Harlem’s ‘New Negro’ renaissance recalled by portraits

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 21

Harlem’s ‘New Negro’ renaissance recalled by portraits

By

BORIS WEINTRAUB,

National

Geographic News Service

Their faces peer from the walls of the small exhibit area at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, each with a distinctive message, an individual personality: • Langston Hughes, wearing a fedora and a street-smart look, sitting on the steps of what must be a Harlem tenement building; • Countee Cullen, a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from his vest, a thoughtful expression on his poet’s face; • Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and folklorist, irony and arrogance fighting for supremacy beneath a stylish hat; • Alaine Locke, every inch the philosopher-scholar in his quiet three-piece suit; • Claude McKay, in an opencollared shirt and braces, his weary face the essence of the blues — or of poetry. All of these photographs, and another 45 besides, were taken by an extraordinary man, Carl Van Vechten. Though he took them in the 1930 s and later, these five and several others recall a remarkable time in American life and letters, the Harlem Renaissance of the 19205.

Van Vechten was white, the product of an almost bucolic late nineteenth century lowa boyhood, a long way from 1920 s Harlem in more ways than one. By the time the Renaissance took hold, he was an accomplished music critic, a published novelist, and a key figure in winning acceptance for the ayant-garde. He wds so close to •Gertrude Stein, foirexample, that he later became her literary executor. ; -

Thus, he was readily able to recognise the worth of a new music that began to become popular after the First World War: jazz and the blues. And he was prepared to appreciate the work of a group of Negro writers, poets, artists, and thinkers who blossomed in New York’s Harlem at roughly the same time. i

Many factors combined to make Harlem, only recently opened to Negroes but soon the nation’s largest Negro community, the site of such an artistic outpouring. Most striking, according to Nathan Irvin Huggins, professor of history and Afro-American studies at Harvard University, is that so many former southern field-hands now lived in the urban North. “Hard times and violence had pushed them from the South, and the European war, which caused industrial expansion in the North, had cut off traditional sources of immigrant labour,” Professor Huggins writes in the introduction to an anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. “Industrial demands pulled blacks into the North.” As rural Negroes were moving into Harlem, West Indian and other immigrants were joining them to create a cultural and creative mixture.

Also, there was a new assertiveness among their social and political leaders. The accommodating theories of Booker T. Washington were being challenged by men like W.E.B. Dußois and A. Philip Randolph, and blacks who had served with wartimedlistinction, even in a segregated afljiy, sought greater freedom in the pos-twar years. However, the cultural flowering

that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance was almost apolitical — shunning politics and concentrating instead on artistic expression and racial pride. Renaissance leaders believed that proving that Negroes had great cultural talent was one way to win acceptance for their race in general.

The result was the appearance of novelists like Hurston and Jean Toomer, poets like Hughes and McKay, painters like Aaron Douglas, and thinkers like Locke, a professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington. Professor Locke’s introduction to a 1925 collection of their work gave rise to a new phrase: the ‘“New Negro.” The New Negro, he wrote, was optimistic, aggressive in pursuing his cultural development, aware of his cultural history as expressed, for example, in traditional spirituals. He was determined to win acceptance, on mmt, by the larger American society. And, he added, there was no

question where the New Negro’s home was: “The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.”

Professor Locke’s manifesto, and the work of his contemporaries, helped create what came to be called the “Vogue of the Negro” — and of Harlem. At a time when cultural theorists were celebrating the spiritual freedom of “primitives” elsewhere, white liberals began to view the Negro as the true American primitive, and to seek him out.

White revellers began to appear in Harlem cabarets and at Harlem parties. Conversely, no party of New York’s literati was complete without the presence of black intellectuals and artists. Newspapers and magazines wrote about Harlem life, celebrating the apparently exotic society their reporters found there.

No-one had a larger rote'in this rage than Carl Van Vecfjfen. He matched Harlem writers With big publishers, wrote of their work in

general publications, and even wrote a novel about Harlem. Its title, “Nigger Heaven,” angered many Negroes even more than the sensationalistic picture he painted of their lives.

Yet, many Harlemites defended him and remained his friend for several decades, long after the Harlem Renaissance ended. What ended it was the Great Depression. No longer was it possible for Negroes to write optimistically of a peaceful, cheerful society in which race was irrelevant and the only thing that mattered was the quality of artistic endeavour. Times had changed. Professor Huggins, who has written a literary study of the Harlem Renaissance, believes that while the emergence of so many minority writers in one place at one time was significant, the quality of their work was not particularly high. , “My view of the writers of tbrf 1920 s is that they were so conventional that they’re not interesting,”

he says. “There is a lack of an authentic voice. Later, black writers had that voice, and there also is an audience now that can work hard enough to understand what they’re saying, so that today’s writers don’t have to explicate black life and culture for the reader.”

Professor Huggins was the principal adviser to the National Portrait Gallery exhibit of Van Vechten’s photographs, titled “0, Write My Name: American Portraits, Harlem Heroes.” It is based on Van Vechten’s work from the early 19305, when he abandoned writing for photography, until 1962, shortly before he died, and includes portraits of several generations.

The photographs, hand-gravure prints made available by the Eakins Press Foundation, are taken from the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Yale University’s Beinicke Library, a collection established by Van Vechten. The exhibit closes June 10.