THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE (Pt. II)
Black Magazines Define The Harlem Renaissance
by: Todd Steven Burroughs
W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, the organ of the NAACP, and Charles Spurgeon Johnson, editor of Opportunity, the organ of the National Urban League, were sociologists, writers and editors, but they were first and foremost "race men."
As race men, they took the creation and the development of the Harlem Renaissance very seriously. Using their magazines, they attempted to shape how the artistic movement would look and be seen by African-Americans and others.
Du Bois, The Gatekeeper
To Du Bois, well into his 50's at the height of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the movement was for a younger generation of writers. He saw himself, and others saw him, as an elder statesmen in Black arts and letters. Besides several articles on the state of Black literature, The Crisis carried "how-to" articles on writing fiction and plays by Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset and others. Unlike Opportunity, whose special issues on the Renaissance over virtually the entire magazine, The Crisis only used small sections.
It is difficult to define and chart Du Bois's intellectual evolution on the question of the role of Black art. At the beginning of the Renaissance, Du Bois, scholar Gary Wintz writes, "advanced art over propaganda," calling not for an all-positive portrayal of Blacks in literature but for a multi-faceted, balanced one. This position, however, evolved over time to a public acceptance of art as propaganda because Du Bois rejected the idea of art-for-arts'-sake proposed by contemporaries such as scholar Alain Locke and artist-activist James Weldon Johnson.
Du Bois saw himself as a gatekeeper--a protector of the Black race from those who would besmudge its collective character. This is contrasted with the self-perceptions of the younger artists, who felt responsible first to themselves, not the race. Du Bois ultimately saw himself as an artistic definer, setting the terms of the debate on Black art through The Crisis and his public addresses. To this end, almost every 1926 Crisis edition contained a symposium on "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed." Participants included Langston Hughes, Fauset, Sinclair Lewis and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Most of the contributors disagreed with Du Bois's all-art-is-propaganda assertion.
Johnson, The Cheerleader
Unlike Du Bois, Johnson went through no evolution of thought on the purpose of Black art. Johnson saw the works of the Harlem Renaissance as "first-class literature" that had to go beyond propaganda. Art was to express all facets of American Black life, Johnson believed, because its purpose was to bring Blacks into White acceptance. Johnson believed in supporting the artists regardless of their multi-faceted portrayals because he believed that the existence of a self-generated and self-defined literature, warts and all, showed the creative capacity--and, therefore, the humanity--of a race.
Johnson directed the Harlem Renaissance through Opportunity's literary contests (used to "discover" talent), his literary dinners and other events, and his contacts with prestigious whites who could serve as publishers and patrons. Harlem Renaissance scholar David Levering Lewis writes that Johnson was a manipulator with a purpose: "to redeem, through art, the standing of his people."
Influence: The Only Weapons
Telling the story of the influence of The Crisis and Opportunity over the Harlem Renaissance is important because it was a time in which words seemed to be the only completely self-controlled weapons Blacks had in the fight for equal distribution of America's political, social and economic resources. Or, more simply, the artist Ishmael Reed has written: "Writin' Is Fightin'."
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