Literature as a Profession: Depression-Era Views Toward Writing

When we think of the Harlem Renaissance, we think of a flourishing literary period. We rarely take the time to consider the POST-Renaissance, the fall from these heights. In the case of the New Negro Renaissance, there was a decisive and abrupt decline as the excitement of the 1920s was stifled by the weight of the Great Depression. In this post, I'll look at literary views in the 1930s, a time when jobs held precedent over sonnets.

I am getting my information from a literary column published in the Atlanta Daily World under the title Literary Flashes and later Along the Literary Front. It began in June of 1934 and continued until January of 1937, at a time when Hitler is rising to power in Germany and Roosevelt is instituting his New Deal policies. It's interesting that the later title for column, "Along the Literary Front", almost sounds militaristic (think All Quiet on the Western Front). Week after week, this column preaches cooperation and practicality in writing above individual genius. Rather than the kinds of publications like Fire which aimed in 1925 to ignite the imagination of blacks with new, shocking ideas, this Depression-era literature seeks to establish writing as a paying profession. Like those in other disciplines during this time, writers are searching for one thing: Stability.

The first thing this column makes clear is that black readers do NOT and have NOT supported black authors. The New Negro  Renaissance was funded and energized by white followers, and once the Negro fad went out of fashion, black authors had no one to buy their books. White patrons disappeared and black patrons were never there to begin with. Rather than blaming a faulty education system or lack of initiative among black writers, this column again and again blames the black consumer public for the literary drought, criticizing their utter lack of patronage of their own artists.

Responding to Frank Marshall Davis' question: “Has the Golden Age of the Negro… come to an end?”, one columnist responds:

“We believe that, at least temporarily, the answer to Mr. Davis’ question must be in the affirmative. Of course, the WHY of this situation is controversial. We know that fads come and go and we are now wondering if the so called “New Negro Renaissance” of 10 years ago was not merely a fad. If so, then we have the answer to the question “Why?” regarding the present situation: The answer is simply that the fad has passed.”

The column goes on to explain that publishing house records show that blacks rarely buy books of black or white authors. When the New Negro was a hot topic in white literary circles, publishers were eager to publish works by black authors. However, once whites moved on to the next fad, the audience evaporated. With black consumers unwilling and unused to buying books, publishers had no reason to risk their assets by publishing black authors. The 1930s was not lacking in writers - it was lacking in readers. 

Later columns detail how truly difficult and grim the situation was for a young writer breaking onto the literary scene. After working tirelessly to write the manuscript for a first novel, unknown authors often had to foot much of the publishing bill in order to get a contract from anyone. They rarely made back the money. After success, publishers were willing to bid for the rights to their work. However, success was not guaranteed and few people had the patience or the resources to wait for years before the "payoff" arrived. 

The column urges writers to cast aside their pride and make money any way they can. Shallow romances, corny greeting cards - any genre was fair game as long as it put food on the table. How different this is from the W.E.B. Du Bois "Talented Tenth" who worried so much about representing black culture as high, sophisticated, and elite!

“Each year, thousands of dollars are paid to writers for sentimental verses to go on holiday and birthday cards while a considerable amount is paid by popular magazines particularly the love story publications, for equally sentimental verses. Many a writer dreams of eventually winning fame and fortune with a book of serious poetry, but will never realize this dream. It is well to aim high in the field of poetry, but silly to completely ignore the more ordinary and popular aspects of this field as represented by light, sentimental verse writing.”

My favorite light genre advocated by this column is "love-pulp". Love-pulp was the 1934 name for books like Twilight or perhaps 50 Shades of Gray. You know exactly what it means. I like this term though because it makes me picture some mushed up fruit or orange juice. Counter intuitively, high-pulp percentage writing offers low brain protein, unlike its citrus equivalent.

Here's another term, "Escape literature":

“The serious authors of the race are needed, and there can hardly be too many of them, but, obviously just at this time, the race is in greater need of authors of “escape” literature.”

“The everyday life of the Negro group in this country is almost hopelessly rooted in problems of a serious nature, and the literature which will more nearly attract the greater number of Negro readers is that slanted for sheer entertainment. Come on, Negro writers, and let’s get busy slanting for the “light” literary stuff.”

This may seem like giving up, aiming low in literature to sell copies rather than setting your sights on artistic greatness. However, artistry was simply not the most desirable attribute in a writer. Writing in any age, including today, is a difficult, unstable profession. The Depression only heightened the uncertainty and desperation of writers. Finding a way to get a steady paycheck was admirable.

Writing becomes more and more similar to other professions, as this column leaves behind the exalted "genius in the attic" stereotype to assume a collective, somewhat formulaic approach to the business of writing:

“Writing is a profession even as medicine, law, music and others. To be a successful lawyer or doctor, it is necessary for one to study prescribed courses in those professions… Likewise, to be a successful author it is necessary for one to study authorship… The work of the so-called “born writer”, or any other sort of writer, is absolutely worthless (from the monetary viewpoint) if it does not comply with the modern formulas as taught in many of the best courses.”

Writing can be taught. It does not flow down from the Muses, or emanate from the trees. It is a craft honed by long days of study and hard work. And you are not alone - The main purpose of this "Literary Flashes" column is to provide a platform for writers to publicize their work, meet each other, and discuss strategies for supporting themselves through their work. The columnist encouraged writers to submit their names, addresses and information on any manuscripts in progress or completed. Then the columnist acted as the middle man, promoting any submitted manuscripts in hopes that a publisher would pick them up. The column is written to create a community among writers. In fact, it is clearly not written for the average reader, but rather is an advice column and meet-up forum for writers only. For that reason, it does not publish much poetry or short stories to entertain the reader. It's a column that talks about literature, rather than being literature itself.

Here's a good explanation of this collective mentality:

In registering with LITERARY FLASHES, you are wisely associating yourself with many already successful authors as well as many ambitious beginners... Negro writers are few and scattered. There is nothing more beneficial than association with those of your own aspirations. LITERARY FLASHES offers all writers this valuable association with one another.

It's interesting that even writing during the Depression has a tendency to unionize of sorts. This is seen most obviously in the name of the group which published this column : the Negro Writer's Guild. The word "guild" makes me think of stone masons in the Middle Ages. It is odd to think of writing, something I consider very personal and creative, as a field with apprentices, teachers, and a tight-knit fraternal structure.

It's a difficult balance: if writers are only respected for being creative, groundbreaking and alternative, they will have a hard time making enough money. However, if they only produce fluff, what's the point? The ideal situation is a writer who makes enough money through "pulp" writing to finance their more creative projects, but light, commercial writing takes time and does not provide assured financial success either. This was not a barren literary period like this column's depressing views suggest: William Faulkner and Carson McCullers wrote amazing works during this time; Frank Marshall Davis brought out his first book of poems, Black Man's Verse, in 1935. However, the outlook is still pretty bleak, and, sad as it is, this column shows that literary output depends just as much upon economics as it does on individual creative genius.

Literary Club or Sex Den? You Decide!

court. Library of Congress

I came across a fascinating series of articles about raids on black social clubs at the turn of the century in Atlanta. The clubs referred to themselves as literary establishments rather than gambling establishments, and the white press tore apart this claim with biting sarcasm in each news brief. You really have to read these articles to get the full sense of how absurd and amazing and petty this whole issue was, but I'll try to give some snapshots of what occurred:

Headline 1: IT HAD A CHARTER. The Negro Literary Club Explains and Justifies Itself. A LITERARY MAN TELLS ABOUT IT. Questioned by the Judge, He Says That It Had Books for Its Members’ Delectation – The Cases Dismissed.

This article details the trial of a large group of members from the Colored Men's Literary and Social Club. The judge, Andy Calhoun, appears again and again in these scuffles, so I guess he enjoyed these sort of cases. The club members have been arrested for disorderly conduct and suspicion of gambling, and at the trial they must prove that they are indeed literary. Here's the white writer's description:

Twenty-five rough-handed, indifferently-clad negroes, who bore but faint, indistinguishable traces of likeness to those gentlemen who delight in the pleasure of literature and society, appeared to establish the club's identity as being distinct and apart from a low resort of gamblers and drinkers." 

The writer continues:

A chocolate-colored negro who imagined himself the possessor of a literary cast of countenance, attemped in a grandiloquent style to put the club before the court in its true light...

“It’s a literary club, is it?” the judge inquired in his blandest tones.

“Oh, yassar, yassar,” was the prompt response, accompanied by a sweeping grin. “Dat’s wut ‘tis; a kind uv litumrary s’ciety”

Here we see that literary is synonymous with elegance and culture, and is judged visually. The fact that the black club members have rough hands suggest they are of the working class, and therefore not genteel enough to be literary. You can see the night-and-day difference between transcriptions of white voices (the judge) and black voices (the witness).

Headline 2: DONE AT THE CLUBS: Will Howard, a Negro Clubman, Gives Himself Up to the Police.

This article describes a violent fight at a black club supposedly started by a dispute over cards and ending with a man shot. Unlike the last article, which criticizes blacks for being "rough-handed, indifferently-clad negroes" and uses their simple attire to argue against their genteel status, this writer uses the extravagance of their attire as evidence of sinful activities:

The name under which the club is known gives a very misleading impression as to the character of the club members. It is called the Laboring Men’s Social and Literary Club, but the members are apparently not of the class of orthodox colored laborers. Most of them are arrayed in fine linen and neat fitting clothes and bear none of the marks of labor. Will Howard, who gave himself up for the shooting of Mitchell, is a fair specimen of the club’s membership. He was dressed in ultra-swell style and wore an extremely gaudy tie.” 

**One side-note: I hope someday to have "ultra-swell style"

The writer doubts the working-class background of the club members based on their fancy dress, and argues that the whole club is merely a cover for gambling, sex orgies, and drinking binges rather than a place for working men to relax and debate the issues of the day. 

Headline 3: FESTIVE CLUBMEN: The Colored Literary Club Met with Disaster Yesterday

Another raid by police, and another chance for the journalist to show his wit by exposing how "ridiculous" it is to link the words Colored and Literary:

“But the climax of grandeur was reached when the officers turned their steps into the elegant barroom… It was an ideal resort for the bibulous disciple of letters… They were struck by the apparent disproportion in the supply of drinks and literature.”

*side-note: bibulous means: 

• fond of or addicted to drink
• absorbent; spongy

“Numerous clubmen, all of them looking very unliterary in looks and not strikingly intellectual appearing about the brow, testified.”

Again, literary is judged visually. Also, we see a creepy hint at phrenology - judging intelligence based on the shape of the skull - in the phrase "not strikingly intellectual appearing about the brow". 

Headline 4: Club Pulling. Two Bon-Ton Negro Clubs Pulled Yesterday by the Police. Forty-Six Club Men At One Haul. ‘The Laboring Men’s Literary Association’ and ‘The Laboring Men’s Pleasure Club’ Before the Recorder Today

This is a fascinating account of a raid of a HOPPING black club. Here we see for the first time that respectable whites are frequenting the clubs also (Uh oh!)

It has leaked out that negroes are not the only people who frequent the Laboring Men’s Literary Association and the Laboring Men’s Pleasure Club... Well-dressed white men have been seen refreshing the inner man there... This first came to the  attention of the police force through Detectives Wooten and Holcombe... On Sunday, two weeks ago, they visited… On entering the clubroom they found it teeming with negroes, all of who were either drinking beer and whisky or playing cards. To their surprise, however, there were over a dozen white men in the crowd, who seemed to be perfectly at home among their sable companions and were enjoying to the fullest extent the refreshments that were being dispensed.”

The black clubs were not the only places to party in town. In fact, many of them were directly modeled after white clubs in the city like the Capital City Club, organized in 1883.

Here's part of a speech by Harry Jackson, former president of the Capital City Club:

Membership in this club should be the insignia of a gentleman and all that the term gentleman includes. The prevailing sentiment of this house should be refinement – refinement in manner, conversation and recreations. Vulgarity should have no place here.

If nonchalance be the Doric column in the character of the gentleman, than perhaps permit me to complete the structure by the addition of another column – gentle courtesy and tender consideration of the rights and privileges of others, which we will call the Corinthian.

What is the defining characteristic of a gentleman? Nonchalance. Nonchalance has lost its glamour in the 21st  century. It isn't revered, and is even equated to carelessness or laziness. The ideals of these clubs, both black and white, are:

• nonchalance
• refinement

It is hard to be nonchalant unless you are rich, and just about impossible to live with nonchalance if you are of the working class. Exactly the point. For blacks working them up from nothing in the city, they may get money, but they will never have nonchalance. Here is an article about yet another raid, but this time the police find very "refined" and "nonchalant" blacks. It must be some mistake!

Headline 5: Made a Huge Haul

The African-American club being raided was called the "Classic City Club" (Note the resemblance to its white neighbor)

This club is the most prominent among the elite of colored aristocracy and has a large and influential membership made up of darkies who have high instincts of social life and whose standards of club life are gathered from contact either as butlers or waiters from the fashionable residences or resorts of Atlanta.

Translation: Refinement doesn't come naturally to blacks; it must have rubbed off from nonchalant white people.

Headline 6: "OUR CITY CLUB.": It Was Raided by the City Detectives Yesterday. IT IS COLORED AND VERY TONY

*Side-note - Don't ask me what "Tony" means, I don't know

This black club literally takes the name of the big white club in town and sticks an "Our" at the beginning to delineate themselves. After being raided, the owner, Bob Stephenson, was quoted in the paper denouncing the inequality between what is allowed in white clubs and what is punished in black clubs. Finally we get a voice from the other side of the debate!

Our City Club is legally chartered and its members are the very best colored people in the city. Our rooms are nicely arranged and we have refreshments, but the institution is conduction on the assessment plan, just like the white folks’ clubs, and we have violated no law. Gambling has never been permitted in the rooms, and I challenge anybody to find a more orderly set of colored folks than our members. It looks pretty hard to be continually raided in this way when the white clubhouses are wide open all the time. 

I'll leave it for you, my blog readers to decide: LITERARY CLUB OR SEX DEN??

Siftings from Georgia - The Poet of the Atlanta Independent

Odd Fellows Building and Auditorium

The Independent was the main African-American newspaper published in Atlanta until 1928. Started in 1903 by the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, it managed to stay in business much longer than its hometown neighbor, the Voice of the Negro, which only ran from 1904-1906. The weirdly-named order originated in the late 18^th century in England, and received a charter in Baltimore in 1820. In 1843, Peter Ogden, a dark-skinned Englishman, submitted an application for a New York charter in the name of the free black community there. Amazingly, he received the charter and from there the order expanded to Philadelphia and even into slave states before the outbreak of the Civil War. The need for mutual support for banking and health services prompted many blacks to join fraternal societies.

Benjamin Davis

Benjamin Davis served as editor. Not meant as a literary journal, the paper chiefly served as a means for people to see their names and the names of their community members in a respectable publication. Frank Marshall Davis, the man who would become editor of the Atlanta Daily World in the 1930s, called it “little more than a personal sheet.” About a third of each issue is devoted to the Personal and Editorial sections, which seem largely interchangeable. They featured short snippets like the following:

Dr. and Mrs. H.D. Canady and Mrs. Neal Daniel were delightfully served with a luncheon at the home of Rev. and Mrs. C.G. Gray, on Foundry street, Sunday, Feb. 1^st. A pleasant evening was enjoyed.

The address and the full names are the core of the entries – by putting a description of your party in the paper, you were seen as respectable. After reading a few of these entries, one get the sense that everyone’s dinners are “delightful” and everyone always has “pleasant evenings.”

Poetry in the paper usually appears as eulogies – a daughter mourning her mother, a mother mourning her lost daughter. The verses are simple, traditional and dignified. Putting one’s sorrows in a poem was a way of honoring the dead and showing their importance to the rest of the community. Here’s an example:

Sleep on dear father,

And take thy rest,

We loved you well,

But God loved you best.

There was also the “Crusader’s Corner,” a weekly column which took submissions of light, sing-song poems by middle school children about cleaning up, doing their homework and not getting too dirty when playing outside. Poetry served as ornament both in the eulogies and the kids’ poems.

At the same time, however, you can see a growing emphasis on respectable art. On March 10, 1921, an article celebrates Charles Gilpin, the first black actor to play the lead in a Broadway play (Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones), as he attends the Drama League Dinner, which sounds a lot like the Tony Awards. There was a big debate as to whether he should be invited, and when he finally came, he received the biggest ovation of anyone in attendance. Gilpin is quoted as saying “Thank you… for calling me artist… The word ‘artist’ is something I always thought of as way off yonder, but not something I could ever attain.” That year, Gilpin won the Spingarn Medal, the most esteemed award in the African-American community, defined as the “highest achievement… in any field of elevated or honorable human endeavor.”

Beginning in the mid-twenties, Thomas Jefferson Flanigan began a regular poetry column entitled “Siftings from Georgia.” As the title suggests, the column was filled with nostalgic odes rooted in the concept of place, more specifically rural Georgian life. His photo appeared at the top of each column, so readers became familiar with him as an individual with a particular personality.

His most common series of poems within this column was called “Echoes from South Georgia.” Now we’ve moved from a state-wide zone to an even smaller region of focus. Although Flanigan moved to the city as a young man, he took most of his material from his childhood in the country. In response to a poem where Flanigan describes his elementary school and the plantation culture, a reader writes:

Am taking this moment to thank you for “The Ballad of Old Bluff Spring School” that appeared in yesterday’s Independent. You depicted rural life so vividly; also your description of the Bluff Spring School, which you attended, was minute in its scope. I can vouch for the rural customs and the description of Bluff Spring, first, because I attended the rural school for seven years, and secondly, I have visited Bluff Spring” (3/12/25)

The poetry is valued more because it is so geographically accurate. Flanigan is best when describing rural pastimes rather than striving for traditional odes to beauty and invocations of the Muse. He uses a soft dialect, and his main structuring element is the refrain, a repeated line which recalls the spirituals. Here he speaks about sowing the fields by harping on one aspect of the planting- the ‘furrow,’ a long, narrow trench made by the plow:

Chris’mus time is over and gone-

Heed the call of the furrow,

If you’d hear the dinner time horn

Heed the call o’ the furrow;

Your honey’s at the table an’ she takes her stan’

In the hard brown crust is the print o’ her han’

Where she spanked the corn pone in the bakin’ pan.

Heed the call o’ the furrow.

Boll weevil waitin’ where the brushes heap,

Heed the call o’ the furrow;

The fiddles stop playin’ and the fiddler’s asleep-

Heed the call o’ the furrow;

Ol’ mule whimpering like he’s rarin’ for work,

Wheel him aroun’ with a friendly jerk,

Tell ‘im “Let’s go back,” no time to shirk-

Heed the call o’ the furrow.

In the January 22^nd, 1925 issue, he acknowledges his formal similarities with the spirituals by printing the poem “Zion” and attempting to start a regular “Gospel Hymn Series” by calling it “Installment No. 1.” He explains, “At the solicitations of any divines it shall be my feeble effort to run one sacred number in the column per week.” While this series doesn’t continue beyond this issue, the rest of his poems to resemble the pace and structure of the spirituals that it might as well have. The paper featured a sermon in every issue, so Biblical topics and ways of speaking were common.

In April 23, 1925’s “A Song of that ‘Sweet Hour of Prayer’,” we return to Christianity:

“Sweet hour of prayer,” those glorious peals

Fired that fighting race of old,

And with the same fervor they send

Live currents through a famished soul.

“Tis joy to head those Sabbath bells

Break forth their chimes on morning’s air,-

Announcing to the waking town,

The approach of that “Sweet hour of prayer.”

I heard my mother, as a child,

In Sunday school, far, far away,

Pour from her heart that old sweet song

Made sweeter by each passing day;

My tender heard, then had not learned

The yoke of life’s long troubling acre,

Only in form. I knelt with her

In that long-time-sweet hour of prayer.

The beating years have stole from me

The sweetness that my life once knew.

The faces of those rural church folk

Ere now have faded from my view,

But there remaineth yet one joy

That from me time nor force can tear

In it a solace sweet I find-

That ever present “Hour of Prayer.”

It seems as if the words ‘faded’ and ‘passing’ are stock elements of all poems about the South. It seems impossible to overcome the weight of nostalgia for rural life, and at the same time, there are no rural poets - the poets have already left their rural communities, whether to go to a Southern city or to head North. It makes you think that these urban writers, including Thomas Jefferson Flanigan, only feel the need to reminisce about plantation life once they have distanced themselves from its struggles. Does poetry exist inside the rural community, or is there only poetry about the rural community written and read from afar? Flanigan gives us some hope when he describes poetry’s role in his upbringing: “My mother was a lover of poetry and we used to get in that far-off isolated rural community the Tri-Weekly Constitution, and I was brought up on Frank L. Stanton and James Whitcolb Riley” (1/29/25). So literature wasn’t entirely foreign to him as a rural kid. It’s interesting to note that both the poets he cites are white – while it’s great that poetry reaches him, the idea of African-American poetry being published and distributed in the rural communities is too much to ask.

Flanigan was not the most creative or lyrical poet, but he managed to maintain a weekly column for years in a paper that only had about five pages total. His Georgia sketches were the only examples of verse in the paper, and were on people’s minds and dinner tables as long as they renewed their subscription. As the sole poetic voice from the Atlanta Independent, it’s useful to see what aspects of life he chooses to depict, and what formal approaches he adopts.

Flanagan was also a folk-painter. This is Fishing by the Quarters

Just for fun, here’s a rare example of a poem written by someone else. This poem was embedded within a fierce editorial condemning the merger of Standard Life, a large black insurance company, and Southern Insurance, a white organization. The article was called “Destroying Institutions and Saving Men – Standard Life an Example,” and the author (an unnamed writer from the Birmingham Reporter) accuses the heads of Standard Life of swindling away the money earned by tens of thousands of employees hitting the streets and building up this black company, arguing that their incompetence and illicit dealings forced the company to surrender its integrity and merge with white business:

God give us men! A time like this demands

Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands;

Men whom the lust of office does not kill;

Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;

Men who possess opinions and a will;

Men who have honor – men who will not lie.

Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

In public duty and in private thinking;

For while the rabble with their thumb-worn creeds

Their large professions and their little deeds

Mingle in selfish strife, lo! freedom weeps

Wrong rules the land, and waiting justice sleeps!

The Deserted Cabin

Here is an example of a volume of poetry published in 1915, just before the New Negro Renaissance grew into a full-fledged movement. The Deserted Cabin, And Other Poems was printed in Atlanta, Georgia by a major publisher named Arther Bunyan Caldwell. It’s interesting to see what styles of black poetry are deemed acceptable by mainstream whites. You can tell that the author, Sterling M. Means, makes a point not to alienate his white audience despite touching on loaded issues like the Civil War, slavery, and economic struggles in the New South.

The introduction is non-stop gushing for the “days of yore,” a nostalgic and probably inaccurate portrait of Antebellum plantation culture. Sterling Means defines the Master-Slave relationship around the concept of loyalty, citing the example of slaves who safeguarded the women and children on plantations while the white fathers and sons left to fight for the Confederacy. Here’s a bit of it:

We stayed at home and worked the farm

Your maid and wife we did not harm

We cared for them and wept for you

And to our trust were ever true

The longing for the Antebellum years seems absurd at first, but when you consider the abysmal economic situation in Georgia at the start of the century, as the South aggressively sought to industrialize while always staying two steps behind their Northern counterparts, it’s easy to see how someone could long for another time, ANY other time. The boll weevil and other factors made agriculture in general and cotton harvests in particular some of the worst ever recorded in the region.

Rather than attack Southern whites for slavery, Means focuses on how the Civil War destroyed the systems of trade and sustenance in the South, as the region became a colony for victorious Northern businessmen. Raw materials and workers were pumped out of the South while little came back in return. Means is critical of slavery, but he identifies with a South still reeling and trying to find its footing after defeat in 1865.

The one poem which was also published in the white city paper Rome Herald-Tribune is entitled Ode to the Statue of the Women of the Confederacy. You can imagine why this poem by a black poet would be seen as palatable to white audiences - It does not condone the cause of the Confederacy, but it sympathizes with those who suffered:

When the shades of want and carnage

Swung her sable curtains low,

And the music heard in Dixie,

Was the mournful bugle’s blow.

It was then the Southern mother

Smothered back the welling sigh,

And upon her country’s altar.

Gave son and husband both to die.

Means goes on to make a direct call for women’s suffrage. Moving from the Civil War to World War I (remember, this book was published in 1915), Means argues that women’s votes would lesson the national tendency and lust for war:

If the law would give them votes,

They would soon disband the armies;

…

Never would devoted mothers

Train their sons for savage war.

Unlike many brash New Negro works from the 1920s, which labeled the South as merely a stain and a hell to be avoided at all cost, Means describes the painful experience of returning home to one’s plantation to find abandoned, rotting cabins and no traces of your ancestors, the feeling of uprootedness. Millions of black lived in the South – until the 20^th century the great majority of the black population lived in the Southern states. While atrocities were common and food was scarce, it was a home that was hard to cut ties with.

In the poem Ise Gwine Back to Yazoo County, he describes “de panic”- a time when people are starving, he is foreclosing on his home and all his possessions are being taken by creditors. Although he knows the plantations are abandoned, he decides to travel back to his Antebellum home in Mississippi. Migration was not always a one-way street going North:

House-rent man wuz hyeah yistidday,

An fu’n’ture agent, too;

But I tol’ ‘em boaf perlitely,

Dar wuz nuffin’ hyeah ter do;

Ef dey wanted any money,

Take de house an’ f’n’ture ‘long;

Fur de times is mighty squally,

White folks’ bizness done gone wrong.

…

Ise gwine back ter Yazoo Country;

It is whur de times iz fair;

Dar is whur mah muddeer’s buried,

An’ her spirit slumbers dar.

Sense Ise been in Jeff’son County,

I has strayed erway f’um God;

I done lef’ mah mudder’s trainin’,

Now Ise passin’ ‘neaf de rod.

The publisher, A.B. Caldwell, played a prominent role in race relations in Atlanta. In 1917 he began publication of his biographical series History of the American Negro and His Institutions. The books told the accomplishments of hundreds of black leaders, each bio accompanied by a dignified photo. They continue to serve as vital tools for patching together family histories. New volumes were published for different states and regions in the South. In 1922, Caldwell published an autobiography of the black president of the West Virginia Industrial School, Theological Seminary and College, Jared Maurice Arter, entitled Echoes From a Pioneer Life. The Virginia Theological Seminary was a very important institution in its day, and was the cornerstone of a vibrant black community in Lynchburg, Va.

I’m not sure if A.B. Caldwell was white or black. I do know that he was the first pastor of the Log Cabin Community Church, a congregation which opened its doors to different denominations and even different races. His wife ran the Ladies' Aide Society. It wasn’t not unusual for a Southern publishing company to be run by a religious man, in this case a Baptist preacher. Christian groups controlled and spearheaded much of the literary publishing in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century in the South.

Mistress and Slave

Here is a stunning poem by an otherwise unknown female poet published in the Christian Recorder in the mid-19th century. The Christian Recorder was the widest circulating black newspaper during the 1800s. It was published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The printing operations were originally established just for producing hymnals and parish handouts, but expanded in the 1860s and 70s. Fighting against slavery and supporting the Union, the paper gained popularity during the Civil War. Until the end of the war, it was banned in the Southern States, but after the North's victory, sales expanded into the new Southern market. In the 1880s and 90s, a Western Christian Recorder was created for the frontier as well as a Southern Reporter for the Black Belt states.

This poem details the creepy narrative of white masters taking advantage of both their slaves and their wives, with women shifting unsteadily between the roles of maidens and mistresses. The speaker is a slave brushing the hair of her young white Lady:

"Mistress and Slave"

Ellen Malvin (12 Dec. 1863)

He wooed her with a lofty grace

And a haughty head unbent;

He touched her with his courtly smile,

And her simple heart outwent;

Ere ever she had learned

What its quicker beating meant,

She mutely dreams with folded hands,

While I, beside her chair,

Before his coming brush and wind

The sunny rings of hair

Slowly she lifts her eyelids

To the mirror, seeing ne'er

How her blue-eyed childish beauty

Pales before my image there.

Dreaming- with her jeweled fingers

Toying in their white unrest,

With the rosebuds that he brought her

Blood-red blossomed on her breast.

To her girlish heart he seemeth

Of all men the noblest, best;

And the world doth give him honor,

Grave men listen when he speaks,

And his tones send rosy pleasure

Flushing to her lily cheeks.

But a troop of dark-browned minions,

Trembling at his bidding wait,

And his shame is on the faces

Of the children at his gate.

But the fear, the shame, the sorrow,

Never haunt the dreamer here,

Dreaming o'er again, the music

Murmured in her maiden ear;

I can say the very words

That he whispered low and clear;

For when he uprose to leave her,

With the last kiss dropt for going,

There I met him face to face.

All his beauty on him glowing,

And my heart stood still within me,

In a sense of dread foreknowing,

For I saw the instant passion

Through his hot blood mounting higher,

Till his burning eyes devoured me

In their fierce exultant fire.

Darkly rose my doom before me,

Slave and victim as the rest;

She, a blossom to be gathered

Just to wither on his breast.

I, a queen to be dethroned

And ground beneath his heel in jest.

I a queen by right of beauty

I a slave by wrong of birth.

Lips and eyes and braided tresses

Valued at their market worth,

For one vile drop within my veins

That links me to the subject race;

To lose my crown of womanhood

For some foul semblance in its place,

Shall I curse her for her glad heart

Throbbing 'neath the snowy lace?

Shall I hate her for the whiteness

Of her cheek, so girlish fair,

For the simple Northern beauty

Falling down her golden hair?

Nay, let her dream on while she may,

For her I have no curse to spare,

Smiling 'mid her flowers and laces,

Petted child, and wife to be,

From this trance of happy worship

She shall bitterest waking see.

Not to us alone the sorrow,

We who suffer, we who toil,

For the serpent's sin so winding

Round their lives his slimy coil.

On our tyrants, our oppressors,

Fall the lightning curses fast,

On a nation old in sinning,

Ere the flush of youth is past,

Who the old world's crime of crimes,

In her first fresh furrow cast.

Not in vain our cries are cleaving

Upward to the throne of God.

Long her sons shall writhe in anguish

Under the avenging rod,

Ere the wo[e]ful sheaves are garnered

And the bloody vintage trod.

-Taken from African American Women's Poetry in the "Christian Recorder", 1855-1865: A Bio-Bibliography with Sample Poems - Eric Gardner

Irony and Brutal Honesty - H.L. Mencken and the Renaissance

Following up on last week’s post on Benjamin Brawley, an intellectual on the fringe of the New Negro movement, I move to another figure who has been cast off in historical analyses of the Harlem Renaissance: H.L. Mencken.

 

Mencken was a white satirist with a bitter, no-holds-barred style who was all the rage in the late 1910s and 1920s. Editor of the popular journal American Mercury, he wrote reviews and essays which defined or rocked the current literary trends. Although certainly not a nurturing personality, his honest criticism and connections to key avenues for publishing made him a hugely important ally for young black writers.

His disregard for political correctness, his use of racial slurs (for all races), and his refusal to tackle even the most serious issue without a heavy touch of irony and ridicule makes his work unappetizing for today’s critics. In the book The Sage in Harlem, Charles Scruggs investigates Mencken’s role in the Harlem Renaissance in an effort to reshape his legacy. This is one of those non-fiction books that reads like a great novel – the author is personally invested in the subject and is unafraid of putting personal opinions and flourishes into the text. I recommend it.

Mencken is distinctive because he approached blacks on equal footing – he judged their work as he would a white writer. If it was crap, he told the author so; if it had merit, he published it. While some white publishers were beginning to buy into the “primitivism/exoticism” of black literature, or publishing black works out of charity, Mencken did not degrade black authors in this way. He published Countee Cullen, George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson and others. He stressed realism and spat on Puritanism, holding up accuracy and honesty as ideals rather than moralistic concerns. He criticized black writers for being too sentimental – basically for crying too much – and called on them to create great works that were a little rough around the edges.

In a book review, Mencken outlined his challenge for black writers:

“The thing we need is a realistic picture of this inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within – a self-portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the Russian or Thackeray’s of the Englishman. The action should be kept within the normal range of negro experience… The negro author who makes such a book will dignify American literature and accomplish more for his race than a thousand propagandists and theorists. He will force the understanding that now seems hopeless. He will blow up nine-tenths of the current poppycock.”

Realism, detail, brutal honesty – Mencken stressed it again and again. He looked to the examples of the Russians and the realism of types like Emile Zola when crafting a critical ideal. This approach influenced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, everyone. I imagine Mencken and Benjamin Brawley would have utterly despised each other. Dirty realism and polished Victorianism don’t mix.

.Mencken attracted the most notoriety in his career for his brutal condemnation of white Southern culture in the essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” from his book Prejudices. Here are a few bits from it which demonstrate just how harsh and snarky he could really be:

“Virginia is the best of the south to-day, and Georgia is perhaps the worst. The one is simply senile; the other is crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious. Between lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence.”

“I published a short discourse on lynching, arguing that the sport was popular in the south  because the backward culture of the region denied the populace more seemly recreations… brass bands, symphony orchestras, etc”

“The southerner, at his worst, is never quite the surly cad that the Yankee is. His sensitiveness may betray him into occasional bad manners, but in the main he is a pleasant fellow - hospitable, polite, good-humored, even jovial. . . . But a bit absurd. ... A bit pathetic.”

Its important to remember this tone when thinking of Mencken’s role in aiding the budding generation of black writers – he wasn’t patting them on the back by any means, but was treating them as writers rather than charity cases or brutish animals.

Did blacks write satires like The Sahara of the Bozart ? Charles Scruggs argues that they did, but that we must expand our definition of satire to see them as such. Satire usually resides in the realm of fiction. Blacks were not writing picaresque novels or farces, they were describing daily struggles – and yet the racism they had to deal with was so absurd that irony was the most apt register for discussion. Can you sustain a serious essay arguing simply “Lynching is wrong?” Does it help if you tack on a mountain of facts to prove your irrefutable original point? No. Better to laugh and expose the desperation and hypocrisy of the Klu Klux Klan than act as if they have any legitimacy in the first place.

It would be interesting to look further into black satire during the period. I doubt I could find much in poetry – satire seems to need a longer format to develop its conceit whereas poems have to be heartfelt and concise. George Schuyler wrote satire in his “Shafts and Darts” column in The Messenger. He also published an absurd novel called Black No More in which a scientist invents a way to turn dark skin pigment white. After everyone changes themselves white, you can still tell the black people apart because the treatment makes them more white even than white people. In result, the whites discriminate against them, and the new fad among whites becomes getting a super dark skin tan to separate themselves from the chemically changed blacks. Absurd. Aaaaabsurd.

Schuyler explained his motives:

“What I have tried to do in this novel is to laugh the color question out of school by showing up its ridiculousness and absurdity.”

There are other black figures – E. Franklin Frazier, Theophilus Lewis, Wallace Thurman – who tried their hands at satire also. All of them were at the periphery of the New Negro movement but are worth a closer look. My teacher, Professor McDowell, specializes in 18^th century satire but I’m sure she would also have insights about this side of the Harlem Renaissance. It would be worth asking her and hope that she pushes me in an interesting direction.

Benjamin Brawley - Contested Notions of Uplift

While we view the Harlem Renaissance as a glorious flourishing of Black arts, some leading contemporary critics were at best wary and at worst disgusted with the new movement. In Benjamin Brawley and the Compass of Culture, Jeffrey Williams describes a much more contentious, varied artistic landscape in the 20s and 30s than we tend to picture. He begins with a discussion of “racial uplift,” the idea that through art and literature blacks could rise in society and slowly change racism to respect. While most of the leading artists of the time believed in the empowering nature of art, Langston Hughes differed from Du Bois who differed from James Weldon Johnson who differed from Brawley. Trying to push aside more than a century of white caricatures which had monopolized public representation of blacks, 20^th century artists held the burden of presenting their race through the work they created. Today, Benjamin Brawley is largely forgotten, cast aside as an upper-class black leader whose Victorian sensibilities prevented him from embracing the inevitable momentum of the Harlem group. There is still lots to learn from him, however - there was more than one way to approach “uplift.”

Benjamin Brawley

Brawley grew up in the aristocratic black community of Charleston, Virginia. His father was a college-educated Baptist preacher and prominent literary figure. Like many Southern leaders, Edward Brawley went North to go to a more prestigious school before returning South. He sought to blur the Color Line by talking up his concept of “American Christians,” highlighting common religion between whites and blacks while avoiding the race question. From a young age, his son Benjamin Brawley was attracted to teaching, and his top-notch education and genteel mannerisms made him an example for other blacks. After excelling at Morehouse College, he eventually became the head of the English department at Howard University, positioned at the helm of the black cultural movement.

Brawley saw excellence in writing as proof of a cultured people. As Jeffrey Williams notes, blacks had a “mandate for achievement… black elites (like Brawley) regarded every instance of advancement, or individual achievement, as ammunition in the barrage against exclusionary racial barriers” (29). It was not “art for arts sake” by any means. Brawley looked to the North and to Western Europe for definitions of culture, hoping to match whites on their own playing field. He published tons of anthologies and biographies chronicling black heroes and scholars, desperately striving to change the national image of African Americans by piling one accomplishment on top of the other until they breached the ceiling of racism. Like Du Bois, he put his faith in the black aristocracy, hoping the few rich blacks who were able to get an education and establish a prominent role in society could stand in as figureheads for a race that still was rough around the edges. Any public presentation of black life should put the best face forward – the race needed as many positive images as possible.

 

For that reason, when Langston Hughes released portraits of prostitutes, gamblers and street fighters in his poetry collection Fine Clothes to the Jew, Brawley tore it apart, lamenting how such a talented artist could go so horribly wrong. In Harlem, Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and others were creating an aesthetic of gritty naturalism – rather than sticking to “safe” figures such as teachers or sports stars, they looked for inspiration in poor urban black communities. Truth trumped uplift. Hughes criticized Brawley for clinging to the white man’s coattails rather than embracing a dawning African American aesthetic. Many Harlemites turned to a Primitivist style which sexualized the sordid, dirty, fast rhythms of the urban slums. Carl Van Vechten’s hugely popular novel Nigger Heaven split critics down the middle, with some praising the work and others calling it a spit in the black community’s face. After years of being labeled as lazy, violent or sex-crazed, conservative critics saw Hughes’ and Van Vechten’s works as a step backwards. I believe Hughes sought to highlight the resiliency and richness of urban slum dwellers rather than make fun of them, but at a time when the dominant pictures of blackness in America were lynchings and minstrels, a negative portrayal by one of your own kind hurt that much more.

Hard Luck – Langston Hughes 

When hard luck overtakes you

Nothin' for you to do.

When hard luck overtakes you

Nothin' for you to do.

Gather up yo' fine clothes

An' sell 'em to de Jew.

Jew takes yo' fine clothes,

Gives you a dollar an' a half.

Jew takes yo' fine clothes,

Gives you a dollar an' a half.

Go to de bootleg's,

Git some gin to make you laugh.

If I was a mule I'd

Git me a waggon to haul.

If I was a mule I'd

Git a waggon to haul.

I'm so low-down I

Ain't even got a stall.

It’s important to note the spectrum of opinions regarding how to uplift African Americans: While Brawley was conservative in comparison to Langston Hughes, they both saw art as the ticket to respect, while Booker T Washington’s Normal School Industrial Model merely stressed the dignity of labor. WEB Du Bois, now heralded as a genius and powerful leader, let his notions of Victorian class superiority seep into his sociology analysis The Philadelphia Negro. It chronicled racism in the crime-ridden black ghetto, but the author could not escape some degree of disgust when discussing the urban squalor. On the other hand, James Weldon Johnson, a member of the “Old Guard,” abandoned Victorian Classicism in favor of folk art through his collection God’s Trombones, an extended poem which takes the form of a Negro sermon. Ideologies varied from person to person, and many scholars contradicted their own ideologies when circumstances changed. At Howard University, Brawley the Victorian worked in the same department as Sterling Browne, a poet who embraced the rural vernacular forms of poor Southern farmers. Black leaders saw the same finish line but diverged in their paths, everyone taking a different view of uplift.

Listen Lord

A Prayer – James Weldon Johnson

O Lord, we come this morning
Knee-bowed and body-bent
Before thy throne of grace.
O Lord -- this morning --
Bow our hearts beneath our knees,
And our knees in some lonesome valley.
We come this morning --
Like empty pitchers to a full fountain,
With no merits of our own.
O Lord -- open up a window of heaven,
And lean out far over the battlements of glory,
And listen this morning.

Lord, have mercy on proud and dying sinners --
Sinners hanging over the mouth of hell,
Who seem to love their distance well.
Lord -- ride by this morning --
Mount your milk-white horse,
And ride-a this morning --
And in your ride, ride by old hell,
Ride by the dingy gates of hell,
And stop poor sinners in their headlong plunge.

And now, O Lord, this man of God,
Who breaks the bread of life this morning --
Shadow him in the hollow of thy hand,
And keep him out of the gunshot of the devil.
Take him, Lord -- this morning --
Wash him with hyssop inside and out,
Hang him up and drain him dry of sin.
Pin his ear to the wisdom-post,
And make his words sledge hammers of truth --
Beating on the iron heart of sin.
Lord God, this morning --
Put his eye to the telescope of eternity,
And let him look upon the paper walls of time.
Lord, turpentine his imagination,
Put perpetual motion in his arms,
Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,
Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation,
And set his tongue on fire.

And now, O Lord --
When I've done drunk my last cup of sorrow --
When I've been called everything but a child of God --
When I'm done travelling up the rough side of the mountain --
O -- Mary's Baby –
When I start down the steep and slippery steps of death --
When this old world begins to rock beneath my feet --
Lower me to my dusty grave in peace
To wait for that great gittin' up morning -- Amen.