t he New Negro Movement

the New Negro Movement American Culture II Luciano Cabral www.uerjundergradslit.wordpress.com

Pickaninnies, mammies, sambo The picaninny is an anti-Black caricature of children. They are "child coons,"(see coon caricature history) with the same physical characteristics. Pickaninnies have bulging eyes, big red lips, and they speak in a primitive, stereotypical dialect. They are often shown stuffing their wide mouths with watermelon or chicken, which they usually stole. They are unkempt, suggesting that their parents are neglectful. Very often they are shown nude, a level of sexualization that is particularly troubling due to their age.

A significant number of items make specific reference to the skin color of black children as being derived from ink, either from drinking ink directly, or from taking the residue from the bathtubs in which black children have bathed. One particularly offensive print, published in 1916, shows a softly caricatured Black child sitting on the floor, drinking from a bottle of ink. This image is contrasted by the simple, stark caption beneath, which reads, "Nigger Milk". The message of these items was clear: Black children are not human. The notion that a child Blackness could be washed off, like an ink stain, is depicted on one 1920s postcard. It is perhaps no coincidence that the few commercial items to employ the pickaninny caricature in their advertising were mostly laundry soaps, including the famous Gold Dust twins, and advertisements for Lux detergent.

“It was the period when the Negro was in vogue” (Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea, 1940) • The Negro Movement or The Harlem Renaissance: “Progress” as the watchword of the movement. • The word VOGUE: (1) blackness was in fashion (2) temporariness, perish, decay: the creation of a fresh African American identity and the dismissal of the old. • Contradictions: Can the past be totally dismissed? Can black art be promoted without white patronage? Is race a local or universal issue?

The Great Migration of turn of the 20th century • African Americans: pushed out of the South and pulled toward the North • Racist violence and repression • Natural disasters: drought and boll weevil infestation • Lack of job opportunities (1)More freedom (2) Better jobs (World War I, USA in 1917)

The Great Migration of turn of the 20th century “Life in the North was more complicated than it looked from down South. Rural black laborers discovered too late that they had been lured to the North in order to break the strikes organized by white (largely immigrant) workers attempting to unionize. And black people who had fled the escalating violence in the South saw the North erupt in brutality, as well. The summer of 1919 was known as the “Red Summer,” and riots broke out in Washington and Chicago, as well as Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, and elsewhere. But even these dismal episodes and circumstances could not keep black Americans from migrating North where the dream of self-determination seemed that much more within reach”.

“More than violence, 1919 was a year marked by triumph and optimism. On February 17, the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the “Harlem Hellfighters”, staged a magnificent parade to mark their return home from the war. More than one million people turned out to behold the heroic soldiers – the only American unit awarded the Croix de Guerre […]. As the regiment turned on to Lenox Avenue, in the heart of Harlem, the band, led by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, began to play “Here Comes My Daddy Now” to an ecstatic crowd. The parade – with its music, spirit, and dignity – was more than a spectacle. It was an articulation of hope that gave way to a growing, infectious certainty that an equitable cultural victory could be won by the art and artists of the Harlem Renaissance”.

Harlem Renaissance: a revival or an ongoing revolution? “Both the ambitions and the contradictions that characterized the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement are embodied in the terms themselves. […] “renaissance” [is] a “rebirth” or “revival.” Some historians and critics believe that what took place during the Harlem Renaissance years was not a rebirth, as such, but only another stage in the evolution of African and African American art that had begun with the inception of African presence in America”. The New Negro Movement was not limited to Harlem Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington DC.

Harlem Renaissance: outdoors and indoors “Black migrants mingled with African American natives of New York across culture and class lines, both outdoors – along the elegant avenues and broad sidewalks that characterized Harlem – and indoors – inside cabarets, buffet flats, speakeasies, and ballrooms that dominated nightlife in the city. The Harlem Renaissance flourished alongside the Jazz Age, an era that recalls the institutions that made it famous, nightclubs like the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Small’s Paradise”. “Mecca of the New Negro”

Some of the most famous jazz and blues artists performed there, such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, and Louis Armstrong.

Harlem Renaissance: the white patronage “The Cotton Club featured black performers like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith but catered only to a white clientele. Black patrons had to sit in segregated, “Jim Crow” sections in order to enjoy black entertainment. Black people were relegated to classless citizenship in venues devoted to the celebration of blackness. It was unavoidable: black art needed white patronage to survive”. “Rent parties”, thrown ostensibly to raise rent money for the host, became important avenues for African Americans to congregate privately, away from the curious gazes of white people. However successful these parties were at giving blacks in Harlem sanctuary from inquiring white eyes, they could not resolve the larger conundrum of white influence on the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem Renaissance: unions and magazines NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois National Urban League, Opportunity, Charles S. Johnson UNIA: Universal Negro Improvement Association, Negro World, Marcus Garvey (piloted the “Back to Africa Movement” “For most African American writers, getting a book published may have been the ultimate goal, but newspapers and magazines reached the broadest audiences, and because of this they constituted significant vehicles for cultural expression during the Harlem Renaissance. Importantly, during the Harlem Renaissance years, New York had recently supplanted Boston as the center of American publishing. For literary hopefuls, the significance of New York was incomparable”.

What’s a New Negro? What’s the Old Negro? “In “A New Crowd – A New Negro,” a 1919 article published in The Messenger, author A. Phillip Randolph, the founder of the magazine, details the distinction between Old and New Negroes. His critiques of the “Old Negro” included political conservatism, accommodationist politics, opposition to organized labor, and dependence upon white benefactors who had nothing but disdain for the working class”. “The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. He had been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism.3 Sambos, pickaninnies, bucks, mammies, Uncle Toms, were stock figures that dominated the cultural landscape of the American South in broadsides, advertisements, and minstrel shows. With the debut of Birth of a Nation, they permeated the new film industry as well”.

“After watching the movie, a white patron in Lafayette, Indiana murdered a black boy. The film incited racist violence all over the country. […] With its dehumanizing images of black savages and buffoons, Birth of a Nation demonstrated the power of the moving picture to name black people in a language more persuasive than anything the page or a photograph could ever manifest. In New York City alone, 3 million viewers went to see the film in the first eleven months”.

What’s black art for? In the preface to his 1922 volume The Book of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson outlines the particular dilemma facing the New Negro writer: The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced … And nothing will do more to change [the national mental attitude toward the Negro] and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art. Published nearly 150 years after Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first published book by an African American, Johnson’s preface underscores a theme that connects both generations of black writers, which is that black authorship requires white readership. It is only through the acceptance of white readers alone that blacks will achieve self-actualization. When Johnson explains, “The public, generally speaking, does not know that there are American Negro poets,” the “public” to which he refers (and which he means to educate) is implicitly white.

What’s black art for? “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), Du Bois wrote frankly that black writers ought to use their art to advocate for black advancement. “The kind of black writing that titillates white readerships has the potential to alienate black readerships. Black writers are therefore in a veritable bind, with the line between commercial success and race betrayal looking very thin indeed. At the time of the Harlem Renaissance, black culture was understood to be in a period of great crisis and radical transformation. Central to this spirit of intense expectation was the hope that black people would be judged differently by white readers and spectators”.

What’s black art for? “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), Du Bois wrote frankly that black writers ought to use their art to advocate for black advancement. The satirist George Schuyler […] In his 1926 essay “The Negro Art-Hokum”, Schuyler characterized any belief in an African American art form that is distinct from a white, or “mainstream,” American art form as a foolish myth. “As for the literature, painting, and sculpture of Aframericans – such as there is – it is identical in kind with the literature, painting, and sculpture of white Americans,” Carl van Vechten

Carl van Vechten Van Vechten outlines his position in his 1926 essay, “Moanin’ Wid a Sword in Mah Han’”, in a discussion about Negro spirituals: It is a foregone conclusion that with the craving to hear these songs that is known to exist on the part of the public, it will not be long before white singers have taken them over and made them enough their own so that the public will be surfeited sooner or later with opportunities to enjoy them, and – when the Negro tardily offers to sing them in public – it will perhaps be too late to stir the interest which now lies latent in the breast of every music lover. In other words, African Americans should heed the call of the market – and fast.

t he New Negro Movement