PROFESSORIAL FORAYS

One of the weaknesses of the Harlem Renaissance was that its producers were frequently reliant on white money to give them the space to create their art. Only sixty years out of slavery and further handicapped by the ferocious repression of an expanding Jim Crow structure, the African American minority could hardly be faulted for its lack of wealth or the weakness of its cultural institutions. However, that did give whites who decided to take up Black causes or knowledge or h

Eric Warlond's Tropic Death, a masterpiece detailing the lives of Black laborers in the Caribbean and Panama. When civil rights activists incubated the upwelling of Black writing and creativity as a calling card for social equality in the 1920s, the “movement” originally bore the label of the Negro Renaissance. The Renaissance fizzled in the 1930s and was only resuscitated historically as a result of the African American awakening of the 60s and 70s engendered by the Civil Ri

Paramount ad for Ma Rainey's lesbian anthem, "Prove It On Me Blues," 1928 Our story begins with a B side, specifically the B side of a 1925 record of a blues banjo player, Papa Charlie Jackson. The song was called “Shake That Thing” (nobody remembers the A side) and became a surprise hit, covered in that year and the next by eight different recording artists, including Ethel Waters. Waters’ star was rising, and her version, recorded for Paramount, bid fair to become the compa

The shoga of the East African coast, a man accepted as a member of women’s society, did not emerge from a vacuum nor from the imposition of outside influence. She was born from the long encounter between Bantu-speaking Africans and Muslim traders from the Arabian Peninsula. Unlike medieval Christianity, which not only condemned “Sodomites” but sought to prosecute and exterminate them, the posture of classical Islam was categorically different. Liwat [anal intercourse between

Robert examines two parallel "Atlanta Compromises" — Booker T. Washington's famous 1895 bargain accepting segregation in exchange for economic opportunity, and the unspoken accommodationism of Southern Jews, who sought safety by assimilating as loyal Southerners and avoiding controversy. Through figures like Judah P. Benjamin and Leo Frank, he reveals how both communities navigated survival under hostile white power by silencing dissent.

In 1920, Perry Bradford, a Black composer and publisher, had the crazy idea that African Americans would buy music recorded by Black artists and musicians. He convinced Okeh Records to shellac a vaudeville and cabaret singer from Harlem named Mamie Smith backed by Black jazz musicians. “Crazy Blues” proved to be a smash hit. Within two months of release, it had sold 75,000 copies. Record company executives (all white) woke up. There was a market here! Money to be made! And so

Americans with a moderate knowledge of musical history know about the minstrel shows that originated in the 19th century—how could they not? Some of them might even be aware that the Black musical reentered and transformed the Broadway stage during the 1920s. But there is this gap from the last decade of the 19th century to the 1920s where only fragments of Black musicality (ragtime, the cakewalk) flicker through the imposed amnesia of the time. Why? Take a deep breath and re

Cotton Club dancers circa 1930s This is a still from a British Pathé newsreel, filmed sometime during the 1930s of dancers at the Cotton Club. Up until the advent of the internet, it would have been impossible to find this episode titled "Harlem (AKA Harlem, New York)." Although the footage, long since recovered and incorporated into every Harlem Renaissance history, is now recognized as a unique and invaluable moving image window on Harlem during the waning days of the Renai

Year one of the Harlem Renaissance

In 1924, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, and promoter of African American cultural art forms, met Langston Hughes at a Harlem party. "Kingston" he called him in the journal he kept at the time, but when he met Langston a second time as the winner of the first poetry contest sponsored by a Black magazine, Langston’s recital of “The Weary Blues” knocked him off his feet. Then and there he committed to getting Langston's first book of poems accepted by his own pu

The real history behind the song "Hound Dog"

Emma Lazarus, a privileged Sephardic Jewish poet, transformed her awakening Jewish identity into passionate advocacy for Eastern European refugees and, through her sonnet The New Colossus, redefined the Statue of Liberty as a beacon of welcome for immigrants.