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.