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“‘A (Black) City Upon a Hill’: The New Negro Black Consciousness Grows up in Harlem”

Eleanora Fagan sat on the train from Baltimore en route to meet her mother in northern

New Jersey. She was only fourteen, and the year was 1929. Though her ticket indicated an

arrival point of Long Branch, Eleanora had decided, “damn Long Branch, I was going to get to

see Harlem someway….have myself a time, and then contact my mother.”1 Certainly the young

Eleanora was eager to see Harlem because she had heard of its fame as “the Negro metropolis”

and “the great Mecca for the sightseer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the

enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world.”2 It would not be long

before the young teenager and her mother began “trying to kick and scratch out a living in

Harlem” with the thousands of other black migrants fleeing to this Northern haven in the wake of

World War I industrialization and the tightening grip and hopelessness of Jim Crow in the

South.3 Little did she know then that Harlem would have such an impact on her life and career,

and that she would help to define its character further. By the time this Harlemite performed

“Strange Fruit” in 1939, Billie Holiday had become one of the most famous black women

entertainers in America, directly because of her association with this neighborhood.

James Weldon Johnson described the unique character of Harlem as he saw it from the

peak of the Renaissance in 1925:

…a stranger who rides up magnificent Seventh Avenue on a bus or in an automobile must be struck with surprise at the transformation which takes place after he crosses One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. Beginning there, the population suddenly darkens and he rides through twenty-five solid blocks where passers-by, the shoppers, those sitting in

1 B. Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, (New York: Harlem Moon, 1956, 2006), 21, 22. 2 J.W. Johnson, “The Making of Harlem”, Survey Graphic, Vol. VI, No. 6, (March, 1925), 635.3 B. Holiday, Lady Sings…, 46; for the Great Migration’s impact upon Harlem see I. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), particularly “Part Three, Exodus, New York.”

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restaurants, coming out of theaters, standing in doorways and looking out of windows are practically all Negroes....There is nothing just like it in any other city in the country.”4

Not only was Harlem unique for its black majority and prosperous middle class, but it was

notable for the specific black Americans that called its streets and avenues home: Zora Neale

Hurston, W.E.B. du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, and

Langston Hughes, among many others. When Billie Holiday lived on 139th St., she was only

three blocks away from Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement League over on 7th. And “if you

should take the A train” not only would you “get to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem”, but you could

also arrive at 7th Ave. and 145th St., where du Bois and the NAACP published The Crisis.5 From

there, one merely had to walk three to four blocks in either direction and arrive at the Savoy or

the Cotton Club. From the Savoy, located on Lenox Ave. and 141st, it was a quick walk past

Billie Holiday’s place to where hair care entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker lived on 136th. Right

down 136th from Walker stood the Urban League, publisher of Opportunity, which lie just around

the corner from both James Weldon Johnson’s domicile on 135th and the Universal Negro

Improvement Association on 7th Ave. And Louis Armstrong blew his trumpet at the Apollo

Theater on 125th St. just about five blocks over diagonally from where Langston Hughes lived on

127th.6 The effervescence of Negro intellectualism as well as artistic expression during the

Harlem Renaissance did not occur in a vacuum to each other, but within the open grid pattern of

a local neighborhood, constantly comingling and interacting, and giving the Harlem Renaissance

its distinctive resonance in the cultural memory of America.

4 J.W. Johnson, “The Making…”, Survey Graphic, 635.5 B. Strayhorn, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” (New York: Columbia Records, 1939).6 T. Millionaire, “Harlem Renaissance Map”, Ephemera Press, Brooklyn, NY, http://ephemerapress.com/harlem-renaissance.html, accessed Dec. 14, 2012.

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This is the story of that neighborhood, for it is only by examining the spatial imaginary

and material culture landscape can the true experience of the uplift movement and the New

Negro aesthetic in Harlem be fully appreciated. The material culture of Harlem’s cityscape

directly helped the infusion of these ideas to neighborhood residents, as it is important to

remember that the individual perceives of his landscape through all five senses, and the

“landscape articulates the individual and the social, the self constructs and interprets the body-in-

space, the self in its surroundings.”7 Adding to the importance of Harlem’s spatial influence upon

the Renaissance is its recognition as a black place. As James Weldon Johnson celebrated, Harlem

contained nearly twenty-five blocks where practically everyone on the street was black, and it

“[represented] the Negro’s latest thrust toward Democracy.”8 For many black Americans, they

had traditionally “found themselves forced to negotiate spaces of containment and confinement

in the land of their captivity,” but Harlem promised something different.9 Historically, the black

spatial imaginary in America also featured restrictions upon freedom of movement, first as slaves

bound to a far-off plantation away from society, and later becoming the situation of being

forcefully kept “in one’s place” by the restrictions of Jim Crow, but Harlem’s city grid

represented mobility and “[e]radicated natural inequalities of topography by providing equal

access to every location within it. It was nonhierarchical...the parts were clearly defined, but the

connections among them were articulated and flexible.”10 Harlem was not “merely a Negro

colony or community...not a slum or a fringe...not a 'quarter' of dilapidated tenements" that could

be ignored or bypassed, but due to its location along Lenox and Seventh Avenues “in the heart of

7 D. Upton, “The City as Material Culture,” The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, ed. by A.E. Yentsch and M.C. Beaudry, (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1992), 52, 53.8 “Harlem”, Opening Essay, Survey Graphic, 629.9 G. Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 5310 Upton, The Art and Mystery, 56

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Manhattan,” Harlem was conceived as a "city within a city.” Though “[t]he pattern of

delicatessen store and cigar shop and restaurant and undertaker's shop which repeats itself a

thousand times on each of New York's long avenues is unbroken” and Harlem was “merely a

rough rectangle of commonplace city blocks,” as Survey Graphic casually explained, its defining

characteristic was that it was “unaccountably full of Negroes.”11

If art can be said to reflect the conditions and questions of the individual artist who

created it, then Harlemite art -- namely its jazz production, both musically and culturally –

reflects the discussions that percolated within the discrete and definable spatial boundaries of the

neighborhood between thinkers such as du Bois, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Langston

Hughes about the proper role of art to the project of Negro uplift; discussions that echoed in

Harlem’s cultural production, the cabarets and jazz clubs that provided a “fertile source” of

material and revues for New York’s downtown theaters, and established Harlem as “part of the

exotic fringe of the Metropolis.”12 The “coming of age” that the Harlem Renaissance represents

in the cultural memory of black American intellectual and artistic expression continues to

reverberate in the black American consciousness today, and the debates over the soul of black art

that began in this neighborhood still raise important questions about identity, authenticity, and

self-fashioning for the black American mentality presently. Furthermore, the culture of Harlem

jazz, though produced in a tiny geographic location, has been exported far beyond the bounds of

the gridded neighborhood to the world over, and has formed the basis for much of the popular

culture that is perceived as merely American, without the preceding qualification of “black.” For

these reasons, anchoring the narrative of the interplay between ideas and expressions of black

11 Survey Graphic, 635, 629.12 Ibid., 629.

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aesthetics to the neighborhood of Harlem for the sake of analysis provides a new lens to

approach this old, yet timeless discussion.

Blackface minstrelsy developed and grew during the nineteenth century, replete with its

various tropes and stereotypes of blacks – the Jim Crow, Zip Coon, the Mammy, the Uncle Tom,

the Buck, the Jezebel, the Mulatto, and the Pickaninny.13 These negative depictions of plantation

life and the nature of blackness circulated the nation through the minstrel circuit, creating a

situation in which it “embodied the iconography of blackness, in popular culture minstrelsy held

absolute domain over blackness and the imagery of blackness.”14 Frederick Douglass did not

mince his words when he declared white minstrel shows “the filthy scum of white society, who

have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and

pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens.”15After Emancipation, the collective

soul and mind of the black community had the opportunity to grow reflective, and challenged the

popular misconceptions about blackness through the creation of Black minstrelsy as parody, as

well as the emergence of black intellectuals that wanted the old tropes to be abandoned forever.

“African American discourses of the New Negro…emerged to contest degrading black

stereotypes.”16

Many of these discourses took place within Harlem on account of its notable black

residents previously mentioned. Four of these theorists of black aesthetics will be reviewed here

– W.E.B. du Bois, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Langston Hughes – and their ideas will be

analyzed for areas of agreement and delineation. The common discursive these thinkers entered

13 See E. Lott, “’The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy”, American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1991): pp. 223-254.14 C.J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory & Meaning: Blacks & The Regimes of Race in American Theater & Film Before World War II, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 12915 F. Douglass, “The Hutchinson Family.—Hunkerism,” The North Star, Oct. 27, 1848. 16 H.L. Gates and G.A. Jarrett, “Introduction”, The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1.

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on the subject of black art and its purpose garnered a great deal of attention from black audiences

and received coverage in popular black publications of its time. As Gates and Jarrett noted,

“[a]lmost as soon as blacks could write, it seems, they set out to redefine – against already

received racist stereotypes – who and what a black person was, and how unlike the racist

stereotype the black original could actually be.” It is important to remember that while the four

theorists presented here did not agree on all points, each was motivated by a desire to see the

alleviation of black oppression and the empowerment of the race; the “New Negro” trope then

was an “original, defining feature” of the “wider critical conversation on race, representation,

and African American culture” that dominated black popular thought in the early twentieth

century. 17

Writing the introduction for a symposium titled “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be

Portrayed” published in The Crisis in 1926, W.E.B. du Bois expressed, “[t]here has long been

controversy within and without the Negro race as to just how the Negro should be treated in art –

how he should be pictured by writers and portrayed by artists,” and while the individual freedom

of the artist remained important, he raised the point that it was equally important that “the

conventional Negro” depiction had created a “net result” in American perceptions by “pictur[ing]

twelve million Americans as prostitutes, thieves and fools.” Du Bois and the other editors

lamented “that such ‘freedom’ in art is miserably unfair.” Among the questions posed to the

readership in this symposium: “What are Negroes to do when they are continually painted at

their worst and judged by the public as they are painted?” and “Is not the continual portrayal of

the sordid, foolish and criminal among Negroes convincing the world that this and this alone is

really and essentially Negroid…?”18

17 Ibid., 3, 2. 18 W.E.B. du Bois, “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed”, The New Negro, 190.

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Du Bois and his circle at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People had no interest in the old depictions and tropes of black Americans, and fervently

believed that a conscious counter-effort should be waged by black artists. Again in 1926, du Bois

explained that the “new battle” of the NAACP was “to say that the beauty of truth and freedom

which shall some day be our heritage and the heritage of all civilized men is not in our hands

yet…” He firmly believed that it was the “bounden duty of black America to begin this great

work of the creation…preservation…[and] the realization of beauty” through its art, art that

deliberately sought to present a realistic view of blackness as opposed to the “Uncle Toms,

Topsies, good ‘darkies,’ and clowns” demanded by the white American market.19

Du Bois’ views on art stemmed from his constructs of double consciousness and the color

line that formed the basis of his work since he first published the Souls of Black Folk in 1903, in

which he explained his belief that “centres of culture protect” a “higher individualism…that

seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks freedom for expansion and self-

development”20 In light of this, du Bois’ bold proclamation “’[t]hus all art is propaganda and

ever must be” seems perfectly logical. Black freedom needed the appendages of culture – namely

artistic merit and recognition – to serve as the very foundations of its existence, or to act as a

shield against the constant onslaught of white supremacy; only when blacks could rightly be said

to have achieved culture could they truly assert their humanity and reject the color line. Du Bois

averred: “I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been

used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a

19 Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art”, The New Negro, 258, 259.20 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: NAL Penguin, Inc., 1969), 138.

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damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to

one side [the Old Negro tropes] while the other is stripped and silent.”21

One such piece of propagandistic art produced by du Bois is his essay on Negro spirituals

called “The Sorrow Songs”. He makes the argument that spirituals were not only “the sole

American music, but…the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the

seas.” The propaganda angle of his argument is revealed in his forceful close to white America:

“Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have

brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring

melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land…”22 By extolling the virtues of Negro

spirituals, du Bois was resituating the importance of the contribution of blacks to the

development of America. For du Bois and likeminded Harlemites, the music being performed in

the clubs and cabarets along Jungle Alley (133rd St. between Lenox and Seventh Aves.), such as

Cab Calloway’s famed Cotton Club performances to whites-only audiences, represented much

more in the struggle for Negro uplift than a mere “good time Uptown” on a Saturday night.23

Alain Locke, editor of the famed The New Negro anthology (who lived in lower Harlem

around 120th St.), also had particular views on the purpose of black art. He, like du Bois, firmly

stated how important black music had been to the development of popular music in America. He

assessed: “It fell to the lot of the Negro, whom slavery domesticated, to furnish our most original

and influential folk music…the Negro has been the main source of America’s popular music…”

However, Locke had a view of art inspired by Kant, and took his views even further than du

Bois, by aspiring for black music “to become one of the main sources of America’s serious or

21 Du Bois, “Criteria…,” 25922 Du Bois, “The Sorrow Songs,” The New Negro, 448, 45223 Despite the Cotton Club’s central location in Harlem, many contemporary observers recalled that blacks only made their way inside by being part of the cleaning/serving staff or by performing, but never as customers.

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classical music…” Sharing the sentiments of Western music theorists generally, Locke further

declared, “A great folk music deserves and demands a great classical music. People with the folk

gift of spontaneous harmony should breed great composers…should eventually have great opera,

expert symphony orchestras, and skilled virtuosi or technical master-musicians.”24 Black art was

not important to Locke for its propagandistic elements to further the Negro cause, but rather

drawing from the idiom of blackness could produce a transcendent, elevated, and distinctly

American form of art.

Locke’s greater appreciation for the “artness” of art than du Bois’ mere view of it as a

tool for pro-black propaganda is further revealed in his 1928 “Art of Propaganda?,” which he

viewed as“[a]rtistically…the one fundamental question for us today.” Despite his

acknowledgement that propagandistic art was “preferable to shallow, truckling imitation,” he

objected chiefly because “it perpetuate[d] the position of group inferiority even in crying out

against it.” Locke believed that the “purpose of art…[was] its function as a tap root of vigorous,

flourishing living” and that it was “rooted in self-expression;” all reasons that pleaded to the

black artist that he “must choose art and put aside propaganda.” The fine distinction between

sharing du Bois’ views on art generally, while still desiring more from art than mere propaganda

is important to delineate. While du Bois’ views on black consciousness, first articulated around

the turn of the twentieth century, were more progressive than Booker T. Washington’s who came

before him, Locke’s views on black consciousness and art that come in the 1920s are the next

progressive evolution beyond du Bois’ circa-1900 conception, and while du Bois remained

fixated on black art directly confronting the color line, Locke was more interested in art that

24 A. Locke, The Negro and His Music, (Washington, DC: The Assoc. in Negro Folk Ed., 1936), 2,5; L. Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 6,7.

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transcended the color line altogether, and recognized the need “for a sustained vehicle of free and

purely artistic expression,” or the type of self-affirming atmosphere that would help promote the

creation of the type of transcendent art he longed to see emerge from the black experience. His

musings for such a place settled on the Negro capital: “If HARLEM should happily till this need,

it will perform an honorable and constructive service.” 25

Taking a different, more caustic view towards the conversation of black art was George

Schuyler. Although he first lived in the United Negro Improvement Association’s Phyllis

Wheatley Hotel upon arriving in Harlem, Schuyler grew to oppose Garvey’s Black Nationalism

and became associated with the Old Right. H.L. Mencken (who himself was no stranger to the

debate on black aesthetics), referred to Schuyler as "the most competent Negro journalist ever

heard of", and it was this professional friendship, combined with Schuyler’s sardonically

deployed satire against the entire concept of race and the ten articles he published for Mencken

in The American Mercury that earned Schuyler the moniker “the black Mencken.”26 It must be

pointedly stated that during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, Schuyler had not yet become

the “archconservative” figure he would be seen as during the 1960s, and that Americanists

reconstructing the past cannot use 1960s Schuyler as a template for reading 1920s Schuyler.27 Far

from typical contemporary associations of black conservatives as being “sell-outs” to the race, or

“Uncle Toms” for ingratiating themselves to whites, Schuyler was very much in favor of black

25 Locke, “Art or Propaganda”, The New Negro, 260, 261. 26 O.R. Williams, George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 70; for Mencken directly on the issue of black art see “The Aframerican: New Style” from 1926, - his review of Locke’s The New Negro - and his reply to The Crisis symposium “The Negro in Art: How Shall he Be Portrayed”, both in The New Negro, Gates and Jarrett, eds.; for Mencken’s broad influence on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, see C. Scruggs, The Sage in Harlem: H.L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).27 J.B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), viii-xi.

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enfranchisement and equality. In his essay “Our White Folks” which appeared in the December

1927 issue of The American Mercury, Schuyler declared:

“The amazing ignorance of whites – even Southern whites – about Negroes is a constant source of amusement to all Aframericans….The dark brother looks upon himself as an American, an integral part of this civilization. To him it is not a white civilization, but a white and black civilization. He rightly feels that it is partially his, because for three hundred years he toiled to make it possible.”28

Schuyler, though entrenched in his non-mainstream views, was far from being a mere apologist

for whites.

On the issue of black art, Schuyler entered his voice into the fray through The Nation,

writing “The Negro Art Hokum” as the beginning of a 1926 series in which Langston Hughes

wrote a rejoinder (his response was printed in the same edition of The Nation and will be

analyzed later). In his typical fashion, Schuyler stated plainly, “Negro art ‘made in America’ is

as non-existent as the widely advertised profundity of Cal Coolidge, the ‘seven years of

progress’ of Mayor Hylan, or the reported sophistication of New Yorkers.” His objection to

black art lie in the labeling of the art as “black,” and how that label indicated a failure to

appreciate the “Americaness” of black people and the culture they had contributed to the

building of the United States. To Schuyler:

the Aframerican [was] merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the European immigrant after two or three generations of exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from the mass of Americans…how much truer must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred years. Aside from his color…your American Negro is just plain American….the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more

28 G. Schuyler, “Our White Folks”, The American Mercury, Vol XII, No. 48, (Dec, 1927), 390, 392.

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resembles this stereotype than the average American resembles a composite of Andy Gump, Jim Jeffries, and a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.29

Schuyler’s aversion to the celebration of “black art” is not a disavowal of blackness, but rather

stemmed from a desire to see the “otherness” of blackness die off. In citing proofs that the

Negro’s intellectual and artistic development had come through the normal channels of

American education, Schuyler reminded his readers that fellow Harlemite du Bois, “[t]he dean of

the Aframerican literati” was actually the result of white knowledge as well, “a product of

Harvard and German universities.”30

He closed his essay by eviscerating the black intellectuals [including du Bois] who he

believed should have known better than to peddle and trade on blackness as artistic merit:

This nonsense is probably the last stand or the old myth palmed off by Negrophobists for all these many years, and recently rehashed by the sainted Harding, that there are ‘fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences’ between white and black Americans. That there are Negroes who will lend this myth a helping hand need occasion no surprise….On this baseless premise, so flattering to the white mob, that the blackamoor is inferior and fundamentally different, is erected the postulate that he must needs be peculiar; and when he attempts to portray life through the medium of art, it must of necessity be a peculiar art. While such reasoning may seem conclusive to the majority of Americans, it must be rejected with a loud guffaw by intelligent people.31

While Schuyler’s views may seem somewhat out of sort to the contemporary, post-Civil Rights

Movement conception of black pride, his peculiar strain of thought within his time had a large

influence upon the black community and the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, Schuyler’s essay

prompted the response by Langston Hughes that has become iconic to declaring the inner

yearning of the “New Negro” aesthetic so foundational to the Harlem aesthete, further indicating

the gravitas, respect, and relevance that Schuyler’s contentions demanded during the

Renaissance.

29 Schuyler, “The Negro Art Hokum”, The Nation 122 (June 1926), 662.30 Ibid., 662.31 Ibid., 662, 663.

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Langston Hughes’ brilliant response, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

forcefully countered the aversion of Schuylerian views towards embracing the label “black,” an

aversion he described as “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--

this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of

American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” Hughes

shared Locke’s view that the black idiom could be used to produce great art, affirming:

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art…. there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears.32

Though Locke and Hughes agreed on the potential for black idiomatic expression to be positive,

here too, delineation must be made between their two positions in order for a textured view of

the Harlem Renaissance to emerge.

Locke’s support of distinctively black-influenced art was predicated upon the belief that

it could potentially furnish the emergence of a great classical music tradition. Contrastingly,

Hughes embraced using blackness as a muse on the mere basis that “[a]n artist must be free to

choose what he does,” but adding to this artistic freedom the tenet that “he must also never be

afraid to do what he must choose;” if this choice for the black artist meant black art, then so be it.

Hughes’ captured the essence of the “New Negro” soul and the seedlings of the “I’m black and

I’m proud” aesthetic of the Civil Rights Movement by proclaiming:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it

32 L. Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, The Nation.

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doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.33

With this new mindset, the constant perception of whiteness as a mirror to blackness was

completely disbanded. In Hughes’ words, the “black Mecca” of Harlem had found its voice.

While this overview of several Harlemite schools of thought regarding black aesthetics is

not nearly as exhaustive as such a study could be, it sketches out a rough view of the intellectual

terrain of Harlem once must navigate through in an attempt to fully contextualize the concurrent

jazz scene of the Renaissance. The self-conscious dialog about the nature of black art was not

divorced from the growing association of Harlem with the uniqueness of the jazz idiom.

Langston Hughes took pride in the fact that “the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing

voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues [would] penetrate the closed ears of the colored near

intellectuals” such as Schuyler.34 Commenting on jazz in May 1925, the editor of Opportunity

beamed, “What an immense, even if unconscious irony the Negroes have devised! They, who of

all Americans are most limited in self-expression, least considered and most denied, have forged

the key to the interpretation of the American spirit.”35 This paper will briefly review some of the

themes of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday’s work, pointing out the reflections of the

intellectual discourse on black art that can be observed. Armstrong and Holiday are not being

held up as a false duopoly, but rather exemplify the importance of the spatial imagination to

one’s socialization, as Billie was clearly a product of Harlem and Louis never stopped being a

representative for the “good times” of New Orleans, even as his named donned the marquee at

the Apollo Theater. Looking at the parallel discourse that existed within jazz music further

33 Ibid.34 Ibid. 35 C.S. Johnson, Opportunity, 3, No. 5, (May 1925), 132-133.

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strengthens the contention that the period of the Harlem Renaissance truly witnessed the coming

of age of American blackness, and whether through direct connection or merely as a function of

spatial didactics, the general conversation of Harlem by day and by night often centered on the

New Negro aesthetic of self-pride.

In a February, 1949 Downbeat Magazine interview, Harlem bopper Dizzy Gillespie

bluntly stated what many young jazz artists at that time felt: "Louis is the plantation character

that so many of us...younger men...resent."36 By “us,” Gillespie certainly could have been

referring to the bop scene of Harlem that was born at Minton’s Playhouse at W. 118th St. at the

bottom end of Harlem. This location is critical because it represents the area of Harlem last

“conquered” by blacks, and as such it is the product of a mature, developed black consciousness,

relative to the “pioneering” black belt of Harlem that developed the aesthetic closer to 135th St.

some twenty years prior to the bop scene. By the time Gillespie and his cohorts at Minton’s

inherited the musical vanguard of Harlem, the vestiges of the Old Negro tropes had ceased to be

appreciated, regardless of any strategic value that particular representation of black culture might

have afforded the blurring and eventual forging of the color line. Though Gillespie later

apologized for his assessment of Armstrong, the question about the legacy of the Old Negro

trope in Armstrong’s work lingers. As recently as 1999, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the

African and African American Experience (edited by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates)

wrote under the heading “The Troubling Legacy of Armstrong’s Persona,” indicating that his

“happy-go-lucky disposition and good humor provided a convenient reinforcement for the racial

prejudices of many white listeners.”37 Despite not being en vogue, criticism of Armstrong’s

36 T. Hallock, “Dizzy’s New Idea Would Help Interpret Arrangers”, Downbeat Magazine, (Feb, 1949)37 A. Appiah and H.L.Gates, eds. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 250.

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continued reliance upon Old Negro tropes for entertainment and comic value is understandable

from the perspective of the Harlemite New Negro aesthetic.

The 1929 cut “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue” was a lament sung from the

perspective of someone who was saddened by their blackness and its rejection by white society.

Originally adapted from the review “Hot Chocolates” about a dark-skinned black woman’s wish

to be lighter skinned, Armstrong turned the song into a type of protest. However, this type of

song does not evoke images of the triumphant, proud black artist that Hughes and Locke desired

to see. In fact, the lyric “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case” certainly would have

provoked Hughes’ disapproval.38Analyzing the text even further, one finds embedded references

to the Old Negro. The opening phrase: “Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead / Feels like ol' Ned

wished I was dead” is most likely a reference to the Stephen Foster minstrel song “Old Uncle

Ned” from 1848: “Dere was an old Nigga, dey call’d him Uncle Ned -- / He’s dead long ago,

long ago! / He had no wool on de top ob his head -- / De place whar de wool ought to grow.”39 It

can be assumed that any songs referenced within the lyrics of another songare popular enough to

be recognized by the intended audience, or else the songwriter’s use of such a device to evoke

particular mental images would fail. The Stephen Foster reference, the provenance of the original

song’s context, and the generally apologetic view of blackness this song presented all suggest the

type of music that would be problematic to those of the Harlemite mind. Indeed, “Black and

Blue” served as the soundtrack for Ellison’s Invisible Man who realized: “Perhaps I like Louis

Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's

unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his

38 L. Armstrong, “Black and Blue” Vocalion Records, 1929. 39 S. Foster, “Old Uncle Ned”, 1848

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music.”40 Invisibility might make for good poetry, but invisibility did not reflect the posture of

the Harlem art aesthete.

Louis continued to incorporate aspects of minstrelsy into his career. His appearance in the

1932 cartoon I’ll be Glad When you Dead you Rascal You in which Betty Boop is held captive

by African natives (who resemble apes in blackface). Armstrong himself appears as the floating

head of one such blackface character, chasing after Betty Boop’s companions in an effort to lead

them away from her. The minstrel themes that appear here include the sexual objectification of

white women by black men, as well as the visual image of blackface.41 An even more brazen

depiction of some of the worst minstrel tropes is seen in Armstrong’s performance of “When it’s

Sleepy Time Down South,” a song he chose as his signature piece. In this short movie

performance, Armstrong is placed in a typical plantation scene, replete with bales of hay, straw

hats, and checker-print shirts. During a trumpet solo, a “lazy, shiftless,” sleeping Negro is

depicted as waking up in response to the beckoning of a large “mammy” figure waving a chicken

drumstick at him. After he takes a bite, he does a lazy dance, and goes back to sleep on the pile

of goods ready for market, chicken in hand. Such images stood in direct opposition to the type of

black art heralded in Harlem, and Armstrong’s perpetuation of their musical currency, even at

such a late date like 1942, certainly would have frustrated the artistic mindset of figures like

Gillespie.

As previously noted, Billie Holiday arrived on the Harlem scene as a young teenager, and

it is no surprise that her music more closely matched the tenor of the aesthetic discussion within

Harlem. The Old Negro tropes are purged from Billie’s career and her life: while Armstrong

40 R. Ellison, “Prologue,” Invisible Man, 1952. 41 L. Armstrong, I’ll be Glad When you Dead you Rascal You, Fleischer Studio, 1932, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV1Z7AnhTN0, accessed Dec 1, 2012; C. J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory & Meaning, 131.

Padilioni 18

explained away the Jim Crow racism he and his band felt on the road – “We were colored, and

we knew what that meant….we understood, so we never had any hard feelings” – Billie Holiday

quit her spot as a “pioneer chick hitting the trail” with Artie Shaw partially because “the hills

were full of white crackers,” and the constant chipping away at her personhood she was exposed

to through Jim Crow.42 Holiday’s strong self-assertion and presentation as the lady with

gardenias in her hair indicate a different mindset than Armstrong’s assimilationist pose, one that

Harlem doubtlessly helped create.

Billie’s first recorded single “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” from 1933 contains the line,

“You don’t have to sing like Bledsoe / You can tell the world I said so,” and once again, the

question of songwriter intent presents itself.43 The average listener of Holiday’s single can be

assumed to have knowledge of the point of reference Billie made to Bledsoe and singing.

Though lost to most today, the contemporary audience would have identified Bledsoe as Jules

Bledsoe, a famous black opera singer of the 1920s. In true Harlem Renaissance form, Bledsoe’s

popularity stemmed from his seamless combination of European high art forms such as opera

with the folk music tradition of Negro spirituals. Not surprisingly, Bledsoe himself went on

record regarding the position of black art, writing in Opportunity that “[t]he Negro as an idiom is

and has been an always dependable means of sure fire entertainment.” He added that as black

entertainers had continued to prove their worth through musical comedy, dance, and jazz, that

the theater would soon follow, “the Black Brother has his place and belongs…by the process of

natural selection.” Not only did Bledsoe believe that black talent demanded a place for blacks

within the artistic mainstream, but his exhortation that “ [i]t is up to the few of us that have 42 For Armstrong on Jim Crow see C. Hersch, “Poisoning Their Coffee: Louis Armstrong and Civil Rights”, Polity, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 2002), 377-79; for Holiday’s description of her time with Artie Shaw, see Lady Sings the Blues, chapter 8, “Travelin’ Light,” 79-92. 43 B. Holiday, with Benny Goodman and His Orchestra,“Your Mother’s Son-in-Law”, (New York: Columbia Records, 1933).

Padilioni 19

gotten past the sentinels at the gate, to fling the gates wide open for our successors” indicated his

belief in the strategic use and purpose of black art.44 Unlike the minstrelsy-derived mental images

and connotations that filled Armstrong’s music, Billie’s first emergence as a recording star

hearkened to the vanguard of the Harlem aesthetic.

Holiday’s signature song, the 1939 “Strange Fruit,” has been regarded as “first significant

protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism, ”due to its use of the black

experience to evince universalized truths about justice and quicken the conscience of white

America.45 “Strange Fruit” proved effective at conveying a civil rights message because of its

aesthetic quality as a song and also because of the stylization Holiday placed upon the song. This

jeremiad to the phenomenon of Southern lynching written by Abel Meeropol first left Holiday

confused, due to her familiarity with the “torch song” style popular in her day, a pattern of lyrics

that “Strange Fruit” did not follow. However, “Strange Fruit” walked the fine line between

transcendent art and deliberate propaganda, with one feminist scholar remarking that “it is

difficult to listen to Billie Holiday singing ‘Strange Fruit’ without recognizing the plea for

human solidarity, and thus for the racial equality of black and white people in the process of

challenging racist horrors and indignities.” The combination of the aesthetic universalization of

the black experience (using oppression specific to blacks, lynching, as a template for all human

oppression) and Billie’s artistic inflexion of its poetic lyrics, firmly anchored to the black blues

idiom, created in “Strange Fruit” the perfect vehicle for jettisoning the intellectual and social

44 L. G. Geary, “Jules Bledsoe: The Original ‘Ol’ Man River,’” The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (1989), 27-54; J. Bledsoe, “Has the Negro a Place in the Theatre?,” Opportunity, printed in The New Negro, Gates and Jarrett, eds., 526. 45 D. Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, And An Early Cry For Civil Rights, (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000), 92; L. Pellegrinelli, “Evolution of a Song: ‘Strange Fruit’”, NPR Music. http://www.npr.org/2009/06/22/105699329/evolution-of-a-song-strange-fruit, accessed 1 Dec., 2012.

Padilioni 20

educational efforts of groups and figures like the NAACP and Ira B. Wells on the issue of

lynching into a popular arts protest. 46

This abridged view of the themes and presentation of Louis Armstrong and Billie

Holiday’s contemporary, yet divergent, careers shows that the discursive within Harlem that

contended with issues of black consciousness and identity and its place within artistic expression

were not exclusive to the journals and magazines being printed in Harlem by day, but continued

to inform the nature of jazz production and performance within the neighborhood at night. The

period of the Harlem Renaissance pivoted the entire perspective of black artists towards the

import of the New Negro imagery replacing the misrepresentations of the Old Negro trope. The

many talented voices and minds that entertained this question, this fundamental reckoning for the

black American soul, produced varied perspectives and pronouncements; the New Negro

aesthetic, though focused, was a diverse movement that embraced an assortment of

recommendations for the Negro’s proper way forward artistically. The Renaissance, though

described as a discrete historical period, continues to hold relevance for the current day. The

need for a New Negro aesthetic has not been completely satisfied, as many of the initial failures

of American democracy towards the Negro remain systemic issues today, and questions about

the strategic use of black art remain pertinent. Alain Locke, originator of the term “the New

Negro,” captured the timeless nature of the uplift project by opining, “if in our lifetime the Negro

should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the

warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of

group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.”47 The New Negro aesthetic,

46 A.Y. Davis, “’Strange Fruit’: Music and Social Consciousness”, chp. 8, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 181-197.47 A. Locke, “Enter the New Negro”, Survey Graphic, 634.

Padilioni 21

incubated and brought to age in Harlem, can hardly be considered new any longer, but its

dialectical impact upon the thoughts and actions of the black artistic community endures as a

timelessly permanent memorial to the Renaissance that emerged within the gridded streets and

avenues of this geographically small yet culturally behemoth neighborhood.

Padilioni 22

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