Arna Bontemps lecture, "Reflections on the Harlem Renaissance," at the University of Iowa, August 1970

Speaker 1: The following is a lecture by Arna Bontemps, delivered at the opening session of the 1970 Institute of Afro American Culture, held on the campus of the University of Iowa, August 9th, through the 21st. The Institute focused on that period of creativity of Black America, commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. Before Arna Bontemps presentation, a welcome to the participants in the 1970 Institute was extended by Philip G. Hubbard, Vice Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Iowa. Philip G. Hubba...: I would like to reiterate that if he were in town, President Boyd would certainly be here to welcome you, because he believes deeply in what we're doing here and has given us his full support. And so I'm very pleased to welcome you on his behalf. I'd also like to mention that the Provost of the University is on vacation, and he's in the Department of English and he would also like to be here but can't make it. Philip G. Hubba...: What [Bob Corrigan] doesn't know is that I passed up a wonderful opportunity in order to be here tonight. I was invited to be a judge in the Miss. Black Des Moines Contest, which is in progress right now in Des Moines. The winner of whom will be a contestant in the Miss. Black Iowa Contest. So it was not an easy thing to turn down. But as I look around the room here, I don't feel that I've lost. Philip G. Hubba...: Some of these people in beards probably wouldn't do very well in a beauty contest, but I think you're beautiful people, I really do, all of you. And we're very pleased that you're here. And I'd like to comment too that the program in which you will participate is one of a number of different things which have been going on for the past two years and which we hope to continue indefinitely into the future, associated with Afro American Culture. Philip G. Hubba...: And that this really began three years ago when two of our Black students who were also senators in the student government, made a proposal. And this proposal was discussed by the Senate, presented to the president of the university, who referred it to the committee on human rights. And it went through a great deal of study before finally being adopted. And one of the people who has been in this from the very earliest stages and has been one of the teachers is [James Rogers], who's sitting at the table in front of me and some of the other students have moved on. Philip G. Hubba...: But it's very appropriate that we see people like [Ted Hughes] and [Jim Lincoln] and [Jim Rogers] and [Earl Eldridge] here, all of whom are both students and staff members here, because this has been a grassroots effort. And we're very pleased that we have been able to develop on the ideas of these students and to use their talents without the need for them to occupy the administration building or threaten to burn down the armory. Philip G. Hubba...: The scholarly input for this program has obviously not come from an engineer. All I have been able to do is help to support the man with the real energy and drive who is Prof. Corrigan. But it's been such an easy thing to do, because I've already mentioned the president and the provost, but the Director of the School of Letters and the chairman of the Department of English, Prof. John Gerber has been a strong supporter of the program, as has Prof. Alex Kern the Director of the Programming in American Civilization. Philip G. Hubba...: And so many other people in that school and in that department, as well as in other departments have been cooperative, that it's been primarily a matter of supporting the people who are really doing the work. And it's a real pleasure to see all of you here following up on the second of this kinds of institute. The one we had last year was somewhat longer and it occurred somewhat earlier in the summer, but it was similar in content. Philip G. Hubba...: And you're now kicking off a new era with Prof. Charles Davis who is a scholar instead of simply an administrator as the past director has been. We have a genuine scholar now at the helm and we hope that you enjoy your stay here for this next two weeks at the University of Iowa. And we hope that you will be back to see us again and to participate in what we think will be one of the leading programs in the country. Welcome to the University of Iowa. Speaker 1: That was Philip G. Hubbard, Vice Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Iowa with a welcome to the 1970 Institute of Afro American Culture. The featured speaker at this opening session of the Institute was Arna Bontemps. Introducing the speaker is Robert A. Corrigan, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Institute. Robert A. Corri...: It's a kind of a sort of a stock thing and the class B films on television for the host to say that your guest does not need any real introduction. It seems to me that no group of people could come to a two week session on the Harlem Renaissance and have to have Arna Bontemps introduced to them. But I think I would like to just very quickly go through some of this man's accomplishments to refresh your own memories as to how important he is for the subject that we wish to discuss over the next two weeks. Robert A. Corri...: He's a Californian, although he was born in Louisiana and makes his home from time to time in Tennessee, at least in the summers. With school and college behind him in California, a small sheaf of adolescent poetry in his suitcase, he hurried away to New York way back in the fall of 1924, arriving just in time to participate in that exciting upsurge of creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance. In that span of years his energies were about equally divided, so we understand, between teaching high school and writing and publishing verse in magazines and anthologies and experimenting with other literary forms. Robert A. Corri...: Publication of God Sends Sunday in 1931, his first novel, mark an end and perhaps the beginning. Certain literary historians have used that work to mark the end of the Harlem movement. For its author however, it marked the beginning of a succession of book publications, which has since included novels like Black Thunder, which has recently been reprinted, Drums at Dusk, histories, anthologies, biographies, books for young people. Robert A. Corri...: In particular, I like to think of the books for young people, we have a number of them in our home. God Sends Sunday unfortunately was not widely read in the Black depression year in which it appeared, but things happened to it eventually in various dramatic and musical adaptations St. Louis Woman, for example. In one way and another too its author was accorded recognitions. Who's Who in America included him as early as 1940. Robert A. Corri...: Current Biography devoted a full page to his life and works in 1946. An entry was carried in the World Book Encyclopedia as early as 1947 and also in the 1954 edition. He was elected to membership in PEN the International Association of Writers in 1948. He is a member of the Authors Guild of America and the Dramatists Guild. In 1953, he was elected by membership vote to the Council of the American Literary Association. Robert A. Corri...: Twice Mr. Bontemps was awarded fellowships by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Later, he served as a literary advisor and member of the committee on fellowships for that fund. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to him in 1949, coincided with his first sabbatical leave as a member of the Faculty of Fisk University. Mr. Bontemps was prepared for librarianship at the University of Chicago and came to Fisk in that capacity in the summer of 1943. Robert A. Corri...: He is the father of six children. The first born in New York City during the fading days of that Renaissance, we are to study. The last born at Fisk while auditions were being held in New York and Hollywood for the first production of St. Louis Woman. Among his best known books are Story of the Negro, winner of the Jane Adams award in 1956. 100 years of Negro Freedom included by the American Booksellers Association among books selected for presentation to the White House. Robert A. Corri...: American Negro Poetry, Golden Slippers and Anthology of Negro Poetry, again for young people. Collaborated with Langston Hughes on the Poetry of the Negro and also the book of Negro Folklore. In recent years, an increasing number of school books have included selections from his writings and he has served others as editor or a consultant. Mr. Bontemps was appointed professor of English in 1967 at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus. Robert A. Corri...: He most recently received an appointment at Yale University in 1969, 1970, as a lecturer in American Studies, Curator of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Beinecke Library and of course, advisor to the Danforth Graduate Fellows at Yale University. It is with a great sense of pride and a great sense of warmth for the man who means so much to this group, that I now introduce to you, our featured lecturer for this evening, Arna Bontemps. Arna Bontemps: Thank you very much indeed Mr. Corrigan and thank you ladies and gentlemen. I assure you that it's a great pleasure to me, to be here. I have been talking to other groups this summer about the surprise with which I greeted the first pictures that I saw of our earth when they were sent back by the astronauts from their trip to the moon. And how I had been impressed by the loveliness of our planet, the pristine beauty of our home here on this star. Arna Bontemps: And I thought about it this evening as we were approaching Iowa, that I had never had a real good view of this part of our country. And I was deeply impressed when I looked out of the plane and saw those fields and houses, everything laid out in such lovely arrangement and in such beautiful color, reminding me of Grant Woods paintings. Iowa is really beautiful. I never knew it before, I never thought of it as being beautiful. Arna Bontemps: Of course, I hadn't seen it very well, but it is indeed something to be privileged to see once at least, which is not to say, I wouldn't like to see more of it of course. I wish I had more time to see it right now. I've also been saying in these talks one or two other things, which came to my mind as I've been conversing with people I've met since arriving. One of the questions they've been asking me is how we use this word Black now. Arna Bontemps: And some of these people I've been chatting with like my friend over here, the poet Naomi. How that when we were children, we didn't dare call anybody Black, or we wouldn't take it if anybody called us Black, but times have changed. I've been thinking about how in the Harlem days Langston my friend, Countee and I, and others, my associates, worked to take the curse off the word Black, because it was a form of derision, which I began to understand after I'd studied a bit. Arna Bontemps: And I think that our efforts bore some fruit. And I remember that when I first titled one of my books, I put Black in the title, it was Black Thunder. All of my... I say all, it seemed to me that nearly everybody I knew came to me to say, "Well, that was very good, that book you wrote, but why in the world did you have to call it Black? Couldn't you have said jet or ebony or something else, but don't say Black?" Arna Bontemps: Well, I think that this has been dispelled now, on the other hand, I think it'd be a pity if we were to go in the other direction too far and react to this by deriding people who use the word Negro, which is also a beautiful word, very beautiful. What's wrong with it? I like to use them both. So as soon as I call something Black, I turn right around call the other negro. A person reminds me of a teacher I used to know when I began teaching at the age of 21. Arna Bontemps: An old teacher told me, he says, "I have to tell you something, you're right from California, you don't know this. But in your class, you're going to have you have people of different colors." He said, "If you have to punish one of the Black ones, turn right around punish a white one so to even it up." I thought that was a quaint reaction, but at any rate, I didn't blame him too much for it, I put it in perspective. Arna Bontemps: And so in this talk that I've been giving, I've been trying to show some of the reasons why I thought that there's something to be retained. First of all, I gave my philosophy about that. Well, I also have been making a point about pollution. And I've been thinking and hearing all of this talk about the pollution of our air and our water and the pollution of our environment, wondering why English teachers haven't said anything about the pollution of our channels of speech. Arna Bontemps: And I have been saying that it has remained for one of our athletes, the innocent Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay, to remind us of this pollution. When he was being interviewed in connection with his first stage debut, he instructed those in charge to expunge from his lines all foul language. And I thought it was very interesting that in his situation, such a person should be the one to raise his voice against the pollution of our channels of speech. Arna Bontemps: It has caused me to think, I hope it will eventually cause others to think and wonder whether or not it helps anybody's cause no matter how, just to fill our channels of speech with pollution. Well, I'm happy to be in Iowa and at the university here. It's a great privilege, indeed. And I couldn't be more pleased that I am with the opportunity to reflect on the period now known as the Harlem Renaissance. Here's what I would say about that. Arna Bontemps: To understand what this Renaissance meant, it is well to recall what preceded it. A perspective of about 150 years is needed. The creativity of Black Americans had been observed in the original colonies before the nation was established, poets, prose writers, painters, scientists and other gifted Negroes had been identified before George Washington became president. I've heard someone say that the trouble he has in teaching Black Studies is that some of the younger people like to think that Black self-expression began with Richard Wright. Arna Bontemps: But I assure you, Richard Wright would not have been Richard Wright if he had thought that. After Gabriel Prosser's revolt in 1800, the one described in the novel Black Thunder to which I've alluded, the atmosphere changed, for complicated historical reasons. And people forgot Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker and Gustavus Vassa, the most famous of the earlier writers. And slave states began enforcing new laws against teaching slaves to read and write. Arna Bontemps: This trend brought on an era of oral self-expression. Negro spirituals were created by illiterate or self-taught Blacks. The folk tales of Africa were revived and remade in the American setting. By the time anti-slavery societies became active in the 1830s and 1840s, Black writers had found ways to learn without much help and had begun to write or tell the stories of their lives. And some of these accounts are now regarded as classics. Arna Bontemps: In most cases, these memoirs told of how the slave longed for freedom, worked for it, and finally achieved it for himself as an individual. These stories captured the world's imagination for about half a century and one of them inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, which may have helped as many felt to bring on the Civil War. During the reconstruction after the war, a wave of hostility against the Black people put an end to some of the interest in the slave narratives. Arna Bontemps: This captivity literature has become known and replaced them with writing which aimed to blame Black people with the nation's troubles, including the Civil War itself and the aftermath which left ruin and desolation in much of the south, an illustration of which is on your program. You're going to see the birth of a nation. So it was not till the 1890s that another burst of self-expression came from Black Americans. Arna Bontemps: And by this time the voices were raised in cities rather than on plantations. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, W.E.B Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson are the writers we associate with this outburst. The most prominent national Black leader of the period was Booker T. Washington. The outstanding Negro painter was Henry O. Tanner. The composer now remembered best, perhaps was James Bland, who wrote, Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, Oh, Dem Golden Slippers, and In the Evening by the Moonlight. But as a generation of creative Blacks, they were followed by another long relative silence. Arna Bontemps: People again, began to wonder if Negroes had been too crushed by slavery and the reconstruction pains to answer back, to speak their minds. This was not mainly the Negroes fault. For example, for nearly 20 years doors were so tightly closed, it became hard, sometimes almost impossible for Negroes to get their books published by the major publishing houses, to have their paintings exhibited, to appear as artists on any of the nations concert stages or to play realistic roles and dramatic productions in the movies. Arna Bontemps: It was a dreadful era made worse by the spread of discrimination in all phases of American life and by lynchings and mob violence against Blacks in many parts of the land and with sickening repetition. Violence sometimes approaching massacres of the Blacks. Nevertheless, these were ironically the years during which Negros created jazz for their own enjoyment without much help or approval from anyone else. Arna Bontemps: It was also the time when The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP and The National Urban League, were founded. Not many people were paying much attention when these powerful seeds were planted. Seeds that were destined to change American life fundamentally. Nor were many people looking or listening in 1917, when a poem by the young poet Claude McKay was published under the title, Harlem Dancer. The poem in which it appeared was obscure. Arna Bontemps: The magazine in which it appeared was obscure. In the same year, James Weldon Johnson collected poems he had been writing in a small volume called Fifty Years and Other Poems, but none of these verses had the sock of Claude McKay's poetry or of Johnson's own later poems. A serious dramatic presentation with a Black cast appeared for the first time on Broadway in that same year, 1917. And it is now possible to say definitively that this was the year the seeds of the Black Renaissance of the '20s were planted. Arna Bontemps: It took from four to five years for these seeds to yield fruit. And during that interlude, a man named Marcus Garvey came to the United States from the West Indies and began thrilling Black people with an eloquence as tingling as that with which Martin Luther King Jr. is now remembered. Garvey was singing the praises of Blackness and dreaming of a return to Africa. His dream was different from Kings of course and it ended in a rude awakening. Arna Bontemps: But before Garvey left the United States in disappointment, Claude McKay, who happened to have been born in the same island in the Caribbean, brought out in New York, a collection of his poems under the title, Harlem Shadows. It contained Harlem Dancer along with many others that are still alive, almost at the same time, shuffle along a musical show by Black writers and composers, Black performers and musicians, found a theater near Broadway and brought a host of exciting talents to the stage. Arna Bontemps: Soon thereafter, Jean Toomer found a publisher for his book Cane and presently the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and their fellow writers and artists made Harlem the place where the action was. About 20 new writers showed up, not to mention an almost equal number of talented in other arts and/or areas. All young, all eager and began offering their works, the magazines, the crisis and opportunity, a journal of Negro life became more interesting than before, they went out of their way to attract the new writers. Arna Bontemps: Publishers started taking notice and soon there was what might be called a breakthrough. The excitement grew, the bright young people arrived in Harlem in ever increasing numbers. Suddenly Roland Hayes was singing to enraptured audiences in Carnegie Hall. Duke Ellington became an attraction at the Cotton Club and introduced for the first time, some of his favorite compositions. Late at night and in small underground places, the voices of Bessie Smith and the young Ethel Waters were heard. Arna Bontemps: After hours, when tables returned upside down on other tables and the gray dawn began to appear, the aging but still wonderfully articulate piano player, composer, singer Jelly Roll Morton, let his fingers run over the keys, sang as he remembered and tried to recall a dream he had once dreamed in New Orleans. W. C. Handy, arrived from Memphis with his trumpet and his St. Louis Blues. Arna Bontemps: The painter, Aaron Douglas put his style of illustrations on the dust jackets of many of the books written by Negroes in the new mood. I understand Douglas was expected here, I talked with him yesterday. He is one of the survivors of the period and he and I were close friends then as we still are, but he is not going to be able to be here. He's told me because a college in Topeka, Kansas, the city in which he was born, Washburn University has decided to put on a show, an exhibit of his paintings. Arna Bontemps: This is equivalent to... I'm sure his feelings are like those I felt when publishers decided to reissue one of my early books. Nobody has been looking at his paintings very much here of late, but now this school where he couldn't have gotten in, couldn't have been admitted when he was coming along, is going to put on a show, an exhibit of his paintings and he's naturally turned on by it and he's going to stay there and try to help them do it. Arna Bontemps: This was the first phase of the Renaissance. I'd like to repeat that this was the first phase of the Renaissance. And right here, perhaps I might digress just to answer those people who have the illusion that the Renaissance was motivated and impelled and directed by whites who didn't belong to Harlem and who didn't belong to the community, but I want you to know that the Renaissance was first identified and hailed by Black scholars. Arna Bontemps: And if you read the New Negro particularly Alain Locke's essay in it, you will find that then it was named the Renaissance, early in 1925 in that essay. And that was before any of these white influences we talk about had shown their faces in Harlem or in connection with this upsurge. But more about that later if you're interested. I said that this was the first phase of the Renaissance, and that brings me up to 1925, the spring of 1925, a second phase followed promptly. Arna Bontemps: But first came the Locke's publication and Locke's naming of the impulse, the upsurge. The influence of the Harlem Awakening began to spread. People from Park Avenue and other parts of New York, as well as from other cities and states heard about the New Negroes in quotes, and came to see for themselves. They asked to meet the young writers and painters, they demanded to hear the new music and musicians, the new voices. Arna Bontemps: Touched by the Black mood, George Gershwin wrote his Rhapsody in Blue and later his Porgy and Bess score. You see, he wrote that after hearing Handy's St. Louis Blues, and he says so, his on record as having said so. Harold Arlen wrote Stormy Weather for the Black entertainers at the Cotton Club, after this. And I believe Lena Horne was a chorus girl at the time, up at the Cotton Club. Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings was produced. Arna Bontemps: His Emperor Jones was revived and the heroic figure of Paul Robeson, who stared in both began to loom. Famous artists, such as Miguel Covarrubias and Winold Reiss made pictorial records of what impressed them on their visits. The Harlem Renaissance was an awakening of creative energy among the Blacks, but its influence was so electric, it began to reach a generation of Americans of many kinds who were glad to plug into its power source, others came from Europe and caught the beat. Arna Bontemps: Here perhaps I'm caused to think about a person from Iowa who got into this and became a strong influence. And I've just pulled out casually two pages from something I'd begun to write about it. This person I'm referring to who caught the beat and who got into the swing of it, and actually served as kind of an advocate and a representative for it was Carl Van Vechten born in Cedar Rapids and grew up here and didn't leave until he went to the University of Chicago as a college student. Arna Bontemps: Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven was a sudden best seller when it was first published in 1925, inspired by the Black awakening. Helped by controversy, sustained by mystery, Nigger Heaven served to open the eyes of a smart set of readers downtown. What it did for the booming surge of self-expression in Harlem is provocative, even in retrospect. This is as I say, is a part of something I'm trying to write, is an introduction for the reissue of that novel, that controversial novel. Arna Bontemps: The controversy flared instantly and red hot at the announcement of its very title. The mystery was at first submerged, but it began to surface when it was whispered that this esteemed albeit somewhat scandalous author, the author of Peter Whiffle, The Blind Bow-Boy and The Tattooed Countess, had again disguised a good bit of solid truth as fiction. At the same time, literary America was brought to attention by the fact that a prominent and perceptive writer had for the first time been seriously turned on by what was going on in Harlem. Arna Bontemps: Van Vechten was not only hailing the happening uptown, but slyly inviting, or at least invigorating standoffish whites, including those from Café Society to venture and see for themselves. Challenged or at least titillated, they responded almost wildly. Dowagers, swains, debutantes, philosophers, poets, diplomats, artists, performers, emissaries, a perfumed host. What was all the shouting about? Arna Bontemps: The Blacks disguised as domestics by day, but coming out as exotic dark princes after night, where music makers such as Jim Europe, Jelly Roll Morton, Handy and Sissle and Blake had been heard by a good many of them. Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson seemed almost unbelievable in their prime. Was it possible that others like them could be heard in nightclubs or shouting churches in Harlem? Arna Bontemps: Van Vechten hinted that they could. And how about writers such as his own fictional hero in Nigger Heaven? Could they be expected to show their heads? Of course, they could. Claude McKay and Jean Toomer had already published books. Books that a small number of readers had found wonderfully exciting, but sales had not been encouraging. Both had left Harlem, leaving behind them legends. Arna Bontemps: Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, neither of whom had yet finished college had already written beautifully in magazines of limited circulation, and been included with numerous poems in the New Negro volume of which I spoke. Now, their names began to excite more general curiosity. Where there's isolated voices or as Black scholars such as Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke insisted part of something big, an incantation was beginning to work. A cult of the primitive was forming. Arna Bontemps: This is what it meant to visitors from Washington Square or Piccadilly or the Left Bank. But this is not what it meant to the people they were watching or admiring. To young artists in Black Harlem, the attention shown them by these visitors was amusing or flattering or unimportant by turn. And no doubt, some of them were thoroughly seduced, but mostly they went on trying to discover who they were and why they were there and what they could do to make others aware of their dreams. Arna Bontemps: The Renaissance was primarily a youth upsurge, but elder statesman like Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, scholars in biblio fields like Locke and Schomburg gave it their blessing and helped to point directions. The exciting period ended when the depression settled down on the city of New York in 1931, following the crash of the stock market two years earlier. The romantic and young people, who had made the decade a thrilling one in which to be alive were scattered in many directions. Arna Bontemps: And it was not until the WPA began to sponsor art projects in the big cities and population centers of the nation, such as Chicago, that other spontaneous outpourings of talent by young Black Americans occurred. When this happened, it was heartwarming to many who had been in Harlem during the happy time to see many of the things they had written or created echoed in the works of their Black juniors. Arna Bontemps: Almost the first thing that members of the depression school of Negros such as Richard Wright did, was to touch hands with the writers of the Harlem group, such as Langston Hughes and his contemporaries. In this way the impulse was passed on and continued. The same could be said of the painters, the composers and the actors who found opportunities in the new programs of the arts. If one looks closely, he can see the same carry over in the decades that have followed and sometimes dramatically, as in the utterances of Lorraine Hansberry and Martin Luther King. Arna Bontemps: A Raisin in the Sun is not the only echo of Langston Hughes in the Hansberry writing, nor is I have a Dream, the only echo of the same poet in the powerful speeches of King, who practically paraphrased Hughes' I Dream a World and the celebrated speech from the Lincoln Monument steps in Washington, D.C. The words of Colin McKay and others of the Harlem days are just as much alive today. Arna Bontemps: Even in the period of the Renaissance, it was pointed out that poets had been the bellwethers of the movement. That was a strange turn of events, it doesn't often happen that way, but that is what occurred in Harlem at that time. And to show you what they were writing and to give you a little indication of how their writings tie in with the impulse itself, I thought it might be of interest for me in closing to give you a small album of Renaissance poetry using three of the poets as my examples, and forgive me if I include myself as one of them. Arna Bontemps: But here is what Countee Cullen was saying that caught the ears of so many in those days. I give you one of his very early ones. In which he's preoccupied with his childhood as he was in a number of his poems. This one he called Incident and it was, "Once riding in old Baltimore, heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small and he was no whit bigger, and so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue, and called me "Nigger". Arna Bontemps: I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December, of all the things that happened there, that's all that I remember." A little later on Cullen wrote in a somewhat different vein, but he was calling in midstream in a poem called Simon the Cyrenian Speaks. "He never said a word to me, and yet he called my name. He never gave a sign to me, and yet I knew and came. At first, I said "I will not bear his cross upon my back, he only seeks to place it there because my skin is Black." Arna Bontemps: But he was dying for a dream, and he was very meek, and in his eyes there shone a gleam men journey far to seek. It was himself my pity bought, I did for Christ alone what all of Rome could not have wrought with bruise of lash or stone." It goes to show among other things that Cullen was aware even at that date of the power of the symbolic gesture. So neither Martin Luther King or anybody else anticipated him in this. Arna Bontemps: But as the Renaissance wore on, I noticed one theme that continued to express itself, to come to the front in the poetry, in the feelings of this young group of writers. And Cullen puts it into this poem called The Wise, "Dead men are wisest, for they know how far the roots of flowers go, how long a seed must rot to grow. Dead men alone bear frost and rain on throbless heart and heatless brain and feel no stir of joy or pain. Arna Bontemps: Dead men alone are satiate, they sleep and dream and have no weight to curb their rest of love or hate. Strange men should flee their company or think me strange who long to be wrapped in their cool immunity." Well, taking these not alphabetically, but by age Cullen was the youngest of the three that I'm talking about and the next youngest was myself. There were about six months difference between Cullen's age and mine, about six months between mine and Langston Hughes'. Arna Bontemps: "We are not come to wage a strife, with swords upon this hill. It is not wise to waste the life against a stubborn will. Yet would we die as some have done. Beating a way for the rising sun." This was published in 1925, the first time. That one's mine, of course. And in midstream as one settles down, the idea of a violent action had been considered given then, and it was not fair, but a feeling that it was folly to a waste of life when one could go on working to achieve these ends. Arna Bontemps: Another thought that came and this... I used to mention my own midstream response. "I have sown beside all waters in my day. I planted deep, within my heart the fear that wind or fowl would take the grain away. I planted safe against this stark, lean year. I scattered seed enough to plant the land in rows from Canada to Mexico, but for my reaping only what the hand can hold at once is all that I can show. Arna Bontemps: Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields my brother's sons are gathering stalk and root; small wonder then my children glean in fields they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit." Well, I don't know whether I was as quite as preoccupied with the theme of death in those days as were some of the poets as was Cullen, but I did have a feeling that things were breaking up in Harlem. Arna Bontemps: And I think I was thinking not only about personally, but also about the community and about the group that had made it a bright period in our lives when I wrote Idolatry. "You have been good to me, I give you this. The arms of lovers empty as our own, marble lips sustaining one long kiss and the hard sound of hammers breaking stone. For I will build a chapel in the place where our love died and I will journey there to make a sign and kneel before your face and set an old bell tolling on the air." Arna Bontemps: Now, the person whom I would like to consider the symbol of the Renaissance movement was Langston Hughes for many reasons, too many to go into, but you will be exploring those yourself, I'm sure. In the first year that he was published in The Crisis, he had two very memorable poems. He was only dust out of high school, had not gone to college yet in 1921, but one of them was The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which everybody knows and another one was "I am a Negro: Black as the night is Black, Black like the depths of my Africa. Arna Bontemps: I've been a slave, Caesar told me to keep his door-steps clean. I brushed the boots of Washington. I've been a worker, under my hand the pyramids rose. I made mortar for the Woolworth Building. I've been a singer, all the way from Africa to Georgia I carried my sorrow songs. I made ragtime. I've been a victim, the Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo." That was the new story about that time. Arna Bontemps: "They lynch me still in Mississippi. I am a Negro, Black as the night is Black, Black like the depths of my Africa." Well, Hughes didn't remain like that. The year that I met him or shortly after I met him.. Matter of fact on the first night in which I met him, he read some of the poems he'd been writing at sea after he left Columbia, after his freshman year, he brought back these poems he'd been writing and among them was this one, which won the first of the Opportunity Contest prizes. Arna Bontemps: These very important Opportunity Contests that brought out so many scholars and writers. This is the way it went. "Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night, by the pale dull pallor of an old gas light, he did a lazy sway, he did a lazy sway, to the tune o' those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key, he made that poor piano moan with melody. Arna Bontemps: O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool he played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a Black man's soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone, I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan, "I ain't got nobody in all this world, ain't got nobody but my self. I going to quit my frowning and put my troubles on the shelf." Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. Arna Bontemps: He played a few chords then he sang some more "I got the Weary Blues and I can't be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues and I can't be satisfied, I ain't happy no more, and I wish that I had died." And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed while the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead." Arna Bontemps: I think much of his poetic vision is somehow included in that early poem, good projection of all that was to follow. But toward the end, just as Cullen had done before him and as others, a great sadness had come over him, so that toward the end of the Renaissance, he was to write a poem called Disillusion. "I would be simple again, simple and clean, like the earth, like the rain, unpolluted. Nor ever know, Dark Harlem, the wild laughter of your mirth. Nor the salt tears of your pain. Be kind to me, oh, great dark city. Let me forget, I will not come to you again." Thank you. Speaker 1: That was Arna Bontemps with a lecture delivered at the 1970 Institute of Afro American Culture, held on the campus of the University of Iowa, August 9th through the 21st. The Institute focused on that period of creativity of Black America, commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. This has been a recorded presentation of the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.