THE GENIUS OF THE GENIUS OF
THE HARLEM THE HARLEM
RENAISSANCERENAISSANCE
VOLUMEVOLUME 1 1
The Genius of the
Harlem Renaissance
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CORE KNOWLEDGE
Teacher Guide and Activity Book
for The Genius of the Harlem Renaissance
(for Core Knowledge Language Arts
®
)
Editor
Andrea Oliver, PhD
Dr. Andrea Oliver is a native of Greenville, Florida, and is currently a
Professor of American History at Tallahassee Community College. An
experienced educator of over 25 years of service in pre-collegiate and
collegiate level classrooms, Dr. Oliver is the author of A History of the
United States to 1880, vol. 1, another Core Knowledge title. At the
time of this book’s publication, Dr. Oliver is working on a book about
the first African American valedictorians and salutatorians in formerly
segregated southern high schools. Dr. Oliver is married to Eddie
Oliver, a decorated high school math teacher, and is the mother of
three children: Julia, Madison, and Eddie (Deuce) II.
Cover and Title Page Image: Ivan Pesic
ISBN: 978-1-68380-847-3
Copyright © 2022 Core Knowledge Foundation
www.coreknowledge.org
All Rights Reserved.
Trademarks and trade names are shown in this book strictly for
illustrative and educational purposes and are the property of their
respective owners. References herein should not be regarded as
affecting the validity of said trademarks and trade names.
Contents
THE GENIUS OF THE
HARLEM RENAISSANCE
The Language of Race . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
THERE FROM THE BEGINNING – THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION. . . . . 3
Paul Laurence Dunbar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND ITS CAUSES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
What caused the Great Migration? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Dr. Charles S. Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
The New Frontage On American Life by Charles S. Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
James Weldon Johnson—A Multitalented Renaissance Man . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
James Weldon Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
Harlem: The Cultural Capital by James Weldon Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
The Role of the Black Press in the Great Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23
Joel Augustus Rogers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
Impressions of Dixie: Another Emancipation Coming by J.A. Rogers . . . . . . . . . . .25
THE NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT AND ITS IDEAS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28
Alain Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
The New Negro by Alain Locke. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
The New Negro and The Historic Sense of Self – A New Way of Dening What a Pioneer Is . .33
Paul U. Kellogg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
The Negro Pioneers by Paul U. Kellogg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
The New Negro Woman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
Elise Johnson McDougald . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
The Task of Negro Womanhood by Elise Johnson McDougald . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43
The New Negro Spirit in Verse – The Poetry of the Early Harlem Renaissance . . . .59
Georgia Douglas Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59
The Heart of a Woman by Georgia Douglas Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Calling Dreams by Georgia Douglas Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Countee Cullen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62
Heritage by Countee Cullen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
If We Must Die by Claude McKay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE OF LANGSTON HUGHES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68
Langston Hughes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68
The Negro Speaks of Rivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70
The Minstrel Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71
I, Too . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72
Life is Fine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Harlem (also called A Dream Deferred) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
POETRY INFLUECED BY THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE POETS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
Nikki Grimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
David’s Old Soul by Nikki Grimes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
The Sculptor by Nikki Grimes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78
ZORA NEALE HURSTON – POWER IN THE PEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
On Colorism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81
Color Struck: A Play in Four Scenes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83
SONGS OF SORROW AND SOLACE:
THE NEW NEGRO AND THE OLD SPIRITUALS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
The Negro Spirituals by Alain Locke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
1
The Language of Race
In referring to racial identity, the speakers and writers in this book
used terms that were accepted in their times, but in many cases are
no longer accepted today. In the primary sources collected in this
book, for the sake of historical accuracy, we have not changed the
terms each speaker or writer used when referring to race. In the
introductory texts that provide background information, we have
aimed to use terms for race and ethnicity that are generally accepted
now. What is accepted, however, is a matter of ongoing discussion.
At the time of this writing, in reference to African Americans, there is
an ongoing discussion about whether to use the lowercase “black” or
uppercase “Black” to refer to persons of African ancestry. In keeping
with the practice of an increasing number of major publications, in
the introductions written for this book, we use the uppercase “Black,”
which acknowledges, as an editor for the New York Times explains,
“the difference between a color and a culture.”
While we have chosen to capitalize “Black” (except when “black” is
used in historical texts), we have chosen not to capitalize “white.”
The historical texts gathered in this book do not capitalize “white.”
Some publications have begun to capitalize “white”—see, for
example, the guidelines of National Association of Black Journalists
or the American Psychological Association. There are arguments for
capitalizing “white” on the grounds that lowercase “white” might
be taken to imply “whiteness” as a commonly accepted norm apart
from race, while uppercase “White” acknowledges “Whiteness” as a
racial identity in the context of American history. On the other hand,
the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, and others
make the point that “white” should remain lowercase because hate
groups and white supremacists have long insisted on capitalizing
2
“white.” Given the lack of consensus on this matter at the time of the
publication of this book, we maintain our practice of not capitalizing
“white,” while affirming that “whiteness” is not to be understood as a
norm but as a racial identity.
To sum up, in this book, when we refer to race or ethnicity, our goal has
been to remain historically accurate in the primary source materials,
and culturally sensitive to generally accepted current usage in the
introductions that provide historical background. If you think that in
specific instances we have not met this goal, please let us know by
contacting the Core Knowledge Foundation.
3
T
– A A
Although this reader will have you looking at poetry and other
literary works central to an important 20th century American
cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, it is
important to know that African Americans have a long and proud
history of making signicant contributions to American literature
and culture, even from the nation’s earliest beginnings.
Born Borteer Furror in the early 1700s, African American farmer
and craftsman Venture Smith published one of the earliest known
examples of an autobiography in colonial America. Though
captured into slavery when he was just six years old, he purchased
his and his family’s freedom as an adult and went on to recount his
experiences while enslaved in A Narrative of the Life and Adventures
of Venture, a Native of Africa….
Another important contributor to
American literature was a young
poetess named Phillis Wheatley.
Though enslaved, Wheatley was
educated in the household of
a prominent Boston merchant.
Wheatley spoke, wrote or
understood four languages and
would later become an important
gure to abolitionists, who touted
her intellectual and creative abilities
as proof that black people could be
Phillis Wheatley, 1753 - 1784
4
rened through education. She was a household name among
literate colonists, and her poetry inspired a generation of American
colonists who were ghting for their political independence from
Great Britain. Wheatley’s poetry skillfully struck patriotic tones and
admiration for the young country’s ideals embracing freedom
and equality. Yet, she never forgot the enslaved status she herself
once carried and was a status shared by tens of thousands of Black
people at the time. In a poem she wrote that appeared in what was
the rst book of poetry published by a black woman in the United
States, Wheatley explained why she was such a rm believer in the
cause for freedom and liberty. She wrote:
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence ow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d* from Afric’s** fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest ,
What sorrows labour*** in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
at from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic
sway?
peruse, v. to read something carefully
molest, v. to abuse
tyrannic, adj. having complete power
* Phillis Wheatley used ‘d in place of the suffix -ed.
** “Afric’s” means “Africa’s” in this line.
*** “Labour” is the British spelling of labor, which Wheatley would have used in Colonial
America.
5
One of her most enthusiastic fans was none other than George
Washington himself. When he assumed command of the
Continental Army, Wheatley wrote a poem in his honor. In a letter
she included with the poem she had written for him, she stated
“Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to
be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with
the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress.”
Washington was so taken by Wheatley’s words that he not only
responded with a letter of his own but extended an invitation
for a personal meeting. In 1776, the two met at Washington’s
Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters in the early months of
the Revolutionary War.
As the Revolutionary War resulted in the emergence of a new
country, African Americans grew more passionate in their demands
to secure freedom for themselves. Several gifted writers lent their
talents to the ght for freedom. Frederick Douglass, the most
famous African American abolitionist of the time, was a self-taught
formerly enslaved native of Maryland who wrote a best-selling
autobiography that catapulted him to worldwide prominence as
an international abolitionist. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of
a Slave Girl gave readers an inside look at the specic problems
enslaved Black women faced through the vivid account of her life
that she gave in that book.
As the 20th century approached, Black creatives continued to
make substantial contributions to America’s cultural lifeblood.
Their works were signs of things to come and set the stage for
the expressive explosion of literature and art we now know as the
Harlem Renaissance. Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of those early
20th century cultural innovators.
6
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s. During the rst
Great Migration (1910-1930) about 1.6 million African-American migrants left Southern rural
areas to migrate to northern industrial cities.
7
Sympathy
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs so through the springing grass,
And the river ows like a stream of glass;
When the rst bird sings and the rst bud opes ,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!
ope, v. to open (opes)
chalice, n. a cup
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Born in 1872 to two formerly enslaved
parents, Paul Laurence Dunbar became
one of the most inuential Black poets
in modern American literature. Dunbar
published two volumes of poetry in the
1890s despite being earlier rejected for
publication because of his race. Dunbar’s
friendship and association with Orville
Wright would later open doors for him
and his poetry. Wright, who along with his brother Wilbur,
invented the airplane, was Dunbar’s high school classmate.
Wright later printed a newspaper called the Dayton Tattler.
Wright printed some of Dunbar’s poems in this paper, which
introduced bigger audiences to Dunbar’s talents.
In 1899, Dunbar wrote “Sympathy”, a poem in which he expressed
the plight of Black people and the eects that racism had on their
lives. After reading this poem, answer the questions that follow.
8
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must y 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 they 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 he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he ings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
For Further Consideration:
1. What is the overall tone of this poem?
2. The use of a refrain (a phrase that is used repeatedly) is a
common rhetorical device in poetry. What refrain does this
poem use?
3. What effect does the use of the refrain have on the tone of the
poem?
4. Who is “the caged bird” the poem references?
5. In what way(s) might the poet identify with the “caged bird”?
fain, adv. rather
9
T G M
Imagine that you lived in a neighborhood where you could regularly
hear music played by skilled musicians, day and night. Picture
yourself surrounded by creative works of art, where you actually
have the chance to talk to the men and women who produced
them. Now see yourself surrounded by lots of smart and interesting
people who know a lot about a lot of dierent things. You hear them
talking about new and interesting ideas about making life better
for all Americans during a time when you know that not everyone
is treated equally or fairly. In this community, you see people
wearing the most fashionable clothing around as they walk down
crowded sidewalks that run alongside the apartment building you
live in with your family. You may even spot one of those shiny, new-
fangled automobiles zipping up and down the bustling city streets.
There is a vibrance and an energy that you have never quite seen
before. You are not exactly sure what to make of the sights and
sounds that surround you. But what you do know, is that it is all
very exciting and is nothing like the life you left behind in the rural,
northern Florida town you were born in.
The scenario you have just read could have described the experience
of any one of the thousands of African Americans who left rural
towns all over the South to relocate to urban centers in the North.
This historic phenomenon is known as The Great Migration. The
Great Migration was the largest internal movement of people in
American History and refers to the mass exodus of rural Southern
African Americans to urban areas in the North, Midwest, and West.
This movement occurred over six decades of the 20th century
and
occurred in two phases. Phase One of the migration started in 1910
exodus, n. an exodus is when a large number of people move away from a certain location
10
and ended in 1940 and the second phase lasted from the 1940s
through the 1970s. In both phases, there were factors that inuenced
people to leave everything behind that they had ever known.
The circumstances that inuence people’s decisions to leave their
places of origins are known as push factors, while those conditions
that attract people to a given area are known as pull factors. For
the African Americans leaving the south, the primary push factors
inuencing their decision were the desire to escape racial hostility
and violence, and the pursuit of better economic opportunity.
Northern, Midwestern and Western cities represented the promise
of relief from the racial oppression of the South and the lure of better
paying jobs than the menial wages of rural farmworkers.
Once they settled in their new homes, recent arrivals were quickly
disillusioned by the realities of the new lives they had chosen.
While the jobs they were able to obtain in the factories and mills
of their new communities paid higher wages than they had ever
earned before, the work was very hard and often very dangerous.
When they were not working, new urban dwellers had to adjust to
life in the big city, often being forced to live in crowded, rundown
buildings that were breeding grounds for crime and disease.
Perhaps most devastating for African American migrants hoping
to escape the racial tensions of their native Southern homelands
was the swift and shocking realization that racial prejudices could
be just as acute in the North. Between the years 1917–1919, there
were several race riots resulting in injuries, deaths and property
destruction in the millions.
Despite the disappointments the reality of their new lives may
have presented them, African Americans made the most of their
situation and developed vibrant communities that helped them to
adjust to their new lives in their new homes. Although both phases
oppression, n. a harsh and unjust treatment
menial, adj. low , as those paid to a servant or non-skilled labor
11
of the Great Migration led to signicant changes for both African
Americans and America as a whole, The First Great Migration set
the stage for an important American intellectual and cultural
movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
The selections you will nd in this two-part reader are products of
that movement. This rst volume will contain readings, with a few
exceptions, from the rst part of the Harlem Renaissance (1915 –
1926) while the second volume will contain passages produced for
the most part during the second half of the movement (1926 – 1940).
So that you will have a better appreciation and understanding of
the works you will read, each passage will include brief biographies
of their authors, as well as information about the historic events
that were happening at the time they were produced.
What caused the Great Migration?
As you have just read, there are various reasons why people would
choose to leave places they may have known all their lives for other,
unknown places. These reasons are called push factors and can
include such things as lack of economic opportunity, poor quality of
life and limited chances for success. All of these were push factors for
African Americans in the South at the beginning of the 20th century,
especially in the minds of educated people of that time period.
One of those educated people was an African American sociologist
named Charles S. Johnson.
One of the essays Dr. Johnson wrote was entitled “The New Frontage
of American Life”. Alain Locke included it in his collection of essays –
The New Negro. In it, Dr. Johnson explains the push factors that led
millions of southern Blacks to leave the South in favor of the North
in the early 20
th
century
12
Dr. Charles S. Johnson
Dr. Charles S. Johnson (1893 – 1956) was a sociologist and the
rst African American president of Fisk University, a historically
black college or university (HBCU) in Nashville, Tennessee*. Dr.
Johnson was a life-long advocate of equal rights for all Americans.
The author of several books and essays on history, politics and
the ght for equal rights, Dr. Johnson was among the rst to
publicly celebrate the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision
Brown v Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation
in American public schools. Dr. Johnson died of a heart attack at
the age of 63 in 1956.
* Historically Black Colleges and Universities or HBCUs for short, served a very important role in
educating generations of African Americans at a time when black people were not allowed
to go to many colleges or universities in America. Although African Americans can now attend
any college or university their grades and talents will allow them to enter, HBCUs continue to
play a significant role in educating and serving communities of color in the 21st century.
13
e New Frontage On American Life
by Charles S. Johnson
e cities of the North, stern, impersonal and enchanting, needed
men of the brawny muscles, which Europe, suddenly aming with
war, had ceased to supply, when the black hordes came on from the
South like a silent, encroaching shadow. Five hundred thousand there
were in the rst three-year period. ese had yielded with an almost
uncanny unanimity of triumphant approval to urge to migration,
closing in rst upon the little towns of the South, then upon the cities
near the towns, and, with an unfailing consistency, sooner or later,
they boarded a Special bound North, to close in upon these cities
which lured them, with an ultimate appeal, to their gay lights and high
wages, unoppressive anonymity, crowds, excitement, and feverish
struggle for life.
ere was Chicago in the West known far and wide for its colossal
abattoirs*, whose placarded warehouses, set close by the railroad,
dotted every sizeable town of the South, calling for men; Chicago,
remembered for the fairyland wonders of the World’s Fair; home of
the fearless, taunting “race paper”**, and above all things, of mills
clamoring for men.
And there was Pittsburgh, gloomy, cheerless—bere of the Poles
and Lithuanians, Croatians and Austrians who had trucked and
smelted its steel. And along with Pittsburgh, the brilliant satellite
anonymity, n. the state of being unknown
placarded, v. to be covered with signs
bereft, adj. to be missing or absent
smelt, v. the process involving heat that is used to remove steel from ore (smelts)
* The phrase “colossal abattoirs” means “big slaughterhouses”. In the early 20th century, Chicago
was the leading meat-packing center in America and the nation’s largest stockyards and meat
processing plants were located there.
** Probably refers to The Chicago Defender.
14
towns of Bethlehem and Duquesne and Homestead. e solid but
alert Europeans in 1916 had deserted the lower bases of industry and
gone aer munitions money, or home to ght. Creeping out, they le
a void, which to ll, tempted industry to desperate measures. One
railroad line brought in 121,000 of these new laborers graciously and
gratuitously. e road-beds and immense construction projects of the
State were in straits and the great mills wanted men.
And there was New York City, with its polite personal service and its
Harlem – the Mecca of Negroes the country over. Delightful Harlem
of the eete East! Old families, brownstone* mansions, a step from
worshipful Broadway**, the end of the rainbow for early relatives driing
from home into the exciting world; the factories and the docks, the
stupendous clothing industries, and buildings to be “superintended”, a
land of opportunity for musicians, actors and those who wanted to be,
the national headquarters of everything but the government.
And there was Cleveland with a faint Southern exposé but with
iron mills; and St. Louis, one of the rst cities of the North, a city
of mixed traditions, but with great foundries, brick and terra-cotta
works; Detroit, the automobile center, with its sophistication of skill
and fancy wages reecting the daring economic policies of Henry
Ford; Hartford, Connecticut, where, indeed, the rst experiment with
southern labor, was tried on the tobacco plantations skirting the city;
Akron and its rubber; Philadelphia with its comfortable old traditions
and the innumerable little industrial towns where fabulous wages
were paid.
munition, n. military weapon (munitions)
Mecca
, n. a sacred Muslim city in Saudi Arabia; all Muslims make a pilgrimmage to Mecca during their lifetime
effete, adj. over refined, without vigor or energy
foundry, n. factories where metal structures are made (foundries)
* Brownstone is a type of sandstone that was used to cover homes in New York City. The term
is also used to mean any townhouse built in the city during the 1800s, even those not made of
brownstone.
** Broadway is a large, important street in New York City.
15
II
Migrations, thinks Professor Carr-Saunders—and he is conrmed by
history—are nearly always due to the inuence of an idea. Population
crowding and economic debasement, are, by their nature, more or less
constant. In the case of the Negroes, it was not exclusively an idea, but
an idea brought within the pale of possibility. By tradition and probably
by temperament the Negro is a rural type. His métier (occupation) is
agriculture. To this economy his mental and social habits have been
adjusted... .
A new type of Negro is evolving – a city Negro. ...in ten years, Negroes
have been actually transplanted from one culture to another.
Where once there were personal and intimate relations, in which individuals
were in contact at practically all points of their lives, there are now group
relations in which the whole structure is broken up and reassorted, casting
them in contact at only one or two points in their lies. e old controls are
no longer expected to operate. Whether apparent or not, the newcomers
are forced to reorganize their lives, to enter a new status and adjust to it
that eager restlessness which prompted them to leave home. Church, lodge,
gossip, respect of friends, established customs, social and racial, exercise
controls in the small Southern community. e church is the center for
face-to-face relations. e pastor is the leader. e role of the pastor and
the social utility of the church are obvious in this letter sent home:
“Dear pastor: I nd it my duty to write you my whereabouts,
also family…I shall send my church money in a few days. I am
trying to inuence our members here to the same. I received notice
printed in a R.R. car (Get right God). O, I had nothing so striking
as the above mottoe (sic)*. Let me no (sic)** how is our church. I
am so anxious to no**. My wife always talking about her seat in the
church want to no** who occupies it. Yours in Christ.”
debasement, n. the act of making something less valuable
* motto
** know
16
Religion aords an outlet for the emotional energies thwarted in other
directions…
In the new environment there are many and varied substitutes which
answer more or less directly the myriad desires indiscriminately
comprehended by the church. e complaint of the ministers that these
“emancipated”souls “stray away from God” when they reach the city is
perhaps warranted on the basis of the xed status of the church in the
South, but it is not an accurate interpretation of what has happened.
When the old ties are broken new satisfactions are sought. Sometimes,
the Young Men’s Christian Association functions. is has in some
cities made rivalry between the churches and the Associations. More
oen the demands of the young exceed the “sterilized” amusements
of Christian organizations. It is not uncommon to nd groups who
faithfully attend church Sunday evenings and as faithfully seek further
stimulation in a cabaret aerwards. Many have been helped to nd
themselves, no doubt, by having their old churches and pastors
reappear in the new home and resume control. But too oen, as with
European immigrants, the family loses control over the children who
become assimilated more rapidly than their parents. Tragic evidences
of this appear coldly detailed in the records of delinquency…
ere is a reorganization of attitudes. ere is a racial as well as a
social disorientation. For those who fed their hopes and expectations
on a new status which would aord an escape from unrighteous and
oppressive limitations of the South, there is a sensitiveness about
any reminder of the station from which they have been so recently
emancipated—a hair-trigger resentment, a furious revolt against the
myriad, adj. many or countless
emancipated, adj. made free
warranted, adj. justified
cabaret, n. a nightclub
assimilate, v. make a part of, absorb fully into society (assimilated)
delinquency, n. minor crime committed by a young person
disorientation, n. confusion
unrighteous, adj. wicked
oppressive, adj., tyrannical; severe
hair-trigger, adj. over responsive; easily made to react
17
years of training in the precise boundaries of their place, a fear of
disclosing the weakness of submission where it is not expected, an
expansiveness and pretense at ease in unaccustomed situation. Exact
balance is dicult. Here are some of the things that register: John
Diggs writes home to his friend this letter:
“Dear Partner:…I am all xed now and living well, I don’t have
to work hard. Don’t have to mister every little boy comes along. I
haven’t heard a white man call a colored a nigger you know how
– since I been here. I can ride in the street or steam car anywhere
I get a seat. I don’t care to mix with white…I am not crazy about
being with white folks, but if I have to pay the same fare I have
learn to want the same acomidation
*
(sic) and if you are rst in a
place here shopping you don’t have to wait till all the white folks
get thro tradeing yet amid all this I love the good old south and am
praying that God may give every well wisher a chance to be a man
regardless of color…”
thro: through
tradeing: trading
* accommodation
For Further Consideration:
1. In the opening paragraphs of this essay, Johnson identifies
cities and the main industries that they were known for at the
time. Name one of the cities he listed and the industry that
was associated with it.
2. Which environment does Johnson believe most African
Americans who initially moved to the North were better suited
for? What argument does he make to support this claim?
3. According to Johnson, what role did churches play in the lives
of Black people in the South?
4. What did Johnson believe the biggest adjustment Southern
Black people who moved North had to make? Use evidence
from the essay to support your answer.
18
James Weldon Johnson—
A Multitalented Renaissance Man
* The Florida Bar is an official state professional organization that attorneys must belong to in
order to practice law in court. In order to be admitted to the Bar, attorneys must pass a test.
James Weldon Johnson (1871 – 1938)
A native of north-central
Florida, James Weldon
Johnson (1871 – 1938) was
one of the most prolic
gures of the Harlem
Renaissance, and was in
fact, a REAL renaissance
man. What is a Renaissance
Man? A Renaissance Man is
dened as someone who
has interests and talents in a
variety of subjects and topics.
Johnson was one of the rst
African American attorneys
admitted to the Florida Bar*. Also during his lifetime, Johnson
was an educator, diplomat, poet, songwriter, historian; and was
once the executive secretary for the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The following
is a selection that appeared in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology
The New Negro. Here, Johnson presents a romanticized view
of Harlem as a destination of choice for southern African
Americans migrating to the North.
19
Harlem: e Cultural Capital
by James Weldon Johnson
In the history of New York, the significance of the name Harlem has
changed from Dutch to Irish to Jewish to Negro. Of these changes,
the last has come most swiftly. Throughout colored America, from
Massachusetts to Mississippi, and across the continent to Los Angeles
and Seattle, its name, which as late as fifteen years ago had scarcely
been heard, now stands for the Negro metropolis. Harlem is indeed
the great Mecca for the sightseer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the
adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the
whole Negro world; for the lure of it has reached down to every island
of the Carib Sea and has penetrated even into Africa.
In the make-up of New York, Harlem is not merely a Negro colony or
community, it is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.
It is not a slum or a fringe, it is located in the heart of Manhattan* and
occupies one of the most beautiful and healthful sections of the city.
It is not a “quarter”of dilapidated tenements but is made up of new-
law apartments** and handsome dwellings, with well-paved and well-
lighted streets. It has its own churches, social and civic centers, shops,
theaters and other places of amusement. And it contains more Negroes
to the square mile than any other spot on earth. A stranger who rides
up magnificent Seventh Avenue on a bus or in an automobile must be
struck with surprise at the transformation which takes place after he
crosses One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. Beginning there, the
population suddenly darkens and he rides through twenty-five solid
blocks where the passersby, the shoppers, those sitting in restaurants,
metropolis, n. an important city
quarter, n. a part of a city
dilapidated, adj. in disrepair
* Manhattan is the island where New York City is located.
** The Tenement House Act of 1901 (New York City) imposed stricter standards for apartment
building construction, including improved light, ventilation, and toilet facilities. Such buildings
were called “new-law” structures.
20
coming out of theaters, standing in doorways and looking out of
windows are practically all Negroes; and then he emerges where the
population as suddenly becomes white again. There is nothing just
like it in any other city in the country, for there is no preparation for
it; no change in the character of the houses and streets; no change,
indeed, in the appearance of the people, except their color.
. . . the Negro colony was becoming more stable; the churches were
being moved from the lower part of the city; social and civic centers
were being formed; and gradually a community was being evolved.
Following the outbreak of the war in Europe Negro Harlem received a
new and tremendous impetus. Because of the war thousands of aliens
in the United States rushed back to their native lands to join the colors
and immigration practically ceased. The result was a critical shortage
in labor. This shortage was rapidly increased as the United States went
more and more largely into the business of furnishing munitions and
supplies to the warring countries. To help meet this shortage of common
labor Negroes were brought up from the South. The government itself
took the first steps, following the practice in vogue in Germany of
shifting labor according to the supply and demand in various parts of
the country. The example of the government was promptly taken up by
the big industrial concerns, which sent hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of labor agents into the South who recruited Negroes by wholesale. I
was in Jacksonville, Fla., for a while at that time, and I sat one day and
watched the stream of migrants passing to take the train. For hours
they passed steadily, carrying flimsy suitcases, new and shiny, rusty
old ones, bursting at the seams, boxes and bundles and impedimenta
of all sorts, including banjos, guitars, birds in cages and what not.
impetus, n. the driving force that causes something to happen
alien, n. foreigner; immigrant from another country (aliens)
join the colors, v. join the military
shift, v. to move (shifting)
impedimenta, n. bulky things or equipment
21
Similar scenes were being enacted in cities and towns all over that region.
The first wave of the great exodus of Negroes from the South was on.
Great numbers of these migrants headed for New York or eventually got
there, and naturally the majority went up into Harlem. But the Negro
population of Harlem was not swollen by migrants from the South
alone; the opportunity for Negro labor exerted its pull upon the Negroes
of the West Indies*, and those islanders in the course of time poured
into Harlem to the number of twenty-five thousand or more…
…These newcomers did not have to look for work; work looked for
them, and at wages of which they had never even dreamed. And here is
where the unlooked for, the unprecedented, the miraculous happened.
According to all preconceived notions, these Negroes suddenly earning
large sums of money for the first time in their lives should have had their
heads turned; they should have squandered it in the most silly and absurd
manners imaginable. Later, after the United States had entered the war
and even Negroes in the South were making money fast, many stories
in accord with the tradition came out of that section. There was the one
about the colored man who went into a general store and on hearing
a phonograph for the first time promptly ordered six of them, one for
each child in the house. I shall not stop to discuss whether Negroes in
the South did that sort of thing or not, but I do know that those who
got to New York didn’t. The Negroes of Harlem, for the greater part,
worked and saved their money. Nobody knew how much they had saved
until congestion made expansion necessary for tenants and ownership
profitable for landlords, and they began to buy property. Persons who
would never be suspected of having money bought property.
enact, v. to act out (enacted)
exodus, n. a mass departure
unprecedented, adj. never happened before
preconceived, adj. a belief of something before facts
congestion, n. overcrowding
* The West Indies are a group of islands bordering the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. During
the 17th century, thousands of Africans were brought to these islands by different European
countries to serve as slave laborers on the sugar plantations.
22
…It is true that Harlem is a Negro community, well defined and stable;
anchored to its fixed homes, churches, institutions, business and
amusement places; having its own working, business and professional
classes. It is experiencing a constant growth of group consciousness
and community feeling…
…Harlem grows more metropolitan and more a part of New York all the
while. Why is it then that its tendency is not to become a mere “quarter”? I
shall give three reasons that seem to me to be important in their order. First,
the language of Harlem is not alien; it is not Italian or Yiddish; it is English.
Harlem talks American, reads American, thinks American. Second,
Harlem is not physically a “quarter.” It is not a section cut off. It is merely
a zone through which four main arteries of the city run. Third, the fact
that there is little or no gang labor gives Harlem Negroes the opportunity
for individual expansion and individual contacts with the life and spirit of
New York. A thousand Negroes from Mississippi put to work as a gang in
a Pittsburgh steel mill will for a long time remain a thousand Negroes from
Mississippi. Under the conditions that prevail in New York they would all
within six months become New Yorkers. The rapidity with which Negroes
become good New Yorkers is one of the marvels to observers. These three
reasons form a single reason why there is small probability that Harlem
will ever be a point of race friction between the races in New York.
For Further Consideration:
1. Using evidence from the passage you have just read how do the
experiences Johnson relates about the Great Migration’s impact on
Harlem reflect what you learned from reading the earlier passage
on the Great Migration?
2. Johnson states that in the early 1920s, Harlem was on its way to
becoming a “stable neighborhood”. What evidence does he offer to
support this claim?
3. In the selection, Johnson claims that Harlem was becoming more “a
part of New York,” and was not in danger of isolating itself from the
rest of the city. What are the three reasons he gives for this?
metropolitan, adj. city-like; diverse
artery, n. route; road (arteries)
23
The Role of the Black Press in the Great Migration
In the early 20th century, Americans received their news and
information from reading newspapers. Because of this, newspapers
performed a very important function in American society. Out of
the hundreds of papers that were in circulation over 100 years
ago, several of them catered to African Americans. Among the two
with the largest circulations were The Chicago Defender and The
Amsterdam News. Founded in 1905 by Robert Abbott, The Chicago
Defender grew its subscription base to half a million readers
nationally, after its humble beginnings in the kitchen of its founder
landlord’s apartment. Himself a southern migrant, Abbott used
his weekly paper as a platform to amplify the ravages of southern
racism. Based out of New York City, The Amsterdam News has played
a prominent role in African American aairs since its founding in
1909. Along with The Defender, The Amsterdam News printed job
bulletins, train schedules, and information on public facilities and
services like parks and schools. They also printed news of Southern
lynchings, and other forms of mistreatment and discrimination
Black people faced in the South.
Harlem’s version of The Defender was the New York Amsterdam News.
Like The Defender, The Amsterdam News started with a modest initial
investment with a determined founder. James Anderson edited
and published his new paper out of his home, printing a paper that
focused on local concerns and the activities of African American
social organizations. In 1910, Anderson relocated his paper’s
oces to Harlem and throughout the Renaissance frequently
published the works of notable contributors like Langston Hughes
and W.E.B. Du Bois. Like The Defender, The Amsterdam News also
lynching, n. the act of killing someone to carry out perceived justice outside of the proper legal channels
(lynchings)
24
printed stories and editorials that had the eect of inuencing the
Black movement to the North. Both papers relied on an informal
distribution network of railroad workers known as porters to
circulate their papers to hungry audiences in the South. Porters,
typically black men, were railroad workers who assisted passengers
with their baggage and
served them food and drink during their
trips. With the opportunities
for travel and relatively high wages,
these jobs were highly sought and considered one of the best jobs
a black man could have at this time. Porters traveling South would
take copies of papers like The Defender and The Amsterdam News on
their trips to the South and arrange for copies of them to be picked
up by contacts who would then get them into the hands of people
in their community.
The following is an article that was printed in the December 15,
1926 edition of The New York Amsterdam News. Read it and answer
the questions that follow.
Joel Augustus Rogers
Joel Augustus Rogers was a Black
writer, lecturer, anthropologist,
historian, journalist, and publisher
who was born in Jamaica in 1880.
He came to the United States
in 1906. J.A. Rogers studied the
history of Africa and African
Americans in the United States.
He challenged stereotypes
that were held about African
Americans and scientific racism.
25
Impressions of Dixie:
Another Emancipation Coming
by J.A. Rogers
Northern born Negroes, lled with horror at tales of lynching and
segregation in the South, are inclined to think that the migration to the
North was due, primarily, to those things. Beyond the few who were
chased by the mob, it is safe to say that the great majority came because
of oppression in the pocketbook, and they saw relief in the North, or
came because of better business projects. In short, they boiled with
indignation, not at the lynchings, but at the size of the pay envelope.
And when work slackened in the North, they returned to the South
in hordes, the majority remaining, of course. Many workers told me
with some heat that they could get jobs at home they couldn’t get in the
North. One blacksmith, working at his trade, said the best job he could
get in Detroit was as a helper.
Everywhere I found Negroes in the South doing work, mechanical work,
that could have been secured only with great diculty in the North. Of
course, there ought to be no cause for surprise at this, since a large portion
of the labor there is black, just as in the North, the bulk of it is white
.
Further proof that the migration is economic is the fact that there is a
continuous migration of northern negroes to the South – of teachers,
clerks, accountants, stenographers, insurance agents, who come to ll
surplus white collar jobs in Negro concerns*. Many marry and make
themselves at home, assuming the protective psychology, and even
Emancipation, n. liberation or freeing from slavery. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation during the Civil War which changed the legal status of African Americans who were
enslaved in the states at war with the Union to that of free men.
indignation, n. anger
white-collar, adj an office job that requires skills and earns an above average salary
* Concerns here is another word for “businesses”.
26
becoming anti-North, while many are heartily sick of it, but remain for
the money’s sake.
ese facts may seem to bear out the southern white’s statement that the
South is the best place for the Negro, but it points to something worse:
it shows that the Caucasianized* Negro, here as well in the West Indies
and South Africa, is so much of a white man within, and hence so lled
with aversion for himself that he hasn’t sucient group-sympathy to be
irked by conditions that would be most galling to the whites were they
in the Negro’s place.
When the southern white man says the best place for the Negro is the
South, his is thinking not of the Negro, but of himself. He prefers to
employ Negroes in certain capacities or to have them around mainly
because of lower wages, color egotism, the Negro’s denitely xed
social position…I have always felt from my experiences in America,
Europe, and elsewhere that white persons have less color prejudice than
mulattoes** and blacks.
What the whites want [is] the economic exploitation of the Negro . . .
For instance, the Jim-Crow law of Georgia expressly provides that when
a colored man travels as the servant of a white, he rides in the white
coach. is is the law, written or unwritten over the entire South, and
includes convicts in the charge of white sheris.
aversion, n. a strong dislike
exploitation, n. to misuse someone to benefit from their work
* Caucasianized is an adjective used to describe a Black person who has adopted the prejudices of a
white person.
** Mulatto(-es) was an early 20
th
century word for some one of mixed-race heritage, usually of white
and black parentage. It is an outdated term no longer considered acceptable to use. Bi-racial is the
more modern and accurate term.
27
. . . Not ten miles from Atlanta, the leading city of the South, I saw
Negroes, so low in the scale of civilization, their single suit of clothing
so encrusted with dirt, that they would have been better o had they
remained in the jungles of Africa. ere, at least their nude skins would
have been washed by the dew. And all of this in America, whose purse
is bursting with gold.
Another emancipation is due…omas Jeerson foresaw, in a similar
evil and sad* that he trembled for his country when he remembered
that God was just
**
.
For Further Consideration:
1. What role did Black newspapers like The Chicago Defender
and The Amsterdam News play in promoting the northward
migration of African Americans in the early 20
th
century?
2. According to the article’s author, what was the real reason
southern African Americans left for the North in the early 20
th
century?
3. Based on what the author writes, does he believe life for African
Americans in the North would be better than it would be for
them in the South? Explain your answer by using evidence from
the text.
* This article has been copied many times, and as a result, the text has gotten a bit garbled.
We think the best translation would be: Thomas Jefferson foresaw a similar evil and said that he
trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.
** “Impressions of Dixie” The New York Amsterdam News (1922-1938); December 15, 1926; ProQuest
Historical Newspapers; New York Amsterdam News pg. 20.
28
T N
The Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and into
the North that started during World War I, showed no signs of letting
up in the 1920s. Partially due to this streaming ux of new residents
into America’s urban centers, and partially due to the return of Black
World War I veterans whose visions had been expanded by travel
abroad, Harvard educated intellectual Alain Locke told Americans
in 1925 that there was a new spirit evident in Black America. Locke
declared that this spirit was one in which Black people embraced
their African ancestry, no longer feeling it necessary to be ashamed
of who they were. Locke gave this new identity a name: The New
Negro. Besides being a new identity, the New Negro gave birth to
a new way of thinking and new sets of ideas. Although these ideas
and the spirit of the New Negro could be seen all over the urban
North, it was the most vibrant in Harlem, New York. By the 1920s,
this New York City neighborhood had become the social and
political capital for Black America, and several organizations were
headquartered, established, or had a large presence here. Harlem
was the center of the universe for the young or young at heart,
especially if they had a heart for the welfare of Black people and
free expression of Black people. “The younger generation,” declared
Locke, “is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake
in the masses . . . Each generation . . . will have its creed.” By the
art, music and culture that was created in this community, 1920s
Harlem represented everything Locke suggested about this bold
new attitude and these fresh, exciting ideas.
29
e New Negro
by Alain Locke
Historians believe that there would not have been a Harlem
Renaissance had it not been for the intellectual contributions of
American philosopher Alain Locke.
In 1925, he published a collection of poetry and essays of the most
brilliant African American thinkers of that time. It was entitled The
New Negro: An Interpretation. is important work set out to disprove
negative stereotypes about African Americans and their ability to
produce works of art and literature.
prestigious, adj. inspiring admiration and respect
Alain Locke
Born in Philadelphia,
Alain Locke (1885-
1954) was one of the
most academically
accomplished African
Americans of his era. He
received his Ph. D. from
Harvard University and
was the first Black Rhodes
Scholar, which is a very
prestigious academic
honor for the world’s best
and brightest.
30
Forward from e New Negro – by Alain Locke
is volume aims to document the New Negro culturally and socially –
to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro
in America that have so signicantly taken place in the last few years.
ere is ample evidence of a New Negro in the latest phases of social
change and progress, but still more in the internal world of the Negro
mind and spirit….Whoever wishes to see the Negro in his essential
traits, in the full perspective of his achievement and possibilities, must
seek the enlightenment of that self-portraiture which the present
developments of Negro culture are oering…So far as his culturally
articulate, we shall let the Negro speak for himself…Separate as it may
be in color and substance, the culture of the Negro is a pattern integral
with the times and with its cultural setting…Although there are few
centers that can be pointed out approximating Harlem’s signicance,
the full signicance of that even is a racial awakening on a national
and perhaps even a world scale.
…Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new
centers, it is nding a new soul. ere is a fresh spiritual and cultural
focusing. We have, as the heralding sign, an unusual outburst of
creative expression. ere is a renewed race-spirit that consciously
and proudly sets itself apart. Justiably then, we speak of the oerings
of this book embodying these ripening forces as culled from the rst
fruits of the Negro Renaissance*.
e New Negro – by Alain Locke
In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics
has happened in the life of the American Negro…e sociologist, the
philanthropist, the race-leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but
* The New Negro: An Interpretation. (New York, NY: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925.), pp. ix-xi.
31
they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their
formula. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology;
the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the
professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial
problem in the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life.
….With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of
the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase….
the migrant masses, shiing from countryside to city, hurdle several
generations of experience at a leap,…the same thing happens…in the
life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his
art, his education and his new outlook…e day of “aunties”, “uncles”
and “mammies” is…gone…Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on*…
…e tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be
fully explained as a blind ood started by the demands of war industry
coupled with the shutting o of foreign migration, or by the pressure of
poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections
of the South and Southwest. Neither labor demand, the boll-weevil nor
the Ku Klux Klan** is a basic factor, however contributory any or all
of them may have been. e 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…a chance for the improvement of conditions.
* The use of the term mammies is referring to a time in the southern United States when black
nursemaids were used to care for white children. Uncle Tom was used to describe an African
American who betrayed his culture and was subservient to white people. Sambo was a word
used to refer to a Black person. All of these terms are considered offensive and are not used today.
** First started after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) first targeted violence against newly freed
African Americans. The organization continues to exist as a white supremacy hate group, targeting
Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, as well as immigrants, LGBT and other minority populations.
boll-weevil, n. a type of beetle that eats and destroys cotton plants
32
…Take Harlem as an instance of this. Here in Manhattan is not merely
the largest Negro community in the world, but the rst concentration
in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted
the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought
together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man
from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant,
the student, the businessman, the professional man, artist, poet,
musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter
and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives
and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been
the nding of one another…prejudice have thrown these dissimilar
elements into a common area of contact and interaction…In Harlem,
Negro life is seizing upon its rst chances for group expression and
self-determination. It is – or promises to be – a race capital.
…If in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full
initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of
these things, celebrate the attainment of a signicant and satisfying
new phase of group development.
For Further Consideration:
1. According to Locke, what was his reason for compiling the work
contained in The New Negro?
2. Using support from the passages, how would you describe
what Locke meant by “The New Negro” and how was he
different from “The Old Negro”?
3. What evidence does Locke offer to support his belief
that Harlem would be the cultural center of an important
movement?
4. In what ways was Harlem a diverse place for Black people? Give
specific examples from the readings.
attainment, n. an achievement
33
The New Negro and the Historic Sense of Self
– A New Way of Defining What a Pioneer is
What do you think of when you hear the word “pioneer?” Do you
think of people in horse drawn wagons moving to the Old West to
create new communities while ghting o hostile Native Americans
to do so? Or perhaps you may imagine hundreds of people getting
in large ships and sailing from Europe escaping religious or political
persecution to begin new lives in an unknown part of the world.
You may even think of astronauts or space travelers as pioneers.
After all, they travel to the greatest unknown of all: outer space.
But, if a pioneer is someone who ventures into unknown spaces
to create new opportunities for themselves and their families,
couldn’t African Americans who participated in the Great Migration
be considered pioneers?
One American writer and scholar certainly thought so. Paul U.
Kellogg was an early 20th century sociologist who wrote an article
entitled “The Negro Pioneers” in 1925. A sociologist is someone who
studies human societies and the various roles that people play in
those societies. Kellogg oered a unique perspective on the millions
of African Americans who left all that they knew for new lives in
dierent parts of the country. Kellogg compared them to dierent
types of white pioneers from earlier American history who had
settled or re-settled dierent parts of the country that eventually
made the country what it was. Why do you suppose
Kellogg did
this? This is one of the questions you will be asked to think about
after you read the following excerpt from Kellogg’s essay.
persecution, n. poor and unfair treatment of people who differ in some way - by appearance, religious
beliefs, values, or habits - from the majority of the population
34
About Paul U. Kellogg
An American social reformer and journalist, Paul U. Kellogg (1879
-1958), Kellogg was best known for ground-breaking sociological
research that led to the elimination of the seven-day work week. A
life-long advocate for workers and civil rights, Kellogg’s contribution
to the Harlem Renaissance was an essay he wrote that was included
in Locke’s The New Negro collection. In “The Negro Pioneers,”
Kellogg compared Southern Black people who moved to the North
to the Great Migration to Americans who settled America in earlier
times; from the Pilgrims and others who founded English colonies,
to Americans who settled in western frontiers during later times.
35
e Negro Pioneers
by Paul U. Kellogg
In Vandemark’s Folly and other of his novels, Herbert Quick* interpreted
the settlement of the Mississippi basin. He gave us its valor and epic
qualities. But in that series of remarkable biographical sketches which
were cut short by his death, he lamented the cultural wastage of
American pioneering. He laid a wreath on the unknown graves of the
artists, poets, singers, the talented youth, who were submerged in the
westward trek of peoples on the new continent as, in the course of
two hundred and y years, they hewed their way through the forests
and at last came out on the open prairie. In the northward movement
of the Negroes in the last ten years, we have another folk migration
which in human signicance can be compared only with this pushing
back of the Western frontier in the rst half of the last century or with
the waves of immigration which have swept in from overseas in the
last half. Indeed, though numerically far smaller than either of these,
this folk movement is unique. For this time we have a people singing
as they come – breaking through to cultural expression and economic
freedom together.
In our generation the children and grandchildren of the settlers of the
Middle West have uprooted themselves as their sires did, but to-day
their faces are turned cityward. In this new urban shi, the Negro is
lament, v. expressed sadness for (lamented)
hew, v. to cut down with an ax
migration, n. a large group moving from one place to another
sires, n. a person of higher social status, usually used when referring to royalty
* Herbert Quick (1865–1925) was an American novelist, businessman and politician. In 1922, he
wrote Vandermark’s Folly, an historical romance set in a fictional Iowa town. Vandermark, the main
character for whom the novel is named, lives the life that generations of Americans lived in settling
the midwestern United States. Though the book is fictional, its popularity and positive critical
reception at the time of its release were indications of the way that the novel spoke to a generation
of Americans who either remember their own experiences settling wilderness America, or who
were raised on the stories of those who did.
36
sharing, but so swily and with such a peculiar quickening as he pours
for the rst time into the new terrain of American economic and
community life, that for him is more than a migration, it is a rebirth.
e full signicance of this belated sharing in the American tradition
of pioneering by black folk from the South should not escape us; nor
the rare fortune that they bring with them cultural talents long buried
and only half revealed in the cotton lands from which they come.
In a way, two great modes of impulse have been at work in the
settlement of the United States, other than the material bettering of
one’s lot.
In no small part, ours has been the history of the under-dog – of
common people rising against kings and overlords, of Pilgrims and
Puritans and Catholics working loose from religious intolerance, of
rebels seeking a new freedom, of adventures breaking away from the
xity of things. is tradition we share with England and Western
Europe; the impulse became a dominant force in New England and
was at ood throughout the tidewater colonies when in the Revolution
they threw o the Georges. We may trace its re-emergence in a new
form even in the part which the South took in the Civil War. is may
be put in terms of its idealists, as resistance to imposed authority by
men who sought the governance of their own lives, however much
they might deny it to their slaves.
We have another tradition – or, at least, another mode of the same
impulse. Not alone rebellion against what has been, but opportunity
for what may be, shaped its course. Set o by three thousand miles of
sea, settled on a continent which had been kept in reserve ten thousand
years, the spirit of our people has been molded by the frontiers we
cleared. It drew and grew from the open spaces, from wildernesses
giving way to settlements, from the building processes of countryside
and commonwealth and nation. Its like is not known in the older
countries of the world, still in the process of shaking loose from old
like, n. something similar
37
tyrannies. We may abuse this heritage, but it is ours, a broader and
more dynamic, more creative conception of liberty. Spiritually we are
rebels. But, we are also pioneers.
e Civil War may be interpreted in its nal outcome, as the clash
between these two great streams of impulse in American life and the
triumph of this newer native embodiment of the thing that has stirred
and molded the American soul.
For, while the record of Western settlement in our dealings with the
Indians* is a chapter not without black pages which may be compared
with our slave trade, nonetheless it was the free play of free men on free
land that built up the Middle West: and it was the rapidly mounting
weight of men and means of that hinterland, ung into the conict
by common faith in an order which meant opportunity for all, which
tipped the scales as between North and South, preserved the Union
and freed the slaves. Lincoln was its man; not its leader, merely, but
framed of the bone and marrow of its plain people; his spirit, the
embodiment of the frontiersmen and settlers.
And what has this to do with the northward migration of the Negro-
or its counterpart, his partnership in agricultural reconstruction in the
South? It has more to do than that children and grandchildren of the
emancipated slaves enter the gates of the cities with the children and
grandchildren of the old frontier. Or even that in this new generation
they are fellow adventurers as never before in the inveterate quest of
our people for new horizons – on the land and in industry. ese things
are in themselves of tremendous import. But, my point is, that in the
pioneering of the new epoch, they are getting into stride with that of
the old. By way of the typical American experience, they became for
the rst time a part of its living tradition.
inveterate, adj. having a particular habit or interest that is not likely to change
epoch, n. a period of time, or era
* The word Indians refers to Native Americans, or the Indigenous people who lived on the land that
is now the United States.
38
e great folkway which is America need no longer be a thing abstract,
apart from them. e Negro boy, who with his satchel steps o the
train in Pittsburg or Chicago, Detroit or New York, to make his way
into what Robert Woods called the city wilderness, may draw at the
same springs of inspiration as the boy next him from Wisconsin or
Kansas, or that other who, still westward bent, throws in his lot in the
valley of some irrigation projects in the mountain states. e same can
be said of the Corn Club boys and girls of Georgia or South Carolina,
who are building up farm homes with new tools and husbandry in
regions which have been held in the mesh of a worn out economy.
e Hampton and Tuskegee graduates, the farm demonstrators and
co-operators who break that mesh, its tough warp of the one crop and
its binding woof of the credit system, and help weave in its stead the
texture of a new and more self-reliant rural life, are settlers in a very real
sense. And so are the men and women who, in a great city district like
Harlem, against the pressure of overcrowding and high rents, against
the drag of black exploiters and white, and the hazards of sickness and
precariousness of livelihood – these men and these women, who strand
by strand fashion the fabric of the good life in a city neighborhood, are
of the breed of the old pioneers. ey are builders
.
Do not mistake me, the land they come to is not all milk and honey.
Nor was the way of the frontiersman, or the frontier woman, or the
frontier child. Nor were these all cast in heroic or congenial, or even
tolerable, molds. But the new order in the Southern countryside,
the new order in the Northern city, oers an economic foothold, as
did the old clearing. It calls on the spirit of team play, as did the old
settlement with its road building and barn raisings. ere is a smack
of opportunity and freedom in the air. e very process as bound up
in those changes in individual fortune, is instinct with that group
consciousness of common adventure, is fresh with the tang of growth
warp and woof, n. the foundation or base of something
39
and expansion, which the wagon trains carried with them to the West,
and which became the theme of our pioneering.
ose of us who trace our blazed ways to the Atlantic Seaboard, to
Pilgrim Rock or James River blockhouse or Dutch trading post, can
perhaps not realize what it means to a people to have their vista of the
past shut in by whitewashed wall, mud chimney and whipping ring of a
slave street. No wonder in his new racial consciousness, the Negro digs
up his past and searches out in Africa the genesis of a proud tradition.
My thought is that the new opportunities he is broaching in American
life and labor throw open another vista of the past, one of the New
World, to which he is not alien. is background may not be his to-
day, I grant; but by some compensating law of relativity, it will come
to meet him as he presses forward. Seldom in the history of the world
have a people moved North. Our history is of Westward expansion. So
coursed the great racial waves into Europe from the East.
We have had the experiment of peoples moving Southward –
Northmen and Frank* and the rest, owering out in a new and milder
climate. Here we are witnessing a reversal of that process. What its
outcome will be cannot be forecast. But it is something which, points
of compass aside, is kin to the whole trend of American experience.
It is a search for the new and democratic chance. It is pioneering.
It is also, an adventure in self-expression – not alone in political
and economic terms, but in things of the word and spirit. We have
witnessed in the United States the duress in which various immigrant
groups have been held until their cause was taken by rare people as
Jane Addams and Jacob Riis, endowed not alone with understanding,
but with the art of interpretation. e Negro has had no language
barrier; but he has been hemmed in by barbed wire entanglements
genesis, n. the beginning or origin
duress, n. the compulsion to do something against one’s will
* Frank refers to German speaking people.
40
of prejudice and xed conceptions. He is learning ways of his own
to surmount them. He employs winged gis that shoot across them.
He brings song, music, dance, poetry, story-telling; rhythms and
color and drama, ardent feeling and eet thought. Not alone is his
a Northward migration within the connes of America, challenging
new communities with his presence. Not alone is it a shi from soil
to city. Not alone a breaking-away from the old inhibitions of a xed
and oen adverse social environment. He is readdressing himself to
America on a cultural plane; and in arenas where the old inhibitions
do not hold. A verse that pierces the heart meets no race barriers. A
song that lis the spirit with its lilt wings free in the democracy of art.
It would be dicult to overestimate the signicance of the Negro’s
employment of these cultural gis. A new generation of both races
respond to them. ey aord white America a new approach to what
we overlong dourly called the Race Problem. ey make for swier
understanding than a multitude of heavy treatises…Harlem presents
to the eye the look of any tenement and apartment district of New
York so far as its physical make-up is concerned. Occasionally some
writer dipped beneath the surface: Negro authors and periodicals had
borne witness to it; yet so far as the newspapers were concerned, it had
not registered, except as an area of real estate speculation and clashes,
and the police news and racial friction of a city quarter. Kipling gave
us the High Road to India in Kim. Sinclair Lewis set down America
in Main Street. But that contrast is not the whole story of East and
West; here was something as alluring as it was portentous happening
in our midst; but unobserved and swathed in the commonplace. How
to unfold it? Our number was cut from city cloth, it brought out the
seams of social problems which underlie it, but also, and in all its
inhibitions, n. the blocking of free activity or expression
adverse, adj. harmful
lilt, adj. rhythm
swathe, v. to wrap in several layers (swathed)
seam, n. place where two pieces of cloth are joined (seams)
41
For Further Consideration
1. Based on your reading of Kellogg’s essay, what is a pioneer?
2. Kellogg compares the experiences of African Americans who
relocated to the North during the Great Migration to the
experiences of European Americans from earlier junctures of
American history such as the Pilgrims of the colonial period
and the western settlers of the 19
th
century. Is this a valid
comparison? Why or Why not? Why do you believe Kellogg
does this? (HINT: Remember that the 1920s were a different
time and African Americans were not always treated fairly).
3. What are some of the reasons Kellogg gives for the importance
of art, poetry, music and dance to the African American
experience?
sheen, the cultural pattern that gave it texture. It proved a magic carpet
which swung the reader not across the minarets and bazaars of some
ancient Arabia, but the wells and shrines of a people’s renaissance. e
pageant of it swept past in pastel and story, poem and epic prose, and
the response was instant…
…this latest experience of the American Negro is properly a
promisefully racial revival, more fundamentally even, it is an
induction into the heritage of the national tradition, a baptism
of the American spirit that slavery cheated him out of, a maturing
experience that Reconstruction delayed. Now that materially and
spiritually, the Negro pioneers, and by his own initiative, shares the
common experience of all the others of America’s composite stock,
his venturing Americanism stakes indisputable claims in the benets
and resources of our democracy.
minaret, n. a tall tower on a Mosque (minarets)
revival, n. the restoration or renewal of interest
42
The New Negro Woman
In the early 20
th
century, Black women had to contend with
discrimination on two fronts, their race and their gender. Because
of their color, Black women were subjected to the same indignities
and threats of violence that Black men faced which made them
targets of physical assaults and denied access to opportunities.
Because of their gender, Black women faced the same types of
discrimination faced by white women the same time period, but
had none of the societal protections extended to them because of
their color. What an incredibly dicult position to be in!
Although the ght for women’s rights gained an important victory
with the ratication of the 19
th
Amendment, which gave women
the right to vote, the women’s rights movement often ignored the
unique plight of Black women. This complaint would plague the
women’s rights movement for the rest of the 20th century and
would expose a deep divide in a movement designed to make
America a fairer and more inclusive country.
Alain Locke was determined to include the voices of Black women
in his New Negro anthology. He wanted to make sure to give voice
to Black women whose perspectives were constantly ignored and
disregarded. The words of one contributing essayist in Locke’s New
Negro compilation eloquently describes the unique status of early
20
th
century Black women.
Elise Johnson McDougald
Born in 1885, Elise Johnson McDougald was
an educator, writer, and activist. She was the
first Black female principal in New York City
public schools. Her essay, “The Task of Negro
Womanhood”, is considered an early example
of African-American feminist writing. She
died in 1971 at the age of 86.
43
e Task of Negro Womanhood
by Elise Johnson McDougald
Throughout the years of history, woman has been the weather-vane,
the indicator, showing in which direction the wind of destiny blows.
Her status and development have augured [predicted] now calm and
stability, now swift currents of progress. What then is to be said of the
Negro woman of to-day, whose problems are of such import to her race?
A study of her contributions to any one community, throughout
America, would illuminate the pathway being trod by her people.
There is, however, an advantage in focusing upon the women of
Harlem – modern city in the world’s metropolis. Here, more than
anywhere else, the Negro woman is free from the cruder handicaps of
primitive household hardships and the grosser forms of sex and race
subjugation. Here, she has considerable opportunity to measure her
powers in the intellectual and industrial fields of the great city. The
questions naturally arise: “What are her difficulties?” and, “How is she
solving them?”
To answer these questions, one must have in mind not any one Negro
woman, but rather a colorful pageant of individuals, each differently
endowed. Like the red and yellow of the tiger-lily, the skin of one is
brilliant against the star-lit darkness of a racial sister. From grace to
strength, they vary in infinite degree, with traces of the race’s history
left in physical and mental outline on each. With a discerning mind,
one catches the multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro
women, and grasps the fact that their problems cannot be thought of
in mass.
Because only a few have caught this vision, even in New York, the
general attitude of mind causes the Negro woman serious difficulty.
subjugation, n the action of taking complete control of a group of people
44
She is conscious that what is left of chivalry is not directed toward
her. She realizes that the ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts, have
excluded her almost entirely. Instead, the grotesque Aunt Jemimas*
of the streetcar advertisements, proclaim only an ability to serve,
without grace of loveliness. Nor does the drama catch her finest spirit.
She is most often used to provoke the mirthless laugh of ridicule; or
to portray feminine viciousness or vulgarity not peculiar to Negroes.
This is the shadow over her. To a race naturally sunny comes the
twilight of self-doubt and a sense of personal inferiority. It cannot be
denied that these are potent and detrimental influences, though not
generally recognized because they are in the realm of the mental and
spiritual. More apparent are the economic handicaps which follow
her recent entrance into industry. It is conceded that she has special
difficulties because of the poor working conditions of her men. It is
not surprising that only the most determined women forge ahead to
results other than mere survival. To the gifted, the zest of meeting a
challenge is a compensating factor which often brings success. The
few who do prove their mettle, stimulate one to a closer study of how
this achievement is won under contemporary conditions.
Better to visualize the Negro woman at her job, our vision of a host
of individuals must once more resolve itself into groups on the basis
of activity. First, comes a very small leisure group – the wives and
* Aunt Jemima, like Uncle Tom, is a derogatory term that refers to a Black woman who is
subservient to white people. Aunt Jemima was a stereotypical African American character in
minstrel shows. The trademarked name and image of Aunt Jemima was used by the Quaker Oats
Company on their pancake mix and pancake syrup until 2021, when they were removed from
packaging due to the negative connotation associated with the name and image.
chivalry, n. good manners; the code of conduct of medieval knights
mirthless, adj. without joy or happiness
vulgarity, n. something that is crude or in bad taste
concede, v. to admit (conceded)
forge ahead, v. to move forward; to make progress
zest, n. great enthusiasm
compensating, adj. offsetting; counterbalancing
mettle, n. strength of character; ability to cope with difficulties
45
preside, v. to be in charge of; to watch over
acutely, adv. intensely
acquaintance, n. a person one knows (acquaintances)
kindred spirit, n. a person whose interests and experiences are similar to one’s own (kindred spirits)
daughters of men who are in business, in the professions and a few
well-paid service occupations. Second, a most active and progressive
group, the women in business and the professions. Third, the service,
with an even less fortunate fringe of casual workers, fluctuating with
the economic temper of the times.
The first is a pleasing group to see. It is picked for outward beauty
by Negro men with much the same feeling as other Americans of
the same economic class. Keeping their women free to preside over
the family, these women are affected by the problems of every wife
and mother, but touched only faintly by their race’s hardships. They
do share acutely in the prevailing difficulty of finding competent
household help.
Negro wives find Negro maids unwilling generally to work in their
own neighborhoods, for various reasons. They do not wish to work
where there is a possibility of acquaintances coming into contact with
them while they serve and they still harbor the misconception that
Negroes of any station are unable to pay as much as persons of the
other race. It is in these homes, modest motors, tennis, golf and country
clubs, trips to Europe and California, make for social standing. The
problem confronting the refined Negro family is to know others of
the same achievement. The search for kindred spirits gradually grows
less difficult; in the past it led to the custom of visiting all the large
cities in order to know similar groups of cultured Negro people. In
recent years, the more serious minded Negro woman’s visit to Europe
has been extended from months to years for the purpose of study
and travel. The European success which meets this type of ambition
is instanced in the conferring of the doctorate in philosophy upon a
Negro woman, Dr. Anna J. Cooper, at the last commencement of the
46
Sorbonne, Paris*. Similarly, a score of Negro women are sojourning
abroad in various countries for the spiritual relief and cultural
stimulation afforded there.
A spirit of stress and struggles characterizes the second two groups.
These women of business, profession and trade are the hub of the wheel
of progress. Their burden is twofold. Many are wives and mothers
whose husbands are insufficiently paid, or who have succumbed to
social maladjustment and have abandoned their families. An appalling
number are widows. They face the great problem of leaving home each
day and at the same time trying to rear children in their spare time –
this too, in neighborhoods where rents are large, standards of dress
and recreation high and costly, and social danger on the increase. One
cannot resist the temptation to pause for a moment to pay tribute
to these Negro mothers. And to call attention to the service she is
rendering to the nation, in her struggle against great odds to educate
and care for one group of the country’s children. If the mothers of the
race should ever be honored by state and federal legislation, the artist’s
imagination will find a more inspiring subject in the modern Negro
mother- self-directed but as loyal and tender as the much extolled, yet
pitiable black mammy of slavery days.
The great commercial life of New York City is only slightly touched
by the Negro woman, of our second group. Negro businessmen
* Often referred to as “The Mother of Black Feminism”, Anna Julia Cooper was just the fourth
African American woman to earn a doctoral degree. In 1924, she received a PhD in history from
the Sorbonne, a prestigious university in Paris, France. She was a prominent author, educator,
sociologist, and activist. Born into slavery in 1858, Dr. Cooper died in 1964 at the age of 105.
score, n. a group of about twenty
sojourning, adv. living temporarily
succumb, v. to submit to an overpowering force; to give in (succumbed)
appalling, adj. shocking; horrifying
rear, v. to bring up and care for
render, v. to provide (rendering)
extoll, v. to praise highly (extolled)
47
offer her most of their work, but their number is limited. Outside
of this field in Negro offices, custom is once more against her, and
competition is keen for all. However, Negro girls are training, and
some are holding exceptional jobs. One of the professors in a New
York city college has had a young colored woman as secretary for the
past three or four years. Another holds the head clerical position in an
organization where reliable handling of detail and a sense of business
ethics are essential. Quietly, these women prove their worth, so that
when a vacancy exists and there is a call, it is difficult to find even one
competent colored secretary who is not employed. As a result of the
opportunity in clerical work in the educational system of New York
City, a number have qualified for such positions, one having been
recently appointed to the office of a high school. In other departments,
the civil service in New York City is no longer free from discrimination.
The casual personal interview, that tenacious and retrogressive practice
introduced into the federal administration during the World War, has
spread and often nullifies the Negro woman’s success in written tests.
The successful young woman cited above was three times “turned
down” as undesirable on the basis of the personal interview. In the great
mercantile houses, the many young Negro girls who might be well suited
to sales positions are barred from all but menial positions. Even so, one
Negro woman, beginning as a uniformed maid in the shoe department
of one of the largest stores, has pulled herself up to the position of “head
of stock.” One of the most prosperous monthly magazines of national
circulation has for the head of its news service a Negro woman who
ethics, n. principles of what is right and wrong
civil service, n. the parts of the government responsible for the administration of a country; for example,
law enforcement, transportation, postal services, etc.
tenacious, adj. enduring; inflexible
retrogressive, adj. going from a better to worse position
nullify, v. to cancel out value; to make null, or nothing (nullifies)
mercantile, adj. related to merchants; shops
menial, adj. lowly; humble
48
rose from the position of stenographer. Her duties involve attendance
upon staff conferences, executive supervision of her staff of white office
workers, broadcasting and journalism of the highest order.
Yet in spite of the claims of justice and proved efficiency, telephone
and insurance companies and other corporations which receive
considerable patronage from Negroes deny them proportionate
employment. Fortunately this is an era of changing customs. There is
hope that a less selfish racial attitude will prevail. It is a heartening fact
that there is an increasing number of Americans who will lend a hand
in the game fight of the worthy.
Throughout the South, where business for Negro patronage are
under the control of Negroes to a large extent, there are already many
opportunities for Negro women. But because of the nerve strain and
spiritual drain of hostile social conditions in that section, Negro
woman are turning away from opportunities there to find a freer and
fuller life in the North.
In the less crowded professional vocations, the outlook is more
cheerful. In these fields, the Negro woman is dependent largely upon
herself and her own race for work. In the legal, dental, and medical
professions, successful women practitioners have usually worked their
way through college and are “managing” on the small fees that can be
received from an underpaid public.
Social conditions in America are hardest upon the Negro because
his is lowest in the economic scale. The tendency to force the Negro
downward, gives rise to serious social problems and to consequent
demand for trained college women in the profession of social work.
The need has been met with a response from young college women,
anxious to devote their education and lives toward helping the
stenographer, n. a person who takes notes in shorthand about what is said
patronage, n. customers
49
submerged classes. Much of the social work has been pioneer in nature;
the pay has been small, with little possibility of advancement. For even
in work among Negroes, the better paying positions are reserved for
whites. The Negro college woman is doing her bit at sacrifice, along
such lines as these: as probation officers, investigators and police
women in the correctional departments of the city; as Big Sisters
attached to the Children’s Court; as field workers and visitors for relief
organizations, missions and churches; as secretaries for traveller’s
aid societies; in the many organizations devoted to preventative and
educational medicine; in clinics and hospitals and as boys’ and girls’
welfare workers in recreation and industry.
In the profession of nursing, there are over three hundred in New York
City. In the dark blue linen uniform of Henry Street Visiting Nurse
Service, the Negro woman can be seen hurrying earnestly from house
to house on her round of free relief to the needy. Again, she is in many
other branches of public health nursing, in the public schools, milk
stations and diet kitchens. The Negro woman is in the wards of two
of the large city hospitals and clinics. After a score of years of service
in one such institution, a Negro woman became superintendent of
nurses in the war emergency. Deposed after the armistice, though
eminently satisfactory, she retained connection with the training
school as lecturer, for the inspiration she could be to “her girls.” The
growing need for the executive nurse is being successfully met as
instanced by the supervisors in day nurseries and private sanitariums,
financed and operated in Harlem entirely by Negroes. Throughout
the South there is a clear and anxious call to nurses to carry the gospel
of hygiene to the rural sections and to minister to the suffering not
relief, n. aid; assistance
depose, v. to remove (deposed)
armistice, n. cease-fire; truce
sanitarium, n. hospital for long-term care (sanitariums)
hygiene, n. cleanliness and other practices that promote good health
50
reached by organizations already in the communities. One social
worker, in New York City, though a teacher by profession, is head of
an organization whose program is to raise money for the payment
of nurses to do the work described above. In other centers, West and
South, the professional Negro nurse is supplanting the untrained
woman attendant of former years.
In New York City, nearly three hundred women share in the good
conditions obtaining there in the teaching profession. They measure
up to the high pedagogical requirements of the city and state law, and
are increasingly leaders in the community. In a city where the schools
are not segregated, she is meeting with success among white as well
as colored children in positions ranging from clerk in the elementary
school on up through the graded ranks for teachers, in the lower grades,
of special subjects in the higher grades, in the junior high schools and
in the senior high schools. One Negro woman is assistant principal in
an elementary school where the other assistant and the principal are
white men and the majority of the teachers are white. Another Negro
woman serves in the capacity of visiting teacher to several schools,
calling upon both white and colored families and experiencing no
difficulty in making social adjustments. Still another Negro woman
is a vocational counsellor under the Board of Education, in a junior
high school. She is advising children of both races as to future courses
of study to pursue and as to the vocations in which tests prove them
to be apt. This position, the result of pioneer work by another Negro
woman, is unique in the school system of New York.
In the teaching profession, too, the Negro woman finds evidence of
the white worker’s fear of competition. The need for teachers is still
so great that little friction exists. When it does seem imminent, it is
smoothed away, as it recently was at a meeting of school principals.
supplant, v. to replace (supplanting)
51
From the floor* a discussion began with: “What are we going to
do about this problem of the increasing number of Negro teachers
coming into our schools?” It ended promptly through the suggestion
of another principal: “Send all you get and don’t want over to my
school. I have two now and I’ll match their work with any two of the
best you name.” Outside of New York City, the Negro woman teacher
faces problems almost as difficult as those besetting the pioneers in the
field. Night riders are terrorizing the leading educators of the South,
with the same tactics used years ago in the burning of buildings and
in the threatening of personal injury. Negro teachers in some sections
show heroism matching that of such women as Maria Becroft, Mary
Wormley, Margaret Thompson, Fannie Hampton, Myrtilla Miner and
others who in the early ‘80s** faced riot and violence which closed
colored schools and made educational work a hazardous vocation.
Throughout the North and South, urban and rural teachers from an
earnest and forward-looking group of women. They are endeavoring
to hold for the future the progress that has been made in the past. The
Negro woman teacher finds that, figuratively speaking, she must stand
on her tip toes to do it, for educational standards are no long what they
were. Surrounded by forces which persistently work to establish the
myth of his inferiority, the Negro youth must be encouraged to think
vigorously and to maintain a critical attitude toward what he is taught.
The Negro teacher is bending herself to the task of imparting
this power to hold the spiritual and mental balance under hostile
conditions. Though her salary in most places lags behind the service
she is rendering (exceptions being noted where the Jeannes-Slater and
* From the floor means to allow members of a group to make comments or ask questions.
** In this writing, the ‘80s refers to the 1880s
Night rider, n. a member of a secret group, such as the KKK, who rides at night in disguise causing terror.
(Night riders)
render, v. to give (rendering)
52
Rosenwald Funds bring relief), her inspiration is the belief that the
hope of the race is in the New Negro student. Of more vital import
than what he is compelled to be to-day, is what he is determined to
make of himself to-morrow.
And, the Negro woman teacher, bringing to
the class room sympathy and judgement, is a mighty force in this battle
.
Comparatively new are opportunities in the field of trained library work
for the Negro woman. In New York City, the Public Library system
has opened its service to the employment of colored women of college
grade. The vision of those in charge of their training is illuminated
by fires that have somewhat of a missionary glow. There is an ever-
present hope that, once trained, the Negro woman librarian will scatter
such opportunities across the country, establishing branches wherever
none exist. Into such an emergency, the successful Negro woman head
of the library of the Veterans’ Hospital at Tuskegee, stepped from the
New York Library on One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street. Recently at
this same Harlem Branch Library a Negro woman has been placed in
charge of the large, permanent collection of books by or about Negroes
and examples of Negro art. Another is acting head of the children’s
department, and several others have been assigned to branches
throughout the city where there is little or no Negro patronage. They
are thus rendering exceptional service, and additionally creating an
impetus for the enlargement of this field for Negro women.
One might go on to such interesting and unusual professions as
bacteriology, chemistry and pharmacy, etc. and find that through
the number in any one may be small, the Negro woman is creditably
represented in practically every one, and according to ability she is
meeting with success. In the fields of literature and art, the Negro
woman’s culture has once more begun to flower. After the long
quiescent period, following the harvest from the pen of Phyllis
patronage, n. customers
impetus, n. boost; encouragement
to flower, v. to develop
quiescent, adj. inactive or tranquil
53
Wheatley, Negro woman dramatists, poets and novelists are enjoying
a vogue in print. There is every prospect that the Negro woman will
enrich American literature and art with stylistic portrayal of her
experience and her problems.
Closing the door on home anxieties, the women engaged in trades
and in industry face serious difficulty in competition in the open
working field. Custom is against the Negro woman in all but a few
trade and industrial occupations. She has, however, been established
long in the dressmaking trade as helpers and finishers, and more
recently as drapers and fitters in some of the best establishments.
Several Negro women are themselves proprietors of shops in the
country’s great fashion district. In millinery, power-sewing machine
operating on cloth, straw and leather, there are few Negro women.
The laissez-faire attitude of practically all trade unions* has, in the
past, made of the Negro woman an unwilling menace to the cause
of labor. When one reviews the demands now being made by white
women workers, for labor colleges, for political recognition, and for
representation at world conferences, one cannot help but feel how far
back on the road of labor progress is the struggling group of Negro
workers. Yet, they are gradually becoming more alive to the issues
involved. One Negro woman has held office and been most active
in the flower and feather workers’ union. Another has been a paid
organizer in the garment industry for several years. Still another has
co-operated as an unpaid worker, in endeavoring to prevent Negro
women from breaking union strikes**. Pacing with pickets***,
* A union is an organization of workers who act together to create a better work environment.
** Union strikes refers to the practice of unionized workers protesting working conditions by
refusing to work.
*** Pickets are people, usually posted by a union, who protest outside of a place of business to bring
attention to poor work conditions.
vogue, n. popular acceptance
proprietor, n. owner (proprietors)
54
or explaining at meetings the wisdom underlying union principles, she
became convinced that the problem lay as much in the short-sighted,
“wait-until-a-strike-comes” policy of the labor unions themselves,
as in the alienated or unintelligent attitude of the Negro worker.
More sincerity and understanding was greatly needed. Within the
past year, she has worked with two Negro men, a white woman and
two white men, all union members, and with this committee of six has
brought about a conference of accredited delegates from thirty-three
unions in New York City. This is the first all-union conference held
on adjusting the Negro workers’ problem. As a result, a permanent
organization has been formed called the Trade Union Committee
for Organizing Negro Workers. Headquarters have been established
and a program is well under way which includes: organizing special
industries, manned largely by Negro men and women; working to
bring about changes in the constitutions of trade unions which make
it impossible or difficult for Negroes to join; educating both black and
white workers in union principles through conferences and speeches;
making necessary adjustments among union members of the two races
and taking part in righting any grievances of Negro union members.
In trade cookery, the Negro woman’s talent and past experience is
recognized. Her problem here is to find employers who will let her
work her way to managerial positions, in tearooms, candy shops and
institutions. One such employer became convinced that the managing
cook, a young colored graduate of Pratt Institute, could build up a
business that had been failing. He offered her a partnership. As in the
cases of a number of such women, her barrier was lack of capital*.
No matter how highly trained, nor how much speed and business
acumen has been acquired, the Negro’s credit is held in doubt.
* Capital here is referring to wealth or assets.
alienated, adj. withdrawn; separated from others
55
Thirty years ago, a young Negro girl began learning all branches of the
fur trade. She is now in business for herself, employing three women of
her race and one Jewish man. She has made fur experts of still another
half-dozen-colored girls. Such instances as these justify the prediction
that the foothold, which is being gained in the trade world will, year
by year, become more secure.
Because of the limited fields for this group, many of the unsuccessful
drift into the fourth social grade – the domestic and casual workers.
These drifters increase the difficulties of the Negro women suited to
housework. New standards of household management are forming
and the problem of the Negro woman is to meet these new businesslike
ideals. The constant influx of workers unfamiliar with household
conditions in New York keeps the situation one of turmoil. The Negro
woman, moreover, is revolting against residential domestic service. It
is a last stand in her fight to maintain a semblance of family life. For
this reason, principally, the number of day or casual workers is on
the increase. Happiness is almost impossible under the strain of these
conditions. Health and morale suffer, but how else can her children,
loose all afternoon, be gathered together at nightfall? Through it all
she manages to give satisfactory service and the Negro woman is
sought after this unpopular work, largely because her honesty, loyalty
and cleanliness have stood the test of time. Through her drudgery, the
woman of other groups find leisure time for progress. This is one of
her contributions to America.
It is apparent from what has been said that even in New York City,
Negro women are of a race which is free neither economically, socially
nor spiritually. Like women in general, but more particularly like those
of other oppressed minorities, the Negro woman has been forced to
submit to overpowering conditions. Pressure has been exerted upon
her, both from without and within her group… .
turmoil, n. extreme confusion
semblance, n. appearance
drudgery, n. tiring work
56
…The ration of opportunity in the …social, economic and political
spheres is about that which exists between white men and women.
In the large, I would say that the Negro woman is the cultural equal
of her man because she is generally kept in school longer. Negro
boys, like white boys, are usually put to work to subsidize the family
income. The growing economic independence of Negro working
women is causing her to rebel against the domineering family attitude
of the cruder working-class husband. The masses of Negro men are
engaged in menial occupations throughout the working day. Their
baffled and suppressed desires to determine their economic life are
manifested in overbearing domination at home. Working mothers are
unable to instill different ideals in the sons. Conditions change slowly.
Nevertheless, education and opportunity are modifying the spirit of
the younger Negro men. Trained in modern schools of thought, they
begin to show a wholesome attitude of fellowship and freedom for
their women. The challenge to young Negro womanhood is to see
clearly this trend and grasp the proffered comradeship with sincerity.
In this matter of sex equality, Negro women have contributed few
outstanding militants, a notable instance being the historic Sojourner
Truth. On the whole the Negro woman’s feminist efforts are directed
chiefly toward the realization of the equality of the races, the sex
struggle assuming the subordinate place…
The Colored Women’s Branch of the Y.W.C.A. and the women’s
organizations in the many churches as well as the beneficial lodges
and associations, care for the needs of their members… . In New
York City, many associations exist for social betterment, financed and
operated by Negro women. One makes child welfare its name and
special concern. Others like the Utility Club, Utopia Neighborhood,
subsidize, v. to finance or fund
manifest, v. to show or display (manifested)
57
Debutantes’ League, Sempre Fidelius, etc., raise funds for old folks’
homes, a shelter for delinquent girls and fresh-air camps for children.
On the other hand, the educational welfare of the coming generation
has become the chief concern of the national sororities of Negro
college women. The first to be organized in the country, the Alpha
Kappa Alpha*, has a continuous program of education and vocational
guidance for students of the high schools and colleges. The work of
Lambda Chapter, which covers New York City and its suburbs, has
been the most effective in carrying out the national program. Each
year, it gathers together between one and two hundred such students
and gives the girls a chance to hear the life stories of Negro women,
successful in various fields of endeavor. Recently, a trained nurse told
how, starting in the same schools as they, she had risen to the executive
position in the Harlem Health Information Bureau. A commercial
artist shows how real talent had overcome the color line. The graduate
physician was a living example of the modern opportunities in the
newer fields of medicine open to women. Alpha Beta Chapter in New
York City, during the current year, presented a young art student with
a scholarship of $1,000 for study abroad. In such ways as these are the
progressive and privileged groups of Negro women expressing their
community and race consciousness*.
* McDougald references two historically black Greek-letter organizations in her essay as organizations
established for Black women and by Black women involved in the movement for racial uplift in
the early 20
th
century. These organizations are known as sororities, and their male counterpart
organizations are known as fraternities. Sorority and fraternity are taken from Greek words that
mean sister and brother respectively. By the time this essay was written, in all, there had been four
historically Black sororities and four historically Black fraternities that were established. They were,
in order of establishment: Alpha Phi Alpha- (fraternity 1906); Alpha Kappa Alpha – (sorority 1908);
Kappa Alpha Psi – (fraternity 1911); Omega Psi Phi – (fraternity 1911); Delta Sigma Theta – (sorority
1913); Phi Beta Sigma (fraternity 1914); Zeta Phi Beta – (sorority 1920); Sigma Gamma Rho – (sorority
1922). A ninth organization, Iota Phi Theta (fraternity 1963) was founded much later but together
with the other eight organizations are known as The Divine Nine, and continues to make important
contributions to the social and cultural improvement of African Americans today.
58
We find the Negro woman, figuratively struck in the face daily by
contempt from the world about her. Within her soul, she knows little
of peace and happiness. But through it all, she is courageously standing
erect, developing within herself the moral strength to rise above and
conquer false attitudes. She is maintaining her natural beauty and
charm and improving her mind and opportunity. She is measuring up
to the needs of her family, community and race, and radiating a hope
throughout the land.
For Further Consideration
Use the passage to answer the following questions.
1. According to McDougald, what was the “Task of Negro
Womanhood?” Cite an example from the text to support your
answer.
2. McDougald listed several challenges Black women faced in the
early 20
th
century. Using the text, what was at least one of those
problems?
3. Just as McDougald identified the challenges facing Black
women in the early 20
th
century, she also discussed solutions to
those problems. Based on the reading, identify at least one of
those solutions.
59
Georgia Douglas Johnson
One of several women to make
important contributions to the
Harlem Renaissance, Georgia
Douglas Johnson was born in 1880
in Atlanta, Georgia. Her parents
were of African American, Native
American and English descent.
She attended Atlanta University
Normal College and studied music
at the Oberlin Conservatory and
Cleveland College of Music. In
addition to poetry, Johnson wrote
plays and a syndicated newspaper column. One of her earliest
poems, The Heart of a Woman, explores themes of loneliness,
pain, love, and isolation from the unique perspective as an African
American woman in the early 20
th
century.
The New Negro Spirit in Verse
– The Poetry of the Early Harlem Renaissance
Literature in the form of poetry was a key part of the artistic expression
that occurred during the Harlem Renaissance. Through their work,
poets described the beauty and pain of the African American
experience of the early 20th century. The poetry these writers created
also sought to shatter negative stereotypes of African Americans while
helping to shape a new identity they hoped would be celebrated and
embraced. Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance was diverse in both
style and substance. You will now read representative works by some
of these insightful writers and thinkers.
60
e Heart of a Woman
by Georgia Douglas Johnson
e heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, so winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
e heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
turrets and vale, n. towers and valleys
61
For Further Consideration
1. What do you suppose Johnson meant when she wrote: “The
heart of woman goes forth with the dawn…in the wake of
those echoes the heart calls home”?
2. What might be the “dreams of the stars”, Johnson wrote about?
(Hint: Think about the lives Black women led in the early 20
th
century and how very different those lives are from today.)
3. How does Johnson address her dreams in Calling Dreams?
4. What does she mean when she demands “the right to make
my dreams come true” in Calling Dreams? How is the tone here
different from the tone of The Heart of a Woman?
Calling Dreams
by Georgia Douglas Johnson
e right to make my dreams come true,
I ask, nay, I demand of life,
Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband
Impede my steps, nor countermand;
Too long my heart against the ground
Has beat the dusty years around,
And now at length I rise! I wake!
And stride into the morning break!
contraband, n. smuggling illegal goods; also used to refer to escaped slaves during the Civil War
countermand, v. to cancel or reverse
stride, v. walk with confidence
62
Countee Cullen
Born in the early 20
th
century,
Countee Cullen was a leading
figure of the Harlem Renaissance
even before he graduated from
high school. He recited his works
in various sites around Harlem
including churches and political
meetings. Among the large group
of young writers and artists who
gathered in Harlem, in the early-
to-mid-1920s Cullen stood out.
Within the New Negro movement,
he represented an “old-school”
writer whose choice of a strict,
formal Romanticism and adherence to traditional measures and
rhymes separated him from, for instance, Langston Hughes, who
experimented with form and created his popular blues poetry.
Whereas many younger Renaissance writers celebrated Blackness,
intending to, as Hughes put it, “express [their] individual dark-
skinned selves without fear or shame,” Cullen declared that he
was “POET and not NEGRO POET”.
Despite his desire to avoid making his race or race-related matters
the focus of his work, it was a tribute to his African heritage that
won him the most acclaim in literary circles early in his career.
The poem called “Heritage,” was published in 1925. In this poem,
Cullen was writing about a theme that was very much a topic
of interest to Harlem intellectuals: their relationship to Africa.
Americans of African descent felt an attraction to the home of
their ancestors – a place that many of them had very little actual
knowledge of since education about Africa had either been
omitted or distorted in their own educational backgrounds.
63
Heritage
by Countee Cullen
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
So I lie, who all day long
Want no sound except the song
Sung by wild barbaric birds
Goading massive jungle herds,
Juggernauts of esh that pass
Trampling tall deant grass
Where young forest lovers lie,
Plighting troth* beneath the sky.
So I lie, who always hear,
ough I cram against my ear
Both my thumbs, and keep them there,
Great drums throbbing through the air.
So I lie, whose fount of pride,
* Plighting troth means to promise marriage
64
scabbard, n. covers for a blades, most often swords (scabbards)
doff, v. to take off
covert, n. bushes in which animals can hide
leprous, adj. having a skin disease, such as leprosy, which was highly contagious and identifiable by a
large rash; leprous people were isolated and avoided
corolla, n. the petals of a flower, often arranged in the shape of a circle (corollas)
Dear distress, and joy allied,
Is my somber esh and skin,
With the dark blood dammed within
Like great pulsing tides of wine
at, I fear, must burst the ne
Channels of the chang net
Where they surge and foam and fret.
Africa? A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.
Unremembered are her bats
Circling through the night, her cats
Crouching in the river reeds,
Stalking gentle esh that feeds
By the river brink; no more
Does the bugle-throated roar
Cry that monarch claws have leapt
From the scabbards where they slept.
Silver snakes that once a year
Do the lovely coats you wear,
Seek no covert in your fear
Lest a mortal eye should see;
What’s your nakedness to me?
Here no leprous owers rear
Fierce corollas in the air;
Here no bodies sleek and wet,
65
Dripping mingled rain and sweat,
Tread the savage measures of
Jungle boys and girls in love.
What is last year’s snow to me,
Last year’s anything? e tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set
Bough and blossom, ower, fruit,
Even what shy bird with mute
Wonder at her travail there,
Meekly labored in its hair.
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
For Further Consideration
1. Using specific examples from the poem, how does Cullen
describe the African continent?
2. How do the images Cullen presents of Africa differ from popular
images of Africa? Why do you think Cullen found it necessary to
offer an alternative view of Africa than that which most people
held at that time?
travail, n. difficult work
66
Claude McKay
Born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, on
September 15, 1899, Claude McKay was a
leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance. At
thirteen, McKay left Jamaica for New York
just in time to join the burgeoning literary
movement that would later become
known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Although mostly known as a poet, McKay
was also a novelist, essayist, journalist,
and activist. His writings include Spring in
New Hampshire (1920), Negroes in America
(1923), and Home to Harlem (1928).
McKay’s political activism was often reflected in his poetry.
“If We Must Die” (1919), his most popular poem, would later be
recited by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill over radio
airwaves during World War II. He would later die of heart failure in
Chicago, Illinois, on May 22, 1948 at the age of forty-eight.
If We Must Die
by Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
67
* “If We Must Die”, first published in The Liberator Magazine, July 1919.
In vain, n. for no reason or purpose
constrain, v., to force (constrained)
kinsmen, n., male relatives
foe, n. enemy
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!*
For Further Consideration
1. What is the overall tone of this work?
2. What does the speaker likely mean in line 12 when he says:
“What though before us lies the open grave?”
3. What main problem expressed in the first two lines of “If We
Must Die” helps reveal the meaning of the poem?
4. What does the speaker in “If We Must Die” suggest that the
kinsmen should do?
5. What audience is McKay addressing in his poem? Why do you think this?
6. How does the speaker describe his foes?
68
T H R
L H
Langston Hughes 1902 – 1967
Born James Mercer Langston
Hughes in Joplin, Missouri, in
1902, Langston Hughes was
the most prolific poet of the
Harlem Renaissance. When
he was a little boy, his father
settled in Mexico looking
to escape American racial
prejudices. His mother refused
to join her husband, despite
his becoming a prosperous
lawyer and landowner in
Mexico. Instead, she moved
quite frequently in search of work
to support herself and her young son. Young Langston received a
love for the arts from his mother, who also insisted that he receive
the best education possible. In 1909, seven-year-old Langston was
sent to live with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas where he
listened attentively to his grandmother’s stories of Black people’s
heroic quest for freedom, liberty and justice. When he was twelve,
Langston’s beloved grandmother died and he was forced, yet
again, to relocate, this time to Lincoln, Illinois to live with his mother
and his new stepfather. There would be one more move in young
Langston’s life, to Cleveland, Ohio, where he graduated, having
developed a keen interest in poetry, art and music.
69
After graduating from high school, Hughes went to live with his
father in Mexico, where he taught English to the children of wealthy
Mexicans. His father didn’t think much of his son’s artistic interests
and abilities, preferring that he instead further his education to
possibly join him at his law practice one day. Hughes rejected his
father’s plans for him and continued to pursue his interest in writing.
His first poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” appeared in The
Crisis, the official magazine for the NAACP, in 1921. That same year,
Hughes decided to enroll in Columbia University, located in New
York City, only to leave after one year disgusted by the bigotry he
experienced there.
Even though he was no longer attending college, Hughes decided
to stay in New York City, eventually making his way to Harlem. By
now, his mother had relocated to Harlem and Hughes would work a
series of menial jobs to support the two of them. One of those jobs
was a cabin boy on board a passenger freight liner, and through
this job, he met a number of the era’s most famous and celebrated
writers including Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest
Hemingway.
Hughes did eventually complete his college education at Lincoln
University, an HBCU located in Pennsylvania. After graduation he
continued to write not only poetry but short stories, essays, novels
and even operas. By the time he died in the mid-1960s, Hughes left
behind a body of work that included a vast collection of poetry,
novels, plays, short stories, operas and children’s books.
bigotry, n. prejudice; discrimination
70
e Negro Speaks of Rivers
For Further Consideration
1. Hughes mentions four rivers in his poem. Using a map, identify
the continent on which each river is located.
2. What concepts do you think rivers symbolize in the poem?
3. What historical event is Hughes referencing in the lines: “I heard
the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to
New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in
the sunset.” ?
4. What do the rivers that the narrator in the poem speaks of have
in common with each other?
5. Describe the mood of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. Which
line(s) best create the mood of the poem?
Some text cannot be shown due
to copyright restrictions
71
e Minstrel Man
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suer aer
I have held my pain
So long.
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry,
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die.
For Further Consideration
1. Based on how the introduction defines minstrel shows, why did
Hughes choose this as the title for this poem?
2. Explain how the speaker’s life is like a minstrel show performer.
3. What is the poem’s message about life for African Americans
during the early twentieth century?
Hughes had the unique ability to compact so much emotion into short
poems. The poem “Minstrel Man” is an example of this ability because it
is a poem that discusses the injustices African Americans faced regularly
and the coping mechanisms they had to develop to deal with them.
The title of the poem references a form of live stage entertainment where
whit
e actors wearing blackface performed skits that played into the worst
stereotypes of Black people. The shows reached their peak in popularity
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
72
I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
ey send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Few poets or writers captured the emotional burdens of African American
life in the early 20th century as skillfully as Hughes. Hughes conveyed the
pain and anger Black people felt as a result of their treatment in a hostile
society. He chose Black men as speakers for most of his poems, perhaps
for no other reason than he himself was a Black man so he was able to
bring a high level of relatability to the impactful words of his poems.
“I, Too” is a cry of protest against American racism. Its speaker, a Black
man, laments the way that he is excluded from American society, even
though he is, and always has been a key part of it. From the first martyr
for the cause of American freedom, to the nearly 200,000 Black men
who gave their lives to preserve the Union, during the Civil War, Hughes
expresses in eighteen short, but powerful lines that, despite the relentless
nature of Jim Crow segregation, African Americans had to fight, that they
would assume their rightful place in American life. Read the poem and
respond to the questions that follow.
73
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
en.
Besides,
ey’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
For Further Consideration
1. What is the overall message of “I, Too”?
2. What does Hughes mean when he says, “I, too, am America?”
3. What do these lines mean? How might these lines support
social changes that were happening or were about to happen
in 20th century America?
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
4. What do these lines say about Hughes’ acceptance and identity
as a Black man?
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
74
Life is Fine
by Langston Hu
ghes
holler, v. yell (hollered)
Some text cannot be shown due
to copyright restrictions
75
For Further Consideration
1. Why does the speaker jump into the river and take an elevator
to the sixteenth floor? What is he trying to do?
2. What emotions might the speaker be feeling?
3. In the end, what happens to the speaker?
dogged, adj. stubbornly determined
Some text cannot be shown due
to copyright restrictions
76
For Further Consideration
1. What is a dream deferred?
2. What are some similes that Langston Hughes uses for a dream
deferred?
3. What dreams could Hughes feel were deferred?
4. What does Hughes mean when he asks if the dream explodes?
Harlem
(
also called A Dream Deferred)
by Langston Hughes
defer, v. to postpone (deferred)
Some text cannot be shown due
to copyright restrictions
77
Nikki Grimes
Nikki Grimes is a contemporary poet, born in 1950. She is a poet, a
journalist, and an award winning author of books for children and
young adults.
The next two poems are from her collection of “Golden Shovel
poems,” One Last Word. Golden Shovel poems use a line from one
poem to write a new poem—one that echoes the original. Here are
two poems that Nikki Grimes wrote using lines from iconic Harlem
Renaissance poems.
In David’s Old Soul Nikki Grimes ends each line with a word from
the line: “my soul has grown deep like the rivers” from Langston
Hughes’s poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
Poetry Influenced by the Harlem
Renaissance Poets
David’s Old Soul
by Nikki Grimes
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For FurtherConsideration
1. What other poem in this reader includes dreams?
2. What role do dreams play in each poem?
3. Why is the title The Sculptor appropriate for this poem?
e Sculptor
by Nikki Grimes
The Sculptor is based around a line from Calling Dreams by Georgia
Douglas Johnson, found on page 62 of this volume. As in David’s Old Soul,
each line of The Sculptor ends with a word from Johnson’s defiant line:
“the right to make my dreams come true.”
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79
Z N H
– P
Zora Neale Hurston
Born in Alabama in the
1890s, Zora Neale Hurston’s
legacy wasn’t fully realized
or appreciated until long
after her death in 1960 at
the age of 69. In addition
to literature, Hurston made
lasting contributions to
anthropology and film in
her portrayals of the racial
and gender struggles in the
early-1900s American South.
Her works were concerned
with both the African
American experience and
her struggles as an African
American woman. She has
and continues to have a profound impact on writers of all ethnic
backgrounds and all genders.
Hurston moved to the small community of Eatonville, Florida,
when she was three years old. Her father was a Baptist minister
and sharecropper, her mother was a schoolteacher. Located just
outside of Orlando in central Florida, Eatonville was one of the
first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States and was
a place where African Americans could live relatively free from
harassment and discrimination.
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Hurston loved Eatonville and used it as the setting in her stories.
When she was a young student, some northern schoolteachers
visited Eatonville and gave Hurston several books that opened
her mind to literature – an experience Hurston later described as a
new kind of “birth” for her. After living the rest of her childhood in
Eatonville, she attended Bowie State University, an HBCU in Maryland
and graduated with a degree in English Literature. At a time when it
was a remarkable feat that African American women obtained one
four-year degree, Hurston acquired two, receiving her Bachelors in
Anthropology at the age of thirty-seven.
Hurston’s works often represented a departure from the works
of other Harlem Renaissance figures. People like Alain Locke and
Langston Hughes used more polished forms of writing to appeal
to middle-class, educated “New Negro” audiences. Hurston, on the
other hand, frequently situated her works in rural, Southern, working-
class environments, using themes and subjects familiar to Black folk
culture that some who may have wanted to distance themselves
from this element of Black culture found repulsive.
Despite her creative talents, Hurston had frequent brushes with
poverty. She received financial support from white benefactors on
occasion and had government employment at other times. When
these sources of income were not readily available, she resorted
to other means to financially support herself including, in her last
poverty-stricken years, as a maid. After stints of living all over the
country, she returned to Florida where she died in poverty and was
buried in an unmarked grave. In the early 1970s, famous writer Alice
Walker, author of The Color Purple, revived interest in Hurston, whose
novels, poetry, and other works are better appreciated and studied
in middle, high school and college classrooms across the country.
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On Colorism
The Harlem Renaissance was all about exploring every possible
dimension of what it meant to be Black in America. This sometimes
meant investigating some aspect of Black life where Black people
discriminated against each other. This is especially true when it
came to discrimination that was based on the shade of a person’s
skin. Being Black was one thing. Being a darker skinned Black
person was another matter entirely. This describes the idea behind
colorism. Colorism is dened as “prejudice or discrimination against
individuals with a dark skin tone among people of the same racial
or ethnic group.”
Wait! Run that back! You mean that people can be prejudiced against
people that share the same racial or ethnic background they do?
As incredible as this may be to believe, this is absolutely the sad
truth. During the early 20th century, the idea that the lighter your
skin was, the better person you were was so widespread that it even
aected people of color as well. If having white skin was considered
the best thing you could have in the early 20th century, then if you
had a skin tone that was as close to it as possible, that may have
been the second-best thing. Take a look at this well-known poem
from the early 20th century, that expressed this point of view:
If you’re light you’re alright
If you’re brown stick around’
If you’re black, get back!
What is the meaning behind this doggerel? If it seems to mean to
you that the lighter your skin is the more people will like having
you around, you would be right. People put meaning behind these
words by creating special clubs and organizations that separated
people, not by their race, but by the tone of their skin color.
doggerel, n. irregular verse used to create a comic effect
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They used what was known as “the paper bag test” to consider
prospective members. They would literally hold a brown paper bag
up to the arm of a person who was wishing to join that group and
if the person’s arm was darker than the paper bag, they would not
be allowed to join.
The topic of colorism is the main theme behind Zora Neale Hurston’s
1926 play, Color Struck. As you read the play, you will see how the
main character’s obsession with skin color cost her everything,
including love and acceptance of herself.
NOTE ON DIALECT
Hurston wrote this play in a dialect that reflected the way she
interpreted Black speech of the South (specifically central Florida)
in the early 1900s. A dialect includes the words and pronunciation
specific to a certain place and/or group of people. This use of dialect
can sometimes be hard to understand. It also contains words that,
although they were commonly used among Black people at that time,
are now considered to be derogatory and offensive. Words like “coons”
and “darkies” are unacceptable terms today as they were used by the
white population to denigrate Black people.
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Color Struck*
By: Zora Neale Hurston
A Play in Four Scenes
SETTING
Time: Twenty years ago and present [1926]
Place: A Southern City.
CHARACTERS
JOHN TURNER, a light brown-skinned man
EMMALINE BEAZELY, a black woman
EFFIE, a mulatto girl
DINKY
ADA
WESLEY, a boy who plays an accordion
JOE CLARKE
OLD MAN LIZZIMORE
LOU LILLIAN, Emma’s daughter, a very white girl
RAILWAY CONDUCTOR
DOCTOR
MAN 1
MAN 2
MAN 3
ST. AUGUSTINE MAN
Several who play mouth organs, guitars, banjos
Dancers, Passengers, etc.
* Color Struck is a phrase used in the African American community to refer to someone who
prefers lighter skin and finer features over darker skin and more pronounced features such as hair
texture, lip size, eye color and nostril width.
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SETTING. - Early night. The inside of a “Jim Crow”’ railway coach.
The car is parallel to the footlights. The seats on the down stage side of
the coach are omitted. There are the luggage racks above the seats. The
windows are all open. There are exits in each end of the car-right and left
.
ACTION. - Before the curtain goes up there is the sound of a locomotive
whistle and a stopping engine, loud laughter, many people speaking
at once, good natured shrieks, strumming of stringed instruments,
etc. The ascending curtain discovers a happy lot of Negroes boarding
the train dressed in the gaudy, tawdry best of the year 1900. They are
mostly in couples-each couple bearing a covered over market basket
which the men hastily deposit in the racks as they scramble for seats.
There is a little friendly pushing and shoving. One pair just miss a
seat three times, much to the enjoyment of the crowd. Many “plug”
silk hats are in evidence, also sunflowers in buttonholes. The women
are showily dressed in the manner of the time, and quite conscious of
their finery. A few seats remain unoccupied.
Enter Effie [left] above, with a basket. One of the men [standing,
lifting his “plug” in a grand manner]. Howdy do, Miss Effie, you’se
lookin’ jes lak a rose.
[Effie blushes and is confused. She looks up and down for a seat.]
Fack is, if you wuzn’t walkin’ long, ah’d think you wuz a rose-
[he looks timidly behind her and the others laugh].
Looka here, where’s Sam at?
EFFIE [tossing her head haughtily].
I don’t know an’ I don’t keer.
DINKY [visibly relieved].
Then lemme scorch you to a seat.
gaudy, adj. overly colorful and bright; in poor taste
tawdry, adj. showy, but poor quality
fack, n. dialect for fact
scorch, v. dialect for escort; take
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[He takes her basket and leads her to a seat in the center of the car,
puts the basket in the rack and seats himself beside her with his hat at
a rakish angle.]
DINKY [sliding his arm along the back of the seat].
How come Sam ain’t heah—y’all on a bust?
EFFIE [angrily]
A man dat don’t buy me nothin tuh put in mah basket, ain’t goin’ wid
me tuh no cake walk.
[The hand on the seat touches her shoulder and she thrusts it away].
Take yo’ arms from ‘round me, Dinky! Gwan hug yo’ Ada!
DINKY [in mock indignation]
Do you think I’d look at Ada when Ah got a chance tuh be wid you?
Ah always wuz sweet on you, but you let ole Mullet-head Sam cut me
out.
MAN 1 [with head out of the window]
Just look at de darkies coming!
[With head inside coach]
Hey, Dinky! Heah come Ada wid a great big basket.
[Dinky jumps up from beside Effie and rushes to exit right. In a
moment they re-enter and take a seat near entrance. Everyone in
coach laughs. Dinky’s girl turns and calls back to Effie.]
ADA
Where’s Sam, Effie?
EFFIE
Lawd knows, Ada.
ADA
Lawd a mussy! Who you gointer walk de cake wid?
rakish angle, n. in a suggestive way showing lower moral standards
cakewalk, n. a high stepping dance that originated on plantations in the nineteenth century and was still
popular in the twentieth century. The prizes for the best performances were elaborately decorated
cakes
86
EFFIE
Nobody, Ah reckon. John and Emma gointer win it nohow. They’s
the bestest cakewalkers in dis state.
ADA
You’se better than Emma any day in de week. Cose Sam cain’t walk
lake John.
[She stands up and scans the coach.]
Looka heah, ain’t John an’ Emma going? They ain’t on heah!
[The locomotive bell begins to ring.]
EFFIE
Mah Gawd, s’pose dey got left!
MAN [with head out of window]
Heah they come, nip and tuck-whoo-ee! They’se gonna make it!
[He waves excitedly.]
Come on Jawn!
[Everybody crowds the windows, encouraging them by gesture and
calls. As the whistle blows twice, and the train begins to move,
they enter panting and laughing at left. The only seat left is the one
directly in front of Effie.]
DINKY [standing]
Don’t y’all skeer us no mo’ lake dat! There couldn’t be no cake walk
thout y’all. Dem shad-mouf St. Augustine coons would win dat cake
and we would have tuh kill ‘em all bodaciously.
JOHN.
It was Emmaline nearly made us get left. She says I wuz smiling at
Effie on the street car and she had to get off and wait for another one.
shad-mouf, adj. a colorist insult drawing attention to a protruding upper lip and comparing it to that of a
shad fish
87
EMMA [removing the hatpins from her hat, turns furiously upon him]
You wuz grinning at her and she wuz grinning back jes lake a ole
chessy cat!
JOHN [positively]
I wuzn’t.
EMMA [about to place her hat in rack]
You wuz. I seen you looking jes lake a possum.
JOHN
I wuzn’t. I never gits a chance tuh smile at nobody-you won’t let me.
EMMA
Jes the same every time you sees a yaller face, you takes a chance.
[They sit down in peeved silence for a minute.]
DINKY
Ada, les we all sample de basket. I bet you got huckleberry pie.
ADA
No I aint, I got peach an’ tater pies, but we aint gonna tetch a thing
tell we gits tuh de hall.
DINKY [mock alarm]
Naw, don’t do dat! It’s all right tuh save the fried chicken, but pies is
always et on trains.
ADA
Aw shet up!
[He struggles with her for a kiss. She slaps him but finally yields.]
JOHN [looking behind him]
Hellow, Effie, where’s Sam?
EFFIE
Deed, I don’t know.
yaller, adj. a slang expression used in the early twentieth century to describe someone with lightly
colored skin
88
JOHN
Y’all on a bust?
EMMA
None ah yo’bizness, you got enough tuh mind yo’ own self. Turn
‘round!
[She puts up a pouting mouth and he snatches a kiss. She laughs just
as he kisses her again and there is a resounding smack which causes
the crowd to laugh. And cries of “Oh you kid!” “Salty dog!”]
[Enter conductor left calling tickets cheerfully and laughing at the
general merriment.]
CONDUCTOR
I hope somebody from Jacksonville wins this cake.
JOHN
You live in the “Big Jack?”
CONDUCTOR
Sure do. And I wanta taste a piece of that cake on the way back
tonight.
JOHN
Jes rest easy-them Augustiners aint gonna smell it.
[Turns to Emma.]
Is they, baby?
EMMA. Not if Ah kin help it.
Somebody with a guitar sings; “Ho babe, mah honey taint no lie.”
[The conductor takes up tickets, passes on and exits right.]
WESLEY
Look heah, you cake walkers-y’all oughter git up and limber up yo’
joints. I heard them folks over to St. Augustine been oiling up wid
goose-grease, and over to Ocala they been rubbing down in snake oil.
89
A WOMAN’S VOICE
You better shut up, Wesley, you just joined de church last month.
Somebody’s going to tell the pastor on you.
WESLEY
Tell it, tell it, take it up and smell it. Come on out you John and
Emma and Effie, and limber up.
JOHN
Naw, we don’t wanta do our walking steps-nobody won’t wanta see
them when we step out at the hall. But we kin do something else just
to warm ourselves up.
[Wesley begins to play “Goo Goo Eyes” on his accordion, the other
instruments come in one by one and John and Emma step into the
aisle and “parade” up and down the aisle–Emma holding up her
skirt, showing the lace on her petticoats. They two-step back to their
seat amid much applause.]
WESLEY
Come on out, Effie! Sam aint heah so you got to hold up his side too.
Step on out.
[There is a murmur of applause as she steps into the aisle. Wesley
strikes up “I’m gointer live anyhow till I die.” It is played quite
spiritedly as Effie swings into the pas-me-la]
WESLEY [in ecstasy]
Hot stuff I reckon! Hot stuff I reckon!
[The musicians are stamping. Great enthusiasm. Some clap time with
hands and feet. She hurls herself into a modified Hoochy Koochy, and
finishes up with an ecstatic yell.]
There is a babble of talk and laughter and exultation.
limber up, v. loosen up
pas-me-la: a similar dance to the cake-walk. It also has ties to plantation life
Hoochy-Koochy, n. a dance with sexual overtones. The Hoochy Koochy was popular in vaudeville shows
from the 1890s through the early twentieth century and was a precursor to the dances performed in
burlesque shows.
exultation, n. applause; approval
90
JOHN [applauding, loudly]
If dat Effie can’t step nobody can.
EMMA
Course you’d say so cause it’s her. Everything she do is pretty to you.
JOHN [caressing her]
Now don’t say that, Honey. Dancing is dancing no matter who is
doing it. But nobody can hold a candle to you in nothing.
[Some men are heard tuning up-getting pitch to sing. Four of them
crowd together in one seat and begin the chorus of “Daisies Won’t
Tell.” John and Emma grow quite affectionate.]
JOHN [kisses her]
Emma, what makes you always picking a fuss with me over some
yaller girl. What makes you so jealous, nohow ? I don’t do nothing.
[She clings to him, but he turns slightly away. The train whistle blows,
there is a slackening of speed. Passengers begin to take down baskets
from their racks.]
EMMA
John! John, don’t you want me to love you, honey?
JOHN [turns and kisses her slowly]
Yes, I want you to love me, you know I do. But I don’t like to be
accused o’ ever light colored girl in the world. It hurts my feeling. I
don’t want to be jealous like you are.
[Enter at right Conductor, crying “St. Augustine, St. Augustine’.’
He exits left. The crowd has congregated at the two exits, pushing
good-naturedly and joking. All except John and Emma. They are still
seated with their arms about each other.]
EMMA [sadly]
Then you don’t want my love, John, cause I can’t help mahself from
being jealous. I loves you so hard, John, and jealous love is the only
kind I got.
hold a candle to, v. to equal or compare to
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[John kisses her very feelingly.]
EMMA
Just for myself alone is the only way I knows how to love.
[They are standing in the aisle with their arms about each other as
the curtain falls.]
SCENE II
SETTING- A weather-board hall. A large room with the joists bare.
The place has been divided by a curtain of sheets stretched and a
rope across from left to right. From behind the curtain there are
occasional sounds of laughter, a note or two on a stringed instrument
or accordion. General stir. That is the dance hall. The front is the
ante-room where the refreshments are being served. A “plank” seat
runs all around the hall, along the walls. The lights are kerosene
lamps with reflectors. They are fixed to the wall. The lunch-baskets
are under the seat. There is a table on either side upstage with a white
Man behind each. At one, ice cream is sold, at the other, roasted
peanuts and large red and-white sticks of Peppermint candy.
People come in by twos and three, laughing, joking, horse-plays,
gauchily flowered dresses, small waists, bulging hips and waists, hats
worn far back on the head, etc. People from Ocala greet others from
Palatka, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, etc.
Some find seats in the ante-room, others pass on into the main hall.
Enter the Jacksonville delegation, laughing, pushing proudly.
DINKY
Here we is, folks-here we is. Geissler take dot cake on back tub
Jacksonville where it belongs.
weather-board hall, n. a hall or building with its outside unpainted, so the wood ages in the weather
gauchily, adj. gaudy; in poor taste
ante-room, n. a small room connected to a larger room
92
MAN
Gwan! Whut wid you mullet-head Jacksonville Coons know whut to
do wid a cake. It’s gointer stay right here in Augustine where de good
cake walkers grow.
DINKY
Taint no ‘Walkers’ never walked till John and Emmaline prance
out—you mighty come a tootin’.
[Great laughing and joshing as more people come in. John and Emma
are encouraged, urged on to win.]
EMMA
Let’s we git a seat, John, and set down.
JOHN
Sho will-nice one right over there.
[They push over to wall seat, place basket underneath, and sit.
Newcomers shake hands with them and urge them on to win.]
[Enter Joe Clarke and a small group. He is a rotund, expansive man
with a liberal watch chain and charm.]
DINKY [slapping Clarke on the back]
If you don’t go ‘way from here! Lawdy, if it aint Joe.
CLARKE [jovially]
Ah thought you had done forgot us people in Eatonville since you
been living up here in Jacksonville.
DINKY
Course Ah aint.
[Turning.]
Looka heah folks! Joe Clarke oughta be made chairman uh dis
meetin’-Ah mean Past Great-Grand Master of Ceremonies, him
being the onliest mayor of de onliest colored town in de state.
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GENERAL CHORUS
Yeah, let him be-thass fine, etc.
DINKY [setting his hat at a new angle and throwing out his chest].
And Ah’ll scorch him to de platform. Ahem!
[Sprinkling of laughter as Joe Clarke is escorted into next room by
Dinky.]
[The musicians are arriving one by one during this time. A guitar,
accordion, mouth organ, banjo, etc. Soon there is a rapping for order
heard inside and the voice of Joe Clarke.]
JOE CLARKE.
Git yo’ partners one an’ all for de gran’ march! Git yo’ partners, gent-
mens!
MAN [drawing basket from under bench]
Let’s we all eat first.
[John and Emma go buy ice-cream. They coquettishly eat from each
other’s spoons. Old Man Lizzimore crosses to Effie and removes his
hat and bows with a great flourish.]
LIZZIMORE
Sam ain’t here t’night, is he, Effie.
EFFIE [embarrassed]
Naw suh, he aint.
LIZZIMORE
Well, you like chicken?
[Extends arm to her.]
Take a wing!
[He struts her up to the table amid the laughter of the house. He
wears no collar.]
coquettishly, adv. flirtatiously
flourish, n. wave
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JOHN [squeezes Emma’s hand]
You certainly is a ever loving mamma-when you aint mad.
EMMA [smiles sheepishly]
You oughtn’t to make me mad then.
JOHN
Ah don’t make you! You makes yo’self mad, den blame it on me. Ah
keep on tellin’ you Ah don’t love nobody but you. Ah knows heaps
uh half-white girls Ah could git ef Ah wanted to. But
[he squeezes her hard again]
Ah jus’ wants you! You know what they say! De darker de berry, de
sweeter de taste!
EMMA [pretending to pout]
Oh, you tries to run over me an’ keep it under de cover, but Ah won’t
let yuh.
[Both laugh.]
Les’ we eat our basket!
JOHN
Alright.
[He pulls the basket out and she removes the table cloth. They set the
basket on their knees and begin to eat fried chicken.]
MALE VOICE
Les’ everybody eat-motion’s done carried.
[Everybody begins to open baskets. All have fried chicken. Very good
humor prevails. Delicacies are swapped from one basket to the other.
John and Emma offer the Man next to them some supper. He takes a
chicken leg. Effie crosses to John and Emma with two pieces of pie on
a plate.]
sheepishly, adv. showing embarrassment
95
EFFIE
Y’ll have a piece uh mah blueberry pie–it’s mighty nice!
[She proffers it with a timid smile to Emma who “freezes” up
instantly.]
EMMA
Naw! We don’t want no pie. We got cocoanut layer-cake.
JOHN
Ah—Ah think ah’d choose a piece uh pie, Effie.
[He takes it.]
Will you set down an’ have a snack wid us?
[He slides over to make room.]
EFFIE [nervously]
Ah, naw, Ah got to run on back to mah basket, but Ah thought
maybe y’ll mout’ want tuh taste mah pie.
[She turns to go.]
JOHN
Thank you, Effie. It’s mighty good, too.
[He eats it. Effie crosses to her seat. Emma glares at her for a minute,
then turns disgustedly away from the basket. John catches her
shoulder and faces her around.]
JOHN [pleadingly]
Honey, be nice. Don’t act lak dat!
EMMA [jerking free]
Naw, you done ruint mah appetite now, carryin’ on wid dat punkin-
colored ole gal.
JOHN
Whut kin Ah do? If you had a acted polite Ah wouldn’t a had nothin’
to say.
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EMMA
Naw, youse jus’ hog-wile ovah her cause she’s half-white! No matter
whut Ah say, you keep carryin’ on wid her. Act polite? Naw Ah aint
gonna be deceitful an’ bust mah gizzard fuh nobody! Let her keep
her dirty ole pie ovah there where she is!
JOHN [looking around to see if they are overheard]
Sh-sh Honey, you mustn’t talk so loud.
EMMA [louder]
Ah-Ah aint gonna bite mah tongue! If she don’t like it she can lump
it. Mah back is broad-[John tries to cover her mouth with his hand].
She calls herself a big cigar, but I kin smoke her.
[The people are laughing and talking for the most part and pay no
attention. Effie is laughing and talking to those around her and does
not hear the tirade. The eating is over and everyone is going behind the
curtain. John and Emma put away their basket like the others, and sit
glum. Voice of Master-of-ceremonies can be heard from beyond curtain
announcing the pas-me-la contest. The contestants, mostly girls, take
the floor. There is no music except the clapping of hands and the shouts
of “Parse-me-lah” in time with the hand-clapping. At the end Master
announces winner. Shadows seen on curtain.]
MASTER
Mathilda Clarke is winner-if she will step forward she will receive a
beautiful wook fascinator.
[The girl goes up and receives it with great hand-clapping and good
humor.]
And now since the roosters is crowin’ foah midnight, an’ most of
us got to git up an’ go to work tomorrow, The Great Cake Walk will
begin. Ah wants de floor cleared, cause de representatives of de
several cities will be announced an’ we wants ‘ern to take de floor
deceitful, adj. dishonest
gizzard, n. stomach
wook fascinator: a wool fascinator—now more associated with fancy headwear, “fascinator” originally
referred to a light shawl or scarf worn on the head and shoulders, often made of lightweight wool
97
as their names is called. Den we wants ‘ern to do a gran’ promenade
roun’de hall. An’ they will then commence to walk fuh de biggest
cake ever baked in dis state. Ten dozen eggs-ten pounds of flour
-ten pounds of butter, and so on and so forth. Now then-[he strikes a
pose] for St. Augustine, Miss Lucy Taylor, Mr. Ned Coles.
[They step out amid applause and stand before stage.]
For Daytona, Miss Janie Bradley, Enoch Nixon
[Same business.]
For Ocala, Miss Docia Boger, Mr. Oscar Clarke
[Same business.]
For Palatka, Miss Maggie Lemmons, Mr. Senator Lewis
[Same business.]
And for Jacksonville the most popular “walkers” in de state Miss
Emmaline Beazeby, Mr. John Turner.
[Tremendous applause. John rises and offers his arm
grandiloquently
to Emma.]
EMMA [pleadingly, and clutching his coat]
John let’s we all don’t go in there with all them. Let’s we all go on
home.
JOHN [amazed]
Why, Emma?
EMMA
Cause, cause all them girls is going to pulling and hauling on you,
and-
JOHN [impatiently]
Shucks! Come on. Don’t you hear the people clapping for us and
calling our names? Come on!
promenade, n. the opening of a formal dance when all the guests march into the dance hall
Grandiloquently, adv. in a way to impress
98
[He tries to pull her up-she tries to drag him back.]
Come on, Emma! Taint no sense in your acting like this. The band is
playing for us. Hear ‘em?
[He moves feet in a dance step.]
EMMA
Naw, John, Ah’m skeered. -I-.
[He tries to break away from her. She is holding on fiercely.]
JOHN
I got to go! I been practising almost a year—I—we done come all the
way down here. I can walk the cake, Emma-we got to-I got to go in!
[He looks into her face and sees her tremendous fear.]
What you skeered about?
EMMA [hopefully]
You won’t go in—You’ll come on go home with me all by ourselves.
Come on John. I can’t, I just can’t go in there and see all them girls-
Effie hanging after you.
JOHN.
I got to go in-
[he removes her hand from his coat]
-whether you come with me or not.
EMMA
Oh-them yaller wenches! How I hate em! They gets everything they
wants.
VOICE INSIDE
We are waiting for the couple from Jacksonville-Jacksonville! Where
is the couple from... .
[Wesley parts the curtain and looks out.]
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WESLEY
Here they is out here spooning! You all can’t even hear your names
called. Come on John and Emma.
JOHN
Coming.
[He dashes inside. Wesley stands looking at Emma in surprise.]
WESLEY
What’s the matter, Emma? You and John spatting again?
[He goes back inside.]
EMMA [calmly bitter]
He went and left me. If we is spatting we done had our last one.
[She stands and clenches her fists.]
Ah, mah God! He’s in there with her. Oh, them half whites, they gets
everything, they gets everything everybody else wants! The men, the
jobs - everything! The whole world is got a sign on it. Wanted: Light
colored. Us blacks was made for cobble stones.
[She muffles a cry and sinks limp upon the seat.]
VOICE INSIDE
Miss Effie Jones will walk for Jacksonville with Mr. John Turner in
place of Miss Emmaline Beazeley.
SCENE III-Dance Hall
Emma springs to her feet and flings the curtains wide open. She stands
staring at the gay scene for a moment defiantly then creeps over to a
seat along the wall and shrinks into the Spanish Moss, motionless.
spat, v. to argue (spatting)
cobble stone, n. flat, rounded, flat stone once used to make roads (cobble stones)
Spanish Moss, n. a bluish grey plant that grows on and hangs on tree branches particularly in tropical
climates
100
Dance hall decorated with palmetto leaves and Spanish Moss—a flag
or two. Orchestra consists of guitar, mandolin, banjo, accordion, church
organ and drum.
MASTER [on platform]
Couples take yo’ places! When de music starts, gentlemen parade yo’
ladies once round de hall, den de walk begins.
[The music begins. Four men come out from behind the platform
bearing a huge chocolate cake. The couples are “prancing” in their
tracks. The men lead off the procession with the cake - the contestants
make a grand slam around the hall.]
MASTER
Couples to de floor! Stan’ back, ladies an’ gentlemen - give ‘em plenty
room.
[Music changes to “Way Down in Georgia.” Orchestra sings. Effie takes
the arm that John offers her and they parade to the other end of the
hall. She takes her place. John goes back upstage to the platform, takes
off his silk hat in a graceful sweep as he bows deeply to Effie. She lifts
her skirts and curtsies to the floor. Both smile broadly. They advance
toward each other, meet midway, then, arm in arm, begin to “strut.”
John falters as he faces her, but recovers promptly and is perfection in
his style. [Seven to nine minutes to curtain.] Fervor of spectators grows
until all are taking part in some way - either hand-clapping or singing
the words. At curtain they have reached frenzy.]
QUICK CURTAIN
[It stays down a few seconds to indicate ending of contest and goes up
again on John and Effie being declared winners by Judges.]
palmetto, n. a palm plant that typically grows in tropical climates
curtsy, v. a greeting, usually made by women, by bending the knee with one foot forward and bowing
(curties)
fervor, n. a strong emotion
frenzy, n. wild excitement
101
MASTER [on platform, with John and Effie on the floor before him].
By unanimous decision de cake goes to de couple from Jacksonville!
[Great enthusiasm. The cake is set down in the center of the floor
and the winning couple parade around it arm in arm. John and Effie
circle the cake happily and triumphantly. The other contestants, and
then the entire assembly fall in behind and circle the cake, singing
and clapping. The festivities continue. The Jacksonville quartet step
upon the platform and sing a verse and chorus of “Daisies won’t tell.”
Cries of “Hurrah for Jacksonville! Glory for the big town,” “Hurrah for
Big Jack.”]
A MAN [seeing Emma]
You’re from Jacksonville, aint you?
[He whirls her around and around.]
Aint you happy? Whoopee!
[He releases her and she drops upon a seat. She buries her face in the
moss.]
[Quartet begins on chorus again. People are departing, laughing,
humming, with quartet cheering. John, the cake, and Effie being
borne away in triumph.]
SCENE IV
TIME - present. The interior of a one-room shack in an alley. There
is a small window in the rear wall upstage left. There is an enlarged
crayon drawing of a man and woman - man sitting cross-legged,
woman standing with her hand on his shoulder. A center table, red
cover, a low, cheap rocker, two straight chairs, a small kitchen stove
at left with a wood-box beside it, a water bucket on a stand close by.
A hand towel and a wash basin. A shelf of dishes above this.
crayon drawing, n. refers to a drawing made with pastels or chalk
10 2
There is an ordinary oil lamp on the center table but it is not lighted
when the curtain goes up. Some light enters through the window and
falls on the woman seated in the low rocker. The door is center right.
A cheap bed is against the upstage wall. Someone is on the bed but is
lying so that the back is toward the audience.
ACTION - As the curtain rises, the woman is seen rocking to and
fro in the low rocker. A dead silence except for the sound of the
rocker and an occasional groan from the bed. Once a faint voice says
“water” and the woman in the rocker arises and carries the tin dipper
to the bed.
WOMAN.
No mo’ right away—Doctor says not too much.
[Returns dipper to pail. Pause.]
You got right much fever—I better go git the doctor agin.
[There comes a knocking at the door and she stands still for a
moment, listening. It comes again and she goes to door but does not
open it.]
WOMAN
Who’s that?
VOICE OUTSIDE
Does Emma Beasely live here?
EMMA
Ye ah —
[pause]
—who is it?
VOICE
It’s me - John Turner.
EMMA [puts hands eagerly on the fastening]
John? Did you say John Turner?
103
VOICE
Yes, Emma, it’s me.
[The door is opened and the man steps inside.]
EMMA
John! Your hand...
[she feels for it and touches it]
John, flesh and blood.
JOHN [laughing awkwardly]
It’s me alright, old girl. Just as bright as a basket of chips. Make a light
quick so I can see how you look. I’m crazy to see you. Twenty years is
a long time to wait, Emma.
EMMA [nervously]
Oh, let’s we all just sit in the dark awhile.
[Apologetically]
I wasn’t expecting nobody and my house aint picked up. Sit down.
[She draws up the chair. She sits in rocker.]
JOHN
Just to think! Emma! Me and Emma sitting down side by each. Know
how I found you?
EMMA [dully]
Naw. How?
JOHN [brightly]
Soon’s I got in town I hunted up Wesley and he told me how to find
you. That’s who I come to see, you!
EMMA
Where you been North somewheres? Nobody out where you got to.
JOHN
Yes, up North. Philadelphia.
104
EMMA
Married yet?
JOHN
Oh yes, seventeen years ago. But my wife is dead now and so I came
as soon as it was decent to find you. I wants to marry you. I die
happy if I didn’t. Couldn’t get over you—couldn’t forget. Forget me,
Emma?
EMMA
Naw, John. How could I?
JOHN [leans over impulsively to catch her hand]
Oh, Emma, I love you so much. Strike a light honey so I can see you
see if you changed much. You was such a handsome girl!
EMMA
We don’t exactly need no light, do we, John, tuh jus’ set an’ talk?
JOHN
Yes, we do, Honey. Gwan, make a light. Ah wanna see you.
[There is a silence.]
EMMA
Bet you’ wife wuz some high-yaller dickty-doo.
JOHN
Naw she wasn’t neither. She was jus’ as much like you as Ah could
get her. Make a light an’ Ah’ll show you her pictcher. Shucks, ah gotta
look at mah old sweetheart.
[He strikes a match and holds it up between their faces and they look
intently at each other over it until it burns out.]
You aint changed none at all, Emma, jus’ as pretty as a speckled pup
yet.
decent, adj, proper, respectable
pictcher, n. dialect for picture
105
EMMA [lighter]
Go long, John!
[Short pause]
...member how you useter bring me magnolias?
JOHN
Do I? Gee, you was sweet! ‘Member how Ah useter pull mah necktie
loose so you could tie it back for me? Emma, Ah can’t see to mah
soul how we lived all this time, way from one another. ‘Member how
you useter make out mah ears had done run down and you useter
screw ‘em up agin for me?
[They laugh.]
EMMA
Yeah, Ah useter think you wuz gointer be mah husban’ then -
but you let dat ole—.
JOHN
Ah aint gonna let you alibi on me lak dat. Light dat lamp! You cain’t
look me in de eye and say no such.
[He strikes another match and lights the lamp.]
Course, Ah don’t wanta look too bossy, but Ah b’lieve you got to
marry me tuh git rid of me. That is, if you aint married.
EMMA
Naw, Ah aint.
[She turns the lamp down.]
JOHN [looking about the room]
Not so good, Emma. But wait till you see dat little place in Philly!
Got a little “Rolls-Rough” too—gointer teach you to drive it, too.
magnolia, n. scented, white flower that grows on a tree of the same name (magnolias)
alibi, v. make an excuse
Rolls Rough slang term for an old, not so luxurious car
106
EMMA
Ah been havin’ a hard time, John, an’ Ah lost you - oh, aint nothin’
been right for me! Ah aint never been happy.
[John takes both of her hands in his.]
JOHN
You gointer be happy now, Emma. Cause Ah’m gointer make you.
Gee Whiz! Ah aint but forty-two and you aint forty yet -
we got plenty time.
[There is a groan from the bed.]
Gee, what’s that?
EMMA [ill at ease]
Thass mah chile. She’s sick. Reckon Ah bettah see ‘bout her.
JOHN
You got a chile? Gee, that great! Ah always wanted one. but didn’t
have no luck. Now we kin start off with a family. Girl or boy?
EMMA [slowly]
A girl. Comin’ tuh see me agin soon, John?
JOHN
Comin’ agin? Ah aint gone yet! We aint talked, you aint kissed me an’
nothin’, and you aint showed me our girl.
[another groan, more prolonged.]
She must be pretty sick - let’s see.
[He turns in his chair and Emma rushes over to the bed and covers
the girl securely, tucking her long hair under the covers, too-before he
arises. He goes over to the bed and looks down into her face. She is
mulatto. Turns to Emma teasingly.]
chile, n. dialect for child
10 7
Talkin’ ‘bout me liking high-yallers—yo husband musta been pretty
near white.
EMMA [slowly]
Ah, never wuz married, John.
JOHN.
It’s alright, Emma.
[Kisses her warmly.]
Everything is going to be O.K.
[Turning back to the bed.]
Our child looks pretty sick, but she’s pretty.
[Feels her forehead and cheek.]
Think she oughter have a doctor.
EMMA
Ah done had one. Course Ah cain’t git no specialist an’ nothin’ lak dat.
[She looks about the room and his gaze follows hers.]
Ah aint got a whole lot lake you. Nobody don’t git rich in no white-
folks’ kitchen, nor in de washtub. You know Ah aint no school-
teacher an’ nothin’ lak dat.
[John puts his arm about her.]
JOHN
It’s all right, Emma. But our daughter is bad off—run out an’ git a
doctor—she needs one. Ah’d go if Ah knowed where to find one—
you kin git one the quickest—hurry, Emma.
EMMA [looks from John to her daughter and back again.]
She’ll be all right, Ah reckon, for a while. John, you love me—you
really want me sho’ nuff ?
108
JOHN
Sure Ah do—think Ah’d come all de way down here for nothin’? Ah
wants to marry agin.
EMMA
Soon, John?
JOHN
Real soon.
EMMA
Ah wuz jus’thinkin’, mah folks is away now on a little trip—be home
day after tomorrow—we could git married tomorrow.
JOHN
All right. Now run on after the doctor—we must look after our girl.
Gee, she’s got a full suit of hair! Glad you didn’t let her chop it off.
[Looks away from bed and sees Emma standing still.]
JOHN
Emma, run on after the doctor, honey.
[She goes to the bed and again tucks the long braids of hair in, which
are again pouring over the side of the bed by the feverish tossing of
the girl.]
What’s our daughter’s name?
EMMA
Lou Lillian.
[She returns to the rocker uneasily and sits rocking jerkily. He returns
to his seat and turns up the light.]
JOHN
Gee, we’re going to be happy—we gointer make up for all them
twenty years [another groan]. Emma, git up an’ gwan git dat doctor.
You done forgot Ah’m de boss uh dis family now—gwan, while
Ah’m here to watch her whilst you’re gone. Ah got to git back to mah
stoppin’-place after a while.
109
EMMA
You go git one, John.
JOHN
Whilst Ah’m blunderin’ round tryin’ to find one, she’ll be gettin’
worse. She sounds pretty bad.
[takes out his wallet and hands her a bill]
Get a taxi if necessary. Hurry!
EMMA [does not take the money, but tucks her arms and hair in
again, and gives the girl a drink]
Reckon Ah better go git a doctor. Don’t want nothin’ to happen to
her. After you left, Ah useter have such a hurtin’ in heah
[touches her bosom]
till she come an’ eased it some.
JOHN
Here, take some money and get a good doctor. There must be some
good colored ones around here now.
EMMA [scornfully]
I wouldn’t let one of ‘em tend my cat if I had one! But let’s we don’t
start a fuss.
[John caresses her again. When he raises his head he notices the picture
on the wall and crosses over to it with her—his arm still about her.]
JOHN
Why, that’s you and me
EMMA
Yes, I never could part with that. You coming tomorrow morning,
John, and we’re gointer get married, aint we? Then we can talk over
everything.
scornfully, adv. without respect
110
JOHN
Sure, but I aint gone yet. I don’t see how come we can’t make all our
arrangements now.
[Groans from bed and feeble movement.]
Good lord, Emma, go get that doctor!
[Emma stares at the girl and the bed and seizes a hat from a nail
on the wall. She prepares to go but looks from John to bed and back
again. She fumbles about the table and lowers the lamp. Goes to door
and opens it. John offers the wallet. She refuses it.]
EMMA
Doctor right around the corner. Guess I’ll leave the door open so she
can get some air. She, won’t need nothing while I’m gone, John.
[She crosses and tucks the girl in securely and rushes out, looking
backward and pushing the door wide open as she exits. John sits in the
chair beside the table. Looks about him - shakes his head. The girl on
the bed groans, “water,” “so hot.” John looks about him excitedly. Gives
her a drink. Feels her head. Takes a clean handkerchief from his pocket
and wets it and places it upon her forehead. She raises her hand to the
cool object. Enter Emma running. When she sees John at the bed she is
full of fury. She rushes over and jerks his shoulder around. They face
each other.]
EMMA
I knowed it!
[She strikes him.]
A half white skin.
[She rushes at him again. John staggers back and catches her hands.]
JOHN
Emma!
fury, n. anger
111
EMMA [struggles to free her hands]
Let me in so I can kill you. Come sneaking in here like a pole cat!
JOHN [slowly, after a long pause]
So this the woman I’ve been wearing over my heart like a rose for
twenty years! She so despises her own skin that she can’t believe any
one else could love it!
[Emma writhes to free herself.]
JOHN
Twenty years! Twenty years of adoration, of hunger, of worship!
[On the verge of tears he crosses to door and exits quietly, closing the
door after him.]
[Emma remains standing, looking dully about as if she is half asleep.
There comes a knocking at the door. She rushes to open it. It is the
doctor—white. She does not step aside so that he can enter.]
DOCTOR
Well, shall I come in?
EMMA [stepping aside and laughing a little]
That’s right, doctor, come in.
[Doctor crosses to bed with professional air. Looks at the girl, feels the
pulse and draws up the sheet over the face. He turns to her.]
DOCTOR
Why didn’t you come sooner. I told you to let me know of the least
change in her condition.
EMMA [flatly]
I did come—I went for the doctor.
DOCTOR
Yes, but you waited. An hour more or less is mighty important
sometimes. Why didn’t you come?
112
EMMA [passes hand over face]
Couldn’t see.
[Doctor looks at her curiously, then sympathetically takes out a small
box of pills, and hands them to her.]
DOCTOR
Here, you’re worn out. Take one of these every hour and try to get
some sleep.
[He departs.]
[She puts the pill-box on the table, takes up the low rocking chair
and places it by the head of the bed. She seats herself and rocks
monotonously and stares out of the door. A dry sob now and then.
The wind from the open door blows out the lamp and she is seen by
the little light from the window rocking in an even, monotonous gait,
and sobbing.]
For Further Consideration
1. Scene One opens in the “Jim Crow” section of a railway car.
What does the “Jim Crow” section mean?
2. Why does Emma get mad with John in Scene One?
3. Near the end of Scene One, Emma claims to have a jealous love
for John. What makes Emma jealous?
4. There are a couple of surprising plot twists in Scene Four of the
play. What is one example?
5. Based on what you read about colorism, what are the effects of
colorism on Emma’s life? Who is to blame for these effects?
113
S S S:
Do you remember the last time that you were sick? Maybe you had
a bad headache, or maybe it was your stomach that was bothering
you. Perhaps it was a fever that took a long time to break, or the
feeling of not ever wanting to leave your bed because you were too
sore or too drained to do much of anything. Whatever it was that
made you feel that way, do you remember what your parents gave
you to make you feel better? Maybe it was a bowl of hot soup, or
perhaps they made you drink plenty of refreshing beverages like
cool water and juices. Maybe they allowed you to stay in bed longer
than usual and watch your favorite television shows or movies in
between naps. Whether it was the soups, the drinks or the rest or
perhaps a combination of all of these things, in time, your body
received what it needed to heal and recover from the illness that
made you feel ill in the rst place.
African Americans had long been exposed to illnesses that caused
pain and suering. From the long, hard voyage that brought many
of them to America during the Middle Passage, to the harsh days of
slavery with its brutal conditions and constant fear of punishment
and family separation, to the days of Jim Crow segregation, African
Americans relied on remedies that could soothe their spirits to give
them the strength needed to move on and endure.
One of their most reliable remedies were songs that were known
as spirituals. These songs, often referred to as African American
or Negro spirituals, were songs that religious messages and were
114
created during slavery by enslaved people who sang them as a
way of both passing time in the elds as they worked, and to relay
secret messages about escape or meeting plans. According to the
Library of Congress, these songs are the most signicant forms of
American folksong and cultural expression.
An essay about this authentic African American art form is included
in 1925’s The New Negro. Because this was a collection of essays
that was meant to celebrate the modern spirit of activism and
pride, the inclusion of an essay about something that is so closely
associated with slavery might be a strange decision. Why do you
think this was done? Perhaps the decision was made to write the
essay as a way of recognizing how far African Americans had come
in a relatively short period of time. Maybe it is possible the essay
was included because they were a positive reminder of how African
Americans used music as a means of self-expression and as a way
of communicating with one another. After all, Locke reminded
his audiences that jazz, the genre of music that was gaining in
widespread popularity during the 1920s, owed its existence to
spirituals. He once wrote that African Americans had always used
music to escape the harshness of poverty and blues and jazz both
have their roots in the spirituals of the ancestors. Locke’s reminder
shows us that the New Negro owed his existence to the Old Negro
in many ways, and the spirituals of the Old Negro, just may be his
most signicant contribution.
relay, v. to pass from one person to another
115
e Negro Spirituals
by Alain Locke
e 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. us, 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 folk-song; but if the Spirituals are what we
think them to be, a classic folk expression, then this is their ultimate
destiny. Already they give evidence of this classic quality. rough
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. is universality of the
spirituals looms more and more as they stand the test of time. ey
have outlived the particular generation and the peculiar conditions
which produced them; they have survived in turn 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. ey
have escaped the lapsing conditions and the fragile vehicle of folk
art and come rmly into the context of formal music. Only classics
survive such things.
In its disingenuous simplicity, folk art is always despised and rejected
at rst; but generations aer, it owers again and transcends the level
untarnishable, adj. not able to be damaged
immortality, n. able to live forever
universality, n. applicable (to many people)
loom, v. to appear in one’s mind (looms)
contempt, n. open disrespect
conventionalization, n. conforming to what is expected (conventionalizations)
repressions of Puritanisms, n. avoiding pleasurable or enjoyable experiences or things
disingenious, adj. not sincere or straight forward
116
of its origin. e slave songs are no exception; only recently have they
come to be recognized as artistically precious things. It still requires
vision and courage to proclaim their ultimate value and possibilities.
But while the rst stage of artistic development is yet uncompleted, it
appears that behind the deceptive simplicity of Negro song lie the richest
undeveloped musical resources anywhere available. ematically rich,
in idiom of rhythm and harmony richer still, in potentialities of new
musical forms and new technical traditions so deep as to be accessible
only to genius, they have the respect of the connoisseur when even
while still under the sentimental and condescending patronage of the
amateur. Proper understanding and full appreciation of the spirituals,
in spite of their present vogue, is still rare. And the Negro himself
has shared many of the common and widespread limitations of view
with regards to them. e emotional intuition which has made him
cling to this folk music has lacked for the most part that convinced
enlightenment that eventually will treasure the spirituals for their
true musical and technical values. And although popular opinion and
the general conception have changed very materially, a true estimate
of this body of music cannot be reached until many prevailing
preconceptions are completely abandoned… .
…It was the great service of Dr. Du Bois* in his unforgettable chapter
on the Sorrow Songs in e Soul of Black Folk to give them a serious
and proper social interpretation…e humble origin of these sorrow
songs is too indelibly stamped upon them to be ignored or overlooked.
But underneath broken words, childish imagery, peasant simplicity,
lies as Dr. Du Bois pointed out, an epic intensity…for which the only
historical analogy is the spiritual experience of the Jews and the only
connoisseur, n. expert; a person who is highly knowledgeable
amateur, n. a person who is unskilled or not a professional
analogy, n. similar experience
* Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist, as well as
one of the founders of the NAACP. He actively protested against lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and
discrimination.
117
analogue, the Psalms. Indeed they transcend emotionally even the
very experience of sorrow out of which they were born; their mood is
that of religious exaltation, a degree of ecstasy that makes them in spite
of the crude vehicle a classic expression of the religious emotion…
…Perhaps there is no such thing as intrinsically religious music…
secular elements can be found in all religious music…but something
so intensely religious and so essentially Christian dominates the blend
that they are indelibly and notably of this quality. e spirituals are
spiritual…
…Emotionally, these songs are far from simple. ey are not only
spread over the whole gamut of human moods, with the traditional
religious overtone adroitly insinuated in each instance, but there is
further a sudden change of mood in the single song… .
…It is in the interest of musical development itself that we insist upon
a broader conception and a more serious appreciation of Negro folk
song, and of the spiritual which is the very kernel of this distinctive
folk art. We cannot accept the attitude that would merely preserve this
music but must cultivate that which would also develop it. Equally
with treasuring and appreciating as music of the past, we must nurture
and welcome its contribution to the music of tomorrow… .
analogue, n. comparable writing
Psalm, n book of Biblical hymns (Psalms)
exaltation, n. joy
intrinsically, adv. naturally
secular, adj. not religious
For Further Consideration
1. According to the passage, what are spirituals and what makes
them an uniquely American folkart?
2. When did spirituals originate? When and by whom were they
started by?
3. Why does Locke believe that spirituals are worth preserving
and studying? Cite specific evidence from the text that
supports this observation.
118
Acknowledgements
“Life is Fine” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel,
Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Harlem (2)” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel,
Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“David’s Old Soul” from One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance, by Nikki Grimes. Copyright © 2017 Nikki Grimes. Used
by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
“The Sculptor” from One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance, by Nikki Grimes. Copyright © 2017 Nikki Grimes. Used by
permission of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Illustrations and Images
Alpha Stock / Alamy Stock Photo / 18
bilwissedition Ltd. & Co. KG / Alamy Stock Photo / 3
Brent Hofacker / Alamy Stock Photo / 82
Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo / 66
From The New York Public Library / b11527526 / 24
From The New York Public Library / b11687727 / 59
Ivan Pesic / Cover, i
Library of Congress / LC-H2- B-7014 / 34
MixPix / Alamy Stock Photo / 12
Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo / 6, 7, 29, 42, 62, 79
World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo / 68
119
ISBN: 978-1-68380-847-3
www.coreknowledge.org
THE GENIUS OF THE GENIUS OF
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCETHE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
In the early 1900s, many African Americans left the South to relocate
to urban centers in the North looking to escape racial hostility, and
searching for greater economic opportunity and relief from racial
oppression. The “Great Migration” was the largest internal movement of
people in American History and set the stage for the important American
intellectual and cultural movement known as The Harlem Renaissance.
The Genius of the Harlem Renaissance is a compilation of writings by
prominent Black writers in the rst part of the twentieth century in
Harlem—where Black people were able to freely express themselves
culturally and artistically.
In this volume, Dr. Andrea Oliver explores dierent styles of writing—
poetry, drama, essays, as well as articles from the legendary newspapers
of the Black Press of the time. Artists such as Langston Hughes, Paul
Dunbar, and Zora Neale Hurston are showcased, as are the great essayists
J.A. Rogers, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson. The poets Georgia
Douglas Johnson, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and many others are
presented in these pages.
The Genius of the Harlem Renaissance gives us thoughtful insights into a
time and place that must not be forgotten; a time and place that distill
the vibrant art of a people who are nally able to express the long
suppressed voices of their hearts and minds.
A publication of the nonprot Core Knowledge Foundation
founded by
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
