Year One of the (Literary) Harlem Renaissance

David Levering Lewis, one of the early—and still the best—historians of the Harlem Renaissance, deemed 1925 Year One. And why was that? Precursors to the Renaissance—Jean Toomer (Cane) and Claude McKay (Harlem Shadows)—had already made a splash. The 1921 musical Shuffle Along had spawned a host of shows trying to capitalize on the Black talent in music, comedy, and dance that white producers were only too eager to appropriate. The Great Migration, begun a decade earlier, had brought about a sea change in African American demographics and widened horizons. Still, Harlem became a magnet for the brightest and most talented of the generation born around the turn of the 20th century. Few, except Countee Cullen, were native Harlemites, but all—Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston—eventually answered the Black Mecca's siren call.

The generation that had preceded them, luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and, crucially but least known, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, felt they had identified a chink in the implacable armor of prejudice and derision that sheathed white America: poetry, writing, the arts. If these race men could shepherd the talents and productions of the younger generation into celebrated works of literature, then the Negro's claim to equality would be self-evident. And once that was established, racial barriers would have to fall away -- "civil rights by copyright" to use Lewis' clever formulation.

Johnson, head researcher for the National Urban League, founded its highly influential journal Opportunity in 1923 and turned it into a showcase for the visual and literary accomplishments of the cohort that was beginning to be termed the New Negro. Du Bois, longtime editor of the NAACP's journal, was much taken up with the Pan-African movement and, during the run-up to Year One, gave Jessie Fauset, as literary editor of The Crisis, a platform from which to disseminate her early discovery of Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes. Fauset had also written a novel, There Is Confusion, published in 1924, that provided Charles Johnson with the occasion to bring together the white publishers, writers, and critics with the New Negro artists whose careers he hoped to advance. The 1924 Civic Club dinner was supposed to celebrate Fauset's achievement (not much admired by the small coterie of African American writers and intellectuals). Still, between the machinations of Johnson and his newly recruited accomplice, the philosopher Alain Locke, the occasion turned into a dress rehearsal for the Renaissance itself.

One of the attendees, editor of the sociological journal Survey Graphic, was so impressed by the presentations that he wanted to devote a whole issue to the subjects broached and to the African Americans who had presented them, or to their poetry. Alain Locke was tapped to edit the March 1925 edition, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." Riding high from his success, Johnson announced the establishment of Opportunity prizes to be awarded in May of 1925. Langston Hughes won first prize in poetry with "The Weary Blues," which so excited the white writer and tastemaker Carl Van Vechten that he rushed to introduce himself to the young poet after the ceremony and eventually arranged for the publication of Hughes's first volume, also called The Weary Blues, the following year. Countee Cullen (2nd place in poetry) and Zora Neale Hurston (2nd place in short story and drama) were also laureates.

In the meantime, Locke was heroically pulling together and polishing an expanded version of poetry and prose from the Survey Graphic edition and the Opportunity prizewinners. This was published at the end of Year One under the title The New Negro: An Interpretation. The quality of Locke's editorship was little short of spectacular. He had not only culled the best African American writing of that time, but he had also enhanced it with superb portraits by the German artist Winold Reiss.

Locke's anthology definitively announced the arrival of "the Negro Renaissance," as it was beginning to be called, on the literary scene. Of course, there was plenty of Black creativity and presence in the other arts—Louis Armstrong began leading his Hot Five band in 1925, and Paul Robeson starred in a revival of The Emperor Jones to great acclaim—but for a long time, the achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was viewed mostly through a literary lens.

—Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Why I Specialized In Swahili Literature

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