Modern Mind

Bois, Langston Hughes, Charles Johnson, Paul Robeson, Alain Locke. A’Lelia’s was the home of what came to be called ‘the new Negro,’ and hers was by no means the only establishment of its kind. 34 In the wake of the Great War, when American blacks in segregated units had fought with distinction, there was a period of optimism in race relations (on the East Coast, if not in the South), partly caused by and partly reflected in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, a period of about a decade and a half when black American writers, actors, and musicians made their collective mark on the country’s intellectual landscape and stamped one place, Harlem, with a vitality, a period of chic, never seen before or since.
    The Harlem Renaissance began with the fusion of two bohemias, when the talents of Greenwich Village began at last to appreciate the abilities of black actors. In 1920 Charles Gilpin, a black actor, starred in Eugene O’Neill’s
Emperor Jones,
establishing a vogue. 35 Du Bois had always argued that the way ahead for the Negro in America lay with its ‘talented tenth,’ its elite, and the Harlem Renaissance was the perfect expression of this argument in action: for a decade or so there was a flowering of black stage stars who all shared the belief that arts and letters had the power to transform society. But the renaissance also had its political edge. Race riots in the South and Midwest helped produce the feeling that Harlem was a place of refuge. Black socialists published magazines like the
Messenger
(‘The only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes’). 36 And there was Marcus Garvey, ‘a little sawed-off, hammered down black man’ from Jamaica, whose Pan-African movement urged the return of all blacks to Africa, Liberia in particular. He was very much part of Harlem life until his arrest for mail fraud in 1923. 37
    But it was literature, theatre, music, poetry, and painting that held most people’s hearts. Clubs sprang up everywhere, attracting jazz musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Wader, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, Scott Joplin, and later, Fletcher Henderson. Nick La Rocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz recording in New York in 1917, ‘Dark Town Strutter’s Ball.’ 38 The renaissance threw up a raft of blacks – novelists, poets, sociologists, performers – whose very numbers conveyed an optimism about race even when their writings belied that optimism, people like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset. McKay’s
Harlem Shallows,
for instance, portrayed Harlem as a lush tropical forest hiding (spiritual) decay and stagnation. 39 Jean Toomer’s
Cane
was part poem, part essay, part novel, with an overall elegiac tone, lamenting the legacy of slavery, the ‘racial twilight’ in which blacks found themselves: they can’t – won’t – go back, and don’t know the way forward. 40 Alain Locke was a sort of impresario, an Apollinaire of Harlem, whose
New Negro,
published in 1925, was an anthology of poetry and prose. 41 Charles Johnson was a sociologist who had studied under Robert Park at Chicago, who organised intellectual gatherings at the Civic Club, attended by Eugene O’Neill, Carl van Doren, and Albert Barnes, who spoke about African art. Johnson was also the editor of a new black magazine to put alongside Du Bois’s
Crisis.
It was called
Opportunity,
its very name reflecting the optimism of the time. 42
    The high point and low point of the Harlem Renaissance is generally agreed to have been the publication in 1926 of
Nigger Heaven,
by Carl Van Vechten, described as ‘Harlem’s most enthusiastic and ubiquitous Nordic.’ Van Vechten’s novel is scarcely read now, though sales soared when it was first released by Alfred A. Knopf. Its theme was High Harlem, the Harlem that Van Vechten knew and adored but was, when it came down to it, an outsider in. He
thought
life in Harlem was perfect, that the blacks there were, as he put it, ‘happy in their skin,’ reflecting the current view that African Americans had a vitality that whites lacked, or were losing with the decadence of their civilisation. All that may have been acceptable, just; but Van Vechten was an outsider, and hemade two unforgivable mistakes which vitiated his book: he ignored the problems that even sophisticated blacks knew had not gone away; and in his use of slang, and his comments about the