black city upon a hill
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Black City Upon a HillTRANSCRIPT
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“‘A (Black) City Upon a Hill’: The New Negro Black Consciousness Grows up in Harlem”
Eleanora Fagan sat on the train from Baltimore en route to meet her mother in northern
New Jersey. She was only fourteen, and the year was 1929. Though her ticket indicated an
arrival point of Long Branch, Eleanora had decided, “damn Long Branch, I was going to get to
see Harlem someway….have myself a time, and then contact my mother.”1 Certainly the young
Eleanora was eager to see Harlem because she had heard of its fame as “the Negro metropolis”
and “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.”2 It would not be long
before the young teenager and her mother began “trying to kick and scratch out a living in
Harlem” with the thousands of other black migrants fleeing to this Northern haven in the wake of
World War I industrialization and the tightening grip and hopelessness of Jim Crow in the
South.3 Little did she know then that Harlem would have such an impact on her life and career,
and that she would help to define its character further. By the time this Harlemite performed
“Strange Fruit” in 1939, Billie Holiday had become one of the most famous black women
entertainers in America, directly because of her association with this neighborhood.
James Weldon Johnson described the unique character of Harlem as he saw it from the
peak of the Renaissance in 1925:
…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 passers-by, the shoppers, those sitting in
1 B. Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, (New York: Harlem Moon, 1956, 2006), 21, 22. 2 J.W. Johnson, “The Making of Harlem”, Survey Graphic, Vol. VI, No. 6, (March, 1925), 635.3 B. Holiday, Lady Sings…, 46; for the Great Migration’s impact upon Harlem see I. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), particularly “Part Three, Exodus, New York.”
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restaurants, coming out of theaters, standing in doorways and looking out of windows are practically all Negroes....There is nothing just like it in any other city in the country.”4
Not only was Harlem unique for its black majority and prosperous middle class, but it was
notable for the specific black Americans that called its streets and avenues home: Zora Neale
Hurston, W.E.B. du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, and
Langston Hughes, among many others. When Billie Holiday lived on 139th St., she was only
three blocks away from Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement League over on 7th. And “if you
should take the A train” not only would you “get to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem”, but you could
also arrive at 7th Ave. and 145th St., where du Bois and the NAACP published The Crisis.5 From
there, one merely had to walk three to four blocks in either direction and arrive at the Savoy or
the Cotton Club. From the Savoy, located on Lenox Ave. and 141st, it was a quick walk past
Billie Holiday’s place to where hair care entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker lived on 136th. Right
down 136th from Walker stood the Urban League, publisher of Opportunity, which lie just around
the corner from both James Weldon Johnson’s domicile on 135th and the Universal Negro
Improvement Association on 7th Ave. And Louis Armstrong blew his trumpet at the Apollo
Theater on 125th St. just about five blocks over diagonally from where Langston Hughes lived on
127th.6 The effervescence of Negro intellectualism as well as artistic expression during the
Harlem Renaissance did not occur in a vacuum to each other, but within the open grid pattern of
a local neighborhood, constantly comingling and interacting, and giving the Harlem Renaissance
its distinctive resonance in the cultural memory of America.
4 J.W. Johnson, “The Making…”, Survey Graphic, 635.5 B. Strayhorn, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” (New York: Columbia Records, 1939).6 T. Millionaire, “Harlem Renaissance Map”, Ephemera Press, Brooklyn, NY, http://ephemerapress.com/harlem-renaissance.html, accessed Dec. 14, 2012.
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This is the story of that neighborhood, for it is only by examining the spatial imaginary
and material culture landscape can the true experience of the uplift movement and the New
Negro aesthetic in Harlem be fully appreciated. The material culture of Harlem’s cityscape
directly helped the infusion of these ideas to neighborhood residents, as it is important to
remember that the individual perceives of his landscape through all five senses, and the
“landscape articulates the individual and the social, the self constructs and interprets the body-in-
space, the self in its surroundings.”7 Adding to the importance of Harlem’s spatial influence upon
the Renaissance is its recognition as a black place. As James Weldon Johnson celebrated, Harlem
contained nearly twenty-five blocks where practically everyone on the street was black, and it
“[represented] the Negro’s latest thrust toward Democracy.”8 For many black Americans, they
had traditionally “found themselves forced to negotiate spaces of containment and confinement
in the land of their captivity,” but Harlem promised something different.9 Historically, the black
spatial imaginary in America also featured restrictions upon freedom of movement, first as slaves
bound to a far-off plantation away from society, and later becoming the situation of being
forcefully kept “in one’s place” by the restrictions of Jim Crow, but Harlem’s city grid
represented mobility and “[e]radicated natural inequalities of topography by providing equal
access to every location within it. It was nonhierarchical...the parts were clearly defined, but the
connections among them were articulated and flexible.”10 Harlem was not “merely a Negro
colony or community...not a slum or a fringe...not a 'quarter' of dilapidated tenements" that could
be ignored or bypassed, but due to its location along Lenox and Seventh Avenues “in the heart of
7 D. Upton, “The City as Material Culture,” The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, ed. by A.E. Yentsch and M.C. Beaudry, (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1992), 52, 53.8 “Harlem”, Opening Essay, Survey Graphic, 629.9 G. Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 5310 Upton, The Art and Mystery, 56
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Manhattan,” Harlem was conceived as a "city within a city.” Though “[t]he pattern of
delicatessen store and cigar shop and restaurant and undertaker's shop which repeats itself a
thousand times on each of New York's long avenues is unbroken” and Harlem was “merely a
rough rectangle of commonplace city blocks,” as Survey Graphic casually explained, its defining
characteristic was that it was “unaccountably full of Negroes.”11
If art can be said to reflect the conditions and questions of the individual artist who
created it, then Harlemite art -- namely its jazz production, both musically and culturally –
reflects the discussions that percolated within the discrete and definable spatial boundaries of the
neighborhood between thinkers such as du Bois, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Langston
Hughes about the proper role of art to the project of Negro uplift; discussions that echoed in
Harlem’s cultural production, the cabarets and jazz clubs that provided a “fertile source” of
material and revues for New York’s downtown theaters, and established Harlem as “part of the
exotic fringe of the Metropolis.”12 The “coming of age” that the Harlem Renaissance represents
in the cultural memory of black American intellectual and artistic expression continues to
reverberate in the black American consciousness today, and the debates over the soul of black art
that began in this neighborhood still raise important questions about identity, authenticity, and
self-fashioning for the black American mentality presently. Furthermore, the culture of Harlem
jazz, though produced in a tiny geographic location, has been exported far beyond the bounds of
the gridded neighborhood to the world over, and has formed the basis for much of the popular
culture that is perceived as merely American, without the preceding qualification of “black.” For
these reasons, anchoring the narrative of the interplay between ideas and expressions of black
11 Survey Graphic, 635, 629.12 Ibid., 629.
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aesthetics to the neighborhood of Harlem for the sake of analysis provides a new lens to
approach this old, yet timeless discussion.
Blackface minstrelsy developed and grew during the nineteenth century, replete with its
various tropes and stereotypes of blacks – the Jim Crow, Zip Coon, the Mammy, the Uncle Tom,
the Buck, the Jezebel, the Mulatto, and the Pickaninny.13 These negative depictions of plantation
life and the nature of blackness circulated the nation through the minstrel circuit, creating a
situation in which it “embodied the iconography of blackness, in popular culture minstrelsy held
absolute domain over blackness and the imagery of blackness.”14 Frederick Douglass did not
mince his words when he declared white minstrel shows “the filthy scum of white society, who
have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and
pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.”15After Emancipation, the collective
soul and mind of the black community had the opportunity to grow reflective, and challenged the
popular misconceptions about blackness through the creation of Black minstrelsy as parody, as
well as the emergence of black intellectuals that wanted the old tropes to be abandoned forever.
“African American discourses of the New Negro…emerged to contest degrading black
stereotypes.”16
Many of these discourses took place within Harlem on account of its notable black
residents previously mentioned. Four of these theorists of black aesthetics will be reviewed here
– W.E.B. du Bois, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Langston Hughes – and their ideas will be
analyzed for areas of agreement and delineation. The common discursive these thinkers entered
13 See E. Lott, “’The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy”, American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1991): pp. 223-254.14 C.J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory & Meaning: Blacks & The Regimes of Race in American Theater & Film Before World War II, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 12915 F. Douglass, “The Hutchinson Family.—Hunkerism,” The North Star, Oct. 27, 1848. 16 H.L. Gates and G.A. Jarrett, “Introduction”, The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1.
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on the subject of black art and its purpose garnered a great deal of attention from black audiences
and received coverage in popular black publications of its time. As Gates and Jarrett noted,
“[a]lmost as soon as blacks could write, it seems, they set out to redefine – against already
received racist stereotypes – who and what a black person was, and how unlike the racist
stereotype the black original could actually be.” It is important to remember that while the four
theorists presented here did not agree on all points, each was motivated by a desire to see the
alleviation of black oppression and the empowerment of the race; the “New Negro” trope then
was an “original, defining feature” of the “wider critical conversation on race, representation,
and African American culture” that dominated black popular thought in the early twentieth
century. 17
Writing the introduction for a symposium titled “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be
Portrayed” published in The Crisis in 1926, W.E.B. du Bois expressed, “[t]here has long been
controversy within and without the Negro race as to just how the Negro should be treated in art –
how he should be pictured by writers and portrayed by artists,” and while the individual freedom
of the artist remained important, he raised the point that it was equally important that “the
conventional Negro” depiction had created a “net result” in American perceptions by “pictur[ing]
twelve million Americans as prostitutes, thieves and fools.” Du Bois and the other editors
lamented “that such ‘freedom’ in art is miserably unfair.” Among the questions posed to the
readership in this symposium: “What are Negroes to do when they are continually painted at
their worst and judged by the public as they are painted?” and “Is not the continual portrayal of
the sordid, foolish and criminal among Negroes convincing the world that this and this alone is
really and essentially Negroid…?”18
17 Ibid., 3, 2. 18 W.E.B. du Bois, “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed”, The New Negro, 190.
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Du Bois and his circle at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People had no interest in the old depictions and tropes of black Americans, and fervently
believed that a conscious counter-effort should be waged by black artists. Again in 1926, du Bois
explained that the “new battle” of the NAACP was “to say that the beauty of truth and freedom
which shall some day be our heritage and the heritage of all civilized men is not in our hands
yet…” He firmly believed that it was the “bounden duty of black America to begin this great
work of the creation…preservation…[and] the realization of beauty” through its art, art that
deliberately sought to present a realistic view of blackness as opposed to the “Uncle Toms,
Topsies, good ‘darkies,’ and clowns” demanded by the white American market.19
Du Bois’ views on art stemmed from his constructs of double consciousness and the color
line that formed the basis of his work since he first published the Souls of Black Folk in 1903, in
which he explained his belief that “centres of culture protect” a “higher individualism…that
seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks freedom for expansion and self-
development”20 In light of this, du Bois’ bold proclamation “’[t]hus all art is propaganda and
ever must be” seems perfectly logical. Black freedom needed the appendages of culture – namely
artistic merit and recognition – to serve as the very foundations of its existence, or to act as a
shield against the constant onslaught of white supremacy; only when blacks could rightly be said
to have achieved culture could they truly assert their humanity and reject the color line. Du Bois
averred: “I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been
used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a
19 Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The New Negro, 258, 259.20 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: NAL Penguin, Inc., 1969), 138.
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damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to
one side [the Old Negro tropes] while the other is stripped and silent.”21
One such piece of propagandistic art produced by du Bois is his essay on Negro spirituals
called “The Sorrow Songs”. He makes the argument that spirituals were not only “the sole
American music, but…the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the
seas.” The propaganda angle of his argument is revealed in his forceful close to white America:
“Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have
brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring
melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land…”22 By extolling the virtues of Negro
spirituals, du Bois was resituating the importance of the contribution of blacks to the
development of America. For du Bois and likeminded Harlemites, the music being performed in
the clubs and cabarets along Jungle Alley (133rd St. between Lenox and Seventh Aves.), such as
Cab Calloway’s famed Cotton Club performances to whites-only audiences, represented much
more in the struggle for Negro uplift than a mere “good time Uptown” on a Saturday night.23
Alain Locke, editor of the famed The New Negro anthology (who lived in lower Harlem
around 120th St.), also had particular views on the purpose of black art. He, like du Bois, firmly
stated how important black music had been to the development of popular music in America. He
assessed: “It fell to the lot of the Negro, whom slavery domesticated, to furnish our most original
and influential folk music…the Negro has been the main source of America’s popular music…”
However, Locke had a view of art inspired by Kant, and took his views even further than du
Bois, by aspiring for black music “to become one of the main sources of America’s serious or
21 Du Bois, “Criteria…,” 25922 Du Bois, “The Sorrow Songs,” The New Negro, 448, 45223 Despite the Cotton Club’s central location in Harlem, many contemporary observers recalled that blacks only made their way inside by being part of the cleaning/serving staff or by performing, but never as customers.
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classical music…” Sharing the sentiments of Western music theorists generally, Locke further
declared, “A great folk music deserves and demands a great classical music. People with the folk
gift of spontaneous harmony should breed great composers…should eventually have great opera,
expert symphony orchestras, and skilled virtuosi or technical master-musicians.”24 Black art was
not important to Locke for its propagandistic elements to further the Negro cause, but rather
drawing from the idiom of blackness could produce a transcendent, elevated, and distinctly
American form of art.
Locke’s greater appreciation for the “artness” of art than du Bois’ mere view of it as a
tool for pro-black propaganda is further revealed in his 1928 “Art of Propaganda?,” which he
viewed as“[a]rtistically…the one fundamental question for us today.” Despite his
acknowledgement that propagandistic art was “preferable to shallow, truckling imitation,” he
objected chiefly because “it perpetuate[d] the position of group inferiority even in crying out
against it.” Locke believed that the “purpose of art…[was] its function as a tap root of vigorous,
flourishing living” and that it was “rooted in self-expression;” all reasons that pleaded to the
black artist that he “must choose art and put aside propaganda.” The fine distinction between
sharing du Bois’ views on art generally, while still desiring more from art than mere propaganda
is important to delineate. While du Bois’ views on black consciousness, first articulated around
the turn of the twentieth century, were more progressive than Booker T. Washington’s who came
before him, Locke’s views on black consciousness and art that come in the 1920s are the next
progressive evolution beyond du Bois’ circa-1900 conception, and while du Bois remained
fixated on black art directly confronting the color line, Locke was more interested in art that
24 A. Locke, The Negro and His Music, (Washington, DC: The Assoc. in Negro Folk Ed., 1936), 2,5; L. Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 6,7.
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transcended the color line altogether, and recognized the need “for a sustained vehicle of free and
purely artistic expression,” or the type of self-affirming atmosphere that would help promote the
creation of the type of transcendent art he longed to see emerge from the black experience. His
musings for such a place settled on the Negro capital: “If HARLEM should happily till this need,
it will perform an honorable and constructive service.” 25
Taking a different, more caustic view towards the conversation of black art was George
Schuyler. Although he first lived in the United Negro Improvement Association’s Phyllis
Wheatley Hotel upon arriving in Harlem, Schuyler grew to oppose Garvey’s Black Nationalism
and became associated with the Old Right. H.L. Mencken (who himself was no stranger to the
debate on black aesthetics), referred to Schuyler as "the most competent Negro journalist ever
heard of", and it was this professional friendship, combined with Schuyler’s sardonically
deployed satire against the entire concept of race and the ten articles he published for Mencken
in The American Mercury that earned Schuyler the moniker “the black Mencken.”26 It must be
pointedly stated that during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, Schuyler had not yet become
the “archconservative” figure he would be seen as during the 1960s, and that Americanists
reconstructing the past cannot use 1960s Schuyler as a template for reading 1920s Schuyler.27 Far
from typical contemporary associations of black conservatives as being “sell-outs” to the race, or
“Uncle Toms” for ingratiating themselves to whites, Schuyler was very much in favor of black
25 Locke, “Art or Propaganda”, The New Negro, 260, 261. 26 O.R. Williams, George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 70; for Mencken directly on the issue of black art see “The Aframerican: New Style” from 1926, - his review of Locke’s The New Negro - and his reply to The Crisis symposium “The Negro in Art: How Shall he Be Portrayed”, both in The New Negro, Gates and Jarrett, eds.; for Mencken’s broad influence on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, see C. Scruggs, The Sage in Harlem: H.L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).27 J.B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), viii-xi.
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enfranchisement and equality. In his essay “Our White Folks” which appeared in the December
1927 issue of The American Mercury, Schuyler declared:
“The amazing ignorance of whites – even Southern whites – about Negroes is a constant source of amusement to all Aframericans….The dark brother looks upon himself as an American, an integral part of this civilization. To him it is not a white civilization, but a white and black civilization. He rightly feels that it is partially his, because for three hundred years he toiled to make it possible.”28
Schuyler, though entrenched in his non-mainstream views, was far from being a mere apologist
for whites.
On the issue of black art, Schuyler entered his voice into the fray through The Nation,
writing “The Negro Art Hokum” as the beginning of a 1926 series in which Langston Hughes
wrote a rejoinder (his response was printed in the same edition of The Nation and will be
analyzed later). In his typical fashion, Schuyler stated plainly, “Negro art ‘made in America’ is
as non-existent as the widely advertised profundity of Cal Coolidge, the ‘seven years of
progress’ of Mayor Hylan, or the reported sophistication of New Yorkers.” His objection to
black art lie in the labeling of the art as “black,” and how that label indicated a failure to
appreciate the “Americaness” of black people and the culture they had contributed to the
building of the United States. To Schuyler:
the Aframerican [was] merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the European immigrant after two or three generations of exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from the mass of Americans…how much truer must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred years. Aside from his color…your American Negro is just plain American….the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more
28 G. Schuyler, “Our White Folks”, The American Mercury, Vol XII, No. 48, (Dec, 1927), 390, 392.
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resembles this stereotype than the average American resembles a composite of Andy Gump, Jim Jeffries, and a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.29
Schuyler’s aversion to the celebration of “black art” is not a disavowal of blackness, but rather
stemmed from a desire to see the “otherness” of blackness die off. In citing proofs that the
Negro’s intellectual and artistic development had come through the normal channels of
American education, Schuyler reminded his readers that fellow Harlemite du Bois, “[t]he dean of
the Aframerican literati” was actually the result of white knowledge as well, “a product of
Harvard and German universities.”30
He closed his essay by eviscerating the black intellectuals [including du Bois] who he
believed should have known better than to peddle and trade on blackness as artistic merit:
This nonsense is probably the last stand or the old myth palmed off by Negrophobists for all these many years, and recently rehashed by the sainted Harding, that there are ‘fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences’ between white and black Americans. That there are Negroes who will lend this myth a helping hand need occasion no surprise….On this baseless premise, so flattering to the white mob, that the blackamoor is inferior and fundamentally different, is erected the postulate that he must needs be peculiar; and when he attempts to portray life through the medium of art, it must of necessity be a peculiar art. While such reasoning may seem conclusive to the majority of Americans, it must be rejected with a loud guffaw by intelligent people.31
While Schuyler’s views may seem somewhat out of sort to the contemporary, post-Civil Rights
Movement conception of black pride, his peculiar strain of thought within his time had a large
influence upon the black community and the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, Schuyler’s essay
prompted the response by Langston Hughes that has become iconic to declaring the inner
yearning of the “New Negro” aesthetic so foundational to the Harlem aesthete, further indicating
the gravitas, respect, and relevance that Schuyler’s contentions demanded during the
Renaissance.
29 Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum”, The Nation 122 (June 1926), 662.30 Ibid., 662.31 Ibid., 662, 663.
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Langston Hughes’ brilliant response, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
forcefully countered the aversion of Schuylerian views towards embracing the label “black,” an
aversion he described as “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--
this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of
American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” Hughes
shared Locke’s view that the black idiom could be used to produce great art, affirming:
Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art…. there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears.32
Though Locke and Hughes agreed on the potential for black idiomatic expression to be positive,
here too, delineation must be made between their two positions in order for a textured view of
the Harlem Renaissance to emerge.
Locke’s support of distinctively black-influenced art was predicated upon the belief that
it could potentially furnish the emergence of a great classical music tradition. Contrastingly,
Hughes embraced using blackness as a muse on the mere basis that “[a]n artist must be free to
choose what he does,” but adding to this artistic freedom the tenet that “he must also never be
afraid to do what he must choose;” if this choice for the black artist meant black art, then so be it.
Hughes’ captured the essence of the “New Negro” soul and the seedlings of the “I’m black and
I’m proud” aesthetic of the Civil Rights Movement by proclaiming:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it
32 L. Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, The Nation.
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doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.33
With this new mindset, the constant perception of whiteness as a mirror to blackness was
completely disbanded. In Hughes’ words, the “black Mecca” of Harlem had found its voice.
While this overview of several Harlemite schools of thought regarding black aesthetics is
not nearly as exhaustive as such a study could be, it sketches out a rough view of the intellectual
terrain of Harlem once must navigate through in an attempt to fully contextualize the concurrent
jazz scene of the Renaissance. The self-conscious dialog about the nature of black art was not
divorced from the growing association of Harlem with the uniqueness of the jazz idiom.
Langston Hughes took pride in the fact that “the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing
voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues [would] penetrate the closed ears of the colored near
intellectuals” such as Schuyler.34 Commenting on jazz in May 1925, the editor of Opportunity
beamed, “What an immense, even if unconscious irony the Negroes have devised! They, who of
all Americans are most limited in self-expression, least considered and most denied, have forged
the key to the interpretation of the American spirit.”35 This paper will briefly review some of the
themes of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday’s work, pointing out the reflections of the
intellectual discourse on black art that can be observed. Armstrong and Holiday are not being
held up as a false duopoly, but rather exemplify the importance of the spatial imagination to
one’s socialization, as Billie was clearly a product of Harlem and Louis never stopped being a
representative for the “good times” of New Orleans, even as his named donned the marquee at
the Apollo Theater. Looking at the parallel discourse that existed within jazz music further
33 Ibid.34 Ibid. 35 C.S. Johnson, Opportunity, 3, No. 5, (May 1925), 132-133.
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strengthens the contention that the period of the Harlem Renaissance truly witnessed the coming
of age of American blackness, and whether through direct connection or merely as a function of
spatial didactics, the general conversation of Harlem by day and by night often centered on the
New Negro aesthetic of self-pride.
In a February, 1949 Downbeat Magazine interview, Harlem bopper Dizzy Gillespie
bluntly stated what many young jazz artists at that time felt: "Louis is the plantation character
that so many of us...younger men...resent."36 By “us,” Gillespie certainly could have been
referring to the bop scene of Harlem that was born at Minton’s Playhouse at W. 118th St. at the
bottom end of Harlem. This location is critical because it represents the area of Harlem last
“conquered” by blacks, and as such it is the product of a mature, developed black consciousness,
relative to the “pioneering” black belt of Harlem that developed the aesthetic closer to 135th St.
some twenty years prior to the bop scene. By the time Gillespie and his cohorts at Minton’s
inherited the musical vanguard of Harlem, the vestiges of the Old Negro tropes had ceased to be
appreciated, regardless of any strategic value that particular representation of black culture might
have afforded the blurring and eventual forging of the color line. Though Gillespie later
apologized for his assessment of Armstrong, the question about the legacy of the Old Negro
trope in Armstrong’s work lingers. As recently as 1999, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the
African and African American Experience (edited by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates)
wrote under the heading “The Troubling Legacy of Armstrong’s Persona,” indicating that his
“happy-go-lucky disposition and good humor provided a convenient reinforcement for the racial
prejudices of many white listeners.”37 Despite not being en vogue, criticism of Armstrong’s
36 T. Hallock, “Dizzy’s New Idea Would Help Interpret Arrangers”, Downbeat Magazine, (Feb, 1949)37 A. Appiah and H.L.Gates, eds. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 250.
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continued reliance upon Old Negro tropes for entertainment and comic value is understandable
from the perspective of the Harlemite New Negro aesthetic.
The 1929 cut “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue” was a lament sung from the
perspective of someone who was saddened by their blackness and its rejection by white society.
Originally adapted from the review “Hot Chocolates” about a dark-skinned black woman’s wish
to be lighter skinned, Armstrong turned the song into a type of protest. However, this type of
song does not evoke images of the triumphant, proud black artist that Hughes and Locke desired
to see. In fact, the lyric “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case” certainly would have
provoked Hughes’ disapproval.38Analyzing the text even further, one finds embedded references
to the Old Negro. The opening phrase: “Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead / Feels like ol' Ned
wished I was dead” is most likely a reference to the Stephen Foster minstrel song “Old Uncle
Ned” from 1848: “Dere was an old Nigga, dey call’d him Uncle Ned -- / He’s dead long ago,
long ago! / He had no wool on de top ob his head -- / De place whar de wool ought to grow.”39 It
can be assumed that any songs referenced within the lyrics of another songare popular enough to
be recognized by the intended audience, or else the songwriter’s use of such a device to evoke
particular mental images would fail. The Stephen Foster reference, the provenance of the original
song’s context, and the generally apologetic view of blackness this song presented all suggest the
type of music that would be problematic to those of the Harlemite mind. Indeed, “Black and
Blue” served as the soundtrack for Ellison’s Invisible Man who realized: “Perhaps I like Louis
Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's
unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his
38 L. Armstrong, “Black and Blue” Vocalion Records, 1929. 39 S. Foster, “Old Uncle Ned”, 1848
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music.”40 Invisibility might make for good poetry, but invisibility did not reflect the posture of
the Harlem art aesthete.
Louis continued to incorporate aspects of minstrelsy into his career. His appearance in the
1932 cartoon I’ll be Glad When you Dead you Rascal You in which Betty Boop is held captive
by African natives (who resemble apes in blackface). Armstrong himself appears as the floating
head of one such blackface character, chasing after Betty Boop’s companions in an effort to lead
them away from her. The minstrel themes that appear here include the sexual objectification of
white women by black men, as well as the visual image of blackface.41 An even more brazen
depiction of some of the worst minstrel tropes is seen in Armstrong’s performance of “When it’s
Sleepy Time Down South,” a song he chose as his signature piece. In this short movie
performance, Armstrong is placed in a typical plantation scene, replete with bales of hay, straw
hats, and checker-print shirts. During a trumpet solo, a “lazy, shiftless,” sleeping Negro is
depicted as waking up in response to the beckoning of a large “mammy” figure waving a chicken
drumstick at him. After he takes a bite, he does a lazy dance, and goes back to sleep on the pile
of goods ready for market, chicken in hand. Such images stood in direct opposition to the type of
black art heralded in Harlem, and Armstrong’s perpetuation of their musical currency, even at
such a late date like 1942, certainly would have frustrated the artistic mindset of figures like
Gillespie.
As previously noted, Billie Holiday arrived on the Harlem scene as a young teenager, and
it is no surprise that her music more closely matched the tenor of the aesthetic discussion within
Harlem. The Old Negro tropes are purged from Billie’s career and her life: while Armstrong
40 R. Ellison, “Prologue,” Invisible Man, 1952. 41 L. Armstrong, I’ll be Glad When you Dead you Rascal You, Fleischer Studio, 1932, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV1Z7AnhTN0, accessed Dec 1, 2012; C. J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory & Meaning, 131.
Padilioni 18
explained away the Jim Crow racism he and his band felt on the road – “We were colored, and
we knew what that meant….we understood, so we never had any hard feelings” – Billie Holiday
quit her spot as a “pioneer chick hitting the trail” with Artie Shaw partially because “the hills
were full of white crackers,” and the constant chipping away at her personhood she was exposed
to through Jim Crow.42 Holiday’s strong self-assertion and presentation as the lady with
gardenias in her hair indicate a different mindset than Armstrong’s assimilationist pose, one that
Harlem doubtlessly helped create.
Billie’s first recorded single “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” from 1933 contains the line,
“You don’t have to sing like Bledsoe / You can tell the world I said so,” and once again, the
question of songwriter intent presents itself.43 The average listener of Holiday’s single can be
assumed to have knowledge of the point of reference Billie made to Bledsoe and singing.
Though lost to most today, the contemporary audience would have identified Bledsoe as Jules
Bledsoe, a famous black opera singer of the 1920s. In true Harlem Renaissance form, Bledsoe’s
popularity stemmed from his seamless combination of European high art forms such as opera
with the folk music tradition of Negro spirituals. Not surprisingly, Bledsoe himself went on
record regarding the position of black art, writing in Opportunity that “[t]he Negro as an idiom is
and has been an always dependable means of sure fire entertainment.” He added that as black
entertainers had continued to prove their worth through musical comedy, dance, and jazz, that
the theater would soon follow, “the Black Brother has his place and belongs…by the process of
natural selection.” Not only did Bledsoe believe that black talent demanded a place for blacks
within the artistic mainstream, but his exhortation that “ [i]t is up to the few of us that have 42 For Armstrong on Jim Crow see C. Hersch, “Poisoning Their Coffee: Louis Armstrong and Civil Rights”, Polity, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 2002), 377-79; for Holiday’s description of her time with Artie Shaw, see Lady Sings the Blues, chapter 8, “Travelin’ Light,” 79-92. 43 B. Holiday, with Benny Goodman and His Orchestra,“Your Mother’s Son-in-Law”, (New York: Columbia Records, 1933).
Padilioni 19
gotten past the sentinels at the gate, to fling the gates wide open for our successors” indicated his
belief in the strategic use and purpose of black art.44 Unlike the minstrelsy-derived mental images
and connotations that filled Armstrong’s music, Billie’s first emergence as a recording star
hearkened to the vanguard of the Harlem aesthetic.
Holiday’s signature song, the 1939 “Strange Fruit,” has been regarded as “first significant
protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism, ”due to its use of the black
experience to evince universalized truths about justice and quicken the conscience of white
America.45 “Strange Fruit” proved effective at conveying a civil rights message because of its
aesthetic quality as a song and also because of the stylization Holiday placed upon the song. This
jeremiad to the phenomenon of Southern lynching written by Abel Meeropol first left Holiday
confused, due to her familiarity with the “torch song” style popular in her day, a pattern of lyrics
that “Strange Fruit” did not follow. However, “Strange Fruit” walked the fine line between
transcendent art and deliberate propaganda, with one feminist scholar remarking that “it is
difficult to listen to Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’ without recognizing the plea for
human solidarity, and thus for the racial equality of black and white people in the process of
challenging racist horrors and indignities.” The combination of the aesthetic universalization of
the black experience (using oppression specific to blacks, lynching, as a template for all human
oppression) and Billie’s artistic inflexion of its poetic lyrics, firmly anchored to the black blues
idiom, created in “Strange Fruit” the perfect vehicle for jettisoning the intellectual and social
44 L. G. Geary, “Jules Bledsoe: The Original ‘Ol’ Man River,’” The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (1989), 27-54; J. Bledsoe, “Has the Negro a Place in the Theatre?,” Opportunity, printed in The New Negro, Gates and Jarrett, eds., 526. 45 D. Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, And An Early Cry For Civil Rights, (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000), 92; L. Pellegrinelli, “Evolution of a Song: ‘Strange Fruit’”, NPR Music. http://www.npr.org/2009/06/22/105699329/evolution-of-a-song-strange-fruit, accessed 1 Dec., 2012.
Padilioni 20
educational efforts of groups and figures like the NAACP and Ira B. Wells on the issue of
lynching into a popular arts protest. 46
This abridged view of the themes and presentation of Louis Armstrong and Billie
Holiday’s contemporary, yet divergent, careers shows that the discursive within Harlem that
contended with issues of black consciousness and identity and its place within artistic expression
were not exclusive to the journals and magazines being printed in Harlem by day, but continued
to inform the nature of jazz production and performance within the neighborhood at night. The
period of the Harlem Renaissance pivoted the entire perspective of black artists towards the
import of the New Negro imagery replacing the misrepresentations of the Old Negro trope. The
many talented voices and minds that entertained this question, this fundamental reckoning for the
black American soul, produced varied perspectives and pronouncements; the New Negro
aesthetic, though focused, was a diverse movement that embraced an assortment of
recommendations for the Negro’s proper way forward artistically. The Renaissance, though
described as a discrete historical period, continues to hold relevance for the current day. The
need for a New Negro aesthetic has not been completely satisfied, as many of the initial failures
of American democracy towards the Negro remain systemic issues today, and questions about
the strategic use of black art remain pertinent. Alain Locke, originator of the term “the New
Negro,” captured the timeless nature of the uplift project by opining, “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 significant and satisfying new phase of
group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.”47 The New Negro aesthetic,
46 A.Y. Davis, “’Strange Fruit’: Music and Social Consciousness”, chp. 8, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 181-197.47 A. Locke, “Enter the New Negro”, Survey Graphic, 634.
Padilioni 21
incubated and brought to age in Harlem, can hardly be considered new any longer, but its
dialectical impact upon the thoughts and actions of the black artistic community endures as a
timelessly permanent memorial to the Renaissance that emerged within the gridded streets and
avenues of this geographically small yet culturally behemoth neighborhood.
Padilioni 22
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