common in African American folklore-the fast-talking trickster and the sagacious saintly old aunt, for example. Although Cullen displays some compassion toward them and a good deal of good-natured wit in dealing with the satirical figures, the two plots never adequately come together. As Rudolph Fisher said in a New York Herald Tribune review of One Way to Heaven, it was as if Cullen were "exhibiting a lovely pastel and cartoon on the same frame."

When 31-year-old Cullen turned to teaching in 1934, he was determined to find some way other than literature to contribute to social change, but he did not abandon writing entirely. In 1935 he published his version of Medea (with the speeches and choral passages curiously attenuated) and collaborated with Harry Hamilton on "Heaven's My Home," a dramatic adaptation of One Way to Heaven. The play, which was never published, is actually more contrived than Cullen's novel, but unlike the original work, "Heaven's My Home" manages to integrate the two plots by introducing a sexual relationship between the protagonists Lucas and Brandon.

Toward the end of his life, in the 1940s, Cullen was relatively successful as a dramatist. With another collaborator, Owen Dodson, he worked on several projects, including "The Third Fourth of July," a one-act play printed in Theatre Arts in August, 1946. During this period Cullen rejected a professorship at Fisk University and instead remained in New York to work with Arna Bontemps on a dramatic version of his novel God Sends Sunday. Cullen, who suggested the adaptation, made this endeavor the center of his life, but the enterprise caused him much grief. By 1945 the play had become the musical "St. Louis Woman," and celebrated performer Lena Horne was expected to star in its Broadway and Hollywood productions. Then disaster struck. Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) argued that the play, set in the black ghetto of St. Louis and featuring lower-class and seedy characters, was demeaning to blacks. Cullen was blamed for revealing the seamy side of black life, the very thing he had warned other black writers not to do. Many of Cullen's friends refused to defend him; some joined the attack, which was patently unjust. Admittedly, greed and criminality figure in the play, which focuses on the struggle between overbearing salon keeper-gambler Bigelow Brown and diminutive jockey Lil Augie for the affections of Della Greene, a hard-nosed and soft-hearted beauty.

But as Cullen argued, the play really deals with human virtues-honor, love, decency, and loyalty. The controversy rounding it wore on, however, until 1946. In March of that year, "St. Louis Woman" finally premiered on Broadway, featuring songs by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen such as "Come Rain, Come Shine" and making singer Pearl Bailey a star. Unfortunately, Cullen had died almost three months earlier and was to be remembered primarily for the poems he had written in his 20s when he was one of Harlem's brightest luminaries.

The limitations of Cullen's poetry such as its archaic and imitative ring, its occasional verbosity, and its tendency to sacrifice sense for conventional prosody restricted his literary status to that of a minor poet with a real lyrical gift. But he was not guilty of the obsequious acceptance of white values for which 1960s black power poets such as Don Lee (Haki Madhubuti) were to dismiss him. Cullen never compromised his integrity as a black man to gain advantage for himself. His primary goal was to bring America closer to racial harmony through his own art and that of his peers and ultimately to achieve complete and colorblind artistic freedom. As he defiantly proclaimed in " To Certain Critics" (published in The Black Christ), though some might call him a traitor to blacks, his program was too universal to be contained: "Never shall the clan / Confine my singing to its ways / Beyond the ways of man."

Probably more than any other writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen carried out the intentions of black American intellectual leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson. These men had nothing but the highest praise for Cullen, for he was brilliantly practicing what they advocated, and he came close to embodying Alain Locke's "New Negro." "In a time," DuBois wrote in a 1928 Crisis essay, "when it is vogue to make much of the Negro's aptitude for clownishness or to depict him objectively as a serio-comic figure, it is a fine and praiseworthy act for Mr. Cullen to show through the interpretation of his own subjectivity the inner workings of the Negro soul and mind." Johnson was pleased with Cullen's decision not to recognize "any limitation to 'racial' themes and forms." In Cullen's wish not to be "a negro poet," Johnson insisted, the writer was "not only within his right: he is right." As these authorities attest, to read Countee Cullen's work is to hear a voice as representative of the Harlem Renaissance as it is possible to find.

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Countee Cullen is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across the African American firmament and then sank toward the horizon. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died in...

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Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was born LutherRobinson in Richmond, Virginia. Bill got his first professional job in 1892 as a member of the pickaninny chorus for Mayme Remington with The South Before the War . When he got to New York, Robinson joined forces with George W. Cooper and they traveled on the Keithe and Orpheum circuits together. However, Robinson's charge for assault split the two men. Robinson continued his career solo and became one of the few African-Americans to perform in New York's Place Theatre. Robinson is best known for his Stair Dance, which he introduced in 1918. When Robinson became married in 1922, his career really took off. He was declared the best dancer ever by at least seven New York newspapers and he started acting in several films. Robinson was also a huge influence on the young dancers of the 1920s at the Hoofers Club in Harlem. He was part of many clubs and organizations, and he donated over one million dollars in loans to charities. To African Americans living in the twenties, Robinson was an inspiration and was like a "...John Henry, who instead of driving steel, laid down iron taps." (http://atdf.org/awards/bojangles.html) When Bill Robinson died in 1949 almost 100,000 people came to his funeral. He will forever be remembered as a symbol of happiness and fun, and will forever be known for his legendary tap dances.

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Bill "Bojangles" Robinson was born LutherRobinson in Richmond, Virginia. Bill got his first professional job in 1892 as a member of the pickaninny chorus for Mayme Remington with The South Before the War . When he got to New York, Robinson joined forces with George W.

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Bill Robinson | Tap dancer, Broadway star, Vaudeville

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Bill Robinson American dancer of Broadway and Hollywood, best known for his dancing roles with Shirley Temple in films of the 1930s. Robinson’s parents having died when he was a child, he was raised by a grandmother and received little formal schooling. He began dancing for pennies at the age of

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Claude McKay - Poems, America & Harlem Renaissance

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Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet best known for his novels and poems, including “If We Must Die,” which contributed to the Harlem Renaissance.

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Ethel M. Caution-Davis met unimaginable loss in her early life. Her mother passed away when she was three years old, and just two years later, her father died from injuries suffered in an accident at his workplace. Caution-Davis relocated from Williamsport, Pennsylvania to live with a foster mother in Boston, Massachusetts. She excelled in her academic career, becoming the first Black child to attend the prestigious Girls Latin High School in Boston, and in 1912, she was one of the first Black students to graduate from Wellesley. Caution-Davis entered Wellesley as the only Black student at the school. While enrolled, she published poems in the Wellesley Magazine and Wellesley News.

Following her graduation, she became a published poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her work has been anthologized in many collections alongside literary giants including Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She taught at various schools in the South and Midwest before serving as the Dean of Women at the historically Black Talladega College for three years. Following her tenure at Talladega College, she moved to New York, where she was a casework supervisor for the New York City Department of Welfare. The Wellesley Alumnae Magazine published a profile on her in 1977, which spoke about the tenacious work ethic that landed her at Wellesley and the influential literary and educational career she led after leaving the college. She passed in New York City in 1981.

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Ethel M. Caution-Davis met unimaginable loss in her early life. Her mother passed away when she was three years old, and just two years later, her father died from injuries suffered in an accident at his workplace. Caution-Davis relocated from Williamsport, Pennsylvania to live with a foster mother in Boston, Massachusetts.

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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, three years after the end of the American Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He died on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 27, 1963 in Accra, Ghana.

W. E. B. Du Bois's 95-year life was truly astonishing. He attended Fisk University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. As a scholar he helped invent the field of Sociology as we know it today. As an activist he helped found the NAACP. As a writer he penned some of the finest works of prose to come out of America in the Twentieth Century, including The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction. As a public intellectual Du Bois fought injustice, inequality, and prejudice wherever he found it through public debates, speeches, countless editorials, and essays. As a propagandist he took on prevailing assumptions of his own time with powerful rhetoric, and compelling imagery.

More often than not, his mouthpiece was The Crisis Magazine, which he edited for almost a quarter of a century. Du Bois was a global figure, a world traveller, a convener of Pan African Congresses, and an enemy of colonialism. He fought for peace throughout his life, and this eventually brought him into conflict with the United States Justice Department, who were caught up in the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s. Du Bois was persecuted, hand-cuffed at his arraignment, vilified, put on trial, but acquitted. Nevertheless, he chose to leave the US behind him and emigrated to Ghana, at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah, where he spent the rest of his life.

Du Bois's legacy, of course, lives on. It resonates in the countless scholarly and popular works he produced, in the archives of institutions like UMass Amherst and Fisk University, and in the enduring activism of the NAACP.

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William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868, three years after the end of the American Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He died on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 27, 1963 in Accra, Ghana.

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Robinson worked throughout his career to make life better for black performers

smithsonianmag.com

1. Performed Solo
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, born on this day in 1878, was one of the early twentieth century's most talented performers.

His career unfolded in the context of laws about how black performers could represent themselves on stage and who they could perform with. But Robinson's talents and the salary he came to command allowed him to flout some of those conventions, at times helping to change them. Here are three things Robinson did that helped change the restrictions on black performers:

According to author Constance Valis Hill, early in his career, Robinson, like other black performers, had to abide by the so-called "two-colored" rule of vaudeville. This rule stipulated that black performers couldn't appear alone onstage. So Robinson teamed up with a number of other black vaudevillians, including George W. Cooper in 1902, Hill writes.
2. Appeared Without Blackface
Robinson and Cooper became famous for their acts, performing together until 1916. "Playing the role of fool to Cooper's straight man, Robinson's stage getup consisted of a clown outfit with a tutu worn over long pants and a derby placed on his head," Hill writes. "Their new act took advantage of Robinson's comic skills at impersonating an automobile having a fit, a mosquito or a trombone-using his lips."

They were extremely popular, she writes, and well paid. Their prominence allowed them to perform in traditionally white-only vaudeville venues as well as black vaudeville venues. By the time they split up, Robinson began performing on his own, despite the rule. When America entered World War I, he volunteered to perform for troops (on his own) and secured a solo act at the Palace Theatre in Chicago.
3. Danced With White Actors
Early twentieth-century vaudeville performers still frequently wore blackface, just like the white "minstrel show" performers who started vaudeville in the 1800s. Black performers also adopted this convention by 1840.

But Robinson and Cooper didn't wear blackface, according to the Library of Congress. And Robinson continued to not wear blackface in his later solo acts, even though it was part of mainstream entertainment well into the mid-20th century and remains a controversial (but present) legacy today.

Like American society generally, the world of performance was highly segregated. But Robinson, whose fame grew as a soloist, frequently performed with white actors. His first film role came in 1930 with Dixiana, a film that had a predominantly white cast, and he teamed up in later movies with the likes of Shirley Temple.

Robinson's partnership with the six-year-old Temple brought him mainstream fame, but in the movies they made together, he assumed the role of a "loyal, docile servant" who took huge amounts of abuse and didn't resist, writes Hill.

"Robinson was chipper and effervescent when he playfully jibed with the house servant played by Hattie McDaniel," she writes; "he was even more so when he enticed the Southern patriarch's six-year-old granddaughter (Temple) to go upstairs to bed, by teaching her his famous stair dance."

Robinson's film roles may have been controversial, but in his own life he worked to combat racism, Hill writes in a separate piece. He helped to found the Negro Actors Guild of America and raised huge sums of money for charities and benefits, she writes. In his memory, Congress passed a resolution in 1989 making today-his birthday-National Tap Dance Day.

Robinson deserves the last word. Here he is with his celebrated stair dance:

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Three Ways Bill "Bojangles" Robinson Changed Dance Forever

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smithsonianmag.com 1. Performed Solo Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, born on this day in 1878, was one of the early twentieth century's most talented performers. His career unfolded in the context of laws about how black performers could represent themselves on stage and who they could perform with.

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A native Philadelphian, Mae V. Cowdery (1909-1953) was raised in a comfortable middle class home. As a senior at the Philadelphia High School for Girls (a school also attended by Jessie Fauset) in 1927, she won first prize in a poetry contest run by The Crisis, as well as the Krigwa Poetry Prize for another poem. After graduation, she, like Gwendolyn B. Bennett, attended Pratt Institute. She quickly took to New York City and enjoyed Harlem and Greenwich Village cabarets. Cowdery was one of the few women of her time to publish a book of her own poems, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (1936). Despite early success and earning the respect of some of the most influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, Cowdery fell silent after the book's publication. Her final years are shrouded in mystery. She took her own life at the age of forty-four. ( Black Women in America)

Genre: Poetry

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LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Mae Cowdery

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Skip to Main Content It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. A native Philadelphian, Mae V.

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This collection present ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her knowledge of folklore in the African-American South. Totaling 1,068 images, most of the scripts are housed in the Library's Manuscript Division with one each in the Music and in the Rare Book and Special Collections Divisions. There are four sketches and six full length plays in this group. Previously known mainly for her fiction and autobiography, Hurston here reveals her high ambitions as a dramatist.

The plays held in the Manuscript Division include:

The Music Division holds:

The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds:

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress received eight of the ten Zora Neale Hurston plays that appear in The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress in the late 1980s as transfers from the United States Copyright Office. At that time, these plays were dispersed among the approximate 250,000 transferred scripts registered as unpublished, which were arranged roughly chronologically, 1901-77, by registration numbers. The other two Hurston plays had been previously transferred when curators selected them for custody by other Library of Congress divisions, probably following their registrations in 1925 and 1944.

The Copyright Deposit Drama Collection from which the Hurston plays were selected is a rich source of twentieth-century theatrical and cultural history. It includes scripts for early silent film and vaudeville; radio and television plays; and dramas by unknown as well as famous writers, many forgotten, many unproduced, many remaining unpublished. The entire mega-collection is being microfilmed, and selected scripts, such as the Hurston plays, will be retained in their original paper format.

Hurston and Her Plays

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), the author of the ten plays (co-author with Langston Hughes on Mule-Bone and Dorothy Waring on Polk County), deposited these scripts with the United States Copyright Office in 1925, 1930, 1931, 1935, and 1944 to protect their copyrights and to place copies in trust with the government. Because none of the plays' copyrights were renewed during the twenty-eighth year, as required by the then-operative copyright law, all eventually fell into the public domain in the versions deposited. Revisions or other versions of these plays held in other repositories, in private hands, or later published, still may be under copyright protection.

Included in the group presented here are four very short plays (sketches or skits) and six full-length plays. Most are light-hearted if not outright comedies and several include song lyrics without the associated music. Hurston knew the songs and the subjects of these plays from her own upbringing and her professional folklore research in the African-American South. She identified as her hometown Eatonville, Florida, the first African-American incorporated township. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Hurston traveled the American South collecting and recording the sounds and songs of her people; her research in Haiti is reflected in the voodoo scenes and beliefs woven into several of the plays.

Meet the Mamma (1925) is a high-spirited early experimental play. Act 1 takes place in a Harlem club, act 2 aboard an ocean liner, and act 3 in the jungles of Africa. Each scene of act 2 experiments with a different dramatic genre. The play spoofs the "Back to Africa" movement of Marcus Garvey.

Cold Keener (1930) is a "revue" with nine skits that are unrelated in their themes, characters, or even their settings, which include Georgia, Harlem, Florida, the Bahamas, and a jook joint. Cold Keener illustrates Hurston's concept of "primitive angularity" in dramatic structure--the parts are linked only by their differences. With this fresh approach, she hoped to challenge the African-American stereotypes derived from minstrel shows and thus contribute to the formation of a "real Negro theater."

De Turkey and de Law (1930) is Hurston's original folktale-anchored version of the play Mule-Bone that she co-authored in 1931 with Langston Hughes. His insistence on a more conventionally romantic version of the tale contributed to the infamous rift between the two Harlem authors.

Spunk (1935) and Polk County (1944) are musical romantic comedies for a folk music that is a typical part of the life of the people portrayed. Such naturalistic use of musical sources distinguishes the Hurston folk-play-with-music from the mainline American musical, in which songs are introduced in operatic fashion.

Uncovering Buried Treasures

With the exception of Mule-Bone, the plays presented here were all unpublished when they were rediscovered in the Library of Congress in 1997. At that time, only Polk County was at all familiar to scholars on the basis of copies in other repositories. Hurston died in obscurity in 1960. Her achievements remained in eclipse until Alice Walker's 1973 pilgrimage to find and mark the grave of this mother of the Harlem Renaissance galvanized her posthumous fame. Even her rediscovery, however, celebrated Hurston's achievements as a novelist and folklorist rather than as a dramatist. Little was known about her theatrical career until 1998, when scholarly publications began to reflect the drama discoveries announced by the Library of Congress.

After the Library's cache of Hurston scripts was identified, a retired copyright specialist determined that they were all in the public domain and could therefore be duplicated and even produced. A series of in-house Library staff lunch-hour readings followed. They began with the sketch "Woofing" (slang for giving a humorous verbal insult), progressed in 1998 to monthly readings of each of Spunk's three acts, and finished in 1999 with the first act of Meet the Mamma.

The unrehearsed readings were such happy and popular events that the Library of Congress co-produced two public concert readings of Polk County in December 2000 in its Coolidge auditorium, featuring archival materials from the Library and artistic talent from Washington's Arena Stage. The production honored the Library of Congress's bicentennial and Arena Stage's fiftieth anniversary.

The great success of these public readings led in turn to a full production of Polk County, enhanced with music, at Arena Stage in the spring of 2002. In preparation for it, dramaturge Cathy Madison and director Kyle Donnelly created an original adaptation from Hurston's long text. The music was researched and recreated by Stephen Wade, a folk-song and banjo specialist long associated with both Arena Stage and the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture. The production was a success with both audiences and critics.

Rediscovering an American Dramatist

The discovery of the Hurston scripts, added to those Hurston plays already known, firmly establishes their author, an African-American woman, as a significant dramatist of the twentieth century. The first outside scholar to see the scripts was Carla Kaplan of the University of Southern California, who visited the Library of Congress in 1997 to look for letters for her 2002 edition of Hurston's correspondence ( Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters). She immediately confirmed that a scholarly treasure had been uncovered.

Spunk and Mule-Bone were not a part of the original cache that Kaplan saw, although their copyright registrations were listed. Pearlie Peters of Rider University examined the cache later in 1997 and recommended a search for the text of Spunk. Peters realized that the 1935 script registered under that title had to be Hurston's long-lost unpublished play, and should not be confused with George C. Woolf's 1992 libretto published as Hurston's Spunk: that musical, produced in New York and Washington, D.C., was Woolf's own creation based on the early Hurston short story of the same title. The 1935 Spunk proved to be a major find and was added to the cache late in 1997. Peters went on to coordinate a session on "Hurston as Dramatist" at the Modern Language Association's 1998 convention in San Francisco. Finally, the text of Mule-Bone was added to the group in 2002 so that scholars could compare it to the version that had been published in 1991.

Looking at the Texts

Visually, the digitized images presented online in this collection are very rough, at times running into margins and off the bottom of a page. That is because they were scanned from typescript copies made on old-fashioned manual typewriters imprinting through carbon paper, with a few original typescript pages included. Hurston appears to have typed some pages herself and dictated others to clearly non-professional typists. Authorial changes on some pages are in pencil or ink, with occasional original typescript inserts. In one case, Hurston has drawn a scene's stage set ( Spunk, act 1, scene 2).

So many scholars have asked to copy these play texts in the years since 1997 that the Library of Congress has decided to put them online for the world to examine, enjoy, and produce. Hurston showed great foresight in depositing the scripts with the Copyright Office. She knew of its close connection to the Library of Congress, which preserves cultural-history documents. She had worked with Alan Lomax and corresponded with Benjamin Botkin, both of the Library's Archive of Folk Song (now part of the American Folklife Center). Many Hurston productions failed during her life--due, perhaps, to her strong personality, the prevailing prejudices, bad luck, or bad timing. Now her plays may be studied and staged on into a new century.

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About this Collection | Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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This collection present ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited as unpublished typescripts in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until a manuscript curator rediscovered them in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar, (born June 27, 1872, Dayton, Ohio, U.S.-died Feb. 9, 1906, Dayton), U.S. author whose reputation rests upon his verse and short stories written in black dialect. He was the first black writer in the U.S. to make a concerted attempt to live by his writings and one of the first to attain national prominence.

Both of Dunbar's parents were former slaves; his father escaped to freedom in Canada and then returned to the U.S. to fight in the Civil War. The young Dunbar was the only black student in his Dayton high school, where he was the popular editor of the school paper. He published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy (1893), at his own expense while working as an elevator operator and sold copies to his passengers to pay for the printing. His second volume, Majors and Minors (1895), attracted the favourable notice of the novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who also introduced Dunbar's next book, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), which contained some of the finest verses of the first two volumes.

A vogue sprang up for Dunbar's poems; he read them to audiences in the U.S. and England, and when he returned from abroad he was given a job in the reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (1897-98). He turned to fiction as well as verse, publishing four collections of short stories and four novels before his early death. Writing for a largely white readership, Dunbar made use of the then current plantation tradition in both his stories and his poems, depicting the pre-Civil War South in pastoral, idyllic tones. Only in a few of his later stories did a suggestion of racial disquiet appear.

His first three novels-including The Uncalled (1898), which reflected his own spiritual problems-were about white characters. His last, sometimes considered his best, was The Sport of the Gods (1902), concerning an uprooted black family in the urban North.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar, U.S. author whose reputation rests upon his verse and short stories written in black dialect. He was the first black writer in the U.S. to make a concerted attempt to live by his writings and one of the first to attain national prominence.

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Mae Virginia (or Valentine) Cowdery (January 10, 1909 - November 2, 1948) was an African-American poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is considered part of the wide-ranging artistic efforts inspired by the Harlem Renaissance in New York City.

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I

Throughout the afternoon I watched them there,
Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky,
Whirling fantastic in the misty air,
Contending fierce for space supremacy.
And they flew down a mightier force at night,
As though in heaven there was revolt and riot,
And they, frail things had taken panic flight
Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet.
I went to bed and rose at early dawn
To see them huddled together in a heap,
Each merged into the other upon the lawn,
Worn out by the sharp struggle, fast asleep.
The sun shone brightly on them half the day,
By night they stealthily had stol'n away.


II

And suddenly my thoughts then turned to you
Who came to me upon a winter's night,
When snow-sprites round my attic window flew,
Your hair disheveled, eyes aglow with light.
My heart was like the weather when you came,
The wanton winds were blowing loud and long;
But you, with joy and passion all aflame,
You danced and sang a lilting summer song.
I made room for you in my little bed,
Took covers from the closet fresh and warm,
A downful pillow for your scented head,
And lay down with you resting in my arm.
You went with Dawn. You left me ere the day,
The lonely actor of a dreamy play.

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I Throughout the afternoon I watched them there, Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky, Whirling fantastic in the misty air, Contending fierce for space supremacy. And they flew down a mightier force at night, As though in heaven there was revolt and riot, And they, frail things had taken panic flight Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar State Memorial House

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Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first African American poets to achieve international acclaim. Born in 1872, the Dayton, Ohio native was also a prolific author of short stories, novels, librettos, essays and articles. Dunbar became a major inspiration for Harlem Renaissance authors like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

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W.E.B. Du Bois, (born February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, U.S.-died August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana), American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist who was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. His collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark of African American literature.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' Britannica essay on African American literature.)

The Souls of Black Folk, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of Blacks. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of Blacks in America, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914 at Atlanta University in Georgia, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899), the first case study of a Black community in the United States.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential Black leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged Blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of whites. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington's strategy, rather than freeing the Black man from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many Black intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the Black community into two wings-the "conservative" supporters of Washington and his "radical" critics.

Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington's opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association's director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class Blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the Black protest from 1910 until 1934.

Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of Black Americans:

One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder....He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Du Bois's Black nationalism took several forms-the most influential being his pioneering advocacy of Pan-Africanism, the belief that all people of African descent had common interests and should work together in the struggle for their freedom. Du Bois was a leader of the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the architect of four Pan-African Congresses held between 1919 and 1927. Second, he articulated a cultural nationalism. As the editor of The Crisis, he encouraged the development of Black literature and art and urged his readers to see "Beauty in Black." Third, Du Bois's Black nationalism is seen in his belief that Blacks should develop a separate "group economy" of producers' and consumers' cooperatives as a weapon for fighting economic discrimination and Black poverty. This doctrine became especially important during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s and precipitated an ideological struggle within the NAACP.

He resigned from the editorship of The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, yielding his influence as a race leader and charging that the organization was dedicated to the interests of the Black bourgeoisie and ignored the problems of the masses. Du Bois's interest in cooperatives was a part of his nationalism that developed out of his Marxist leanings. At the turn of the century, he had been an advocate of Black capitalism and Black support of Black business, but by about 1905 he had been drawn toward socialist doctrines. Although he joined the Socialist Party only briefly in 1912, he remained sympathetic with Marxist ideas throughout the rest of his life.

Upon leaving the NAACP, he returned to Atlanta University, where he devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, Atlanta University's "Review of Race and Culture." In 1945 he published the "Preparatory Volume" of a projected Encyclopedia Africana, for which he had been appointed editor in chief and toward which he had been working for decades. He also produced two major books during this period. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935) was an important Marxist interpretation of Reconstruction (the period following the American Civil War during which the seceded Southern states were reorganized according to the wishes of Congress), and, more significantly, it provided the first synthesis of existing knowledge of the role of Blacks in that critical period of American history. In 1940 appeared Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this brilliant book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom, viewing his career as an ideological case study illuminating the complexity of the Black-white conflict.

Following this fruitful decade at Atlanta University, he returned once more to a research position at the NAACP (1944-48). This brief connection ended in a second bitter quarrel, and thereafter Du Bois moved steadily leftward politically. Identified with pro-Russian causes, he was indicted in 1951 as an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although a federal judge directed his acquittal, Du Bois had become completely disillusioned with the United States. In 1961 he applied to, and was accepted as a member of, the Communist Party. That same year he left the United States for Ghana, where he began work on the Encyclopedia Africana in earnest, though it would never be completed, and where he later became a citizen.

Du Bois also wrote several novels, including the trilogy The Black Flame (1957-61). The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in the United States in 1968.
Elliott Rudwick The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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W.E.B. Du Bois | Biography, Education, Books, & Facts

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W.E.B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist. He was the most important Black protest leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is a landmark of African American literature.

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In general, I prefer not to work from photos. The camera has only one eye, while we have two. The camera takes the three-dimensional object and flattens it to two dimensions for us, so we miss the volume of the object. Plus, I just prefer to see what I'm drawing. Particularly with portraits -- drawing a living, breathing human being, right there, is a very different experience than working from a photograph.

However, sometimes there is really not a choice. Here are two examples.

I came across the Wellesley College yearbook from 1912 at a thrift store. One face leapt off the page at me. Her name: Ethel Caution-Davis. In that time, college was for the well-to-do. Most colleges were either all-white, or mostly so, and, if black, a student attended one of the historically black colleges. Yet, she went to an elite women's institution, the only African-American in her class. I did a Google search, found her right away, with her yearbook picture the first image hit. Remarkable woman. She became a published poet of the Harlem Renaissance and an educator, rising to become Dean of Women at Talladega College, an historic black college. Later in life, she moved to New York City, worked in public assistance, and became director of a residence club for single women. She never married, and died at the age of 101. What a remarkable woman she must have been!

So, here I share the original yearbook photo, and my version, in which I tried to achieve that hand-painted, vintage photograph look.

The original yearbook photo

My photo manipulation. In this case, working directly from an image load, using the digital tools in the Sketch Club app for iPad.

Then, being challenged to draw a 1920's movie star of my choice, I stumbled upon a photo of Nina Mae McKinney, known as the "Black Garbo" in Europe. She became the first African-American actor to sign a long-term contract with MGM, but, alas, the company didn't seem to know what to do with her. Racism: irrational, and oh, so powerful.

In this case, I did not work from an image load. I printed off the photo and drew from that, using the Sketch Club app again.

Here I share the original photo found on Google, followed by my version. I haven't done her justice, but I hope I have communicated some of her spirit. You can find clips of her work on YouTube, and they are well worth viewing.

Studio photo of Nina Mae McKinney

My version of Nina Mae McKinney, drawn using the Sketch Club app for iPad.

Two remarkable women. I wish they were alive today, so I could draw their portrait from life!

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In general, I prefer not to work from photos. The camera has only one eye, while we have two. The camera takes the three-dimensional object and flattens it to two dimensions for us, so we miss the volume of the object. Plus, I just prefer to see what I'm drawing.

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Black Excellist:  10 Things to Know About Countee Cullen  (Harlem Renaissance Poet)

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Singer Bessie Smith's recording career lasted only 10 years, but during that time she created a body of work that helped shape the sound of the 20th century. Her first single, "Downhearted Blues" - written by two women, pianist Lovie Austin and blues singer Alberta Hunter - was a major hit in 1923, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and helping her label, Columbia Records, out of a financial slump. With her subsequent recordings, Smith was one of the artists who propelled the fledgling "race records" market of music targeted to black audiences that had launched a few years earlier in 1920 with Mamie Smith's hit "Crazy Blues." Through the rest of the 1920s, Bessie Smith became one of the earliest stars of recorded music and a leading figure of what came to be called classic blues (a genre dominated by African American women). She was the highest-paid African American artist working in music and the first African American superstar. Bessie Smith's sound and her attitude, rooted in a distant era, are with us in the 21st century.

In that first hit record, "Downhearted Blues," you can still hear what won the hearts of her audiences. A lament about the problems associated with love relationships, Smith sings about "being crazy about a man" who mistreated her and broke her heart. It's a situation that most listeners (then and now) can relate to, but what sets the song apart is the attitude she assumes as she tells her story. In the opening lines she confronts the simple, terrible fact that "it's hard to love someone when that someone don't love you" and the pain that situation causes. But she also makes a commitment to avoiding this kind of agony in the future. "The next man I get," she sings in a subsequent stanza, "has got to promise to be mine, all mine." The song's final lines express a confidence that suggests she might succeed in doing so:

I got the world in a jug, the stopper's in my hand
I got the world in a jug, the stopper's in my hand
I'm gonna hold it until you men come under my command

Smith's protagonist presents herself as a person with power and agency, someone who can choose and refuse, someone who will no longer be put upon or accept whatever she is handed. This is a defiant stance, especially for a poor, black woman to assume, and one that surely resonated with black female listeners. As black feminist critics Daphne Duval Harrison and Angela Davis have explained in their books on the classic blues, Smith's songs are tales of liberated women who are not afraid to speak openly about what they want, what they need and what they are tired of.

*****

By the time she became the bona fide superstar whose influence earned her the nickname "The Empress of the Blues," Smith had been singing for decades. Orphaned by age 9 and raised by older siblings, Smith sang for spare change on the street corners of her hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn., and went out on the road when she was 16. She learned how to hold the attention of an audience in the makeshift rural venues and city theaters where touring black artists performed throughout the South in the early 20th century. An all-around entertainer, she developed an act that consisted of songs, dances, jokes and sketches.

Her onstage costumes of gowns, wigs, plumes and elaborate headdresses communicated glamour and wealth, and she carried herself with a regal bearing that fit her nickname. But Smith's singing voice, of course, is the element that remains, the element that made her a legend. When Smith rendered a song she tapped into her experiences of the hardships of poverty, racism, sexism and, above all, the ups and downs of love. This gave her a down-to-earth quality that made it easy for her black, working-class audience to connect with her. Whether she was singing the "Empty Bed Blues (Parts 1 and 2)" (1928), a ribald and humorous meditation on the sexual prowess of a lover, or expressing the terrifying experience of a flood in "Backwater Blues" (1927), Smith's authoritative delivery conveyed an authenticity that suggested she had actually lived through the things she sang about. An excellent storyteller, she made prodigious use of her skills as vocalist, actress and comedian to develop convincing and compelling performances, live and on record.

Smith sang about the things her audiences were living and feeling and, as a result, they identified with her deeply. Decades before hip-hop artists rapped about the vicissitudes of black working-class life - often constructing personas who seemed to have lived the lyrics - Smith sang about the everyday reality of wanting to live life to its fullest as a young, black, poor woman-a category of person that the mainstream of America ignored with impunity, but a category that Smith, through her sonorous, commanding vocals, insisted was important. Her voice reverberates with the tone and color of the South and her lyrics, peppered with colloquialisms and turns of phrase associated with black English, brought a distinctively African American woman's perspective into the public conversation at a time when black voices and black experiences barely registered there. By singing about black lives with care and conviction, Smith and her sister classic blues women Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter and Sippie Wallace advanced the revolutionary idea that black lives mattered - and specifically, that black women's lives mattered.

Appreciating the artistry of Smith can be challenging for 21st century listeners. Our ears are accustomed to the insistent, amplified rhythms that propel rap, R&B and rock, and we expect songs to have verses, choruses and occasional bridges that lend a measure of sonic variety to these three- or four-minute-long productions. In contrast, the classic blues, with their acoustic instrumentation, might sound quiet, slow and repetitive. The repeated lines and consistent chord changes inherent to the classic 12-bar structure can feel static to contemporary listeners, but even in the 1920s, there were listeners who found Smith's Southern blues too slow. Smith's primary audience comprised Southern working-class African Americans who connected with the content, feel and pace of her music, and it was likely that they were already familiar with the form. The precise starting point of the blues is hazy, but scholars place its origins in the post-Emancipation musical practices of African Americans living in the South. It was music that formerly enslaved people created, using it to explore deeply personal experiences and the worries, tensions and desires that accompanied them.

To hear Smith's genius and to begin to understand the power of the blues, we need to slow down and adjust to her tempo so we can appreciate the care and skill with which she makes her vocal choices. Working within the framework of the blues, she varies her inflection and phrasing to convey an idea or a feeling. She stretches a note to emphasize a word, sings with varying degrees of roughness, or hits a high note at an unexpected moment to make us pay attention to her point. She stresses certain words while cutting others short; she deviates from the expected melody, offering an element of surprise. Smith teases meaning out of her lyrics, even the pedestrian ones, imbuing them with significance and using them to express her own unique personality and attitude. The individuality of her voice, the content of her lyrics and her style of delivery communicate a new type of womanhood, a modern form of femininity. By turns Smith sounds confident, assertive, vulnerable, self-possessed, independent and complex. The appeal of this persona and the vocal approaches that created it were powerful. Smith's artistry, communicative power and public appeal anticipate that of Beyoncé, a singer whose capacity to articulate the longings, frustrations and passions of African American women with tremendous vocal dexterity and onstage polish are a latter-day manifestation of the Empress of the Blues.

With their focus on intimate relationships, there's a timeless quality to many blues songs, but much of the material recorded in the 1920s was emphatically modern, responding to seismic cultural shifts. These were songs about and for women who were experiencing migration - either moving from rural Southern areas to Southern towns or Northern cities or experiencing the movement of those around them. The departures of lovers and the comings and goings of trains are frequent themes. In some cases Smith offers advice: "Pinchback Blues" (1924), a song that warns women about avoiding entanglements with good-looking, no account men, opens with Smith's spoken word introduction, "Girls, I wanna tell you about these sweet men." At a time when American women of all races and classes were enjoying a considerable degree of personal freedom and mobility, this type of caution was an apt response to the rise of modernity associated with the Jazz Age. Migration brought black women from the countryside to bustling cities where, earning their own money and often free from the surveillance of their families, they could experiment socially and sexually. Smith reminds her listeners to do so with their eyes open. Her catalog also includes observations about contemporary social inequities. In "Washwoman Blues" (1928), Smith sings about the day-to-day drudgery of being a laundress, about wishing for another option - working as a cook would be better, she sings, because she "could eat aplenty." In "Poor Man's Blues" (1928), a song she wrote, she addresses "Mr. Rich Man" and attacks him for being willfully ignorant of the way poor people live: "The working man's wife is starving, your wife is living like a queen," she assails. Smith's songs take seriously the psychic pain of being left by a lover, the urgent desire for sexual attention, and the brutal reality of poverty. Usually, Smith's protagonists demonstrate strength and independence; they are willing to seek other options, even when they don't seem easily available.

*****

Smith's legacy began to take shape during her lifetime, and her sound has influenced some of the most prominent vocalists who followed in her wake. Smith made her final recordings in 1933 with producer John Hammond; three days later, working with Hammond in the same studio, Billie Holiday cut her first record. Over the course of her storied career, Holiday paid tribute to Smith; cited her as a formative influence; recorded "'Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do," a song associated with Smith; and, most important, adopted Smith's approach to excavating and expressing the meaning of the lyrics she sang through ingenious choices of phrasing and inflection. The Depression and the growing preference for the swinging music of big bands and vocalists like Holiday made the sound of the classic blues women seem passé by the early 1930s, but the sound of Smith's resonant voice and confident attitude reverberate in the popular music of the 20th century, exerting a lasting impact on the vocalists who came after her. When gospel great Mahalia Jackson was a child, she learned to sing by listening to Smith's records, and as a teenager she sang Smith's 1925 hit "St. Louis Blues" at church socials. Once Jackson began recording in the 1940s, her voice was compared to Smith's, even though she only sang sacred music. In 1958, the release of Dinah Washington Sings Bessie Smith and LaVern Baker Sings Bessie Smith indicated a continued interest in the Empress of the Blues two decades after her death. Washington, one of the leading lights of vocal music during the 1950s, and Baker, the first queen of rock and roll, located themselves in a musical lineage that Smith launched. Through their influence on the next generation of vocalists, they kept her sound alive. So did Big Mama Thornton, a blues shouter who had been billed as "Bessie Smith's Younger Sister" on occasion during her touring years in the 1940s. Once she began recording in the early 1950s, her commanding voice and her commitment to the blues carried the imprint of Smith to white rock and rollers Elvis Presley, who covered Thornton's "Hound Dog" in 1956, and Janis Joplin, who covered Thornton's "Ball 'n' Chain" in 1968.

Joplin went right to the source, studying Smith's records and putting what she heard into the recordings she made as a member of Big Brother and the Holding Company and as a solo artist. (In 1970, Joplin also acknowledged her debt to Smith by contributing money to purchase a headstone for Smith's grave, which had been unmarked since her burial in 1937.) During the 1960s and 1970s, it was possible to hear Smith's direct influence on popular music through the work of Chicago-based blues powerhouse Koko Taylor, but singers in other genres also turned to the blues, connecting to one of American popular music's most important sources and finding a liberating mode of expression there. On her 1967 album Nina Simone Sings the Blues, Simone put her spin on "I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl," a double entendre tune that Smith originated as "Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl." That same year, Aretha Franklin served up a forthright enumeration of desire in "Dr. Feelgood," a soulful take on the blues form. She also covered Otis Redding's song "Respect," giving it a double meaning as a demand that men show women respect in love relations and, in step with the tenor of the times, that white Americans treat black Americans with respect. Chaka Khan, the women of Labelle, and Betty Davis, who offered adventurous fusions of soul, funk, and rock in the 1970s, followed in the self-determining footsteps of Smith. Davis infused her recordings with the spirited attitude of blues women and name-checked blues musicians in her songs, drawing on what she learned when listening to her grandmother's blues records as a child. To give a new generation access to this music, in 1970 Columbia Records started the process of reissuing the 160 sides that Smith had recorded over the course of her career; the multivolume set affirmed her significance with the auspicious title Bessie Smith: The World's Greatest Blues Singer.

Even as the sound of popular music drifted away from the blues, Smith's persona, subject matter, forceful vocals and fierce attitude were a presence on recordings released by succeeding generations of musicians. This was especially clear in the 1980s and 1990s, when women of the hip-hop nation such as Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa and TLC showed themselves to be inheritors of Smith's tradition. Their uncompromising attitude and their emphasis on chronicling the everyday aspects of black working-class life offered updated versions of the blues spirit. It is no accident that Queen Latifah, who started the rap on her 1993 track "U.N.I.T.Y." by calling out men who disrespected black women with the confrontational question "Who you calling a 'bitch?' " was tapped to portray Smith in Dee Rees' 2015 biopic Bessie. Queen Latifah's insistence on respect, her majestic demeanor and the reference to royalty in her stage name connect her to Smith, the first queen of African American popular music. Salt-N-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex" and TLC's "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg," both released in 1991, opened up musical conversations about sexuality in relation to emotional fulfillment, physical pleasure and sexual health. While the forthright approach of these songs and their direct address to women were in the mode of Smith's songs about the pursuit of sexual pleasure ("Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine" [1923] and "I'm Wild About That Thing" [1929], for example), they were also very much of their time: The exhortations to insist that male sexual partners use condoms were a response to the AIDS epidemic and part of "safe sex" campaigns that were coming into the mainstream but still controversial. Like Smith in the 1920s, these latter-day artists made the many dimensions of sexual intimacy part of a public conversation.

Smith's voice continues to resonate. The echo of her vocal sound is present in the work of Shemekia Copeland, an accomplished blues singer who has sustained Smith's legacy throughout her career - most recently on her album America's Child (2018). Copeland records with an electric band and has broken from a strict blues form, but she continues Smith's tradition of using her powerful voice to speak the truths of working-class people. Smith's attitude is present in the recordings of the Knowles sisters - in Solange's A Seat at the Table (2016) and Beyoncé's Lemonade (2016) - which offer detailed explorations of the emotional states and personal challenges that each woman is confronting and working through. Beyoncé's "Don't Hurt Yourself," featuring Jack White, is explicitly rooted in the blues and traces one path the music has taken through musical references to the British rock band Led Zeppelin's version of "When the Levee Breaks" (1971) - a song originated in 1929 by one of Smith's contemporaries, the African American blues singer and guitarist Memphis Minnie. Smith's commitment to delving into and experimenting with vocal range and inflection continues in the vocals of singer, songwriter and guitarist Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes. On the albums Boys and Girls (2012) and Sound and Color (2015), Howard takes her voice through its heights and depths to parallel and communicate the emotions referenced in her lyrics.

Nearly a century after Smith started her career as a recording artist, we can take for granted the presence of female singers who are at home laying claim to their needs - romantic and otherwise - and taking their voices to their limits without apology. The roots of these forthright articulations of womanhood were first sounded in the music of the classic blues women, and all of us - the singers and those of us who take pleasure in listening to them - owe a debt to Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, the woman who, with a gorgeous, powerful voice, boldly sang the blues.

Maureen Mahon, a cultural anthropologist, is an associate professor in the Department of Music at New York University. Her book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

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How Bessie Smith Influenced A Century Of Popular Music

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Singer Bessie Smith's recording career lasted only 10 years, but during that time she created a body of work that helped shape the sound of the 20th century. Her first single, "Downhearted Blues" - written by two women, pianist Lovie Austin and blues singer Alberta Hunter - was a major hit in 1923, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and helping her label, Columbia Records, out of a financial slump.

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Countee Cullen was born Countee LeRoy Porter on May 30, 1903, likely in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York City and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. When he was fifteen, he was unofficially adopted by F. A. Cullen, the minister of a Methodist church in Harlem.

Cullen entered New York University after high school. Around the same time, his poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine published by the National Urban League. Cullen was soon after published in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won several awards for his poem, "Ballad of the Brown Girl," and graduated from New York University in 1925. That same year, he published his first volume of verse, Color (Harper & Bros., 1925), and was admitted to Harvard University, where he completed an MA in English.

Cullen went on to publish several more poetry collections, including On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen (Harper & Bros., 1947); The Black Christ and Other Poems (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1929); Copper Sun (Harper & Bros., 1927), and the seminal anthology Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties (Harper & Brothers, 1927). An imaginative lyric poet, Cullen wrote in the Romantic tradition of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the Modernists; his work demonstrates the range of subjects and aesthetic interests that poets of the Harlem Renaissance addressed.

The poet Major Jackson writes, "Cullen was celebrated as the golden exemplar of a campaign by Black political and cultural leaders who sought to engineer a new image of Black people in America. Yet he was also targeted as an aesthete, and his expressed desire to be read as 'a poet and not a Negro poet' was increasingly condemned as representative of black aristocratic self-hatred, and worse, a veiled longing 'to be white.'"

Cullen taught in New York City public schools for twelve years beginning in 1934. He died on January 9, 1946.

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Countee Cullen was born Countee LeRoy Porter on May 30, 1903, likely in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York City and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. When he was fifteen, he was unofficially adopted by F. A.

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By: Anita Scott Coleman "This Poem was written during the time of racism" About the poet... Anita Scott Coleman, was born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico in 1890 she was married to James Harold Coleman Anita published nineteen stories and several poems Her poems appeared on magazines

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Paul Laurence Dunbar, hailed as the Poet Laureate of the Negro Race, was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1872. His father, Joshua Dunbar, was an escaped slave who joined the 55th Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army and served in the Civil War. Joshua married … Read MorePaul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

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W.E.B. Du Bois was an American civil rights activist, sociologist and writer who is famous for being the foremost black leader during the first half of the twentieth century, opposing racism and fighting for the civil rights of African Americans. Du Bois made important contributions to sociology starting from his first major work The Philadelphia Negro. He co-founded the NAACP; was editor of its journal The Crisis; was a leading Pan-Africanist; and wrote many important books including The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction. Know more about the contributions of WEB Du Bois by studying his 10 major achievements and accomplishments.

#1 W.E.B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University

#2 His work The Philadelphia Negro was the first case study of a black community in U.S.

#3 He wrote The Souls of Black Folk and introduced the concept of double-consciousness

#4 He laid the foundation for the African American struggle for equal rights

Influential African American leader Booker T. Washington had struck a deal with Southern white leaders known as the Atlanta compromise, by which blacks were to submit to white political rule in return for basic education and due process in law. Du Bois opposed this and insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation. He co-founded and led Niagara Movement, a black civil rights organization opposing the Atlanta compromise. He also publicized the concept of The Talented Tenth, a term to describe the likelihood of one in 10 black men becoming leaders of their race. To help The Talented Tenth realize their potential he pushed for classical education as opposed to the industrial education promoted by the Atlanta compromise. Du Bois's ideas ultimately prevailed over Booker T. Washington marking the ascendancy of the African American fight for equal rights.

#5 W.E.B. Du Bois co-founded NAACP and was editor of its magazine

Along with Moorfield Storey and Mary White Ovington, W.E.B. Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP became the leading African-American civil rights organization of the 20th century and remains active till date. In 1910, the NAACP launched its official journal The Crisis. The magazine was phenomenally successful and its circulation would reach 100,000 in 1920. Du Bois was its editor for first 24 years before he resigned from NAACP due to dispute over organizational policy and direction. He re-joined NAACP as director of the Department of Special Research in 1944 but renewed disputes caused his removal in 1948.

#6 He played a leading role in opposing racism in the United States

As a prominent member of NAACP and the editor of its journal, Du Bois played an influential role in opposing racism. He waged a war against lynching, writing several pieces against the practice including an in-depth report of the lynching of Jesse Washington titled "Waco Horror". In 1914 he wrote an editorial deploring the dismissal of blacks from federal posts. In 1917, 50 to 250 African Americans were massacred by whites due to resentment caused by St. Louis industry hiring blacks to replace striking white workers. Du Bois condemned the incident in his article "The Massacre of East St. Louis". Du Bois wrote numerous other pieces against racism in U.S. which brought the topic to the forefront in the nation.

#7 W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the leading intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance

Though he later distanced himself from the movement, W.E.B. Du Bois was among the leading intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance (1918 to mid-1930s). As editor of The Crisis, he provided a platform for several well-known writers of the movement, including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. Du Bois's ideas, views, and concepts like 'double consciousness' played an important part in the renaissance and were widely used by writers of the movement. Also, his articles for The Crisis played an important part in spreading the movement.

#8 He changed the prevailing view about Reconstruction Era

The prevailing view at the time of Du Bois was that Reconstruction Era failed due to the ineptitude and corruption of the black community in the South. Du Bois countered this view through his superlative work, Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935. Through extensive research and analysis, he documented how African Americans were central figures in American Civil War and Reconstruction. He also provided evidence of how they made alliances with whites and how the coalition governments established public education and social service programs. Though Black Reconstruction was initially ignored by historians, it was re-evaluated in the 1960s and ignited a revisionist trend in the historiography of Reconstruction. By 21st century it was considered the definitive text on the role of African Americans in Reconstruction.

#9 W.E.B. Du Bois was among the most prominent Pan-Africanist

Du Bois endeavored for the cause of people of color not only in U.S. but around the world, including Africa and Asia. He was a proponent of Pan-Africanism helping its effort to fight for independence of African colonies from European powers. He attended the First Pan-African Conference in July 1900. He then helped in organizing a series of pan-African congresses around the world with the last one being in late 1945, where he was elected as president. Also his 1915 book The Negro enhanced support for Pan-Africanism.

#10 He was the foremost black protest leader in U.S.

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10 Major Accomplishments of W. E. B. Du Bois

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W.E.B. Du Bois was an American civil rights activist, sociologist and writer who is famous for being the foremost black leader during the first half of the twentieth century, opposing racism and fighting for the civil rights of African Americans. Du Bois made important contributions to sociology starting from his first major work The Philadelphia Negro.

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Anita Scott Coleman was a relatively unknown but important western contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico in 1890, Coleman’s mother, Mary Ann, met her father, William Henry Scott, near Fort Elliott, Texas where he served as a buffalo soldier. He retired … Read MoreAn…

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Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialect verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895) and Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1896). The dialect poems constitute only a small portion of Dunbar's canon, which is replete with novels, short stories, essays, and many poems. In its entirety, Dunbar's literary body is regarded as an impressive representation of Black life in the turn-of-the-century United States.

Dunbar began showing literary promise while still in high school in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived with his widowed mother. The only African American in his class, he became president of the school literary society, editor-in-chief of the school paper, and class poet. By 1889, two years before he graduated, he had already published poems in the Dayton Herald and worked as an editor of the short-lived Dayton Tattler, a Black newspaper. Although their names are not listed in the publication, Dunbar's classmate, Orville Wright, and Wright's brother Wilbur, printed the newspaper.

Dunbar aspired to a career in law, but his mother's financial situation precluded a university education. He consequently sought employment with various Dayton businesses, only to be rejected because of his race. He finally found work as an elevator operator, a job that allowed him time to continue writing. At this time, Dunbar produced articles, short stories, and poems, including several in the dialect style that later earned him fame.

In 1892, one of his former teachers invited Dunbar to address the Western Association of Writers convening in Dayton. At the meeting, Dunbar befriended James Newton Matthews, who subsequently praised Dunbar's work in a letter to an Illinois newspaper. Newspapers throughout the country reprinted the letter, bringing Dunbar recognition outside Dayton. Among the readers of this letter was a lover of Matthews, poet James Whitcomb Riley, who then familiarized himself with Dunbar's work and wrote him a commendatory letter.

Bolstered by the support of both Matthews and Riley, Dunbar decided to publish a collection of his poems. He obtained additional assistance from Orville Wright and then self-published with United Brethren Publishing, a Dayton firm that eventually printed Oak and Ivy (1893) for 125 dollars. The publishers loaned the sum to Dunbar, who was earning four dollars a week at the time. In Oak and Ivy, Dunbar included his earliest dialect poems as well as many other pieces. Among the latter is one of his most popular poems, " Sympathy," in which he expresses, in a somber tone, the plight of Black people in American society.

Shortly after the publication of Oak and Ivy, attorney Charles A. Thatcher approached Dunbar and offered to fund his college education. Dunbar, however, rejected Thatcher to pursue a literary career because of the promising sales of Oak and Ivy. Thatcher then applied himself to promoting Dunbar in nearby Toledo, Ohio, and helped him obtain work there reading his poetry at libraries and literary gatherings. Dunbar also found unexpected support from psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey, who helped distribute Oak and Ivy in Toledo and occasionally sent Dunbar much-needed financial aid.

Tobey teamed with Thatcher to publish Dunbar's second verse collection, Majors and Minors. For this book, Dunbar produced poems on a variety of themes and in several styles. The dialect verse found greater favor with his predominantly white readership and Dunbar gained increasing fame. Instrumental to Dunbar's growing popularity was a highly positive though extremely patronizing review by eminent realist writer and literary critic William Dean Howells. In Harper's Weekly, Howells praised Dunbar as "the first man of his color to study his race objectively" and commended the dialect poems as faithful representations of Black speech. Critics believe Howell's applause also had a chilling effect on Dunbar's legacy, as the fervent discussion around Dunbar's dialect poems precluded a comprehensive study of his oeuvre.

Through Thatcher and Tobey, Dunbar met an agent and secured more public readings and a publishing contract. He then published Lyrics of Lowly Life, a poetry collection derived primarily from verse already featured in Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors. This new volume sold impressively across the country. On the strength of his recent acclaim, Dunbar commenced a six-month reading tour of England. There he found publishers for a British edition of Lyrics of Lowly Life and befriended musician Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not to be confused with Samuel Taylor Coleridge), with whom he collaborated on the operetta Dream Lovers.

When Dunbar returned to the United States in 1897, he obtained a clerkship at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Although his health suffered during the two years he lived there, the period nonetheless proved fruitful for Dunbar. In 1898, he published his first short story collection, Folks From Dixie (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898), in which he delineated the situation of African Americans in both the pre-and post-emancipation United States. Although these tales, unlike some of his dialect verse, were often harsh examinations of racial prejudice, Folks From Dixie was well received upon publication.

At the end of 1898, his health degenerating still further, Dunbar left the Library of Congress and commenced another reading tour. In 1899, he published another verse collection, Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dodd, Mead and Company), which was well-received by critics. However, in the spring of that year, his health lapsed. Ill with pneumonia, the already tubercular Dunbar was advised to rest in the mountains. He moved to the Catskills in New York State but continued to write while recovering.

After a brief stay in Colorado in 1900, Dunbar returned to Washington, D.C. Shortly before his return, he published another collection of tales, The Strength of Gideon (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1900), in which he continued to recount Black life both before and after slavery. Reviewers at the time favored his pre-emancipation stories, which were seen as humorous and sentimental, and ignored work that detailed volatile accounts of abuse and injustice.

Dunbar followed The Strength of Gideon with his second novel, The Love of Landry (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1900), about an ailing woman who arrives in Colorado for convalescence and finds true happiness with a cowboy. Like his first novel, The Uncalled (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898),The Love of Landry was dismissed by critics. Dunbar suffered a further critical setback with his next novel, The Fanatics (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1901), about the United States at the beginning of the Civil War. The novel's central characters are from white families who differ in their North-South sympathies and spark a dispute in their Ohio community. The Fanatics was a commercial failure upon publication. The Sport of the Gods (1902), Dunbar's final novel, which featured racist violence perpetrated by police officers and other white characters, presented a far more critical and disturbing portrait of Black America.

Although its acclaim was hardly unanimous, The Sport of the Gods earned substantial praise as a powerful novel of protest. By this time, however, Dunbar was experiencing considerable turmoil in his own life. Prior to writing The Sport of the Gods, he suffered another lapse of poor health, compounded by alcoholism. The same year The Sport of the Gods was published, he separated from his wife of four years, writer Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson. The next year, following a nervous breakdown and another bout of pneumonia, Dunbar assembled another verse collection, Lyrics of Love and Laughter (Dodd, Mead, 1903), and another short story collection, In Old Plantation Days (Dodd Mead & Company,1903).In Old Plantation Days includes 25 stories set on a southern plantation during the days of slavery. Dunbar's stories drew the ire of many critics for their stereotyped characters, and some of his detractors went so far as to allege that he contributed to racist concepts while appearing to disdain such thinking.

Though he continued to write and publish, Dunbar's health declined further. Relying on alcohol to temper his chronic coughing only exacerbated his illness. During the last three years of his life, he lived with his mother in Dayton, Ohio. He died February 9, 1906, at age 33.

In the years immediately following his death, Dunbar's standing as the foremost Black American poet seemed assured, and his dialect poems were prized as supreme achievements in African American literature. In the ensuing decades, however, scholars questioning the validity of his often stereotypic characterizations and his apparent unwillingness to sustain an anti-racist stance damaged his reputation. More recently, Dunbar's stature has risen, and poems that did not receive much attention during his lifetime are now prized as some of his greatest achievements in verse.

Modern champions include Addison Gayle Jr., whose Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Doubleday, 1971), is considered a key contribution to Dunbar studies, and Nikki Giovanni, whose contribution to A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1975) hails Dunbar as "a natural resource of our people." For Giovanni, as for other Dunbar scholars, Dunbar's work constitutes both a history and a celebration of Black life. "There is no poet, black or nonblack, who measures his achievement," she declares. "Even today. He wanted to be a writer and he wrote."

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Paul Laurence Dunbar | Poetry Foundation

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Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature and was internationally acclaimed for his dialect verse in collections such as Majors and Minors (Hadley & Hadley, 1895) and...

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To mark Black History Month, we want to showcase the work of black authors and poets from throughout history. This week's featured poem comes from our Head of Teaching and Learning at The Reader, Clare Ellis, who introduces us to 'For A Poet' by Countee Cullen.
For A Poet
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold;
Where long will cling the lips of the moth,
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth;
I hide no hate; I am not even wroth
Who found earth's breath so keen and cold;
I have wrapped my dreams in a silken cloth,
And laid them away in a box of gold.
Countee Cullen Thoughts
Dreams? When do we first have them? Not the kind of dreams that come to us in our sleeping hours (although of course there m ay be much overlap), but dreams in terms of our life's hopes and ambitions?

On reading this poem, I first wonder what kind of dreams we might care enough about to wrap them in 'silken cloth' and put them 'in a box of gold'? I then go on to wonder why we might need to do this - as in, why 'wrapped' and 'laid...away'?

Have you thought of any? It takes a while...When I thought of some, I felt they were so private, so precious, but also so painful because that have not come true and will never do so now, for me, that I would not want to type them out in an open space. I would want to keep them safe - wrap them up and lay them away. Are the type of dreams that we hide away in this manner then the ones that have not come true yet? If so, regardless of the care and precious materials, the feeling might be one of sadness, regret?

But to return to the speaker of the poem. Are they sad? What has made them put their dreams away 'where long will cling the lips of the moth'. The reference to moths makes me think of coffins and death, of jumpers with holes in and mildew. A place where no one really looks anymore, forgotten. Is this what happens to dreams that are put away? If so, what happens to the people who once had these dreams?

The person says 'I hide no hate; I am not even wroth/ Who found earth's breath so keen and cold'. I wonder what they are feeling here...'I hide no hate' strikes me as an unusual expression. I might expect something like 'I do not hate' than 'I hide no hate'. What difference might it make to be put that way? I look up the word 'wroth' and find 'angry'. So the person is not angry...but defining ourselves in terms of what we are not still leaves a gap to fill for thinking about who we are...In any case, it would seem that the world has not been welcoming: 'keen and cold'. Perhaps hostile for dreams to thrive?

I feel there are a lot of silences in this poem; perhaps that links in some way to the silences we find in ourselves. I'm just not sure whether the poem is wanting us to address and challenge those silences or to let them rest? I also don't know how to feel about the box of dreams - what use is such a thing if not lived? A touchstone perhaps to hold on to...? Maybe - but is that enough? To continue these reflections, please do now share with us your thoughts on this poem and conversation...

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Featured Poem: For A Poet by Countee Cullen - The Reader

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To mark Black History Month, we want to showcase the work of black authors and poets from throughout history. This week's featured poem comes from our Head of Teaching and Learning at The Reader, Clare Ellis, who introduces us to 'For A Poet' by Countee Cullen.

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James Weldon Johnson Poems

James Weldon Johnson Biography

James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his leadership within the NAACP, as well as for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University. Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of Helen Louise Dillet and James Johnson. His brother was the composer John Rosamond Johnson. Johnson was first educated by his mother (a musician and a public school teacher-the first female, black teacher in Florida at a grammar school) and then at Edwin M. Stanton School. His mother imparted to him her considerable love and knowledge of English literature and the European tradition in music. At the age of 16 he enrolled at Atlanta University, from which he graduated in 1894. In addition to his bachelor's degree, he also completed some graduate coursework there. The achievement of his father, headwaiter at the St. James Hotel, a luxury establishment built when Jacksonville was one of Florida's first winter havens, gave young James the wherewithal and the self-confidence to pursue a professional career. Molded by the classical education for which Atlanta University was best known, Johnson regarded his academic training as a trust given him in the expectation that he would dedicate his resources to black people. Johnson was also a prominent member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. He served in several public capacities over the next 40 years, working in education, the diplomatic corps, civil rights activism, literature, poetry, and music. In 1904 Johnson went on Theodore Roosevelt's presidential campaign. Theodore Roosevelt appointed Johnson as US consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela from 1906-1908 and then Nicaragua from 1909-1913. In 1910, Johnson married Grace Nail while he was a United States Consul in Nicaragua. They had met several years earlier in New York when Johnson was working as a songwriter. A cultured and well-educated New Yorker, Grace Nail Johnson became an accomplished artist in pastels and collaborated with her husband on a screenwriting project.)

The Best Poem Of James Weldon Johnson

The Creation

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely--
I'll make me a world.

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said: That's good!

Then God himself stepped down--
And the sun was on his right hand,
And the moon was on his left;
The stars were clustered about his head,
And the earth was under his feet.
And God walked, and where he trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.

Then he stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And he spat out the seven seas--
He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed--
He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled--
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around his shoulder.

Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And he said: Bring forth! Bring forth!
And quicker than God could drop his hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said: That's good!

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that he had made.
He looked at his sun,
And he looked at his moon,
And he looked at his little stars;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I'm lonely still.

Then God sat down--
On the side of a hill where he could think;
By a deep, wide river he sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in is his own image;

Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen.Amen.

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James Weldon Johnson - Poet James Weldon Johnson Poems

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James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his leadership within the NAACP, as well as for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore.

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Claude McKay

Claude McKay was one of the most distinguished poets of his time. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933).

Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on 15th September, 1890. Born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, he is the son of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, farmers. The youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an early age to live with his oldest brother, a schoolteacher, so that he could be given the best education available. An avid reader, McKay began to write poetry at the age of ten.

In 1906 Claude McKay decided to enter a trade school, but when the school was destroyed by an earthquake he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinetmaker; a brief period in the constabulary followed. In 1907 McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman residing in Jamaica who became his mentor, encouraging him to write dialect verse. Jekyll later set some of McKay's verse to music. By the time he immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had established himself as a poet, publishing two volumes of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912).

McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered in when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated. At Tuskegee, he disliked the "semi-military, machinelike existence there" and quickly left to study at Kansas State University. At Kansas State, he read W. E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. But despite superior academic performance, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars.

McKay published two poems in 1917 in Seven Arts under the Alias Eli Edwards while working as a waiter on the railways. In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as Co-Executive Editor until 1922). It was here that he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. This was among a page of his poetry which signaled the commencement of his life as a professional writer.

In 1922 McKay visited the USSR. Active in the social justice movement, McKay became a Socialist, believing that socialism offered his cause hope. While in Russia McKay attended the fourth congress of the Communist International in Moscow. There, he met many leading Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. While in the Soviet Union he compiled his journalistic essays into a book, The Negroes in America, which was not published in the United States until 1979. For a time he was buoyed by the success of his first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which was critically acclaimed but engendered controversy for its frank portrayal of the underside of Harlem life.

His next novel, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), followed the exploits of an expatriate African-American musician in Marseilles, a locale McKay knew well. This novel and McKay's presence in France influenced Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and other pioneers of the Negritude literary movement that took hold in French West Africa and the West Indies. Banjo did not sell well. Neither did Gingertown (1932), a short story collection, or Banana Bottom (1933). Often identified as McKay's finest novel, Banana Bottom tells the story of Bita Plant, who returns to Jamaica after being educated in England and struggles to form an identity that reconciles the aesthetic values imposed upon her with her appreciation for her native roots.

Claude McKay traveled extensively abroad; After visits to London, Berlin and Paris, he settled down in France for a decade. He, however, remained in contact with the expatriate community of American writers. McKay returned to the United States in the early 1930s.

After returning to America in 1934, McKay was attacked by the Communists for repudiating their dogmas and by liberal whites and blacks for his criticism of integrationist-oriented civil rights groups. McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. In 1940 he became a U.S. citizen; in 1942 he was converted to Roman Catholicism and worked with a Catholic youth organization until his death.

McKay's viewpoints and poetic achievements in the earlier part of the twentieth century set the tone for the Harlem Renaissance and gained the deep respect of younger black poets of the time, including Langston Hughes. He died in 1948.

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Claude McKay was one of the most distinguished poets of his time. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933).

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Jazz and blues vocalist Bessie Smith’s powerful, soulful voice won her countless fans and earned her the title “Empress of the Blues.”

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Home > By Subject > Poetry > Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906

( Page updated Aug 2021)

We compiled a brief biography of Dunbar for you. Click here to read it. Purchase AO's Volume 5 poetry collection which includes Kipling, Longfellow, Whittier, and Dunbar in paperback or Kindle AmblesideOnline has a resource page about dialect poetry to help with poetry using regional dialect. Most of these poems are from Lyrics of a Lowly Life, 1896. Some are also from Lyrics of the Hearthside, 1899 and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 1901.

01. Whittier 1896

02. Sympathy 1899

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass
And the river flows like a stream of glass
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And the pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!

03. The Lesson 1896

04. The Master-Player 1896

05. After the Quarrel 1896

06. October 1896

07. Dawn 1896

08. We Wear the Mask 1896

09. Lonesome 1896

10. Opportunity, 1901

11. The Sparrow 1896

12. Not They Who Soar 1896

Not they who soar, but they who plod
Their rugged way, unhelped, to God
Are heroes; they who higher fare,
And, flying, fan the upper air,
Miss all the toil that hugs the sod.
'Tis they whose backs have felt the rod,
Whose feet have pressed the path unshod,
May smile upon defeated care,
Not they who soar.

13. Dreams 1899

14. A Choice 1899

15. Compensation 1901

16. Life 1896

17. The Poet and his Song 1896

18. Rain-Songs 1901

19. Morning 1901

20. Good-Night 1896

21. Little Brown Baby
from The Book of American Negro Poetry, 1922

AmblesideOnline has a resource page about dialect poetry to help with poetry using regional dialect.

22. The Haunted Oak
Written in 1900 after Dunbar heard about a young Black man who was hanged on an oak tree by a white mob after he was falsely accused of a crime.

AmblesideOnline's free Charlotte Mason homeschool curriculum prepares children for a life of rich relationships with God, humanity, and the natural world.

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Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906

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AmblesideOnline is a free homeschool curriculum that uses Charlotte Mason's classically-based principles to prepare children for a life of rich relationships with everything around them: God, humanity, and the natural world. Our detailed schedules, time-tested methods, and extensive teacher resources allow parents to focus on the unique needs of each child.

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Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). (Wikimedia Commons)

Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887. He founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914.

UNIA stressed racial pride and self-improvement, much like the views of educator Booker T. Washington, whom Garvey admired. Garvey, however, had greater international ambitions, including the development of worldwide black-owned industries and shipping lines. He also called for the end of white colonial rule in Africa.

At the invitation of Washington, Garvey traveled to the United States in 1916. He soon established his UNIA in New York City, opened a restaurant, and started a newspaper. In 1919, he formed the Black Star Line, the first black-owned shipping company in the United States.

The publicity over the Black Star Line caused great excitement among black Americans, many of whom bought stock in it. Garvey organized huge parades to promote this and other UNIA projects. He often appeared in a colorful uniform, wearing a plumed hat.

In 1920, more than 20,000 people attended Garvey's first UNIA convention in New York. The convention produced a Declaration of Negro Rights, which denounced lynchings, segregated public transportation, job discrimination, and inferior black public schools. The document also demanded "Africa for the Africans." Without actually consulting any African people, the convention proclaimed Garvey the "Provisional President of Africa."

Garvey believed that white society would never accept black Americans as equals. Therefore, he called for the separate self-development of African Americans within the United States.

The UNIA set up many small black-owned businesses such as restaurants, groceries, a publishing house, and even a toy company that made black dolls. Garvey's goal was to create a separate economy and society run for and by African Americans.

Ultimately, Garvey argued, all black people in the world should return to their homeland in Africa, which should be free of white colonial rule. Garvey had grand plans for settling black Americans in Liberia, the only country in Africa governed by Africans. But, Garvey's UNIA lacked the necessary funds and few blacks in the United States indicated any interest in going "back to Africa."

A poor economy and the near-bankruptcy of the Black Star Line caused Garvey to seek more dues-paying members for the UNIA. He launched a recruitment campaign in the South, which he had ignored because of strong white resistance.

In a bizarre twist, Garvey met with a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta in 1922. Garvey declared that the goal of the UNIA and KKK was the same: completely separate black and white societies. Garvey even praised racial segregation laws, explaining that they were good for building black businesses. Little came of this recruitment effort. Criticism from his followers grew.

In 1922, the U.S. government arrested Garvey for mail fraud for his attempts to sell more stock in the failing Black Star Line. At his trial, the evidence showed that Garvey was a poor businessman, but the facts were less clear about outright fraud. The jury convicted him anyway, and he was sentenced to prison.

In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence, and he was released. The government immediately deported him to Jamaica.

His vision for black separatism and "back to Africa" never caught on with most African Americans, and he and his spectacular movement soon faded away. Garvey died in 1940, an almost forgotten man.

For Further Reading

Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
Return to Black History Month Home Page

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Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). (Wikimedia Commons) Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887. He founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. UNIA stressed racial pride and self-improvement, much like the views of educator Boo, Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887. He founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914.

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Table of Contents

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Claude McKay, (born September 15, 1889, Nairne Castle, Jamaica, British West Indies-died May 22, 1948, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose Home to Harlem (1928) was the most popular novel written by an American black to that time. Before going to the U.S. in 1912, he wrote two volumes of Jamaican dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads (1912).

After attending Tuskegee Institute (1912) and Kansas State Teachers College (1912-14), McKay went to New York in 1914, where he contributed regularly to The Liberator, then a leading journal of avant-garde politics and art. The shock of American racism turned him from the conservatism of his youth. With the publication of two volumes of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922), McKay emerged as the first and most militant voice of the Harlem Renaissance. After 1922 McKay lived successively in the Soviet Union, France, Spain, and Morocco. In both Home to Harlem and Banjo (1929), he attempted to capture the vitality and essential health of the uprooted black vagabonds of urban America and Europe. There followed a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and another novel, Banana Bottom (1933). In all these works McKay searched among the common folk for a distinctive black identity.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)
After returning to America in 1934, McKay was attacked by the communists for repudiating their dogmas and by liberal whites and blacks for his criticism of integrationist-oriented civil rights groups. McKay advocated full civil liberties and racial solidarity. In 1940 he became a U.S. citizen; in 1942 he was converted to Roman Catholicism and worked with a Catholic youth organization until his death. He wrote for various magazines and newspapers, including the New Leader and the New York Amsterdam News. He also wrote an autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), and a study, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His Selected Poems (1953) was issued posthumously.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
J.E. Luebering.

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Claude McKay, (born September 15, 1889, Nairne Castle, Jamaica, British West Indies-died May 22, 1948, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose Home to Harlem (1928) was the most popular novel written by an American black to that time. Before going to the U.S.

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A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson was a man of many talents. Not only was he a distinguished lawyer and diplomat who served as executive secretary at NAACP for a decade, he was also a composer who wrote the lyrics for " Lift Every Voice and Sing," known as the Black national anthem.

Dual career in education and law

Born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson was heavily influenced by his mother, who passed on her love of music and literature, interests that would follow him throughout his multifaceted career. After graduating in 1894 from Atlanta University, a historically Black college, Johnson returned to Jacksonville and taught at the Stanton elementary school for Black students. Once he became principal, Johnson expanded the school to include high school education.

While at Stanton, he also began studying law and in 1898 became the first Black man admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction. While balancing his dual career in education and law, Johnson still found time to write poetry and songs, including " Lift Every Voice and Sing," to honor Abraham Lincoln's birthday.

Songwriter and diplomat

In 1901, Johnson moved with his brother, a composer, to New York City to write for musical theater. Together, they composed about 200 songs for Broadway. In New York, Johnson began making connections to influential members of the Black community, leading to the next stage of his career in diplomacy.

After serving as treasurer for the Colored Republican Club, Johnson was sent to become the United States consul in Venezuela by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Three years later, he was moved to Nicaragua to serve as consul. During this time, Johnson continued to write poetry and anonymously published his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a story of a young biracial man living in the post-Reconstruction era.

Civil rights leader

Johnson left the diplomatic world to join the civil rights movement in 1916 as a field secretary for NAACP, where he helped open new branches and expand membership. He also campaigned for a federal anti-lynching bill and spoke at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching. In 1920, Johnson became NAACP executive secretary, a position he used to fight against segregation and voter disenfranchisement in South.

Johnson believed Black Americans should produce great literature and art in order to demonstrate their equality to whites in terms of intellect and creativity.

Johnson held the top position at NAACP for a decade before resigning to teach creative writing at Fisk University in Nashville, a position created in recognition of his achievements as a writer and his standing as a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem Renaissance figure

Through the course of his wide-ranging career, Johnson developed a unique philosophy on achieving equality for Blacks and combating racism, one that stood in contrast with views espoused by W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. While Du Bois argued for steeping oneself in a liberal arts education and Booker T. Washington advocated for industrial training, Johnson believed Black Americans should produce great literature and art to demonstrate their equality to whites in terms of intellect and creativity.

Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 67 in a car accident. He had established his place within the Harlem Renaissance with The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, republished in 1927, his poetry collection God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), and the anthology he compiled and edited, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).

A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson was a man of many talents. Not only was he a distinguished lawyer and diplomat who served as executive secretary at NAACP for a decade, he was also a composer who wrote the lyrics for " Lift Every Voice and Sing," known as the Black national anthem.

Dual career in education and law

Born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson was heavily influenced by his mother, who passed on her love of music and literature, interests that would follow him throughout his multifaceted career. After graduating in 1894 from Atlanta University, a historically Black college, Johnson returned to Jacksonville and taught at the Stanton elementary school for Black students. Once he became principal, Johnson expanded the school to include high school education.

While at Stanton, he also began studying law and in 1898 became the first Black man admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction. While balancing his dual career in education and law, Johnson still found time to write poetry and songs, including " Lift Every Voice and Sing," to honor Abraham Lincoln's birthday.

Songwriter and diplomat

In 1901, Johnson moved with his brother, a composer, to New York City to write for musical theater. Together, they composed about 200 songs for Broadway. In New York, Johnson began making connections to influential members of the Black community, leading to the next stage of his career in diplomacy.

After serving as treasurer for the Colored Republican Club, Johnson was sent to become the United States consul in Venezuela by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Three years later, he was moved to Nicaragua to serve as consul. During this time, Johnson continued to write poetry and anonymously published his novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a story of a young biracial man living in the post-Reconstruction era.

Civil rights leader

Johnson left the diplomatic world to join the civil rights movement in 1916 as a field secretary for NAACP, where he helped open new branches and expand membership. He also campaigned for a federal anti-lynching bill and spoke at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching. In 1920, Johnson became NAACP executive secretary, a position he used to fight against segregation and voter disenfranchisement in South.

Johnson believed Black Americans should produce great literature and art in order to demonstrate their equality to whites in terms of intellect and creativity.

Johnson held the top position at NAACP for a decade before resigning to teach creative writing at Fisk University in Nashville, a position created in recognition of his achievements as a writer and his standing as a leading light in the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem Renaissance figure

Through the course of his wide-ranging career, Johnson developed a unique philosophy on achieving equality for Blacks and combating racism, one that stood in contrast with views espoused by W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. While Du Bois argued for steeping oneself in a liberal arts education and Booker T. Washington advocated for industrial training, Johnson believed Black Americans should produce great literature and art to demonstrate their equality to whites in terms of intellect and creativity.

Johnson died in 1938 at the age of 67 in a car accident. He had established his place within the Harlem Renaissance with The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, republished in 1927, his poetry collection God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), and the anthology he compiled and edited, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).

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A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson was a man of many talents. Not only was he a distinguished lawyer and diplomat who served as executive secretary at NAACP for a decade, he was also a composer who wrote the lyrics for " Lift Every Voice and Sing," known as the Black national anthem.

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Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, Fair use image

Alain Leroy Locke, a leading black intellectual during the early twentieth century and an important supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 13, 1886 to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke. His parents were middle class educated professionals. A gifted and talented student, Locke attended Harvard University in 1904 where he studied under renowned scholars including Josiah Royce, George Santana, and William James.

Locke excelled at his studies and became the first African American to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1907, Locke attended Oxford University where he obtained another B.A degree in 1910. The following year he attended the University of Berlin in Germany.

In 1912 Locke returned to the United States where he became an assistant professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., beginning an academic career that would span four decades. He also joined the newly organized Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity. In 1916 Locke interrupted his teaching career at Howard to return to Harvard University where he earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy. When Locke rejoined the faculty at Howard he quickly rose in rank and in 1921 became the chair of the Philosophy department. He remained in this position until his retirement in 1953.

Locke was known as an engaging, talented, accessible and admired professor by both his students and his colleagues. He was a pioneer in interdisciplinary scholarship as his work transcended standard academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Locke also embraced progressive, avant-garde, and, some would argue, unorthodox teaching methods while at Howard which were sometimes viewed with suspicion by more traditionally oriented colleagues and administrators at his institution.

Alain Locke has been widely regarded as the originator of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. His main contribution to both movements was the promotion and emphasis on values, diversity, and race relations. He challenged African Americans to acknowledge and promote their cultural heritage while at the same time, making the effort to integrate into the larger society and appreciate the mores and customs of other ethnic groups. He also was a firm believer in W.E.B DuBois' Talented Tenth philosophy, yet, unlike DuBois, he remained socially attached to the general African American population and staunchly resisted any form of elitist behavior.

Locke was a resourceful, intelligent, altruistic, and generous man who managed to serve as a mentor and establish close relationships with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, and Zora Neale Hurston. While Locke was never open about his homosexuality, his sexuality contributed to his various sensibilities and would frequently manifest itself in his works.

Alain Locke died on June 9, 1954 in New York City, New York at the age of 68.

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Alain Leroy Locke, a leading black intellectual during the early twentieth century and an important supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 13, 1886 to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke. His parents were middle class educated professionals. A ... Read MoreAlain Locke (1886-1954)

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Arthur Huff Fauset, Mae V. Cowdery and Laura Wheeler Waring, were active during the Harlem Renaissance while living and working in Philadelphia.

Huff Fauset (1899-1983) was a civil rights activist, anthropologist, folklorist, and educator. The half-brother of Jessie Redmon Fauset, he lived and worked in Philadelphia and was principal of Philadelphia's John Singerly School for twenty years.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Fauset conducted field work in the American South, the Caribbean, and Nova Scotia bringing attention to African American folklore. His essays were published in Opportunity, The Crisis, The New Negro, Ebony and Topaz, as well as Fire!

In 1927, Fauset and Nellie Rathbone Bright co-edited Black Opals, a Philadelphia literary magazine, with Allan Randall Freelon as the artistic director. The magazine lasted one years, and Alain Locke complimented the magazine.

Fauset's influential anthropological work was Black Gods of the Metropolis, a book which explored African American "religious cults in Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago".

Mae Virginia Cowdery (1909-1953) was a poet and native Philadelphian. Mentored by Arthur Huff Fauset, she was a part of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. Her poems were published in Black Opals, a Philadelphia literary magazine, in Crisis between 1927 and 1930, as well as in Opportunity in 1927 and 1928. Cowdery was awarded The Crisis magazine's Krigwa Poetry Prize in 1927 and her photo appeared on the January 1928 issue of Crisis magazine. In 1927, one of her poems appeared in the anthology, Ebony and Topaz, edited by Charles S. Johnson. In 1936, her book of poetry, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems, appeared and was critically well received. It was said of her that she was "a bright intelligence made bored and reckless by the ordinary surroundings." She committed suicide in 1953 at the age of 44.

Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948) was an artist and educator, who was best known for her portraits of prominent African Americans that she painted during the Harlem Renaissance.

Waring spent most of her life in the Philadelphia area. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in 1914 won its William E. Caisson Memorial Scholarship to study and travel through Europe. She only stayed for three months due to the outbreak of World War I.

Waring taught art and music at Cheyney State Teachers College, now Cheyney University, in Cheyney, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Her work has been displayed at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., The Harmon Foundation exhibits, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Waring received the second Harmon Award in 1927. The Foundation's mission was to promote interacial cooperation and understanding.

The Harlem Renaissance began with the industrial expansion and prosperity following WWI and began to decline after the stock market crashed in 1929. Key individuals of the Harlem Renaissance began to disperse to follow their individual career goals. For example, W.E.B. DuBois left New York to chair the Sociology Department of Atlanta University. Langston Hughes embarked on his travels through European countries, including Russia. Aaron Douglas and Charles S. Johnson began academic careers at Fisk University.

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Research Guides: Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection: Local Harlem Renaissance Connections

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Arthur Huff Fauset, Mae V. Cowdery and Laura Wheeler Waring, were active during the Harlem Renaissance while living and working in Philadelphia. Huff Fauset (1899-1983) was a civil rights activist, anthropologist, folklorist, and educator. The half-brother of Jessie Redmon Fauset, he lived and worked in Philadelphia and was principal of Philadelphia's John Singerly School for twenty years.

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MICHEL MARTIN, host:

It's Black History Month, and we're remembering people and events that have played a key role in this country's history. As part of our celebration, editor and writer Kai Wright has been telling us about some exceptional stories. In his fourth installment, Kai tells us about the music of the Harlem Renaissance. Bessie Smith is one artist whose talent and character caught Kai Wright's attention. Tell us more about black history, Kai.

KAI WRIGHT (Editor; Writer): Thanks, Michel. When I last spoke with your audience, we heard from the voices of both white and black Americans in the immediate aftermath of slavery's falling apart as we walk through the front lines of the Civil War.

Today, we move into the 20th century, and hear from some of the young black artists of that era who were really the precursors culturally to today's hip-hop artists. We think that it's a new conversation, this debate about how black art and how black artists represent themselves, and whether or not it is an appropriate representation for our children and for the broader society. But that's been going on for a very long time.

And in the '20s, black activists like W.E.B. DuBois came up with a new way to challenge Jim Crow. He famously coined the term the Talented Tenth, which was about finding the cream of the crop of black society, supporting their striving and their achievements to give the lie to the racism that underpinned segregation.

And with that in mind, he and others supported many of the young artists that would be part of what would become to - known as the Harlem Renaissance. But those artists weren't particularly interested in that kind of conversation. Many of them took great offense to the idea that their art had to be a certain kind of way or to voice a certain kind of thing for white people or black people.

Langston Hughes famously wrote an essay in 1926 for The Nation magazine that was titled, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." The title says it all - which he professes that he and his compatriots will, quote: If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful and ugly, too.

I like to think that this started with Bessie Smith. Music historians may know more precisely, but I love the music of Bessie Smith as a really great, early example of this kind of defiant spirit. Bessie was a blues singer in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She was very well-known by Southern blacks at the time.

But before she started, most black music did not make it into the mainstream. The only thing that record companies would produce was minstrel singing. They, right around the early '20s, discovered that there was actually a market out there for authentic black music from actual black voices, and Bessie stepped in as one of the biggest-hit sellers in that genre.

(Soundbite of song "T Ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do")

Ms. BESSIE SMITH (Blues Singer): (Singing) There ain't nothing I can do Or nothing I can say...

WRIGHT: She produced her first album in 1923, sold a million copies, and what was lovely about her is that she stood almost in exact contrast to the stereotype of a black woman at the time. She was boisterous. She was unapologetically sexual. Many historians say she was openly bisexual. She refused to back down. She loved to stand up in people's faces when they crossed her. And the song that most embodies that is the famous "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do" where she says things like, if I should take a notion.

(Soundbite of song "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do")

Ms. SMITH: (Singing) If I should take a notion...

WRIGHT: To jump into the ocean.

(Soundbite of song "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do")

Ms. SMITH: (Singing) To jump into the ocean...

WRIGHT: Taint nobody's bizness if I do.

(Soundbite of song "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do")

Ms. SMITH: (Singing) Taint nobody's bizness if I do...

WRIGHT: If I go to church on Sunday, then just shimmy down on Monday.

(Soundbite of song "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do")

Ms. SMITH: (Singing) If I go to church on Sunday Then just shimmy down on Monday Taint nobody's bizness if I do...

WRIGHT: That's Bessie Smith, doing her wonderful "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do." Thanks, Michel, for bringing that to your audience.

MARTIN: Thanks, Kai. Kai Wright is editor of "The African-American Experience," a compilation of black history and culture through speeches, letters, editorials, poems, song and stories. He joined us from our studios in New York. We'll hear Kai each week this month in our series "Tell Me More About Black History."

And that's our program for today. I'm Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. Let's talk more tomorrow.

(Soundbite of song "Taint Nobody's Bizness If I Do")

Ms. SMITH: (Singing) If I give him my last nickel And it leaves me in a pickle...

Copyright © 2009 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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MICHEL MARTIN, host: It's Black History Month, and we're remembering people and events that have played a key role in this country's history. As part of our celebration, editor and writer Kai Wright has been telling us about some exceptional stories. In his fourth installment, Kai tells us about the music of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Augusta Savage | American sculptor and educator

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Augusta Savage, original name Augusta Christine Fells, (born February 29, 1892, Green Cove Springs, Florida, U.S.—died March 26, 1962, New York, New York), American sculptor and educator who battled racism to secure a place for African American women in the art world. Augusta Fells began modeling f…

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1. Chronology

1885

Born Arthur Locke September 13 to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke in Philadelphia, PA.

1902

Graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia during that same year Locke was afflicted by rheumatic fever, which did permanent damage to his heart.

1904

Graduates with Bachelor of Arts degree from Philadelphia School of Pedagogy first in his class. Publishes "Moral Training in Elementary Schools," his first known publication.

Locke attends Harvard University, earning his second Bachelor of Arts degree and graduating magna cum laude. During his time at Harvard Locke was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society and studied under Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, Hugo Münsterberg, and Ralph Barton Perry. Though he was a member of the faculty at the time Locke never actually studied with William James. While at Harvard Locke received the Bowdoin Prize in English for an essay composed on Tennyson entitled "The Prometheus Myth: A Study in Literary Tradition." It was while at Harvard that Locke first met Horace Kallen, who worked as an instructor.

In 1907 Locke was chosen as the first-ever African-American Rhodes Scholar. Even though he held a right to admittance to an Oxford college as a Rhodes Scholar he encountered some difficulty in this regard until he was finally admitted to Hertford College. While at Oxford Locke studied philosophy, Greek, and literature. It was while at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar that Locke first met and became friends with Pixley Ka Isasha Seme. In 1907 and 1908, Horace Kallen was also at Oxford as a Sheldon Scholar.

Following his studies at Oxford University and before returning to Harvard University to complete his PhD, Locke studied at the University of Berlin under the German sociologist Georg Simmel, where he was reacquainted with his Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg. While at the University of Berlin Locke deepened his interest in value theory, particularly in the work of theorists such as Alexius Meinong, Christian Freiherr von Ehrenfels, and Frantz Brentano.

Appointed as assistant professor of English, philosophy, and education to Teachers College at Howard University.

1915

Gives a series of lectures to the Howard chapter of the NAACP on the scientific study of race and race relations entitled "Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race."

1917

Doctoral dissertation entitled The Problem of Classification in Theory of Value submitted to adviser Ralph Barton Perry September 17, 1917.

1918

Receives PhD in philosophy from Harvard University.

1925

Fired from Howard University following efforts to achieve pay equity between black and white faculty. December of that year Locke publishes The New Negro: An Interpretation perhaps his most famous work and earns himself recognition as a leading African-American literary critic and aesthete.

1928

Returns to Howard University following the appointment of Mordecai W. Johnson, the university's first African-American president.

1935

Reportedly it was in this year that Locke renewed his interest in writing philosophy as signaled by the publication of "Values and Imperatives," in American Philosophy, Today and Tomorrow edited by Horace M. Kallen and Sidney Hook.

1942

Publishes two edited volumes and an article: When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture edited with Bernhard J. Stern, Color: The Unfinished Business of Democracy special volume of Survey Graphic and "Who, and What, Is Negro?".

1943

Delivers a series of lectures entitled "The Contribution of the Negro to the Culture of the Americas," under the auspices of the Haitian Ministry of Public Instruction as the Exchange Professor for the Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations.

1953

Retired from Howard University and moved to New York.

1954

Died June 9 in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York from persistent heart trouble.

2. Axiology/Value Theory

Locke's seminal essay in value theory, "Values and Imperatives" is as ambitious in its aims as it is pioneering. In it Locke states what he takes to be the central problem for axiology; details the reasons for the failure of American philosophy, particularly pragmatism, to make anything more than a minimal contribution to the development of the philosophical study of values; argues that values are primarily rooted in human attitudes; and provides an elaborate theoretical account of value formation and the functional role of values. A value, according to Locke, is "an emotionally mediated form of experience." Locke issues the following warning:

[i]n dethroning our absolutes, we must take care not to exile our imperatives, for after all, we live by them. We must realize more fully that values create these imperatives as well as the more formally super-imposed absolutes, and that norms guide our behavior as well as guide our reasoning. (VI 34)

Values are an important and necessary part of human experience. Values are an essential part of human existence as all human persons are inherently valuing beings. He writes:

[t]he common man, in both his individual and group behavior, perpetuates the problem in a very practical way. He sets up personal and private and group norms as standards and principles, and rightly or wrongly hypothesizes them as universals for all conditions, all times and all men. (VI 35)

Valuations of multiple kinds pervade nearly every aspect of our lives; our aesthetic, moral and religious evaluations and judgments.

On Locke's estimation,

the gravest problem of contemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle or criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into their corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, of intolerance and mass coercion. (VI 36)

This is the central and driving question of Locke's axiology and as such it points to some of the crucial aspects of his overall philosophical view, but his theory of value specifically, and importantly his social and political philosophy. On the axiological plane the question is reformulated as whether or not the fundamental value modes automatically or dispositionally set up their end values prior to evaluative judgment. If value modes automatically or dispositionally set up their own ends, then there would exist a more direct approach to the apprehension of values. Moreover, if a connection can be discovered between certain psychological states and particular valuations then that might yield at least one avenue for an objective assessment of values and valuations. On the social and political plane-the practical plane where persons actually form valuations and act on them in myriad ways-the question is formulated in terms of how best to avoid a theory of value that is static, arbitrary and overly formulaic in ways that impede the theory's ability to provide an adequate understanding of value phenomena. To do this, a functional analysis of value norms is required, and normative principles must be the result of the immediate context of valuation. This we will see in the following sections is the major thrust of Locke's value pluralism and relativism.

2.1 Value-Feelings and Value-Modes

Locke begins by considering what he takes to be the most basic feature of values; their emotional character. He writes

the value-mode establishes for itself, directly through feeling, a qualitative category which, as discriminated by its appropriate feeling-quality, constitutes an emotionally mediated form of experience. (VI 38)

There is a particular feeling or feeling-quality associated with each value-mode. In fact, Locke contends that value-modes differ in virtue of differences in feeling-qualities. The value-mode, or perhaps better, the mode of valuing, refers to the qualitative character of a particular way of experiencing as mediated by a given emotion or attitude which Locke terms the feeling-quality. This has several important implications for the general theory of value: predicating a value to a subject depends on the feeling-quality associated with it; values are immediately recognized through an apprehension of their emotional quality; value-predicates are determined by the affective and volitional influence of the feeling-quality; and the imperatives of a given value are given immediately once the primary feeling-quality has been established.

Locke claims that there is a necessary connection between the feeling-quality and the value-mode with the former determining the later. The value-mode is normally established as the value is being apprehended. If this were not the case, the value-mode would be indeterminate even while its immediate quality is being felt. The basic categories of value are not rational: one cannot simply reason one's way to an understanding of them. In developing and articulating his axiology, Locke looks for the categories of value in the actual valuations of human beings. Rather than predetermining the categories of valuation and attempting to cram experiences of values into them, his theory begins with our concrete valuations and determines which if any features they have in common. It is then on the basis of the commonalities observed to obtain between particular experiences of values that they are classed together as members of the same class. Locke writes,

[f]lesh and blood values may not be as universal or objective as logical truth or schematized judgments, but they are not thereby deprived of some relative objectivity and universality of their own. The basic qualities of values...pertain to psychological categories. They are not grounded in types of realms of value, but are rooted in modes or kinds of valuing. (VI 38)

Locke is aware that it is not easy to demonstrate that the fundamental identity and unity of a value-mode depends on a feeling-quality. It may be that the position thus far articulated is merely hypothetical and speculative and requires an experimental methodology to prove it. Locke notes that the main objections to the position have been addresses by developments in the Gestalt psychology insofar as it has established an empirical basis for a comprehensive perceptual scheme functioning in recognition, comparison and choice. Further circumstantial evidence is offered for the position by the phenomenon of transvaluation (see section 2.3 below).

2.2 A Functional View of Values

On Locke's view, though the value-mode is determined immediately by the affective character of the value, this is not the final determination of the value. Even after the value-mode has been ascertained, the legitimacy of the value may still be in question, its place in the overall value scheme may be unclear, and particular aspects of the context of valuation may be uncertain. This leads Locke to conclude that the primary normative character of value norms is best sought in their functional role as stereotypes of feeling attitudes and as habitual impulses toward certain choices of actions. This would make them culturally specific, as well as temporally and geographically contingent as values can only be habituated and function with any degree of reliability in specific contexts. Moreover, as in the case of apprehending value-modes, the functionality of a given value is to be discovered experientially; rather than, postulated a priori. Values, then, would only become absolutes-should they become absolute at all-because reason and judgment secondarily re-enforce them as such. In their immediate character and quality values are affective, but they are further mediated by reason and judgment. Value predication depends on reason and judgment; but the predicates themselves are determined by the modal quality of the value. So, the judgment that an object is beautiful or ugly involves reason and judgment, but that the object is experienced as aesthetic depends on its affective apprehension; its being experienced aesthetically.

Commenting on his own preference for a functional theory of value Locke writes:

I confess at the outset to a preference for a functional theory of value, but my brief for a functional analysis of value norms is not completely parti pris, but is made rather because a functional approach, even should it lead to a non-functionalist theory of value, of necessity treats the value varieties in terms of their interrelationships, guaranteeing a comparative approach and a more realistic type of value analysis. (FVVU 81)

Moreover, a functional account of value has the theoretical advantages of being able to account for parallels between values, value interchangeability, and transvaluation. It is perhaps in taking a functional view of values and their associated imperatives where Locke's theory of value is most pragmatic. A functional view of values emphasizes the fact that values are an essential feature of our lived-experiences. At its most basic level value functionality aims to provide a way of understanding how particular values operate as coordinating mechanisms for individual and collective action. Some values have a specific social role; a societal aim or goal that they have been modified and adapted over time to help achieve or maintain. Such values are often codified in the customs and traditions of a culture and can sometimes remain ritualized long after their functional role is obsolete. The importance and usefulness of a functional view of values in Locke's social and political philosophy is further explored in section 3.2 below.

2.3 Transvaluation

Transvaluation is a central tenet of Locke's axiology. He writes:

[t]he further we investigate, the more we discover that there is no fixity of content to values, and the more we are bound, then, to infer that their identity as groups must rest on other elements. (VI 40)

The feeling-quality of a given value necessarily establishes the mode of valuation, i.e., the type of value in question (for example, aesthetic, religious, moral etc.) as well as the appropriate value-predicates. However, there is no necessary connection between a given object that serves as the content of a value and any particular emotional response to that object. One and the same object may affect the same person differently at different times, or may at the same time elicit from multiple people different emotional reactions. Transvaluation, then is most simply valuing something in a different way, which requires, at first, having an atypical emotional association with the object of value. There are multifarious potential causes of such transformations in one's affective responses to an object, and those causes can be immediate or unfold over time. "The changed feeling-attitude creates a new value" says Locke "and the type-form of the attitude brings with it its appropriate value category. These modes co-assert their own relevant norms; each sets up a categorical imperative of its own" (VI 41).

Locke treats transvaluation as inevitable; values are dependent upon social and cultural forces that are always in a state of flux and subject to myriad transformative influences at any given time, hence static values are implausible. Value transformation can take place on the individual level or on the level of widespread social or cultural values. Locke's hope is that this analysis will bring us closer to a practical understanding of value and the mechanism of valuation, which he hopes will bring us closer to understanding the grounds for both agreements among values and value conflict.

2.4 Taxonomy of Values

Locke offers a schematization of four traditional values-religious, moral, logical and aesthetic-to demonstrate how his theory classifies values into types according to their characteristic feeling-quality (see the table below) (VI 43). The schema also charts the value-predicates and the positive and negative poles associated with each value-type (type of value). Finally, the schema further divides each value according to its directionality; that is, whether the value is primarily introverted, functioning inwardly on the individual subject, or is extroverted, functioning externally in a social context.

Locke contends that his position has certain advantages over more logical theories of value. In particular, it is better able to explain certain value phenomena that are troubling for the latter type of theories. Phenomena such as transvaluation, value merging, and value conflict are able to be explained in terms of the basic doctrine that the mode of valuation is determined by the character of a subject's affective response in a value context. Locke claims that logical theories of value have historically had difficulty accounting for phenomena such as the aesthetic appraisal of a logical or mathematical proof; moral commitment to aesthetic production; or aesthetic appreciation of religious practice. In particular, logical theories have struggled to make sense of assigning predicates from one value-type to objects that are traditionally the content of a different value-type as when a proof in logic is deemed beautiful or ugly. Traditional theories treat such value predication as merely metaphorical or analogical.

Locke explains value conflict in terms of a more fundamental psychological incompatibility. Not only does the value-feeling determine the qualitative character of a given value, it also establishes broader categories of value by grouping values according to their common affective quality. As he puts it "[c]hange the attitude, and, irrespective of content, you change the value-type; the appropriate new predicates automatically follow" (VI 44).

Value attitudes can be psychologically incompatible, and where they are Locke contends that a hierarchical ranking of values will not resolve the incompatibility. In fact, he suggests that people resolve the incommensurability of their various value attitudes by shifting from one mode of valuation to another. This is why a functional account of values that determines the various value-modes on the basis of underlying psychological states is desirable. Such a theory is better able to achieve a reflective equilibrium with our actual value practices. All values have associated with them a set of imperatives. Locke does not have a great deal to say about how imperatives are formed. Presumably, imperatives are determined, at least in part, by the qualitative character of the value in question. People begin by forming a value-attitude based on one's initial affective response to the object of valuation. As a mediating form of experience a value supplies motivational drives toward acting and refraining from acting in certain ways. Values provide normative direction not only for cognition and psychological drives, but also for action. Imperatives are partially in place as soon as the affective quality of the value is apprehended.

3. Pluralism

Locke's philosophical worldview is pervaded by a concern for diversity. Locke takes pluralism in all its form-religious, cultural, value etc.-as a basic feature of the world. His primary focus then becomes one of understanding the multiplicity of ways in which peoples meet, and providing some normative guidance concerning how best to act when they do. Values organize, coordinate, mediate and direct experience. In so doing, they serve both a valuable epistemic as well as existential function. Values direct and guide our activity, but more than that they color the nature of our encounters with other persons, and frequently function as a source of conflict between individual persons and groups of human beings. The common mistake among valuers that leads to a "totalizing" of values as "absolutes" or "ultimates" is to forget that any given value encompasses only an aspect of reality and ought not to be treated as transcendent or reducible to that reality. This is a fundamental insight of Locke's philosophy of value as it is applied to social theory. And Locke believes that if he is correct in asserting that "[a]s derivative aspects of the same basic reality, value orders cannot reasonably become competitive and rival realities" that he will have provided the necessary theoretical foundation for a more latitudinarian exchange between diverse human collectives (VI 47). Locke's presentation of his pluralist position proceeds as a response to three obstacles or barriers to pluralism: absolutism, (counter) uniformitarianism, and arbitrary dogmatism. If individual valuers or value groups are able to avoid these three pitfalls, then either may possibly develop a pluralistic value orientation.

3.1 Three Barriers to Pluralism

The first barrier to pluralism is absolutism. Values and their associated imperatives are absolute when they are thought to apply to all human beings, at all times irrespective of social or historical conditions. This is because absolutist conceptions of values are derived from, and ultimately justified by something other than the lived-experiences of human beings, be it God, or human rationality. Whereas pluralism is intended to accommodate a wide array of contending values, absolutism countenances one, and only one set of values universally applicable to all human beings. Locke claims that "absolutism has come forward again in new and formidable guise," and he warns us to be on guard for "social and political forms of it, with their associated intellectual tyrannies of authoritarian dogmatism and uniformitarian universality" (PID 53). These newer forms of absolutism, Locke claimed, are the products of older ones. When values are held to be absolute there often results a tendency to discount the legitimacy of rival values. Pluralism avoids conceiving of values in absolutist terms. Setting various value conceptions on equal footing is the aim of Locke's pluralism.

Uniformitarianism, the second obstacle to pluralism, is the view that values ought to be uniform within a given community or group. The experiences of members of a given group are filtered through the same forms of mediation to produce value uniformity. Values are ascribed a single form for all members of a group; rather than allowing for a multiplicity of mediated experiences. Value uniformity can be achieved violently, coercively or peacefully, but in all instances it is an attempt to replace diversity with homogeneity. Locke suspects that it is the desire to defend one's own culture and to create consensus among competing value claims that is at the root of the quest for uniformity. Unfortunately, that motivation can easily lapse into an attempt to force one's own value system onto others without justification. Uniformitarianism is a refusal to accommodate the myriad value forms that are essential to pluralism.

Finally, Locke warns us to avoid the pitfalls of arbitrariness and dogmatism. Value commitments are arbitrary when one forms them-thereby rejecting viable alternatives-in the absence of any justification for choosing them over other available options. One holds her values dogmatically when she takes them to be indisputable and is closed-off to the possibility of taking a critical view of her value commitments that could possibly result in her altering or rejecting them.

3.2 Pluralism as a Functional Base

Locke describes pluralism as a functional base, one that can function as a foundation from which to achieve a rapprochement of conflicting values. Pluralism, as Locke envisions it, has the potential to create agreement among competing and conflicting values, through the recognition of common features of various values and value systems. A closer look at Locke's analysis of values; in particular, the three concepts of basic human values, basic equivalence, and functional constancy will illuminate what it means for pluralism to function in this way.

First, is the concept of basic human values, by which Locke means those values that are common to many, or all value systems; values such as belief in god, commitment to one's cultural community, respect for human life, etc. which though they may have multifarious manifestations, are in a more general way common to most, if not all groups. Of course, value communities differ, and no two value communities will be exactly alike, but there does exist substantial overlap of a subset of values across values communities. Basic human values then, are basic and human in virtue of their common expression in a plurality of value contexts and their pertaining to the lives of human beings, and not as a matter of their universal applicability across all of humanity.

The next two concepts-basic equivalence and functional constancy-are perhaps best understood as two sides of a distinction between formal and functional equivalence. Basic equivalence refers to a similarity of form and functional constancy refers to a similarity in function. Basic equivalence is a formal resemblance owing to a corresponding value-mode. It is a similarity in the type of value, or better, being particular values of the same type. This notion rests on drawing a distinction between the object of valuation and the way the object is valued. The object may differ where the value mode does not. As a consequence a single object can be valued multiple ways, and many different objects can be valued in the same way. Take for example the institution of marriage as the object of valuation. Marriage is valuable in least two senses, first, it may be valued as the religious union of a man and a woman, and secondly, the marriage ceremony itself could be valued as a ritualized aesthetic experience. In both cases one and the same phenomenon is the content of two different value modes. In the first instance, marriage is valued religiously; the characteristic quality of the value, its form, is spiritual. In the second instance, marriage could be valued because of the elegant décor, grandiose ceremony, and beautiful arrangements that characterize the event. The example goes to illustrate the fact that different ways of valuing can be applied to the same object by the same person or by different people. Valuation works the other way as well, that is, different objects can be valued the same way. As for example, a marriage, a baptism, or a christening can all be valued religiously or aesthetically. One can recognize a similarity in the form of competing values even though their objects may differ, or a difference in form where the object stays the same. Basic equivalence then speaks to an identity of form not of content. It is a conceptual tool that enables persons to recognize that their respective value expressions are species of the same genus. Locke speaks of the objective comparison of basic human values which leads one to think that his claim is that different groups may regard different sets of values as basic to human beings though these may not be identical, but rather, formally equivalent values.

The other side of the formal/functional equivalence distinction is the notion of functional constancy. By functional constancy is meant the ability of basic equivalent values to operate as stable features of value processes and activity within various value communities. Locke envisions that what will be found beneath potentially vast differences in content, and beyond a similarity of form, is a comparable utility of various values across contexts. Every value has an attendant function; a role that it plays within a given value community. Values that differ either in form or in content may still be equivalent as regards their function. These functional constants are discovered through comparison of fundamental values found across value groups.

Thus functional equivalence provides a constancy of two sorts: first, the function is constant within a given value community insofar as it plays the same role for different members of the same value group, and second, the function can be a common feature across value groups. Think here again of the example of marriage. Admittedly, there is a wide variety of particular manifestations of such a value, and there can be differences in the form as well as the content of such values. But it is still the case that such variation results in a similar function within a value community. Children are reared, networks of support are maintained, property is held in common and bequeathed to successive generations etc. and these social roles are served by a myriad of expressions of familial ties in the community. Moreover, family values function in this way across cultures. To be sure, there may not be an exact equivalence of function across value communities, or even within them for that matter, but to a large extent this equivalence of function is there to be observed. It may be the case that there exist social functions for a given value in one context that are absent in another: if so, there is no equivalence to be made. All values have a function, but as there is no necessary connection between a given value and a particular function, it does not follow from this that every value function can be found in every culture.

4. Relativism

Relativism, for Locke, begins as a systematic approach to the recognition of the sorts of value equivalence discussed earlier, and is then able to militate against the pernicious forms of valuing that often turn cultural exchanges into intractable problems. The view is termed relativist because it makes a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the values of a given culture dependent-at least in part-on that culture being viewed in relation to other cultures. Moreover, Locke claims that cultural relativism can serve as "a scientifically impartial interpreter of human values, and sometimes even as a referee and mediator among conflicting values" (CRIP 70).

4.1 The Principle of Cultural Equivalence

Relativism, on Locke's view, is not a negative skeptical position that is predicated upon the belief that one is unable to make a satisfactory determination about the relative worth of value communities. Instead, it is a positive and affirmative position concerning the relative worth of distinct value traditions and cultures. Locke formulates his relativism in terms of the three principles of cultural equivalence, cultural reciprocity, and cultural convertibility. He claims that the three principles are derivable from this larger relativist outlook and will enable "a more objective and scientific understanding of human cultures and...more reasonable control of their interrelationships" (CRIP 73).

The first of the three principles is:

The principle of cultural equivalence, under which we would more wisely press the search for functional similarity in our analyses and comparisons of human cultures; thus offsetting our traditional and excessive emphasis upon cultural differences. Such functional equivalences, which we might term 'culture-cognates' or 'culture-correlates,' discovered underneath deceptive but superficial institutional divergence, would provide objective but soundly neutral common denominators for intercultural understanding and cooperation. (CRIP 73)

The effect of the first principle is to lay bare the fact that the seemingly vast differences between cultures is more a matter of our selective preferences; that is, the habits of mind we have cultivated for being more keenly attuned to difference rather than similarity. The first stage of relativism, then, is to reorient our focus in favor of the similarity to be found across value communities. Cultural cognates and correlates are objective because they are discovered to be real features of multiple value systems. They are in an important sense "there" to be discovered both by internal and external observers of the value group. The reason that these value cognates count as neutral is that they do not, in virtue of their being objective, privilege any value-type or value-content over any other. At this stage they are taken as mere facts of the matter about the values that exist within communities.

4.2 The Principle of Cultural Reciprocity

The second principle of cultural relativism is:

The principle of cultural reciprocity, which, by a general recognition of the reciprocal character of all contacts between cultures and of the fact that all modern cultures are highly composite ones, would invalidate the lump estimating of cultures in terms of generalized, en bloc assumptions of superiority and inferiority, substituting scientific, point-by-point comparisons with their correspondingly limited, specific, and objectively verifiable superiorities or inferiorities. (CRIP 73)

This aspect of Locke's relativism requires a "beneficent neutrality between divergent positions" (CRIP 70-71). It begins by fostering a disposition toward cultural toleration in the hope that such toleration will lead to mutual respect, which would in turn serve as a foundation upon which to base reciprocal exchanges between cultures. In the most likely case, these initial exchanges will be centered around specific values that form narrowly defined communities of agreement. In the end, if cultural relativism is able to foster reciprocity between value communities to a sufficient degree, then cultural relativism may well establish a foundation of mutual understanding and appreciation to support active cooperation between value groups. The principle of cultural reciprocity restrains the inferences that we are able to make as a result of the principal of cultural equivalence in at least two ways: first, its emphasis on point-by-point comparisons limits the scope of the value cognates that are discovered, and second, it issues an injunction against identifying or connecting specific values with specific cultures or value communities. Relativism is to borrow from an idealized model of scientific practice; a point of view that does not prejudge the results of a given observation before it is carried out. Moreover, it points out that the discovery of cognates and correlates is not likely to be wholesale, but instead, specific and contextualized.

4.3 The Principle of Cultural Convertibility

Finally, we have the principle of cultural convertibility:

The principle of limited cultural convertibility, that, since culture elements, though widely interchangeable, are so separable, the institutional forms from their values and the values from their institutional forms, the organic selectivity and assimilative capacity of a borrowing culture becomes a limiting criterion for cultural exchange. Conversely, pressure acculturation and the mass transplanting of culture, the stock procedure of groups with traditions of culture 'superiority' and dominance, are counterindicated as against both the interests of cultural efficiency and the natural trends of culture selectivity. (CRIP 73)

All value-types are independent of any given value-content; any given value-type can be joined with any value-content. This fact of valuation is what grounds cross-cultural transformation. The extent to which cultures are modified by their interactions with other cultures, is in part a function of how stringently the cultures in question associate their own value-forms with specific value-content. At a higher level, Locke indicates that associations might even be made between a value and its institutional form, by which he seems to mean the manner in which the value is organized into the social structure of a value community. If specific values are correlated with particular institutional forms, a necessary connection may be assumed to exist between them where it does not.

5. Aesthetics

Locke is perhaps best known for his work in aesthetics, in particular, his role as both an intellectual purveyor of Negro art and literary critic. Locke managed to position himself at the forefront of one of the most significant and important artistic rebirths in American history. His seminal work, The New Negro, was ground-breaking in its presentation of Negro art as thoroughly self-expressive of the individual artist, and not as merely representative of aesthetic, cultural and social possibilities. Locke's publication of The New Negro was in many ways in direct defiance and contradiction of the black intellectual elite of his day, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as being the advance guard of the aesthetic sentiments of the average Negro of his day. There is evidence of his philosophical views, especially in the areas of axiology, culture, race and ethnicity throughout his writings on aesthetics. Major themes in Locke's aesthetics include: universal human appeal and the relationship of universal and particular; the transition from folk art to high art; the centrality of individual expressivity; and cross-cultural communicability through the aesthetic.

5.1 The New Negro

Prior to the period of individual expression characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance, Negro art in Locke's estimation had as its primary function representation of a Negro type that was socially acceptable and laudably ideal. The aim of much Negro art was to advance presentations of the Negro as civilized, cultured, and capable of making a worthwhile contribution to American society, or to portray blacks in America as a progressive people, needing only to be liberated from slavery or Jim Crow segregation to realize their true potential. In discharging this representative function, Negro art was consumed with the promulgation of stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. It had constantly to react against negative portrayals and stifling social pressures; to attempt to make out of Negro life and experience something worthy of respect, a fitting object of honor and emulation. As Locke put it,

for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being-a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be 'kept down,' or 'in his place,' or 'helped up,' to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. (NN 3-4)

The primary consequence of this social environment on black aesthetics in the United States according to Locke was its Ghettoization. In dealing with this specialized subject matter of social uplift Negro aesthetics segregates itself from the broader American social context and fails to achieve universal human appeal. "The thinking Negro," by whom Locke seems to have Du Bois primarily in mind, "has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem" (NN 3-4).

Art at its best on Locke's view is not propaganda, and though there may be some initial phase in which art is forced to perform such a function that is not the ultimate goal. "Until recently," Locke comments "lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others." Yet as "the thinking few know" as that self-understanding is achieved and worked into artistic expression the result is "that in the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken" (NN 4). This is the first significant change in the social environment that produces the "New Negro"; namely, the attitude of young Negro artist to racial segregation.

Another change in American society that had a profound impact on the aesthetic advancement of African-Americans at the time of Locke's publication of The New Negro was the Great Migration. One major consequence of "that shifting of the Negro population" was that it "made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even predominantly Southern" (NN 5). Locke did not however regard the cause of the great migration as chiefly racial; that is, escape from the segregation of the South was not the major motivation behind the mass African-American exodus from the South to the North and Mid-West. Instead,

The tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest...The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. (NN 6)

The Great Migration brought with it a need for a plurality of social adjustments as the droves of African-Americans flooded into Northern cities. Principal among this was the realization that the Negro was

rapidly in process of class differentiation, [and] if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous. (NN 5-6)

Negro life in America according to Locke is comprised of many diverse elements. The plurality of groups that congregated in places like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Harlem all with varying motivations and group specific aims constituted some of the largest concentrations of diverse segments of the Negro population. These circumstances coupled with the oppressive effects of prejudice forced myriad sectors of the African-American population to discover and interact with one another. Prior to that Locke claims that

it must be admitted that the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common. (NN 6-7)

Locke explains that in part the artistic endeavors of the Negro have failed to achieve universal resonance because the Negro himself has been so poorly understood. He readily admits that "[i]t does not follow that if the Negro were better known, he would be better liked or better treated[,]" and goes on to note that despite this fact "mutual understanding is basic for any subsequent cooperation and adjustment" predicated upon, or in pursuit of an understanding of the universality of Negro experiences as expressed in art. Moreover,

effort towards this will at least have the effect of remedying in large part what has been the most unsatisfactory feature of our present stage of race relations in America, namely the fact that the more intelligent and representative elements of the two race groups have at so many points got quite out of vital touch with one another (NN 8-9)

And in addressing that crucial fact, such efforts may go a long way towards facilitating an appreciation of Negro art as expressive both of the peculiar racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences of African-Americans, and as expressive of ubiquitous aspects of human experience. It is a mere "fiction...that the life of the races is separate," and a dangerously divisive one at that, "[t]he fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels" (NN 9). Hence, it is not simply a failure of contact, but a failure of the right sort of contact that accounts for the under appreciation of the aesthetic life of black peoples.

For his part, Locke argues, the "New Negro" in recognizing "the necessity for fuller, truer self-expression,...[and] the realization of the unwisdom of allowing discrimination to segregate him mentally, and a counter attitude to cramp and fetter his own living" has played a vital role in demolishing "the 'spite-wall' that the intellectuals built over the 'color-line[.]'" (NN, 9-10). Life for the Negro in the early 1920's was steadily progressing toward the ideals of American democracy. The Negro of the time was also characterized by a new vein; one around which there was a growing consensus primarily of feeling and attitude; rather than opinion or program. As Locke has it:

Up to the present one may adequately describe the Negro's 'inner objectives' as an attempt to repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective. Their realization has acquired a new mentality for the American Negro. And as it matures we begin to see its effects; at first, negative, iconoclastic, and then positive and constructive. In this new group psychology we note the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and 'touchy' nerves, the repudiation of the double standard of judgment with its special philanthropic allowances and in the sturdier desire for objective and scientific appraisal; and finally the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of social debt to the responsibilities of social contribution, and offsetting the necessary working commonsense acceptance of restricted conditions, the belief in ultimate esteem and recognition. Therefore, the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not (NN 11).

Locke ends his exposition of what is characteristic of the New Negro with the observation that the reception of black aesthetic products is an experiment in democracy. As African-American art resists ghettoization and increasingly makes its presence felt in the American artistic mainstream it seeks to establish itself as a subset of American art; rather than, the totality of Negro American art. And since, according to Locke,

[d]emocracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are closed...the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other. (NN 12)

The North American Negro artist in being 'new' is a living instantiation of the fact that no culture, people, race, or society is a static one. Such entities are always in process of transformation, and always a composite of myriad cultural, ethnic, racial, and social influences. The emergence of the new is at once a presentation of what has been and an indication of what the future may hold. This is a deeply pragmatic current running through Locke's aesthetic philosophy. Locke is later critical of the Harlem Renaissance because it failed to sustain a cyclical process of rebirth. In the years following the height of the Harlem Renaissance he remarked later that that a new Negro must be born every decade or two.

5.2 The Young Negro

Locke explains that the aesthetic renaissance that took place in Harlem and elsewhere was primarily a movement of young artists. The youth, Locke claims, speak in distinctive overtones, and "out of a unique experience and with particular representativeness" (NN 47). The experiences of young American Negroes is uniquely representative because

[a]ll classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. (NN 47)

Here we find an interesting problem in Lockean exegesis: How is it that the aesthetic contribution is at once characterized by a disavowal of representativeness, while at the same time being uniquely representative? Locke goes on to note that

[r]acial expression as a conscious motive, it is true, is fading out of our latest art, but just as surely the age of truer, finer group expression is coming in-for race expression does not need to be deliberate to be vital. Indeed, at its best it never is. (NN 47)

Locke's resolution of the seeming paradox comes by way of recognizing that "[o]ur poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro[;]" the sort of representativeness characteristic of past aesthetic pursuits and instead now "speak as Negroes" (NN 48). The main difference being that "[w]here formally they spoke to others and tried to interpret," the experiences of African-Americans for white or other nonblack audiences "they now speak to their own and try to express." "They have" he notes "stopped posing, being nearer the attainment of poise" (NN 48). With this change in the mind of the Negro artist the aim of art is no longer the presentation of an ideal type, or an effective counter-stereotype; instead, it is the expression of the universal truth contained in the particularity of Negro experiences.

This is a major theme that runs throughout all of Locke's aesthetic philosophy; the idea that within a particular manifestation of human experience can be found something of universal human significance. Indeed, this is the quintessential marker of "high art" or "classical art". In the case of the young Negro artist Locke claims "[r]ace for them is but an idiom of experience, a sort of added enriching adventure and discipline, giving subtler overtones to life, making it more beautiful and interesting, even if more poignantly so. When viewed from this more objective attitude and "so experienced, it affords a deepening rather than narrowing of social vision" (NN 48).

The youth "constitute a new generation, not because of years only, but because of the new aesthetic and a new philosophy of life" (NN 49). Locke explicates this new aesthetic philosophy by way of comparison to "[t]he elder generation of Negro writers" who were resigned to expressing themselves in "cautious moralism and guarded idealizations" (NN 49). This generation of artists, with

the repercussions of prejudice...heavy on its heart...felt art must fight social battles and compensate social wrongs; "Be representative": put the better foot foremost, was the underlying mood. (NN 50)

This hampered both the individual expressivity of the older generation of artists as well as their ability to communicate cross culturally the truth of black experiences. The artist was not free to speak his heart or mind, but had to remain cognizant of the way he presented the Negro yet again. With the youth of the Harlem Renaissance there came a "newer motive," for the younger generation of American Negro artists the aim "in being racial is to be so purely for the sake of art." (NN 51) The new artist does not take folksy racial types to be emblematic of anything but the individual artist. Locke sees this manifested in the artist's ability to make of "the racial substance something technically distinctive," a method of giving expression to a specific type of experience that allows for full expression of that experience across cultural, racial, or ethnic boundaries. In this way techniques that exist as "an idiom of style may become a contribution to general resources of art"; (NN 51) available in the end, not only to those who created, cultivated and refined them, but to any artist who wished to deal with that particular idiom.

5.3 The Negro Spirituals

In Locke's estimation, the spirituals are the quintessential Negro contribution to American art and culture; manifesting as they do so much, not only about the North American Negro and his aesthetic and cultural heritage and evolution, but also in standing as a paragon of processes of aesthetic transition and development.

The spirituals are really the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America. But the very elements which make them uniquely expressive of the Negro make them at the same time deeply representative of the soil that produced them. Thus, as unique spiritual products of American life, they become nationally as well as racially characteristic. It may not be readily conceded now that the song of the Negro is America's folksong; but if the spirituals are what we think them to be, a classical folk expression, then this is their ultimate destiny. Already they give evidence of this classic quality. Through their immediate and compelling universality of appeal, through their untarnishable beauty, they seem assured of the immortality of those great folk expressions that survive not so much through being typical of a group or representative of a period as by virtue of being fundamentally and everlastingly human. (NN 199)

The best evidence, Locke seems to think, in support of the spirituals' claim to universality is that they have withstood the test of time. As an art form they have outlived not only the generations that produced them but the peculiar social environment that enlivened them. Beyond this the spirituals have survived

the contempt of the slave owners, the conventionalizations of formal religion, the repressions of Puritanism, the corruptions of sentimental balladry, and the neglect and disdain of second-generation respectability. (NN 199)

In short, they have successfully made the transition from folk art to formal music.

The spirituals at once exemplify all of the three major themes of Locke's aesthetic philosophy: they are expressive of the individuality of a given artist-think of the distinctiveness of Paul Robeson's baritone renderings of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"; they have universal human appeal; and they epitomize the process of transition from a folk art to high or classical art. "In its disingenuous simplicity, folk art is always despised and rejected at first; but generations after, it flowers again and transcends the level of its origin" (NN 199).

Negro folk music or spirituals contain the raw material for myriad new musical developments. That material was at the time of the publication of The New Negro to Locke's mind underdeveloped, but as Negro artists grew in sophistication and craft Locke saw the potential for them to complete the conversion of so fundamentally American and pedestrian an art form into an avenue for insight into some of the most deeply emotional aspects of humanity.

Locke credits Du Bois with being among the first to give the spirituals "a serious and proper social interpretation," with his chapter in The Souls of Black Folks on the Sorrow Songs. "But underneath the broken words, childish imagery, peasant simplicity, lies" Locke notes

as Dr. Du Bois pointed out, and epic intensity and a tragic profundity of emotional experience, for which the only historical analogy is the spiritual experience of the Jews and the only analogue, the Psalms. (NN 200)

But whatever they may lack in terms of poetic form, they more than compensate for in their ability to embody the religious mood. This North American Negro folk form is replete with the spirit of exaltation. The spirituals are remarkable for their ability to transcend the profound tragedy that gives birth to them and offer up a model of enduring hopefulness in this world or the next. "Their words are colloquial," Locke notes, being the products of unlettered folk "but their mood is epic" giving emotive expression to experiences that exemplify the possibilities of humanity at its best (NN 201). The spirituals "are primitive, but their emotional artistry is perfect" (NN 201).

Historically, Negro colleges were the mechanism through which the spirituals were popularized. The travelling choirs of Negro institutions such as Hampton University, Wilberforce University, Fisk University and Tuskegee University performed the spirituals across the country as a means of raising funds for their respective institutions, all the while bringing to black and white audiences in the United States knowledge and appreciation of this indigenous musical form. Many of these university choirs also recorded compilations of Negro spirituals and published them. It was thus, as Locke has it, that the spirituals were able to avoid simply falling out of fashion and failing to survive "that critical period of disfavor in which any folk product is likely to be snuffed out by the false pride of the second-generation" (NN 202). This, by Locke's lights, is not an uncommon situation for folk arts to face, finding it necessary as they often do to resist being disavowed by subsequent generations wishing to distance themselves from the supposedly deficient quality of the folk expression.

Emotions and attitudes form the very foundation of Locke's philosophy of value: undoubtedly, one reason that Locke was so enamored with the spirituals was that as he understood them their primary artistic virtue was their deeply emotive character. "Emotionally," he points out, "these songs are far from simple" (NN 205). There is to be found in the spiritual folk music of the American Negro the entire range of human moods and emotions, and within a given spiritual there can be a drastic change in mood from the deepest sorrow to glorious praise, as each and every song is infused with religious sentiment. Surprisingly, when it comes to the problem of classification of the spirituals, Locke does not insist upon the primary mode of classification being the feeling-quality of the song as his value theory might suggest. In fact, Locke argues that

[i]nteresting and intriguing as was Dr. Du Bois's analysis of their emotional themes, modern interpretation must break with that mode of analysis, and relate these songs to the folk activity that they motivated, classifying them by their respective song-types. (NN 205)

In the case of the spirituals Locke is in favor of a different method of classification because contemporary interpreters of the Negro's music tend to mischaracterize, or characterize in a way that is not true to the folk that produced it, the music of the Negro. Locke laments the fact that "at present many a half secularized ballad is mistaken for a 'spiritual,' and many a camp-meeting shout for a folk hymn" (NN 205). He believed the folk music of the Negro is best categorized according to the sort of activity they inspired. "From this point of view" Locke claims

we have essentially four classes, the almost ritualistic prayer songs for pure spirituals, the freer and more unrestrained evangelical shouts or Meeting songs, the folk ballad so overlaid with the tradition of the spirituals proper that the distinctive type quality has almost been unnoticed until late, and the work and labor songs of strictly secular character. (NN 205)

However, discriminating Negro folk music into types on the basis of the folk activity that underlies them is not necessarily to exclude the emotive content of the song. In fact, it seems that what is really being discriminated is the active expression of the underlying emotional content, i.e., the activity that is most commonly associated with a particular emotion or mood. And here we see perhaps the most direct effect that Locke's axiology has on his assessment of spirituals discriminating them as he does into types in terms of their feeling-quality, but also linking each form with a set of imperatives in this case, a practical imperative understood by the type of activity that each song is used to motivate.

Locke sees as a major problem with the scholarship on Negro folk music in his day the tendency to overemphasize one of the various distinctive elements of the music over the others. The result was a jaundiced view of Negro music. "Strain out and emphasize the melodic element" Locke informs

and you get only the sentimental ballad; emphasize the harmonic idiom, and you get a cloying sentimental glee; overemphasize the rhythmic idiom and instantly you secularize the product into syncopated dance elements. (NN 206)

5.4 Who, and What, is "Negro"?

Lurking in the background of all of this talk of the "New Negro" is the assumption that there is something distinctively Negro about at least some American art. As to what that is, or could be, answers are sometimes extremely hard to come by. But, Locke warns

[s]ooner or later the critic must face the basic issues involved in his use of risky and perhaps untenable terms like 'Negro art' and 'Negro literature' and answer the much-evaded question unequivocally,-who and what is Negro? (WWN 209)

Beyond this Locke thinks it a meaningful query to ask whether the racial concept has any place in art at all. Perhaps it would be better to understand art as a cultural or social mode of production that cuts across racial and ethnic divisions.

5.4.1 Who is Negro?

In answering the question "Who is Negro?" Locke begins by exposing a common misguided assumption in such queries:

[t]he fallacy of the 'new' as of the 'older' thinking is that there is a type Negro who, either qualitatively or quantitatively, is the type symbol of the entire group. (WWN 210)

Locke sees this as the unfortunate consequence of the past need to proffer counter-stereotypes to combat demeaning stereotypes of Negro persons. Counter-stereotypes may well contain some element of truth, but they fail to convey the whole truth about as diverse a population of human beings as Negroes in the United States, let alone the Americas or Negroes the World over. There is no distinctive singular Negro type. The answer then to the question posed "who is Negro?" is no Negro in particular. The Negro is a dynamic and multifaceted population admitting of myriad cultural and social forms characterized as those are by variegated linguistic, religious and artistic elements. This is important for Locke to note as the Negro of his day was thought to be classless, undifferentiated, and ethnically homogeneous. In fact, Locke himself thought it possible (and actual) for human beings biologically similar in the way that American race thinking presupposes to be members of different races. A full and accurate artistic portrayal of who is Negro would, Locke argued, have to picture the many diverse Negro strands in their own right, weaving together from these diverse threads a multifaceted presentation of Negro experiences.

5.4.2 What is Negro?

"Turning to the other basic question,-what is Negro," Locke begins by narrowing the question to "what makes a work of art Negro, if indeed any such nomenclature is proper,-its authorship, its theme or its idiom?" (WWN 211). In other words, what gives a particular work of art its distinctive, if any, racial character: the racial identity of its author, its treatment of themes characteristic of a particular racial experience in a particular place, or its use of styles and modes of expression peculiar to a given people? Of these three candidates for the foundation of Negro art Locke claims each has had its day depending on the social environment that was prevalent at the time. Locke dismisses nearly out of hand the first option remarking that many a Negro artist has produced the most amateurish works of art due primarily to their poor mastery of Negro idioms, and inadequate treatment of Negro themes. What is more, some white (or at least non-Negro) artist have been quite adept in either their use of characteristically Negro styles, or their dealings with Negro motifs. Of course, it stands to reason that artist steeped in the cultural, ethnic and racial environments that give rise to these idioms and themes are most likely to master their use and expression, and that persons who do so are most likely to be members of these communities, having the same racial, ethnic or cultural identities as other members. However, such communal membership is not a necessary condition for the work of a particular artist to count amongst the works that comprise a racially distinctive body of art such as might be called "Negro art."

6. Philosophy of Race

Locke understood race as primarily a product of social culture. Locke denies as do nearly all contemporary race theorists that races are biologically distinct categories of human beings. Locke maintained that culture and race were distinct, but often overlapping categories. There is no tight causal or otherwise necessary connection between race and culture. The two are mutually exclusive even though they do sometimes vary together or otherwise correspond. Race, for Locke, is not determinative of culture or civilization. Locke's position on race does not deny, as some of his contemporaries concerned with the notion of race and culture did, that there ever is a significant connection between racial and cultural factors, nor does it deny that "race stands for significant social characters and culture-traits or represents in given historical contexts characteristic differentiations of culture-type" (CRASC 188). This is primarily a cautionary observation on Locke's part seeing as how

[i]t is too early to assume that there is no significant relationship between race and culture because of the manifestly false and arbitrary linkage which has previously been asserted. (CRASC 189)

Locke has some hesitation about the prudence and possibility of completely eradicating racial categories. He states,

[i]n some revised and reconstructed form, we may anticipate the continued even if restricted use of these terms as more or less necessary and basic concepts that cannot be eliminated altogether, but that must nevertheless be so safe-guarded in this continued use as not to give further currency to the invalidated assumption concerning them. (CRASC 189)

Locke attributes the original idea that race is a primary determining factor in culture to the work of Arthur de Gobineau, though he thinks the main scientific justification for the view has been offered by those who seek to interpret culture in evolutionary terms such as the social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer. Positing a fixed link between race and culture was useful for such theorists in developing a step-by-step account of the development of cultures. But even in Locke's day, the supposed scientific foundations of such theoretical positions faced challenges. In light of that Locke thinks it understandable for some to want to correct this misinterpretation of the facts by insisting that there is no connection at all between race and culture. We see here again perhaps some of the influence that pragmatist thinkers, in this case Dewey, may have had on Locke, as Dewey was apt to point out on numerous occasions the shortcomings of Spencer's social Darwinism, and chiefly its attempt to offer a universal account of all aspects of human development. Locke worried that extreme cultural relativism

leaves an open question as to the association of certain ethnic groups with definite culture traits and culture types under circumstances where there is evidently a greater persistence of certain strains and characteristics in their culture than of other factors.

It is "[t]he stability of such factors and their resistance to direct historical modification" Locke thought, which

marks out the province of that aspect of the problem of race which is distinctly ethnological and which the revised notion of ethnic race must cover. (CRASC 190)

6.1 Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race

Locke postulates three conceptions of race: theoretical or scientific, political, and social or cultural. Scientific conceptions posit race as natural biological kinds. The existence of race and racial differentiation are explained in terms of biological or ethnological features of human populations. Scientific theories frequently assert a natural biological hierarchy between races and aim to explain divergent cultural characteristics of groups though biological factors. Locke argues that genetic inheritance varies both within and between human populations and cannot be the basis for the sociological concept of race. The factors that create genetic subdivisions of the human species such as physical and social reproductive isolation produce various consequences (Locke, 1989, 190 - 92 see also Locke, 1992, 4-6) that may not vary conterminously with the group's social history. Genetic subdivisions produce population variances that may not track the social distinctions that a given society deems salient in terms of group identity.

Locke argues that biological race is an ethnic fiction. (Locke, 1992, 11 - 12). Putative biological races do not necessarily correspond with the racialized social identities operative in a given society. One way race can be an ethnic fiction is when non-biologically determined ethnic or cultural groups are presumed to be real biological populations, when in fact they are not. Locke does not seem to think that this fictitious conception of race undermines the social reality of the phenomenon. On Locke's view race amounts to something significant even if many common conceptions of it are mistaken. Racialized populations can be comprised from various genetic, cultural and ethnic intermixtures throughout its history. Isolating any one of the plurality of factors around which a population is racialized as the single factor constituting the race can cause a significant divergence between one's conception of racial groups and any underlying reality. Such divergence can inform a whole host of mistaken beliefs and misguided racial practices. Locke writes: "[a]s I pointed out, these groups, from the point of view of anthropology, are ethnic fictions. This does not mean that they do not exist, but it can be shown [that these groups do] not have as [permanent] designations those very factors upon which they pride themselves. (Locke, 1992, 11)

Locke's understanding of race is influenced by the ethnology of his time. The notion that racial types are not permanent he derives from Frantz Boas. (Locke, 1992, 75-76) Locke's belief that race and culture vary independently of each and are thus not causally linked stems from the work of R. H. Lowie. (Locke, 1989, 189-90) Locke agreed with Sapir that unique cultural or ethnic traits are best explained historically; rather than, biologically or psychologically. (Locke, 1989, 190) His reading of Flinders-Petrie's account of assimilative processes initially informed his view of social race, and racial differentiation, though these are latter most influenced by his concept of cultural pluralism. (Locke, 1989, 191-92) Finally, he derives the view that race practices are deeply rooted in imperialism from Lord Cromer. (Locke, 1992, 64)

6.2 Political Conceptions of Race

Political conceptions of race reject two basic assumptions of scientific theories, they reject that races are distinct biologically determined populations, and secondarily reject that biological differences of race account for cultural variation, or establish the relative inferiority or superiority of putative race groups. Political conceptions of race contend that racism is constitutive of races. Racial groups result from political, economic, and social mechanisms that create relative group advantage or disadvantage. Racial differentiation and hierarchy are the consequences of group exercise of political power.

Political race, for Locke, is merely favorable or unfavorable social inheritance masquerading as genetic ethnic inheritance. Racial differences and inequalities are caused by these factors, and so, will not account for the duration or amelioration of inequalities and differentiations. The permanence of racial groups, if it is to be promoted, must be based on something other than metaphysical realist notions of race. Conversely, if racial inequalities are to be eradicated, that too will likely require attention to, and control of, factors and elements of putatively racial groups other than their supposed biological or anthropological similarity.

Characteristically racial modes of living are wrongly regarded as biologically, rather than, socially inherited. This social inheritance can be either favorable or unfavorable. Locke observes that cultures are often racially diverse. Multiple races may share some larger cultural elements. (Locke, 1989, 193-94) Races are regarded as "concrete culture-types," according to Locke, which are "composite racially speaking, and have only an artificial ethnic unity, of historical derivation and manufacture." (Locke, 1989, 194) Race is a learned epistemic mode of being. A sense of race membership is enculturated and socialized, and once acquired, the race sense partly conditions how one perceives and understands the world.

6.3 Social or Cultural Conceptions of Race

Locke's social conception of race is a proto-social constructionist account of race. Race, for him, is a cultural-historical phenomenon and not a natural kind distinction. Race, for Locke, is culture; or conversely, culture is race. The cultural conception views race as a learned socially inherited phenomenon. Culturally conceived, a race is a transactionally constituted, and inherently transformational, subcultural variant, not fixed by biological determinants. Race for Locke is the characteristic differentiation of culture-type perpetuated through social heredity. Locke states that "[r]ace in the vital and basic sense is simply and primarily the culture-heredity, and that in its blendings and differentiations is properly analyzed on the basis of conformity to or variance from culture-type." (Locke, 1989, 192) Locke's view of social race implies that there are further distinctions to make within current racial categories. Many groups commonly regarded as one race constitute several different races.

Locke held that race was in point of fact a social and cultural category rather than a biological one. For this reason he developed the notion of ethnic race or culture group. By ethnic race, I take Locke to mean a peculiar set of psychological and affective responsive dispositions, expressed or manifested as cultural traits, socially inherited and able to be attributed through historical contextualization to a specifiable group of people. The concept of ethnic race is a way of preserving the demonstrated distinctiveness of various groupings of human beings in terms of characteristic traits, lifestyles, forms of expression; without resulting to the scientifically invalidated notion of biological race. "Race," Locke argues "would have been regarded as primarily a matter of social [as opposed to biological] heredity," if only the science of his day had reached a more tenable understanding of the relationship of race to culture which would likely have resulted from focusing more on the ethnic; rather than, anthropological factors. The distinctiveness of a given race would be understood as the result of "the selective psychological "set" of established cultural reactions" (CRASC 191).

The notion of ethnic race is better able to capture the myriad differences between culture groups in terms of the actual social, cultural and historical conditions that give rise to such variation, and without the scientifically indefensible reliance on biological factors. On this view, race is no longer thought to be the progenitor of culture; instead race is understood to be a cultural product. Locke held that the more objective analysis of culture he advocated would likely result in the development over time of distinctive culture-types for which it may prove possible to work out some principle of development or evolution. This he thought might eventually make it possible to develop "a standard of value for relative culture grading" (CRASC 194).

Nearly every culture is highly composite; consisting as most due in the union of various social and historical influences; moreover, every ethnic group in the unique outcome of a specific social history. A more scientific understanding of man replaces the abstract artifice of biological race, and requires that we deal with concrete culture-types which are frequently complex amalgamations of supposed races united principally by entrenchment of customary reactions, standardized practices, traditional forms of expression and interaction, in sum, the specific history of a given people in a particular place. It is noteworthy and perhaps illuminating of Locke's conception of ethnic or social race that the groupings of human persons formerly thought to constitute "races" in the biological sense such as "Negro," "Caucasian," or "Asian" are in fact each composed of several different social or ethnic races. On Locke's view there are many so-called "Negro," "Caucasian," or "Asian" races. This revised understanding of culture constitutes in Locke's estimation a fundamental paradigm shift in the study of human cultures "[s]o considerable...[in] emphasis and meaning that at times it does seem that the best procedure would be to substitute the term race the term culture group " (CRASC 194).

Locke quickly notes while the notion of race has been invalidated as an explanation of culture groups understood as totalities, race does help to explain various cultural components within a given culture. "Race operates as tradition," Locke noted, "as preferred traits and values," changes in these aspects of culture in a distinctive way by a subset of a culture group constitutes "ethnic remoulding" (CRASC 195). Race becomes a term that designates the specific outcome of the "peculiar selective preferences" in favor of some, and against other, culture-traits of a given group. "Such facts" Locke observed

nullify two of the most prevalent popular and scientific fallacies, the ascription of a total culture to any one ethnic strain, and the interpretation of culture in terms of the intrinsic rather than the fusion of its various constituent elements. (CRASC 195)

To illustrate Locke's view consider African Americans, they share a common culture with white Americans in terms of language, religion, aesthetic sense, and many other cultural elements. Even with these cultural elements in common there are characteristic, qualitatively distinct, and phenomenologically unique forms that common language, religion, and aesthetic sense have among African Americans that are not characteristic of white Americans. Characteristic differences such as have produced the musical styles, literary techniques, humor, oratorical idioms, mannerisms, forms of worship and religious expression, hair styles etc. and many other elements of culture that are the frequent objects of appropriation.

A sense of kinship among members of a subcultural group which yields an understanding that "different practices [operate in] their society from those which [operate in other societies and therefore] determine their treatment of other groups," Locke argues is a key element in racial differentiation. (Locke, 1992, 20) Racial consciousness is not itself pernicious, but a group's sense of itself and its difference from other social races can be based on the domination and oppression of other groups. (Locke, 1992, 20)

A social group's sense of itself as a distinctive subculture yields the formation of peculiar values and beliefs, alongside specific practices and forms of living. These produce over time distinguishing qualities of the subculture in terms of elements that are noticeably present in one, or lacking from other groups. (Locke, 1989, 194-96) Culture-traits-ways of acting, speaking, interrelating, worshipping, eating, expressing etc.-establishes a dominant and characteristic pattern in a population. This pattern consists of social norms toward which members of the group conform. With sufficient conformity around those norms a culture-type is eventually established. (Locke, 1989, 194-95) Some people self-identify in racial terms, but the core elements with which they identify may be illusory. Such identification can benefit a racialized group. Observing that some racial conceptions are ethnic fictions does not lead Locke to deny the practical utility of racial identification.

6.4 Race Creeds, Race Practices, Racial Difference and Prejudice

Political and social conceptions of race are more useful in explaining racial domination and cultural assimilation and pluralism than scientific theories of race, which have been thoroughly undermined as the cause of cultural variation. Moreover, the distinctions made, the very populations designated by, anthropological race, rarely if ever coincide with those of ethnic race. The three conceptions carve up the world differently, and of them, Locke finds the political analysis and social or ethnic conception of race more accurate historically and sociologically. This is a matter of some debate in recent work in the philosophy of race. Also, advances in recent decades have raised important questions about the viability and usefulness of treating genetically discernable populations of human beings as races. Locke provides us further reason to doubt the viability of such projects. Moreover, he was adept enough to envision that even in the light of such advances it is a separate question whether the genetic populations of evolutionary biologists track closely the social populations putatively taken to be races.

Putatively biological conceptions of race, Locke argues, are social fictions. This aligns his thinking with fictionalist, or antirealist accounts of race, and inclines him in the direction of racial eliminativism. He argues that theoretical and scientific conceptions of race are misguided and ought to be eliminated for metaphysical, epistemological and normative reasons. Despite this he regards race as a fundamental category for understanding human social interactions. This informs his view that political conceptions of race are useful for understanding the way a society's race creeds can rest on false beliefs, race practices are misguided and effectuate oppression, and understanding of the role of race in advancing imperialism and colonialism. In good pragmatist fashion, Locke is careful not to interpret political conceptions of race as postulating race as a metaphysical reality. His political conception of race offers a model for interpreting and analyzing a society's racial creeds and race practices, it does not establish that race is a real biological or cultural factor of human populations or of individual persons. Locke argues that the only viable meaning of race is social. The conception of social race is for Locke the only plausible meaning of race. This aligns him with contemporary social constructionist. Locke endorses a form of substitutionism by contending that metaphysically realist conceptions of race should be abandoned in favor of ethnic or social race. His view is reconstructionist in that it aims to correct classical racialist views as well as the prevailing metaphysically realist views of his day.

Locke distinguishes between racial conceptions and a society's race practices. The social differentiations that produce various social groupings including races, result on his analysis from social, political, and economic causes. Locke does not deny that racial differences or racial prejudices exist. Racial differences, he thought, often parallel racial inequalities. (Locke, 1992, 1-14) Locke claims that "[w]e should expect naturally that race theory should be a philosophy of the dominant group." (Locke, 1992, 3) As it was in the United States and other European colonial powers whose members proffered racial theories that privileged dominant groups. This leads Locke to argue that much of what has passed for race theory in Western civilizations is "bad science." Specious justifications of exploitive and oppressive race practices abound, and such theories, Locke observes are resistant to correction by more accurate scientific investigation, or social scientific or historical facts.

Locke is doubtful of the prospects of a thorough-going racial eliminativism. He writes: "I believe that a word and an idea covering so indispensable, useful, and necessary a grouping in human society will never vanish, never be eradicated, and that the only possible way in which a change will come about will be through a substitution of better meanings for the meanings which are now so current under the term." (Locke, 1992, 84-85) This is a clear articulation of Locke's racial substitutionism. He rejects eliminativism as the appropriate response to problematic conceptions of race or pernicious race practices and creeds. But Locke, unlike Du Bois, is not clearly a racial conservationist. He argues that prevailing conceptions of race are illegitimate, present race practices are pernicious, and contemporary race creeds unjust.

Locke is arguably a qualified or partial eliminativist as he advocates a radical redefinition of race in terms of culture, the elimination of certain race practices, race creeds, and race prejudices. Race prejudices, Locke claims, are ultimately based on cultural differences and differences in the type of civilization. Racial difference is at base a difference in the social consciousness of groups. Race prejudice erroneously assigns that variation to biological and anthropological factors that are unrelated to racial groups. This leaves racial prejudice in the paradoxical situation of being "an almost instinctive aberration in favor of anthropological factors erected into social distinctions" without any scientific warrant for so doing. (Locke, 1992, 10)

Race prejudices, Locke claims, result from aberrant psychological predispositions and tendencies. These habits often function unconsciously, but are not exempt from control and amelioration. Moreover, race creeds are for Locke distorted conceptual schemes and at the root of our notions of racial superiority and inferiority. Race prejudice and race creeds can and should be eliminated as features of race practice. His racial eliminativism is partial or qualified because he advocates jettisoning the more pernicious forms of our race practice, and is adamant about substituting current racial conceptions for the view of race as social culture.

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1885 Born Arthur Locke September 13 to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke in Philadelphia, PA. 1902 Graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia during that same year Locke was afflicted by rheumatic fever, which did permanent damage to his heart. 1904 Graduates with Bachelor of Arts degree from Philadelphia School of Pedagogy first in his class.

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Harlem Renaissance - Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY

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The Harlem Renaissance marked a golden age in Black culture.

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United Through Arts celebrates Black History Month as we feature the achievements of the
​Musicians of the Harlem Renaissance.

During the 1920s, Louis Armstrong brought a huge impact during the Harlem Renaissance within the Jazz world. The music he created was an incredible part of his life during the Harlem Renaissance. His impact touched many, including a well-known man during that time named Langston Hughes. The admiration he had for Armstrong and acknowledging him as one of the most recognized musicians during the era. Within Hughes writings, he created many books which held the central idea of jazz and recognition to Armstrong as one of the most important person to be part of the new found love of their culture. The sound of jazz, along with many other musicians such as Armstrong, helped shape Hughes as a writer. Just as the musicians, Hughes wrote his words with jazz.
Armstrong changed the jazz during the Harlem Renaissance. Being known as "the world's greatest trumpet player" during this time he continued his legacy and decided to continue a focus on his own vocal career. The popularity he gained brought together many black and white audiences to watch him perform.

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 4, 1901. He was raised by his mother Mayann in a neighborhood so dangerous it was called "The Battlefield." He only had a fifth-grade education, dropping out of school early to go to work. He grew up in dire poverty in New Orleans, Louisiana, when jazz was very young. As a child he worked at odd jobs and sang in a boys' quartet. In 1913 he was sent to the Colored Waifs Home as a juvenile delinquent. There he learned to play cornet in the home's band, and playing music quickly became a passion; in his teens he learned music by listening to the pioneer jazz artists of the day, including the leading New Orleans cornetist, King Oliver. Armstrong advanced rapidly: he played in marching and jazz bands, becoming skillful enough to replace Oliver in the important ​Kid Ory band about 1918, and in the early 1920s he played in Mississippi riverboat dance bands. An early job working for the Jewish Karnofsky family allowed Armstrong to make enough money to purchase his first cornet.

Armstrong was playing trumpet, and his technique was superior to that of all competitors. Altogether, his immensely compelling swing; his brilliant technique; his sophisticated, daring sense of harmony; his ever-mobile, expressive attack, timbre, and inflections; his gift for creating vital melodies; his dramatic, often complex sense of solo design; and his outsized musical energy and genius made these recordings major innovations in jazz.

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United Through Arts celebrates Black History Month as we feature the achievements of the​Musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. During the 1920s, Louis Armstrong brought a huge impact during the Harlem Renaissance within the Jazz world. The music he created was an incredible part of his life during the Harlem Renaissance.

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Find free reading passages to build vocabulary and to improve reading fluency skills for the ELA practice tests. Become better readers and writers with fun and interactive reading and vocabulary practice resources.

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Langston Hughes, American writer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and who vividly depicted the African American experience through his writings, which ranged from poetry and plays to novels and newspaper columns. Learn more about Hughes’s life and work.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry, short stories, and dramatic plays. After a short time in New York, he spent the early 1920s traveling through West Africa and Europe, living in Paris and England.

Hughes returned to the United States in 1924 and to Harlem after graduating from Lincoln University in 1929. His first poem was published in 1921 in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, T he Weary Blues in 1926. Hughes's influential work focused on a racial consciousness devoid of hate. In 1926, he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation: "The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves."

Hughes penned novels, short stories, plays, operas, essays, works for children, and an autobiography. Hughes's sexuality is debated by scholars, with some finding homosexual codes and unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover to indicate he was homosexual. His primary biographer, Arnold Rampersad, notes that Hughes exhibited a preference for African American men in his work and his life, but was likely asexual.
View objects relating to Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

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James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.

After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, a launderer, and a busboy. He also traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes's debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter (Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who cited Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of Black life in America from the 1920s to the 1960s. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable Black poets of the period, such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Culle n, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of Black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language, alongside their suffering.

The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes

differed from most of his predecessors among black poets... in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read... Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously-though always seriously-to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known "Simple" books: Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950). He coedited the The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949) with Arna Bontemps, edited The Book of Negro Folklore (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958), and wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940). Hughes also cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed "Langston Hughes Place."

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Langston Hughes - A poet, novelist, fiction writer, and playwright, Langston Hughes is known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties and was important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Organized by guest curator Jeffreen M. Hayes, Ph.D., the Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman exhibition features nearly 80 works of art, including sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, and is the first to reassess Harlem Renaissance artist Augusta Savage's contributions to art and cultural history in light of 21 st-century attention to the concept of the artist-activist. The fully illustrated companion catalogue presents the most up-to-date scholarly research, re-examines Savage's place in the history of American sculpture and positions her as a leading figure who broke down the barriers she and her students encountered while seeking to participate fully in the art world.

A gifted sculptor, Savage (1892 - 1962) was born in Green Cove Springs and later became a significant teacher, leader, and catalyst for change. Overcoming poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination, Savage became one of this country's most influential artists of the 20 th century, playing an instrumental role in the development of some of the most celebrated African American artists, including: Charles Alston, William Artis, Romare Bearden, Robert Blackburn, Selma Burke, Ernest Crichlow, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and Morgan and Marvin Smith, whose works are also included in the exhibition. A prodigious and highly acclaimed artist in her own right, Augusta Savage created works that elevated images of black culture into mainstream America. A central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, she worked with other leaders, writers, musicians, and artists to showcase the contributions of African American culture. As a community organizer and teacher, Savage created a bridge between the first generation of Harlem Renaissance artists and subsequent generations of artists.

Through this exhibition, the Museum will highlight the artistic, social, and historic impact of Augusta Savage who, despite how she transformed the artistic landscape, is deserving of greater national appreciation. Today, Savage is best known for Lift Every Voice and Sing (formerly known as The Harp), her commissioned sculpture for the 1939 World's Fair, and is recognized in Black community as an educator and an important community leader. However, Savage's artistic skill was widely acclaimed nationally and internationally during her lifetime, and a further examination of her artistic legacy is long overdue. This exhibition will introduce Savage as a pioneering artist and community organizer who helped shape artistic movements that changed the way artists represent the Black figure, using art as a form of activism. This exhibition has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sotheby's Prize and was on view between October 12, 2018 to April 7, 2019.
Gallery Guide
Augusta Savage Exhibition Planning and Community Advisory Committee: Carol Alexander; Dustin Harewood; Barbara Harrell; Marty Jones; Princess Simpson Rashid; James Richardson; Adonnica Toler

Augusta Savage Host Committee (to date): Mr. and Mrs. Thompson Baker, III; Sally F. Baldwin; Caroline O. Brinton; Susan and Hugh Greene; Mr. and Mrs. William Harrell; John & Jan Hirabayashi; Mr. Hank Holbrook and Mrs. Pam D. Paul; Peter and Kiki Karpen; John and Nancy Kennedy; The Law Office of James F. Waters, III, P.A.; Velma Monteiro-Tribble; Rick and Amy Morales; Kitty and Phil Phillips; James Richardson and Sandra Hull-Richardson; Sharón Simmons and Shirley Webb; Nina and Lex Waters; Dr. and Mrs. H. Warner Webb; Mr. and Mrs. Charles B. Zimmerman

Exhibition Season Presenters: Ameris Bank; City of Jacksonville; Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville, Inc.; Robert D. and Isabelle T. Davis Endowment at The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida; The Director's Circle at the Cummer Museum; The Schultz Family Endowment

Sponsors: Charmaine T.W. Chiu and Ernest Y. Koe; Dr. Elizabeth Colledge; Cynthia G. Edelman Family Fund; The Hicks Foundation; Bob and Monica Jacoby; Dick and Marty Jones; Trisha Meili and Jim Schwarz; Michael Munz; NEA Art Works; Van and Sandra Royal; Mr. Ryan A. Schwartz; Allan Schwartzman; Carl S. Swisher Foundation, Inc.; Sotheby's Prize; State of Florida; Wells Fargo

Community Partners: Avant Arts; City of Green Cove Springs; GENERATION W; Jacksonville Public Library; Jax Chamber; Leadership Jacksonville; Museum of Science & History; OneJax; Ritz Theatre and Museum; Special Project Partners; TEDx Jacksonville; University of North Florida Center of Urban Education and Policy; University of North Florida Department of Art and Design; Women of Color Cultural Foundation; Women's Giving Alliance

In-Kind Sponsors: Agility Press, Inc.; DoubleTree Jacksonville Riverfront; The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; Wingard

With Publication Support From: Henry Luce Foundation

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Organized by guest curator Jeffreen M. Hayes, Ph.D., the Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman exhibition features nearly 80 works of art, including sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, and is the first to reassess Harlem Renaissance artist Augusta Savage's contributions to art and cultural history in light of 21 st-century attention to the concept of the artist-activist.

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Langston Hughes - Short Biography (Life Story)

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Duke Ellington | Songwriters Hall of Fame

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Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World

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Twentieth century writer and poet Langston Hughes

Born: February 1, 1902
Died: May 22, 1967

Langston Hughes was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, which was the African American artistic movement in the 1920s that celebrated black life and culture. Hughes's creative genius was influenced by his life in New York City's Harlem, a primarily African American neighborhood. His literary works helped shape American literature and politics. Hughes, like others active in the Harlem Renaissance, had a strong sense of racial pride. Through his poetry, novels, plays, essays, and children's books, he promoted equality, condemned racism and injustice, and celebrated African American culture, humor, and spirituality.

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Twentieth century writer and poet Langston Hughes Born: February 1, 1902 Died: May 22, 1967 Langston Hughes was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, which was the African American artistic movement in the 1920s that celebrated black life and culture.

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Aaron Douglas | African-American, Harlem Renaissance, Painter

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Aaron Douglas was an American painter and graphic artist who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska in 1922, Douglas returned briefly to his native Kansas to teach art. By 1925 he had moved to New York City,

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The Black Woman Artist Who Crafted a Life She Was Told She Couldn’t Have (Published 2021)

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At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage fought racism to earn acclaim as a sculptor, showing her work alongside de Kooning and Dalí. But the path she forged is also her legacy.

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Poet, Author, Literary Genius

The legacy of any individual is always a difficult item to measure. It is calibrated against the tenor of the times and the underlying currents of society. These issues have always colored how literary historians and others have viewed the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Poet and author, writer and revolutionary, Dunbar shows aspects that fit into many niches and philosophies. Yet what is the essence of this African American writer from Dayton, Ohio?

Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote more than just poetry, he wrote literature in all of its venues. He wrote poems and novels, newspaper articles and lyrics for Broadway musicals. He wrote short stories and operettas, ballads and orations. He is credited as the first writer to put the African American experience in all its diverse forms before a broader audience. His work became the voice for the African American experience in America at that time.

Dunbar became known for his use of dialect to capture the African American experience. Yet his talent could not be confined to that form alone. Paul Laurence Dunbar was an experimenter, and innovator who tried to express his feelings and vision in the many forms that literature offers. He has been called the "poet laureate of his people," yet he has become a voice for all people. Through all of his writing runs the desire to explain the ambitions, hopes, and dreams of African Americans. He strived to show to the world the reality of blacks as caring, thoughtful, creative individuals, as people, not stereotypes. He was an African American struggling with the racism and oppression of his time, and yet he is a spokesperson for all who have dreams unfulfilled.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African American to be widely accepted and acclaimed within literary fields in the United States. It began with a review of his work published by William Dean Howells in 1896 and continued into the 1920s and beyond. Dunbar's work laid the foundations of, and set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance of the 20's and 30's. This was an explosion of literary and cultural talent unlike anything this nation has seen since. Dunbar's work remained a model for writers during this period including James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.

Today schools, banks, hospitals, and other institutions across the nation are named in honor of Paul Laurence Dunbar. His work remains a legacy of the past and a beacon for the future. It encompasses all the expressions of human emotion and is just plain good literature.

His work can be summed up in two statements. The first was written by his wife Alice Ruth Moore in 1914.
"A poet is a poet because he understands, because he is born with a divine kinship
with all things, and he is a poet in direct ratio to his power of sympathy."

The second statement comes from a letter Dunbar wrote to Dr. Henry Tobey on July 13, 1895.
"I did once want to be a lawyer, but that ambition has long since died out before the
all-absorbing desire to be a worthy singer of the songs of God and nature. To be able
to interpret my own people through song and story, and to prove to the many that
after all we are more human than African."

Review the list of schools honoring Paul Laurence Dunbar.

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Paul Laurence Dunbar's Legacy - Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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The legacy of any individual is always a difficult item to measure. It is calibrated against the tenor of the times and the underlying currents of society. These issues have always colored how literary historians and others have viewed the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

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10 things you probably don't know about Paul Laurence Dunbar

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"He was the first African-American to be accepted by the discipline of American literature when most people thought that most African-Americans would not have anything to write about," said LaVerne Sci, a nationally respected Dunbar expert and retired site manager of the Paul Laurence Dunbar House Historic Site at 219 North Paul Laurence Dunbar St.