Darwin Turner lecture, "Towards the New Negro," at the University of Iowa, June 27, 1975

Speaker 1: The following is a presentation from the Seventh Annual Institute of Afro-American culture held at the University of Iowa, June 15th to the 27th, 1975. Towards the New Negro is the subject of this lecture by Darwin Turner, professor of English and chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa. Introducing Dr. Turner is researcher and author, Bettye Thomas. Bettye Thomas: I consider it to be quite a privilege to be able to introduce the speaker for this occasion, Dr. Darwin T. Turner. And truly, I mean this when I say it, other speakers make this statement but it has more meaning tonight for me. That Dr. Turner really needs no introduction, for he is well-known in the national arena of scholars, as well as in the University of Iowa's academic community. He is a scholar with few equals, as his 18 page vita clearly indicates, single spaced and tight. His scholarly activities and publications are far too numerous to state in detail. However, I shall endeavor to indicate the breadth of Dr. Turner's outstanding career. Bettye Thomas: Darwin Turner received the Bachelor of Arts degree at 16 years of age. Both the Bachelor of Arts degree and the Master of Arts degree in English, were taken at the University of Cincinnati. Because of his outstanding record as an undergraduate, he was selected to become a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He earned the PhD at the University of Chicago, specializing in English and American dramatic literature. His thesis topic was American non representational drama, 1920 to 1930. Prior to becoming chairman of the Afro-American Studies program at the University of Iowa, Dr. Turner held teaching and administrative positions at a number of well-known academic institutions, such as Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, Morgan State College, Florida A&M University, North Carolina A&T College, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan and the University of Hawaii. Bettye Thomas: He has held administrative positions and participated on programs in a number of professional organizations, such as the College Language Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Modern Language Association, the Association for the Study of Negro Life in History, the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture, and others too numerous to mention. His publications span 12 pages of his vita. He has authored, edited and co-authored 17 books on diverse topics in English and Black American literature. They include titles such as Frank Yerby, Golden Debunker, Nathaniel Hawthorne's, The Secret Letter. The Scarlet Letter, I'm sorry, the selected writings of Jean Toomer and Black American literature, essays, poetry, fiction, drama. Bettye Thomas: Dr. Turner has published over 15 articles, which are included in encyclopedias, anthologies, and specialized sources. He has written over 60 articles and book reviews, which have appeared in major journals, such as the College Language Association's journal, The Journal of Negro History, The Journal of Human Relations, The English journal and others. Dr. Turner served as the general editor in 1969 for Arno Press's Afro-American Culture Series, the general editor for the Charles E. Merrill company's African, Afro-American series, and advisory editor for the Bulletin of Black Books and Obsidian. Bettye Thomas: Notwithstanding all of this, Dr. Turner is also a poet. His list of published poetry is quite extensive. And it covers a variety of subjects. Topics such as The Skyscraper, Heartbeat, The Citian, Loneliness and Love. Need I say more? Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Turner. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Thank you. Now I understand what makes Dr. Thomas such an excellent scholar. Anyone who could wade through that vita and come out with an organized introduction, is truly a researcher. A history of the literature of Afro-Americans during the past 100 years, is a story of the efforts of one people to identify themselves and to define methods not merely for surviving, but also for succeeding in the United States of America. It should not be surprising that that history has been and continues to be sometimes ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, for a search is concluded only when the goal has been reached. Until then, a journal of the search can merely reveal the trails pursued, the aborted trips, the misleading maps, the turnings and the re-turnings. So must be the history of the literature of Afro-Americans, as long as they continued to be denied opportunity, equal to their effort and talent. Dr. Darwin T. T...: In such a situation, the ambiguities, the vacillations, the contradictions of Afro-American literature are understandable. Nevertheless, too many Americans, Black and White, continue to attack as non artistic, non universal, non American, non Black, or what have you, any effort contradictory to the one or ones which they espouse. Surely if we, in institutions of higher education, insist that we are the objective interpreters and guardians of culture, surely we at least must muzzle our barking prejudices sufficiently long to examine the various efforts in terms of the writers and the times in which they live. Dr. Darwin T. T...: With these ideas as a roadmap, I wish to re-examine that literary generation, which emerged between Emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance. For I believe that the literature of this generation, of the past, has been as frequently misunderstood as has the literature of the Black Arts Movement of our own time. Although ironically, writers of both groups have insisted that a primary purpose for their writing was to improve life for Afro-Americans. If the Black Arts Movement has been attacked for being too political, for insisting too much on Black consciousness, so writers of the earlier generation have been attacked as too genteel, too White in their thought. Consequently, some teachers, readers and critics, while praising the art of Afro-Americans of this period, have questioned their racial consciousness. Yet the writers of this period, however old-fashioned they may seem to some Americans today, were not old-fashioned to themselves or to their times. Dr. Darwin T. T...: In fact, Sutton Griggs, a minister and novelist, identified the generation as that of The New Negro. Writing 26 years before Alain Locke permanently attached the phrase The New Negro to Afro-Americans of the 1920s, Griggs, in his novel, Imperium in Imperio, published in 1898, or '99, stated, the cringing, fawning, sniffling cowardly Negro which slavery left had disappeared, and a new Negro, self-respecting, fearless and determined in the assertion of his rights was at hand. In one respect, of course, Griggs established a false comparison. His contemptuous generalization about the old Negro, though undoubtedly an accurate photograph of some slaves and freedmen, takes no note of the slaves who defied their masters, sabotaged tools, fled from the plantations, on some instances, assaulted and killed their masters. Regardless, Griggs assertion is clear, he believed that a new Negro had arrived in the generation at the end of the 19th century. Dr. Darwin T. T...: What I propose to do this evening is merely to describe in part, the image of that new Negro presented by the four major Afro-American fiction writers of that generation, writers who published between 1890 and 1900. Obviously, by looking at images from writers alone, I am failing to define The New Negro totally, for authors by the very fact of their identification with arts and letters may be suspected of seeing the world solely from the perspective of individuals who believe in the powers of formal humanistic education and they may be suspected of defining human potential in terms of those who have similar aspirations. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Hence, it should not be surprising, if The New Negro of the writers does not possess the technical school consciousness identified with Booker T. Washington. Without explanation, and with an apology to any of you, to whom my reflections will see merely an elementary rearrangement, reshuffling of elements which should be obvious in works that are familiar, let me proceed. Dr. Darwin T. T...: In Griggs' novel, Imperium in Imperio, Belton Piedmont, a dark-skinned Afro-American of impoverished uneducated parents, advises a congress, an Imperium of Afro-Americans of the need to re-educate Anglo Saxons. He says, "We must change the concepts in which the Anglo Saxon has formed our character. Before we make a forward move, let us pull the veil from before the eyes of the Anglo Saxon that he may see the new Negro standing before him humbly, but firmly demanding every right granted him by his maker and rested from him by man." Dr. Darwin T. T...: Although Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the most widely known and respected Afro-American creative writers of the generation, may have disagreed with Griggs about the details of the image of the new Negro, they agreed fully with his concept of the mission of the black writer. Although both wanted to be literary artists, both saw literature as a device to educate White Americans to awareness of the new Negro. Both writers, it must be admitted, pictured their new Negros as individuals aspiring towards Anglo Saxon standards. Or to be more exact, I should say that they pictured individuals aspiring to what Chesnutt and Dunbar identified as the standards of American culture. Since the tradition bearers of that culture were presumed to be Anglo Saxon, it followed that the standards were to be identified with Anglo Saxons. Neither Chesnutt nor Dunbar publicly questioned the correctness of these standards. Dr. Darwin T. T...: In a journal of 1880, 21 year old Charles Chesnutt wrote, I think I must write a book. If I do write, I shall write for a purpose. A high holy purpose. I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism, I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people. And I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it. The Negro's part is to prepare himself for recognition and equality, and it is the province of literature to open the way for him to get it. To accustom the public mind to the idea, to lead people out imperceptibly, unconsciously, step by step to the desired state of feeling. If I can do anything to further this work, and can see any likelihood of success in it, I would gladly devote my life to it. Dr. Darwin T. T...: In the tales collected and published in The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, 1899, Chesnutt carried out his mission. The title story of the volume evidences the hard work, ambition and nobility of the new Negro, Mr. Ryder, a model of the Horatio Alger ethic. Chesnutt writes, he was always neatly dressed, his manners were ever approachable, his morals above suspicion. He had come to grow in a young man and obtaining employment in the office of a railroad company as a messenger, had in time worked himself up to the position of stationery clerk, having charge of the distribution of the office supplies for the whole company. Although the lack of early training had hindered the orderly development of a naturally fine mind, it had not prevented him from doing a great deal of reading or from forming decidedly, literary tastes. He was economical and had saved money, he owned and occupied a very comfortable house on a respectable street. His residence was handsomely furnished, containing, among other things, a good library, especially rich in poetry, a piano and some choice engravings. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Highly important to the characterization of Mr. Ryder is the fact that Ryder's wife recalls that he was a trifler when he was a slave. Thus Chesnutt suggests that some of the demeaning character traits popularly identified with slaves reflected their reactions to that unnatural circumstance in which they could not control their destinies. Once free, they demonstrated ability and industry never suspected. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Chesnutt emphasizes a second quality, nobility. As those of you who are familiar with the story well know, on the day of a party at which Ryder proposes to announce his engagement to a beautiful, sophisticated woman, he is surprised by a visit from his former wife, whom he has not seen for 25 years and whom he considers dead. She is an old, ugly, black-skinned, uneducated, dialect speaking woman. I emphasize each of those, because Chesnutt deliberately loads the dice as much as he can against this woman. Despite the fact that they were bound by no man made law stronger than the custom of jumping over the broomstick, despite the fact that Ryder has nothing to fear from her since she has failed to recognize him, despite his own conviction that the race must lighten itself by marrying lighter people, Ryder, renouncing his beloved acknowledges and returns to his former wife. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Rather than imply that Ryder is an incredible exception to Negro morality, Chesnutt labors to identify Ryder's moral nobility, with that of other members, The Blue Vein Society. Pretending that a friend of his has posed a dilemma for him to resolve, Ryder tells the story of what happened to him that day, and asks the members of The Blue Vein Society to judge what his friend should do. Now although the members of the society are very shallow in many respects, especially about skin color and hair texture, they unanimously agree that the friend should acknowledge the wife. The black-skinned former wife has her virtues too. Fidelity, loyalty, devotion, evidenced by her 25 year long search for her husband. I can't resist an ironic digression as a footnote. To emphasize Ryder's sophisticated literary tastes, Chesnutt shows that when Ryder wishes to pay poetic tribute to his prospective fiance, he quotes from Tennyson. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Now the passage he quotes is from Tennyson's tale of Queen Guinevere, Arthur's wife, who is perhaps best known for her adultery with Lancelot. Thus, the knowledgeable reader sees two contrasting portraits, an immoral queen from that race which presumes to set the standards of morality and a morally circumspect woman who belongs to that race which some Americans presume to be innately promiscuous. Although Chesnutt in this story ascribes fidelity to women, one wonders whether he does not see it as a racial virtue of the old Negro, that is the slave. Or even of the new Negro who is relatively free from a mixture of Anglo Saxon blood. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Nine years before the publication of The Wife of His Youth, Chesnutt in 1890 had written to George Washington Cable, I noticed that all of the many Negros accepting your own whose virtues have been given to the world in the magazine press recently, have been Blacks, full-blooded. And their chief virtues have been their dog like fidelity to their old masters, for whom they have been willing to sacrifice almost life itself. Such characters exist, but I can't write about those people, or rather, I won't write about them. If one assumes that Chesnutt rebelled against the object of the devotion, rather than character trait itself, perhaps one understands better the nature of that slave in his short story, Her Virginia Mammy, the slave who pretends to be only the mammy of her mulatto daughter, so that the daughter will feel free to marry a prominent White man. Dr. Darwin T. T...: One may understand the characterization of dark-skin Frank in Chesnutt's novel, The House Behind the Cedars. Chesnutt writes, Frank was not proud, a smile which Peter would have regarded as condescending to a free man, who since the war was as good as anybody else, a kind word, which Peter would have considered offensively patronizing, a piece of Ms. Molly's famous potato poem, From Rina's Hands, a bone to a dog, Peter called it once. These were ample rewards for the thousand and one small services, Frank had rendered the two women who lived in The House Behind the Cedars. Throughout the novel, Frank, somewhat in the manner of one of those devoted British suitors from a novel by William Thackeray or Thomas Hardy, Frank patiently waits to serve the one to whom he dares not confess his love. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Ryder, of course, is not the only Charles Chesnutt conceived protagonist who embodies the qualities that Chesnutt seems to ascribe to Anglo Saxon heritage. In The Sheriff's Children, a mulatto characterized by a bitterness, predating that of William Faulkner's Christmas, plans to kill his White father. The mulatto's complaint is that the father sold him into slavery after furnishing him with, quote, a White man's spirit. Notice that the pride and rebellion are attributed to the White blood. Dr. Darwin T. T...: In The Marrow of Tradition, 1901, a novel that Chesnutt wrote in horrified revulsion against the murders of Afro-Americans during the so called riots in the 1898 elections in Wilmington, North Carolina, the protagonist is an Afro-American physician, who in education, skill and morality is the superior of most Caucasians. Perhaps the only supposed virtue he lacks is the quality of forgiving. When a Southern gentleman who has been largely responsible for the riot, in which the doctor's son was killed, begs treatment for his own dying son, the doctor refuses, understandably. In fact, some of us might say, "Right on bruh." But Chesnutt insists that forgiveness motivates some Afro-Americans who have just cause not to forgive. The doctor's wife, upon appeal from her White half sister, who previously has denied any blood relationship, and has stolen the wife's inheritance, the doctor's wife upon this appeal, sends to the doctor to save the child. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Chesnutt wrote this story at a time when Northern business seeking Southern markets was joining in a seemingly national effort to forget the past. Digressing again for just a moment, forgive me I've been a chorus so much in this institute that I find myself making choral comments from time to time. Digressing, this insistence that Afro-Americans should forgive and forget seems paradoxical and almost unAmerican, in this land where prize of Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine, Remember the Pueblo, The South Shall Rise Again, attest our conscious desire to remember all the affronts, whether slight or serious. Willingness to forgive, however, loyalty and humaneness were the qualities which Paul Laurence Dunbar attributed to the old Negro. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Except for uncle Julius of The Conjure Woman tales in 1899, Chesnutt had been more inclined to describe the new Negro risen beyond the plantation world. In contrast, Dunbar focused primarily on the old Negros. Incidentally, I am using the term Negro so often in a speech, not merely because it's become a popular term during the Institute, but because the writers of the period used the term themselves. Therefore it is the most appropriate in most instances. Dunbar focused on the qualities of the old Negros, the slaves. As a youth who wished to become a champion of his race, Dunbar once wrote that he desired to prove that his people were, quote, more human than African, unquote. Notice the contrast, more human than African. And he did so, by picturing their gaiety, gossip, flirtatiousness, indolence, pathos. Dunbar may not have suspected that some readers, Black and White, would presume such qualities to be evidence of childishness and a primitive quality characterizing the American Negro alone. He may have learned however, when he read W. D. Howells' introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life. Dr. Darwin T. T...: The one virtue which Dunbar especially wished to emphasize as characteristic of the old Negro was loyalty. Although the appearances of loyalty offend many readers today, who view them as traitorous suggestions that blacks love slavery, I suspect that Dunbar perhaps naively, may have created his loyal slaves consciously as propaganda for the Negro cause. Publishing at a time at which the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government were demonstrating benign neglect or hostility towards Afro-American issues, Dunbar followed a course which he and more highly educated Afro-Americans may have considered reasonable for any people who lacked the physical power to secure their rights. He appealed to the moral conscience of White Americans. Dr. Darwin T. T...: To this end, he articulated indeed, over emphasized incredible loyalty among the slaves. His message to the White American South was this, we know you suffered economically when you lost your homes and your slave property, but we suffered too as slaves. If we who served you before and after Emancipation, with a loyalty far exceeding any human expectation, if we are willing to forget the past, and join hands with you in the future, perhaps you will be willing also. Certainly Dunbar seems to stress this idea in one of his best known non dialect poems, Ode to Ethiopia, when he praises the willingness of Blacks to forgive. He wrote, no other race or White or Black, when bound as though word to the rack, so seldom stoop to grieving. No other race when free again, forgot the past, and prove them men so noble in forgiving. Dr. Darwin T. T...: The theory that Dunbar emphasized, loyalty, for propagandistic political reasons, provides, I believe, a more favorable interpretation of such a work as his short story in which free and unpaid servants preserved the sanity of their senile former master by concealing the news that the South lost that war, a generation earlier. Such a theory explains the even more astonishing story of Gideon. The story is told in The Strength of Gideon, the title story of a volume published in 1900. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Named by his devout slave parents who presumed that God would select the task for him, Gideon discovered his mission, when his master, departing for the Civil War, charged Gideon with the responsibility of caring for the mistress and the daughter of the plantation. When the master was killed, fighting to keep Gideon a slave, Gideon remained steadfast in his pledge, even though in doing so, he lost a possible job, his sweetheart and the opportunity to go north. It may be consoling to some of you that by 1903, when lynchings, new discriminatory laws and other abuses persuaded even Dunbar that America either had no moral conscience or had one that was death to Blacks, in 1903, in a story told in Old Plantation Days, Dunbar killed the mistress, married off the daughter and reunited Gideon with his sweetheart. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Dunbar wrote less frequently than Chesnutt about the new Negro of his day. Perhaps Dunbar considered literary example unnecessary, since he himself personified the educated, artistic new Negro, whenever he published a work, or whenever he appeared before an audience to read his poetry. If he created fewer newer Negroes in literature than Chesnutt did, he nevertheless created more varied types. One is Bert Halliday, a northern reared college graduate adequately trained to assume a professional position in American society, trying to live by the English poets' assertion that a man is a master of his fate and captain of his soul, Halliday is blocked by racial discrimination, which bars him from jobs suitable to his training. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Like Chesnutt, Dunbar found the new Negro also in the uneducated freedman, who once permitted to design his lifestyle, observed the American ethic. In a novel entitled The Sport of the Gods, 1902, Dunbar described the home of Berry Hamilton, who was born, reared and matured in slavery. The description reads, the little cottage in which he lived was somewhat in the manner of the old cabin in the quarters. But unlike the cabin of the early day, it was a neatly furnished modern house, the home of a typical good living Negro. Dr. Darwin T. T...: For Dunbar, the new Negro in many respects, was either the descendant or the resurrection of the African whose praise he's saying in Ode to Ethiopia, from which I've quoted in part before, but which I'd like to quote at greater length now, "On every hand in this fair land, proud Ethiope's swarthy children stand beside their fairer neighbor. The forests flee before their stroke, their hammers ring, their forges smoke, they stare in honest labor. They tread the fields where honor calls, their voices sound through senate halls in majesty and power. To right they cling. The hymns they sing up to the skies in beauty ring, and bolder grow each hour. Be proud, my race, in mind and soul. Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll in characters of fire. High mid the clouds of fame's bright sky thy banner's blazoned folds now fly and truth shall lift them higher. Thou hast the right to noble pride, whose spotless robes were purified by blood's severe baptism. Upon thy brow the cross was laid, and labor's painful sweat-beads made a consecrating chrism. Go on and up. Our souls and eyes shall follow thy continuous rise. Our ears shall list thy story from bards who from thy root shall spring, and proudly tune their lyres to sing of Ethiopia's glory." Dr. Darwin T. T...: Of course, Dunbar knowing little about Africa, merely used Ethiopia as a symbol of Black Africa. But recall that poem when you think that Dunbar totally betrayed his race by writing stories. Despite his self identification as a descendant of Africa, Dunbar obviously envied the Anglo Saxon culture, which he knew because it had been taught to him while he was a high school classmate of the younger, of those Wright boys who played with bicycles and later with airplanes. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Brainwashed, Dunbar, insisted in The Love of Landry, a novel published in 1900, that the only true gentlemen were English. Some Virginians, he admitted came close and some Philadelphians pretended, but no Americans could truly be gentlemen. In the short story, One Man's Fortunes, Halliday's Black friend Davis explains Anglo Saxon superiority to a White classmate. Now, if that sentence seems illogical, blame it on Dunbar not on me. He, the black man has to explain Anglo Saxon superiority to the White. Davis says, "Why can't you see, you sentimental idiot? That it's all different and it has to be different with us. The Anglo Saxon race has been producing that fine frenzy and new for seven centuries and more. You come with the blood of merchants, pioneers and heroes in your veins to a normal battle. But for me, my forebears were savages 200 years ago, my people learned to know civilization by the lowest and most degrading contact with it. Thus equipped or unequipped, I attempt an abnormal contest. Can't you see the disproportion." Dr. Darwin T. T...: Davis is not a fool. In fact, he succeeds economically and spiritually while the protagonist fails. But before you castigate Dunbar consider that that concept of being behind in the racial competition, not only saturates W. E. B. Du Bois's thought in The Souls of Black Folk 1903, but it's clearly evident in the demands of many Black civil rights leaders of the 1960s and 1970s. The reason of course, lies in the criterion. Aware that they lag behind in acquiring that culture which many White settlers brought to America, Blacks have judged themselves behind, not necessarily inferior to, but behind other Americans who are not of African ancestry. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Sutton Griggs articulated the problem effectively in a preface to his novel, Overshadowed, published in 1901. He wrote, he whose grandfather was a savage and whose father was a slave has been bidden to participate in a highly complex civilization, on terms of equality with the most cultured, aggressive and virile type of all times, the Anglo Saxon. The stupendous character of the task is apparent, when it is called to mind that the civilization in which they are to work out their respective destinies is fitted to the nature of the Anglo Saxon, because he evolved it. While on the other hand, the nature of the Negro must be fitted to the civilization, thus necessitating the casting aside of all that he had evolved. Dr. Darwin T. T...: This one way criterion which Griggs rejects, I fear we find today when a student of Afro-American literature, for example, is disparaged because he does not know American literature, but a student who knows White American literature, but not Afro-American literature may be highly praised for a scholarship. Both Chesnutt and Dunbar accepted Anglo Saxon cultural heritage as the model towards which the Afro-American would build. Though they protested against the vicious, unjust behavior of individual Anglo Saxons or groups of them, neither questioned the basic assumption that the drive of the new Negro was to achieve equality in Anglo Saxon cultural heritage, as well as in life in the country governed by those Anglo Saxons. Perhaps one might wish to blame some of their unquestioning acceptance of American values on censorship by White editors who published and scrutinized their works. To a degree this argument has validity. Certainly well-known are Dunbar's laments about editors' preferences for his dialect poems. Dr. Darwin T. T...: One collection of stories in Old Plantation Days that I referred to before, was requested by a publisher years after Dunbar had begun to write more forcefully about the conditions of contemporary Blacks. Editors delayed publication of Chesnutt's, The Wife of His Youth and The House Behind the Cedars, which are comments on contemporary social problems, while those same editors encouraged Chesnutt to devise more conjure tales in which imperceptive readers may misjudge the shrewdness of Julius as Julius' female employer does, or imperceptive readers may miss the horror of Julius' tales of slavery, as Julius' male employer does. Dr. Darwin T. T...: It is also true than in 1890, Chesnutt complained to George Washington Cable, the kind of stuff I could write, if I were not all the time oppressed by the fear that this line or this sentiment would offend somebody's prejudices, jar on somebody's American trained sense of propriety, would, I believe find a ready sale in England? An English writer would not hesitate to call a spade a spade. I don't know whether Chesnutt realized the irony of that. An English writer would not hesitate to say that race prejudice was mean and narrow and unchristian. He would not be obliged to kill off his characters or immerse them in converse as [inaudible] does his latest heroine to save them from a fate worse than death, that is, the confession of inferiority by reason of color. Dr. Darwin T. T...: On the other hand, an English writer will make his colored characters think no less of themselves because of their race, but infinitely less of those who despise them because of it. Mister Gilder finds that I either lack humor or that my characters have, quote, a brutality, a lack of mellowness, lack of spontaneous imaginative life, lack of outlook that makes them uninteresting. Unquote. I fear alas, that those are exactly the things that do characterize them. And just about the things that might have been expected to characterize people of that kind. The only qualities which the government and society had for 300 years labored faithfully , zealously and successfully to produce the only qualities which would have rendered their life at all endurable in the 19th century. I suppose I shall have to drop the attempted realism and try to make them like other folks. This after all, was not a literary decade governed by Stephen Crane's Maggie, or Theodore Dreiser's Sister, Carrie. It was still the decade of William Dean Howells and Henry James, and many true realists, White or Black had difficulty publishing their works. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Even Afro-Americans who published their novels privately leaned in the direction of glorifying Anglo Saxon culture as a model for the new Negro. For example, in the privately printed Imperium in Imperio, Sutton Griggs wrote, and I will read only part of this. It goes on and on and on. In the midst of a debate, opposing a mulatto, who has insisted that there be either the right to vote or war, this response is given. Our president alluded, president of a society that is, alluded to the fact that the Negro was unpaid for all his years of toil. It is true that he was not paid in coin, but he received that from the Anglo Saxons, which far outweighs in value all the gold coin on earth. He received instruction in the arts of civilization, a knowledge of the English language and a conception of the one true God and His Christ. While all of the other races of men were behind the ball of progress, rolling it up the steep hill of time, the Negro was asleep in the jungles of Africa. Newton dealt with the law of gravitation, Herschel swept the starry sky in search of other worlds, Columbus stood upon the prow of the ship and braved the waves of the ocean, the fiercer ridicule of men, Martin Luther single handedly alone, fought the pope the religious guide of the world, and all of this was done while the Negro slept. Dr. Darwin T. T...: After others had toiled so hard to give the bright light of civilization to the world, it was hardly to be expected that a race that slept while others worked, could step up and at once enjoy all the fruits of others toil. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Now, this does not come from a sympathizer with slavery. The speaker is proud dark skin, Belmont Piedmont, you recall the one who before was talking about the new Negro, a champion of Negroes in liberty, one who dares to be sufficiently free thinking that he concludes this speech by urging his Afro-American listeners to consider establishing a separate state as a viable option for the survival of Blacks in America. Dr. Darwin T. T...: It is not strange that Griggs, Chesnutt, Dunbar would admire the Anglo Saxon heritage. Consider how little the conventionally educated Black American of the 1890s knew about the strengths of African civilizations, and how much he'd been taught about the glories of Anglo Saxon culture. Griggs however, is different from Chesnutt and Dunbar not because of his militancy, or bitterness, for Griggs never published any fiction more bitter than Chesnutt's, The Marrow of Tradition or Dunbar's, Mr. Cornelius Johnson. What distinguishes Griggs is that refusing to find perfection in the Anglo Saxon lineage, he attributes weaknesses of the new Negros to their imitation of the inherent racial vices of Whites. And alone among the three authors discussed thus far, he questions the standards of Anglo Saxon culture. Dr. Darwin T. T...: In a novel, Overshadowed, the heroine, a brown skinned woman named Erma Wysong attacks the White race's luxurious idleness. She says, "Because our race has borrowed the White man's language, manner of dress, religion, ideas of home, philosophy of life, we have apparently decided that everything the White man does is good for us to imitate. We do not stop to think that the White race has deep ingrained faults as a race. And thus we proceed to imitate faults and virtues alike. Indiscriminately and instinctively we unhesitatingly adopt even those erroneous traits in the White man's character that have oppressed us. Now one of the most baneful evils that slavery left us is the idea that physical labor is a badge of disgrace, and that a condition of luxurious idleness is the most exalted, the most honorable, the ideal existence. Dr. Darwin T. T...: The southern White people are parents of the idea that physical labor is disgraceful, and being such an imitative people, we have accepted without question, their standard of what is honorable. The insidious influence of that idea is what makes the rising generation of Negro youths so idle, and so averse to physical labor." Isn't that delightful? That Blacks are lazy because they're imitating White Americans. Think about that for a while. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Later in the work, the same heroine tries to discourage a Black minister from believing that he needs a degree, not education, that he needs a degree in order to impress his congregation. She says to him, "Oh, Mr. Nerve, as I have had occasional remark before, we must learn to quit accepting customs as good and grand simply because the White people have accepted them. They are but human and can error, even in a body as a race." But he responds, trying to defend his decision to imitate... I will not read this as Griggs has written it. Because to emphasize the fact that he is absolutely pretentious, Griggs puts a hyphen between each word to indicate that Mr. Nerve pronounces each word independently. "If we ever turn to liking Black faces," he says, "it will only be after the Whites turn that way. The Whites regulate all of our tastes, even to telling us who are our greatest men among us. We just won't acknowledge a man is great until the Whites have done so." And Griggs concludes the scene, poor deluded soul, contented to grasp with a death clutch at the shadow of Anglo Saxon civilization, his brethren are many. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Climactically, at a time when the White South was rationalizing lynchings as its defense against Black brutality, Erma Wysong accuses Whites of establishing the model for brutality. Her brother has killed a master workman and she proposes to get the brother to confess. This is her reason. The thought flashed over her mind that the Anglo Saxon race, whose every advancing footstep had been planted in a pool of blood, was about to impart its mercilessness to the Negro, a being of another mold. And John, her brother, was the first victim over whom the bloody shadow had cast itself. She was determined to return John into the ways of his father's. He was to renounce the pathway of blood and have recourse to God. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Griggs ironically, does not condemn Anglo Saxon brutality, as virulently as that supposedly genteel, W. E. B. Du Bois, who disgusted by lynchings and war, still before the Harlem Renaissance wrote in a poem called The Riddle of the Sphinx, "The white world's vermin and filth. All the dirt of London, all the scum of New York. ⁠Valiant spoilers of women. And conquerors of unarmed men. Shameless breeders of bastards. Drunk with the greed of gold. Baiting their blood-stained hooks with cant for the souls of the simple. Bearing the white man's burden of liquor and lust and lies. I hate them. Oh, I hate them well, I hate them, Christ as I hate hell. Dr. Darwin T. T...: If I were God, I'd sound their knell this day. Who raised the fools to their glory, but Black men of Egypt and Ind, Ethiopia's sons of the evening, Indians and yellow Chinese, Arabian children of the morning and mongrels of Rome and Greece? And they that raised the boasters shall drag them down again. Down with the theft of their thieving and murder and mocking of men. Down with their barter of women and laying and lying of creeds. Down with their cheating of childhood, and drunken orgies of war. Down, down, deep down. Till the devil's strength be shorn. ⁠Till some dim, darker David, a-hoeing of his corn, and married maiden, mother of God, bid the Black Christ be born." Dr. Darwin T. T...: Perhaps it overshadowed one sees a new Negro, whose behavior anticipates the alienation expressed by Claude McKay in the 1920s. Astral Herndon, the bright educated husband of Erma Wysong decides at the end of the novel to become a wanderer. He cannot go to Africa, which under the control of Whites has become as oppressive as America. Therefore, he declares, "I Astral Herndon, hereby and forever renounce all citizenship in all lands whatsoever, and constitute myself a citizen of the ocean and ordain that this title shall be entailed upon my progeny until all generations, until such time as the shadows which now envelop the darker races and all lands, shall have passed away, away and away." Dr. Darwin T. T...: The fourth novelist of this meditation, Pauline Hopkins, followed the mission of the other three to educate the public. In a preface directed to the colored readers of her novel, Contending forces in 1899, she wrote, in giving this little romance expression in print, I am not actuated by desire for notoriety or for profit, but to do all that I can in a humble way to raise the stigma of degradation from my race. The colored race has historians, lecturers, ministers, poets, judges, lawyers, men of brilliant intellects who have arrested the favorable attention of this busy, energetic nation. But after all, it is a simple homely tale, unassumingly told, which cements the bond of brotherhood among all classes and all complexions. Fiction is of great value to any people, as a preserver of manners and customs, religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us. Dr. Darwin T. T...: We must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro, with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history and is yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo Saxon race. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Concentrating on political, social and moral issues, Pauline Hopkins makes less effort than the other three authors to identify the new Negro as an exception. Yet even she, uses two pages to educate any readers who may be aware of the refinement of the new Negro, giving little attention to praise of the virtues of Anglo Saxons, she concentrates on weaknesses of that blood and on strengths of the African character. For example, she blames the selfishness and mercilessness of a Black lawyer on his White blood by writing, Langley's nature was the natural product of such an institution of slavery. Natural instinct for good had been perverted by a mixture of cracker blood of the lowest type on his father's side, with whatever God saving quality that might have been loaned the Negro by pitting nature. This blood, while it gave him the pleasant features of the Caucasian race, vitiated his moral nature and left it stranded high and dry on the shore of blind ignorance. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Like Dunbar, she praises the humor of Blacks as a racial trait, and she judges superstition as a mystic quality, which Whites she says, are finally beginning to value. Superstition, she writes, is supposed to be part of the Negro's heritage. They have brought much of it from their native Africa. It gives color picturesqueness light and shade we may say to the darkness of life and complexion, which so far has marked the Negro for its own. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Claiming kinship with the Egyptians and other Black races of the Eastern continent, the Negro is thought to possess wonderful powers of necromancy. The Negro, however, no longer holds the distinction of being the only race that believes in the pretensions of those who claim to be able to look into the future with mesmerized sight, favored by the hidden powers that have a knowledge of coming events. In these days of palmistry, phonology, card reading, mind reading, lucky pigs, rabbits feet, [inaudible] chain for lot and four leaf clover encased in crystal and silver for the same reasons, who shall say that the Negro has not lost his monopoly of one great racial characteristic? Dr. Darwin T. T...: Now, what does all this mean? Four writers, one, a fair-skinned industrious man who wanted to be respected for his literary talent, but who sought to educate White readers to awareness that freed Blacks are as fully Americanized, as those European immigrants who came to find a new life and a new identity in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. A second, a dark-skinned ambitious man who wanted to be respected for his literary talent, but who wanted also to educate White readers to awareness that Black people are just as human as others, except that they're perhaps more loyal. Wanted to educate them also to awareness that a new generation of educated Blacks is rising. A third writer, a man who communicating with Black readers looked for weaknesses in the White race, and embittered by life concluded that intelligent Blacks must live separately, or must become the Ishmael's of the world because the only alternative is death. Finally, a woman who wrote primarily for Black readers to educate them to issues of their time, but realizing the possible White readers, offered a statement or two about the weaknesses of Whites and the racial virtues of Blacks. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Except in their reflection of change conditions of the society, such as the northern immigration and the urbanization of Blacks, how different are the newer creators of new Negros from their parents in this genteel generation? Except for that African coloring which is not essential to the play, how different is Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun from the spirit and purpose of Chesnutt? Or how different is Jessie Fauset's, Comedy American style, from the spirit and purpose of Chesnutt? Except for the fact that Dunbar emphasized loyalty as an inherent racial virtue, how different are his Black peasants from the minor Black characters in Rudolph Fisher's, The Walls of Jericho during the Harlem Renaissance? Or from Langston Hughes', Little Ham? Or even today, The Tenants of Christian Hunters, The Landlord? How different is LeRoi Jones in writing Dutchman and the Slave, from the thrust and purpose and despairing conclusion of Griggs in Imperium in Imperio and in Overshadowed? Except that the modern writer, Williams is aware of the dominance of White readers, how different is John Williams thrust in the novel Sissie, from that of Pauline Hopkins? Dr. Darwin T. T...: Now, I realize that every time a lecturer at this institute has selected examples outside the period of study, something unhappy has happened. Therefore, I don't want to push these parallels too far. But I ask you to think about these beyond this night. Are the Afro-American novelists of the genteel generation merely relics of the past? Or are they the prototypes of what Afro-American authors are and will be until Black people find identity and success on this continent? Despite the defiant boasts of Langston Hughes in 1926, that younger dark-skinned artists would express themselves without fear and shame, despite LeRoi Jones's prescriptions of a new poetry and Black art, the new Negros of the 1920s and the newest Blacks of the 1960s, I think they're not so very different from their ancestral new Negros of the 1890s. Dr. Darwin T. T...: Those in the 1890s, and some today, are sometimes confused about the cultural standards appropriate to Afro-Americans. They were uncertain about the qualities inherent in Anglo Saxon culture, uncertain of the significance of their African ancestry, uncertain even of the qualities inherent in the African race, uncertain and disagreeing with each other about whether Blacks are temperamentally similar to or different from Whites. But those writers of the 1890s seem united by three convictions. One, that in their decade, their generation, there was a new Negro. Two, whatever the standards are, new Negros have obtained them or will attain them. And three, the Negro writers' responsibility is to educate readers to awareness of these facts. Dr. Darwin T. T...: A decade after the last major work by any of these was published, a year before the 1920s began. Six years before Alain Locke published the book entitled The New Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois, sometimes identified as the most genteel of the generation, W. E. B. Du Bois in an editorial crisis, proclaimed the return of Black soldiers from World War I. He proclaimed this return with a fervor which left no doubt, that it was Sutton Griggs's new Negro speaking and returning. Dr. Darwin T. T...: After enumerating the ways in which the United States abused Negros, Du Bois concluded, "In the voice of the veterans, this is the country to which we soldiers of democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought. But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land. We return. We return from fighting, we return fighting. Make way for democracy. We saved it in France, and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, I know the reason why." That ladies and gentlemen, was the new Negro drawn by Afro-Americans of the genteel generation. Thank you.