A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance
With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved.
Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.
A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance
With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved.
Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.
Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro
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A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance
With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved.
Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252091247 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Spectres of 1919
CLASS AND NATION IN THE MAKING OF THE NEW NEGRO
By BARBARA FOLEY
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09124-7
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The New Negro and the Left
This is an era of war and revolution, of struggle and revision, of contest and change.
—Masthead, Modernist, 1919
Writing in The New Negro in 1925, Alain Locke was purportedly describing a self-evident state of affairs when he proclaimed that the "deep feeling of race" currently being manifested as the "mainspring of Negro life" is "radical in tone, but not in purpose" and that "only the most stupid forms of opposition, misunderstanding or persecution could make it otherwise." Although, Locke conceded, "the thinking Negro has shifted a little toward the left with the world-trend, and there is an increasing group who affiliate with radical and liberal movements," at present "the Negro is radical on race matters, conservative on others, in other words, a 'forced radical,' a social protestant rather than a genuine radical." The "Negro mind"—a unitary phenomenon for which Locke presumably felt privileged to speak—"reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas." Even the Negro's attempt to "build his Americanism on race values," while a "unique social experiment," entailed "no limitation or reservation with respect to American life." It actually constituted a realization of Americanism: "Democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are closed.... So the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other." By "now becom[ing] a conscious contributor and lay[ing] aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization," the New Negro accomplished, for Locke, two things: he or she moved beyond "the arid fields of controversy and debate"—presumably in large part over political and economic questions—and toward "the productive fields of creative expression." The zone of culture—where "race values" would be explored in the spirit of pluralism, not separatism—thus supplied an antidote to the radicalism that might otherwise move from "tone" to "purpose." The culturalist project embodied in The New Negro was indissolubly linked with both antiradicalism and American nationalism.
Beneath its bravado, however, Locke's formulation of the New Negro movement rested on somewhat unsteady underpinnings. His admission that "an increasing group ... affiliate with radical and liberal movements" hardly squared with his assertion that this affiliation was not to be taken seriously. Moreover, there was a veiled threat in Locke's assertion that "Harlem's quixotic radicalisms call for their ounce of democracy to-day lest to-morrow they be beyond cure." As Anthony Dawahare reads between Locke's lines, "U.S. political and economic rulers must legally recognize the rights of blacks to be offered what American capitalism has to offer, or else they may face some form of revolution." Nonetheless, Locke's normative definition of the New Negro movement as above all a cultural movement, simultaneously Negro nationalist and American nationalist, has been taken as not canon-forming but canonical by many of the literary critics and cultural historians commenting on the New Negro movement/Harlem Renaissance. From John Hope Franklin's 1947 assertion that "the writers of the Harlem Renaissance ... gave little attention to the propaganda of the socialists and communists" to the more recent absence of New Negro leftism in accounts by Ann Douglas, Steven Watson, Mark Helbling, Michael North, and J. Martin Favor, most investigations of the movement have reduced its radical critique—when it is mentioned at all—to postwar militancy. After a brief nod to African American self-defense in the 1919 race riots and a perfunctory citation of Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," these accounts usually move rapidly from the assertion of a new selfhood in the zone of the streets to the articulation of a new discursive practice in the zone of representation. Chidi Ikonné and Robert Bone, who emphasize the movement's engagements with primitivism and pastoralism, relegate any consideration of radical politics to the margins. Even the canon-challenging studies of women Harlem Renaissance writers by Cheryl Wall, Gloria Hull, and Claudia Tate, which have reconfigured the gendered lineaments of the movement in significant ways, remain silent about the left-wing sympathies of the important African American women writers they treat. Cary Wintz's recent volumes recovering many scattered and ignored texts of the Harlem Renaissance further codify the prevalent notion of the Harlem Renaissance as a purely aesthetic movement by occluding all radical voices from this—presumably exhaustive—archival project. Houston Baker, who views the progenitor of the New Negro modernists as none other than that most subversive of all tricksters, Booker T. Washington, limits the radicalism of African American modernism to cagey linguistic subversion: McKay's deployment of the sonnet form to oppositional ends, more than his call for class-conscious and anticolonial rebellion, constitutes the core of his politics. Walter Kalaidjian celebrates the supersession of class-based political radicalism by racial, gender, and sexual proto-identity politics. Robert Stepto and Carla Cappetti, while offering important critiques of the view that the New Negro movement should be unproblematically associated with Harlem or dubbed a "renaissance," do not regard exploration of its political origins as relevant to its reconfiguration. Even critics offering long-overdue revisionary views of the movement's interracialism—Douglas and North, Eric Sundquist, and, most signally, George Hutchinson—discern no significant connections between the unprecedented intermingling of whites and blacks in the early 1920s and the Left's call for class-based multiracial unity. As far as these accounts are concerned, the historical crucible of 1919 was important to the origins of the New Negro movement/Harlem Renaissance primarily for hastening African American migration to the North, with all the dramatic developments that this demographic shift entailed. The revolutionary politics shaping both discourse and practice during this era of global war and revolution would appear to have been, as Locke opined, largely irrelevant to the culturalist movement that, from its hesitant postwar beginnings, gained momentum after the 1923 publication of Jean Toomer's Cane and culminated in the publication of Locke's anthology two years later.
The prevailing notion that the New Negro movement was from the start a cultural phenomenon, only peripherally influenced by leftist politics, has always been controversial. Some commentators have viewed the Harlem Renaissance's eventual culturalist emphasis as the product of a struggle that culminated in an outright betrayal of the movement's initial commitment to a Left-inflected political praxis. Nathan Huggins, targeting the corrupting influence of thrill-seeking white patrons, laments that the "militant and self-assertive" New Negro movement of the postwar years was doomed to be "shattered" because of its "naive assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities." Theodore Kornweibel argues that the term New Negro originally designated "the attitude of militance that had been born in the war and nurtured in the 'Red Summer' of 1919"; he particularly associates it with such figures as the Messenger editors A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, who, he argues, viewed the cultural issues that would preoccupy their successors as a distraction from the economic and political changes forming the core of the New Negro's historic task. Theodore Vincent declares that the New Negro movement was simply hijacked by conservatives. "The term 'New Negro' was originated by political radicals as a means of distinguishing themselves from traditional black leadership" but was "gradually co-opted by that very middle class which by radical definition was 'Old Negro,'" he writes. "Blacks who denounced radicals of all stripes commercialized the concept into a distinction between 'new' aggressive individualists who capitalized on the social changes that came with the move to the city, and the lethargic Negro of the Old South." David Levering Lewis, regarding the aesthetes of the post-1925 years as undeserving heirs to the legacy of the wartime and postwar New Negro rebels, adjudges the Harlem Renaissance "a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations in a time of extreme national backlash." The Talented Tenth, in Lewis's view, reacted to the extreme violence and repression of the Red Summer of 1919 by "jump-start[ing]" a movement that "sublimated" African American revolutionary energies into textual—and therefore safe—channels of expression. Lewis's useful periodization of the Harlem Renaissance into the years 1919–23 and 1924–28 is premised on his estimate of the moment when this sublimation became definitive. For Huggins, Kornweibel, and Lewis, culturalism implies conservatism; the focus on aesthetic representation in the Harlem Renaissance of the mid- to late 1920s presupposed an overt rejection of the political radicalism informing the New Negro movement of the wartime and immediate postwar years.
Some of the scholars who applaud the New Negro's mid-1920s emergence as culture hero acknowledge the movement's roots in postwar radicalism and emphasize Locke's formative role in its transmutation. Henry Louis Gates grants that the "mythological and primitivistic defense of the racial self that was the basis of the literary movement which we call the New Negro, or Harlem Renaissance" derived from the "aggressive self-defense" of the postwar period. "Locke's appropriation of the name in 1925 for his literary movement represents a measured cooptation of the term," he points out, from Randolph's earlier use of it to describe the "militant, card-carrying, gun-toting Socialist who refused to turn the other cheek." Even though Gates's own focus on the vernacular tradition as central to African American letters draws, to some degree, on this same "mythological and primitivistic defense of the racial self," he grants that the debate over the identity of the New Negro initially went beyond the realm of letters. Arnold Rampersad, in his introduction to the 1992 reissue of Locke's text, observes that "[a] sense of the economic underpinnings of society" is largely absent from the anthology and that "[r]adical socialism is given short shrift." Locke's text "helped Harlem turn its back even more firmly on radical social movements," writes Rampersad. "[T]he unity suggested by The New Negro was mainly a front presented to the world." Gates and Rampersad remind us that Locke's anthology signifies less a recognition of the New Negro's arrival as interpreter of black modernity than an attempt—and a politically conservative one at that—to bring a certain version of that modernity into being. In their readings, Harlem Renaissance culturalism is the inverse of New Negro radicalism; the supersession of the latter by the former involves not a dialectic of transmutation but a process of takeover, eradication, and obliteration.
Still another critical school argues that the New Negro's devolution into culture hero is itself largely a literary-historical myth, produced mainly by scholars who have ignored substantial evidence of a continuing radical strain in African American literature of the 1920s. Faith Berry has persuasively demonstrated that Langston Hughes's lifelong commitment to political radicalism, while peaking in the 1930s, began in the early 1920s and is continually visible in his work. Focusing on the central role played by McKay, James A. Miller has cautioned against viewing the Harlem Renaissance as, in Clyde Taylor's words, the "'happy hour of black literary and historical studies'"; McKay's political radicalism was, Miller argues, not anomalous but typical of a substantial segment of the movement's participants. William Maxwell proposes that Locke's 1925 manifesto be read not as coup de grace to a moribund New Negro radicalism but instead as a failed effort to displace a leftist politics that was influential throughout the decade. "It is only the immense rhetorical and institutional success of Locke's wrestling match with his predecessors that has permitted us to forget that the Harlem Renaissance outlined in The New Negro represents a stab at rearticulation," argues Maxwell. "The anthology is neither the originary moment nor the final truth of the postwar black renaissance, but—among many other things—a polemical attempt to reconfigure this renaissance according to a less radical design." Examining such hitherto neglected writers as the radical poet Andrea Razafkeriefo and reminding us of the persisting leftism of Hughes and McKay, Maxwell argues that anticapitalism and proletarian internationalism influenced African American writers throughout the 1920s. That the literary proletarianism of the 1930s constituted a continuation of, rather than a reaction to, the left-wing cultural production of the previous decade is a crucial corollary to these revisionary historians, for whom culturalism exists in tension with a continuing "Red line" of radical literary and artistic practice that remained powerful throughout the decade.
This study acknowledges its debt to those scholars who locate the beginnings of the New Negro movement in wartime and postwar radicalism and envision the movement as part of the "Red line" of history, both literary/artistic and political/economic. But that radicalism was itself contradictory, and nationalism—both Negro and American—was in many ways at the heart of this contradiction. In chapter 2, I examine the ways in which the postwar radical movement's continuing emphasis on representation in the arena of politics helped lay the basis for the movement's eventual emphasis on representation in the arena of aesthetics. In subsequent chapters, I explore the nature and extent of the postwar Thermidorian reaction and the role played by cultural pluralism in further influencing the development of the nationalist culturalism of the Harlem Renaissance. However, to the extent that the Harlem Renaissance formed a bridge between the revolutionary moment of 1919 and the renewed radicalism of the 1930s, this occurred largely because, albeit in varying degrees, all three moments were characterized by the notion, or at least the hope, that a "good"—that is, democratic—nationalism could be leveraged against the "bad" nationalism of 100 percent Americanism and made to work for the working class, native and immigrant, white and African American. The declaration of the Communist Party of the United States of America during the Popular Front era that "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism" codified a "Left" patriotic—but essentially class-collaborationist—tendency that was inherent in the radical movement from its very outset. The predilection of the postwar Left—Second International and Third International alike—for linking emancipation from oppression with control over a given terrain, and identity with a given soil, would end up critically weakening the New Negro movement's structural critique of class inequality and hence racism. The ease with which Locke's version of the New Negro became hegemonic is attributable in no small measure to the Left's prior accession to Locke's nationalist premise. Culturalism was thus not so much the inverse of political radicalism as its loyal opposition, its dialectical counterpart. The eventual substitution of the term Harlem Renaissance for New Negro movement signals not simply the triumph of the poets over the protesters or the emergence of Harlem as a "race capital" through the massive demographic shifts produced by the Great Migration but also the ascendance of a place-based nationalist politics in the discourse of the entire early-twentieth-century Left. The welding of place to race—Harlem, on the one hand, the South of the Negro "folk," on the other—was the distinctive contribution of the New Negro movement to this larger national and international trend. Although Locke's proclamation of the New Negro's nationalist identity was clearly an effort to bring this identity into being rather than a declaration of self-evident realities, his act involved not simply co-optation, hijacking, exclusion, or betrayal but also a refashioning of ideologies already integral to the outlook of many leftists and progressives, black and white. In short, to understand the process whereby Harlem Renaissance culturalism emerged from New Negro radicalism requires that the two poles of the contradiction be viewed as neither identical nor antipodal but as constituting a simultaneous unity and struggle of opposites. The concrete nature of this dialectic is the subject of Spectres of 1919.
Before examining the contradictions internal to New Negro radicalism that would result in its eventual negation by culturalism, however, one must get a sense of the horizon of revolutionary possibility that was, however briefly, made visible by the massive class and antiracist struggles erupting in the wake of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution, because the emergence of the New Negro as warrior in the realms of both politics and culture is inseparable from the global postwar revolutionary upsurge. In 1919 and its aftermath, what the New Negroes were expressing was more than a vague hope for a better world coming out of the war; in the domain of U.S. race relations, they were reflecting the leftward shift of contemporaneous political discourse and praxis. I thus begin with an account of several events and situations that figure paradigmatically throughout this study. I next examine the radicalizing effect of the postwar upsurge on contemporaneous definitions of the New Negro offered by mainstream and liberal commentators, African American and white. I then demonstrate the pervasiveness of the conviction among leftists—again, African American and white—that it would take the abolition of capitalism to overcome racism. To an extent that many readers in the beginning of the twenty-first century may find difficult to imagine, leftwing ideas enjoyed a mass influence in the period following World War I, significantly affecting the ways in which radicals and nonradicals alike perceived historical developments and construed the relation between race and class. It was only because radical ideas were so pervasive that the contradictions within the postwar Left could exercise the influence that they would turn out to have.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spectres of 1919 by BARBARA FOLEY. Copyright © 2003 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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