Charles T. Davis lecture, "The Harlem Renaissance," at the University of Iowa, April 6, 1970

Charlies T. Dav...: ... afford you an opportunity to ask me questions. I suppose, in a sense, your question could then begin with the title of my lecture. Speaker 2: The 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. He is introduced by Professor Robert Corrigan of the Department of English at the University of Iowa. Robert Corrigan: The following week, Clinton Oliver will be in on Drama. And the week of May 4, we'll have Don Lee in on Black American Poetry. And then we'll conclude with Charles Nilon on Black Contemporary Fiction. So next week is the last of the break weeks, so to speak. Now let me get to this week's lecturer. You'll recall that I said when I introduced Saunders Redding that I wanted to indicate to you that Afro-American Studies or Black Studies wasn't a new field, that men like Saunders Redding had been pioneering in it from the '20s and the '30s. When I introduced Philip Butcher, I indicated that a lot of the work was being done by, what might be called, instant experts, but that men like Phillip Butcher, at least from the middle 1940s, have been doing some very profound scholarship. I suggested when I introduced to you Professor Nichols from Brown University, that much of the 19th Century material became valuable as a way of understanding the 20th Century. Robert Corrigan: In introducing today's speaker, I'd like to suggest to you that Black Literature does not exist even in what might be called a historical cultural vacuum. That many of the people who have been working in the field of Afro-American Literature have established for themselves rather profound reputations in the field of English and American Literature, and they are bringing to bear on Afro-American Literature the same critical tools that they developed initially to work with the, what might be called, White American Literature. Thus, our lecturer for this week will be talking on the subject of the Harlem Renaissance or the Negro Renaissance, is Charles T. Davis who is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Davis was born in Hampton, Virginia. He graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Dartmouth College, took an MA from the University of Chicago, and his PHD in English and American Literature from NYU in 1951. Robert Corrigan: In addition to teaching at Penn State and NYU, he has taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Bryn Mawr, Yale, and Harvard. And is the author of a number of articles and several books including an edition of Walt Whitman's poems, the Early Poems and Letters of E.A. Robinson, and an edition of a New England Girlhood. I am told that his edition of Afro-American Literature is just about to come off the press. He is also working on critical studies of Robinson and of Whitman. I'll pass out, as he begins his comments, a list of the lecture topics that he will have for you this week. I would reemphasis that he does have an office over in the English building, 366, he will be there for consultation with students. So without further ado, let me introduce to you Charles T. Davis from Pennsylvania State University. Charlies T. Dav...: Thank you very much Mr. Corrigan. It's a delight to be in Iowa City. I wasn't really quite sure that Iowa was delighted to see me yesterday, however, because I had all kinds of difficulty getting to Iowa City, especially from Chicago. And the last difficulty was afforded by something I really hadn't anticipated, that is a difficulty which was presented by the elements. Just as the plane came down, descended, at Cedar Rapids, a storm developed and there was all kinds of turbulence. When we finally did land, and since I tend, obviously, to interpret things allegorically, it seemed to me that this was some kind of sign that ought to be adequately interpreted. It either meant that I should not come to Iowa City at all, and I refuse to accept that immediate explanation. Or two, that there was celestial displeasure because of the continued indisposition of the members of the controller's union so that the planes were not flying on time. Or three, and this is the explanation I do accept, that something significant, something important, something momentous would occur during the week that I spent at Iowa City. Charlies T. Dav...: I've heard that you've been exposed to all sorts of teaching methods, all kinds of lecturing techniques. Some of these people, I understand, ask certain things of you, insist that you contribute, obviously, to the discussion. That seems to be an excellent thing. I've also heard that you've had some lecturers who do all the work themselves, which seems to me, not to be a very good thing, because I suspect the best instruction occurs when we have a kind of cooperative venture going, in which the professor makes some kind of contribution and you will be expected to make some sort of contribution too. And so this is the way we will run it. And I hope, before the end of the hour, to be able to stop at some point and afford you an opportunity to ask me questions. I suppose in a sense, your question could begin with the title of my lecture, which is sufficiently puzzling. This is the first and introductory lecture to the Negro Renaissance. It is called Preparation for Two Rituals, Rebirth and Initiation. And what I propose to say now will, I think, explain just how these two things do come together. Charlies T. Dav...: America is a country of rebirths. And I think some of you recall the deeply held convictions of the Puritans at the Massachusetts Bay Colony was a holy society. The sacred city on the hill, one appropriately administered by Mosaic Law. Or some of you may recall the theory supporting the American Revolution, that insisted that colonists had the right to de solve their relationships with Britain and to commence building new political institutions after returning once again to a human condition they called the state of nature. And indeed, I hope some of you remember Walt Whitman's confident announcement in the Children of Adam poems of 1860, of the coming of a new man to match the new world that he occupied. Charlies T. Dav...: There has, indeed, been so much rebirth in America that Frederick Jackson Turner identified it as the historical principle that is most meaningful in our history and that it is responsible for much that is typical in the American character. Now, Black Americans in some measure participated in all these bursts of generation, but not as recognized or matured agents. Before 1900, American Negros had experienced rebirth in a most fundamental way, that is to say in the activity of emancipation itself, after 1863, when slaves became men, and men, citizens. But rebirth and bright promises were followed after Reconstruction by a period of painful adolescence and a loss of basic rights and privileges. And it was not until the 1920s that Blacks in America were to manage a Renaissance of their own. And in doing so, they displayed talent and maturity that commanded the attention and the respect of the nation. As they demonstrated their uniqueness as a race, they followed, of course, a path well marked by other groups, societies, and individuals in America. Charlies T. Dav...: Now, no one has explained the meaning of the Negros' coming of age better than Dr. Alain Locke, Professor of Philosophy at Howard University, who, in March 1925, edited a Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic Magazine. Now the materials in the Survey Graphic would provide the nucleus for a book, The New Negro, published later in 1925. I've asked you, as a matter of fact, I think to get hold of that book and I hope the Iowa book stores posses it now. Locke said that the old stereotypes no longer apply. The Uncle Tom and the Sambo types which came from two quite different traditions in America, one, the propaganda of the Abolitionist Movement and the fiction related to that, and the other, the minstrel stage, both of these types were dying, if not dead. But as you know, and as I know too, stereotypes are like generals, they die hard. And it is in our turbulent day that we have seen a revival of their use again. Charlies T. Dav...: No stereotype, according to Renaissance thought, was adequate any longer. The Negro, Locke insisted, must now be presented as a human being, not as a formula. As art had reduced the image of the Negro in previous years, so moral debate and historical controversy had dehumanized him. The Negro was not the problem, for Locke and for Locke's colleagues, but an individual capable of making a valuable and unique contribution to American culture. Charlies T. Dav...: Now Renaissance is a term often loosely applied to any cultural movement with demonstrable ties to the past, when a certain amount of dignity seems desirable. But Locke was quite serious in his use of the term. What the Negro Renaissance affirmed for him was a varied set of cultural achievements, experiences, and associations. Locke wished to build on racial contributions in folk art and music. He sought to exploit the Negro's roots in the South, established by three centuries of residence there. And he hoped to reestablish contact between Black people in America and those living in the original homeland, Africa. At times the intellectuals of the Renaissance talked rather of personality traits, like humor, sentiment, imagination, and [inaudible] nonchalance, or of a gentleness of spirit. And we find a certain vagueness here, though this area offered clearly qualities of character that were cherished, cultivated or recovered in the general renaissance of a people. Charlies T. Dav...: Though Locke's manifesto for the movement appeared in 1925, the actual date of the beginning of the Negro Renaissance is earlier, linked, possibly, to the publication of Harlem Shadows, poems by Claude McKay in 1922, and the remarkable work Cane by Jean Toomer, which I know you are reading, in 1923. Though he never claimed that any formal organization ever existed, Locke maintained that ties among the members of the group were aesthetic and philosophical. They were, in general, the members of the group, not interested in politics. Arna Bontemps recalls today the friendly relations, the talk, the curious self consciousnesses, found in the Renaissance artists in their supporters. Some, no doubt, found it a very trying experience to be displayed as new Negros and to be asked to do something to justify the name. Charlies T. Dav...: Harlem was the cultural center of the movement, to such an extent that the movement is sometimes called the Harlem Renaissance. In the minds of many artists of the '20s the area above Central Park in Manhattan, stretching then from 125th Street to the 140s, was not the grim ghetto that we know today. Now of course we would, I suppose, say that Harlem stretches from 110th Street to well into the 150s, probably going on the East Side, even below 110th Street. But then it began at 125th Street. It was a region, in the 1920s, offering splendid jazz music, gaiety and exotic color, though evidences of the sordid and the tawdry were there for those who looked hard enough. Charlies T. Dav...: What was impressive and new was the number of artists gathered there. No longer could one now cite a single name, like that of Charles Chestnutt, that intruded in itself into the company of the respected writers, all white, of the genteel tradition. Or no longer could one find, for example, the work of a single poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, to be included, say, in an anthology edited by that monument of the genteel tradition, Edmund Clarence Stedman. We think now, not only of Toomer or of McKay, or of Bontemps, names that you've heard already, but of Cullen, of Hughes, Warlrond, Fisher, James Walden Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, to name only some of the best known authors who associated themselves with the Renaissance. Coming of age is marked by a rich abundance of talent never known before, and rebirth very clearly means more birth, the creation of many works of art in a rich diversity of forms. Charlies T. Dav...: Now the Renaissance we know, those of you of course know especially you bring a certain sophistication from history and from physiology, the Renaissance was not willed into being by Alain Locke and a few associates. Though it was never a popular movement, it was prepared for by important developments in the nation and in the society. Nothing was more important than the movement of Negros from the South and the West Indies to the cities of the North. There was a steady flow of Black people from the South, from the turn of the century on, and that flow became a torrent during the years of World War One. Stimulating migration were labor agents hired by the government in large industrial concerns who went South to recruit Negros for Northern industry. These were people who are commonly called recruiters, or cruiters as a matter of fact. James Weldon Johnson recalled watching the stream of migrants passing to take the train in Jacksonville, Florida. People carrying flimsy suitcases and boxes and bundles and banjos, guitars and birds in cages, all on the way North, on the way up North to find jobs and to find, actually, a freedom that they did not find in the South. Charlies T. Dav...: Now this scene, I suppose had some reservations, a reservation being that in some sections of the South certainly you will not find people carrying birds in cages. This scene was reproduced elsewhere in the South. Many of theses people came to New York, specifically to Harlem to meet their more exotic recent migrants. Perhaps as many as 25,000 of them from Jamaica, from Trinidad, the Barbados, and elsewhere in the West Indies. This huge dislocation of Black people was an important phenomenon considered by itself. But there are special factors about it that relate immediately to the Renaissance. Negros as a group, became, for the first time, important components in the urban population of the North. And partly because of the greatly expanded industry of wartime, these were Negros with jobs in industry, rather than Negros occupying the traditional service occupations. In short, Negros with more financial resources than they ever possessed before. Charlies T. Dav...: And what was being formed, of course, was the basis for the emergence of a Black middle class with the taste, the education, the social aspirations that are that peculiar properties of that class. And the Renaissance, I wish to remind you, was a middle class, urban phenomenon with no illusions about serving the people, except to provide a set of models for the aspiring young. There were, for example, no common people in the parlors on 139th Street in Harlem, in the handsome row of houses built by Stanford White, early in the century, where intellectuals, artists, professional people sometimes gather. Charlies T. Dav...: But then, as well as now, though we sometimes tend to forget it in our educational institutions, most of the people were common. And some of them, particularly those with West Indian backgrounds, were touched by another movement. This one founded by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican. Garvey's movement actually had begun in the West Indies, and when Du Bois had visited Jamaica, oh in the middle of the second decade of the 20th century, about 1915, he discovered already functioning there a well developed movement headed by Garvey. Garvey came to this country immediately after the war. And when he did so, he proceeded to establish the United Negro Improvement Association here. That association promoted a program of separatism. And it offered the hope of a return to Africa. Charlies T. Dav...: In America, the association sought to persuade Negros to build a Black economy apart from white capitalism. And in Africa, he planned to cooperate with native Blacks in building a strong Black nation. Before bankruptcy proceedings and financial chaos punctured the dream, the Garveyites, amazingly, organized the Black Star Line and bought ships, two to be precise, and a few Negros were successful in reaching Liberia where they received an uncertain reception. Charlies T. Dav...: Lower class folk where attracted to the United Negro Improvement Association for reasons, I think, that seem to be plain, because of the emphasis upon race pride and because of the brilliant trimming, the brilliant trappings, the special flavor which the genius of Garvey provided in the titles, in the uniforms, the splendid parades, the Black limousines, in the members of the Black Cross, a counterpart, of course, to the Red Cross, other things of that kind. Charlies T. Dav...: The correspondences linking Garvey's movement to the Renaissance are many and plain. We see the common interest in Africa, the shared belief in the existence of Black cultural tradition that had already made a significant contribution to the world. And the conviction that there are patterns of personality traits, qualities of temperament that were identifiably Negro. But the Renaissance was not nationalistic. It held to W. E. B. Du Bois's conception of cultural pluralism which Du Bois very possibly got from William James when he was a student at Harvard. That conception that Du Bois eloquently announced and expanded upon in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. And the Renaissance believed that a rich Negro artistic contribution could be made within the framework of American civilization. Charlies T. Dav...: A startling new development, in the entertainment world, seemed to support such a conviction. A trend was initiated in 1921 by a remarkable musical production called Shuffle Along. Noble Sissle, one of the four collaborators on the show, the others were Flournoy Miller, Aubrey Lyles, and Eubie Blake, commented much later on the opening of the show at Daily 63rd Street Theater in New York. The big city, Sissle said, was ready for Shuffle Along and Shuffle Along was ready for the big city. Charlies T. Dav...: Being ready was the disposition then to look for new lifestyles, to use a term much abused today. I understand, indeed, the young look for nothing else. For the 1920s, we have often been told, was a period of revolt and experimentation. A time when prohibition was deplored and Victorian morality publicly ignored after many years, of course, of private evasion. What the white world discovered in Shuffle Along was jazz. A lively score by Sissle and Blake, spectacular dancing, and the beautiful voice of Florence Mills, described by enthusiastic critics as being bird-like or bell-like or some such lovely adjective as that, which seemed to be always the peculiar properties of critics. Shuffle Along had a spectacular run and it was quickly followed by productions with the titles The Plantation Review, Dixie to Broadway, How Come?, and I remember How Come? for the simple reason that it featured Sidney Bechet on the soprano saxophone, Strut Miss Lizzie, Chocolate Dandies, Black Birds Running Wild and this would be a list of productions actually from 1921 to only about 1926 or so. Charlies T. Dav...: The appetite of the audience was, once aroused, could not be satisfied, it would seem, with Broadway productions alone, and whites flocked North of 125th Street to be conducted at times on guided tours by Harlem hosts, for a fee of course, to see and to listen to the jazz players perform in their native surroundings. If the visitor were in luck, he might hear Duke Ellington, the same Duke Ellington by the way who seems to be ageless and exceedingly active now, might hear Duke Ellington and his orchestra at the Cotton Club, or Fletcher Henderson's band at The Nest, a crowded, smokey, subterranean establishment, the walls of which seem to buckle when that big Henderson noise, you see, came out. Or musical groups headed by Louis Russell or Clarence Williams at Small's Paradise and at the Savoy. Charlies T. Dav...: If the preference were for intimate clubs, a visitor might hear the great jazz pianist James P. Johnson, or his somewhat better known protégé, equally talented and more colorful Fats Waller. And the Lafayette Theater it was possible at times to catch Bessie Smith on stage singing the blues in her majestic, rolling voice. I suspect, however, that the usual white visitor, with notions about the Bunny Hug and the Toddle and mind-addled by a bathtub gin, cared little for distinguishing between Waller's witty art and an enthusiastic but inept performance of a college boy in a blazer, slashing away on a tenor banjo. A sad irony may be the fact that these liberated young people, who loudly announced the arrival of the Jazz Age, very likely knew very little about jazz. No matter, for Blacks and for whites alike Harlem was the thing, at the Cotton Club, at Connie's Inn, and elsewhere, and Langston Hughes put the case, the Negro was in vogue. Charlies T. Dav...: Now we have discussed a tradition in the popular arts, jazz. But we should understand that there were more formal traditions exercising an influence upon the intellectuals and artists of the Renaissance. The famous Armory Show in 1913, and I hope some of you know that and some of you no doubt have had courses in Art History and American Art History, the famous Armory Show in 1913, in New York, introduced to America, in a complete way, modern European post-impressionist experimentation in the visual arts. And among the many discoveries made by Americans then, they became aware, for the first time, of the power of African primitive art. Now this was not something that had to be accepted as an act of faith. Americans saw it in the work, which way they saw actually on the walls at the Armory. In the work of Picasso, of Matisse, of Durant, of Modigliani, of Archipenko, Epstein, Lipchitz, Zadkine, and the list could go on. Charlies T. Dav...: Though Alain Locke was well aware of the vast differences separating characteristic African art expression, and the terms that Locke used for this would be adjectives like controlled and disciplined and abstract and heavenly conventionalized, though Locke was well aware of the vast differences of that art, separating it from the signs of Afro-American genius, for which Locke used such adjectives as free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental, human, he valued nonetheless African art objects as models for aspiring Negro artists. This distinction, it seems to me, is very important to make and for you to remember, because the influence, obviously, of African art objects is not one that is felt in a direct way, but it's one which, in some ways, more subtly recorded than that. Charlies T. Dav...: If you have a copy in hand, and I hope some of you possess one, of The New Negro, and this is a reprint of the original volume which has just been issued, you will have noticed, or you will notice, to change the tense somewhat if you don't possess a copy as yet, the unusual ornaments and devices at the tops of pages and between the sections of the book. These are the work of the German artist Winold Reiss, and they are designed to suggest motifs in African art. One such a design would be something like... can you see that? Perhaps not. At least some of you who are sitting close will be able to see it. These are the work, as I say of Reiss, and they're designed to suggest motifs in African art and to convey something of a spirit of African culture. Charlies T. Dav...: Now Locke was explicit about the educational function of Reiss's work. He said, “The main illustrative material for this volume has been deliberately conceived and executed as a path breaking guide and encouragement to the younger Negro artist.” And Locke supplied the obvious reason for doing this. “If African art,” he said, “is capable of producing the ferment in modern art that it has, surely this is not too much to expect of its influence upon the culturally awakened Negro artist of the present generation.” Though there was no demonstration at the time comparable to Armory show of 1913 to indicate the artistic presence of Africa, some of the leaders and artists found in the private collection of African artworks of Albert C. Barnes at Merion, Pennsylvania, a substitute of a kind. Charlies T. Dav...: Now what is important to the writers of the Renaissance, and you will see by the throwaway you've already received from me, what is important to the writers of the Renaissance was not so much physical contact with the dark continent. That was less important as the idea of Africa, that is to say a conception that was based almost entirely on art and not upon direct experience. Africa, as you will see in my third lecture, served a deeply felt cultural need in such Renaissance artists as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. And the shape of the land that emerges from that work, from their work, has very little to do with any accurate documentation of life on the Ivory Coast or life in Accra or in Lagos or anywhere else in West Africa. Charlies T. Dav...: A quickening of interest in another form of art was important at this time too. This was an interest in folk art, especially in folk music. The Negro spirituals, sorrow songs Du Bois had called them, when sung by The Fisk Jubilee Singers, The Hampton Quartet, or The Hampton Choir, or groups from Tuskegee, or groups from Saint Helena island, one of the sea islands off the coast of Georgia. These groups had stirred audiences all over America from the 1870s on, and it was, I suppose, in 1871 when that original group, for Fisk Jubilee Singers, went north in order to raise money for that institution at Nashville. Charlies T. Dav...: In the early years, Hampton and Tuskegee, assisted by a few dedicated individual collectors, undertook to preserve these songs through periodic publication. Typical titles for such published volumes would be Religious Folk Songs Of The Negro As Sung On The Plantations, printed by the Hampton Institute Press in nineteen nine, or New Plantation Melodies As Sung By The Tuskegee Students, which appeared also in nineteen nine. Nearly 10 years later, The Schirmer Company, that's the great music publishing house, as you all know, offered in four volumes The Hampton Series Negro Folk Songs, published in 1918 and 1919. Charlies T. Dav...: Now there's... though there's some interest indicated here, nothing approximated the abundance of editions of spiritual appearing in the '20s. From 1924 to 1926, there were a dozen separate editions. Perhaps the most impressive of these editions was The Book of American Negro Spirituals, edited by James Weldon and Rosamond Johnson in 1925. And it is this one, and in critical material written by a music critic named [Craybeal], it is this one that asserted the claim, in a most ambitious way that the Negro spiritual had made a considerable contribution to our culture. And the measure of that contribution is to be found in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro, published by R. Nathaniel Dett in 1926. Here a highly sophisticated and richly endowed musical talent applied itself to presenting the traditional spirituals. And if America needed further confirmation of the artistic worth of the spiritual, after Dvořák's New World Symphony, say, here it was in the work of a modern Black composer. Charlies T. Dav...: It's intriguing to see how more primitive materials of this kind can contribute, obviously, to a sophisticated musical composition. Those of you, for example, who know the music of Charles Ives, and I hope some of you do, will remember the marvelous way in which Ives integrates into his musical compositions hymns, pieces of folk themes of various kinds. And the measure, in a sense, of the richness of the music is the way it informs a wholly different kind of tradition, as it did obviously here for R. Nathaniel Dett, and for others obviously writing music at this particular time. Charlies T. Dav...: As we discuss the elements that form a distinctive Renaissance tradition, we should not forget the continuing interaction that occurred between Black writers and white writers within the general American tradition. We recall, of course, that the 1920s brought a rich harvest in American letters. It is perhaps the richest decade in our short history. It is sufficient, actually, for me to call the names of the writers and to do that alone, those writers who published major works. Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner, Hemingway, Eliot, Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Cummings, Dos Passos, Frost, Robinson, William Carlos Williams. I've just begun. There seems to be no end of names, all retaining, amazingly, a life not yet snuffed out by compulsive anthologizing, and inept analytical demonstrations in our educational institutions. Charlies T. Dav...: Now, how does the Renaissance relate to the larger abundance that I have just hinted at? Not very clearly, if we view the problem superficially, and speakers always view the problems at depth never superficially, as you know. The Renaissance artists had little interest, in general, in technical experimentation, of the kind found in works by Faulkner, Eliot, Pound, Hart Crane, and Dos Passos. I hope that some of you have read some the works of these people. That is to say except for Toomer, who created a new thing in Cane. Nothing ever quite like it was ever produced before. But Cullen and McKay relied heavily upon the English Romantics for their poetic technique. Hughes owes something, perhaps, to the Imagists, H.D., that would be Hilda Doolittle, H.D. no doubt, but this seems to be a comparatively conservative heritage in a revolutionary time. Other poets coming at the very end of the Renaissance, Sterling Brown, for example, looked to lesser writers like Sandburg and Masters. Charlies T. Dav...: The real impact of the experimental '20s in poetry did not reach Negro verse until two decades later, in the work of Melvin B. Tolson, for example, or of Owen Dodson, to mention two or three names. Nor do we find much interest in structural experimentation in the fiction writers of the Renaissance. I say structural to make a convenient but false distinction between the ordering of elements in a prose work and the diction of that work. Now, Rudolph Fisher's tales show no advance structurally over Charles Chesnutt's The Wife of His Youth, published at the turn of the century, But Fisher's ear was phenomenal, sensitively attuned to city dialects of all kinds, and this would be not, what, simply the Southern dialect that one would find, say, on 135th Street, or the West Indian dialects. It would be, obviously, some form of Italian dialect too, or that particular kind of language spoken by policeman in New York. These are all dialects, obviously, that Fisher recorded actually with a great deal of accuracy and a great deal of sensitivity. An impressive verbal distinction was displayed too in the work of Eric Warlond, Tropic Death, and in the novels of Zora Neale Hurston. Charlies T. Dav...: Now, correspondences in form tell us little here. It's rather the correspondence in theme that is more valuable and which is the one that I propose to explore now. Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, and John Dos Passos made the point that man in modern in technological society denied love and failed to find happiness, despite enjoying more conveniences and physical advantages than any other man before him. That sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? We've heard something like that very recently. Indeed, I sometimes think we hear nothing else. Charlies T. Dav...: Now, Anderson went further. In Dark Laughter, a novel which I don't expect you to know, he maintained that joy could still be found in a submerged group in our society, in white folk's kitchens, where Negros congregated. Now, the notion of a defective machine society, of an unbalanced scientific society, badly in need of an emotional charge, was one that appealed strongly to Renaissance writers, and Locke and Hughes and McKay thought that Negro culture could supply that lack that makes half rather than whole men. We are intrigued, I think, still by the ritualistic exercises in Hemingway's fiction, the trials that involve virtues not cerebral or intellectual, qualities of heart or endurance that equip a Pedro Romero in The Sun Also Rises to triumph a Robert Cohn, despite Cohn's former eminence as middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. This same form of testing is found in Toomer's Cane, though the qualities that count there tend to be defined in more mystical terms. What we are describing is sometimes called the primitive strain in modern American literature, and the writers of the Renaissance are in general to be located within this particularly continuity. Charlies T. Dav...: Few white writers went as far as they did, though one certainly did, and I'm thinking now of Waldo Frank, who in a novel, Holiday, celebrated the intimate and creative relationship between the Southern Negro and the soil. And he sounds for all the world very much like Toomer, and this a year or so before Cane was published. We are not surprised to discover that Toomer and Frank were intimate intellectual associates and close friends. And we see in this close relationship the probability that Toomer would pursue some of the intellectual fads that would engage Frank and his friends Gorham Munson and Hart Crane. I'm thinking specifically of the mystical doctrines of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Charlies T. Dav...: Let me say just another word about this primitive strain. It's not really peculiarly American, though I think it developed more richly here in America than anywhere else. One finds evidences of it in D.H Lawrence, for example. The belief in blood consciousness there, the value which sex acquires there, the sense that we have of the debility, the weakness, and the inadequacy of those characters in Lawrence's novels that come from middle class society. Charlies T. Dav...: The Renaissance, then, is not the isolated cultural phenomena it may seem to be, despite the fact that it has the distinctive background which I have just sketched. It is to be related to the mainstream of the intellectual development of America. And the point is made quietly, but persuasively I think, by the participation of white intellectuals and artists in the Black Renaissance. If you glance at the table of contents, and perhaps some of you have found to do that much, of The New Negro you will note the names of Albert C. Barnes and Melville J. Herskovits, both white. Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven is as much dominated by Renaissance mythology as is McKay's Home to Harlem. And Frank's Holiday, we have noted, resembles Cane very closely. Whites could and did participate in the launching of the Renaissance without stirring anxieties in Black artists that they were being corrupted or taken over. After all, Locke had asked Winold Reiss, a German, to make the monuments... the ornaments, I should say, and the devices for The New Negro, the book The New Negro, with the thought that Reiss might inspire Black artists to investigate more fully a forgotten African past. You see there that cultural phenomena can be very complicated indeed, exceedingly complicated I regret to say, and I suppose that we might understand the Renaissance better if it were simpler. Charlies T. Dav...: The Renaissance achieved its basic purpose. It demonstrated that Black Americans could make a major contribution to American culture in a form that gained for them understanding and recognition. A publisher could no longer condescend to or offer explanations for its single Negro author. There were now many published authors. Blacks had come of age at last and to do so they had exploited heritage, that had resurrected their Southern past, or had relived a West Indian or Central American childhood. They had affirmed the vigor of their popular arts, so long snubbed because of notions of crudeness or vulgarity. They had selected from a dominant white culture the elements and qualities they desired and rejected others. And they played imaginatively with an African past that was best only dimly a part of their racial memory. The Renaissance permitted the African Negro to return to the roots that he remembered and to probe for those he did not. There was so much of the old in the Black man's discovery of a new identity that it could be legitimately called a rebirth. The rituals, rebirth, and initiation, or coming of age, joined to give America the first, great, explosive burst of the creative genius of the Black man. Charlies T. Dav...: I can't begin to list all of the works that were written during that time. One finds a bibliography of sorts in The New Negro. But one finds here volumes of poems by Hughes, The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes to the Jew, The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, all written during this time. Or poems by Cullen, Color, 1925, Copper Sun, The Ballad of the Brown Girl, The Black Christ and Other Poems, all editions issued at this time. Poems and novels by Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows in 1922, Home to Harlem in 1928, Banjo in '29, Gingertown in '32, Banana Bottom in '33. These are just some of the works that I might list at this time, and I will have occasion to refer to these and others later. Charlies T. Dav...: The Great Depression killed the Renaissance. Well-to do-whiters.... well-to-do whites, I should say, no longer came uptown to observe a lifestyle different from their own. The cabarets closed and jobs disappeared. The gay place that seemed so alive and so carefree suffered more intensely than any other section of the city from economic distress. A few writers struggle on into the '30s, but they knew that their world had changed. It is Langston Hughes who records it memorably, the coming of poverty, grief and tragedy, to his Harlem. Indeed, Harlem never recovered from this disaster. The riot of 1935 destroyed whatever vestiges of the Harlem Renaissance that remained. The war brought a little recovery to Harlem, but very little of the affluence of the years following World War Two reached Harlem. The 1950s brought a special kind of plague in Harlem, the plague of drugs, recorded so memorably in that book Manchild in the Promised Land, which some of you have read, that book by Claude Brown. Vanished was James Weldon Johnson's hope that Harlem might become a prosperous community with a distinctive and rich culture. Gone too was Du Bois's ambition to make Harlem the cultural center for the Black world, receiving and assimilating Negros from Africa and West Indies, as well as all parts of America. The dream remains for us to study this week, and our study, it seems to me, is given dramatic intensity when we realize, with the perspective of history, that we stand on the edge of nightmare. Thank you. Speaker 2: 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. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30pm, April 6th, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium, and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.