Beinecke Library
A black novelist was so sick of the portrayal by his fellow writers of the Negro as fundamentally different from other homo sapiens that he wrote a satire, Black No More, starring a doctor who invents a procedure to lighten skin pigment.
A white champion of the new black lit himself penned a novel called Nigger Heaven, featuring sexual promiscuity; it sold well, and he was accused of exploitation.
And one of Langston Hughes‘s earliest blues-inspired poems was called “Fine Clothes to de Jew”; it broke new ground but its subject infuriated the black middle class — and, yes, there already was one in the Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s.
One of the many new zines for black lit during the Harlem Renaissance.
Those remarkable revelations and insights into the efflorescence of literature and other arts in between-the-wars Harlem, known as the Harlem Renaissance, are now on display at Yale University’s Beinecke Library in “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance & The Beinecke Library.”
The exhibition, organized by Melissa Barton and featuring more than 300 items, puts literature on the ground floor and visual arts, dance, and music on the second; it all derives from the library’s remarkable James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collections and runs through April 17. (See our previous article on the music offerings of the exhibit here.)
The show, along with a spate of public programs, is part of the 75th anniversary of the rare book and manuscript library and has as its double aim to throw scholarly light on the complexity of the Harlem Renaissance and also to highlight the importance of collecting. If James Weldon Johnson, himself an important writer and scribe of the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” known as the black national anthem, had not also been a kind of artistic pack rat who kept paper ephemera from personal letters and notes to playbills, we still would have had the Harlem Renaissance, but not this exhibition.
Just as Elizabethan literature for all too many of us consists largely of Shakespeare and Marlowe, likewise for too many of us the Harlem Renaissance is Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and maybe, toward the tail end, thanks to the WPA, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
Enter with this show’s treasures a cohort of writers generally unknown to most of us, like Jamaica-born novelist Claude McKay and journalist and socialist George Schuyler, writer Jessie Fauset, and poet and novelist Jean Toomer.
Manuscript of the title poem of Hughes’ controversial 1927 volume.
Toomer’s contribution during the period was as much about Eastern philosophies and the new modernist experimental techniques in prose and poetry as African-American themes.
While the show is a treasure house of scholarly items — the south vitrine is a chronology of the period and the north vitrine full of items on more philosophical matters, such as what “Negro Art” is — more questions are asked than answered.
You can’t help, for example, to be touched by James Weldon Johnson’s “pass” to attend a Congressional session to respond to the epidemic of lynching that afflicted the country, particularly in the South of the 1920s. The show’s contextualizing makes your jaw drop that this went on in the South during the same period that African Americans were ascending literary pedestals in the north.
How to explain the parallel phenomenon?
The exhibition, which begins with the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. at the turn of the 20th century and the promise that the hundreds of thousands of Negro World War I soldiers would return to a more just America, suggests that literary changes and political changes went hand in hand.
Yet just how were the fingers of each hand intertwined? And what was the writer’s role in social change? Those answers are left up to the viewer to determine after peering at and poring over these wonderful documentary materials.
The show, especially in the more philosophical of the vitrines on the north side of the library, makes clear the writers of the period were urgently engaged in the very same questions.
For some the writer’s role was no mystery at all. The show suggests that W.E.B. DuBois, the historian and activist, was the godfather of the movement, and he had such a clear sense of urgency about race matters that he proclaimed, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
The show also suggests tantalizingly, however, that the Renaissance may not have happened, or certainly wouldn’t have been as influential as it has become, were it not for white go-betweens and facilitators like journalist and photographer Carl Van Vechten.
He championed Lanston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, among many others, and promoted the photography of James Van Der Zee, whose images of Harlem personalities and hot spots are also part of the show.
Yet Van Vechten ended up also infuriating many with his novel, Nigger Heaven. And he wasn’t the only one who showed you could harbor conflicted racial attitudes even while doing good.
Blanche Knopf, the publisher whom van Vechten introduced Hughes to, wondered in one of the manuscript letters in the collection whether the book contract she sent to the promising young writer might be too complicated for him to understand.
There were also a gazillion competitions and literary prizes being offered — many by whites — to promote Negro writers at the time. To what extent was all this white literary involvement driven by guilt, or perhaps an awareness of the terrors going on in the Jim Crow South? After all, many of the writers and artists coming north to Harlem and Chicago were leaving there as part of the Great Migration.
This exhibition doesn’t speculate. And yet it reveals that some of the Fifth Avenue patrons, such as the dowager-like Charlotte Osgood Mason, required to have “Hughes and her other protegees, who include Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglass, call her Godmother.”
It was no wonder that by 1937 Richard Wright, in his essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in New Challenge magazine — the work supported by the WPA Writers Project — declared that the writers of “the Negro Renaissance went a‑begging to white America … dressed in the knee-pants of servility.”
On the eve of the Trump administration and following on the hoped-for but apparently not yet realized post-racial America, it is one of the many achievements of “Gather Out of Star-Dust” that the exhibit’s materials and the questions they ask seem not only relevant, but as contemporary and urgent as ever.
“Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaisssance and the Beinecke Library” is on exhibition at the Beinecke Library until Apr. 17. Visit the library’s website for details about hours. Admission is free.