Jazz paved the way for the establishment of an African American expatriate community in Paris. The French were blown away by the syncopation introduced during World War I through the Harlem Hellfighters regimental band. African Americans were seen as musical, exotic, and paragons of entertainment. If you were already in France, faced with the choice of staying in a country that – naively perhaps – blew up your talents or returning to an America in the throes of the deadliest, most extended set of race riots in its history (the Red Summer of 1919) … well, only the pull of family and culture might bring you back home.
Warranted or not, Paris gained a sheen as a bastion of freedom for American Blacks. Countee Cullen expressed the deep appreciation for the respite from the unrelenting racism felt by many African Americans in a 1932 sonnet, “To France.”
As he whose eyes are gouged craves light to see,
And he whose limbs are broken strength to run
So have I sought in you that alchemy
That knits my bones and returns me to the sun
And found across a continent of foam
What was denied my hungry heart at home.
Many entertainers had a good run there. Some like Josephine Baker and Bricktop settled as permanent residents. Others, like Adelaide Hall, lived there for shorter periods. Clarinetist Sidney Bechet would have stayed in France longer than his first four-year stint, but after serving an eleven-month prison term for an accidental shooting of a woman during a brawl, he was deported. (The story ends happily. He eventually emigrated to France in 1951 after his performance as a soloist at the Paris Jazz Fair caused a surge in his popularity.)
As the interwar capital of the visual arts – as well as seedbed for any number of modernist movements – a sojourn in Paris immeasurably enhanced the techniques and reputations of those African American artists who managed to get there: Palmer Hayden, Hale Woodruff, Archibald Motley, Jr., and Augusta Savage.
The great obstacle encountered in expatriating oneself to France was the language. You didn’t necessarily need to master French in order to blow a clarinet, but you were likely to be living on the economic edge and not speaking French closed many doors. Langston Hughes spent six months in Montmartre in 1924 eking out a living as a cook and dishwasher. “Stay home!” he warned Countee Cullen in a letter.
Jobs in Paris are like needles in hay-stacks for everybody, and especially English-speaking foreigners. The city is over-run with Spaniards and Italians who work for nothing, literally nothing. And all French wages are low enough anyway. I've never in my life seen so many English and Americans, colored and white, male and female, broke and without a place to sleep as I have seen here.
Cullen didn’t listen. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928, he lived a year in Paris working on his poetry, spent summers in France as often as he could, and, when he had to find a “day job” in 1934 to support his writing, did so as a French teacher in a Harlem junior high school.
Because of his appreciation for the visual arts, Cullen bridged both the literary and artistic community of Black visitors and expatriates. Hale Woodruff, perfecting modernist techniques during his French sojourn, daubed a famous painting of Cullen while the both were in Paris in 1928.
The transatlantic influence didn’t run just one way. The writings of the Harlem Renaissance served as an inspiration to the African and Caribbean leaders of the Negritude movement that came to birth in the 1930s. They were particularly appreciative of Claude McKay’s second novel, Banjo (1929) which manifested a fully pan-Africanist worldview, centering on a community of Black seamen in Marseilles and critiquing how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan colonies. The deepening of the Great Depression forced many Black intellectuals, notably McKay himself, back to America where a change of zeitgeist and economic hard times had drained the Harlem Renaissance of its vitality. That was not the end of the story, however. One of Countee Cullen’s students at Frederick Douglass Junior High was James Baldwin who matriculated there from 1935 to 38. Perhaps le bon professeur taught him more than just French …
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