The Great Migration: Two Books

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart and The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson have been my recent reading. Both books are very long, very dense, and very thought-provoking. I have not finished The Warmth of Other Suns, and I find it emotionally challenging to learn details of the depths of mistreatment, bigotry, and abuse that was the horror show of southern treatment of black people from the era after the Civil War until well into the twentieth century. The biography of Alain Locke was a fascinating companion to this book, because it showed one way that Black Americans were able to overcome the evils of white supremacy of that era.

Alain Locke (1885-1954) was a highly accomplished scholar and public intellectual who is very little known. This prize-winning book has probably introduced Locke to many other people besides me. Unfortunately it's extremely long -- I found it excessively long, though mainly fascinating.

One of the most amazing things about Locke is that he was incredibly flexible in his intellectual life, and was a leader in several areas of scholarship about Blacks in America and in creative support of several forms of emerging Black American culture. He wrote, among other things about the effects of the Great Migration, which began around the time of his birth, and continued throughout much of his life.

As a young man, prior to World War I, Locke attended Harvard and then was the first Black recipient of a Rhodes scholarship -- and it's interesting that he was the last one until around 50 years after his was awarded. Although his British hosts were reasonably welcoming, he had trouble finding a college where he would be accepted. Worse yet, he was very badly treated by the severely racist Southern Rhodes scholars (the scholarship is distributed evenly among the US States). For example, the Southerners forced the Rhodes social organization to exclude him from an invitation to the traditional Rhodes scholars' Thanksgiving dinner.

Despite the bigotry he experienced, Locke assimilated European culture, and came back to the US to finish a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard.  He then became a professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Soon after receiving his PhD, Locke became a leader and a creator of the Harlem Renaissance, and subsequently a driving force in other important intellectual and artistic Black cultural creations. The book title, "The New Negro," comes from a concept that Locke invented in the 1920s to encourage poetry, painting, sculpture, and fiction-writing that reflected the Black experience. As a member of a minority group, and also as a mainly closeted gay person, he was alienated from mainstream society in a number of ways. As author Jeffrey Stewart explains it:

"Locke did something remarkable with his alienation. He decided to use art, the beautiful and the sublime that nurtured his and his friends’ subjectivities in a world of hate, to subjectivize the Negro, to transform the image of the Negro from a poor relation of the American family to that of the premier creator of American culture." (p. 8)

Locke was an encourager and a colleague of a number of still-famous participants in the Harlem Renaissance; among those that are still famous are authors Zora Neal Hurston and Langston Hughes. Two of his collections of works, including his own essays are still in print today, particularly the volume titled The New Negro, published in 1925. 

During the 1930s and 1940s, Locke continued to be an innovator in encouraging Black culture. Stewart's book documents this at length, but I'm not going to try to summarize these activities. I would like to share something that I learned from this book, as well as from reading a biography of Paul Robeson (blog post here). These books forced me to think about Black Americans' response to the patriotism and idealism that predominated the nation during World War II. While Blacks were highly patriotic and willing to volunteer to work in the war effort, bigotry against them was rampant. Stewart writes of Roosevelt's famous "Four Freedoms":

"Almost as soon as the president laid out the Four Freedoms— Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear— for which the war would be fought, African Americans made it known that for them these rights were unattainable in America. A. Philip Randolph, having left the National Negro Congress, proposed in 1941 a march on Washington to demand desegregation of the armed forces, elimination of discrimination in hiring, and equal opportunity for Negroes in federal government contracts as the price of full-throated Black support for the war effort. FDR avoided that embarrassing protest in the nation’s capital by issuing Executive Order 8802 that banned discrimination in the hiring in wartime jobs, the awarding of contracts, and established the toothless but symbolically valuable Federal Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), but the Chicago Defender kept the pressure on by announcing a “Double V” campaign— victory in Europe and victory in America— to tie the loyalty of Negroes in war to an expected transformation of American race relations in peace." (pp. 821-822)

I'm ashamed that I had never thought this deeply about the Four Freedoms, which I've written about before (link). I learned a great deal in reading these two history books, but this is all I have to say right now.

"Blackface"

Sadly, the mistakes our society has made in the past remain with us seemingly forever. One cruel and despicable mistake that's been in the news recently is the practice of Blackface. I doubt if anyone needs a description, but here's a particularly insightful one from an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday:

"Blackface is a performance historically grounded in white supremacy and as such, an act of epistemological and ontological terror. In other words, blackface is a form of 'white knowing' (in reality, of white unknowing), of white projection, and of stipulating through performance of what it means to be black by way of lies about what it means to be white. Hence, to understand blackface, we must return to the white face that refuses to see itself in its own monstrous creations."

The article was titled: "Why White People Need Blackface: To understand this degrading practice, we must examine the white face that refuses to see itself in its own monstrous creations" It was written by George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Emory University. Yancy treats the practice of blackface as a way of making fun of blacks and alienating them from consideration as full human beings:

"Within the white American antebellum context and after, anti-blackness was at the very heart of white blackface minstrelsy. The black body functioned as the repulsive and revolting object of white disgust, with whites 'throwing forth' their hatred and lies onto what they themselves had created. White American blackface performers engaged in exaggerated and distorted gestures, warped dialect and racist clowning, all creations of the white American imaginary. As white performers blackened their faces with burnt cork, re-presented the black body in caricatured, silly, ersatz, inferior, horrible, and damnable ways, they were able to mark black bodies publicly as appallingly stupid and subhuman."

Recently, I've been reading  Martin Duberman's Paul Robeson: A Biography about the great singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976). Blackface was very much an issue during Robeson's debut as an actor in 1924 in two plays, The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings  by Eugene O'Neill. In both plays, Robeson acted the role of a black protagonist: roles that had previously been played by white actors in blackface. The discussion of his being chosen for these serious roles provides interesting insight beyond the use of blackface as burlesque, illustrating what happened when a serious black character role was assigned to black actors:

"In March [1924], shortly before rehearsals for Chillun were to begin, Paul acquired additional experience by acting in a revival of Roseanne, by the white playwright Nan Bagby Stevens. The play, about a transgressing black preacher in the South saved from his 'avenging congregation' by Roseanne, had first been produced in 1923 with a 'burn-corked' all-white cast (despite the acclaim Charles Gilpin had received in 1920 in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, the long-standing practice of whites playing black roles in blackface remained widespread). But the revival at the Lafayette in Harlem in 1924 had an all-black cast, headed by Robeson as the preacher and Rose McClendon in the title role." (Kindle Locations 1320-1324).

The casting of Robeson in these three roles, was not only controversial (despite his distinct abilities), but resulted in near-riots and terrible harassment via letters and other comments from a widely racist public. Although a few years later, he was widely popular in London and New York as star of two hits -- Porgy and Bess and Showboat -- these early experiences are significant.

Later in his career, Robeson was passed over for roles where producers preferred to cast a white man playing in blackface. They refused to cast Robeson, an extraordinarily talented black actor, in serious roles. In 1928, the Metropolitan Opera chose to feature a white singer in blackface for a role as a black jazz musician in the opera Johnny Strikes Up the Band by Ernst Křenek. In 1933, an opera based on The Emperor Jones gave the title role to a white man in blackface in preference to Robeson, though a few minor black characters were played by black singers. While the Met may have evolved since that time, our society still has many perplexed issues with this fraught subject.

Another highlight of Robeson's career was his performance in the 1940s as Othello, which he achieved with great success. For at least a century before this production, most American versions of the great Shakespeare play had de-emphasized Othello's blackness, employing white actors in the role with at most a hint of dark makeup. These versions avoided the play's obvious racial issues. Robeson completely changed this; he expressed the "view that Othello was a great— and persecuted—'Negro warrior,' and that his own responsibility was to convey the tale of a man who had managed to rise to a position of leadership in an alien culture— only to be destroyed by it." (Kindle Locations 6264-6266). 

Paul Robeson was a complex, multi-talented man of great genius. He was mistreated in many ways, and eventually became more and more dissatisfied with American society and racial attitudes.  I'm a life-long admirer of Paul Robeson. My father had huge respect for him, loved listening to recordings of Robeson singing spirituals, and was dismayed at the terrible treatment Robeson received at the hands of certain fanatics after World War II.