Week 6 – Back to the Roots: The African-American Experience from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

Question 1

What is the Harlem Renaissance?

Answer 1

• Period of time roughly spanning from 1865 to the 1930s
• Development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century
• Subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted.
• Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art

Question 2

The End of the Civil War (1861–1865)

Answer 2

• Northern States (gradually industrialized) vs Southern confederate States (rural and dependent on slave labour in cotton plantations)
• With the end of the Civil War in 1865, the Blacks in the South are free – but by no means part of the American society.
• As the Southern economy is both exhausted and destroyed by the war, and because the strong agricultural direction that the plantation economy has taken is not yet competitive, work is scarce.
• Poor whites and ex-slaves compete for the few jobs available.

Question 3

13th Amendment and Black Codes

Answer 3

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (13th Amendment)
- Four million people go from bondage to freedom as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude.
- Thirteenth Amendment loophole: involuntary servitude is prohibited except as a punishment for crime
- Southern states implement repressive laws known as ‘Black Codes’, creating new types of offenses (loitering, homelessness…), limiting the rights of African Americans, and relegating them to an underclass status.

Question 4

14th and 15th Amendments and Jim Crow Laws

Answer 4

• The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) gives ex-slaves citizenship. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gives them voting rights.
• Southern states shift from Black Codes to Jim Crow law, claiming status of “segregated but equal” for African-Americans
• African-Americans still discriminated with fewer resources available for their communities.
• Violence on the rise with organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan

Question 5

The Great Migration

Answer 5

• Many African Americans migrate to the large Eastern and Northern cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, where industrialization requires a cheap labor force.
• Between 1910 and 1970 six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states
• Attempt to take part in public life, confronting racial prejudice and racism (still widespread in the North)

Question 6

Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. Du Bois

Answer 6

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, two of the foremost African-American intellectuals of their times, represent two diverging opinions as to how to integrate the freed slaves into society.

Question 7

Booker T. Washington

Answer 7

• Attempt to stop to the migration of thousands of African Americans to the North.
• “Pragmatic” approach: in order to be accepted into American society and to gain political status, African Americans have to prove that they deserve it, that they can be useful and productive.
• Director of Tuskegee, first institution of higher learning for African Americans founded in Alabama in 1881. Teaches practical crafts and trades.
• Political and social power would automatically follow economic power

Question 8

Issues with Booker T Washington’s strategy:

Answer 8

• Blame shifts from an overall broken and racist system to personal responsibility
• Emphasis on economy and capitalist system
• Citizenship and rights not demanded by African Americans by bestowed on them by white Americans

Question 9

Washington’s ideas endears him to both Southern and Northern whites

Answer 9

• North: interested in cheap labor – and Washington effectively “sells” black workers and craftsmen.
• South: can sit back and wait to see if the efforts envisaged by Washington fail. If this were to happen, it would reinforce all the prejudices in the South about African Americans being lazy and unfit for work.

Question 10

W.E.B. Du Bois

Answer 10

• Contrary to Washington, Du Bois has been raised and educated in the North and outside the US. Du Bois studies at Fisk and in Harvard, where he is exposed to the works of the leading intellectuals and philosophers of their days.
• First African American to receive a PhD from Harvard with a dissertation titled ‘The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870’
• Approaches the question of race from a more philosophical and socio-economic perspective, trying to expose the privilege of white people and striving for the equality of coloured people.
• The Souls of Black People (1903): “the problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the colour line.” Mix of socio-economic research, poetry, storytelling, and philosophy

Question 11

Du Bois’ “Double Consciousness”

Answer 11

• African-Americans seen only through the lens of race prejudice
• the struggle African Americans face to remain true to black culture while at the same time conforming to the dominant white society
• State that he describes as a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”
• Forced separation that prevents the individual from feeling “whole” and violates something fundamental in the human condition
• In order to “merge this double self into a better and truer self,” an African American in the US needs to be able to feel both American and Black.
• Du Bois aims to show that African American have a distinct cultural identity that must be acknowledged, respected and enabled to flourish

Question 12

Du Bois’ Program

Answer 12

• In spite of his idealist positions, Du Bois insists upon the primacy of political influence, since in his view, liberty, and the right to vote should not be possible outcomes of a growing racial self-consciousness, but its prerequisite.
• He realizes the inherent danger in completely submitting to the rampant materialism and economic thinking that he considers Washington to have succumbed to

Question 13

Du Bois’ The Role of the Artist

Answer 13

• Du Bois’ view of the African American intellectual or artist, then, is that rather than fighting for a job, Black artists should be fighting for civil rights and raising their voices against, as well as other people’s awareness of, the all-pervading commercialism of American society as a whole.
• This is also why he considers African-American music to be a bulwark against these tendencies and even calls it the one “true” American music:

Question 14

The Harlem Renaissance

Answer 14

• Before and after WWI, New York’s Harlem becomes the site of an enormous influx of African Americans, as Whites increasingly abandon the neighborhood.
• Many artists, painters, literati, musicians, and intellectuals move here to create what has become known as the Harlem Renaissance.
• Desire for racial self-assertion and self-definition against white supremacy coinciding with a blossoming of literary arts

Question 15

The New Negro

Answer 15

• One of the driving forces behind the Harlem Renaissance is Alain Locke, whose anthology The New Negro (1925) can be considered the cultural and political manifesto for the movement.
• Term New Negro used to signify militant self-defense against white supremacy, intellectual aspiration, and cultural affirmation of Negro identity

Question 16

Alain Locke

Answer 16

• Attempt to create a ‘cultural citizenship’ rather than a political one, a new American identity based on culture rather than politics
• Complex balance between referring backwards to cultural roots not based on Anglo-American white tradition and forward to a new urban and creative centers such as Harlem
• Attempt to combine the “primitivism” that has entered the US by means of the European avant-garde with a high modernist sensibility and elitism – a difficult task.

Question 17

Cultural Roots

Answer 17

• Common goal is to unearth and create a genuinely African-American voice – a difficult task after being geographically and culturally cut off from their heritage through centuries of slavery.
• Two of the main cultural traditions that have survived are story-telling and music.
• Unearthing these traditions requires both anthropological as well as artistic work.

Question 18

“Primitivism”

Answer 18

• Range of practices cutting across artistic styles between mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century
• Valorization of so-called ‘primitive’ art and cultures of non-Western societies (i.e., African masks, Tahitian tribes…)
• Inherits the romantic distrust for science and civilization from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is highly critical of Western concepts of civilization as progress, and nostalgically yearns for a Golden Age of human closeness to each other and to nature.

Question 19

Two examples of “Primitivism”

Answer 19

Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau:
- whose works express a longing for a paradisiacal past unspoiled by science, technology, civilization, and modern society.
- In the context of the Modern, the “primitive” represents the libido, the “id” of psychoanalysis, as well as the unblemished and unrestrained sexuality associated with primitive tribes. This stands in marked contrast to European codes of behavior, which restrict sexual activity, and economic forces that result in later and later marriages.
- Simplistic understanding of other cultures, structured by the primitivists’ own desires, their lack of knowledge of other societies, and the racist and colonial attitudes of European society.
- Ongoing belief that non-western societies are fundamentally similar in their “primitiveness,” supposedly referring to their irrationality, closeness to nature, free sexuality, freedom, proclivity to violence, “mysticism,” etc.

Question 20

African-American Artists: The Dilemma

Answer 20

• On the one hand, fashionable “primitivism” offers an outlet and a market for the African roots of African-American culture; on the other hand, these roots seem to confirm the very primitivist stereotypes that Black artists encounter and want to work against.
• One possibility is to ironically break and play with the prejudiced preconceptions of the White public.
• Hardly anyone embodies this double bind in a more paradigmatic way than one of the most famous stars of the Harlem Renaissance: Josephine Baker

Question 21

Josephine Baker

Answer 21

• Baker consciously plays with the stereotypes of white audiences, as her highly erotic shows both cater to their “primitivist” and sensationalist expectations as well as undermining them ironically
• She becomes not only a sex symbol known as “black venus,” but also the richest African-American woman of her time.

Question 22

Aaron Douglas

Answer 22

• Primitivist and cubist influences are clearly recognizable in the work of Aaron Douglas.
• Works Progress Administration commissions four murals for what today is the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
• Representation of past, present, and future of African American experience

Palmer C. Hayden, William Johnson, Archibald Motley

Question 23

Blues and Jazz

Answer 23

• Emerging from the work-songs and the spirituals sung during slavery – both already mixed musical genres, combining European harmonies with African rhythmic patterns – Blues and Jazz become enormously influential, opening African-American culture to a predominantly white market.
• New Orleans becomes the cradle of this new music, a melting pot of different musical influences from Africa, the Caribbean, Spain, France, and England.
• New instruments offer the freed slaves new approaches and lead to new styles. such as the piano (Ragtime) and horns (the “singing horns” which white musicians then turned into Dixieland).
• The “blue notes” (a flattened third and a flattened seventh) are added to the regular diatonic scales of European music, as well as the syncopating, rhythmic style.

Question 24

Chicago and New York

Answer 24

• While jazz – driving up the Mississippi to Chicago – turns into the classic, soloist and improvising style we still know, it arrives in New York in the form of big band jazz.
• Jazz, and black music in general, also becomes the form of expression that finds its way into poetry and short stories.
• This can be seen, e.g., in James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues,” which is infiltrated by music on the levels of both content and form, and in many of Langston Hughes’ poems, whose forms sometimes follow the 12-bar Blues.

Question 25

Langston Hughes (Considered as the progenitor of blues poetry)

Answer 25

• Langston Hughes – prolific playwright, novelist, and poet – becomes one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance – and beyond.
• Along the lines of Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” Hughes’ poems oscillate between the wish to become integrated into American society and a defiant self-assertion of African-American identity.

Question 26

Jean Toomer

Answer 26

• One of the most brilliant achievements of the Harlem Renaissance is Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923)
• In a highly original way, Cane combines the modernist aesthetic style with the African-American experience, both in the North and the South of the US.
• Toomer’s background covers 12 different ethnicities (among them Welsh, Scottish, German, Native American, Spanish, and others). However, because Toomer doesn’t think of himself as African-American, he does not consider himself part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Question 27

Zora Neale Hurston

Answer 27

• Another important figure of the HR is Zora Neale Hurston.
• Hurston is both anthropologist and author/novelist, collecting old African stories, as well as writing short stories and novels.
• Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered to be the first feminist voice in what in the 20s (and beyond) is a highly patriarchal, male-dominated African-American culture.

Question 28

How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)

Answer 28

• Published in The World of Tomorrow, a political magazine read mostly by white women
• Presents a highly intimate approach to race
• Color as shifting categories and race as performative to some extent
• Zora Neale Hurston claims a non-apologetic identity:
  “But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes… I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it… No I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” (2098).
• Essay criticized by Alain Locke, who considered it as a sort of violation of the standardized image of the New Negro presented to white people (a more codified, less intimate one)
• No personal myth in last lines of the essay
• List of common objects that can be either priceless or worthless depending on the value that is attached to it
• Essay ends with a question. No assertive answer to the essay title “How it feels to be Coloured Me”: unsettling of any straightforward assessment of how it might feel to be African American