Charles T. Davis lecture on Black Arts and Black Power at the University of Iowa, April 10, 1970

Speaker 1: ... Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies program at the university, presents a series of lectures by Black specialists as material for the university's course, Afro-American Literature. The lecturer for this week is Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, speaking on the Harlem Renaissance. Speaker 1: The guest lecturers to date have been J. Saunders Redding, Professor of American Civilization at George Washington University, speaking on 19th century Afro-American literature and culture. Philip Butcher, Professor of English at Morgan State College, speaking on some neglected Black people in American Literature. And Charles H. Nichols, Jr., Director of the Afro-American Studies program at Brown University, speaking on the slave narratives. And some sources of the Black picaresque in biography and fiction. The series has also included recorded talks by the late Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Abernathy, James C. Corman, Charles Hamilton, and Stokely Carmichael. Guest lecturer for the week of April 20th will be Donald Gibson, Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Speaker 1: Now, here is Professor Davis. Speaker 1: (silence) Charles T. Davi...: This is my last lecture at the University of Iowa in this series. And I must say, before I begin my discussion today, that I've enjoyed being here immensely. As you know, we have talked about the Harlem Renaissance, and in the course of that discussion we have seen to it that spring has returned to Iowa. I don't suppose that any series could be much more successful than that. Charles T. Davi...: Today, as you have known, I'm not going to talk about the Renaissance, essentially. I'm going to talk about the '60s. At some point in my discussion today, I intend to compare the literature of the '60s with that of the '20s. And since, as an English professor, I'm acutely sensitive to the claims that I'm not being relevant. Which is the term of course, that is the lovely one that we hear constantly today, I am going to talk about two things that you've heard of, the Black Arts and Black Power. And about the relationship existing between the two. Charles T. Davi...: Now, the Black Arts are an issue still in the present crisis in America. It makes little difference where you locate the crisis. On the campus at the University of Iowa, or in the streets of our cities, the issue remains. The American, whether he is a student attending a university or its president, whether he is a citizen of a city or its mayor, cannot avoid reckoning with new intellectual pressures that threaten in their most extreme expression, to overthrow traditional values in an abrupt and botherous way. Charles T. Davi...: Adding to the necessity for attending to the Black Arts, is the confusion of artistic disciplines and political and economic strengths. The Black Arts have become indistinguishable from Black Power. Indeed, some Black militants insist that no art is Black, unless it serves the objectives of those believing in Black Power. What was a relationship between two plainly different things, become suddenly by alchemical transformation, an equation. The society has responded in a manner to support the confusion. Universities have ignored the need for the study of the literature of the American Negro for years. With the complacency unruffled by periodic explosive contributions from a Wright, or an Ellison, or a Baldwin, or a Jones. Charles T. Davi...: But when Negro Literature became Black Literature, complacency was succeeded by rapt attention. What has changed is not Wright, or Ellison, or Baldwin. Perhaps only Jones, I suspect, in a direction not entirely helpful to his art. What is added to the official view of the many educational institutions, is the apocalyptic vision of what Congressman Adam Powell used to call Marching Blacks. At a time when there were few. Now at a time when there are more, literature, because it is wedded to power, commands an audience unimagined before. Charles T. Davi...: I'm pleased quite frankly, with some of the consequences of the marriage. Certainly, the new greatly expanded audience, both Black and white, for Afro-American literature is a gratifying sight. Especially to scholars and students who have sought to make the study of American literature something other than the great tradition from Hawthorne to Robert Lowell. Charles T. Davi...: I'm disturbed by other consequences. Nothing troubles more than the tendency, in many ways perfectly natural given our recent history, to evaluate literature in terms of power. To pass judgment upon a poem or a play or a story, in terms of its imagined contribution to the creation, say, of a Black community. It is a little like comparing the art of John Updike and that of Jacqueline Susann, by counting and classifying the erotic episodes in couple, say in The Valley of the Dolls. Charles T. Davi...: I do not need to be told that sex is power, too, and with us to stay. What is urgently needed now, is a sober evaluation of the new literature, written under the stimulus of the Black aesthetics. In short, I am demanding a divorce, a separation for this afternoon at the very least, for the Black Arts, specifically the art of literature and Black Power. I wish to replace Black Power as a context by supplying a framework partly aesthetic, partly historical, that is more traditional. I do this, not because I am old-fashioned, or because I am on the wrong side of 30, but because genuine connections exist, linking the Black literature of today with the artistic achievement of the past. Charles T. Davi...: First, I must explain why it is that I have to engage in a critical act that would be obvious and expected, given the cultural situation that approximates the normal. A few years ago, the phenomenon, the Black Humor, not related by bloodline to the Black Arts, but connected rather by spiritual ties and qualities of mood and atmosphere, received exhaustive examination by the critics. I look in vain and the discussion of the Black Arts for the same preoccupation with sources, the same attention to comparisons, with movements both within and without the American cultural tradition. The same concern for historical perspective and speculative projection. I do not find them. Instead, I encounter inevitably the themes of Black Power. It is as if history and artistic criticism were suddenly erased by the sweep of a dank rag across a blackboard. Charles T. Davi...: The answer of course, is the simple fact that our cultural climate is not normal. We exist in the situation of emergency, then. And art does not, or does, relate to the moment of crisis. Whether or not I wish to, I have to begin with a description of the crisis, the general outline of which is as familiar to you as it is to me. On campuses too numerous to mention, where there is a Douglass Society or an Afro-American group, or a Black Student Union. And where there are cooperating chapters of white liberation fronts. The demand has been made by petition, by sign, by demonstration, for Black literature, Black history, Black anthropology, Black in economics. Indeed, the full range of the Black Arts. Charles T. Davi...: What is wanted is an instant Black curriculum, to be organized often in the most ambitious projections into Afro-American programs and Afro-American institutes. And these are important. Now, the interest in the Black Arts is not tangential or peripheral to the main thrust of the student revolution. It stands at the center of the turbulence, like the eye of the hurricane. Exemplifying in a remarkably pure way, the desperate need of the contemporary student for a relevant tradition and for a dignity that grants him the responsibility and the authority of manhood. Charles T. Davi...: In short, the Black Arts offer a brilliant illustration of a paradox that is general. On the one hand, there is the desire to reject all previous interpretations of history, all earlier artistic performances. The desire to experience this exhilarating sensation of beginning from scratch to build a new tradition. This deep impulse in the young derogates and inhibits the exercise of critical faculties that have served in the past to refine and to enrich original expression. On the other hand, there is the desperate need to find models with which to identify, and principles to follow. So long as these do not come from a time too far removed from the present. Charles T. Davi...: Recent history is the only history that is respectable. The only heroes are those who died yesterday, not the day before. The sense of emergency exists not only in American universities, but in American society, as well. In the Black ghettos of American cities, the issue is, if anything, clearer. Militant leaders no longer base their pleas for change upon the integration of Blacks and Whites, upon the implementation of constitutional decisions, upon the fulfillment of the American dream. They speak of a Black culture, separate and distinct from a decadent society which they call white. Charles T. Davi...: The Black Arts will provide a substructure for a new Black consciousness, Black schools, Black institutions, a Black economy, and finally indeed, a Black nation. The dream of Marcus Garvey has acquired strength and overall, popular support that it never possessed in the 1920s. And it has moved some distance toward picking up respectability. That is to say, it has received a commitment from some Black artists, a few Black intellectuals, a sampling of Black technicians. People equipped to offer orientation and direction, and to supply the knowhow to achieve limited goals. Indeed, it is just possible this time that the Black star line will not Fonda in a sea of futility and economic chaos. Charles T. Davi...: We should make the point that the situation of Blacks in the inner city resembles in many ways that of all urban citizens, caught in the condition of poverty. The difficulty is, that more Blacks suffer in the city than do other racial or ethnic groups and they suffer more. It is hard to say to a Black boy living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto that he deserves a better art. When before his exposure to the Black Arts, he has been untouched by art of any kind. Yet it should be said, we understand why he should be attracted to an art devoted to the objective of improving his lot in life, and restructuring the damaged image of self. No doubt, there is a stage in his development when the aesthetics and the mythology of separation offer the only support that is available to him. But they offer no permanent relief. No art that restricts and reduces human sympathies can boast of humanizing the cold world, nor of providing for the true disciple, a human condition that satisfies the full range of his instinct and intelligence. Charles T. Davi...: My hope is that the Black Arts will develop, profiting by a truer perspective and that afforded by Black Power. I say truer, because the Black Arts, like the white arts, have come from our general western tradition, where else? An extension of those skills and disciplines developed first in Egypt, then in the Near East, then in Greece. A tradition to my best knowledge, neither exclusively Black nor white. Charles T. Davi...: Now, the primary meaning for the Black Arts is obvious. The phrase describes the culture of Black people. Specifically in our own society, it stands for the culture of the American Negro, to use a descriptive tag now much out of favor. Since it arouses in the minds of many, Black and white, unpleasant associations of inferior status. Charles T. Davi...: There is another meaning that is equally apparent. I refer to the tradition of magic, diabolism, and incantation, that covers practices so diverse, as voodoo and alchemy and invest authority and figures so different, as the Juju Man, Goody Cloyse and Doctor Faustus. In this context, the Black Arts emerge from the dark evil side of our natures, offer concrete expression to seek quick and forbidden impulses, and supply satisfaction that is exotic and intense. Commonly found in manifestations so removed in time, as Salem witchcraft and Rosemary's Baby, there's an opposition to established values. Frequently religious and social. Charles T. Davi...: If the establishment is western culture, as it is for the new wave of Black artists, we have a point of correspondence that is not simply academic. One Black critic, Larry Neal, lines out the form of this opposition in a recent issue of The Drama Review with disturbing lascivity. "The motive behind the Black aesthetic," Neal says, "is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world." And LeRoi Jones, the merlin of the movement, has written in full awareness of secondary associations of Blackness, "We are unfair, and unfair we are Black magicians. Black Arts we make and Black labs of the heart. The fair are fair and deathly white. The day will not save them, and we own the night." Charles T. Davi...: Let me offer now some preliminary comments that may help us, in arriving at a perspective on this new phenomenon. The first observation that must be made is the fact that the Black Arts, considered in any pure sense, have very little meaning for the bulk of the creative achievement of the American Negro. For all the talk of cultural imperatives and national goals, the Black artists wrestled with their problems in the same old way. Adopting techniques and offering themes in light of their own experience. And both have come down to them from a western tradition not dead, but alive and kicking. Charles T. Davi...: A second observation, equally necessary, is the fact that what we have in literature is being representative of the new wave. Is unhappily not as good as it should be. If we take the new anthology, Black Fire, recently edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, as an early harvest, we have reason to wish for more. There is in it the statement of intention rather than achievement, a program rather than the ordered deeply felt experience that is art. Charles T. Davi...: Talent, we discover without doubt, and in abundance. But it survives with difficulty, in a setting defined by revolution, anticipated political and economic power, and crystallizing concepts of Black aesthetic theory. The problem is not simply a reliving of the cultural situation of the 1930s, when proletarian art served the class struggle. It requires no scholar's perspective to say, that the result of that commitment was not memorable art. Indeed, the point is dramatized by the simple fact that we see on every hand the fulfillment of the brave beginnings of the 1920s, in poetry, fiction, and criticism. And we shall see shortly that this applies, obviously, to the literature of Blacks in the 1960s as well, the fulfillment of the 1920s of the Harlem Renaissance. What survives from the 1930s, is a mistaken model, accepted with passion and without criticism by the leaders of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s. Charles T. Davi...: The problem of the unholy alliance of the Black Arts and Black Power, is more serious than the issue of a wrongheaded choice. Art has survived bad models in the past, and will again. One critic has described the danger well. This is Edward Margolis. He documents the deterioration in much of Jones's recent writing, the loss of depth and sensitivity, as nationalistic ideals have become stronger, replacing artistic principles. Charles T. Davi...: Margolis notes that Jones's poetic style has become a destruction of syntax, order and sense, as if somehow to write may be an expression of hostility. In short, the desperate effort to get rid of the white thing, moves toward the destruction of self. The Black magician succeeds, not so much in destroying the hated white civilization, as he does in vulgarizing his own skills. And what is threatened, at last, is Jones's identity as an artist, a considerable one, by the way. His ability to move an audience, either Black or white. Charles T. Davi...: Now, the Black artists same, that they are interested only in a Black audience, in inspiring the Black masses to action. By this, they mean of course, a basically non-literary audience, one not corrupted by the inhibitions, the limitations, the hangups of white society. There's no doubt that many people, not only the young, living in Black city ghettos, on rural slums, have been untouched by arts of any kind. And the most effective initial approach to them may be through the emphasis on a common or shared Blackness. May I say Jones has demonstrated this? And securing an expanded audience for literature not available before. Charles T. Davi...: This notion of a great mass audience, however, of pure listeners or readers, and potentially pure believers, may turn out to be a fanciful abstraction, finally. Like the anticipated mass audiences of the 1930s. The dream of the informed and cultivated workers, who would rise from the oppressed classes. Charles T. Davi...: We suspect finally, that a Black audience is not terribly different from a white audience, for better or for worse. Nor should we expect it to be. They share most elements in our culture, assumptions, aspirations, ideals, rewards. The latter certainly not equally. The historical fact is, that the creation of a purely Black audience seems not to be possible without negating primary responses. To insist upon an exclusively Black relationship is as destructive as is the artist's devotion to the rigid standards and themes of Black nationalism. Charles T. Davi...: And I must say in all honesty, that I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between Black reactions and white reactions. When a colleague of mine attended a concert by James Brown recently, he discovered that race was not a significant factor determining the depth of response. White college students seemed to be just as excited as the Black ones. Though race had little importance here, age, age did alas, to judge from his tempered reaction. Charles T. Davi...: We reach now a delicate stage in this investigation. How are we to assess the Black Arts? Measured by ordinary scholarly yardsticks, the phenomenon is so far hardly impressive. The achievement of the new movement looked at in perspective is, so far, even, except for certain distinguished accomplishments. Except for the poetry, say, of David Henderson. Except perhaps for scattered dramas by Bullins, Jones himself and one or two other Black playwrights. Charles T. Davi...: Moreover, the validity of the artistic conception supporting the new breed, is questionable, providing a most unstable foundation for artistic efforts. We are justifiably suspicious when, after so much instruction, we discover that nearly 200 pages of Black Fire, a book of some 650 pages of text, are given over to rhetoric, to manifesto, to denunciations, appeals. Proclaiming the birth of the Black Arts and the need for Black Power. If our temptation were to dismiss the movement on this basis, we should be wrong, because its importance rests elsewhere. No one can afford to ignore this movement in the Black Arts. It acquires importance in the emotional energy that has gone into the formulation of programs, and into the commitment of serious artists to the Black aesthetics. It is also in the genuine response of many Negros to the Black Arts. Some of them indeed never touched before by art of any kind. Charles T. Davi...: I have in mind especially the interest of Black youth, spirited young men and women, who have added to the general distrust of the adult world, so current these days. A special animus that comes from the identification of that world as honky. Much of the emotional power generated by the Black Arts comes from the sense of newness, and we can talk about this now with some authority, and because we've just gone through a renaissance ourselves. The movement claims no western ancestors. The single allegiance, other than that to a Black audience, is perhaps to the third world, and this only tenuously. Acquiring a Black consciousness is a little like being born again. Everything in the world is change, even the special place that mother occupies in our hierarchy of sentiments. You will be pleased to know that mother flunks again, as she has been flunking steadily since 1920. Charles T. Davi...: More immediately evident, is the alteration and the tastes of the new breed, in friends, music, clothes, hairstyles. It is possible for one of the editors of Black Fire to say, "We can learn more about what poetry is by listening to the cadences in Malcolm's speeches than from most of western poetics." I respect Malcolm too, but the statement is as false as it is brash. Malcolm was many things to many people, no doubt. Elijah, Joshua, Mohammad, Cicero, but never, never Aristotle. Charles T. Davi...: But are the Black Arts new? If we as objective critics can demonstrate that there are western precedents for the new phenomenon, we may have less difficulty in coming to terms with it. And perhaps more important, we can urge the artist to claim, the Black artist that is, to claim and to profit from a tradition which is rightfully theirs. Now, this is to assume that history can teach, and that at the end, of course, of a set of lectures, I must assume that. I cling to this idea, despite the fact that the young today believe that wisdom is the property of adolescence only. Vanishing of course, in the desert of middle age. Charles T. Davi...: The Black Arts recall another movement. You know the one, of course. The Harlem Renaissance, that flowered until the 1920s and lived until it was killed by the Great Depression. The high priest of that movement, as you know, was Alain Locke, Professor of Philosophy at Howard University, who announced the coming of the Renaissance, and illustrated its achievement in the March issue of the Survey Graphic in 1925. Charles T. Davi...: The two movements have much in common. Both are international. Locke considered the American Negro as the advanced god of African peoples in contact with 20th century civilizations. While present nationalists speak at times of their loyalty to the third world, to Africa, to Asia, rather than either to the United States or the Soviet Union. Both define the unique cultural contribution of the Negro, emphasizing the documentation, in the documentation, I should say, music and the folk arts. Both tend to deal in character types. That is to say, to isolate certain personality traits as being especially desirable, or as belonging uniquely to the Negro. Charles T. Davi...: Locke's New Negro understood that his nature emerged from a tradition of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance, which was not destroyed by American slavery. Contemporary Black consciousness builds similarly on qualities of personality, rather different ones, however, since a premium is placed upon a militant resistance to assimilation. Still, the personality patterns in both instances highlight primitive virtues. The ability to sense emotional rather than intellectual truth. Both movements assume the burden of rehabilitating the race in terms of world prestige, correcting the low opinion of the Black man, established originally by the institution of slavery. Charles T. Davi...: Now the differences between the movements are mocked, too. The Harlem Renaissance, as we know, was a middle class phenomenon, essentially restricted to the literary salon, certain favored parlors on 139th Street in Harlem, say. The academy, Professor Locke, and the cabaret, Professor Fletcher Henderson. It did not touch the people. Indeed, it did not extend with any certainty beyond the city limits of New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Charles T. Davi...: The Black Arts seek now to build upon close ties connecting the artist and Black people. The Renaissance was not political. Locke wished to present the Negro as a human being, rather than as a problem or a formula. He hoped to liberate the Negro from moral debate and historical controversy. The Black Arts, we are told, accept Black Power, and contribute to the political and economic revolution that is coming and to the Black nation of the future. Charles T. Davi...: And finally, the Harlem movement, though glorying in the primitive, in the heroes of Claude McKay and Jean Toomer and others, did not engage in black magic. It did not oppose the full range of moral, religious and social values to be found in our world. It did not call for arson and murder as necessary steps toward the achievement of complete freedom. It did not see artistic expression as a substitute for physical violence. Remember Dutchmen in this connection, as a channel for the festering hate that this society has created in the minds and souls of all Black people. Charles T. Davi...: Indeed, the Harlem Renaissance envisioned Black Art as a force complementing and enriching the dominant white culture. And in the minds of some ambitious prophets, the Black Arts would humanize the white machine society, the white technology. Du Bois' pluralism announced in the souls of Black folk in 1903, seemed entirely possible. A man could be both Black and American. The Black Arts of today deny that this is possible. Charles T. Davi...: The Black magician now wishes to destroy the America that he knows, a white thing. This posture is new. It is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Black Arts. Yet, there are precedents even for this position. Coming from the American tradition that is so thoroughly despised. In this connection, Leslie Fiedler, that marvelous guide for subterranean literature in our country, Leslie Fiedler says of the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, writing of the American gothic and love and death in the American novel. Fiedler says, "Poe's novel is surely the first which uses Gothicism to express a peculiarly American dilemma. Identifying the symbolic Blackness of terror with the Blackness of the Negro and the white guilt he embodies." Charles T. Davi...: Now, the natives of Tsalal in the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and Tsalal is an island somewhere and probably located in Antarctica. Poe, in general, was not strong in geography. The natives of Tsalal are never identified specifically as being Negroes. Though they are jet black and are given other negroid characteristics such as thick and wooly hair and thick and clumsy lips. Certainly, the models for the inhabitants of this region in Antarctica, are the Black slaves in Poe's own state, Virginia. Charles T. Davi...: Pym makes an amazing discovery about the dark followers of the leader of those natives on the island of Tsalal. These dark people are not the cheerful, incompetent, faithful, menials, who populate the pages of sentimental fiction about the South. And live still amazingly in the imaginations of some Americans, live there indeed, while they sip mint juleps and listen to the sounds of the Hall Johnson Choir. Coming in, obviously, to their parlors. They are these natives, instead, devious. Beyond the wildest expectation of Poe's narrator and malignant beyond his power to describe. Charles T. Davi...: They destroy all the members of the crew of the Jane Guy, except for Pym and a companion, who survived largely by accident, rather than by reliance upon intelligence and ingenuity. There is not a dash of white applied at any point in the description of these benightive primitives. Even their teeth are black. I suppose that's an especially Poe-esque touch. In this context, Blackness does stand for unknown and indescribable terror, a malice defying powers of explanation by civilized man. And energy totally beyond the measurement of science. Charles T. Davi...: Fiedler discovers a tradition for Blackness so defined, identified invariably with the Negro, and presented always as a force, taxing, if not exceeding, human understanding. There is Babo in Melville's Benito Cereno. I hope that some of you read that marvelous long story of Melville's. Entirely outside of the experience of the very American Captain Delano and different from any conception that emanates from Delano's simple good nature. There is the Negro blood in Roxanna and in Valet de Jarm. In Twain's Pudd'nHead Wilson, a Blackness so deep that Roxanna maintains that it has possessed the soul of her son, a white man to the society around him. And the line does not cease with Twain, but is cultivated with typical virtuosity by Faulkner, when he creates Charles Vaughn in Absalom, Absalom! And Joe Christmas in Light in August. Charles T. Davi...: Let me suggest what surely must be obvious now. The potency of the black magic of present-day practitioners is not anything out of Africa, or Haiti, or Trinidad, or the Barbados. It comes out of the American 19th century. The Black strain in our homegrown romanticism that steadfastly refuses to die. The Black Arts, black magic in literature, preceded then by a wide margin any thought of Black Power. Charles T. Davi...: There is something familiar, too, about the impulse to construct programs, and there are lessons to be learned from earlier fusions of art and power. Larry Neal designates seven criteria for a Black culture. Specifically mythology, history, social organization, political organization, economic organization, creative motif and ethos. The intention is, to liberate the Black men completely from the repressive standards and values of the society. To reject an inferior status in fact, and in symbol, and to achieve a Black brotherhood. Charles T. Davi...: I am reminded more than a little of Whitman's program in 1860. "Recall the celebration of sex and brotherhood. The confident announcement of the arrival of a new human being, and the ability to create a new city of love. The construction of a new mythology based on the perfect equality of the sexes." I should expect any day for the women's liberation front to quote Whitman in this regard. They haven't as yet. "The affirmation of the evolutionary process and the implications that Eden was at hand, if not today, tomorrow." Charles T. Davi...: Remember, too, the sexual violence that pervades Whitman's system of references. The freedom, license, some called it, of his vocabulary. But above all, let us remember that Whitman's great poetry in 1860 occurred when program suddenly disintegrated in the Calamus poems, the Calamus section of the Leaves of 1860. When the call for brotherhood aroused in Whitman homoerotic impulses and a strangling death wish, both using to supply powerful substance to which Whitman, with difficulty gave for. Charles T. Davi...: A significant number of Americans obviously hold to a very important concept here. What is clearly stronger than color, black or white, would seem to be the disposition toward romanticism in America. A significant number of Americans still hold to the conviction that art can remake reality. Now, the Black Arts, apparently brash, iconoclastic, frightening in their cultivation of violence, are a thoroughly American phenomenon. Indeed, the wedding to Black Power is the consequence of an old seduction involving art and the rigid programming of human intelligence. And art has always suffered. Charles T. Davi...: It is perhaps sanguine to hope that those practicing the arts will develop an awareness of the models that have appeared before. A sense of connection would help. Studying American precedence would be a tonic for both the art and the humanity of the artist. Yes, humanity, too, because the human condition is enriched with the sharing of experience. At this crucial moment, we should view the emergence of Black consciousness and the Black Arts with deep sympathy, understanding and hope. With a range of favorable sentiments that we need not indeed, we should not reserve for Black Power. And once again, in American literary history, Adam rises, early in the morning, with limbs quivering with fire. Only this time, Adam is Black. But the cultural situation of the artist remains unchanged. The Black Arts will never prosper so long as aesthetic judgments are dictated by the desire to achieve political goals. Charles T. Davi...: I've discussed Whitman in 1860. I might use just as well, Richard Wright, in 1940. Though officially a communist, he refused to adjust the conclusion of Native Son to fit the orthodox sentiments of his party. The allegiance to art, to the integrity of Bigger Thomas, to the human truth of Bigger's tragic situation, was too great to permit distortion. It is my hope that the Black Arts will come of age, free themselves from the reductive standards of Black Power. Eliot warned us in Gerontion nearly a half century ago, that history cannot teach modern man because his corruption is so thorough and so complete. Charles T. Davi...: This afternoon, at the beginning of spring in Iowa, at the conclusion of our consideration of our own renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, I should like to think that Elliot was wrong. I should like to think that teachers learn from their students, and students occasionally from their teachers. I should like to think that artists will derive lessons from history, and will cease hankering after false gods and leap to the true. And in this way, and in this way only, will the Black Arts mature, will the Black Fire be tempered, trimmed, so that its flame will endure. Charles T. Davi...: Thank you. Charles T. Davi...: We have time for some questions and I really expect them today. Yes? Speaker 3: Can you speak a little more directly on the impact of the position in the Black Arts in the 1960s of the Black oratory? Especially Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown and [crosstalk]. Charles T. Davi...: Yes, right. This is exceedingly important in the Black Arts of the '60s, oratory. It's important, of course, because it is an art that moves masses of people. It should be and must be studied structurally. Because there are devices and there is the use of a form, which is, I think consciously, brilliantly employed here in the art of Malcolm X, Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and others. Charles T. Davi...: I would be untrue to myself if I said, if I failed to point out, that there's a tradition involved here, too, a great tradition. And that great tradition is the tradition of the Black preacher, the evangelical speaker. The shape, the form, which he used. If you want to see it employed in the Renaissance, let me suggest that you read God's Trombones by James Weldon Johnson. In which you find a form which parallels in some way the form which is employed by Malcolm X and others. It's exceedingly important in the '60s, and it's like the drama which is, in a sense, more important in the '60s than in the '20s. Because there's a greater concern for involving people, involving the masses, touching the people. And that is a form that does do that. Charles T. Davi...: Just one more point, and then I will invite some other questions, in the rise of street dramas in the 1960s. This is a very interesting artistic development. And I suppose of all the artistic developments associated with the Black Arts, this seems in some ways to be most interesting. A drama much like that of [Bertolt Brecht's] in the '20s, a drama which is intended to inspire people to assume a particular position, to move them in this way. It's related, of course, to the oratory of Brown, of Carmichael, and of Malcolm X. Charles T. Davi...: Other question? Yes? Speaker 4: What do you think of [inaudible]? How do you feel about the [inaudible] as identified by the Black Panther movement? [inaudible]? Charles T. Davi...: The question is, and it's an exceedingly important one, because I take it very seriously, indeed. The question is, how do I respond to the new tendency to be found in the ideas of the Black Panthers? Actually, I suppose the pattern for this was first found in Malcolm, wasn't it? No longer to think entirely in separatist terms, to identify the position of Blacks in America with the position of oppressed peoples elsewhere in the world. To have a perspective which comes generally from history. And the history, obviously, that impinged upon the consciousness of Malcolm, was a history that he encountered in visiting Muslim countries, in the Middle East. Charles T. Davi...: Exceedingly important. And I place great store by this particular development. It seems to me that this is an aspect of maturity of the movement, in that it extends itself in this way. And will unquestionably have consequences, I'm sure, in terms of art, too. Speaker 4: I think the awareness of this is [inaudible] Black Panthers will either circle back to [inaudible]? Charles T. Davi...: The question here is that, whether or not I think that this will lead to a development, which will encourage the Black Arts. Yes, is the answer, because it means that what is accepted or some of the precedents, the model that I've talked about, if one breaks down the barriers of separatism in this way. And the way Malcolm, it seemed to me, wished to do so, at the end of his life. You set up the probability for a kind of profitable exchange which will lead, I think to the maturing of art. I think it will have this particular kind of effect, and I welcome it. It seems to me an exceedingly important development, indeed. Speaker 5: That was Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa. In cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies program at the university, as material for the course, Afro-American Literature. Speaker 5: Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 PM, April 10, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium. And was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa.