Darwin Turner lecture, "W.E.B. DuBois and a Black Aesthetic," at the University of Iowa, June 25, 1972
Speaker 1: The following is an address recorded at the Fourth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture, held at the University of Iowa June 25th through July 7th, 1972. Speaking on W.E.B. Du Bois and a black aesthetic is Dr. Darwin Turner, visiting professor at the University of Iowa. Introducing Professor Turner is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at the University of Iowa and Chairman of the Institute.
Charles T. Davi...: It is a pleasure to introduce our speaker, Dr. Darwin Turner, who has been, during the past year, a visiting professor of English at the University of Iowa, attached to the Afro-American studies program and who will be my successor as the new Chairman of the Afro-American studies program. He comes to us from the University of Michigan, from far away Ann Arbor, where he has taught in his specialized area Afro-American literature. Professor Turner's career is amazing in many ways. I know of no one in the academic world who seems to be so equally distinguished as a teacher, an administrator, as a scholar.
Charles T. Davi...: Until recently, much of his teaching has been done in black colleges in the South, at Clark, at Morgan State, at Florida A&M and North Carolina A&T. However, before and after his tenure at Michigan, he has had teaching assignments at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Hawaii. As an administrator, he has been a chairman of two departments of English. He has also been Dean of the graduate school at North Carolina A&T State University. He has served as Secretary and then again as President of the College Language Association, and a member of important committees of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, sometimes call the Four Cs, at the College English Association, the National Council of the Teachers of English, and the Modern Language Association.
Charles T. Davi...: He announced his great promise as a scholar when he was graduated from the University of Cincinnati at some ridiculously young age, with a Phi Beta Kappa key. That tender age was 16. Since then, he has received graduate degrees of the University of Cincinnati and at the University of Chicago. He has edited half a dozen important anthologies of Afro-American literature, and he has completed a definitive bibliography in the field, an indispensable tool for a neophyte coming to Afro-American literature for the first time. Recently, he has published In a Minor Chord, the critical examination of Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston, three of the important writers of the Harlem Renaissance and he has in pickle, as they say completed and do for publication a study of Frank Yerby.
Charles T. Davi...: His critical essays are too numerous to mention but they have appeared in periodicals covering a spectrum from black world to American literature. Darwin Turner is perhaps the best known critic and historian of Afro-American literature and it seems natural to think of him as a Dean. He falls into that line of continuity that stretches from Benjamin Brawley through Sterling Brown, Arthur Davis, Saunders Redding to our own time.
Charles T. Davi...: He's thoroughly established in the field which much of the academic world is just discovering and he is doubly valuable of course because of this fact. His primary area of interest has been drama especially Afro-American drama. But tonight he is discussing a problem that is beyond the field of his chosen interest, but one that is central to understanding the revolution that has occurred in black drama. I refer of course to the black aesthetic, and his subject this evening is Du Bois and a black aesthetic.
Charles T. Davi...: I'm pleased to introduce my friend and colleague, the new chairman of the program in Afro-American studies at the University of Iowa Prof. Darwin Turner.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Thank you Dr. Davis, ladies and gentlemen. I used to think that Dr. Davis just said all those things because I was working on his staff. It turns out however that in the tradition of individuals from a certain state, he is a scholar and a gentleman. Before I begin the lecture tonight I would like to acknowledge an indebtedness to [Carolyn Gibson] for the genesis of this idea. I'm afraid that had she not discussed certain ideas with me when she was working on her dissertation on Du Bois, I might've continued too much to hold to the image of Du Bois merely as a Victorian prude who could not stand certain behavior antics of the young writers of the Renaissance. But her concern for some of Du Bois' ideas started me looking. One apology before I begin, having decided to stay in Iowa for summer during the summer I have contracted a cold and although coughing may not ensue, as you know an individual who is at the lectern does generate quite a bit of hot air and that may cause overheating. If I must stop for coughing, please let me apologize to you.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: In the crisis of the Negro intellectual, Harold Cruse castigated Negro critics for failing to establish a black perspective from which to examine and evaluate the works of black artists. Similarly black arts critics of the 1960s insist that black art must adhere to a black aesthetic. Such contemporary critics and theorists as Imamu Amear Baraka, Larry Neal, Don L. Lee, Hoyt Fuller, and Addison Gayle, Jr. join with Cruse in demanding that black artists seek sources, subjects and styles from black folk culture and that these efforts be evaluated according to criteria emerging from and appropriate to that culture. Such ideas have been rejected by some critics both black and white, who naively insist that since no white aesthetic exists, no black one can. It is their idea that no white aesthetic exist.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Any movement by Blacks to establish a new aesthetic is considered consequently a threat to the century long struggle for integration. It will reestablish segregation and prostitute art to political agitation. Despite the diatribes of such idealists however, the concept of a black aesthetic may prove to be the most significant cultural theory to emerge from black people since Alain Locke articulated the doctrine of the new Negro in the 1920s. The theory of a black aesthetic is not totally new. Like most theories of black Americans it can be seen as a restatement or an extension of ideas conceived but not realized by earlier Blacks. The theory of a black aesthetic was anticipated in Alain Locke's urging Blacks to seek subject and style in African culture. It was anticipated in the bold rhetoric of young Langston Hughes' insistence that new black artists would express their individual dark skinned selves without caring whether they pleased white or black audiences.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: It may be surprising however to discover such a concept articulated distinctly in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois. Logically perhaps one should not be surprised. At one time or another Du Bois probably espoused every conceivable theory which could develop a strong and self-confident black American population. Nonetheless I believe that the identification of Du Bois with a black aesthetic will astonish many contemporary readers, who influenced by white critics and by black critics, imagine Du Bois as an elitist assimilationist who stammered in his efforts to separate himself from the folk culture and to melt into the pot.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: I must admit at the start that Du Bois did not fully define and delimit his theory of a black aesthetic, or as I prefer to designate in reference to Du Bois, his theory of art from a black perspective. Despite his continuing interest in art, Du Bois was an historian, a social scientist and a political leader who envisioned art, especially literature as a vehicle for enunciating and effectuating social economic and political ideas.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Hence he sketched artistic theory, rather than exploring it with the single-minded concentration which would've characterized one whose major concern would've been the art itself. Moreover, like other theorists Du Bois sometimes experience difficulty with practical application of his theories. His insistence on the right of the black artist to present all aspects of black life clashed with his own fear that too many black writers overemphasize the deplorable aspects. This conflict compelled him to argue for more conservative pictures merely to correct the imbalance. Despite these weaknesses in definition or in application, DuBois adumbrated the theory during a high period of black culture, The Harlem Renaissance.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: And this evening I would like to consider with you Du Bois' theory of black art as he shaped it and applied it, as the editor of the crisis through the height of the Renaissance to mid depression moment at which his insistence on the importance of independent black institutions became one of the wedges forcing his separation from the NAACP.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: In 1921, the dawning of the Renaissance might have been viewed in historical research of Carter G. Woodson and the cultural history of Benjamin Brawley, but especially in the interest shown in black people why such white writers as Edward Sheldon, [Richley Torrence] and Eugene O'Neill. At that time Du Bois was struggling to inculcate race pride in all age levels. In a picture which continues to fascinate me, Du Bois was publishing for children, The Brownies' Book, in which writing as the crow he taught black children to respect the beauty of the black feathers of a crow.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: For more mature readers and in a more characteristic manner, writing with the confidence which Alain Locke later posited for the new Negro, Du Bois admonished older readers to accept artistic presentations of the truth of Negro life. In criteria for Negro art which has been frequently reprinted, he wrote, 'We are so used to seeing the truth distorted to our despite, that when wherever we're portrayed on canvas, in story or on the stage as simple humans with human frailties, we rebel. We want everything said about us to tell of the best and highest and noblest in us. We insist that our art and propaganda be one. This is wrong in the end is harmful. We have a right in our effort to get just treatment to insist that we produce something of the best in human character and that it is unfair to judge us by our criminals and prostitutes. This is justifiable propaganda.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: On the other hand we face the truth of art we have criminals and prostitutes, ignorant and debased elements just as all folks have. When the artist paints us, he has a right to paint us whole and not ignore everything which is not as perfect as we wish it to be. The black Shakespeare must portray his black Iago as well as his white Othello. We shrink from this. We fear that evil in us will be called racial, while in others it is viewed as individual. We fear that our shortcomings are not merely human, more foreshadowing and threatening of disaster and failure. The more highly trained we become, the less we can laugh at Negro comedy. We will have an old tragedy and the triumph of dark height, dark right over light villainy.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: The results are not merely negative, they are positively bad. With a vast wealth of human material about us, our own writers and artists fear to paint the truth lest they criticize their own and be in turn criticized for it. They fail to see the eternal beauty that shines through all truth.'
Dr. Darwin Turn...: You may notice that phrase, the idea comes out through Du Bois for the rest of his writing, the eternal beauty that shines through all truth and try to portray a world of stilted, artificial black folk such as never were on land or sea. Thus the white artist looking in on the colored world, if he be wise and discerning, may often see the beauty, tragedy and comedy more truly than we dare.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: While admitting that some white writers such as Tom Dixon might choose to see only exaggerated evil Negroes, Du Bois insisted that Blacks would survive any honest treatment of Afro-American life. He continued, "We stand today secure enough in our accomplishment and self-confidence to lend the whole stern human truth about ourselves to the transforming hand and seeing eye of the artist white and black. And Sheldon, [Torrence] and O'Neill our great benefactors, forerunners of artists who will yet arise in Ethiopia of the outstretched arm." If the vigor and confidence seem to echo the statements of Locke, the statements which came later from Hughes, the tone I think is characteristic of the pride.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Within the next two years the Renaissance of the new Negro produced its first works, 'Shuffle Along' was enthusiastically received by Broadway audience and imitations of 'Shuffle Along' began. Claude McKay and Jean Toomer created 'Harlem Shadows and Cane'. Willis Richardson with 'The Chip Woman's Fortune', became the first Afro-American author to have a serious play staged on Broadway.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: The Renaissance was beginning but was just beginning but already Du Bois perceived a possibly insurmountable barrier to honest black art. That barrier was the prejudice of American audiences who expected Blacks to be quote, "Bizarre an unusual and funny for whites". In an article in which he praised the Ethiopian Art Theater's performances of "Salome", "The Chip Woman's Fortune", and the comedy of errors, "All that Jazz", Du Bois reprinted the Ethiopian players statement that director Raymond O'Neill had not tried to train the actors quote, " In imitation of the more inhibited white actors, but to develop their peculiar racial characteristics, the freshness and vigor of their emotional responses, the spontaneity and intensity of mood, their freedom from intellectual and artistic obsession". Just as he was pleased to observe the emphasis on racial talent in the acting, so Du Bois perceived a corresponding value in an emphasis on racial subjects. In such racial emphasis he suggested Blacks could make a distinct contribution to American drama. He did not deny that it was legitimate and even useful for black actors to prove their talents by interpreting what he called, "white plays for white audiences", nor did he deny the value of expanding the culture of black audiences by performing white plays for them. But even more important for Du Bois, was the opportunity for black actors and writers to explore quote, "their own terrible history of experience" unquote.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Of course he conceded at this time the development of writers would be a slow process, possible only after Blacks had gained quote, "something of that leisure and detachment for artistic work which every artist must have" unquote. Having had little leisure himself but considerable interest, Du Bois had written a pageant, "The Star of Ethiopia", which he was advertising and having produced at various places.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: "Wise men believe," Du Bois concluded, "that the great gift of the Negro to the world is going to be a gift to art". And he felt that the Ethiopian players had begun to peel from drama critics quote, "The scales that blinded them for years to the beauty of Negro folk songs that make them still deaf to the song of Negro singers and but half alive to the growing Negro drama and the ringing Negro actor", unquote.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Two years later in 1925 when the Renaissance was well underway an already defined and Locke's the new Negro, Du Bois reemphasized his concern for the uniqueness of American Negro art. Art which would not be merely imitative of white American standards. While he praised the artistry of such Negroes as Henry Tanner, or Charles Chesnutt or William Stanley Braithwaite, at times his colleague, Du Bois denied that they had contributed significantly to American Negro art.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: They had distinguished themselves as individual American artists but they had not contributed to American Negro art, which Du Bois defined as, "a group expression consisting of biographies written by Blacks, of poetry portraying Negro life and aspirations and activities, of essays on the Negro problem and novels about the color line, pictures and sculpture meant to portray Negro features and characteristics. Plays to dramatize the tremendous situation of the Negro in America, and of course, music".
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Such art, Du Bois felt was quote, "Built on the sorrow and strain inherent in American slavery, on the difficulties that sprang from emancipation, on the feelings of revenge, despair, aspiration and hatred which arose as the Negro struggled and fought his way upward. Whenever a mass of millions of people, having such common memories and experiences are granted intellectual freedom and economic wealth, they will establish a school of art which whether or not it uses new methods of art, will inevitably bring new contact or if you will in this case, black content. And that new content would be a truth which is different from anything else in the world."
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Du Bois stated, If this truth is beautifully expressed and transformed from sordid fact into art, it becomes from its very origin, unusual, splendid. Already he sensed the uniqueness of the artistic expression had been evidenced in new music, new rhythm, new melody and poignant, even terrible expressions of joy, sorrow and despair. The new music was winning respect. Now Du Bois foresaw Afro-American literature was emerging with quote, "New phrases, new uses of words, experiences." Unthought of and unknown to the average white person. Newer writers created a distinct norm. Newer writers created a distinct norm. Their own norm and a new set of human problems. They were hindered only by the white audiences' inability to understand, and by the black audiences stubborn insistence on favorable propaganda.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: As black artist matured they would perfect an understanding of their messages and an awareness of methods of expression. Consequently they would move from the wild music, laughter and dancing of slavery into the more studied, purposeful and restrained but true artistic expression. Let me bite digress for a moment, I can't help feeling that this recalls what Hoyt Fuller was doing in the 1960s as he was making many allowances for the Newport saying, "Give them a little time they will learn, they will develop."
Dr. Darwin Turn...: But there is perhaps another idea which is cardinal in his statement. Du Bois saw a moving from the wild music, laughter and dancing of slavery that may lead to a question of whether what Du Bois saw as a black perspective, was really a Du Bois created black perspective, rather than a black, black perspective.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Nevertheless the banners of the new movement were to be beauty and truth. In May 1925 in the crisis he proclaimed a new editorial policy. We shall stress beauty, all beauty but especially the beauty of Negro life and character, it's music, it's dancing, it's drawing and painting, and the new birth of its literature. This growth which the crisis long since predicted is sprouting and coming to flower. We shall encourage it in every way, keeping the whole a high standard of merit and never stooping to cheap flattery and misspent kindness.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Meanwhile however, Du Bois continued to insist, as he had so many times before, We are seriously crippling Negro art and literature by refusing to contemplate any but handsome heroes, unblemished heroines, and flawless defenders. We insist on being always and everywhere all right and so often we ruin our cause by claiming too much and admitting no faults. It's a fascinating statement coming from a man who has been announced by some critics as one who always wanted to idealize the black subject.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: As early as 1926 however, Du Bois' statements reveal what I feel to be the ambivalent sentiments, our inherent contradictions which have deceived critics who unsuspectingly have fixed Du Bois at one or another of his positions. Early in 1926 in a laudatory review of the new Negro, Du Bois wrote against the doctrine of art for the sake of art. With one point alone do I differ, he wrote, Mr. Locke has newly been seized with the idea that beauty rather than propaganda should be the object of Negro literature and art. His book proves the falseness of this thesis. This is a book filled and bursting with propaganda but it is a propaganda for the most part beautiful and painstakingly done. If Mr. Locke's thesis is insisted upon too much, it is going to turn the Negro Renaissance into decadence. It is the fight for life and liberty that is giving birth to Negro literature and art today. And when turning from his fight or ignoring it, the young Negro tries to do pretty things, or things that catch the passing fancy of the really unimportant critics and publishers about him. He will find that he has killed the soul of beauty in art.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: In the same issue of crisis, Du Bois, announcing the second annual Krigwa Awards competition, the awards were established to encourage Blacks to develop their skills in painting and in writing. In announcing the second annual awards, Du Bois emphasized, both his belief that Negro art must act as propaganda, and his willingness to accept reflections of all avenues of Negro life. We want to especially, he wrote, to stress the fact that while we believe in Negro art, we do not believe in any art simply for art's sake. A repetition of his attack on Locke. We want Negro writers to produce beautiful things but we stress the things rather than the beauty. It is life and truth that are important and beauty comes to make their importance visible and tolerable. Right then about things as you know them in the crisis at least you do not have to confine your writings to the portrayal of bakers, scoundrels and prostitutes. You can write about ordinary, decent, colored people if you want. On the other hand do not fear the truth. If you want to paint crime and destitution and evil, paint it. Use propaganda if you want, discard it and laugh if you will, but be true, be sincere, be thorough and do a beautiful job.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Undoubtedly interwoven his John Keats philosophy, beauty is truth and truth is beauty. Now Keats was a poet who could disclaim any responsibility for explaining that statement. Du Bois further complicated the ambiguity by insisting that art must teach, and by accepting depictions of the ugly and the sordid. There should be little wonder that Du Bois experienced difficulty using this theory as a touchstone for any single work of art. Although he rejected idealized portraits of Negroes, he just could not understand why educated talented young authors never wrote about the decent, hard-working Negroes in their own families. Moreover although he charitably urged young writers to write about the sordid if they wished, he soon suspected that they sacrificed authentic pictures of low black life in favor of stereotypes modeled after the images of Carl Van Vechten's "Nigger Heaven", and in one of the most vehement essays ever written by man who was frequently vehement, Du Bois announced "Nigger Heaven", as "An affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white". The book, he felt, "... slaughtered both beauty and truth," he continued, "... it is a caricature, it is worse than untruth because it is a mass of half-truths."
Dr. Darwin Turn...: To Van Vechten the black cabaret is Harlem. Around all his characters gravitate. Such a theory of Harlem is nonsense. The overwhelming majority of black folk there never go to cabarets. Something they have what is racial, something distinctively Negroid can be found but it is expressed by subtle, almost delicate nuance and not by the wildly barbaric, drunken orgy in whose details Van Vechten revels. Van Vechten is not the great artist who with remorseless scalpel probes the awful depths of life. To him there are no depths. It is the surface mud he slops around in. Life to him is just one damned orgy after another with hate, hurt, gin and sadism.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Both Langston, Hughes and Carl Van Vechten know Harlem cabarets, but it is Hughes who whispers. One said he heard the jazz band sob when the little dawn was gray. Van Vechten never heard a sob in a cabaret, all he hears is noise and brawling. Now previously Du Bois had lamented the limitations of Du Bose Heyward's, "Porgy". Because by excluding educated Negroes of Charleston, it implied for audiences that the total black world of Charleston was the waterfront world. But at a crisis such as this, Du Bois insisted that "Porgy" had a human and interesting quality absent from Van Vechten's characters.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Now, just how does one determine that a writer has created human and interesting characters and that another writer has not? Can any reader truly determine whether an author has treated degraded characters with compassion or has exploited them? Du Bois could not find the answers to these questions. Perhaps his research orientation persuaded him that sincerity can be measured, or perhaps with his attention on other matters he did not even consider the questions fully. The theory was clear, at least to him. A writer should write honestly about the Negro people he knew. If the writer did, the work would ring with truth and consequently beauty and would be useful black literature. If the writer became excessively absorbed with cabaret life, Du Bois stood ready to impale him with the pen reserved for those who dished up black humanity piping hot for the slobberings of white public.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Even if he did not fully consider questions needed to clarify his own criteria of art, Du Bois nevertheless quickly sensed a possible weakness in his efforts to encourage propaganda for the race by soliciting young black writers to write about themselves. What if for the sake of publication all these new black writers began to imitate Van Vechten?
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Early in 1926 Du Bois had initiated a symposium on the Negroan art. He asked various writers to consider several questions. Are writers under obligations or limitations as to the kinds of characters they portray? Should authors be criticized ... you need not bother to get these down, I'm going to try to summarize them, they're overlapping ... Should they be criticized for painting the best or the worst characters of a group? Can publishers be criticized for failing to publish works about educated Negroes? What can Negroes do if they're continually painted at the worst? Should Negroes be portrayed sincerely and sympathetically? Isn't literary emphasis upon sordid, foolish and criminal Negroes persuading readers that this is the truth and preventing authors from writing otherwise? And finally, that one that bothered him, Is there danger that young colored writers will follow the popular trend?
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Now the overlapping questions revealed Du Bois' basic concern, all of the questions focused just on this issue, Is the literary world conspiring to typify Negroes by sordid, foolish, and criminal characters, and what can be done to prevent that? Some of the responses from white authors and critics must have confirmed Du Bois' worst fears. Carl Van Vechten bluntly stated that the squalor and vice of Negro life would be overdone quote, "for a very excellent reason" unquote. The very excellent reason, such squalor and vice offers a wealth of novel, exotic picturesque material. Van Vechten dismissed the life of the cultured, educated person that Du Bois wanted to have written about as identical with the life of a white person, a revelation of the superficiality of Van Vechten's knowledge of the two worlds, and implied that such material consequently just would be uninteresting.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: The only thing for the black writer to do, Van Vechten said, was to exploit the vice and squalor before the white author did. Henry [Macon] who was busy sticking pins and everyone else after the country finally re-accepted him after World War I, Henry Macon chided Blacks for failing to see the humor in the derogatory caricatures of Octavius Cohen. Instead of applying scientific criteria to art, he said, Blacks should write works ridiculing Whites. He didn't say who should publish these works.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Another white author, John Farrar laughed off the stories of Octavius Cohen, literally laughed them off by admitting that they amused him immensely and seemed no liable to Negroes. In contrast, although he confessed scant knowledge of the South, he thought water whites firing the flip quote, "A trifle one-sided", unquote, but not Cohen. William Lyon Phelps, better known perhaps as an educator, mildly admonished Negroes to correct false impressions by setting good examples in their lives.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Having no answers but more questions Sinclair Lewis suggested a conference to discuss the issues and suggested establishing a club for black writers, a club at a small hotel in Paris. I'd like to believe that Sinclair Lewis was just being facetious. Sherwood Anderson was not being facetious. He reminded the crisis that he had lived among Negro laborers, had found them quote, "About the sweetest people I know" unquote, and had said so sometimes in his books. In short, Negroes were worrying too much and being too sensitive. They had no more reason to complain about their portraits and literature than whites would have to complain about their own.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: And Julia Peterkin, the lady of the mansion and plantation in Virginia asserted that Irish and Jewish people were not offended by caricatures, so Negro should not be. She used the occasion to praise the black Negro mammy and to chastise those Negroes who had protested against a recent proposal in Congress to erect a monument to the black mammy. Now, I could continue to detail the responses which appeared in the crisis over a period of a year and probably did not surprise Du Bois, but certainly strengthened his conviction that black writers must fight for their own race. Even in the sympathetic white writers he found weaknesses. For example Paul Green's Pulitzer prize-winning play, "In Abraham's Bosom", impressed him as another example of quote, "The defeatist genre of Negro art which is so common. The more honestly and sincerely a white artist looks at the situation of the Negro in America, the less is he able to consider it in any way bearable and therefore his stories and plays must end in lynching suicide or degeneracy" unquote.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Du Bois added that even if such a writer learned differently by observing black people's refusal to accept failure, the publisher or the producer would refuse to permit him to portray triumphant Blacks, pathetic defeatism or exotic degeneracy. These would be the dominant images of Blacks unless Blacks corrected the images by writing about themselves from their own perspective.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: In April 1927 he reminded his readers of the black artistic heritage in Ethiopia, Egypt, and the rest of Africa. Now he insisted, That artistic heritage must be continued in the spoken and written word, no longer in sculpture, no longer in painting alone. It must not be restrained by the white desire for silly and lewd entertainment. It must not be blocked by the black revulsion from unfavorable images. The Negro artist, he wrote at this point, must have freedom to wonder where he will, portray what he will, interpret whatever he may see according to the great canons of beauty which the world through long experience has laid down.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Du Bois was beginning to sound a bit like his future son-in-law, Countee Cullen. He would now accept anything black writers wanted to do if only they did it beautiful. When James Weldon Johnson published "God's Trombones" in the same year, Du Bois rejoiced in the preservation of the Negro idiom and art. In the beautiful poetry and when he felt to be the wild, beautiful, unconventional, daring drawings of Aaron Douglas. These drawings I must remind you, were stylized to emphasize Negroid rather than Caucasian features.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: In 1928 black writers provided Du Bois with examples to clarify his judgment about the difference between the commendable and the atrocious. The commendable he saw in Nella Larsen's "Quicksand", which he described as a fine, thoughtful and courageous novel. The best since the day of "Chestnut". Subtly comprehending the curious crosscurrents swirling about black Americans, the author created an interesting character, fitted her into a closely woven plot, rejected the improbable happy ending, but avoided the defeatist theme. He concluded, Helga Crane sinks at last, still master of her whimsical, unsatisfied soul. In the end she will be beaten down, even to death, but she never will utterly surrender to hypocrisy and convention.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: But a shameful contrast was "Home to Harlem". Redeemed only by the fact that Claude McKay was quote "Too great a poet to make any complete failure in writing" unquote. The redemption was to be found in beautiful, fascinating changes on themes of the beauty of colored skins, the portrayal of the attractions of Negroes to each other, and the interesting, appealing Jake and Ray.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Despite all these, Du Bois felt "Home to Harlem" pandered to white folks' enjoyment of Negroes portrayed in quote, "That utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying, if enjoyment to can be called. That which a certain decadent section of the white American world centered particularly in New York, longs for with fierce and unrestrained passions. It wants to see written out in black and white and saddled on black Harlem. McKay has used every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity, and utter absence of restraint in as bold and bright colors as he can. Whole chapters are inserted with no connection to the main plot except that they're on the same dirty subject." It is this tone which has created for many the image of Du Bois as the post-Victorian prude.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: As a picture of Harlem life or of Negro life anywhere, it is of course nonsense, untrue. Not so much on account of its facts, but on account of its emphasis and glaring color. Du Bois was always anxious to make that distinction, he would never deny that any individual character or any individual incident could be found in Harlem. But he protested always that the arrangement created a distorted picture, it was the arrangement not the individual fact.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Between the level of "Quicksand" and that of "Home to Harlem" was Rudolph Fisher's "The Walls of Jericho" which Du Bois feared might impress the casual reader merely as an echo of Van Vechten and McKay. Nevertheless, the main story are the two working black people, he felt was psychologically sincere. The book's witnesses lay in the excessive sophistication and unreality of the background and in such minor characters as Jinx and Bubber, who speak authentically but do not seem human as the major figures shine a piano mover and Linda, a housemaid. But, DU Bois continued in bewilderment, Rudolph Fisher has not depicted Negroes like his mother, his sister, his wife, his real Harlem friends. He has not even depicted his own soul. The glimpses of better class Negroes are ineffective make-believe. Why? Du Bois asked. Hearing no answer, he concluded with the hope that this book at least marked a step upward from Van Vechten and McKay.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Now, Du Bois was not so biased that he believed that no white could write successfully about Blacks. He continued to praise what Paul Green was doing. He praised some of the collections of "Peasant Philosophy." He wasn't totally biased but he was forced to make such a statement as, I assume that the white stranger cannot write about black people. In nine cases out of 10 I am right. In the 10th case, and Du Bose Heyward is the 10th case, the stranger can write about the colored people whom he knows. But those very people whom he knows are sometimes so strange to me that I cannot for the life of me make them authentic.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: As Du Bois continued to comment in the waning moments the Renaissance, he increasingly appears as an individual reluctant to condemn a black writer except when that black turned against his blackness. For example, despite earlier objections in the crisis to the glib superficiality of Wallace Thurman's comments on black life and culture, Du Bois attacked "The Blacker the Berry", that novel which is supposedly a justification of blackness and emphasis on the stupidity of scorning blackness. Du Bois attacked "The Blacker the Berry", primarily because he felt Thurman did not believe in his thesis. Du Bois wrote quote, "The story of Emma Lou calls for genius to develop it. It needs deep psychological knowledge and pulsing sympathy and above all the author must believe in black folk and in the beauty of black as a color of human skin. I maybe wrong but it does not seem to me that this is true of Wallace Thurman. He seems to me himself to deride blackness. It seems that this inner self despising of the very thing that he is defending makes the author's defense less complete and less sincere" unquote.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: As the decade closed, Du Bois, in a review of "Green Pastures", which incidentally he praised, probably on the basis of the production which apparently was tremendously better than the script. It was the dignity of Harrison, his acting performance which changed what seems to be merely a farcical slur on Blacks into a moving theatrical moment for many Blacks such as Du Bois. But in a review of "Green Pastures" he reiterated themes he had tried vainly to teach readers, writers and critics. Restatement, All art is propaganda and without propaganda there is no true art. But on the other hand, all propaganda is not art. If a person portrays ideal Negro life, the sole judgment of its success is whether the picture is a beautiful thing. If he caricatures Negro life and makes it sordid and despicable, the critics criterion is solely, is the idea well presented?
Dr. Darwin Turn...: The difficulty with the Negro on the American stage is that the white audience demands caricatures and the Negro on the other hand either cringes to the demand because he needs the pay or bitterly condemns every Negro book or show which does not paint colored folk at their best. Their criticism, the criticisms of Negroes should be aimed at the incompleteness of art expression at the embargo which white wealth lays on full Negro expression and a full picturing of negro soul.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: The 1930s introduced the great economic depression and brought to an end the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. In those early years of the 30s re-examining the position of Blacks in America and reevaluating his own attitudes, Du Bois evolved a theory which elicited more controversy than any other stance he had assumed in the crisis. That theory which confused some people more than 1/4 of a century later when Stokely Carmichael summarized it tersely as, black power. For Du Bois, the idea was clear if not always too easy to explain or to sell. He continued to believe that the most desirable society ... in the 30s this is, he continued to believe that the most desirable society was an integrated one. Nevertheless he faced truthfully a bitter fact that quote, "We are segregated, apart. Hammered into a separate unity by spiritual intolerance and legal sanction backed by mob law. That the separation is growing in strength and fixation, that it is worse today than a half-century ago. And that no character, address, culture or dessert is going to change it in one day or for centuries to come" unquote.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: In such a condition is pointless to continue as though one is not an American Negro he felt. Whether there is any such creature as an American Negro is not the issue, for 12 million human beings are treated as Negroes. Whether segregation is desirable, is a useless debate, it exists. The only question is what American Negroes can do to avoid genocide the answer he saw was quote, "To carefully plan and guide our segregated life, organize an industry and politics to protect it and expand it. And above all to give it unhampered spiritual expression in art and literature" unquote.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Now one of the immediate possibilities, one of the things that could be done first was to render Negro institutions more serviceable by concentrating on their true purpose. That is, it was absurd Du Bois felt to pretend that a Negro college was just another American college. It must be recognized as a Negro institution. He continued, A Negro University in United States of America begins with Negroes. It uses that variety of English idiom which they understand and above all it is founded on a knowledge of the history of their people in Africa and the United States and their present condition. Then it asks, How shall these young men and women be trained to earn a living and live a life under the circumstances in which they find themselves? Beginning with such a premise the Negro University would expand from its examination of black life, history, social development, science, humanities into a study of all life and matter in the universe. But it must begin with the black and it must proceed from a black perspective. Only in this way could ever reach universality.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Now in the antithesis of this theory, Du Bois found reasons for his failure to create the literary renaissance which he had desired. A literary renaissance in which Blacks would write honestly and artistically about Blacks in works purchased by Blacks. The Renaissance never took root he argued quote, "Because it was a transplanted and exotic thing. It was a literature written for the benefit of white people and at the behest of white readers and starting out privately from the white point of view. It never had a real Negro constituency and it did not grow out of the inmost heart and frank experience of Negroes. On such an artificial basis, no real literature can grow."
Dr. Darwin Turn...: By the time he wrote, "Dusk of Dawn" seven years later, Du Bois, again an educator at Atlanta University, was less interested in explaining artistic theory than he had been earlier. Nevertheless his brief summation of his idea roots him firmly in a black aesthetic and establishes him as a progenitor of a Black Arts Movement. Creative Art, he felt was essential to the development and transmission of new ideas among Blacks quote, "The communalism on the African clan can be transferred to the Negro American group. The emotional wealth of the American Negro, the nascent art in song dance and drama can all be applied, not to amuse the white audience but to inspire and direct the acting Negro group itself. I can conceive no more magnificent our promising crusade in modern times.
Dr. Darwin Turn...: But to achieve this crusade reeducation in Negro oriented educational institutions was required, he continued quote, "There has been a larger movement on the part of the Negro intelligentsia towards racial grouping for the advancement of art and literature. There has been a distinct plan for reviving ancient African art through an American Negro Art Movement and more especially a thought to use the extremely rich and colorful life for the Negro in America and elsewhere as a basis for painting, sculpture and literature. This has been partly nullified by the fact that if these new artists expect support for their art from the Negro group, that group must be deliberately trained and schooled in art appreciation and in willingness to accept new canons of art. And in refusal to follow the herd instinct of the nation".
Dr. Darwin Turn...: In groping for a black aesthetic W.E.B. Du Bois experienced many difficulties as he tried to shape and apply an idea which he sensed to be sound. Perhaps the major idea is that with this idea as with others, Du Bois was a quarter to one half century ahead of those 12 million Blacks he wanted to lead from self-respect to pride to achievement. Today there is a Black Arts Movement, and there are black writers and educators who discuss a black aesthetic. But as one considers the contemporary black arts dramatists and poets, those who see only the vice and squalor of ghetto life, one may unhappily imagine Du Bois in afterworld he could never envision, muttering, "No, no, no, will they never understand to be black is to be beautiful and strong and proud."
Dr. Darwin Turn...: Thank you.