The Harlem tour was incredibly engaging and informative. It was moving to walk through streets with so much history and imagine what Harlem was like a century ago. Standouts for me was learning more about Marcus Harvey’s Black Star Line and getting to stand in the spot where the Savoy Ballroom was located. The walking tour made me think a lot about the concept of a United Black community. It felt like during the Harlem renaissance, Black people weretruly joining together to build a community where their lives could be fully realized outside of the white gaze. It’s unfortunate that it didn’t totally last or come to fruition, and many setbacks were to come in the future.
In Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, non-fiction essays about Harlem and the black experience are placed side-by-side with imaginative and fictive work like the journal’s many poems and illustrations. Both kinds of work are given equal importance on the page, serving the common goal of enlightening the reader on “modern” black life in Harlem. Though creative works and non-fiction works are often placed into separate categories, with non-fiction seen as more “true” and superior, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro shows how they can work in tandem. But why was imagination and fiction so important to a community that had so many urgent real-life struggles to face? Why should made-up works like poems and illustrations be necessary for readers to learn more about Harlem and come to a better understanding of who the New Negro is?In his essay “Harlem” in the magazine, Alain Locke reveals answers to these questions.
An Illustration by Winold Reiss appears between poems in Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.
“American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination.” (p. 630) writes Locke. Here, Locke not only touches on what is happening culturally in Harlem during the Harlem renaissance, but also helps explain why this issue of Survey Graphic and many other works from the Harlem renaissance, focus intently on fiction and imagination. The best way for black people to see a brighter future for themselves at this time was to imagine it through creativity.
A photo of Harlem appears in Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.
Locke sees Harlem as an opportunity for black people to create their own unique identity out of the struggles of the past. The large number of free blacks that came to Harlem from across the country were finding community in each other and building a new identity for themselves. Because so many rights were still denied to black people, art was one of the only ways in which they were able to exert control of their lives. So, the Harlem issue of Survey Graphic could not simply be a sociological report filled with data and essays on the state of black life. It was necessary to include imaginative work like the poems of Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. Though these works may not go into great detail about Harlem’s history like the essays “Harlem” by Alain Locke and ” The Making of Harlem” by James Weldon Johnson, they provide just as much insight into the world of Harlem by showcasing the breadth of talent that comes from the neighborhood. This too is sociological work. For the full story of black life in 1920s Harlem to be told, works that showcased both the intellectual and artistic brilliance of black people must be placed side by side.
Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro. Survey Associates, 1925. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/17368696.
In The Crisis, Survey Graphic, Opportunity, and perhaps the majority of black writing to come out of this time period exists not only a similar goal of the advancement of the black race, but also a yearning for a higher, more perfect way of being and living. It was not enough for Black thinkers at the time to gain freedom and equal opportunity. There seemed also to be a need for what we may now realize is mythology. Mythology meaning something that is widely believed to be real, but for which there is no hard evidence or consensus about its existence.
Concepts like “The New Negro” and a “Negro Heaven” formed and were often discussed, though what people and areas fit these ideas was seldom agreed upon. Was the New Negro a respectable, well educated individual easily able to integrate into white society, or a vibrant, self-assured young person uninterested in the white gaze? Was Harlem the true center of free Black life in America, or was it simply a safe haven for a large group of Black migrants? It seemed unfathomable to some thinkers and leaders of the 1920s that Harlem was anything but heaven for the America Negro. Harlem’s large population was often used as evidence for this idea.
Eugene Kinckle Jones.
“The cosmopolitanism of the city attracts the Negro. The heterogeneity of the population has generated an atmosphere of freedom and democracy. The city’s reputation has been broadcasted to every nook and corner of the Southland, and when Negroes decide to move it is natural for those along the Atlantic seaboard to think of New York and act accordingly.” (p. 413) writes Eugene Kinckle Jones in an essay in the January 1926 issue of Opportunity.
Jones, a leader of the National Urban League which produced Opportunity magazine, seems to speak with authority on the matter. Though Black people existed in large numbers in many other parts of the country, he seems fixated on Harlem. Jones notes Manhattan’s “heterogeneity” and atmosphere of “freedom”–not accounting for the fact that Blacks congregated specifically in Harlem mostly likely because they were not welcome in other areas of New York City. Jones goes even further in his hopes for New York and the Negro:
“The Negro is probably the real test of democracy in America. Shall this democracy endure? The Negro migrant to New York State may yet give the answer.” (p. 416) writes Jones.But was New York really that important to the Negro, or simply the location that had the largest number black people in the country in the 1920s? Not every scholar of the time agreed with Jones on Harlem being the Mecca.
“Where is the Negro’s Heaven?” an essay by Kelly Miller in the December 1926 issue of Opportunity vehemently argues that Washington D.C., as opposed to Harlem, is the “Negro’s Heaven”–a black utopia.
“The New Negro, of whom we have heard so much is nothing but the old Negro exposed to the Harlem environment.” (p. 765) writes Miller.
A group of Harlem singers.
Miller argues that Harlem’s reputation is overblown, largely due to its population. Though New York has many more Black people than Washington, the culture of Washington better supports freedom for Black people, Miller alleges. “If every Negro should withdraw over night from the greater New York, nothing would be missed except the jazz and the blues.” (p. 765) writes Miller. It’s a harsh hypothesis that undermines how Harlem was thought of then, and even how the period of the Harlem renaissance is spoken about today. Though Miller does not destroy the idea that a Negro Heaven exists, the very disagreement on its location calls the whole concept into question. Miller is able to see the cracks in Harlem’s facade. He seems to be saying that the cultural breakthroughs found in Harlem will not protect its citizens from the cruelty of American racism.
Though Miller disagrees with many other thinkers of his time, he interestingly still has faith in a Negro Heaven. The belief in such a place may have been necessary in the 1920s, when racial hatred was on the rise and segregation was beginning to bloom after a failed period of reconstruction. With rights and privileges slowly slipping away, Black Americans may have needed a mythology like The New Negro or a Negro Heaven in order to imagine a future. The downside of this may have been losing touch with real measures of progress. In Miller’s essay, he seems to be aware of the shortcomings of Harlem, but is somehow blind to the downsides of Washington. Today, a century later, we know that no place in America then could have been a Negro Heaven. Despite the cultural and quality-of-life strides that many African Americans made in the early 20th century, the peak of institutionalized segregation was still decades away. And even now, after Black Americans have achieved so-called legal equality, neighborhoods in New York City and the Washington area remain heavily segregated. What is needed today is not another iteration of a New Negro or a Negro Heaven, but a Negro reality. True progress cannot be measured in population size or cultural contribution, but equity and representation in all ares of American life.
Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) is an insightful piece of literature on racial tension, colorism, and intracommunity struggles. But just beneath the surface, it can just as easily be read as a story about queer desire. Reading between the lines, protagonist Irene, and several other characters, may indeed be passing–not for white, but for straight.
It is obvious to interpret Irene’s discomfort in her encounter with Clare to be about her being “found out” as a black woman, but there is more to it than that. Irene is not only intrigued by Clare because she subconsciously recognizes her, she is also clearly attracted to her.
Very slowly she looked around, and into the dark eyes of the woman in the green frock at the next table. But she evidently failed to realize that such intense interest as she was showing might be embarrassing, and continued to stare. (Larsen, 17)
Irene is both confused and enthralled in this scene. She does not know where she knows Clare from yet, but she also does not understand why she is so compelled toward her. Given the way their relationship evolves and their lives become inextricably linked, it is fair to assume that there may be a level of romantic or sexual attraction between them, or at least on Irene’s part.
Another piece of literature from the Harlem Renaissance, the short story “Smoke, Lillies and Jade” (1926) by Richard Bruce Nugent, also features an encounter bursting with queer desire. Though the protagonist Alex and his love interest Beauty have a more obvious sexual and romantic connection than Irene and Clare, there is still more implication than explicit disclosure of queerness.
the castanets of their heels clicking accompaniment…the stranger inhaled deeply and with a nod of content and a smile…Alex blew a cloud of smoke…Alex felt like singing…the stranger knew the magic of blue smoke also (Nugent, 36)
Daveed Diggs performs a reading from “Smoke, Lillies and Jade”
In this encounter, we find a more obvious instance of attraction, but a similar level of discreteness. Both encounters use metaphors and symbolism to express the desires of their protagonists, and express feelings that were much more taboo then than they are today. In his 2015 article “Desires Made Manifest: The Queer Modernism of Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!” Matthew N. Hannah explores the queer themes found in literature of the Harlem Renaissance.
Nugent reconfigured hetero-normative literary tropes into explorations of queer, interracial desire; moreover, this reconceptualization questions the boundaries and possibilities of art. Rather than relying on art to idealize normative sexuality’s role in reproducing the race, Nugent celebrated the pleasures of same-sex desire with a catalogue of his beloved. In keeping with the purported aims of Fire!!, Nugent imagined an alternative to the propagandistic art idealizing the struggle for racial uplift. (Hannah, 174-175)
What fascinates me about both of these examples of literature is the way the two writers so thoughtfully and tenderly incorporated queer narratives into the larger collection of literature produced during the Harlem Renaissance. During the Harlem Renaissance, the struggle for rights and respect for Black Americans, then often called “The Race Problem”, was far from over, and top of mind for everyone. Yet Larsen and Nugent were still able to weave queer ideas into their work and to place the Black Queer struggle into context within the Black struggle. This is particularly important to acknowledge because even today, there are many who seek to separate Queer issues from Black issues, when in reality both have always existed in spite of each other. In “Smoke Lillies and Jade”, Alex’s difficulty in finding his identity is clearly not just due to his blackness, as the success of his brother is pointed out, but also due to his queerness. In “Passing”, Larsen brilliantly places Queer Identity alongside Black identity, perhaps evene equating them. For these characters their Blackness and Queerness are inexplicable, challenging long held myths about how people should identify.
